Inspiration

If we are to live, we are to be blown off course.  It is the willy-nillyness of the blow that calls spirit down off its high horse in the high heavens so that we learn to wallow.  It is in those dark hours, as we perch precariously between the moat of crocodiles and a fire breathing dragon, that we wake up and come alive.  In ancient alchemical tradition, this blackening process was the beginning of transformation.  Blackening has everything to do with going down, being off-course, and suffering.  It is 2013, another year in the 21st century.  It still the same, time worn process. As a society, we have grown more and more masculine; working longer, taking on greater responsibility, trying to be more spiritual, if not religious, and attaching ‘excellence’ to all of it.  These are ego driven elements of fire and air.  They hope to push and pull us out of the mundane, off the earthy, to take flight. What balances this yang expression? The yin of earth and water.  The higher we ascend, the more fiery and ballistic we react, the more we require the grounding of practical earth solutions, and slower muddy waters of emotional silence.  You can’t see very far from down below.  The only exceptional view is within.  Ascending a spiritual mountain, home to gods is far easier.  There is nothing wrong in standing tall among at the peak, except it usually comes at the expense of suppressed yin. When we don’t use or allow balancing yin energies, there is a rise in violence, addiction, depression, and illness.  They behave as un-invited guests at the bliss-banquet.  It is the old spell of the 13th fairy godmother who was not invited to Sleeping Beauty’s christening.  As you know, anything not invited, not listened to, or……

In our endings lie our beginnings.  The power of graduations is they symbolize the work accomplished that opens the next level. Each birth is the first step towards death. Thresholds, cycles, wheels, call it what you will, 2012 offered multiple time and space opportunity to see the cause and effect of our actions, to comprehend the wisdom, and the shadow in our choices.  Consequences have grown more defined, intentions- more visible.  ‘What goes around comes around’ is coming around faster and faster.  Having survived the turbulence of the past 365 days, we hopefully cross the threshold into 2013 with greater consciousness, greater heart. 2012 ended a number of cycles, and in those endings we can choose to access faster bandwidths, more options, along with a demand for greater potency, and compassionate intuition. As our amplification ascends from the Manipura/third chakra (emotional focus) to the Anahata/fourth chakra (heart wisdom), we breakthrough self-centered impetus into heart-driven awareness, especially around feminine, or receptive, power. Our ideas of creativity are expanding. We have a greater comprehension in our relationship to self, which transforms all other relationships. We are motivated toward partnerships that nurture and foster caring consciousness. We support one another in listening to music from the spheres beyond the physical.  We are dancing with difficult truths, requiring subtle, transformational wisdom.  This territory is for the truly courageous. It is harder and harder to be someone we are not.  We are making fundamental changes relating to our authority, integrity, accountability, and relationships. We are more capable of healing our own shadow material so we may move on, so we might know our ‘true name.’  2013 may be an extraordinary year in the acceptance of ALL our unique light and shadow-Selves.  Again, courage is a password to what lies ahead as we are willing to……

The numinous has been leeched from our bones by the radioactive society we’ve created.  We worship the maudlin and horrific, the mundane and safe.  We are frightened by mystery and magic.  The ancient mystery of the Winter Solstice has departed, gone in pre-Christmas flounce and flurry.  What was most sacred is now scarcely noted, roared past as road kill.  Ritual re-sanctifies and empowers because we become the catalysts to bring forth healing and transformation.  We do not use an intermediary to ask for absolution, which puts power in their hands, not ours.  The solstice, like the equinox, are perfect moments to stand still with the Gaia.  Take stock. Participate with nature.  Re-connect to earth’s cycles. The on-going unspeakable tragedies, some Nature’s doing, all too many man’s creation, tell us we need to re-connect, to one another, to the earth, to our own spirit.  It is time to re-invent ourselves, so that communities care for the disenfranchised, cities re-claim their homeless.  Let us be different in this long dark night, let us light the light within. If it’s religion that feeds you, make a new space within its old traditions.  “The goal in the etymology of the word ‘religion’ is to re-link us to the Universal.” (Jessica Murray in Mt.  Astrologer) This is the same goal Yoga propounds– link our Practice to life, become a bridge, or lynch pin to expanding consciousness.  We are bits and pieces of an eco system that we need to nurture, not the other way around.  This is particularly true during dark cycles, when much of the animal and plant life are dormant.  Our dormancy often carries us toward depression, sickness, SAD, even suicide because we’ve misplaced the light within. The Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh said, “Thanks to impermanence, everything is possible.”  We pass through……

Is there a better reason for living than to discover who we are?  Is there anything more powerful than becoming our true colors, then sending them out to seep into the world, where as wild dyes they/we sustain, transform, and pigment everyone and everything touched? As the forces of change build to a momentous turning point – the ending of a 26,000 year cycle, announced with this year’s winter solstice, it is critical we seed and impart this transformative time with Grace, not fear, with joy, not divisiveness, with wisdom not delusion. Nothing new in that, but the timing is insistent. There is deep need to pay attention to anything that directs us toward knowing and serving true-self, like Yoga, creativity, and poetry, Astrology and ripe friendships.  These are constructs that nurture soul so we might bloom as one of Rumi’s roses…. “If you want to know Him and yourself Look at this open rose- From one infinite silent drunken heart So many petals, so many worlds.” One of the reasons I love poetry is that like the horoscope it can reveal essential self, as does a Yoga Practice, only differently. If you re-read last week’s breath, “Why and Because,” the creative process offered another exploration of the same. There is reason humanity has expressed through these archetypal forms for thousands of years.  Each is a superb structure to hold the mysteries, and support the devotion required to unlock a DNA, to plumb secrets of the evolutionary heart.  Going within is difficult.  There is a reason few have explored consciousness. That is changing as we come to embrace the breadth and depth of our spirit and soul.  We need prediction less. We trust more. Science acknowledges that everything on earth relates: ecological systems, planetary systems, human societies, the physics of……

Why Do we only search for God when love is missing? If we were ecstatic, love-filled beings, why would we ever seek to change? Is there a conspiracy running all religions to keep us fearful and unhappy? If filled with light, why feel a need to turn to priest, rabbi, Imam, or Maharishi? If love destroys fear and fills us with courage, how is it we are so frightened we must hate? We need love, like breathing.  How and why do we refuse it in a thousand small ways?  Why is there not more of it, or the visible signs of it? What do you think – ‘Why?’   Because It is the time to question assumptions. It is the hour to re-evaluate old fears and bring them to light. The stuff of dreams is love, for it lends its intelligence, its imagination, its light, its passionate breath to everything within heart-sight. Love lifts us beyond our ordinary self toward spontaneous combustion.   We know all this.  We’ve struggled with it for years, if not centuries.  I’m not trying to solve the earth’s biggest problem in this paragraph…would that I could.  No, what brings this front and center is I recently choreographed to an old Beatles song, “Because,” off the Abbey Road album.  In working with it day after day, its simple refrain of,  ‘”Love is old, love is new, love is old, love is you,” sunk below the surface, down into bone and muscle to emerge days later in large questions. Because body/mind connections are far more complicated and transformative than we know, I’ve found through the years that one of the lovely gifts of creating anything is the surprising syntax, and synchronicity that flow from opening oneself to the process.  I think it’s partially because we grow profoundly……

    Green pears rolled on gold cloth Warm pecans startled against cold marble Julienned ginger scenting the room. God is in the details Never more so than now. Absorb everything.         Stand Your Mat/Listen to Heaven There is a saying: ‘Fill your eyes- fill your heart.’  It is the Yogi repeating, ‘be present.’  In this season of gratitude, let your eye seek the one needing love, then love them for no other reason than they are as beautiful as the green pears.  The gift of the witness is to bear witness.  The gift received is being seen.   Astrological Notes Remember we are between eclipses, so not only is it a shake-up, shifting time, but eclipses move us to clearing old closets, of every sort, and re-aligning our ideas about projects and relationships. This energy, along with a Mercury still retrograde until the end of the month, offers a Thanksgiving week serving inner journeys, especially if we are once again with family…that old hunting ground of turbulence and chaos. Sun & Moon enter the first quarter square, putting the focus on Venus, again- relationships, value, and money…another abundant area ripe for review.  Venus is about to move into Scorpio, where Saturn has been holding sway.  This will take us more personally into the deeper, read hidden waters of old wounds. With luck, Venus may show us another way through difficult, transformative emotion toward bigger, better understanding of who we can be.