Tag Archives: personal transformation

Sunday inspiration: Working with the Hierophant to create our destiny

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My friend Beth Owls Daughter writes that 2012 is the Year of the Hierophant according to the Tarot numerology system. The Hierophant in the Tarot is traditionally associated with the Pope as a symbol for religious structures and dogma.

The word Hierophant comes from the ancient Greek that means ta hiera,“the holy,” and phainein, ”to show.”  In ancient Greece the hierophant was the priest who interpreted the sacred mysteries and served as the bridge between the spiritual experience and the individual worshiper, just as the Pope later took on that role.  The word Hierophant is also considered an advocate, proponent and supporter.

Beth quotes Caitlin Matthews (creator of the Arthurian Tarot)

The ancient Tarots make this card a Pope, while the more recent ones return to an older tradition of the hierophants of the Greek Mysteries.  Both Pope and Hierophant draw upon earlier traditions and represent important concepts. Drawing upon pre-Christian Roman religion, the Pope is called the pontiff or bridge who, in his own person, bridges this world and the other.

The ancient Mystery Religions were largely about the revelation of myth through dramatic representation or sacred ritual.  This is still an important part of our divinatory profession whereby the Tarot-reader bridges the everyday and the deep worlds for the client, through the medium of the cards’ story.

Beth also posts a Tarot spread created by Ms. Matthews to work with the energy of the Hierophant, the arbiter of the “Triple Crown” as she says of Fate, Free Will and Destiny. If you are a Tarot aficionado you may want to try this spread, but we can all use Caitlin’s outline of this spread as a map to unwind our past so that it lays out before us as a map to our future, without using a single Tarot card.

Wisdom of the Years Behind Me.

Begin by making a list of everything you have learned from the experiences that you have been through during your lifetime.  We often find that the most difficult and intense times of your life (often denoted by transits of Saturn and Pluto) are the times in which we gained the most insight and wisdom and deep understanding.

Sometimes it helps if we begin by listing the most intensely powerful and challenging experiences of our life, and then extract the gifts that came out of those experiences.

How I Wisely Traverse 2012

While there is nothing particularly significant astrologically for the year 2012, this is the year that Uranus and Pluto make their first exact square after coming close in the summer of 2011.  When the revolutionary (Uranus) and the destroyer and rebuilder (Pluto) face off in battle, the result is often intense and always involves endings and new beginnings.

What in your life are you ready to let go of?  Where is change needed in your life, and what do you need to do in order to achieve a flexibility of spirit so that this transformation can occur?

The Wisdom of the Years Ahead of Me

When you look ahead along the timeline of your future, what do you see?  Is the future blank and filled with fear?  Do you see a long and open road that is ready to be populated with people events?  Do you have a dream, a vision or an idea that can carry you into your future?

Whether or not we have a vision for the future, we will create it out of what we carry in the present.  Creating a vision for our future timeline is not the same as making a plan: the work of visioning requires a higher and broader view and a desire for a sense of purpose.  The transformation of the Uranus and Pluto square will continue through 2015.  Consider where you would like your life to be when this Great Transformation period is complete.

This Tarot spread also lays out three defining tools:

The Hand I’m Dealt (Me and my Fate)

In the astrological language, the hand we’re dealt is the birthchart.  This defines the potential of our personality and whether certain areas of life will be difficult for us or easy and harmonious.  Modern-day astrologers have learned that fate and destiny are two different things, and our free will is the determining factor of how one becomes the other.  The family we are born into, the circumstances over which we had no control – these are our fate.  What we do with that fate is up to us.

Looking along the timeline of your past, how can you define this hand that you were dealt?  What are the tools that you were given either to facilitate your progress, or to create challenges for you to overcome?

The Game I Play (Me and my Free Will

How we play the cards we are dealt is up to us.  Say you were beaten by your father.  Are you going to allow that experience to create bitterness and rage that will destroy your relationships and your future?  Or will you seek the help that you need to find the empowerment and compassion from the experience that can help you to become a mentor and healer?

This is where the path of Life becomes interesting.  We read about Free Will every day in the newspaper: how some people surpass incredibly horrific life experiences to accomplish great things, and others turn to a life of crime.  It’s all a question of how we play the game with the cards we’re given.

The Hand I Create (Me and my Destiny)

The question over whether or not we have any control over our Destiny is a thorny one and has been the subject of much debate.  Most dictionaries define Fate and Destiny as being synonymous, but my own belief is that they are quite different.

Using this triad of experiences, our Fate is the hand we are dealt, and our Destiny is created by how we play the Game.  Through the Free Will we have been given, we can make choices in our life that can alter the trajectory of the life that we are living.  In my theology, our higher self and celestial teachers assist in this process, speaking to us like the proverbial angel on the shoulder, helping to guide us towards the Right Actions that will help our destinies to unfold.

Most of us spend a great deal of our lives listening instead to the little devil on the shoulder which urges us to react in habitually patterned responses rather than break free of those bonds.  It takes wisdom and attention to learn to tell the difference between those two voices.

Where has your own voice of old habits and patterns held you back from making the transformations that are needed?  Where can you make better choices which will help you to break through the blocks to bring you closer to your own Destiny?

This is a beautiful exercise for the New Year and I thank Beth and Caitlin for their inspiration.  Please share your experience in the comments!

 

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Life can be hard

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personal transformationMy own life wasn’t a picnic until after my Uranus opposition at the age of 42, but every time I talk with a client who has had a challenging period of time or traumatic experiences I am filled with wonder at the ingenious ways in which we manage to keep ourselves alive despite dramatic and sometimes horrific experiences.

I have come to avoid seeing experiences as “good” or “bad.”  When we have a number of loved ones die in a short period of time we are usually under the favor of Pluto who is calling on us to go deeper into the Underworld – to face the jaws of Cerberus at the gates of hell and face the adventure of death and life as purely naked as it is possible to be, free of artifice and casual banter.

When our lives are going well and we blithely zip from here to there without a thought to our inner world or the life of the soul that continues beneath the superficial, some may call this an ideal experience.  I’m sure it’s Saturn who sits always on my Sun, but I am suspicious of that which comes too easily and have come to cherish those life experiences that force me out of my comfort zone, pushing me through spaces that feel much too small into a new and brilliant world.  Birth, anyone?

Don’t get me wrong, I can enjoy getting my bliss on as much as the next person.  Life is given to us so that we can find the joy, despite all of our sad stories and self-destructive tendencies, and then share it with others.  But the way to joy is sometimes through darkness, and when we encounter that darkness the only way is to go through it.  There are no short cuts, not that I can find anyway.

So I honor all of the valiant souls whom I am blessed to consult with – those who continue to seek the magic of self-knowledge and personal transformation and never give in to the darkness. The human journey is truly a remarkable thing.

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“Tell me something good.”

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It’s human nature to seek pleasure and avoid pain.  Nobody wants to feel bad, or go through difficult situations.  I have been an astrologer for more than half of my life now, so it’s hard for me to remember what it was like before I new about planetary cycles that were likely to bring challenges that required adjustment and change, but I imagine that it is pretty confusing.  Life is going great, and then all of a sudden here comes a curve ball and suddenly I’m feeling depressed for apparently no reason.

Some of you have heard me say that I have the hardest chart I’ve ever seen, and I like to think that’s so that I can bring some understanding to the table when consulting with clients.  When I talk about healing the core wound, or dealing with depression, it’s not just a concept – I’ve been there.  I know what it’s like to consider suicide.  I know what it’s like to feel that life will never get any better.  But I also know what it’s like to have moved through these horribly difficult times and come out the other side with great joy and happiness.

Sometimes in a consultation the client will say “I’ve just had a terrible time but now I want to move on.  Tell me something good.”  And it would be easy to help her to forget about where she has just been and talk only about the Jupiter transits that are coming, or the fact that her Moon has just progressed into Sagittarius which will make it easier for her to avoid the pain that she’s feeling.  But my experience tells me that before we can REALLY move on, we have to understand what just happened.  Where did those feelings of despair come from?  What was happening in the client’s chart when his wife had an affair?  And perhaps most importantly, when will these bad feelings start to subside?

To me, this is the magic of the astrological consultation: to take the distress of feeling bad and transmute it into an excitement over the transformation that is occurring.

This may be a bad example, but I have been dieting for the past several weeks.  I gained twenty pounds when I married Rich, and I’m ready to let go of that extra weight.  At first I felt very panicky when I was hungry, so hunger felt “bad.”  It was nearly impossible to tolerate.  But when I started losing a few pounds I started to reframe that sensation of hunger and started to think of it as a feeling that is associated with losing weight.  If I’m a little hungry, I will lose weight and feel better about myself and more energetic.  I will be eating within a few hours so I won’t starve.  That sensation of hunger brings less panic now and more excitement that the diet is working.

It’s the same when we are working through a deep core wound.  We know it’s a core feeling if it seems out of proportion to the event that triggered it, or if it just erupted by itself.  Sometimes this happens to me during yoga practice – all of a sudden I start weeping.  This feels “bad,” but we can reframe the experience so that it instead feels like welcoming an old abandoned part of ourself into our heart.  As we allow the ancient pain to fill our experience instead of use all of our coping skills to avoid it, we release the pain and become more integrated with abandoned parts of ourselves.

So don’t worry, I’ll tell you something good.  But it might not be what you think!

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Sunday inspiration: Butterfly transformation in the collective

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Thanks to Beth Owls Daughter for this link about the phenomenon of “imaginal cells” in the metamorphosis of the butterfly:

After a caterpillar buries itself inside its cocoon, it waits to morph into a butterfly.  The caterpillar does not simply shrink a bit and sprout wings.  Instead, it sort of disintegrates into a puddle of ooze within the cocoon.  If we were to open the cocoon halfway through the process, we would not find a half-caterpillar half-butterfly type creature, but a blob of goop.  The goop is made up of a bunch of individual cells that are all basically the same type of oozy cells.  For whatever reason, after the caterpillar has turned into ooze, a new type of cells start appearing.  The original ooze cells are NOT changing into these new cells, but rather the new cells seem to come out of nowhere.  They just appear out of thin air so to speak.

These new cells are called imaginal cells and they are so completely different from the original ooze cells that they are thought to be a virus or some other form of enemy so the ooze cells begin attacking the imaginal cells.  However, even though the imaginal cells are being killed off for not fitting in, they still keep showing up, more and more of them.  Eventually, the imaginal cells begin to find each other and cluster together.  Like attracts like, and the clusters begin to join up with other clusters.  The original ooze cells still keep attacking them but the imaginal cells continue to multiply and cluster together.

Eventually, they become a large community and they switch gears from simply being a group of like-minded cells into the programming cells of the butterfly.  Some imaginal cells start changing into wing cells, some start changing into antenna cells, some start changing into digestive tract cells, and so on.  They are no longer imaginal cells but become butterfly anatomy cells.  As we all know, if left alone to do his thing, the butterfly eventually emerges as a completely new entity from the original caterpillar.  Do they hold the same memories, life lessons, and consciousness?  Who knows?  One would think that for survival of the species, the butterfly would still retain whatever knowledge the caterpillar had learned before entering into the cocoon state.

imaginal cell transformation

This is a new concept to me, so I began to do some research.  The metamorphosis from caterpillar to butterfly has always fascinated me because it so closely mirrors my own experience of personal transformation in which we begin as an ordinary caterpillar, and then are forced into a chrysalis by a transit of Saturn, Pluto or Chiron.  The chrysalis is actually a protective device to protect us as we complete the transformation process.

Transformation goes  beyond the personal, and once we have made the metamorphic leap ourselves we can begin to serve as “imaginal cells”  for the transformation of the communities in which we live.

This process isn’t easy.  Like the imaginal cells in the metamorphosis of the butterfly, those of us who serve as transformative forces in our community are not always recognized as a positive influence and this will be especially true as the force of government power (Pluto in Capricorn) squares off against the force for revolutionary independence (Uranus in Aries).  But just as in the story of the butterfly, as we join forces, sharing the resonance of a new vibration and new information, we can become forces for positive transformation that will reverberate around the world.

For daily planetary news, visit my Facebook and Twitter pages.

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Looking forward – part III: The transformation of 2012

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This is the conclusion to a three-part article.  You can catch up on Part I here, and Part II here.

Transformation of 2012The gods are kind and they will be gracing us with a number of powerful harmonious transits to accompany the stressful times.  Chiron (the Soul Healer) and Neptune (the Soul Teacher) both move into Pisces this year where they will offer a direct line for us to communicate more directly with our own inner guides and teachers.  This process will be facilitated by Pluto, the Great Transformer, in a harmonious sextile to Chiron that occurs between 2012 and 2014.  At the same time, Saturn, the Celestial Teacher, will be in a harmonious trine to Chiron, helping us to more easily work with the soul wounds that are the source of our greatest pain, but also the keys to our greatest personal transformation.

Saturn will also trine Neptune between 2012 and 2013, enhancing our ability to give form (Saturn) to our direct connection to the spiritual world and our own personal guidance.  And finally, a harmonious sextile from Saturn to Pluto during this same period will provide us with a solid container (Saturn) within which this tremendous metamorphosis can take place.

Because every human being is interconnected through an energetic grid, the personal work that each of us does to accelerate our personal transformation will have an affect on every other person on the planet.  But this works both ways: we ourselves our affected by the energies with which we surround ourselves.  Waves of fear and distress can be internalized in ways that are not helpful.   We are being guided here by the most powerful of the planetary gods, and a high level of trust in the process will be required of us.

The biggest enemy of personal transformation is resistance, and in a period of extreme volatility such as the one we are entering it is tempting to try to protect ourselves by digging in our heels and attempting to hold back the flood of change.  This will not be effective and will only create additional distress.

As part of this resistance you may find yourself experiencing physical illness or drug addictions (especially with both Chiron and Neptune in Pisces, the sign of escapism as well as spirituality).   You may be plagued with anxieties as you attempt to hold back submerged thoughts and memories which clamor for attention and release.

Or you may find yourself engaging with these planetary energies by allowing yourself to be led by them in a mode that is completely reactive and without thought or planning.  The force of Uranus can inspire us to quit our jobs and leave the country one minute, and regret it the next.  Some of us will react to heightened anxiety by acting out and creating chaos in our relationships and work environments.

Under this pressure, psychotherapy may be helpful, although most psychotherapists are not trained to look at life through the lens of a spiritual awakening.  Throughout this period we will be best served by orienting ourselves towards the spiritual experience by seeking greater intuition and wisdom that is freely given from the inside.  Turning inwards In meditation, ecstatic dance, yoga, chi gong – all of these classic modalities teach us how to work with the energy of life to find the quiet center within.  It is from this center that all effective transformation comes.

And most of all. learn to trust the planets.  Through their guidance and wisdom we learn that just as we fear we will be enveloped by the darkness, the light shines through in greater measure than ever before, bathing us in the warm glow of ecstasy as we leave the darkness of the past behind and walk into a new world.

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Looking forward: The transformation of 2012

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This is Part I of a series that I will be posting on my website this week. I’m also doing a special radio show on Wednesday, March 3, at 7 pm Eastern on Blog Talk Radio.  Stay tuned for more details.

Looking back to understand the future.


No matter what you think about the controversy over the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012, there is no question that this is a significant time in human history.  As I write this, a wave of revolutionary fervor is spreading throughout North Africa and the Middle East, and in the United States frustrated workers are taking to the streets in protest against a political structure that favors banks and corporations and strips individuals of their economic rights.

It would be easy to think that perhaps the world really IS coming to an end if you weren’t following the astrological trends.  These trends provide a context for these world events and offer clues to help us to make sense of them as well as the changes that are occurring in our own lives.  The interrelationships of the planets as they circle the Sun help us to define periods of cyclic change that will encourage personal growth and global balance.  Depending upon the nature of the individual planet, areas of life which are out of balance will be highlighted and will require that we make some sort of adjustment in order to achieve a harmonious state in our lives.

In order to understand the nature of the changes that are coming, we must travel back in time to the beginning of 2008 when Pluto entered Capricorn.  As the planet that governs destruction and regeneration as well as revelations about the dark side of human character, Pluto has a transformative effect on the issues of any sign that it travels through.  Pluto’s journey through its own sign of Scorpio witnessed revelations of sexual abuse and the HIV epidemic  (death through sex) which transformed the way most of us viewed the permissive sexuality that came about during Pluto’s sojourn through Libra, the sign of relationships.  Pluto’s passage through Sagittarius brought us not only the September 11th tragedy (death by airplane and religion, both Sagittarian motifs) but also a relentless optimism ® that resulted in “bubbles” in the stock market and in housing.

With the entry of Pluto into Capricorn, that excessive optimism of the Sagittarian theme was forced down to earth with a hard landing.  Where Sagittarius encourages us to seek worlds that lie beyond the boundaries of our imagination, Capricorn requires that we restrict our scope and attend to the details at hand.  The economic debacle that followed Pluto’s entry into Capricorn has been most difficult for those of us who were the most optimistic during the Sagittarian period – those of us who took out large mortgages in anticipation of employment success or who were living beyond our means.

The difficult adjustment period of Pluto’s entry into Capricorn in 2008 was followed by a conjunction of Chiron (wounding and healing) to Neptune (spiritual attunement) in 2009 and early 2010 that brought up all of our anxieties and emotional distress and may have made it even more difficult to work through our economic difficulties.  Chiron’s ultimate goal is to heal any imbalance in the body/mind/spirit system and sometimes in order to do that we must undergo a “healing crisis” which forces the release of mental and emotional toxins which have become problematic.  Occasionally this results in actual illness that must then be attended to.

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The North Node/Pluto conjunction November 2010

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The North and South Nodes of the  Moon are important parts of the astrological chart, but they are not planets.  Rather, they are points in the sky that mark the passage of the Moon across the path of the Sun.  I like to think of them as signposts in the sky that point us in the right direction so that we can accomplish our evolutionary journey.  The South Node is associated with the past – things and emotions which give us comfort but also hold us back.  The North Node is associated with our destiny and helps us to align with our future self.  On November 27th Pluto conjoined the North Node for the first time since 1994

Geeky astrological detail – some astrologers use the “True Node,” the exact position of the Nodes, and some use the “Mean Node,” the average position of the Nodes which tend to vacillate forward and reverse rather erratically.  In my work I have found the Mean Node to be more accurate but as in anything else, astrologers will differ which is why you may find differing dates for this conjunction.

Transits involving the nodes of the Moon do not usually set off major events the way planetary transits do, but they do tend to signify a change in course that alters the path of our journey.

The last few times Pluto conjoined the North Node occurred in 1961 (in Virgo), in 1977 (in Libra), and in 1994 (in Scorpio).  1961 marked the beginning of the turbulent 1960s (which were helped along by the conjunction of Uranus and Pluto from 1962-1968).  The years after the 1977 conjunction saw the fall of Iran and the rise of religious dogmatism around the world which necessitated realignments of international alliances (with Pluto and the North Node in Libra).  In 1994, with Pluto and the North Node both in Pluto’s own sign of Scorpio, the genocide in Rwanda killed nearly a million people, and the bombings in Oklahoma City and at the Atlanta Olympics were  the first major terrorist attacks on American soil.

Pluto isn’t always the friendliest planet, and in fact is associated with death and destruction as well as the principle of rebirth.  Its job is to bring into the open the  hidden facets of our lives that need to be exposed and either destroyed or transformed.  When Pluto conjoins the North Node, Pluto’s job becomes the facilitation of our evolution.

Because nodal cycles don’t usually bring a big event that happens at the exact time of the cycle, it will be some time before the effect of this conjunction is known.  If you are currently in the middle of a transit of Pluto to your own chart, this will be a particularly significant time and you may want to pay close attention to the day-to-day events in your life.

Because the North Node is opposite the South Node, when Pluto conjoins the North it opposes the South which serves to bring up things from the past that are unresolved.  This is no time to shrink from confrontation, because Pluto will not rest until matters of consequence are dealt with!

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Chiron and Neptune – the final dance

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Chiron and Neptune are within twelve minutes of a conjunction now, about as close as they are going to come before finally separating in late November.  Although their conjunction is not exactly at the same degree, the influence of these two planets has been making itself known since early 2009.  Chiron is the healer of the soul, and Neptune connects us to our transcendent, creative and spiritual selves so these two planets together are a powerful pair.

Over the past eighteen months since Chiron and Neptune have been traveling in tandem there has been a powerful urge in the collective psyche for healing and reparations of all kinds.  See this link for other articles about this planetary combination.

On a personal level, many of us have had deep emotional experiences of release that freed us from the past, or which helped us to break through a longstanding block.  For others this has been a time filled with emotional pain and worry as we struggled to hold on, not realizing that it’s the letting go which ultimately frees us.

In any case, as Chiron and Neptune, both retrograde, take their final bow we may find ourselves looking back to see where there might be wounds that still haunt us; that still prevent us from truly evolving.  These two great spiritual teachers can provide the wisdom that we need to release the stuck energy of the past.

Quoting myself from an earlier article at the dawn of the conjunction:

Both Chiron and Neptune pose difficulty for the expression of the ego. Chiron requires that we process the wounds of the psyche before the ego can manifest in a truly healthy form, and Neptune calls for the transcendence of the ego into the divine unconscious: “from a drop of water to the endless sea.” In Aquarius that transcendence of the ego is even more important as Aquarius is a transpersonal sign; the sign that loves mankind but isn’t so crazy about people as individuals. The new “transhumanism” is a signature of Aquarius, in which technology and innovation are used to perfect the human being.

Because of this transpersonal nature of Aquarius, it is not the sign best suited to the kind of emotional processing that is required by Chiron. Where Scorpio will delve deep into a rich depression and excavate the psychological wisdom that can be found there, Chiron in Aquarius may instead retreat into a world of technology where life is more easily managed and the emotional component is less compelling. The result of this can be a core loneliness and isolation that is not easily rectified. On the other hand, there is also a brilliant innovation at work under the influence of Aquarius, and Chiron in Aquarius can bring about new and unique healing modalities that occur as conventional wisdom is rejected and new ideas brought forth. Aquarius is doubly ruled by Saturn and Uranus, and Chiron is the bridge between them so with Chiron in Aquarius we have a linkage between form (Saturn) and trans-form (Uranus).

In the conjunction, we sometimes get the best of the planets involved and sometimes their more difficult faces, depending on how we approach them and how they affect the rest of our charts. With Chiron and Neptune working in tandem, we are being called to deepen our spiritual experience of life in a body (Neptune) through feeling and releasing the pain of being human (Chiron). Barbara Hand Clow, whose book Chiron: Rainbow Bridge Between the Inner & Outer Planets is a wonderful resource, says that Chiron and Neptune serve to “bring the higher self into space and time” where we can become both grounded into our true natures under Chiron’s influence, and fully aligned with our higher self (Neptune) at the same time.

When Chiron and Neptune are working together, they combine to assist with the work of the soul. The body, the mind, and the ego are all most interested in living a life well-grounded in the material world that offers the maximum of pleasure and the minimum of pain. The soul does not pursue pleasure and avoid pain; instead, there is an embrace of experiences that will assist us at the deepest level to completely learn the lessons that are presented to us so that we can release the past and move forward with greater wisdom.

Chiron facilitates this aspect of soul work by uncovering any wounded places that have been left unresolved so that we can be freed of the blocked energy that our unreleased wounds hold within the body/mind/spirit system. Neptune assists by reminding us that there is a world of experience that lies beyond the boundaries of the material world. Under the influence of Neptune we either open up to experiences of a powerful mystical nature, or else we become confused and deluded as the nature of our personal reality is blurred and we have nothing to replace it with. Neptune bestows creative genius and a spiritual connection to our Divine self as the physical world is transcended, or it can cause us to indulge in escapist and addictive behavior in an effort to escape the prison of our own mind.

As in everything else in the astrological language, there is a both a higher and lower manifestation of both Chiron and Neptune, so when they combine in a conjunction there is the potential to for a transcendent experience of healing spirituality, or a confusing descent into the hell of the unknown of the psyche.

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Astrology in my world: Handling Jupiter/Uranus energy

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Art by Alex Grey

Much has been written about the positive aspects of the combination of Jupiter and Uranus in the chart, and there is no doubt that when these planets come together it is a rockin’ opportunity to open doorways, both in our life and in our own being, that have been stuck closed.  Jupiter is the planet of expansion and good fortune – it can bring pinnacle experiences and a sense of unlimited opportunity.  Uranus is known as the planet of change and sudden surprise, but it is also the instigator of experiences that serve to liberate us from anything that is holding us back – even if it is a prison of our own making.

The first conjunction (joining) of Jupiter and Uranus occured last week  in Aries, and the rest of the cycle takes place in Pisces.   Typically the first phase of a planetary cycle is most intense, because we encounter a new energy which has not yet become assimilated into our experience.  The initial conjunction took place at zero degree Aries, in an exact square to Mars in my own chart.

Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while may remember that my Mars has been hit repeatedly over the past couple of years.  It all began when Pluto entered Capricorn and hit my Mars at zero degrees Cap.  Then last fall, when Saturn entered Libra, it began a series of squares to my Mars.  Now, with Jupiter and Uranus both at zero degrees Aries, they are having a field day with my Mars!

From the comments on the Astrodynamics Facebook page it appears that I’m not the only one having some trouble with the energy of this conjunction.  Planetary cycles affect us all differently, and this one is no exception.  People who have a lot of fire and air in their charts – who embrace change and relish excitement – they will likely have an exhilarating process of release and enthusiasm under this planetary combination.  But for those of us for whom change is difficult, and whose charts contain lots of earth and water and are more security-oriented, this wild energy can be overwhelming and even frightening.

My own chart contains lots of fire and air, so I should really be in the first camp, but my chart is made up entirely of cardinal and fixed signs.  I am all action and stubbornness and have a lot of trouble relinquishing control.  This gives me a great deal of focus and an ability to work hard and accomplish a lot of things, but it also makes me somewhat inflexible (you wouldn’t know it to look at me though, because Gemini, the sign of adaptability, is rising in my chart).

I first noticed Jupiter approaching the square to my Mars because I became much more outspoken than I usually am.  In fact, I said just about everything that was on my mind, and it was fantastic.  With three planets in Libra and Saturn on the Sun, I am usually not that free and it felt very liberating.  Then one night, as the square culminated, I became terribly sick for about three hours in a huge release of energy that came through my body.  Afterwards I was fine – it was a purely energetic event that was really uncomfortable, but in the weeks since then I realize that something shifted within me that night and broke through my normal resistance.

However, the shift was evidently not complete because about two weeks later, when Uranus aligned in the exact square to my Mars, I experienced severe heart flutters when a huge force of energy became blocked at my solar plexus.  Mars is associated with the solar plexus, and astrologer Alan Oken says “The solar plexus is linked to self-preservation and the survival of the ego, the lower self. It is also the seat of the astral or desire energy field.”  Although this was a frightening event I wasn’t really afraid, because I knew that this was the very day that Uranus was aspecting my Mars and I was ready for something intense to happen.  Fortunately I work with a wonderful healer who helped to open up these blocks and release  some of the remnants of the difficult energies that still linger in my body and spirit.

For those of us on a healing journey, every challenging experience like this is an opportunity to clear some of the psychic and emotional debris of the past and emerge as a more whole and joyful human person.

If I can quote myself from the previous article on my Pluto story:

Someone asked me yesterday, “how do we know that we have worked through our issues so that we get to the higher manifestation of the planets?” Our personal issues and personality quirks create resistance within us to the unfolding progress of soul growth. As long as we identify with these issues and quirks and hold onto them instead of relaxing into the process of change, the difficult planetary transits create lessons and challenges for us in order to facilitate that process. Once we have stopped resisting and feel enough trust in the process so that we surrender each moment to the energies of the planetary gods as they work to deepen our evolutionary story.

I do have some tips for anyone going through intense energetic changes as a result of the current Jupiter/Uranus conjunction:

  • Yoga is one of the best ways to balance your energy system and release stuck emotions.  We often hold these blockages in our body, and by releasing them through a hatha yoga practice we can realign our energy fields and improve our experience.
  • Practicing mindful meditation.  Not a meditation that seeks to block thoughts and emotions, mindfulness is an awareness and a sense of being present in your experience.  Through a practice of mindful presence we awaken to the stirrings within the heart, and open the doors for blocked emotions and feelings to emerge and be welcomed and released with love.
  • Seek the help of healing professionals.  Sometimes we need talk therapy to work through situational difficulties.  Sometimes we need astrologers to help to give shape and explain the underlying nature of what we are experiencing.  Sometimes we need practitioners in the energy fields to help restore balance to the psycho-energetic systems.

As we delve more deeply into the more subtle realms, our need for healing and guidance becomes more subtle as well.  But if we approach these experiences with the awe and wonder they deserve, instead of being challenging they become an exciting adventure that will bring greater liberation and joy.

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