We’re In Heaven : Reflections on Uranus and Individuation

Uranus is your quirks, those little things that make you who you are. Instead of ostrasising them, embrace them. This heals the wounds, fills in the missing parts and makes you shine brighter. You are different and that is the beauty of it.

Leah Whitehorse

It’s a blessing to reach the age where you start to realise a lot of what made people tease you or sideline you actually isn’t the thing you need to change, but the very thing you need to embrace and celebrate. To reach a stage where you no longer hunger as much for the love and approval of others.

I’ve been deliberating on subject a fair bit lately as I have begun to realise that happiness comes from feeling okay within my own skin, not from the externals but from the peaceful way I feel when I front up on any day, just willing to face what wants to be faced and be me.

I’ve shared before on this blog about some of my more painful feelings that have come from feeling alone and that I don’t belong and I know that I do oscillate between the old co-dependent way of feeling that there is something wrong with me (indeed I blogged about that yesterday) and the new way of being which means I love and accept myself as I am while realising its okay not to be perfect (which was demanded of me and internalised as I grew up).

It’s a blessing to understand that all along there was the option to belong to myself. When being me, is okay with me, it no longer bothers me as much how people are responding. I get it that they are coming from their own space and place and point of view.

I recently read a post on Kim Saeed’s blog Let Me Reach concerning the Inner Child. Most specifically she was referring to the work of Robert Burney author of Codependence: Dance of Lost Souls.  In fact I had been writing my own blog about him earlier in the week after listening to him being interviewed on Blog Spot Radio.  But mid week my internet connection got lost and I wasn’t able to post the blog.

I just came back from half an hour with the technician where he fiddled around with a very serious look on his face and told me that I was going to have to drop the computer back to the shop to get it upgraded, but at the last minute a miraculous reprieve, he figured out a way to reconfigure it and my connection was back up.

It is my understanding that there are always resonances surrounding us that echo themes in our own lives working out when we are sharing a path of recovery with others.  Robert, like me is a recovering alcoholic.

If you are one of the people, like me, healing from a relationship with a narcissist also and having to address your own co-dependency, sooner or later you are going to stumble on similar things that help you.

One of the things Robert addresses in his interview is how we, as children, come to the core belief that something about ourselves is not okay or lovable. When our inner child is wounded in its ability to be, understand and express itself we carry these wounds deep inside and sooner or later we attract people to play out the tangled dance of co-dependency which can end up with us badly messed up and lost.

In trying to win the love we can never win a lot of us turn ourselves inside out and swallow whole the belief there is something wrong with us. In one way the thing that is most wrong with us rests in looking outside for the love, approval, mirroring, empathy and understanding that was lacking in childhood.   Wounded and wounding relationships recreate the earlier pain that we felt and set us on the journey to heal.

Often when I blog I say I have just been reading. Well in the past few weeks I have been reading the book The Curse of Lovely (now that I have returned it to the library I am sorry I cannot tell you the author’s name). The “curse of lovely” is essentially about people like me who were conditioned to be “nice” and stuff our true feelings. In the course of learning this method of coping, most especially in families where we turned ourselves inside out trying to win love, we build up a huge bank of resentment inside. We also learn to live in our heads, sabotaged by the critical parent which Robert talks of in the above interview and badly split off from our body and intuition.

Healing comes for us when enough pain gives us the insight into the condition we are in.   In order to heal we have to make a relationship with the inner children within that we lost connection with and got wounded in the course of living. In his interview Robert talks about not just an inner child, but an inner family.

John Bradshaw deals with the same issues in his book Homecoming.  In our psyche are a number of children of different ages, all the way up to adolescence. At certain ages we confront developmental issues and hurdles which are contingent upon learning necessary skills.  Often due to lacks, wounds or deficit we don’t get to complete these and so we can and do remain frozen at different ages.

For me a major accident at 17 left me, to a large degree, frozen at this age. My addiction really began to kick into gear at around the same time. I started to use drugs as well. It was a kind of check out, and a rebellion against the control of a father who did not really support or encourage me through the painful struggles of adolescence. Now at age 52 I have begun to address a lot of this, but I still find that there is deep within me an adolescent in rebellion.

On reflection, editing this to post it several months later, that part of me carries an authentic part of my spirit that does not want to be hijacked by collective cultural norms, expectations and ways of doing things. In many ways the rebellion has been necessary and it’s really on my mind at present, especially since soon (this transit has now passed over the time this blog has been on the backburner) Saturn will begin to square my natal Uranus in the first house.

This Uranian energy in the Leo ruled first house makes me a person who doesn’t really like to toe the line and who needs to individuate. Challenges to this come from all my seventh house planets (not in exact opposition but which did begin to oppose this placement my progression as I grew).  I remember as a child wanting very much not to be involved in family outings, especially where there was some buried trauma.

A close friend of the family had gone to prison due to being caught up in a spare parts trafficking issue on the black market. This was a repeat of something that had occurred for his father, my godfather, year’s back, a case of a family secret held within the collective as a shadowy imprint playing out, through an oldest son.

As a child I felt a strong intuitive charge around this event and dug my heels in about going to visit the prison. This kind of rebellion and intuition can serve me well, I’d rather sidestep complex family gatherings and fly solo, the more I can accept that I am happier living this way, the more peace I find.

For years I was convinced that I needed to be different or adopt a different attitude it felt too mean to hold onto my own perspective or I met challenges to it.  The deep unconscious fear of abandonment led me to toe the line.  I’ve needed to learn to be more narcissistic in a healthy way in the face of pressure.

In one week’s time we will be having a celebration for my mother’s ninetieth. In this case I’m giving my support as much as possible rather than going down the rebel pathway. On reflection it was a very difficult thing to be involved in and I did end up with an injury following it. In the blog I was writing, this is what I said

“It is a good feeling to know I’m not stuck in reactions that are fuelled by a whole host of repressed feelings.”

Mmmm was I kidding myself?   So much that was repressed from the family history reared its head around this event and I ended up damaged due to the fact of not honouring my own boundaries and carrying a lot of energetic gunk that was shared with me by a family member.

In any event this time of year is associated with a lot of critical events : my father’s diagnosis with a life threatening illness, my marriage and the breakdown that led me to confront my alcoholism nearly 10 years later . It was also associated with the giving up of a path my ex husband and I had tried to take that led us overseas to start a new life in the UK,  At this time of year we returned to face what I had left behind and to give support to my mother who had undergone an injury and a sister who was struggling.  Things blew up around the time Uranus was beginning to oppose its own place.  I had explosive dreams and I now know I was experiencing unconsciously so much conflict, so much fear, so much obligation, such a pull back.

Around this time of year four  years ago I returned to the city of my birth after over 24 years away. Another relationship went into the fire and the pain of being alone I had to confront was enormous, life was pulling me out of a narcissitic relationship in which someone was making demands of my soul that were conflicting with my own spirit.

During the past four years I haves suffered many black days of grief and at times have felt suicidal, and yet somehow out of that dark space I am emerging into the light.

Over the past 13 years I have felt that on some level I have been undergoing a profound death rebirth passage. It is not an unusual thing to experience as we undergo the Uranus opposition to it’s birth place, something deep within our soul of our authentic individuality that could not live cries out and seeks to find expression as we integrate past experiences and seek a new way forward using all we have learned.  . I have heard this described as “the return of the repressed”.

The pain and struggle to form my own individual identity out of the family matrix and other pulls from my seventh house was not something conscious, rather it was something happening deep within me in silence and at night in the depths of the dark.

Last year around this time I underwent a painful sinus operation. In some way I now know what I only dimly intuited then, I had repressed a lot of grief and pain over family and personal trauma which was expressing through my immune system and sinuses.  Last year was a very lonely Christmas but out of this I connected with someone very wise and special who encouraged me to start this blog. This year I carry all of this wisdom and experience onwards.

This Christmas, too, was solitary and painful, as imprints of last year and all other  years expressed in a bit of a blood bath.  I was in emergency at the hospital on Christmas Eve.  I now know it was the PTSD manifesting and the doctor was asking me a lot of questions, trying to get an insight into my distress.  Bleeding and clotting went on for over four days. This shows me that my feelings are still to a degree blocked and in conflict inside me and so I still have a fair way to travel on my path of recovery.

Choosing to spend a solitary Christmas although it was painful did show that I was making an effort to care for myself and yet that desire conflicted too, with my desire to be with ones I love, challenging as they can be.  I probably won’t ever be free of this conflict with Uranus in Leo in my first house ruling all those planets in the seventh.

I can only say that each year brings a little more growth in awareness and perspective.  It shows me my need to be able to sustain time in the dark and alone as necessary to the generation of a deeper creative process.

On the second last day of the year, 2014 I look back with a growing perspective of awareness and acceptance of what I struggled with and judged myself for in error throughout the year.  I am sure that the dark days will not end but the fact is that the comfort and sense of peace and homecoming I feel that grows out of the rich compost of those days bestows great blessings.

For what it is worth I am sharing it here, publically, rather than in a closed journal, because I guess in the unmasking is the saying “yes” to being seen, not to be confirmed but in order to bear testament to what has occurred in the shadows and which I feel needs to find a voice as I move through the final hours of 2014.

As I liberate this blog over two months from when I first started to write it the Sun Mercury Venus and Pluto are all passing through the fifth house of creative self expression so I feel that it is timely to release it.

On the day I first wrote this blog Jasper and I sat quietly in the afternoon shadows listening to the song “We’re in Heaven”, that is the title I first gave to this blog. I think about how heaven is a place where I am not struggling and not in pain, at least for a short while.  It is a place where I am deeply connected and centred, a place where I come home to my true self.  Heaven appears and recedes from time to time, just as the sun appears and then is obscured by the clouds.

I am grateful for the days and moments in which I feel this sense of heaven surrounding me and am liberated for a time from the dark womb of pain, while seeing  how I have internalised collective judgements around it.  I hope to grow in acceptance that both the dark and the light are necessary parts of a creative unfolding process that is life, that we only emerge into the light, to the extent that we can embrace the dark and find healing within it.

I reflect as I write this about Uranus both natally and in transit.  Of the current alchemy between it and Pluto, as they move closer to wards exact square.  I see one as a representative of the dark and the other as a representative of the light.  I know they are working their alchemy as the Gods around us that manifest in our own journey to consciousness and evolution.