I originally wrote this blog about a year ago. Tonight I found it saved to drafts and since it speaks to a current them for me, of feeling my heart with several planets in Leo I am posting it tonight.
I need to feel my heart’s ache to find way to listen to the truth it is trying to tell me and to open to a reservoir of meaning that it holds for me.
This reservoir is a deep. I am aware of a disconnection I can feel to people in this world and of the sadness this brings for me. A sadness of longing to feel connected and having that longing denied or cut off can live inside me on a deeper level. Knowing what feels good and what doesn’t seems to be the only way to draw closer to that which nourishes me and take distance from what which feels disturbing or toxic. And yet, I need to remember too that in life, no one is perfect. When I deny this I expect too much from the wrong sources and loose the reminder to turn within and guard and take care of my own hurting heart so the hurt does not lodge too deep and make me loose my way forward to inner strength. This is not to deny that in becoming vulnerable I can break through and heal at a deeper level too.
A far deeper sadness for me lies in the fact of closing off from and not be open to the truths that my own heart is trying to tell me. And it occurs to me that the minute I start the journaling or blogging process, that is, find a way to express and know these truths, I am on the road to healing myself, feeling peace and becoming whole again. This is the realisation I have awoken with this morning
I was thinking about pain, as I often do. I was thinking how hard as it is, at times pain, especially emotional pain can be a way into my soul, a way in which my soul is trying to make its voice heard.
In early September I had some really tough days. This blog is being posted some time later but at the time i wrote it the Sun had been passing over natal Pluto in the first house.
I was involved in a family event which bought up residual trauma about the lack of nurture in our home, and the way alcohol was used in pretty unhealthy way. My father encouraged us to drink and several times my family thought it was funny to see me get really drunk and throw up, not by my own choice so much but through a lack of care and attention at family events. I was not so aware of this toxic hurt in my heart from these events but on some level it had lived inside of me and was awoken recently.
I now know that alcohol was far too harsh and toxic a substance for my sensitive nervous and emotional system. It made me ill from very early days and yet I sought that thing that made me ill because I was struggling inside and had no idea of how to protect myself, nurture myself and make healthy decisions regarding what I ingested, substances, people and relationships. I also used alcohol, and later drugs, unconsciously for many years to cover up deep fears and insecurities as well as difficulties in relating to others that came out of a lonely childhood with much older siblings.
As a younger adult I thought the way to connect was to go out party, get drunk and end up with someone. I had absolutely no idea of how to establish healthy relationships of emotional connection. I don’t want to go into the whole story but I got in a lot of trouble with alcohol and drugs and into quite a number of unhealthy relationships in my life. I was not capable of a healthy relationship.
My first real boyfriend was addicted to light drugs. And in this kind of atmosphere it was impossible to be aware of my heart, my heart was numb. Two terminations followed with this person and I gave myself away to someone who actually nursed unrequited love for another partner. In the end I was abandoned, betrayed with someone else and discarded as rubbish. Hard as it is to see now I attracted that kind of relationship as I did not have the ability to walk away and stand up for myself, love myself, nurture myself.
After much trauma at age 31, I got involved in AA and found sobriety. However that point I still felt that I was the bad person for having sought this method in the first place and had to do a lot of work to correct myself in order to recover.
Something in me questioned the AA approach in coming years, as I began to realise I needed to find a way to know and accept myself and find a pathway into myself that had been lost to me. I feel my true healing started when I realised that rather than having to “fix” myself so much recovery for me was going to be a quest for understanding of myself, of my inner child’s wounds and longings and of learning how to be my own good parent. To learn to make wise choices and to look less to the outside world for the missing validation of myself. This way of being I am seeing more and more recently was the true root of my co-dependency.
As I look back now I see I tolerated much hurtful behaviour because I was scared to be on my own. Life eventually forced me to face this and letting go of the last painful relationship, many years into my sobriety, took all of my strength. I cried over many years and wrestled deeply until I finally faced the truth that what I received from this person was not love. And that I too was limited in my ability to give my heart until I knew what was good for it. As long as I tolerated abuse and tried to turn myself into something else in order to win a counterfeit love I was going to be in pain.
It took over three years following the end of this relationship. In the end I won my heart back from its entrapment, the journey to understand the echoes in current enmeshed family relationships and establish healthier boundaries would take a few more years.
On an astrological note, I’m wondering lately about the Saturn principle as being one of core integrity towards protection of the self and its nurture and growth. Certainly it relates to the ability to be authentic.
Saturn has just passed through its third and final transit in square to my natal Sun, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter in the seventh house. As I write it is exactly in square to my nodal axis which falls across the first house/seventh house of self and relationships. As this transit has progressed,
I have noticed that I have a pattern of seeking therapy in order to be validated and mirrored. I have been trying to compensate for the lack of my childhood, in not being seen and mirrored. As I have come to understand the core truth of this, it is the parent’s task to reflect back to the child the truth of what she is feeling and experiencing. And yet, with the parent, being as they are imperfect and perhaps having not been showed the same cannot always give us this. So we are left with an absence, a void if you will, that needs to be filled from somewhere.
This void has driven me to therapy but also to the re-enactment of the central trauma of invalidation that I experienced before. Being able to experience that now as an adult and knowing I am no longer the trapped child means I have a choice to walk away.
In the accident I experienced at age 17 I was actually pinned in place in the car which crushed around me trapping me inside. I was thrown forward onto the steering wheel on impact and the impact broke a rib, which punctured my lung and there were two other broken bones. I lost my front teeth and was trapped inside the car for some time. I then spent three months pinned to a bed in skeletal traction with a pin through my lower leg bones.
In my case this was a core impact that I have taken into all my relationships. When feeling penetrated by someone’s sharp misunderstanding which feels like a wound I would still stay and not take freedom.
But that was not the major wound the major one was not having the strength to trust and act on my instincts, feeling trapped. I now know that it is a long journey to understand all of this. Until I can see and know myself how can I know that you are in fact mirroring the real me? And until I have learned to accept and love all of me (even the so called dark, angry, yucky bits how can I find that acceptance from anyone else?
In healing I have had to face a lot of inner poison put into me at times my others. The poison that I may hold inside may be the very antidote to the pain, once freed into the light it may purge me clean. Maybe Pluto transits do this in forcing us to go through difficult experiences, Saturn definitely presents me with experiences which demand some kind of separation from or pruning of past patterns.
As I write this blog I am seeing that Saturn’s transit has shown me that this has been one of the core dilemmas of my life. Standing strong for and supporting the validity of my own feelings and needs has been a long struggle.
It is kind of lovely to be on the other side of the Saturn transit. This one has been hard but it has brought me towards certain deeply embodied truths. At times, especially on this blog, I have shared about how lonely and disconnected I felt. And yet it’s a kind of curious paradox in that being able to see and feel and express these feelings things feel better for me.
I’m beginning to accept that some loneliness may be part of this path of healing, of having undergone the things I have. And that solitude is, in of itself a very powerful gift. Even deeper is the understanding that solitude is different to isolation. For from out of understanding and accepting the necessity of solitude to the birth of an individual soul comes a deeper sense of connection to life.
The words of a song by Massive Attack come to me as i sit here typing this.
I try to believe what I feel these days
It makes life much easier for me
It’s hard to decide what is real these days
When things look so different to me
…………
I feel like a thousand years have passed
And younger than I used to be
I feel like the world is my home at last
I know everyone that I meet
It is not only the words of that particular song that touch and stir my deep soul so much but the beautiful undulating rhythm which like a wave of movement and flow carries me deep within my heart to an ecstatic place of connection and truth.
When I dance the wave it becomes like a Sufi dervish whirl which connects me deeply to world pain, longing, sadness, desire, passion, trauma, healing, love, hunger. joy, and ecstasy.
I would not be dancing this spiral dance had not trauma and addiction bought me here. It has not been an easy road. But has, perhaps, been a necessary one? For someone with a strong Pluto Chiron signature touching my Mars and Moon. The deep wound has ached so at times and yet it has been the entry point into healing and to the deep mystery of life, not only my personal life, but the collective one too.
Sometimes the wholeness of it seems too much to fully encompass and I feel as though I will burst. There are not sufficient words to give it a voice. Images may speak to deeper truths. Peace, healing, love, joy, wonder, awe, ache, longing, desire, frustration, connection, beauty, mystery I honour you all as aspects of what it is to live fully awake, fully alive on this planet.
Emerging From The Dark Night 