When you can cry

Tears open us up to our soul and this is why those locked in a defended prison of intellect will not countenance them. This is my ongoing realisation lately as I gain more and more insight into my own challenges of feeling fully in my family and this society.

I just took a drive to drop off some clothes and books to charity and luckily I rescued a book that my inner critic tried to toss out.. I bought at the Chalice Wells Garden’s bookshop while having that breakdown in Glastonbury from August to December 2005 where I went following the head injury after the family I was lodging with told me my tears were making them face too much of their own buried pain.

At that time I was in so much deep pain over my marriage ending.. I had tried to go back to Cambridge and start a new life after my husband left but I had trouble finding a place where I could live freely. I ended up lodging with that family who would not let me use the living room, only the kitchen and bathroom.. Thinking about how all of this came hard on the back of being emotionally abused by my mother and sister in the aftermath of Jonathan leaving it’s no surprise I ended up hitting my head open again after only a few months of living there. That I now see as reprenting repressed life energy, emotions and anger bubbling up as well as grief that had no way out.

The grief and trauma was not only my own since in the cranio sacral session just before I had it, with my first therapist, Wendy, I had been reliving my 1979 crash and near death from above my body as a soul seeing and feeling the terrible effect on my father who only lasted another 5 years after it and my older sister’s aneurysm 4 months later. When I think of my fathers soft Libra Moon and of how challenged the ruler of that Venus (feminine feeling value principle) was in his own chart by Pluto and Chiron that makes sense. My own Venus is conjunct my Sun (father) in the seventh house of relationships square to natal Neptune in Scorpio which connected to my Mum’s powerful three planet stellium of Sun Mercury and Saturn in that sign. In my chart natal Neptune sits in the 3rd house of siblings.. Saturn as to do with loneliness and lack and Mum was an only child whose heart longed for siblings.

I also found out over the weekend that a planetary body which is one of the Centaurs discovered in 1992 a year before I got sober and was undergoing my darkest year of active addicition Polus is very related to alcohol and alcholism and sits smack bang on my Sun and Venus in Aquarius..

In myth the father of Polus is Silenus who is the son the nature God Pan and tutor of the God of wine Dionysus (Neptune in the astrological system) and he is an alcoholic.. Polus ends up getting wounded and dying in the same mad situation involving all of the Centaurs getting drunk with Hercules (Mars) after Hercules goes to Polus begging him for a taste of the wine.. Soon all of the Centaurs who live close by get wind of it and end up meeting up in Polus cave hoping to have a taste of the wine, they are then shot at by Hercules and both Polus and Chiron are wounded.

Chiron (another Centaur planetary body discovered in 1977) also gets injured by one of Hercules spears with poison on it but he does not die, just suffers that wound for the rest of his life. Polus only gets hit by the poison from the arrow that kills him as he tries to remove it from another one of the Centaurs involves. He ends up dying due to both that inquisitiveness and self sacrifice. According to astrologer Zane Stein who has done a lot of research on Polus and the time of its discovery, in a personal birth chart the placement of Polus can relate to a situation where curiosity ends up being destructive in our life, or where we go beyond normal boundaries to help due to our own curiosity around wounding (my take on this is that our early struggles with non available or addicted trauamtized parents and grandparents is that we may get set up for this helper role and even our own self destruction due to high level empathy.) This certainly all rings very true for my own life. You can read Zane’s detailed article below.

https://zanestein.com/pholus.htm

Polus as a moving astrological body crosses over the orbits of both Saturn and Neptune and has to do with where we may, in attempting to go beyond boundaries end up in hot water or dipping our toes in the deep waters of our own or another’s unexamined madness.

And here is astrologer Nick Campions take on the Pholus effect in a birth chart.

“He intensifies very strong, brings you to your limits, raises a strong urge for growing (but often very spontaneously and unconscious), when at the same time you feel a lack of inner possibilities to grow in that specific area. Therefore you live in a very unstable ‘borderline’ situation, where you tend to do things impulsively (to cross the border) or you don’t do anything at all, because you feel an inner blockade.”

Anyway back to the book that I rescued and bought at the Chalis Wells gardens in Glastonbury.. It is a book about the secret teachings of Mary Magdalene who was the lover and wife of Jesus, a fact that patriarchal forces erased from the biblical history since Peter one of the disciples was very opposed to Mary and her relationship with Jesus. The book is very intriguing to me as it talks of Mary being Jesus’ divine celestial counterpart and of the teachings and wisdom she also carried that is not at all widely known due to her profound influence and teachings having been erased.

During my time in Glastonbury I so often visited the tiny Magdalene Chapel there where people placed prayers and votive candles on a simple alter and often in the gardens I had visions of three Mary’s with Jesus crying over his body following it being taken down from the cross. According to some legends the saint Joseph of Arimetha took the body of Christ to the earth tomb where it was interred after his death. It is also believed that he took the blood of Christ to Glastonbury in a Chalice and it is after this Chalice that Chalice Wells gardens are named.

This erradication of the Divine Feminine principle is, what I firmly believe makes our culture so toxic.. We seem to have outlawed women’s spiritual, sexual and creative power and so it appears as a kind of ‘madness’ or becomes to be so judged that way by the masculine dominated society that only wants power over these so called ‘irrational’ ecstatic and Dionysian elements.. Often the ones who are judged as ‘mad’ or insane in the outgoing Kali Yuga have been those who are bright, intelligent, creative, inspired (filled with spritual fire) prone to spiritual visions or insights that are not understood within a far too narrow band of consciousness that we now inhabit.

These words stood out to me when I read them in that book a short while ago: that the intellect when confronted by the wisdom of the soul often negates it seeing it as irrational when in fact intuition and deep feeling are the most important parts of us. There is always, at base, a profound psychological reason (psyche here meaning soul and psychology ; the logos of soul) for the things we do as well as the longings we pursue…and often it seems to me that the ones who suffer most deeply in this society often seem marked out for the deepest journey, if suicide does not take the first.

I will close out today’s reflections with a piece of writing I came across a few days ago in one of older leather bound journals.

it is often the most spiritually healthy and advanced among us who are called on to suffer in ways more agonizing than anything experienced by the more ordinary. Great leaders, when wise and well, are likely to endure degrees of anguish unknown to the common man. Conversely, it is unwillingness to suffer emotional pain that usually lies at the very root of emotional illness. Those who fully experience depression, doubt, confusion and despair may be infinitely more healthy than those who are generally certain, complacent, and self satisifed. The denial of suffering is, in fact, a better definition of illness than is its acceptance.

M Scott Peck