Yesterday was intense, more pressure from Scott, and big spins. It is so hard to be in a situation where someone is pleading with you for their life, then you have those who know you have overextended yourself for so long, you even know it yourself, but you did it out of love meeting so much opposition along the way.. I did not know if I would stand up today but I did and I ate and got us out to the park and was rewarded by Jasper being able to connect with another little dog called Wolfie who was ripe for a big run around, that was so good for Jasper who absorbs so much of my stress.. We then did a brisk walk before heading home to get a coffee on the way.
I had not seem my local barrista, Miguel for a while, I have such a soft spot for him and its lovely to have someone in your life who asks after and missed you.. He had not been that well either, the guy works two jobs and is so fast and friendly working in the cafe.. I just told him vaguely its been a tough two weeks and that was enough..
I am home now and the day that started foggy and cloudy is clearing with sun now shining down on me in the little nook where I write my blog in the mornings, is that a metaphor? I made a new friend on Instagram they wanted to support me in what I was going through but after opening up to Jackson and getting in so much hot water financially I had to just not reply, its best if I manage my own life, its the only way.. I did put a call through to my brother and just as well as he is off to America today after 2 years of not being able to go there.. He has a place in Utah and usually spends their winter skiing and missing out on summer, my therapist always jokes about how he prefers an icy place to the warmth of Australia. There is no easy way to be close to my brother, I have wept over it, he has devalued me so many times but I still love him, never the less I did feel so spun around after our chat on Tuesday. I keep the communication open even if there is so much I cannot speak to him about.. He was telling me how much he also struggles with his sinuses and about an awful medical procedure he had done on them as a child. I always learn something new from our chats.
I was so happy after our walk yesterday to the wild reserve close to us.. I sang and wrote a number of poems.. I then watched the movie A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood with Tom Hanks all about a man who is so angry with his emotionally abandoning father.. It made me realise the unconscious so often draws us close to those things that resonate. Earlier in the day my guides had directed me towards a reading in the Al Anon reader on being there for an unavailable parent by being able to accept them as an imperfect and deeply flawed human being.. the movie helped me to see how so often my anger and resentment derailed me and can still do.. I am trying my best to find ways to forgive my father.. he did his best I know that, I also know that he loved me. Our closest times were riding the Cha Cha at the Hanging Rock fair, because on those early coast holiday fishing always came first and I abhorred being out on the boat as did my older sisters who always jumped ship and swam in to shore.. Being young I could not do that and was just stuck there. I remember one day throwing up an apricot yoghurt after being seasick. I had so little power or control as a young one and the still carries through today and as much as I blame myself I know the entire thing goes very much deeper. There are just so many deeply unconscious reasons I get drawn to men with problems and try to save them when really I should be saving myself and yet that his how deep our longing for connection goes.. nothing to be ashamed about at all.
My living sister is very on my mind.. I miss her, I do.. We have not spoken for weeks.. Seeing Lloyd sitting by his dying father’s bed in that movie called to mind my Mum later days.. Dad was taken so quickly we never got to speak as the drugs took him under prior to us losing him after they tried to perform an emergency tracheoctomy on him in January 1985. I carried that terrible loss, buried grief and guilt for years in my addiction, it only began to burst out of me from 1999 onwards and then the seas churned so wildly in my life as I was pulled this way and that forwards and backwards to family and my ancestral lands in the UK. One’s soul journey is enormous that is for sure and MOST CERTAINLY HAVE ENDURED MORE THAT MOST
SEVER BODILY INJURIES INVOLVING BURNS LACERATIONS OR DEEP CUTS UP TO 4 OR 5 TIMES
NEARLY DYING AT 17
HAVING MY SISTER DISABLED IN 1980
HER SUICIDE ATTEMPT
MY FATHER’S DEATH
ADDICTION
TERMINATIONS OF PREGNANCY
LOSS OF MY OLDER SISTER AFTER A PROLONGED PERIOD OF ILLNESS
SECOND SUICIDE ATTEMPT OF MY SECOND SISTER AND HER ONGOING INCARCERATION AND SHOCKING WITH ECT
EMOTIONAL ABANDONMENT BY MY BROTHER IN HIM NOT BELIEVING ME AFTER MUM DIED
I need to write all of this stuff out so I get a more realistic sense of how well I actually have coped up to now… no one really understands, except maybe my therapist.. the important thing is that I do.. and i no longer consent to drown in toxic shame for having admirably tried to help someone also in a very difficult situation, my own emotional neglect set me up for this and God knows unconscious patterns can take years and years to get an adequate handle on.
I lay down on the earth out the front of my house earlier and gazed upon the tapestry of branches above me, some almost totally denuded of leaves.. We are at the tail end of autumn here in the Southern Hemisphere and I can also feel a kind of newness as the 1st of June approaches, although I believe the seasons actually tend to anchor in around the equinoxes and solstices around the 21s of the respective months, April, June, September and December.
I had a major spin out before.. Still trying to help a friend who is in a desperate situation and made me their rescue plan, part of me was crying and thinking I held on so long when it was costing me so much and then I thought of the warmth of my older sister’s body how she held me as a baby when Mum as an older mother was not there and then of how abruptly she departed when I was only 3 marrying a dark man and going to New Zealand.. At the time I did not know of our ancestral connection there.. My sister’s husband Ron was in a forestry career and gone for long periods, I know from the many letters my older sister sent back that came into my hands after she died in the care home that she was often alone out there and exchanging weekly and even daily letters with both he and my Mum, as in the mid 60s there was no email or internet.
I got myself out after this experience of hitting the ground to a wild area close to a residential space that Jasper loves, there were tens of red and gold large mushrooms scattered around on the ground.. they looked so magical, almost like a home for gnomes.. Immediately I already felt better for going out.
Another person has come into my life too who seems to be offering me a connection but there seems to be a face off by the two people I care about and this relates to the planet Mercury being in the sign of the twins (Gemini) very close to my Chiron in Pisces at the time we connected though as I write Mercury has backtracked to about 28 degrees of Taurus in square to my natal Uranus in the first house. It goes direct on the 5th of June so there is a lot being stirred up at present in terms of old karmic themes.
On the issue of my first house Uranus in Leo, I never felt much like i belonged anywhere, most especially after Dad died, all I experienced growing up was my family fracturing and then the turmoils and traumas hit as Pluto in Scorpio swept through and I then my sister had bad accidents and trauma.. all of these dark experiences with separation and isolation have made it hard to trust, to have faith or belief in anyone.. I seemed to not know how to truly join my energy with another person in a good way and am often resisting just to preserve my own emotions. (The planet Uranus spins backwards to any of the other planets and I experienced this most powerfully about 2 am the other morning, my entire body was spiralling in a very strange pattern. )
With Mars in Fire now and the Sun there too with Jupiter though there is an uplift energy as soon as I get outside into nature. Jasper loves it too. In nature I experience my energy as free. I talk to the birds and notice everything.. The sky and trees and grass seem so alive.. I know that there are presences around me too, that even in those dark days of my addiction when my grief over the loss of my father and his callous treatment of me in the wake of my accident and Judith’s aneurysm, held sway I was kept safe on many of the nights I was in some kind of alcoholic black out.. and things descended into the loneliest place in Sydney upon my return from overseas until God sent me my ex husband and I finally found sobriety 1993. What a journey since then.
Anyway despite my spin out earlier I know now how to ground out of these things where i get swept up in someone else’s issues so powerfully and obviously this is all about my unconscious working patterns out in relationships (7th house) and men (transiting Uranus in Taurus squaring my Sun Neptune square).
I do not know exactly what will work out only that something will and that my energy is a lot more available than it has been to actually get up living and moving than at any time after the second head injury. Difficult and good times oscillate in life like a pendulum, sometimes the swing down to the bottom feels so desolute and deep and desperate you feel you will never rise or see the light again and yet that has not been my experience.. And even if I held onto Scott for too long who knows if I was not meant to rescue him.. I think in these times we are so set on taking care of ourselves at times that we can forget our fellow humans may be enduring something just as bad. I also notice my tendency to judge which can come from a narrower view not so open to the mystery.. So it is I draw close to the angels in prayer and thank them always for keeping me safe, no matter how unsafe I have so often felt myself to be as I continue to find ways to surrender myself to the working out of deep patterns that seem to do with multi-generational trauma unravelling.
Admittedly these two terms are all relative to who is deciding or projecting value judgement in life but we have astrologically experienced a big shift over the past few days with the planets Mars and Jupiter both moving from the depth unconscious watery sign of Pisces (the final in both the zodiac and the watery trilogy) into the first active, intitiating cardinal fire sign of Aries ruled by the planet Mars. So Mars is now not as debiliated as it was being in the sign of its natural rulership.
Many of us will be integrating powerful lessons around our use of power, assertion and energy in the weeks to come, especially empaths, it is something Lee Harris flagged up in his most recent monthly update. For myself I am rising earlier since the shift and seeing where my need to always help, be ‘nice’ do the ‘right’ or ‘good’ (people pleasing) thing gets me into so much hot water.. That said we live in a me first kind of society at the moment where so many people are out for what they can get and are in difficult situations due to the way governments and the ‘systemic’ energies are organised. With all of our abundance so many seem to be panicky or in extra need right now.
For me lately I have to be very mindful of where i place my energy and I notice a hell of a lot of enlightened empaths posting on this, that said at times it might be a form of hubris to claim ‘enlightenment’ after all what does that term actually mean?
Well to me Aries is about that burst of primal fire, identity or self that must rise up and about the light we need not to have dimmed in order to be true to a larger sense of Self. For many of us empaths this is not necessarily a powerful strongly secure egoic self for many of us, indeed often we were raised more on the powerless end of the narcissism/empath spectrum which meant our egos could not feel strong and often our real gifts such as empathy, spiritual attunement and sensitivity were devalued. Sadly the mainstream education system and much of our conditioning may have shut us down or even pathologised us for these many valuable qualities that we do have.
Awakening empaths such as Anita Moorjani claim that the world at the moment is making a shift from the patriarchal heroic/negatively overpowering to and devaluing of nature narcissistic end of the spectrum to a more caring, femininely centered, intuitively and spiritually oriented one (grounded in both nature and the body), one in which empathy is valued and people appreciate the fact of what we owe to older cultures who lived more embedded with nature and knew how to respect it and it cycles..
The rise of feminine power is just one part of this as its about a shifting balance between masculine and feminine ends of the polarity. In the old dying system narcissists seem to be able to rule by denigrating anything they decreed to be more lowly and primal.
I watched a recent David Letterman interview with Barak Obama last night and a lot of it concerned the civil rights movement that sparked such conflict in one of the first major protests of the black community : a march that took place from Selma to Montgomery on the 7th of March, 1965 but was initially squashed by police and state powers leading to it being both overpowered and turned back
Prompted by Martin Luther King the march resumed two days later getting as far as the Pettus bridge in Selma, befoe again being turned around by a court order.. Eventually the march began again a few weeks later on 21st of March arriving in Montgomery 4 days later on the 25th of March It is to be noted that on the 25th of March the sun has shifted from the Neptune sign of Pisces into the Mars ruled sign of Aries.. Aries carries a very different energy. . This march eventually ensured the passing of legislation to allow black Americans the right to vote.
Obama stated that he owed his presidency to these protests and whether or not you are a fan (and many are not) this tenacity of the black American’s ensured they could not longer be as disabled from their constitutional rights but as we all know the fight still had and has a very very long way to go.
I can identify with the lack of empowerment of people such as Black Africans while knowing I do not know at depth the level of injustices they do face.. Seeing what happens to our indigenous population in this country is enough to sicken any empath but luckily things are now changing with our new Prime Minister willing to finally endorse our aboriginal people’s call to change outlined in the Uluru Statement From the Heart and our first appointment of an indigenous person in the office of Minister of Indigenous Affairs.
Getting back to the more personal, lately I am seeing how I also collapsed in the past due to having no power or having to ‘keep the peace’. It has not been an easy pill to swallow at all.. But no longer criticising myself as much is helping even if those old voices telling I would be better off killing myself came back with a lot of ferocity a few days ago.
The shift of both Mars and Jupiter into the cardinal fire sign of Aries does show we are entering a new 12 year cycle.. Jupiter remains in each zodical sign for a year and Mars only for a few months at a time (with the exception of when it is moving retrograde). An entire Mars cycle of the zodiac takes about 2 years. And Mars can oppose and square the Sun which is not possible for the other personal planets Mercury and Venus.
So be prepared to take action at this time, and if not be prepared to feel like you need to have something change. Like its is not as possible as before to dim your solar light.. Mars fights for the Sun and when it is combusted or debilitated like mine is it may take years for us to rise out of dis-empowerment victim thinking but we must do it because at times it far better to be real and authentic than ‘nice’ or ‘good’.
To plaster on a painted smile to hide pain may appear to be living in denial, it may also be a response to a world in which our true feelings were shamed or not welcomed expression.
I often think about this when I listen to talks by Eckhart Tolle, he does not share a lot about his family background but it must have be torturous from the little he does say in some of his videos.. He said he nearly went mad with an intense pain body and then he had an awakening, his principal teaching is mostly about awakening through accepting in and releasing our suffering to live more fully surrendered in the present moment
And when I read the writings of Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh lately and he speaks about smiling to our heart through suffering that makes sense, after all life is impermanence, if we look all around in nature it goes through many cycles of seeding, gestation, birthing, growth, blooming and blossoming and then decaying and then the return to the fallow state. Sadly, in our culture, versed in what Purlitzer Prize winning author Ernest Becker has called the denial of death we would like to air brush all of these dark phases out of the picture and as soon as death raises its head many seem to get absolutely terrified..
One of the aspects of suffering significant early losses and trauma is that we know from a very young age that not a lot can be relied upon to stay the same, we have often to deal with losses no one talks to us about or helps us to make sense of possibly due to their own un-integrated ones.. And as kids we are just open to the magical and to th world of wonder, and feeling..
As a child, I know I used to talk invisible presences all the time, as my older sister told me this later in life, she thought it was a great joke.. Then there are the words that stand out so strongly in the AA Big Book about finding ourselves at the depths of our rock bottom from trauma or addiction, beyond human aid. This means at pivotal times there was no one to turn to at all in human form. Possibly due to their own emotional vacancy, or emotional neglect no one could be there to be our mirror for a time and so we may meet an inverted or distorted mirror.
We may also turn to substances and religions and the archetypal dimensions which may open us up to great spiritual and artistic resources but may lead us to being pathologised in a culture that also denies the veracity of these things.. In time we do have to find a way to walk in the world though, as painful as that might be.
Lately I find myself between so many different worlds. Leading to the lunar eclipse I helped someone again with a promise of money only to have everything turn out wrong and once again I am nearly emptied out.. There was nothing i could do at one point but cry and feel absolutely terrified, on Wednesday I went to the police and then had the person provide evidence they were genuine, when I opened up to Scott about it I got slammed.. This is the precarious world I find myself in lately.. But somehow I have kept moving forward.
For some reason going through all of this is just making me appreciate the simplicity and poignancy of the present moment even more.. We were out and walking by 9.30 am today and the autumn colors were intense.. I felt the moisture on the ground, we walked down the back streets close to Nana’s old place and to the park before going to the milk bar for a coffee, there we met a lady with another cavalier dog and a lovely young woman called Tamara who has just moved to my home town from very far away in Perth.. It was so good to start my day like this, instead of on the computer.. I felt fully engaged and as if I had made new friend, as before she left Tamara said she hoped to see me again..
I am also finding my readings of Thich and Buddhist Nun Pema Chodron are sustaining my soul at the moment and keeping my spirit both bouyant and joyous.,
I astarted the day with a morning Chi Gong practice and meditation to these words adapted from Thich Nhat Hanh’s.
Breathing in I feel my heart
Breathing out I smile to my heart
Breathing in I touch the present moment
Breathing out I feel myself grounded in the precious present moment.
Smiling to any pain or sadness does not mean I am repressing and denying it or painting on a smile, it means I am acknowledging that impermanence is a part of life.. Losses do not come to punish me, but to wake me up, should I chose to see them as attacks I will stay cycling in misery. If I really want to find peace and liberate my soul to joy then I am best to welcome them into my heart deeply, breathe them in and then let them go allowing the deepening into feeling and presence that fully engaging with each experience ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ brings to me..
My life is what I have made it! Come on this journey with me and explore some of the thoughts about things that has happened in my past, present, and see whats to come of it all!
Emerging From The Dark Night 