I know, but I don’t, or do I!?

Sometimes I am realising I just don’t really know what is going on with me.  I think I know.  I can spend a lot of time in thinking about the said thing and come up with conclusions and/or so called answers or responses, only to find after this occurs a feeling comes up from nowhere like a wave to blind side me, upturning the carefully constructed world of my thoughts which like a house of cards tumble down or become all wet and soggy in the deluge.

I just went to get a take away coffee on the way home from the park after having a lunch date cancelled and read this interpretation of an upcoming transit:  In few days Mercury, the sign of thinking, perception and communication will come into a square (challenging aspect  to do with cutting away and decisions) with the outer planet, Neptune which is now stationing forward.  The interpretation made was that when this occurs we may get insight into illusions which have been a source of confusion for us for some time.

I immediately ran this through my thinking mind.  Not a few minutes earlier I had been in floods of tears, my Mum and I decided to pull the plug on a trip to travel north to see my now dead sister’s sons in a few weeks time.  I feel it was the right decision but it brought up a lot of grief and sadness as I know they were looking forward to it and I hate not honouring commitments I made.  Some of my inner dialogue went like this (and a lunch date was cancelled at the same time)  “Here we go, this ends with you all alone again”, echoes imprints flooding followed.

At the time I was also listening to a sad song from my early teenage years.  I was drawn back as I often am when listening to this song to the living room in our big house where I would sit after school perched in front the turntable listening to my favourite records alone.  Longings for my big sister rose up then, memories of the separations and divisions and moves and traumas that led to severings from a cosy place of comfort.

I was reminded that for so many years I was without a true home, a place to rest and find shelter with others, often cast out for feeling as I did. I also got the subtle message many times that my pain or sadness or exuberance was too much.   Often things occurred that led me to be whipped away and end up all alone.  In these alone times and spaces I would wander watching others happily sharing time together and wonder why I could never find that togetherness place .

After I drove home and parked the car I had had the thought of how I often struggle to find a place of belonging with others.  I wanted to write a blog on it.  Then I logged on to find a comment I had made on another blog written about the dichotomy between thinking and feeling, I got a bit diverted starting my blog on this but the deeper insight happening for and to me in the midst of writing this is that being alone and not belonging ‘out there’  isn’t the worst thing that can happen if I am at home with me in touch with my deeper feelings and thoughts.  This is where I feel like I belong. At home with myself.

And as sad as it was to have these alone realisations today I am beginning to see that maybe I shouldn’t fight against this pattern.  I can have the thoughts then let the hidden feelings flow up and out and in time they will pass and I will feel freer.  Maybe I should just surrender and keep on finding the comfort that deep solitude and aloneness can bring, for within this place of aloneness now it is true that I am beginning to feel a much deeper sense of connection with myself and with life energy.  I also feel connected to the souls of those I love or have loved.

In my life I feel I have spent a lot of my life looking out there for a place to ‘fit’ but sooner or later I find I don’t ‘fit’ and the price of remaining is to cut myself to ‘fit’ what others have told me I must be to belong there.  And so I have spent years trying to change my shape or being left in the end because amidst the pretence that I had put on (and was not totally aware of, at the time)  others glimpsed the fact I wasn’t truly being real and when my real self popped through it didn’t suit or fit in or my beingness outraged them in some way.

I have only just recently learned that in fact I have another choice, when the signs appear that I don’t fit in I could just pack up my things and leave instead of turning myself inside out to fit in. Or, instead of being so scared of being left or abandoned I could just be my real self and if others want to leave, let them go.

I am not entirely sure what this has to do with insight in the confusion of illusions but I am sensing that the illusion may lie in thinking that if I just negate myself and try to fit in I will feel like I belong when I don’t.  If I try to push through with plans I have made when it becomes apparent that is not the best thing to do, I am better to be honest and tell others I can’t do it.  This doesn’t come easily for me as I am a chronic people pleaser.  I also sense others wounds and want to be there to help.   This has got me in a lot of trouble due to the fact that I now see I have tried to take on responsibility for things, feelings, pain in my family that actually had nothing to do with me.  I was in my own pain and had my own deep needs that could never be understood, accepted or realise in my family of origin.  I really should have been finding ways to deal with and address these but I just could not as my focus was so firmly planted outside myself on others.  It really is a backwards, co-dependent way to live.

At the moment I feel the lesson I am being given is to put my focus within.   When I try to do it part of me argues I am being narcissistic, and that part of me implies that narcissism is absolutely a bad thing, but it’s  not.  Healthy narcissism is actually a form of maturity.  It recognises I have needs that if not fulfilled cause me depression and pain.  Sacrificing my own needs as I was conditioned to do by my Catholic education and even in 12th step fellowships and seeing any personal desire as selfish is not at all healthy and it doesn’t really serve anyone.

And this brings me back to the beginning of what I was trying to express earlier.  Often my mind tells me things that have nothing to do with truth or reality.  My mind can and does come up with things that are illusions at times.  Illusions like, I am responsible for others pain, if I just try harder it will work out, I should think of others first, not doing so is selfish or shows I am not a ‘good’ person.  All illusions.

I posted a blog by Courage Coaching the other day entitled “You are not a failure.”  It seems that so many of us live the illusion that we have failed in some way when really we have just being trying to find and live a path that is true for us.  We may set ourselves up to win or achieve things that aren’t meant for us or suited for us, we may have started life without the necessary nurturing to embrace and live so called “success”.

And it seems to me that the true failure lies in not loving, caring for, accepting and supporting ourselves or gaining deeper insight into the real causes we struggle as we do.  The true failure lies in believing lies that damaging inner voices say, things like “you aren’t good enough”, “you don’t belong”, “you are a failure”.  What might it take to give up these illusions?  What might it take to realise that we are okay as we are despite all our so called mistakes or flaws?  What might it mean to go a bit damn easier on ourselves?

The fact I cannot make it north in a few weeks doesn’t show I failed.  It won’t kill or damage anyone.  I feel really sad about it on one level, the level that shows the love I feel for family and the care and support I want to show.  But at the same time at the moment I need to centre in my own life, care for my own being, nourish my emerging self.   Because if I don’t take care of myself first, I really don’t have much to give and it is only from a place of fullness that I can give anything of meaning or value to anyone else.

I have also accepted that I am but a mere speck here in the universe, and although I may have thought I was omnipotent in the past, I must only focus on the small sphere of influence I actually have control over.

Shannon

Source : https://griefsite.wordpress.com/2016/11/16/2273/comment-page-1/#comment-275

Round pegs into square holes : the wound of not fitting : the joy of finding a place of belonging

It seems to me that for years I have been going through a kind of storm that is both a rain shower and a rebirth, a darkness too that is so deep and crushing at times it is hard to breathe. But then, when I find the courage to reach out and connect, when I can talk about all that has been going on (and all that I had not fully realised until then I had been struggling with) with someone who understands, the heaviness lifts and I can breathe again.  I am no longer the ugly duckling who feels like she is all alone in the wrong place or at least a barren place where I am unrecognised by my kind.  Instead I find I am the fledgling cygnet that begins to recognise her self through being recognised by her swan family.

We just had a spring shower that cleared to reveal patches of blue interspersing gunmetal grey rain clouds.  I went out this afternoon as I felt the need to just make some movement.  I was getting bored at home and overly critical of things.  I had a big crush twice earlier in the day when two of my panic attacks came out of nowhere.  I sat with myself to feel into it but it wasn’t abating and knew on some level what I was feeling was disconnection/loneliness, my old frenemies, more present in the past three weeks that my therapist has been away.

I decided to call a friend who is also in recovery and we talked.  I felt the heaviness lift and was able to go on with my day and even eat something, something that I could not have managed to do if I had just sat alone with myself.  I then cleaned a couple of the windows in my dining room and took myself out for a coffee and bought a pair of earrings which were half price.

Upon my return Jasper trotted out to greet me, I ate half an orange and now he is sleeping quietly at my side, filtered sunlight is streaming in through the windows casting beams of light on the carpet in front of me.  I can feel the warmth of it on my feet.  The brace around my heart is gone and there is that quiet, calm, steady peace of late afternoon, the deep peace of just being.

It is good to realise that these days I do not get stuck in those crushed, breathless places as much as I used to. They still descend on me with alarming regularity but I manage to do something to shift the energy, whether it is breathing deeply to connect to my heat, doing a yoga pose or writing a blog, forcing to get my self out in to the fresh air, there is some small thing that I can often do.  And I find if and when these techniques fail reaching out to someone I can trust is the best remedy.  It needs to be someone who can respond to me fully, empathise and understand.

I am learning slowly where not to turn for validation, these days.  There are a lot of experiences I have which I feel I just cannot share with a lot of people.  My friend today knew where I was coming from when I spoke of the disconnection I feel in groups of normal earthlings.  He said he feels the same.  “It is almost as if I am waiting for the space ship to arrive and beam me up,” he said.  He gets it.

We spoke about the difficulty in trying to fit in where you know you don’t belong.  “It’s just too hard being a round peg that has to fit into those square holes with all the sharp edges,”  he said.

While he was saying this I was thinking about Missy Higgin’s song Scar

He left a card, a bar of soap

And a scrubbing brush

Next to a note that said

Use these down to your bones

And before I knew it I had shiny skin

And it felt easy being clean like him

I thought “this one knows better than I do” 

A triangle trying to squeeze through a circle

He tried to cut me so I’d fit

In our conversation as it proceeded we talked a bit about the pain of this.  Looking for a place to belong conditional upon not being who we are seems to come at far too high a price, but as in Missy’s song the wound that is left from the cut that eventuates becomes a scar, and that scar is the reminder for us to remember “never to go that far” in trying to shape ourselves in the way others would like us to.  And so our wounded places of invalidation are our reminders to stay true to who we are.

On Friday I had one of those conversations with my Mum where I tried to share some of my deep insides, should have learned by now not to do it.  I told her how I feel very apart at times, she told me how I need to see things different and change so as to fit in.  This time it didn’t annoy me, I know this ground.  No matter how many times I try I don’t get the response that I need but there are a few people who get it. Those are the people I need to talk to, not her.

There are too many scars, reminders of how essential it is to respect who I am and not overextend beyond what is good and natural for me or begin to engage in a pretence in which I attempt to become someone others like and recognise.   A healthy realism means being a bit more pessimistic when that is indicated and trusting past pain and experience to show me where I need to stay self protected.  But in order for my heart to open I need to keep looking for people and places where I can and do connect.

My friend helped me a lot yesterday when he suggested that I try a spiritual meeting which takes place on the second and fourth Sunday of every month close to where I live.  I wasn’t sitting there very long when I was befriended by two women talking just next to me about astrology.  Wow that doesn’t happen much these days in the town where I am living where everyone is so conservative.  The meeting itself was lovely, consisting of guided meditations, songs and talks on a range of subjects.  Following the end of the meeting we connected over  a cup of tea.

This afternoon I have just finished conversation with one of the beautiful ladies I met.  We have so much in common as this woman has a deep interest in astrology as well as in Jung.  She is also from England which is one of my most favourite places, a place where in the past I have made deep connections.  My heart felt so light after our conversation and I feel that for a time the lonely place I inhabit here with few friends on the same wavelength has disappeared.

It took courage to reach out to my other friend yesterday when my heart was so sore and hurting and the fact that he was able to intuit on some level a place for me to go where I could feel connected, makes me feel that somewhere someone is watching and guiding me towards a better path.

One of the songs we sang last night in the midst of the meeting was Cat Steven’s Morning Has Broken.  It was one of my dead sister’s favourite songs and I must say I shed a lot of tears standing in the community hall singing it last night.  I had a vision of my sister as she was in later years, bedridden with her long grey tresses of hair spread around her face like a lion’s mane.  We would often just be together and listen to music.  Last night I had the feeling that she was so very close at hand and that the deep spirituality and love of nature that she had is so clearly expressed in that song that in some way through singing it I was connected to her heart and soul at that moment and remembering the fund of love that always existed between us.  As I am writing this I am sure that that song is one of the songs played at her funeral just over 17 months ago.

Yesterday ended with me in a much more connected place than it began.  Today I have had a day where I could reach out to my Mum even knowing that we wont ever find the depth of connection I have with my new friend and my dead sister.  She is my Mum and I still love her.  And when I block off the thwarted love I feel, it isn’t good for my own heart. But I was able to reach out to my new friend and show her understanding and feel connected in a way that is needed for my soul.  I felt that here was a place that my unique shape was appreciated and my heart was full to overflowing, no wounds, no scars from sharp edges.

Feeling my darkness – longing for light

Vulnerability is the birth place of all we hunger for

joy creativity faith and love

and there is none of this without risking failure

Be open enough to take the risk to fail.

Brene Brown

Ever since beginning this breast cancer journey I have been more and more aware of the degree of pain and suffering of my life, I notice also that a lot of my focus at times is on the pain and suffering.  It seemed from adolescence onward so many difficult experiences transpired, things that isolated me and took me away from others that it was almost as if I was captured by the darkness.  I now see however I wish to reach for light, for joy, for happiness but could it be that not being too familiar with these things at times I get stuck in a darkness rut?

Lately I am also realising that because my own relationship with my mother was not easy (there were already many hurts in place by adolescence) my ability to connect deeply with girlfriends was damaged to a degree.  I found it difficult to reach out and trust.  To open my heart to connection again.  I can see all of this now in hindsight and because of the amount of work I have done in therapy.  There were always reasons for what happened and life was really a healing journey in which pain would be a very powerful teacher.

In early recovery from addiction I was already very interested in astrology and archetypes, those eternal patterns of human psychological process, understanding and symbology, myths and stories which give meaning to the profound passages we humans go through on the soul’s journey.

When I came across Roger Woodger’s book on the Goddess archetypes and read about Persephone who in astrology and mythology is the feminine aspect of the archetype and planet Pluto I became aware of the underworld themes of my own life reflected in her story.  I became aware that I was a Persephone woman myself.

Persephone is a goddess who lived in the underworld, she has a strong connection to the underground psyche, the great unconscious both personal and collective.  She underwent painful profound passages of loss and stripping away which marked her for this kind of knowing of cycles of birth, loss, death and transformation.  Persephone women are no strangers to suffering, the may have gone through abuse which leads them to become addicts.  They may have had to relegate huge parts of themselves to the Underground.  They may not have been fully accepted by family or culture and this may have sent them out on a journey where they had to be alone and in knowing aloneness they came to know their own soul well and through this understanding of human pain and vulnerability they end up developing insight into others too.

As I am writing this it has occurred to me that understanding and acceptance of this life journey, painful as it can be at times enriches us.  I also means we can be more accepting of our need for alone time to reconnect with the self and don’t have to struggle as hard to be liked or be one of the crowd.

As a young person feeling different this was not how I felt.  I longed to belong to the crowd, to be attractive, easy to get along with and popular but now I see that if I had been these things I would not have been totally me.  Also due to my own negative self concept I may have also judged myself to be less liked or loved than circumstances are now revealing to me that I am.  I also misunderstood that standing on the sidelines and observing did not necessarily mean I was disconnected,  in a way I was more connected to insights and impressions.

My recent hospital stay has brought up for me so many aspects of my damaged past.  The scary near death motor crash of 1979, the three months of hospitalisation pinned to a bed where I could not leave and my range of motion was restricted.  The months of isolation from friends and school, my tentative return and then very close to the coming out of hospital my sister’s cerebral bleed which over the next two years fractured our family relationships and in four years led to my father’s death.  My trip over to the other side of the world where more difficult relationships ensued as I struggled to live and connect.  The four painful abandonments by partners who in leaving blamed me, after treating me cruelly.  My loss of belief in myself and descent into addiction and then my painful realisation that I needed to enter recovery.  The attempt to turn my life around over the next 10 years, the ending of my marriage, entry into a narcissistic relationship and two other accidents.  My entry into therapy and struggle to find the right help.  My sister’s suicide attempt, mother’s illness following major surgery, my older sister’s death and my recent diagnosis with breast cancer.  Phew, that is an enormous amount of suffering and difficulty.

As I write all of this down today I am filled with awe in a way that something in me that is strong has survived and lived through all of this and today I am reminded too that in time all of these conditions passed.  I do believe that despite the dark I have known I can still find the light on many  days.  Indeed it seems the reward for being in the dark and passing through painful feelings or allowing them to pass through and transform me I find the light.  And this is one of the functions of Persephone/Pluto.  We are transformed by opening up to vulnerability and pain and allowing ourselves to be transformed by the darkness which can scare others.

Deep in my soul I know that due to my own Pluto Moon in true mythological Plutonian fashion I am the one whose path has led into the burning flames many times and that after time I do come out transformed, even if black at times and covered in soot and dismissed, disregarded and rejected by those who never knew the full extent of my journey.   And in this I am most certainly not alone as there are so many of you out there enduring your own dark passages and living to tell the tale, with learnings to speak of and share.  I read about all of your journeys here.  It truly is a long and winding road.

Many times over the past few days in hospital the words of that Beatles song have come to me:

Many times I’ve been alone

And many times I’ve cried

Anyway you’ll never know

The many ways I’ve tried

But still they lead me back

To the long winding road

I am still walking the road, even if at the moment following my time in hospital I am resting more.  In some miraculous way in my hour of greatest need people I have felt abandoned by or who did not understand have showed up to support me.  I don’t know if even a year ago I could have opened my heart to allow in this support and love of me in.  I don’t know if I would have felt worthy enough or had healed enough of my own co-dependence.

A few years ago I could not have reached out and expressed my sadness and need at not receiving help, nor given people a chance to know how I was truly feeling.  Its been scary at times to unmask this vulnerability and need and to tell the truth of my story.

I lately often get told by one family member that I am lucky but the truth is I think I have expressed myself more than this person and asked for help.  I have shown that I am vulnerable in a way they have not and it feels a bit invalidating to be told I am lucky when in fact I have taken steps even on the darkest days to reach in some way for the light.

Through blogging, through trips to the park with my dog, through making phone calls to connect with others by life has expanded a little more towards happiness and joy.   By leaving my prison of isolation and pain which at times seemed too large and by taking risks to be truthful and express the dark even though my fear was I would be judged and rejected I have found support and love.

My Leo North Node lesson in any case is all about this.  Its about developing a voice and a will and a power of self expression that is assertive rather than aggressive.  When I started my recent chiropractic treatment which involves breathing and connecting into the navel, heart and throat centres it was my throat centre that was still more blocked than the other two.  I was taught to connect to my gut and tapping it a few times to “speak up”.  My mother’s generation’s pain (1920-1930) was silenced. They could not speak up. They had to endure.  Later generations are turning this around.  Deep inside me there was so much pain it was hard to vocalise or ‘cough up’.

The reward over the last few weeks for opening up my throat and asking and expressing has been love.  I have never felt more surrounded with love and for this I feel so grateful.

At times when I blog I still criticise and judge my own darkness.  When I publish some raw pieces and I don’t get many likes part of me feels I should change my expression, not be so raw.  But I know that this would not be right because I need to be authentic and my value does not rest on anyone else’s opinion.  Learning and living that truth is part of co-dependence recovery.

I feel the journey that we take into the dark is the journey to rescue ourselves.  In the end no one else can do it.  We have to face the fear of the dark and embrace it anyway and we have to be honest, even if our vision is dark and challenges other people. They have a right to their vision, we have a right to ours.  Once we take self responsibility others seem to be more willing to show up.  At least that is my experience.

Opening up and asking has meant having to feel a lot of fear.  One of my deepest fears has been that if I asked for help I would be overpowered.  I now know that was an old fear.  I have the boundaries to say something now if my boundaries are transgressed.

In a moment of synchronicity while writing this I checked my Reader in WordPress and following a shame link came across the Soul Sunday video interviews between Oprah Winfrey and shame researcher Brene Brown.  In one video Brene spoke about our cultures fear of vulnerability and the dark she also spoke about how it is the birthplace of all that we hunger for.  Some of her words headlined this piece I was writing this afternoon.

Today after four or so dark days the light is returning for me.  It feels as though Persephone is coming up for air on one of her upper world visits just in time for the Pisces New Moon tomorrow that falls not very far away from opposition with my natal Pluto in the first house.  So I guess this blog is right on time.  And the day ends with me feeling so much stronger  and lighter than I was this time yesterday, aware of so much more, grateful too for so much.

Feeling like I dont belong may be the price of belonging to myself.

For a long time in my life, although I was not aware of it, I was wandering the world hoping for understanding and comfort.  As the youngest I felt very much like an observer and an outsider in my family.  There are huge age gaps between me and my oldest siblings and so in some ways living in my family was like being an only child.

I wrote in an earlier blog about finding a cache of letters written during the year I was four which outline the context of our family life.  What came across were two parents who were very involved in their own life and little involved in mine.  A conversation with my mother midweek revealed little memory, on her behalf of this time, only the observation that I was a “difficult child”.  It wasn’t only me who was difficult, the dog was difficult too.  What I am beginning to see is that we were probably both really bored and so, as lively beings do, we began to get up to mischief.

Its interesting as it has been coming into my mind this week that I need to write some blogs on the family scapegoat.   I am actually intrigued by the concept of the scapegoat and felt so grateful to come across the most wonderful book on the subject by a Jungian analyst Syvlia Bretton Perrera around the time my marriage ended.

The fact was that I became a scapegoat target for my husband’s family and eventually, towards the ending of my marriage when I was trying to bust out of my false self and reclaim my true self, an alignment took place between my husband and my mother who seemed determined to keep me in lock down by scapegoating me further. I wish I could say, that at that time, I was strong enough to break out, but I wasn’t.

If you have spent a life time being told that who you are, isn’t who you are, that what you feel isn’t what you feel, its not so easy to break free.  In my case I needed others around me who actually saw who I was and the person I was struggling to be, that got buried so many years earlier.  I also needed to be part of a group of others who were determined to bust through facades and come clean about the true reality of their deeper selves, all the ways in which they had put on fronts, consciously or unconsciously to hide the secret of who they were.

If you have spent years locked in an addiction, as I had and then get into recovery the point is this : that the false self has to crack.  As I recovered and reviewed my history it became clear to me that my addiction began to escalate around the time I was forced to follow a career of my father’s choosing, rather than pursue the one was dear to my heart. Along that path part of me went into a deep freeze.

I looked to substances and other outside sources of soothing and comfort that would help me to unfreeze and liberate some of the buried energy I had locked down deep inside.  At my Saturn return the pain of the distance between my true and false selves began to squeeze and cause me a great deal of pain.

Prior to finding recovery and dealing with my addiction I make a conscious effort to make a move away from what was imprisoning me.  Thus began a journey that led me to recovery and along the way as things began to thaw I had to navigate some fairly powerful emotions.  Emotions that most certainly were not acceptable to my spouse or my family.

In her book Perrera makes the point that the scapegoat carries, for the collective of which it is a part, energies that have been placed in the shadow and are so necessary for wholeness.  Rather than accepted these energies are exiled to wilderness, that wilderness may lead the scapegoat to the acting out of addiction.  While engaged in the addiction the scapegoat is expressing the pain of their entrapment and exile.  Once consciously navigated this pain can act as the motivation for spell breaking, for finding ways to explore and release the repressed and trapped energies which so long ago were exiled, but only to the degree that we reach an understanding of the role we have had to take on, of necessity.

Its interesting to me that as a child I was expressive, strong, outspoken and emotional.  By the time I was an adolescent I had turned into someone who was awkward, insecure, shy and uncertain.   It is obvious to me now that I became that way as my true self was never mirrored by the collective of which I was a part.

The exception to that was my eldest sister.  A scapegoat herself, she saw me, she got me, but unfortunately she had a cerebral bleed when I was 18.  Perhaps the powerful underground message that I absorbed from this tragedy was that it was dangerous to be strong, to be independent, to be expressive and to try to break free.  Indeed my sister moved away from home when I was only 3.  She returned when I was 17 and things rapidly fell apart.  The consequences of her trauma causing rifts in a family which was set to undergo it own transformative splintering.

In the end my sister suffered exile to a home, where most members of my family had little contact with her.  I was lucky enough to witness the entire collapse, her attempt to take her life and then diagnosis and drugging that followed and kept her trapped in that role.  I am sorry to say that I was “lucky” enough, but I was having this conversation yesterday with a close friend, who is himself the youngest in a large family about the gifts of being the younger.  We get to witness and learn a lot.  In my case, being an outsider came with gifts.  And I made the choice not to have children and have them carry my own pain before I could process it and become conscious of it.

At times in different groups I have been aware that I have taken on a scapegoat role, being exiled or thrown out of the group, due to the fact I was suffering emotionally.  As an active addict I was an easy target for others scapegoat projections.  What was so important for me during the course of my recovery was to break my own identification with both scapegoat and victim.  I have just been re-reading Eckhardt Tolle’s power of now and in it he makes the following comment:

There is a great deal of unconscious ego investment in pain and suffering.

I had a bit of an ah-ha moment when I read that comment.  My exile is only painful to me when I identify being part of the group as a cherished ideal.  In truth, though at times it can be lonely, not feeling apart of things brings a far greater freedom.  Its amazing how the unconscious process we undergo also brings insights at certain moments, from deep within when we have been elaborating on certain truths.

Last night I had powerful dream that the group of which I have been a part for some years, told me that I was no longer welcome there. “You are just too outspoken” they said.  I walked away feeling there was nothing I could do, that I most certainly did not belong, that who I was in my deepest self had been rejected and that I was now on my own.

On waking I was aware of a very powerful underground grief and a dull headache.  Over the day it has passed.  I am not totally sure what to make of this dream but it was no surprise when I looked into the ephemeris to see that the Sun had passed into 00 degress Leo today and that I was undergoing my annual solar opposition to Mars Saturn Moon in Aquarius.

Yesterday following a conversation with one of the leaders of this group I had a knot of pain in my stomach telling me that what had occured during our conversation was all about invalidation.  I had been aware of this before and not honoured my true feelings.

Deep in the twelfth house the Sun is transiting.  Energy has been low, but I am feeling the rumblings of that slumbering Lion.  Currently Venus and Mercury are behind the Sun and we are heading in a few days towards the dark of the Moon prior to the annual Leo New Moon.

Maybe the Lion roars too loudly at times, but what if its trapped cries have been imprisoned for ages.  The thorn in its paw hurts and it may be taking some time for it to heal.  Still I am glad of the Leo/Lion energy and find a great primal beauty in it.  It appears to me such an antidote to the loaded Aquarian energies of my own chart.  With my Sun’s ruler Uranus in the sign of the Lion and in the first house opposing the seventh, was I ever really going to feel like I belonged in the group?

In a conversation with my Mum last week she said “You never wanted to do what everyone else wanted to do”.  What I do remember is that at times there were very painful things going on, I just energetically did not want to be a part of.  It occurs to me that over later years I pretended that I did and even came to believe there was something wrong with me for feeling this way.

Apparently this is not an unusual situation for empaths.  Sadly in the past, the price of being outcast just seemed too expensive to pay.  I am beginning to realise now that maybe at times, its better to be able to be alone in that and be real, rather than pretend and loose my self, my way and my authentic voice and feelings.  If others like it or lump it is that really my business?  As I continue on this ongoing journey that is my life I pray for the strength and courage to be true to me. And to find the power and strength in times of aloneness.