Tuesday, Oct. 19
Yesterday was one of those days. For most of the day I felt heavy. My body hurt in familiar and unfamiliar places. I felt tired, sad, lethargic, and restless all at the same time.
It wasn’t how I expected to feel. The Sun was shining, the sky was a beautiful clear blue, the temperature outside was perfect, and it was my day off. When I went to bed last night, it was with reasonably high hopes for the morrow.
I wanted to write a post on both Mercury and Jupiter stationing direct yesterday (Oct. 18) but the way I was feeling when I finally got myself into my office to sit down and write, it was hard to imagine coming up with anything I’d be proud to sign my name to.
So, instead of writing, I gave myself permission to lie on the floor and meditate.
What are these feelings in my body? I asked.
Sadness. Heavy. Alone.
What is the sadness?
The sadness of the world. Sad at feeling alone so often in life. Sad at the people — shocking how many people across half a lifetime — who made you responsible for their happiness. And who, when you didn’t give them what they wanted, turned on you, suddenly vicious and accusing.
Sad, too, for the needless suffering of the people. So many people in the world, especially now, feeling sad, alone, defensive/aggressive, craving more love and more joy and more genuine companionship. And, through no fault of their own but having chosen to be born into a slave system and endure the trauma we all experience as children in this society, they perpetuate — daily, moment by moment even — with their thoughts and their actions this shared state of miserable exile from Life.
#AloneTogether
After a few minutes of tuning in to the feeling in my body and in my heart, the heaviness and fatigue started to melt away. Before long I was seeing the dance happening among the degree symbols in the charts for this week. I started to feel (cautiously)…enthusiastic!
When it hit me that I had just experienced one of the key messages of the Libra Mercury retrograde period that came to an end yesterday morning, I got up off the floor, sat down at my desk and spent the rest of the evening writing the post below.
(I say this next part as a reminder to myself and to you, gentle reader.)
Every time I remember that I have the choice to stop struggling, slow down, breathe, and tune in to what I’m feeling, I inevitably start to feel better, clearer, more alive and more hopeful. The “symptoms” don’t always dissolve as quickly as they did tonight, but the light of consciousness always clears them sooner or later.
Monday, Oct. 18
The Divine Messenger squares off with the Lord of the Underworld
The Mercury retrograde period that ended today began with Mercury stationing in the 26th degree of Libra on September 26. Mercury retro in Libra was always going to focus us on relationships, naturally. But this retrograde came with an unusual and powerful undertow, signified by Mercury’s close square to Pluto in Capricorn.
Pluto was retrograde in Capricorn from the end of April to the beginning of October. Pluto moves very slowly even when operating at full speed and Pluto’s station October 6 meant the Lord of the Underworld moved only about 2 arc minutes from the start of the Mercury Rx to its end.
Stationary planets in a horoscope take on an extra heavy vibe. Sometimes this manifests as the planet seeming to act in a malicious or destructive way. Sometimes the effect of the planet in the horoscope lasts much longer than it usually would.
As Phoenix and I discussed in our Libra New Moon Report, the Mercury-Pluto square was going to focus this Mercury retrograde period on how our relationships are either helping or hindering us in light of Pluto’s mandate to radically transform world society. ()
It’s interesting how many people have canceled us, dropped us as friends, and even flat-out attacked us for refusing to validate their belief in the lies being sprayed on the population since the start of the Covid era by the government, the media, and paid influencers.
In many cases, these people were clients or friends in whom either Tatiana or I had invested a lot of genuine care and loving attention.
Interesting aside: Once I’d worked through the hurt and anger that followed these attack episodes and I could see the other person clearly, in most cases it was clear that the person didn’t believe most of what they were saying. They didn’t believe we were guilty of the things they were accusing us of, they didn’t believe they were acting from good motives, and they didn’t really believe The Science(TM) they were supposedly defending. There’s some kind of mass psychosis at work in society right now that’s downright spooky.
We understand where these people are coming from. They’re scared, they feel powerless, they just want the nightmare to end, and they’ve been tricked over the course of a lifetime into giving their power over to the media, friends, family, the group, social media influencers, the government, or some other entity that represents authority.
Understanding it doesn’t always make it easier to take, though. I know many of you have been shamed, disowned, and ostracized by family and former friends for the same crimes of remaining true to your inner guidance and refusing to bow down before society’s idols.
I can only imagine what it’s like to be a vaccine holdout on Portland, Seattle, San Francisco or many places on the West Coast right now.
Standing in your personal truth when everyone around is telling you that you’re wrong can feel like a very lonely place to be. And…
Only truth can set us free
On a personal level, a big part of the answer — as I feel fortunate to have remembered this evening — is allowing ourselves to face into the pain we are feeling, rather than numbing it out and avoiding it. The truth really will set us free, but we have to be willing to know the truth.
I know how hard this can be. A big part of the truth I’ve had to face on my spiritual path is to acknowledge the role I played in the relationships I was ruminating on earlier today, the people who eventually turned on me and betrayed me. I’ve had to acknowledge over and over situations where I chose to act “nice” or “loving” or “peaceful” rather than set a boundary, call someone on their bad behavior, or ask for what I really wanted.
It took me an uncomfortably long time to learn that continually suppressing my own needs and desires to avoid conflict with the other person wasn’t a recipe for love and peace, but for an abuser-victim relationship. As one ex said to me when I complained that she was always ignoring my needs to get what she wanted, “If you’re not going to stand up for yourself, why shouldn’t I run over you?”
Basically, I’ve had to own up to my own fear-based methods of complying with, placating, and flattering other people because I would do anything to avoid confrontation.
We can’t really stay in our own inner authority without a commitment to clearing the emotional trauma of the past.
Building a society that is free and fair requires us to develop some degree of mastery in the art of relationships. This means knowing who we are, knowing what we want and don’t want, and knowing what we are willing to accept and what is intolerable.
If the other party is incapable or unwilling to listen to our point of view and to respect us as autonomous individuals, that relationship probably needs to die anyway.
But we need community, especially at this crucial time in history, when it really seems the fate of the world and of future generations hangs in the balance. We want to be building bridges, not just burning them.
I feel like the Mercury-Pluto square at the heart of this Mercury retrograde gives us a key for how we move forward.
Air sign Libra symbolizes our mental paradigm for relationships in general, not just relationships with any given person. This includes how we relate to the institutions and social structures that Pluto in Capricorn has been focusing his death and regeneration ray on since 2009, big systems such as government, health care, education, money, and transportation. ()
The world must change now, just as it did with the American Revolution in the 1770s and the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s. Both of those Pluto-in-Capricorn periods brought tremendous expansions of freedom and opportunity to large masses of people, but they did so because a few brave people refused to buckle to corrupt authorities and tyrannical rulers and stood for the dignity of man — at the risk of their lives, honors, and fortunes.
Love gives us the grace to remain in truth
In his last book, Letting Go, scientist David Hawkins talks about a phenomenon we are all familiar with. The more aggressively someone insists that you validate their opinion, the less likely you are to do so. We see this in religion, in politics, and — on social media — in just about every possible facet of life.
Reverence is the key to rising above this seemingly in-built quirk of human nature, Hawkins says. Rather than taking pride in our opinions and beating others over the head with them, we can simply to choose to honor the love we feel for the things we love.
“That which we truly cherish and revere is protected by our reverence. If we tell somebody that we do something because we get enjoyment out of it, there is really nothing much they can say about it, is there? If we infer that we do it because we are right in doing it, we will instantly see their hackles go up…”
I’ve seen myself take the pride side of that equation much more often than I’d like to have to admit in 2020 and 2021. It’s easy — especially in a social reality that has been purposely engineered to divide us from each other — to react to criticism with a defensive pride: “No, you’re wrong and I’m right!”
Most of us who love freedom are tired of feeling like we must defend our bodies and our choices from invasive energies, be they experimental gene therapies, restrictive mandates, or the anger of family or coworkers.
I believe many people who got swept up in the multiple concurrent psyops last year are coming to their senses and looking for a way back to reality. They are realizing they may have overreacted and they long for relationships based on something deeper than the ever-escalating popularity arms race that has been engineered on the big social media platforms.
Many more people are going to have their eyes opened to the truth that politicians and the Big Tech moguls and the Big Pharma billionaires will lie to us all day long and promise us whatever they think will gain our compliance in order to get their way. Sociopaths feel no remorse. Call them on their lies and they’ll just lie some more — probably while trying their damnedest to make you believe it’s all your fault!
I hate to say it, but this winter is shaping up to be the Dark Winter that Uncle Joe promised us last year. Some of it is probably going to flat out suck for almost everyone.
But, as grocery store shelves get emptier, as services we’ve all taken for granted become unreliable or unavailable, and as the combined mental and physical effects of nearly two years of lockdowns, deprivation, and the destruction of hundreds of thousands of businesses begin to manifest in earnest, more people are going to wake up and realize they no longer want to be complicit in their own destruction.
As Mercury begins to move in direct motion now, we have the opportunity to integrate what we’ve learned over the past 24 days and make course corrections in how we relate to other people, based on what we know about how world society must evolve or die now and on our vision for the future of our planet.
When we stop clinging to all of the opinions we’ve been programmed to defend, we remember that most of us want the same things. We want to be free to do more of what we love and less of what we hate. We want to have enough — enough good food, enough health, enough love, enough security.
And we want to be loved. We want real companionship, with people who actually listen to us and get us and are capable of giving to us as well as receiving from us; people who are capable of genuine care.
Let us proceed with reverence — for the abundance of life and of the Earth, for our own strength and resilience and love, and for whatever it is that we love most in the world. We do have the power to make everything good again, but we can’t do it in self-protective isolation. By building bridges to, and forging communities with, likeminded souls, we can weather the storm that’s coming and build the new world amid the ruins of the old one.
Notes
We are living through a traumatic moment. I would even argue that much of what is being broadcast to our phones and mobile devices daily is information presented with the intent to trigger childhood trauma and even collective trauma that most people aren’t aware of holding deep inside their unconscious.
