Love

The emotions illumined by the past full moon, especially as it moved from Aries to Taurus became all the more amplified as it went past Jupiter in Taurus.  This rained over the seeds we all have in us that drive us to go beyond the known to the unknown.  This has given rise to a host of feelings about what we're really up to in our lives.  And if it's not inspired by your surrender to what you naturally feel called to do, the way of your dhama, it's a time of reckoning.

Meanwhile our personal fire, the Sun, that which drives and motivates us is in Libra, alongside our ever present awareness of limitation, Saturn.  Here we taste the bitter sweet karma inherent in a world built on duality.  Bitter is the effect, when actions stem from ego.  Sweet is the result, when we act from our true nature.  And the balance of the two is what we're here to embody.

These two transits, in a nutshell, mean we’re feeling a lot and we want like hell to expand further into the goodness or out of the feeling of suffering.  The difficulties and challenges we feel are being augmented by a host of doubtful or denying thoughts from our ego.  Like salt on a wound, this is sparked by the Sun Saturn conjunction, generating the peculiar paradox of limiting the natural expression of our boundless inner fire.
 
The question this transit asks of us:  What do I do when the perpetual failure that results from my best efforts serves only to trigger my deeply unconscious fear of inadequacy?

Let's start with the patterns of the brain.  When I shift my focus away from the emotions of my limbic brain, and into the cognitive faculty of my neocortex, I recognize this fear to be both irrational and untrue.  Sure, I might forget this twenty times a day, but still I know this unconscious fear to be false.  But the limbic (emotional) patterns don't go away overnight.  This essential revision takes time, and support.  And action behind the awareness of the assorted imbalances.  Meditation.  Yoga.  Therapy.  Breathwork.  Bodywork.  Free-form writing.  Positive affirmations.  Take your pick.  Do them all.  Do whatever it takes to work with and reconcile what's coming up at this time.  The fruits are many.

Returning to the origin of my very first limbic pattern, I discover the unavoidable experience of separateness that occurred the moment I was born.  In this moment, the original seed of doubt - that I am unworthy of love - was planted in my consciousness.  I was cast out.  Then I was held once again by my mother, and the vibration of love returned.  Then I was left alone, and the vibration I’ve associated with love had forsaken me once again.  As this cycle continues, my nervous system programed itself to protect me from experiencing the trauma of this ongoing separation from love.  And thus I developed conditions on my love, and the love I open myself to receive from others, for fear that it will go away.  And my limbic patterning developed accordingly.

We all experience this cycle, and the powerlessness of its perpetuity.  Or do we?  Is it really us experiencing the impermanence, the separateness, the suffering, or is it that slippery little subversive otherwise known as our ego?

From Albert Einstein... "A human being is a part of the whole that we call the universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness. This illusion is a prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for only the few people nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living beings and all of nature."

Let’s bring this back to astrology.  The planet associated with love and compassion is Venus.  And just three weeks ago Venus was up close and personal with Saturn as it transited through Libra.  I know many, myself included, who felt the onslaught of this karmic challenge.  I endeavored, which is to say life circumstance forced me, into an agonizing exploration of the myriad ways I relate from unconscious patterns and conditions developed out of the basic mis-understanding that love is impermanent, and I am therefore unworthy of it.  Astrologically speaking... Saturn transiting through Libra is bringing all kinds of karmic issues around love, relationship, balance and worthiness to the surface.  And buyer beware, the ego side of Libra will manipulate to get what it wants and to maintain a sense of balance built on illusion.

Here's where we can seize the blessing inherent in our ego-based relatedness.  Venus is in Scorpio (with the aforementioned conjunctions of the Moon and Jupiter in Taurus, and the Sun and Saturn in Libra).  Venus, what we love and how we attraction, rules Libra and Taurus.  Her current transit through Scorpio holds the key to using these planetary positions to heal the illusions of ego, the unconscious identifications, that are surfacing like a geyser.  It will serve us to take stock in all that we’ve attracted into our lives, and really check in with how we relate.  Ask yourself... How do I relate to myself and others from an imbalanced place?  Do I regress into old patterns that reinforce a feeling of separateness?  Am I willing to do the work to transform how I relate with the polarities of light and dark?  Now's the time to view your self objectively and be honest.  What am I letting go of?  What am I making room for?

With Mars keeping the flame burning strong in Leo, this Venus transit through Scorpio - currently opposing Jupiter - can work magic in transforming how we unconsciously relate and expanding more deeply into what we consciously attract.  As one of my teachers said to me recently; “If you want to be comfortable, first you have to let yourself be uncomfortable.”  And that means getting up close and personal with all your ego has created.  It is the ego that fundamentally inhibits our feeling and expression of unconditional love, and inclines us toward what Ram Das calls Need-based, emotional or romantic love.

There are countless teachings and dissertations on what the ego is and how it functions. With Venus as the key we're playing with in this letter, I think it best to share pg. 86-89 of Tibetan Rinpoche, Choyam Trungpa's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C3%B6gyam_Trungpa, book: The Myth of Freedom to explore love, and the ego's relationship to it.  Here it is...

LOVE
 “There is a vast store of energy which is not centered, which is not ego’s energy at all. It is this energy which is the centerless phenomena, the universe interpenetrating and making love to itself. It has two characteristics: a fire quality of warmth and a tendency to flow in a particular pattern, in the same way in which fire contains a spark as well as the air which directs the spark. And this energy is always on-going, whether or not it is seen through the confused filter of ego. It cannot be destroyed or interrupted at all. It is like the ever-burning sun. It consumes everything to the point where it allows no room for doubt or manipulation.


But when this heat is filtered through ego, it becomes stagnant, because we ignore the basic ground, refuse to see the vast space in which this energy occurs. Then the energy cannot flow freely in the open space shared with the object of passion. Instead it is solidified, narrowed and directed by the central headquarters of ego to move outward in order to draw the object of passion into its territory. This captive energy extends out to its object and then returns to be programmed again. We extend our tentacles and try to fix our relationship. This attempt to cling to the situation makes the communication process superficial. We just touch another person’s surface and get stuck there, never experiencing their whole being. We are blinded by our clinging. The object of passion, instead of being bathed in the intense warmth of free passion feels oppressed by the stifling heat of neurotic passion.
   
Free passion is radiation without the radiator, a fluid, pervasive warmth that flows effortlessly. It is not destructive because it is a balanced state of being and highly intelligent. Self-consciousness inhibits this intelligent, balanced state of being. By opening, by dropping our self-conscious grasping, we see not only the surface of an object, but we see the whole way through. We appreciate not in terms of sensational qualities alone, but we see in terms of whole qualities, which are pure gold. We are not overwhelmed by the exterior, but seeing the exterior simultaneously puts us through to the interior. So we reach the heart of the situation and, if this is a meeting of two people, the relationship is very inspiring because we do not see the other person purely in terms of physical attraction or habitual patterns, we see the inside as well as the outside.
   
This whole-way-through communication might produce a problem.  Suppose you see right through someone and that person does not want you to see right through and becomes horrified with you and runs away. Then what to do? You have made your communication completely and thoroughly. If that person runs away from you, that is his way of communicating with you. You would not investigate further. If you did pursue and chase him, then sooner or later you would become a demon from that person’s point of view. You see right through his body and he has juicy fat and meat that you would like to eat up, so you seem like a vampire to him. And the more you try to pursue the other person, the more you fail. Perhaps you looked through too sharply with your desire, perhaps you were too penetrating. Possessing beautiful keen eyes, penetrating passion and intelligence, you abused your talent, played with it. It is quite natural with people, if they possess some particular power or gifted energy, to abuse that quality, to misuse it by trying to penetrate every corner. Something quite obviously is lacking in such an approach -- a sense of humor. If you try to push things too far, it means you do not feel the area properly; you only feel your relationship to the area. What is wrong is that you do not see all sides of the situation and therefore miss the humorous and ironical aspect.


Sometimes people run away from you because they want to play a game with you. They do not want a straight, honest and serious involvement with you, they want to play. But if they have a sense of humor and you do not, you become demonic. This is where lalita, the dance, comes in. You dance with reality, dance with apparent phenomena. When you want something very badly you do not extend your eye and hand automatically; you just admire. Instead of impulsively making a move from your side, you allow a move from the other side, which is learning to dance with the situation. You do not have to create the whole situation; you just watch it, work with it and learn to dance with it. So then it does not become your creation, but rather a mutual dance. No one is self-conscious, because it is a mutual experience.


When there is a fundamental openness in a relationship, being faithful, in the sense of real trust, happens automatically; it is a natural sensation. Because the communication is so real and so beautiful and flowing, you cannot communicate in the same way with someone else, so automatically you are drawn together. But if any doubt presents itself, if you begin to feel threatened by some abstract possibility, although your communication is going beautifully at the time, then you are sowing the seed of paranoia and regarding the communication purely as ego entertainment.


If you sow a seed of doubt, it may make you rigid and terrified, afraid of losing the communication which is so good and real. And at some stage you will begin to be bewildered as to whether the communication is loving or aggressive. This bewilderment brings a certain loss of distance, and in this way neurosis begins. Once you lose the right perspective, the right distance in the communication process, then love becomes hate. The natural thing with hatred, just as with love, is that you want to make physical communication with the person; that is, you want to kill or injure them. In any relationship in which the ego is involved, a love relationship or any other, there is always the danger of turning against your partner. As long as there is the notion of threat or insecurity of any kind, then a love relationship could turn into its opposite.”

This last sentence warrants extrapolation from an astrological point of view.  Trungpa Rinpoche elucidates the very real lynchpin of duality, or the dynamic tension of the polarities within our earthly experience. The recent full moon in Aries directly opposed the Sun / Saturn conjunction in Libra, serving to illuminate the ways in which the ego incessantly plants a feeling of doubt or opposition that pull us off balance.  Instead of remaining a balanced vessel of Free Passion, the ego filters the vast centerless phenomena of the universe interpenetrating and making love to itself - and flips it into Neurotic Passion.  As soon as there is a notion of threat or insecurity, abstract or otherwise, the triumphant joy of conscious unconditional love quickly shifts into the horrible beauty of emotion-based conditional love.

And that, in a nutshell, is what we get to reconcile as we progress into fall and winter.  Imagine freeing up all that filters this vast centerless energy; the phenomena of the universe interpenetrating and making love to itself...

All that inhibits this phenomena has been surfacing in preparation for the Sun’s progression into Scorpio, where we have the opportunity to bring all these outdated patterns to a ceremonious death, return the ego to his rightful position as an ally and a servant to our true nature, and be reborn in the spring.  The astrological year is only half over.  We're at the midpoint of the four seasons.  This is the time where we shift our perception from subjective to objective.  Where we see the projection of the ego, and our reactive nature, and integrate this awareness.  When we respond to what is, as opposed to reacting to what isn't, and remain free of attachment and connected to our center, we experience what Trungpa Rinpoche called "seeing the whole of another person or situation." When we dance with what is, in a mutual exchange, we reclaim authority in our lives, instead of authoritatively clinging to controlling our lives.

The next six months call forth reconciliation and integration.  If we endeavor to transform all the old, unconscious structures, we will better be suited to thrive in the death and rebirth of our various structures forecast to occur when Saturn enters Scorpio in October, 2012. As the structures we once relied upon transform before our eyes, we will have the resolute connection to our center that will allow us to integrate fully our conscious awareness of the centerless non-dual current of unconditional love.  Imagine creating a new foundation from this place.

Back to the question of this transit "What do I do when the perpetual failure that results from my best efforts serves only to trigger my deeply unconscious fear of inadequacy?"

The answer:  Don't believe the hype.  It's all in your mind.  You can't do anything wrong.  And thus, what might feel like failure on one level, is really success on another level.  They coexist to design our journey through duality.  Again and again, we fail in order to succeed.  Where this all falls on the time line of your life is completely irrelevant, when the attachment of the ego is surrendered.

A major key offered by Trungpa Rinpoche is the importance of maintaining a sense of humor in all that is unfolding.  Life is, after all, a giant cosmic joke.  When we look in witness at our lives, we see the ego did nothing more than set us up with exactly what we need to awaken.  Once we accept that it couldn’t be any other way, that it’s simply thus and so, we can remember and surrender to our inherent grace.  And grace trumps karma... and ego... every time.

In gratitude to all for your unique contribution to our collective awakening,

Ryan

www.bodyworkastrology.com