Winter Solstice and beyond

The winter solstice is upon us.  Like no other time in the year, we’re called to source our light from within.  And in so doing, we burn through the veils of illusion that lock our perception in a world of separation.

And there’s really no way around it.  We have to burn through the endless chatter of this suffering mind in order to receive with crystal clarity the healing melody of our heart’s song.  Calming the deafening explosion of dissonant thoughts, we heed the guidance and harmonic pulse of our soul’s rhythm.  Listen.  Let that pulse guide you.

With the new moon in Capricorn on December 24, and Jupiter finishing it’s retrograde cycle and starting fresh at 0 degrees Taurus on December 25, we find ourselves with an extraordinary opportunity to restructure our lives in accordance with the harmonic pulse of our soul’s purpose on this planet.  If that sounds like kind of a big deal, it is.

Like never before in my observation of astrological cycles, it appears that all the challenges and traumas we’ve endured can be transmuted into whatever we consciously choose in the year ahead.  The operative word being “consciously.”  How can we discern our conscious choices from our unconscious?  Easy.  Look back at the last year of your life.  What choices did you make out of habit?  Out of reaction?  What were the results?  With 20/20 hindsight, reflecting on the effects of your choices, what will you do differently when similar circumstances present themselves?  And they will.  Only this time, you’ll meet them not from your fear-based patterns of reaction, but instead with responsive awareness centered on the truth and wisdom you’ve gleaned from all that led you to this moment. 

The key with Saturn’s transit through Libra (going retrograde from Feb 7, 2012 - June 24, 2012) is to relate - with everyone and everything - without getting pulled off center.  Take responsibility for your feelings, instead of letting them spin you out into the spectrum of outdated reactions.  And recognize that you’re not responsible for the feelings of anyone else.  They’re going to feel how they’re going to feel.  By staying in, or enabling another to remain in, our unconscious patterns (codependence, for example), we perpetuate karmic repercussions we can no longer afford.  The imbalance in the world is a direct correlate of every individual’s commitment (or lack thereof) to living in alignment with our truth.  And if you’re living in your truth, with genuine kindness and compassion, the universe will bestow many blessings upon your path in the year ahead.  That’s Jupiter finally moving forward in Taurus.  Big abundance and creative output awaits all who follow their bliss, and remain devoted to their truth.

It’s been a year.  Not all bad.  Not all good.  But all perfect.  We’re alive to tell the tale.  Only now we can narrate the story moving forward, as opposed to pulling it up from the past.  See the year to come as though it were already manifest.  Put to rest your orientation to a now that’s built on the faulty construct of a dissociative past.  Those days are over.  Let them die as the year expires.  Give birth instead to what dreams may come.

Few can argue the epoch of our human existence is shifting.  Into what?  Well... that’s subject to what you believe in.  And in all matters of belief we cannot escape from subjective opinion.  Absent concrete evidence to support my claims, I share the following knowing full well that the constructs of religious indoctrination will illicit a reaction, or better stated, a denial from most.  Like the GOP pundits and their propaganda machine (FOX News, etc) that surreptitiously deny human activity contributes to climate change, I too recognize you can never underestimate the power of denial.  Did you know that over half the populace of America, thanks in part to the aforementioned propaganda machine (and a healthy dose of denial-based ignorance), now believes that the rising CO2 put out by our growing industrial world has NO effect on climate change?  To this I simply say... wow.

But I digress.  The POINT I was getting at, is the shifting of the human epoch.  I have a bent towards examining the correlation between science and spirituality.  Some lean towards one or the other.  Recognizing there is no separation (original theme of this post), I like to think we’re shifting from Homo sapien to Homo illuminous.  That we’re more than just our physical body.  That a light source exists within us, and that light is surfacing in profound and beautiful way.  And in conjunction with that shift, we’re shifting from the Information Age to the Age of Intuition.  What does that mean...?

It’s like cloud computing.  A mobile application (the human mind) processes data and software stored in remote servers (the universal mind) and delivered through the internet (collective consciousness).  Incalculable bits of information are traveling through  the internet (the spontaneous gamma oscillations of human consciousness) and retrieved by our individual web browser (intuition) and downloaded accordingly.

I’m still working on that one, but I put it out simply to illustrate that the mechanism of our intuition has a mirror in our technological innovation.  We have access to energy and information like never before.  That's no accident.

And all this is to say....  We have A LOT available in 2012.  The winter solstice still represents a time of going inward, a hibernation of sorts.  We have access to A LOT right now.  Tune in.  Solidify your connection to the light.  Receive your guidance from within.  Create alchemy with all you’ve accumulated.  And come spring, the seeds of your deepest intentions will take root like never before.  Plant them in the fertile soil of an emptied mind.  Remain aware that past habituations and patterns (ego-based emotions and fears) will arise from time to time in an attempt to distract us.  Identify with nothing and remember your aim.  With Jupiter in Taurus on your side, you can clear those distractions without effort and focus into completion the manifestation of your dreams.  Dream big.

In gratitude to all for your contribution to our collective awakening.

Stellar blessings,
Ryan

www.bodyworkastrology.com

An added bonus... A passage from T.S Elliot’s masterstroke Four Quartets that beautifully illustrates through graceful prose the soft darkness of this winter solstice...

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of
    Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
And we all go forth with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury.
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness
    on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away--
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long
    between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness
    deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious
    of nothing--
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without
    love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought;
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the
    dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth
            You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are
    not,
   You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
   You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
   You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
   You must go through the way in which you are not.
and what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.