Home is where our heart is. The first of three Lunar Eclipses.

The first of a powerful line up of lunar eclipses occurs tomorrow the 26 April 2013.   There will be two more before the mid year Solstice.   Eclipses  bring greater voltage to the charge of change.

This first eclipse combined with a what the Buddhists called a Wesak (enlightened) full moon in Scorpio, brings into our sphere the usual and sometimes dreaded Plutonic energies of transformation through dissolution and penetrating exposition.

Issues around latent and hidden insecurities regarding money, home and relationships; romantic, business and platonic, are illuminated.  Along with these anxieties there is a strong presence of the rise of compassion and desire to put this to good use for the collective community.

Our sense of home is literally being shaken up by escalating violence, struggles with finance,  or feeling isolated.  The world seems to becoming increasingly 'unsafe' and we are being pushed more and more to find our true home which, lies in the centre of our be-ing; our Heart.

For me personally this is indeed true.  I have had this past week the ressurection of grief around wishing to move home but feeling thwarted by the financial impossiblity of this and then at the same time I have been more than usual, deeply touched by the sight of real homeless people that pepper the streets of my city; a city that claims to be one of the most prosperous at this point in  our history.

Neither my angst over not being able to change my own residence nor the sight of a man sleeping rough have made any sense and I have been awash with both anger and grief.

This is the effect of the current planetary energies amplified by the rising 'awakened' collective.  We are in the first phase of re-BIRTH.  The contractions are tame to what they will become but we don't know this yet and so the pain is as sharp as it would be upon crowning.

The Full Moon in Scorpio is of course accompained by our central Sun being placed in earthy, pragmatic, designed-for-comfort Taurus so the impulse or push to integrate even more of the opposing energies of the Divine Masculine and Divine Feminine will also be on the cards.

Maybe you have a feeling of being penalized by society if you are woman or have fostered the traditional role of nurturer and giver, or if you are male whose primary purpose has been to provide and find pragmatic solutions to issues around finance, security, protection and the future you might be feeling suffocation and intense pressure.  Both embed a sense of powerlessness.

There is likely a sense of being under the pump, a sudden shot in the arm that jerks you into first anxiety and then into thoughts based in social justice.

Anger, resentment and grief are all emotions that are being called up to be released.  The 'feeling" closet  of our lives is being opened up, ransacked, dusted and purged of all old gremlins that have had the job of keeping an unhealthy ego and a reality that serves it, alive.

In the 'darkness' of this Lunar Eclipse our eyes are being re-adjusted, re-callibrated. Our pupils dilate letting in sufficient light so we can make known the aspects of ourselves that lurk like monsters in the dusty recesses and dank corners of our minds.

It's a really good time to clear any residual emotional (and real) clutter that no longer serves you. Just like the old pair of shoes you keep simply to remind you of a time gone by but never really wear, its time to release old feelings that no longer serve your evolution.

Anything remotely Scorpio is always about re-birth, about re-construction, but first it must be made known before you torch it.   Intense emotions are a sign you are letting go.  Tears and tantrums are merely the processing tools. Don't attempt to swallow your feelings.  To do so literally brings 'water retention' into play which if not released can affect the health of your 'heart'; the place that now leads us.

WIth  grand-daddy structured Saturn travelling through the sign of Scorpio and  Darth Vader Pluto weilding its power in Capricorn there is a definite feeling that this is the time, this is the place, where old "architecture" (read establishment) is being bulldozed to the ground.  To add flow to the whole process a watery Grand Trine begs us to attune to the needs of mass consciousness with compassion.

We are being en-COURAGE-d to release all that we thought was real and necessary for our sustenance. We are being asked to disengage from the pursuit of  false, fear based individual growth and freedoms and re-align ourselves with more communal enterprise, pursuit and philosophy.  

To do this it is imperative to anchor ourselves in our hearts for this is where our true home and security lies.  With a strong sense of 'home" embedded deep in the centre of our BE-ing-ness the old, outworn carcasses of what we have called 'reality" for centuries can finally be thrown on to the pyre.

Boston bombings, bone rattling earthquakes and balance.

“From birth, man carries the weight of gravity on his shoulders. He is bolted to earth. But man has only to sink beneath the surface and he is free.” – Jacques Yves Cousteau

Bombs in Boston and earthquakes in the Near and Middle East.  We have had two deaths in the family and it seems everywhere I go I see ambulances rushing to the scenes of serious road traffic accidents.  

Its likely Pluto the planet of transformation through destruction is active along with good old Mars putting an explosive oar into our stream of consciousness. 

I am tapping into something beneath the surface that heralds a time of ramping up energies; of change and shift.  It asks the collective to take a leap of faith and let go of all our fears, of all our tendencies to deal with difficulty by putting up more walls, by attempting to find safety in the skirts of "wars" against what we don't like or don't want.

No one in the corridors of power is asking if our current methodolgy of dealing with bombs and other such atrocities involving, invoking more fear and breeding less trust is really working.  Well its clear and apparent despite all the measures put out to increase our security, is in fact not taming this terrorist beast in the slightest.  We aren't safer and we feel more threatened.  

The obstinacy of the pro-gun supporters in the States has not manifested more safety, the wars and drones are killing more, causing more pain and buliding more fear. 

It makes sense that what we focus on we get more of.  Have you ever noticed that when you have pain in your body if you keep thinking about it it gets worse?  The role of pain killers essentially block pathways to the brain that keep your attention on the suffering.  Have you ever seen the merit of a friend who comes around when you have had a bad day, brings a funny movie, a bottle of wine and a box of chocolates?  The shift of focus is what brings relief.  Yet we are largely unconscious of the power of this apparent facile distraction. 

It may sound cruel or inhuman to suggest that in the light of tragedy that we look the other way.  I mean people have been killed, maimed and seriously affected by the Boston bombings and yes there are hundreds who suffer the consequences of drone attacks and so called controlled bombings in the Middle East in the name of bringing peace. However Universal Law would poo poo this approach.  She would instead ask us to look for love to foster ease and peace. She would likely ask us to look out of the window at the blossom on the tree or wish we made cupcakes instead of watching the News.

Compassion is a great healer of all wounds and I sometimes seriously consider the idea that all this horror that we increasingly experience is literally waking us up.  It is in the wake of disaster that you see true humanity at work.  Tragedy brings heart out of the closet and everyone concerned begins to rally round for the good of a unified collective.  

As we hear of the sadness and grief of others we automatically, because we are human, begin to feel compassion for those affected.  We begin to feel vulnerablity; our own and that of others.

As our vulnerablity is highlighted we tend to begin to see our neighbours, our families, friends and even strangers from this perspective.  They are just people like you or I trying to make sense of the world and their experiences. 

When our own lives are touched in some way, either really deeply and personally, or through viewing scenes of horror through media coverage ironically our love for ourselves and our own small lives is set alight.  Once that takes hold our hearts begin to open.  Once our hearts begin to open we start to literally 'feel" the pain of the other.  

I know when I open my heart to myself and feel compassion (not pity) for myself I start to see everyone else's vulnerablity and the beauty of their humanity.  Our hearts literally go 'out' to others, whether its to feel compassion for a mother struggling with a basket load of shopping and a fractious toddler  in the supermarket, the bent old man sitting alone in a cafe reading his paper or the Afghan wedding party decimated by a 'legal' bomb. 

There is always method in some madness especially when we learn to drop our duality glasses and view life from a place of non judgment, from a place where we see that the ideology of right and wrong as being obselete.

Once you adopt this neutral, observant stance beauty, love and compassion literally rises from the dead.

The atrocities that seem to have gone viral of late, those which none of us can hide from any longer, are gifts.  They support this invisible evolutionary shift to a heart centred, more caring, co- creative paradigm.

From vulnerablity and the acceptance of its strength, it's beauty, grows compassion and the realisation that one persons pain is actually part of our own and then from that compassion comes balance.

Grief is now my friend; Finding the beauty in loss.

I lost a dear friend last week.  She was more than a friend.  She, inspite of her own pain and tragedies of her inner landscape, offered unconditional love always.

She died from a sad choice she made to undergo gastric sleeve surgery; something someone in her physical state should not have been advised to do.  It all went horribly wrong and she ended up riddled with infections that antibiotics seemed to fail miserably at controling.  A leak caused by this barbaric surgery was the cause of these multiple infections which left her weak and immune impaired.  Her lungs started to fail because she was already severely asthmatic and eventually just when it seemed she might be on the mend she suffered massive cardiac arrest from which she could not be revived.  She was 44.

There are so many arms to this story that could be explored and argued. The one that holds her therapist  and doctors responsible for supporting this poor choice as an attempt to find relief from her pain.  The one that focuses on how she came to make this decision, the one that tries to find reasons and explains why such a talented and filled with love person would choose to put her life at risk for the sake of her outer image. The one that looks back at her past and childhood for answers. And then there is the one that was born from the constant barrage of fear she got from health professionals who kept telling her if she did not lose the weight she would die; well she did.  Not from her weight but from a mismanaged situation and from a story she herself was sadly not able to let go of or re-frame.

However, those stories whilst indeed important and painful are merely a reworking of suffering. Instead  I looked at ways to honour her that were more befitting her Soul. She was a larger than life person.  She was beautiful in my eyes inside and out. A talented artist, curator, writer and academic.  The best friend any person could ever have.  She showed me what unconditional love was, fired up my compassion and extended my understanding.  For when she needed you, you really were called upon in no uncertain terms.  She could not pretend or masquerade her emotions.  For that experience that some found hard to handle, I am eternally grateful. She ironically in her so called drama showed me that emotions should never be judged but seen as our best navigator.  She lit up the pathway to Heart with the lantern of her luminous be-ing.

As usual in amidst tragedy there is always a ray of hope; a gift hidden amongst the dark dregs of despair and as usual I found it as I swam, literally, in the murky waters of my grief.


The sadness one feels when you lose a loved one is not just based in the loss of their physical presence or the emotional attachment.

The pain opens doors and connects us to the parts of ourselves we too have over time and conditioning anesthetised and abandoned.  As the emotion flows we are given opportunity to breathe life back into those parts of ourselves that have been numbed out or feel dead.

Here lies the joy of release.  Here lives the beauty in grief.

Testosterone

Testosterone has a lot to answer for. I am a feeble, floundering sole female in an all male household. As they all grow up (debatable) I am increasingly aware that the air is thick with this gun toting, hairy hormone.

The atmosphere if left on its own for more than a few hours feels like the fur on a dogs back that has been stroked the wrong way, all on edge and spiky. We cannot as a family, sit down to a lovingly prepared meal with out at least one of the other three “boys” (and that is what they are and what they will remain) sniping about something or the other. As the 10 minute enforced civilized sit down disintegrates, tweety bird chests expand and the fight over which bits of roast lamb are ‘theirs’ or which potatoes have their names stamped on them becomes unbearable. The subversive tactics employed to hide a few green beans could be better utilized in a career in the SAS. For a sex that claims to be the stronger, the sight of a bit of fat on an offending piece of meat sends them into a girly flat spin.

 My teenage ninja mutant first born loudly proclaimed last night, he didn’t like to “forage” for his lamb amongst bones and a bit of fat. “What have I given birth to?” I thought. "It’s all gone wrong- we’ve gone from hairy mammoth hunters to lazy, spoilt Neanderthals!"

 I struggle to bite my forked estrogenic tongue and try not to point out that it took me nigh on two hours to prepare this clearly unacceptable meal. However I was brought up to be a lady and my female heritage predisposes me to an uncanny and unnatural capacity for keeping my mouth shut. Perhaps it is a way of keeping that godforsaken evil apple, which haunts our sisters’ psyches, at arms length.

There is nothing like a nice piece of soothing music to help your dinner go down but when I conceived my two boy children and bequeathed my body and soul to that handsome lad from down the road I was unaware that the predominant background symphony would be nothing more than a consciously composed backing track of belching and farting in F major. To sit at a table and endure this daily, cannot but help bring forth a counter rage. It’s called PMS (post marital stress or pissed off mothers stress), lasts a whole month and is undoubtedly the hormonal bottling up of complete disbelief and horror that such an opposite species actually exists.

I made the grandiose mistake of taking some time out last Saturday.

Anyone would have thought I had deserted troops in Iraq. Exhausted and fully fed up with the monotony of weekend chores I retired to bed, leaving my manly trio with a wide-eyed, high eye browed look on their faces.

The fact that I had actually drawn the curtains and got into bed rather than sheepishly pass out for three seconds on the sofa whilst waiting in the wings for the muffins to be ready, seemed to shock them in to a few moments of being able to walk without leaving echoing footprints or demanding food. But within 10 minutes we were all back to normal and the kerfuffle in the kitchen resumed. Cupboard doors opened and shut with alacrity and I counted the fridge had been opened and shut about 12 times in as many minutes. “ Boy vision” had returned and I was being whispered at for culinary advice or the GPS of homework that was “lost”. The elder (but not always wiser) of my three boys, my husband, enthusiastically set about preparing a "best ever" dinner but “checked’ in on me three hundred times for step by step instructions until my progesterone depleted rage directed him to that same cupboard which had already been opened and shut 7 times, where a barrage of good cook books lay, which had in print what I have in my overburdened head.

All you good women know the outcome of this story don’t you? It’s all too freaking familiar. I now know why our planet and politics are in such a mess.

Too much testosterone!

It knows nothing of order, of beauty, of negotiating without war, of acting before disaster strikes. I left my intelligent brood for a few hours and our house is adorned with wet towels and bathers left casually slung on dining room chairs. Empty wrappers of food that have no nutritional content, grace the coffee table in front of the TV that wastes our precious energy as it blabs away to an empty room. The dishwasher is half stacked and on. The dog is going stir crazy because she hasn’t had a walk. Attempts at domesticity are evident- the ironing basket sits proudly in full view of who ever might walk in but oddly it’s still full. The energy is flat and flaccid, dull and dreary, devoid of a special kind of love and conscience that only a woman who has embraced a true feminine essence can replace.

By feminine essence I don’t mean the frilly pink kind. I speak of an energy that is used to saying ‘yes’ more than no’, one that works tirelessly to create safety and harmony; one that works from instinct and pure love, one that’s strong but always soft.

 It’s a shame we sometimes feel like a well-known toilet paper though isn’t it? Take heart girls, the world would literally be a shitty place without us!