Inhabiting Our New Heroic Identities

“Be good to your skin. You’ll wear it every day for the rest of your life.”

— Renee Rouleau

Saturn Standing Still

Back in June, I blasted out a post regarding how to use Saturn’s retrograde through Pisces (Containing the Imperceptible) … Now, we’re finally on the tail end with Saturn standing still in the sky and about to station direct on Saturday, November 4th.

The next couple of days are a great time to review how you’ve spent the last 5 months eliminating the distractions that create resistance, disconnect you from receiving the blessings the Universe perpetually pours into you, and block your ability to effortlessly channel light and grace into the world.

Look at what’s been eliminated or taken away — or, what you’ve learned you have to phase out once Saturn goes direct — and thank it for its service in helping you become the wonderful person you are before releasing it.

Now, look at what’s on your docket. It’s this that Papa Saturn will give you every resource and the discipline to birth into manifestation once he goes direct. Learning what you need to enter into states of flow will be essential.

BUT, remember, Saturn is standing still. So, you might feel a sense of frustration that things aren’t rolling forward in the Capricorn and Aquarius parts of your life especially if you’ve been doing deep work to re-form the internal structures of how you perceive, think, and respond but not yet seeing that mirrored in your external reality.

Over the weekend, this video popped up on my YouTube feed and seemed a perfect “checklist” post Taurus / Scorpio eclipse cycle and pre-Saturn direct.

Where Does Skin Come In? A Blast from the Past

When I was 32, I was convinced that I had to “put away childish things” (aka my career as a storyteller) and do something “adult” and “Saturnian”. At the time, I was working as a Research Analyst and Portfolio Administrator at a prominent private equity firm in one of its funds managing $5 billion and looked around me to see everyone making so much money and leading such materially abundant lives. So, I decided to apply to Business School.

One of the essay questions what was mattered most to me. My answer at the time was “my skin”. Clearly, the admissions readers did not find my skin allegory very compelling. I didn’t get into any of the schools I applied to despite high GMAT scores and letters of recommendation from people on those schools’ Board of Directors (but that is not the point). Regardless, I still stand by my response. There is nothing more Saturnian than skin as 32 year old me would like to share with you:

AUTHENTICITY is a word that a lot of us use when discussing the lives, identities, and actions we want to craft in this incarnation — especially in reaction to the phenomena of living life on display for social media. The search for authentic identity compels many of us to seek out clarity on the question “Who am I?”

Reflecting on the enJOYment of being...typical Leo Season fare!

At First It Was Just the Usual…

It was another typical session of Anak’s “spiritual standup” on IG Live … piecing together, in a riff whilst procrastinating packing, my very 12th House Profection deep dive into Dr. Haramein’s new physics theories about gravity and the Nature of Reality, taoism, kabbalah, yoga, and tantra:

What if this life we are each living is our “vacation”?

If we are indeed a fractal expression of the Universe, both the Divine Mother/shakti and Her creation, the atoms of the Universe made conscious to observe itself, in other words: Let’s suppose for this discussion that our existence is based on this “spark” of life, that flame of the timeless that we carry into this discrete experience (btw, represented by the Sun in our natal charts). 

Some traditions see this embodiment as “maya” (mistranslated as “illusion” into English but is more accurately interpreted as “a construct”) — from which we have to achieve liberation — whether that’s moksha, nirvana, heaven. The body is perceived as a prison for the “light”, and we’re in The Great Escape, trying to tunnel out from mountains of karma accumulated over billions of years to get re-absorped into an undifferentiated Consciousness…like participants in an universal auto-da-fé or a bonfire of the vanities — carrying our metaphorical sinful objects in the long queue of time and experience up to a magnificently raging flame into which we will cast it and be made pure again. (Jupiter, is that you orchestrating all this?)

Then, there are those who see the body not as a prison with senses and desires to be purified of but as a vehicle through which to both recognize and inhabit the timeless in a way that can’t be when you’re an energy being or a star out there burning in the vast void of space time. 

It’s like an early episode of Star Trek the Next Generation (LOL — you knew my nerdy ass was going to go there), the crew come upon a planet with a weird energy cloud on it. They send an away team down to check it out but they wind up crashing and one of them breaks an arm. Anyhow, the three that were fine get possessed by some energy beings…Long story short: The cloud was filled with the consciousness energy of these prisoners who were separated from their bodies and sentenced to exist as pure energy — and they needed bodies to escape.

Which leads me to…

What If We’re Here on Vacation?

Being the Moon

The first installment of this series, Containing the Imperceptible, was all about a planetary day / chart based method of structuring your time in order to optimize your entry into flow states.

Since today is indeed the first day of Cancer Season and hence Summer Solstice, the longest and most yang day of the year, it seems most appropriate to delve into the planet that rules Cancer and the most visible receiver of the Sun’s light in the sky — the Moon.

Rabbi Simon Jacobson’s talk in this Youtube video This Plan Will Make You Unstoppable literally blew my mind and I found myself crying in the course of it. Basically, for our purposes, the most relevant bit to the rest of this newsletter is the concept that we are each moons. We receive and then reflect light/energy back into the world in cyclical ways that reflect our individual and unique experiences of manifested existence. There are times when light floods us and we easily reflect its full glory back into the world and serve as a light for others. Then there are other instances when there’s very little light for us to reflect and are given a chance to rest and be still. He even talks about the divine purpose of instances and periods in life when we, as moons, are eclipsed — times of distress or trauma not meant to diminish us but show us the fundamental nature of our human dignity in ways that the business as usual cycles are unable to.

With that train of thought in mind, the other great astrological tool in our arsenal is one our ancient ancestors first drew on to organize time as early as 15,000 years ago: moon phases.

The User’s Manual

Using phases of the moon to plan and time events is a minimalist approach that enables you to TRUST YOUR LIFE whilst enabling you to ride that flow with greater sensitivity to and intuition of the energies available to you.

How to Get Saturn Retrograde on Side

Today, June 11th, Mercury finally breaks free of Taurus for home in Gemini today and Pluto retrogrades back in Capricorn. However, underlying these two ingresses is Saturn in Pisces slowing down significantly this week, getting ready to retrograde on June 17th and remain so for four months — which it does every year.

If you haven’t seen it yet, on Instagram, I riffed on the how Friday’s moon in Pisces transit to Saturn would be helpful in highlighting the issues that might come up during the retrograde. Check it out here.

This week is a great time to take stock of what structures / projects / work you’ve found to contain your creativity, dreams, ideals, connection to source, and ability to be a conduit of source into manifest / perceived reality. Ask yourself:

• Which of these will stand the test of time?

• Which will bring BOTH earthly, material as well as spiritual, universal benefits both to yourself AND reverberate through your relationships, communities, and eventually through to the world?

• Which of these truly enables you to RECEIVE in order to SHARE?

Because of the stationary nature of Saturn this week, this is about standing still and dialing into your awareness — especially of your perception and use of time.

Saturn is the planet of time in the sign of timelessness … one of the primary lessons (for my money and mileage at least) of this transit and placement is learning when and how to enter into “flow states”. Saturn in Pisces is about learning how to properly contain that which is imperceptible — time.

This retrograde will provide a natural period to CULL your docket so that what you focus your attention on will both teach and enable you to create that timelessness in the time you invest.

“The task at hand is to eliminate the distractions that create resistance and hence disconnect you from grace and block your ability to effortlessly channel light and grace into the world.”

With that said, oh look! You have an amazing tool at the ready … astrology.

Astrology + Time Management

The ancient origins of astrology lie in our ancestors’ need to predict season shifts in order to organize life and death matters such as the planting and harvesting of crops as well as a search for meaning in omens that correlated with celestial cycles — aka time management and decision making.

There are numerous contemporary schools of thought around time management and optimization along with the requisite apps and planners. However, below are ways that I often deploy myself as well as work through with clients in our 1:1 work.

Hopefully, they provide a more “seasonal” and “biorhythmic” option for you.

On Mercury Retrograde

The beginning of it starts at the end.
—TOM WAITS

Breathing a sigh of relief because Mercury is finally direct?

Take the moment to enjoy finishing up a three week audit of how you use Mercury — the planet of connection that’s primarily responsible for connecting your internal and external realities.

In the sign of Taurus, regardless of what house it covers in your chart, this will have to do with stability (or lack thereof) especially of material resources as well as beliefs and habits around wealth (not necessarily money but what support is needed to thrive and engage with the external world).

Okay. Now, before you go bounding off thinking all is done and dusted, please take the next couple of weeks, as Mercury finds its footing again, to sit down and properly wrap out of this process. Doing so will optimally set you up for the opportunities that will arrive when Jupiter joins the party of Mercury, Sun, the North Node, and Uranus on May 16, 2023 at 10:20a PDT for a yearlong stay.

Check Out

With the planetary pileup in Taurus, it’s important to thoroughly check out how Mercury’s retrograde has activated the slower transiting planets:

Purification + Clarity

“The offering up or cleaning up ego stuff is called purification. Purification is the act of letting go. This is done out of discriminative awareness. That is, you understand that you are an entity passing through a life in which the entire drama is an offering for your awakening.”
— RAM DASS

It’s been a weird week. Monday’s Mercury Cazimi seems to have played out very literally for almost everyone I spoke with — which makes sense with Mercury being in very literal Taurus.

Cazimi’s, as expounded in 911+In Honor of Jupiter’s Cazimi, is when a planet goes into “the heart of the sun” — both to join with the king / soul and to be purified of ego based attachments that detract from the planet’s function. Mercury (the Intellect) gets “purified” more than most planets except the Moon (the Mind). Because they are the planets with which we most readily interface with manifest reality, both are prone to the kind of mental and emotional clutter that tend to distract us from being spiritual beings having a human experience.

Find the Solution!

Endurance is nobler than strength, and patience than beauty.
—JOHN RUSKIN

SAVE THE CAT

Back in 2005, Blake Snyder published one of the definitive books on screenplay structure called Save the Cat (no, that is not an affiliate link — I wish!). The fifteen beats Snyder identifies guide a protagonist from the moment right before they’re called upon to embark on a virtually impossible heroic quest to the moment after the impossible has been achieved and the protagonist and the world forever changed.

Meditating on the closing action of the Taurus North Node/Scorpio South Node eclipses that started on November 19, 2021 and that we’ll see the backside of on October 28, 2023 as well as the opening action of the Aries/Libra eclipses, it struck me like a proverbial lightning bolt — the story of the transiting nodes very much follows Snyder’s framework — with the eclipses serving as the fulcrums of the story line.

This is the perfect time, during the time between eclipses, to do this exercise.

As I write this post, the Sun and Jupiter are about to meet in the sky in what’s called a “cazimi” — a term derived from the Arabic that means “in the heart of the sun”.

The Moon is a planet that I don’t spend a lot of time talking about on print but have found myself devoting whole sessions to helping a client get better clarity on their own; but, with the eclipses just around the corner, it’s time to remedy that.

As the sun claws back its dominion over the sky from the night, so the soul’s voyage moves from the primordial waters of Pisces into the hungry fires of Aries.

Aries compels planets that occupy it to act impulsively, disregarding consequences, believing wholeheartedly, passionately that the courageous action defines them.