“Tom and myself rode down this hill in a ropey old 1950′s Leyland bus, typical of the Maltese bus fleet, but driven by the stunt driver for the bus scenes in ‘Speed’ where the bomb would go off if they slowed to less than [...]]]> The photographer’s description of this image is as striking as the picture itself:

“Tom and myself rode down this hill in a ropey old 1950′s Leyland bus, typical of the Maltese bus fleet, but driven by the stunt driver for the bus scenes in ‘Speed’ where the bomb would go off if they slowed to less than 40mph! We were on high seats opposite the exit door and had to grip on whilst centripetal force took us and the bus closer to the outside wall. Tyres squealed on the hot tarmac and we were saved by some old dear in black who didn’t seem to need to hang on and dinged the bell as calmly as you like for the driver to stop and let her off.” (Source)

Life feels like this, sometimes, for each of us. Yet some people are more prone than others to careening through the days, whipped back and forth by forces they feel they can’t control. They complain of other people’s actions and influences on their lives: “He made me feel bad,” “She won’t let me go,” “They really have me tied down.”

In traditional psychology, this innate sense of where control lies in one’s life is referred to as the locus of control. In astrology — namely in Huber astrology — we can determine where a chart native’s locus of control lies in different areas of life by examining the dynamic calculations: a series of negative and positive numbers whose values reflect the strength of various mode and element combinations within the chart, based on planet, sign and house placements.

For example, someone with dynamic calculations of +33 mutable and +14 earth will end up with a “build-up” of +47 in Virgo energy (Virgo being the mutable earth sign). This means, in a nutshell, that the person tends to assume that Virgo-type control over life exists externally, out in the world, not within her own domain. So though she may have several planets in Virgo, she may feel their obligation, responsibility and critical analysis being imposed on her from others rather than from within herself.

Similarly, someone with dynamic calculations of -18 fixed and +10 water will end up with a “cut-down” of -8 in Scorpio (fixed water) energy. The person’s sense of emotional depth, intensity and control will lie more within himself than without; he is more likely to acknowledge that his strong feelings are generated internally rather than to blame someone else, or some external circumstance, for them.

This basic knowledge of dynamic calculations, alongside the psychological concept of locus of control, can be enormously helpful for clients who feel they are careening down a mountainside in a runaway bus with a crazy driver and a bomb on board. The astrologer may be the wise woman in black, calmly ringing the bell, telling the client it’s okay to get off, to see what it’s like to descend calmly and quietly on his own two feet.

Image: Harry Willis

My first instinct with this one was Saturn: the organization, the predictability, the safety of the grid-like pattern. But then I thought: No, Uranus: energy, electricity. Or Mercury: thousands of little connections [...]]]> Most of the time, when I look at the picture of the week, I see right away the astrological archetype with which the image aligns.

My first instinct with this one was Saturn: the organization, the predictability, the safety of the grid-like pattern. But then I thought: No, Uranus: energy, electricity. Or Mercury: thousands of little connections all bringing energy to an undefined, in-between space.

All of these archetypes are true to the image in their own way but they don’t really get to the core of it for me. What is most striking about this photo, in my view, is the stark, bright, white light against the utter blackness: the striking oppositeness come together. Secondarily (or perhaps primarily, depending on the viewer), the grid pattern kind of couches or embraces a cross, which in the Christian tradition is the symbol of light penetrating dark.

But what is light penetrating dark in terms of astrology? I don’t think I can choose a single planet or sign to reflect that idea, for light and dark are such basic archetypal energies that undergird and run through all of life, through all the energies we carry within us: Venus, Jupiter, Mercury, Sagittarius, Cancer — each of these and every other astrological energy carries its own brand of light and dark into embodiment, into the life of the person who carries that energy.

For instance, Venus is the goddess of love and beauty and, as such, represents merging relationship, sensuality, art and luscious enjoyment of life. But she can also be desperate and demanding, vain and superficial. These are two sides of the same coin, the light and the shadow of a single archetypal energy that lives in all of us.

There are others: Mercury’s quick wit, light laughter and adaptability is shadowed by detachment, fickleness and nit-picky-ness; Jupiter’s wisdom, perspective and generosity may be darkened by arrogance, excess and sloth.

When we accept, embody or live out only one side of an archetype, denying the other side’s potential within us, we run into trouble. This is the condition first identified by Sigmund Freud as projection and cast into mythic terms by Carl Jung as shadow.

Western astrologers have long identified shadow with the seventh house (the house of relationship), suggesting that we draw people to us who have the qualities we are not yet ready to accept in ourselves and integrate into our consciousness.

But we can experience shadow in any house of the horoscope, for example if we have a strong seventh house and little in its opposite house, the first, we may identify more completely with others than with ourselves, making the self into shadow material: fear of being alone, denial of one’s own worth, self-effacement or self-abnegation or self-mutilation, to go to the extreme. If our ninth house is dominant over the third, we may find ourselves in an ivory tower, alienated from community, and thus critical of people who have strong local connections and networks. And so forth.

This is all shadow material. Light penetrates shadow through the channel of consciousness, of becoming aware of where your shadows lie, where they’re sourced, how they’re triggered, how they grow.

Consciousness, in turn, is cultivated by self-reflection, self-honesty and ventures into the darkness, to discover and retrieve and reclaim what is there. It can be done, to some extent, on one’s own, but is more often effective with a faithful guide, a Virgil to one’s Dante or a Gandalf to one’s Frodo. Such guides can bring the wisdom, insight, faith, humbleness and even humor we need to believe in our own survival through the dark shadows of our own psyche. They can help us find our own light.

Image: Drake Guan

What about you? Does this look exhilirating, totally doable, challenging or terrifying? Easy? Or perhaps some combination of these? Maybe your reaction is reflected on your 4/10 axis.

The 4th house sits at the bottom of the [...]]]> Having both a child and an insane fear of heights, this picture puts my heart, thick and loud, in my throat:

What about you? Does this look exhilirating, totally doable, challenging or terrifying? Easy? Or perhaps some combination of these? Maybe your reaction is reflected on your 4/10 axis.

The 4th house sits at the bottom of the horoscope chart, the 10th house its opposite, high on top. Together they create a tension, a tug-o-war of sorts. On one end, we want to stay home, hunker down, find a safe space to curl up and close our eyes. The 4th house is associated with Cancer, the crab, which carries its home on its back, stays close to the ground (even in the water), and retreats when it’s threatened. You’re not going to find many crabs climbing mountains.

On the other extreme, we want to scale the heights before us — build a ladder to the stars, conquer the world, make a name for ourselves — all those cliches associated with the 10th house, which is also associated with Capricorn: the lone mountain goat, finding each foothold it needs to move slowly up the craggy hillside.

The animal equivalents are inspiring and instructive but they don’t consider that humans need both ends of the rope. We need that safe space and we need to take risks as well. And we can only do well with risk if we come from a secure base — if we trust that the world will support us, that there is firm ground beneath our feet, that the harness is secure and somebody’s got our back. Without that kind of grounding, fear will freeze us.

What about you? Do you trust that you’re held safely even as you work to achieve your ambitions? Or are you thwarted by your fear of falling? How can you build the secure base you need in order to move forward?

Photo credit

Sometimes we get caught in an unhealthy pattern and call it a bad habit or an addiction. Other patterns grow into rituals that mark certain moments: beginnings, endings, transitions, the rhythms of the seasons. Still other patterns become routines — neither healthy nor unhealthy, just [...]]]> Astrology is the study of patterns as they play out through time.

Sometimes we get caught in an unhealthy pattern and call it a bad habit or an addiction. Other patterns grow into rituals that mark certain moments: beginnings, endings, transitions, the rhythms of the seasons. Still other patterns become routines — neither healthy nor unhealthy, just the usual way of doing things, until something comes along to change, upset or improve old standbys.

It’s pretty easy to tell when something’s a routine as opposed to an addiction, a rhythm as opposed to a habit. Though each word means essentially the same thing, we can feel it in our bones when the pattern is unhealthy, or comforting, or neutral. But the etymology of these words can give us further insight into how the things we do repeatedly — Saturday morning chores, for example, or singing a particular lullaby to a child, or that six-pack you just can’t get through the evening without — affect the deep psyche.

Addiction comes from the Latin root deik-, which means “to show or pronounce solemnly.” From the same root grew words like dictate, ditto, indict, verdict and jurisdiction, giving “addiction” the feel of a judicial, gavel-banging, authoritative pronouncement. The addict is indicted. The verdict is dictated. It’s hard to escape an addiction, or fight it, or squirm out from under it. We can only get off for good behavior.

In the horoscope chart, we might look to the fixed cross — the 2nd and 8th houses, the 5th and 11th — to understand our unhealthy repetitive behaviors: how we embody Sysiphus in our own lives, and what healing god we might call upon inside ourselves to get out of our addictive cycles.

Ritual comes from rite, which is rooted in the basic Latin ar-, which means “to fit together,” and which spawned all sorts of English words including arm, art, order, reason and rhyme. A ritual, then, is like a piece of the puzzle falling into place, making sense of something chaotic. It is a small part of the larger whole, a connector that helps us make elegant the empty spaces of life, that infuses our days and weeks with meaning.

Ritual may be the other side of the addiction coin, the bright face of addictive darkness. Perhaps addiction is a expression of the search for meaning, an expression that took a wrong turn. Like addiction, ritual appeals to the senses and meets a need for soothing. But done authentically and practiced faithfully, ritual — unlike addiction — should lead to order and connection instead of chaos and isolation.

There are, of course, rituals that become meaningless or unhealthy, for example through overuse or misuse or because the act of placing the puzzle piece has continued long past the need for the puzzle’s meaning or message. In this case, the ritual may become an addiction because lack of courage, or lack of creativity, prevents a person from seeing life anew, from building new rituals that reflect life’s current rhythms.

In the horoscope chart, we can again look at the fixed cross to understand how to recreate addictions as rituals: what rituals might meet the need that the addiction is currently fulfilling. Of course, there are other elements too — the planets and signs and other houses as well — that must be considered depending on the nature and need of the addiction.

I got into this whole train of thought intially because I’m reading Beyond the Rainbow Bridge: Nurturing Our Children from Birth to Seven by Barbara J. Patterson and Pamela Bradley. The book describes the Waldorf educational philosophy, which emphasizes the importance of daily, weekly, monthly and yearly rhythms in children’s lives. Rhythm comes from the Latin root sreu-, which means “to flow.” In the Greek, it’s rhuthmos, meaning “measure or recurring motion.” The word is also related to bodily flushings such as diarrhea and catarrh; the rock rhyolite; rheuma (the humors of the body); and possibly to the Russian struga, meaning “a deep place.”

What strikes me about rhythm is that its word associations encompass so much: fluid, cyclical motion and the stillness, the hardness, of rock; the humors of the body and their occasional purging outbursts; the plain, mundane task of measuring time and the shrouded, sacred mysteries of life’s deep places. There’s a yin-yang feel to this word family, a sense that rhythm must include both external expression and internal pondering; both silence and noise; both stillness and motion. In fact, Patterson and Bradley suggest that preschool days should be ordered in an external-internal-external-internal “breathing-type” rhythm so as to encourage children’s exuberance while also preventing them from spinning out of control and becoming enslaved to the barrage of sensory input all around them.

The book also makes the point that rhythms come from without and within. If we are attentive and aware and not so out of control in our lives, we internalize the external rhythms that surround us. Our bodies and senses can respond with rituals that anchor the beginnings and endings of each rhythmic cycle — rituals that mark the turn of morning into noontime, the fading of brash summer into more ponderous fall, the growth of child into adolescent into adult. The word “ritual” often carries a religious flavor in our culture, but it doesn’t have to. Its importance is in placing a puzzle piece in such a way that meaning and connection are forged in the life.

Keeping that caveat in mind, psychotherapy pioneer Carl Jung famously wrote to Bill Wilson, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous:

[The] craving for alcohol [is] the equivalent on a low level of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness … You see, Alcohol in Latin is “spiritus,” and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison. The helpful formula therefore is: spiritus contra spiritum. (Source)

If we are attentive to the rhythms that order the physical universe around us, we then, perhaps, do not need addictive behavior but, instead, meaningful ritual to order our lives. Rites that give physical space, plenty of time and honored acknowledgment to change, growth, loss and newness can go a long way to connect our souls to the larger rhythms of life, to feel how we ourselves are pieces in the larger puzzle of the universal order. We do not, then, need addiction because our spiritual thirst is slaked by something else.

Rhythms are patterns, ways of ordering our time and our senses, that emerge from authentic depth, from time-tested processes, rather than from our own momentary behaviors — based on anxiety, desire or compulsion — injected into the matrix of time. Disconnected from the rhythms of life, we seek addiction: something dependable, comforting — yet ultimately disconnecting. When we are in touch with those larger rhythms, though, we can then connect with others, with the world, with the Divine — and with ourselves. That connection can be achieved and expressed through ritual, through the placement of the ordered pieces into the big picture of life.

Image credit

The tool uses the template of the horoscope chart to guide self-employed people in examining their internal life for its potential effects on their business and livelihood. Part II, just posted this week, asks questions about how your [...]]]> Just a quick note that I’ve posted the next installment of my self-assessment for aspiring (and established) entrepreneurs here.

The tool uses the template of the horoscope chart to guide self-employed people in examining their internal life for its potential effects on their business and livelihood. Part II, just posted this week, asks questions about how your relationship with possessions, both tangible and not, impacts your sense of personal power and self-worth. It also asks you to examine the effects on your business decisions of envy, jealousy or plain old want of what others have.

It’s an interesting and detailed exploration that is rarely touched on in traditional “Am I ready to work for myself?” questionnaires.

Click here to access the Introduction, which describes the tool and how to use it, and click here to access Part I, which explores the image you project into the world and what you expect to get back from it.

Keep your eyes out for Part III next week. It will cover where you come from and where you’re going in terms of unique contributions to your field.

Once all six sections are posted, I’ll post a final PDF version of the entire booklet, which includes tables and tools, that you can print out for your own use.

“I miss my hoooome!” he wailed. “Why aren’t we going hoooome?”

I started with the pat answer: “Wherever you [...]]]> The Dragon always enjoys an airplane ride, but when we arrived at a hotel in the midwest last week — instead of Grandma and Grandpa’s house in the northwest, as he expected — he was a little thrown off.

“I miss my hoooome!” he wailed. “Why aren’t we going hoooome?”

I started with the pat answer: “Wherever you and Daddy and I are together,” I told the Dragon, “that’s home.”

He looked doubtful. You just can’t fool a three-year-old. He wanted his bedroom, his toys, his stuffed orca that we’d forgotten. He wanted the cat, and going to get the mail, and routine. Familiarity.

So we explained a little about taking trips and assured him that we’d go home eventually. As we did, I thought of the basic structure of the horoscope chart, with home, memory, ritual and habit at the bottom, faraway places and new perspectives at the top. I thought about the ninth house up on high, the place where long-distance travel is implicated, and about stretching your mind and pushing out of your comfort zone.

After reassuring him, we talked to the Dragon about the value of experiencing new things, finding out how other people live, seeing different houses and streets and landscapes. A place with fewer people, more space; a place with lots of trees but no mountains. What did he think about not having a mountain in our backyard for a few days?

“I don’t know,” he said sullenly.

How did he feel about seeing a city he’d never seen before?

“I want to see the lights,” he said, referring to a family ritual of driving up the mountain at night to look out on the city. He was troubled when we told him we couldn’t do that here.

How did he feel about meeting a cousin his age who he’d never met?

“I want to,” he said, with a little more perk.

Aah, I thought, there’s his Libran energy emerging.

“You know,” I told him, “This hotel room will be home to us for a few days. This is where we’ll come to sleep, and play a little, and read books and talk at the end of the day. Even though we’re not home, we can make a little home away from home, right here.”

His three-year-old imagination was captured by that phrase: “Home away from home.” He kept repeating it throughout the trip. “Why are we making a home away from home?” he’d say as we rode the elevator to the lobby or got lost trying to find the train. “Why are we making a home away from home?”

And so he turned my mind back to the bottom of the chart, to the realm of home.

While on the trip, I read an article in Wondertime magazine about a family who traveled around the world for a year when their children were eight and 11 years old. I thought about that family, trekking through 28 countries, making little homes everywhere they went: the mountains of Peru, the deserts of Dubai. In the same issue, there was an article about Sukkot, the Jewish holiday in which celebrants build a temporary shelter to commemorate the structures in which their ancestors lived while wandering in the desert for 40 years.

It’s a natural human impulse to create a home — and to inspire a brief sense of it when far away. But how does that happen? And why?

The roots of the word “home” will not be surprising to anyone who has ever had one. Its stem, “tkei-,” meaning “to settle, to dwell, to be at home,” is related to words like “garden” and “situate” and has birthed several other words meaning, for example, “covering,” “village,” “haunt” and “to frequent.” It was these last two that really caught my attention. Of course we settle and dwell in a home; of course a home covers and shelters us; of course a garden and a village are close by.

But it seems to me that — despite pat statements about a home being love, or family, or where the heart is — what really makes a house feel like a home is that our frequency haunts it.

In physics and in life, “frequency” refers to the number of times something occurs within a given timeframe, for example the frequency with which we occupy a space: once per hour, once per day, once per year. In physics:

High-frequency electromagnetic waves have a short wavelength and high energy; low-frequency waves have a long wavelength and low energy. (Source)

It is not just our history, our families and our possessions that mark a home as ours. It is that we make it a frequent, recurring habit to be there. High-frequency visits increase the energy of a place for us. And when we are on the same “wavelength” as a person, a thing or a space (for example, our home) we feel comfortable there — even if we don’t like everything that happens in the place.

When we return home from work, or school, or the neighbor’s house, or a long trip, we download the energies of the day into the space we call home. Simply by being there, we imprint our wavelength onto the place. Our energies haunt the structure, seed it with our feelings, blossom — with repetition — into a certain sensibility that lives there even when we don’t: warm, or anxious, or loving, or sad, depending on how we haunt it. When we infuse our home with our own energy, its wavelength fits us. We feel we belong.

It is interesting, too, that the bottom of the horoscope chart is associated with short trips — commuting to work and borrowing sugar from the neighbors, for example — whereas the longer wavelengths of our lives, up at the top of the chart, tend to be less frequent, slower-going, with a wider perspective. Perhaps this is a reflection of the fact that we tend to slow down during vacation: We are trying to see a new place, to take it all in, to feel out where our frequency fits into the vibe of the new space. That we don’t get there as often means its energy patterns aren’t so deeply imprinted on us. It takes time to navigate our way through a new city, or up a mountain, or along the beach we’ve never seen.

And perhaps that’s also why that slower frequency is so hard to hold onto when we get home. The familiar is so because we practice it until we can do it in our sleep, with our hands behind our backs. We don’t need to think so deliberately. We can make the repetitive motions of the day quickly and by rote.

And yet — and yet. Even on vacation, we still need that homelike space at the end of the day, that space to return to again and again, larger than we were that morning but still comforted in the fact that familiar ground exists beneath our feet. Even in the midst of adventure, we need to feel somehow moored, to know that habit and familiarity still live within us, even as we allow the unfamiliar to engage us for a spell.

So after the pat answer, I finally found my bearings to say to the Dragon, “We’re making a home away from home because we all need a little familiar place when we’re far away from everything we know — a place we can curl up in like a blanket for the night.”

He seemed more satisfied with that answer.

Photo credits: Airplane, sukkah, light waves