Depth Astrology » individuation

Picture of the Week: I Heart Boys and Girls

Kathy — Tue, 26 May 2009 23:51:19 +0000

Funny, after what seems to be a lifetime of being female-oriented — going to a women’s college, working in lots of women-owned and women-dominated businesses (including at a women’s PAC), being generally very pro-female and pro-feminist — boys seem to be springing up everywhere in my life these days. I blame Jung and the tension of opposites.

I knew my first child was going to be a boy, and I was right (call it intuition if you want), but I was 99% sure my second child — the one still twisting and gestating in my belly — would be a girl.

Nope. Bubbaloo, as he’s been dubbed till he emerges, is full-on boy as well. Two sons!? I never really considered the possibility that I would be the only family member without a Y. Or, on a more positive note, with a very fine double-dose of X.

And then there’s this freelance work I’m doing, writing grant proposals for a boys’ mentoring program. I’ve been engrossed in distressing research about how the school system is stacked against boy energy; how boys receive messages that set up a struggle between traditional masculinity and contemporary ideals; how, despite appearances, boys’ self-esteem is actually quite fragile; and so on.

The knee-jerk part of me wants to say, Oh, waaah. Get over it. Let me tell you about being female. But the therapist, the mother, the wife and — yes — the feminist in me shush the reactionary, not just with concern for the boys and men I know and love but also with increasingly clear glimpses of how very, very important it is for women that men, too, are deeply understood and valued. Not valued for their traditional power/control/management roles but for their natural, wild, authentic maleness.

And, while we’re at it, how very important that women can claim and integrate traditionally masculine features and that men can claim and integrate traditionally feminine features.

One of the traditional elements of maturing in our society — the rite of passage — has largely been lost to both genders. Oh, the trappings are still there among some sub-populations: confirmation, debutante balls, fraternity hazings. But none that I know of (and admittedly I don’t know them all) carries the deep drumbeat of the initiation process that characterizes a traditional rite of passage: the conscious, ritualized separation from the former, more childish self; the dreamlike hang-time in liminal space; the sense of accomplishing feats of physical and mental survival; the deliberate opening to and cultivation of adult spiritual wisdom; the reincorporation, as an adult, into the society where one was once a child.

In astrological terms, the rite of passage is/was a sort of “graduation” from unconscious, undifferentiated Mars/Venus energy into a firmer grasp of gender energies on a more subtle, conscious, individual level — from Mars to Sun (mental will and awareness) and from Venus to Saturn (physical security and awareness). In other words, it is the movement from the communal energy of the lower half of the chart to the individuated energy of the upper half through the fires of the most fundamental questions of identity: What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a woman? With luck, depth and wise guidance, the initiate may even glimpse Pluto and Uranus energy during this process.

When a boy or girl can claim their gender birthright, not as prescribed behaviors like flirting or competing or giggling or dominating, but as unique, self-aware expressions of their individual mix of gender — XX, XY or some lovely soup of the spectrum in-between — then a rite of passage has taken place. We move away from stereotyped gender roles and into the embrace of all possibilities within, able to move in and out of stereotypical maleness, femaleness and gender-neutrality with much more ease, assurance and spiritual wisdom than we did as children.

And we become able, as it seems too few do in contemporary life, to turn around to the generation that follows, to become mentors and guides to the boys and girls behind us, who still struggle to understand what it means to be a boy or a girl or a man or a woman — or anything else, for that matter — in today’s society. The astrological archetypes are not the only container for these energies, for this process, but they are vivid and tangible ones that can be useful guides along the way.

Can you identify a rite of passage in your life? Was it intentional or not? How did you grow through it? What did you sacrifice and what did you gain? Who guided you? What archetypal energies — masculine, feminine or anything else — were important in that journey?

Image: John Paul Bosbolo

The Bearded Lady, the Cycle of Life and Meditations on the End of Summer

Kathy — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 17:09:06 +0000

Last night I dreamt I shaved off my beard — a stylized goatee that came to a perfect point at the bottom, the sides curving around my jaws like little arms.

For the record, I don’t have a beard in waking life.

I awoke in the full mood of fall and went about the tasks of the morning without thinking much about it. But when the boys were gone, NPR was turned off and the dishes had settled in their stacks, the dream came back quietly.

In essence, I think, it was about shedding what had grown: saying goodbye to the old, getting ready for the new. It was an appropriate, if funny, dream for the change of season.

Even though it’s not officially fall yet, the summer cycle is definitely closing: Ask anyone who has school-age children, or arthritis. Last week on our midwest visit, there was talk of sweaters, hayrides and apple presses. Even here in southern California, the air is a little crisper and the traffic much thicker than last week. And Starbucks has mercifully brought back its pumpkin spice latté.

This is the time of year when, in my quieter moments, I tend to remember the ancient myth of Persephone, who picked a flower and was whisked away into the underworld by Hades (Pluto) himself. Persephone’s mother, the earth goddess Demeter, mourned the loss of her child and withheld the harvest from the people until Zeus (Jupiter) brokered a deal: Persephone would stay in the underworld with Hades for one-third of each year and reunite with her mother during the remaining eight months. The separation, disappearance, change in cycles was necessary for the growth of both mother and daughter.

There are more complexities to the story, but its core truth lies in these simple details; and we see that truth reflected, also, in the horoscope chart. Bruno and Louise Huber identified a way to interpret the chart as a “life clock” — starting with birth at the ascendant and spending six years in each house. At a certain point in each house, people tend to turn inward. They feel their active energy thwarted or stilled. They are forced to take stock and turn the season of their life toward the next more active, more outwardly-effective cycle.

This internal period can often be felt as a crisis point — the point where, like Demeter, no matter how hard you try, you simply cannot get what you want. Waiting is necessary, and that can be frustrating. It can even feel like death — like being dragged into the underworld against your will, like being taken away from everything light and abundant and familiar.

But the Demeter story, and the Hubers’ work, and astrology in general remind us, each in their own ways, that life happens in cycles, and thus the underworld period is essential. Shortcuts and bypasses are decidedly not advised.

See: The flower germinates; it blossoms; it dies. The school year begins; it proceeds; it ends. Babies are born; the family coheres; the children grow up and move away. Before the third phase of each cycle, we must catch our breaths, because in truth that third phase is just the preparation for the next cycle: As it dies, the flower must seed the next crop. As the school year ends, the student must make ready for the next. As they grow up and move away, our children prepare to give birth themselves.

I know a lot of people who say they feel nostalgic every year as fall begins. Maybe some of the nostalgia is a longing for eternal summer, but there’s something deeper going on there, too, I think: a wistfulness for the cycle that was, perhaps; an uncomfortable acknowledgment that time always urges us forward; a wish for the familiar footprints we’ve already put down. We know that place behind us. Why can’t we just stay there, or jump forward to the next activity? Why must we power down a bit now?

And yet we know the fall, too. Its familiarity, it smells and its slower tempo are ancient and comforting. Its darker days cloister us indoors, where we are forced to face the internal. We survive the cold, and the dark, and the frightening because we must — and because our fiber is thicker and heartier than we give ourselves credit for in the bright sweat of summer.

Yet it’s often as surprising to remember our own strength, and our own tenacity, and our own depth, as it is to dream of a woman shaving off her pointed goatee to prepare for what’s next.

Go to Meditations for the End of Summer

Photo credits: Bearded lady, life cycles, autumn

…and, Curtain.

Kathy — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 03:53:00 +0000

I started my career in the California nonprofit sector on Monday, January 26, 1998.

I ended it yesterday — Friday, February 15, 2008.

Whew.

These days I’m reading about the Age Point in Huber astrology. It starts at birth at the Ascendant and moves through each house over a period of six years. So, for example, the day you turn six, your Age Point enters the second house; the day you turn 12, your Age Point enters the third house; and so on.

Each house is divided into three sections: cardinal, fixed and mutable. You enter the fixed zone two years, three months and 15 days after the multiple-of-six birthday.

I mention this now because on Thursday, February 21, I’ll reach that “balance point” in the seventh house, having also just moved into Pisces from Aquarius on November 29, 2007.

For non-astrologers, or even non-Huber astrologers, this probably sounds pretty technical. But what it means is that I’ve spent the last couple years trying to extract myself from a way of life that was very cerebral, idealistic, systems-oriented — and, yes, sometimes psychosomatically maddening — and into one more concerned with empathic, intuitive engagement in relationship.

I don’t mean to disparage my work in the nonprofit sector. I did lots of good stuff over the last ten years: raised funds for good causes, wrote helpful articles, managed people for better or for worse (I hope for better) and supported positive change in the world.

But in a way, I also wasn’t greatly suited to it. Though I am a good writer, a good manager, a good employee, I also felt the confines of my work strongly. I am not an institutional enthusiast, and I prefer interchange and mutuality over hierarchy and dependence. The deeper I worked my way into the nonprofit sector, the more of the latter I felt.

Charitable giving is an honorable and generous act — yet it bothers me deeply that our most-needed institutions spend inordinate amounts of time and resources simply struggling to survive, to get the money and please the donors they need to keep the lights on. And even in the context of self-sufficiency, nonprofit organizations have to work so much within the bounds of what is socially, legally and politically acceptable that that, too, eventually began to grate on me.

As I moved out of sixth-house Aquarius and into seventh-house Pisces, the hardness of thought and airy analysis that I had to put into my everyday work began to wear me down, to wear me thin. I operate so much better through feeling and intuition than through thinking and research. So much so that, just a month before I left my career, my neck — the gateway between heart and mind, between feeling and thinking, gave out as if it had finally had enough of simply trying to shoulder the density of my thoughts. I was laid up for a week, popping Vicodin and musing on the metaphor.

Today was my first day of my new life. I woke up sick: sore throat, cough, general aches and malaise. I know what this is; it happens every time. It’s gunk I’ve been carrying around throughout a cycle I wasn’t suited to — gunk I needed to make it through, which my body can now expel in anticipation of a new cycle that’s more aligned to my truth.

I can’t wait to see what this cycle brings.

(Photo credits: curtain call, Pisces)

Shameless Commerce

Kathy — Fri, 11 May 2007 06:19:00 +0000

In mythology, Mercury (aka Hermes) is the God of A Lot of Things: thieves, travelers, wrestling, gymnastics, trade, profit, merchants — and commerce. His stories are legion and his legacy is, well, legend.

He is also known as “guide of souls” because of his role escorting the newly-dead to the underworld. In this capacity, he is also a patron of depth (especially Jungian) psychology, which understands the journey to the underworld as a metaphor for going deep within the self as part of individuation.

The complexities of Mercury perplex the literal mind. What has wrestling to do with thievery? The underworld with commerce and profit? Remember that the ancients were required to pay the ferryman to get to the underworld, and in many cultures (even today), people are sent to their rest with worldly goods to help them through the period post-mortem.

But even this is certainly metaphoric to the underworld experience of the living. What does one give up with the decision to delve deep within the self? What is the price of self-knowledge and individuation? The ancient goddess Inanna hung on a meat hook in the underworld for three days before she ascended back to her heavenly throne (not unlike another, more “modern” Son of God we know). Is that a high enough price? How are we asked to hang in preparation for becoming more ourselves?

Mercury is amoral — that is, although he is known as a “personal planet” in astrology, in mythology his character is one that remains fairly apart from individual desire. His actions defer to the larger universal dynamic rather than the fleeting wants of the individual. So allowing Mercury to guide you requires faith that the universe has your best, highest outcome in store — a trust that you might not, in fact, be always best-suited to choose your exact course. Mercury’s price might feel steep, but it almost always has a reason.

Has Mercury ever enticed you into underworld experiences — regretful purchases, slips of the tongue, misguided information or worse — that nevertheless helped you know yourself better? What is Mercury connected to in your chart? Where is he placed — in what sign, in what house? How might he pull you into experiences that feel like rabbit holes but ultimately lead to your higher self?

(And speaking of Mercury: Click on the Cafe Press link to the right to engage in a little shameless commerce — I’ve just introduced my first line of astrology apparel, so you can wear the stars on your sleeve! And more is on the way…)