This is a fantastic astrological image! A detail of the London Eye, the biggest Ferris wheel in Europe and now the UK’s most-visited tourist attraction (source), the photo suggests the tension of the Jupiter archetype — the desire to encompass everything — at the risk of losing sight of what’s important. In other words, losing the [...]]]>

This is a fantastic astrological image! A detail of the London Eye, the biggest Ferris wheel in Europe and now the UK’s most-visited tourist attraction (source), the photo suggests the tension of the Jupiter archetype — the desire to encompass everything — at the risk of losing sight of what’s important. In other words, losing the trees for the forest.

The planet Jupiter actually has a feature astronomers call “the eye” or the Great Red Spot:

This real-life “eye” on the solar system’s largest planet reminds us that the archetype Jupiter is concerned with seeing the big picture, with new experience and new ideas, with pulling back from the daily grind to get perspective — the kind of perspective one gets from atop Europe’s largest Ferris wheel:

This is a fantastic place to go — literally or figuratively — when you feel yourself getting bogged down in the details of daily life, in the rules and expectations that unconsciously guide so many of your choices. Studying a new field, taking a trip far away, looking on life through new lenses, making a daring kind of choice that you wouldn’t normally make: All these things are Jupiter activities that expand your horizons, develop your brain and bless you with new ways of thinking.

Jupiter’s style reminds me of this fabulous quotation from Helen Keller — who had the inner vision of a Jupiterian if not the literal eyesight:

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.

Jupiter is most at home in the zodiac sign Sagittarius, which lies opposite the chart from my last Photo of the Week, which depicted the Gemini archetype. Sagittarius is the only mutable fire sign; imagine a temple full of flickering candles, each one representing a hope or a belief or a different way of looking at the world. Sagittarius is an equal-opportunity believer, seeking truth wherever it may lie; and it sees the quest for truth as life’s daring adventure.The problem may come when Jupiter/Sagittarius cannot help us focus, when each one of those little flickering candles holds such sway over us that we become indecisive, or too agreeable, or mushy around the edges of our thoughts.

Yet Sagittarius also trusts in the process, where more conservative or suspicious signs may balk. Certainly climbing into a little glass capsule with 23 other people to be carried 443 feet into the London air is the quintessential Jupiterian/Sagittarian act. It is big, it is daring, it breaks out of the norm, it ventures into the unknown, it provides the sweeping view of life of which people strong in these archetypes often dream.

And yet the Photo of the Week — the first photo above — tells the other side of this archetype, the side that sometimes gets lost in more popular descriptions. That is the Archer archetype, the seeker brought to the stillpoint of one breath, where focus on a single point 100 feet in the distance allows all else in the world to melt away for an instant, to seize the shortest line between two points and deliver everything you have through that narrow tunnel of vision.

So, too, must the designers and builders and riders of a giant, inspiring, visionary structure like the London Eye have interest in each minute detail as if it held the integrity of every life it supports in each little hinge and latch and joint.

Because, in fact, it does.

Photo credits:Detail of London Eye; Jupiter; view from atop the London Eye

This week, after much ado in my mind, I launched the Zodiac Signs section of my website, with the addition of four complete sign pages. The other eight signs will roll out over the next few weeks.

These pages go beyond the usual textbook descriptions of each zodiac [...]]]> If it’s Aries, Taurus, Libra or Scorpio, you’re in luck!

This week, after much ado in my mind, I launched the Zodiac Signs section of my website, with the addition of four complete sign pages. The other eight signs will roll out over the next few weeks.

These pages go beyond the usual textbook descriptions of each zodiac sign, digging deeper into each archetype to get at the psychological dynamics underlying each common trait and behavior. So even if you think you’re all read out on your Sun sign, check it out — you might get new insight after all.

The pages also include some shopping links so you can explore birthday or holiday gifts sign by sign. Currently there are shopping links for all four signs listed above, plus Gemini and Sagittarius. Enjoy!

This morning, same thing. I’ve been coughing violently all day, trying to hold [...]]]> The morning after I wrote this post, I woke up at 4:27 — three minutes before Sadhana was to start — with a terrible cough that’s clung to me for two days now. I fell back into my pillows and slept until 7:00 a.m.

This morning, same thing. I’ve been coughing violently all day, trying to hold it together through this Solstice Eve, hoping I have the strength to return for the final two days of Sadhana tomorrow.

Illness and exhaustion have happened to several of us doing this Sadhana. Vera, the studio owner and yoga teacher, said it happens often that participants have similar personal experiences during the seven or forty days of Sadhana, as if a like energy draws the group together, or pervades it, generating the particular experiences they need as a collective.

A Sadhana done as Sagittarius is waning and Capricorn begins to take hold — as the Winter Sun stands still in its path — would naturally, then, bring people who seek spiritual truth in preparation for personal growth. The stillness of Solstice reflects the deepest part of this process, the final letting-go of old attachments, old habits, old assumptions. It is the act of succumbing to the darkest hour just before the long, slow ascent into light. The Sun, standing still for three days, asks us to stand in place, to be quietly where we are, to feel Will, Spirit and Energy shift around us, shift inside of us.

But before the Spirit can move through, the body needs clearing. Illness, though unpleasant, is our way of getting rid of what we don’t need. Not unlike feng shui, illness clears sick or unbalanced energy from the space of the body. It washes our internal pathways clean of debris so energies of a higher order may travel well and smoothly through us.

We might well ask ourselves what the body is trying to clear: If it’s nausea, have you allowed yourself to swallow something that you can’t digest — a belief, a habit, a way of being? If it’s coughing, have you allowed your authentic voice to be swallowed? If it’s an achy back, in what way might you need to strengthen your spine — literally or figuratively? What is the body trying to expel, and how, and what do those things tell you?

As I write, I am hearing my two-year-old son cry in his father’s arms as he tries to let go of the day, to fall into sleep. He, too, is trying to reach a new truth, a new understanding of who he is without the constant doting of his mom, without nursing, without the comforting helplessness of infancy to curl up in. He is afraid — as the ancients were afraid, at Winter Solstice, that the Sun would disappear completely — that nothing as good as babyhood will come to fill his cup. He tries to cling to the old times, to the summer Sun, all the while knowing that he must let go.

He’s had this cough, too. Maybe as I creep out of the house at 4:20 each morning, he, too, is doing his own Sadhana in the instinctive way of the toddler.