The Season of Deep Feeling
To choose non-violence and go through pain consciously requires the strength to understand that you have the choice to empower yourself or harm yourself at any given moment.
Every year, two eclipses inaugurate the season of deep feeling.
One conceals the Sun, guiding us to feel what the world around us needs from us right now. The second, a lunar eclipse highlights psychological fears and wounds that shine light on our inner, personal struggles.
Polarities in Astrology
Astrology uses polarities between the dwarf planet Pluto and the Pluto polarity point to reveal the main narrative of our chart.
Pluto highlights the themes from where our souls come from, and the polarity point represents where our souls long to evolve towards.
The eclipses in Fall 2023 are on the Taurus-Scorpio axis. A pivotal marking for the Pluto in Scorpio gen (1983-1995).
The circumstances in which we are called to acknowledge in our psychological landscape are often laid down by cycles of cataclysmic worldly events. They throw our inner landscape into despair and hopelessness, sending a pulse of energy inside like SONAR, revealing our depths.
We are called to take notice of our feelings and needs. Very often and during Scorpio season the we are called to cultivate the opposite feelings worldly events evoke. In times of violence we long for peace.
This is the fundamental principle of polarity. The main principle of opposing forces is that they are complementary to each other. It is through that complimentary nature that we understand their qualities. You know hot in comparison to cold. You experience relief after being in chastity.
Balance is achieved by understanding polarities and embracing their complementary nature. Sounds simple. With the right tools and guidance, it is possible.
In ancient Tantric Ha-tha Yoga and in Evolutionary Astrology that uses polarity points to understand the main aspects of the chart, we concern ourselves with recognising how to balance opposing qualities within ourselves and our relationships: cultivating strength, clarity, from the contrasting recognition of the Other.
Scorpio
Scorpio's energetic archetype is power. Scorpionic power can be felt when engaging in a deep visceral union with someone.
It is paradoxical that despite our condemnation of power's destructive nature, we all seem to strive for it. Wealth and fame have become the metrics by which we measure our earthly power, instead of the perseverance to love and care for each other.
In our attempts to acquire power, we mistake it for force. We are led to believe that we can obtain power through methods. Feelings of control and greed arise when we force ourselves to feel a certain way.
Our decision making is primarily influenced by habitual pathways learned during infancy. The ways humans around us related to the world, what they thought was necessary to become, acquire, and to chase, become part of us.
What this means is when we slow our bodies down, there is a sudden recognition of the rapid mental moves going on within us, that previously we thought of simply as life.
Experiences of relief, joy, rapture, and awe, which the Indians called Samadhi, expand our worldview. We become aware that there is a greater power that expands beyond our previous mental landscapes. When suffering is temporarily alleviated, we feel as if we are the recipients of some cosmic marvel. When in truth, we have always been in the garden, but but not taken a break enough, from the constant worrying about self, to stop and smell the flowers.
From that place, emerges a different kind of power. Not the imbalanced impulse to control, force, but a groundedness, in exactly where you are, exactly the options available to you, and exactly which option you know you want to seek, power.
Inner awareness becomes our key to understanding our subjective reality, and then we can start making choices.
The body’s function of emotional responses are to detect changes in our environment and react accordingly. The body's own reactions provide clear signals of changes in conditions, just like a houseplant would react when it was placed somewhere with more or less light.
You may choose to use physical or psychological violence when angry. You might try to distract yourself if you feel pain. To choose non-violence and go through pain consciously requires the strength to understand that you have the choice to empower yourself or harm yourself at any given moment.
At its most potent, Scorpio is a sign of connecting with your own inner power by bringing to the surface situations that may highlight the opposite, i.e., a feeling of powerlessness or hopelessness.
Our inner energy can be knotted in itself, wrapped by factors outside our control, like greed, scarcity, habitual patterns; or it can be viscerally aligned with clear, inner, reflective desire. These are the entrapped and intentional sides of Scorpio.
Taurus
Taurus embodies self-care and self-reliability and is the opposite of Scorpionic Power. Taking care of our needs, taking care of ourselves, and resting helps us connect with our bodies' power and intelligence.
The body has its own natural capacity for self-correction and wisdom—if only it is slowed down.
We find the balance between the Scorpio and Taurus axis, Power and Self Care, when we can tend to ourselves softly, lovingly, honouring and respecting our inner guiding intelligence.
Through slowing down and resting, Taurus invites us to connect with our emotions and notice our physical signals. A deep embodied pleasure is at the heart of the archetype. Instead of relying on what we believe should be good, we cultivate the discernment to know what feels good.
We learn to regulate our emotions through relationships. The body, especially during infancy, is our tool for measuring the world around us. Our senses help us ‘make sense’ of ourselves and the world.
Children regulate their emotions by using their parents' nervous systems. Mirroring a child's emotion and acknowledging their sadness lovingly is the most effective way to help them release sadness. The same principle applies to anger. When a child is angry, a parent can diffuse the anger humourously.
It is when we are loved and honored for who we are that we learn to love and honor ourselves.
As we look at the Scorpio - Taurus axis, we ask how our relationships serve to reveal what empowers or hinders our ability to connect with our inner intelligence, as well as how we cultivate our inner power in a loving or destructive manner.
What does it feel like to be around someone? Is your inner power being stoked or dimmed? What needs do these feelings bring forward?
The evolution of our species depends on our ability to connect. In contact with one another, we recognize our limitations, thereby acknowledging the guiding feelings of self-reliance.
Sexuality is a major theme of the Taurus-Scorpio polarity. For Scorpio, sex is about strong sensations, deep feelings, and osmosis, it's about devouring and becoming one with their lover. It is often this need to feel deeply that leads to exaggerated expressions of force and power dynamics within sex and relationships.
We exert force in order to counteract numbness.
Contrary to what we may believe, the trick to feeling deeply is the opposite of force. As we become more sensitive and gentle, our capacity, power to feel deeply increases. That's where Taurus' polarity point of deep bodily pleasure comes in to complement Scorpio's need to feel intensely.
Relaxation increases our sensitivity. We feel safe to be calm and sensitive when we cultivate our inner voice and settle in our authentic self.
At its worst, Taurus energy leads us to inertia, which does not increase potency. At its best, Taurus energy relaxes us into a receptivity—it naturally invites the softness of attitude that leads us to greater bravery and engagement with the world: strength.
What does it mean to have a sense of balance?
Self-care makes us care for others.
By recognizing our beauty, we can empower each other. Our soul's evolutionary growth is based on taking care of each other's nervous systems, defusing conflict, and seeing how certain beliefs prevent us from living what we long for.
In order to understand balance, I’d like to look into the symbolism of two contrasting forces, of the horizontal and vertical depicted in ancient cultural artefacts.
Particularly dark brown-black paint and single swastikas on an ancient Cypriot bowl from 900-750BC made of pale buff-pink clay.
Swastikas are composed of a vertical and horizontal line like the letter "x". When slightly rotated they resemble a cross, an ancient symbol of the four elements, they point to the four directions on a compass. In numerology, the number four represents nurturing and motherhood.
Swastikas with clockwise arms were generally considered solar emblems. A counterclockwise sauvastika, such as the one depicted on the vase, represents the moon. A ladder in the middle connects the polarities of the Moon, our inner reality, and the Sun, our projected reality.
I like to delve into the symbolism of the ladder deliberately placed in the middle of the two swastikas.
Ladders convey a sense of ascent. According to pop culture, the ladder is "the stairway to heaven". In the philosophical text The Symposium, written in 385BC, Diotima and Plato analyse the “Ladder of Love”, the steps of earthly love cultivated in relationships that help us relate deeply to each other and by effect connect to our inner divinity.
Rather than a way of ascension to some fairy-tale fictional land outside ourselves, I like to look at the symbolism differently. I prefer to see it as earthly steps leading back to where we feel safe, our home. Our Heart.
On the other side, a stylized tree and snake-like markings flow upward, creating a picture of nature, our earthly home.
There is a scalloped rectangle with a saltire on the edge that could be used for hanging. Perhaps it depicts a mirror. A metaphor for how inner and outer realities reflect one another.
It’s possible to read the symbology of these artefacts as deeply representing the polarities of complementarities that as we rest on one opposite, the other finds it way.
The snake and ladder markings on the Cypriot bowl remind me of the ancient Indian board game, Gyanbazi (Game of Knowledge), popular among Rajasthani courts and especially women during the 18th and 19th century.
In the game, whether the player ascends via ladder or descends via snake is a matter of chance. Life can feel like that too.
An endless sequence of reacting to snakes and ladders events arriving one after another. Where is the choice and the awareness?
When we tend to our feelings, we cultivate our own authority. When we acknowledge our limitations, we more accurate discern the options actually available to us.
The more we face our limitations, the more we evolve towards safety, peace, and ascend the steps to our Earthly Home, our body. Here, we cultivate a sense of connection to all life.
Ha-tha Yoga, the psycho-spiritual tool of balance
To understand the interconnected qualities of our inner and outer worlds as we enter eclipse season, use the psycho-spiritual tools of Ancient Ha-tha Yoga.
You can expand your capacity to receive by using your breath in conjunction with movement. Take a deep breath and let it caress and connect you to your body from the inside out.
Face the feelings of the past with the strength of your exhale as you dive into the Scorpionic void. Breathe out and let go of the wounds your genetic profiling has left you with. Acknowledge the impermanence of feelings while listening to the ghostly voices of your ancestors inside your body.
Feel free to contact me if you are interested in learning more about this technology.
May we clear away the beliefs that perpetuate our suffering by moving and breathing gently and with reverence for our bodies, each other, and this earth.