 "The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others." -Carl Jung
On this healing path, I've worked a lot on "not taking on other people's stuff." This is a phrase we speak often in bay area healing circles. While I've benefitted immeasurably from the meditations where I've given people back their stuff, envisioned myself surrounded by a protective orb of energy and all that powerful woo, I'm feeling more and more like it's a lie that reveals the truth rather than the truth itself. This Friday, October 18th the full moon brings us a lunar eclipse in Aries/Libra. So much of the Aries/Libra story is about self and other. Over the next year or so, our job is to learn as much as we can about how we relate and how we act as individuals in those relations. Now is a moment where we're probably getting a lot of information about that. I keep thinking about an old neighbor who was struggling with addiction. He was abusive, acting out in all sorts of ways and destroyed my garden more than once. Nothing I did got him to act more sane until I stopped trying to get him to do anything, hung up some mirrors on the front door and in the garden and started wishing him well. Even then, not much changed with him, but I did. Years later, in retrospect, as the child of an alcoholic, I can't deny that me learning how to live with addiction is completely my stuff. It's so easy to get caught up in feeling wronged, feeling that if other people would just do what we think is best then we could finally relax and life would get better, we get distracted from what we actually can change: ourselves. The crucial thing to remember in this eclipse heightened time is that whatever is coming up is a mirror. All the things, especially when we're obsessing about the outer world, are just reflections of our inner life. Often they are mirrors of your beauty. Sometimes though facebook, our friends, our family, our inbox, etc. are reflections of our unresolved stuff. The good news is we're being given the (sometimes) agonizing gift of greater resolution and healing, if we take the time to go inward. Two weeks from now on November 3rd, that inner work will help us rise to meet a solar eclipse in Scorpio. Along with mercury retrograde also in Scorpio (10/21-11/9), now is a time to look at that part of ourselves that keeps getting attracted to the same lessons, that keeps looking in the same mirrors (over and over and over again). Invite your psyche to tea and ask the bigger questions of what you are to learn from this shifting time. Let go of blame and heal what only you can heal. Halloween and Day of the Dead remind us that Scorpio's time is a one to sit with the reality of death. Somehow this unifying thread amongst us all, this promise of a returning to source, even just as compost, helped me to see that the more I embraced the mirrors in my life, the more clearly I could see myself. Yes, we are separate, embodied beings AND in this mystery of oneness, whatever Scorpionic sh*t you're called on to deal with now is yours to compost, even if it appears to be somebody else's. Perhaps it's as simple as there is no other? Perhaps it's all just a lie that reveals the truth? Either way, enjoy the reflections. Photo credit: Nathan Taylor
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