Forecast for Saturday, August 8th
Aries Disseminating Moon; Part 2
★Oracular Overview—great care should be given to the words, thoughts, and even images you choose to be involved toward the self-authoring of your life story…
The mind is a powerful thing… what the mind believes is true, or what it believes to be debilitating, is quite powerful and this is largely up to you, and essentially only you, to decide—so, naturally, it is this much more important to choose your systems of belief and efforts in trust tests wisely.
Aries energies typically operate by instinct, or primal reaction, which is typically to be trusted, especially so within those extreme parameters of circumstance when it’s necessary, such as these days, this year, here in this Now, as everything is changing and No Longer is so clearly no longer…
And these days, even the lone warrior isn’t alone within these emotionally-based mentality transitions into one’s heart-spaces.
❝Is it always a bad thing to be lost? To wander in the unknown without a map? I’d like to propose a good version of being lost. It requires you to be willing to give up your certainties, to relinquish your grip on the comforting dogmas that have structured your world—but to do so gladly, with a spirit of cheerful expectancy and curiosity. It «doesn’t» require you to be a macho hero who feels no fear or confusion. Rather, you have faith that life will provide blessings that weren’t possible until you got lost.❞
——Rob Brezny
Still invoking the illuminations of the inner warrior, or hero—today’s energies inspire a deeper depth within these primal reactions, instincts, and systems of trust, to be tested, challenged, and ultimately, to be reevaluated… those beliefs and perspectives, mindsets, and outlooks about this, that, and the other thing which no longer serve you, which no longer motivate your inner warrior, which no longer challenge you to be the best version of yourself—it’s time to conquer these, rewrite your story, and let go of No Longer.
It’s time to begin challenging your own mental barriers, as it is within your own mental parameters that your reality, as it is, exists… and if you’re not exactly impressed with your reality as it is—your thoughts are clearly not serving you, despite whatever preferences of mentality you might have. However, if you are already venturing into new and unfamiliar territory within your reality and its new potentials, moving beyond your preferences or inner patterning, but are ready for more—your thoughts, again, have everything to do with your opportunities.
As I mentioned yesterday—lucid envisioning… to further illustrate this concept through context, allow me to share with you a couple of articles I have recently stumbled upon…
Delving deeper into this notion, a recent article I read in The NewYorker about writer’s block explored that “there are some experiences that almost all blocked writers have in common—almost all of them experience flagging motivation; they feel less ambitious and find less joy in writing, they’re also less creative… psychologists Barrios and Singer found that blocked individuals showed ‘low levels of positive and constructive mental imagery’: they were less able to form pictures in their minds, and the pictures they did form were less vivid—they were less likely to daydream in constructive fashion—or to dream, period…”¹
What I’m clumsily calling ‘lucid daydreaming’…
Venturing even further, psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman, “became convinced that allowing for error—and realizing how nonlinear a process creativity can be—was an essential step for overcoming blocks in writing… “I think one must trust the writing process. Understand that creativity requires nonlinearity and unique associative combinations,” he says, “creative people do a lot of trial and error and rarely know where they are going exactly until they get there.”¹
❝We keep our images and fantasies at arm’s length because they are so full of love.❞
——James Hillman
According to PsychologyToday, there are nine strategies you can use to ease your efforts in mental mastery—attempting cognitive distancing; cognitive defusion; mindfulness; focusing upon direct experience; labeling; staying present; broadening your view; actual movement; and cognitive discernment.
Cognitive distancing is when you “try to see your anxious thoughts as guesses, not as facts… your mind is trying to protect you by predicting what could happen—but just because something could happen doesn’t mean it will; look at objective evidence: how likely is it that the negative outcome will actually happen?; is there anything good that might happen instead?; which do you think is most likely to happen, based on past experience and other information you have about the situation?”²
Cognitive decision is when you become ‘fused’ to your thoughts… “think of your thoughts as moving data passing through your mind, rather than the objective truth about a situation—our brains are hypersensitive to threat and danger because this kept our ancestors alive in the wild—some of your thoughts may just be automatic conditioned reactions generated by a brain that is oriented to survival… choose whether or not to believe these thoughts, rather than just accepting them.”²
Mindfulness is merely a fancy way of describing the simple observation of your thoughts, allowing them to come and go rather than dominate your imagination, resulting in anxiety or reaction.
Labeling is in regard to actually labeling your thoughts by the essential motivation of what they are—for example, worries are ‘worrying’ and judging others as ‘judgments’… you’ll begin to notice how many of each category, especially if you keep a log, and you’ll visually see where much of your time and energy goes…
Especially as No Longer continues to fade into the background and echo its residual value, staying present here in the Now has possibly never been so imperative.
Broadening your parameters is in tandem with open-heartedness and open-mindedness… moving motivates… and “just because a thought is true doesn’t mean that it is helpful to focus on—at least not all the time—focus your attention on what is helpful and let the rest go!”²
And to this—I suggest feeling with your heart over thinking with a distracted monkey mind… talk about vicious cycling.
A New York Times writer, Bruce Feiler, begins his article ‘Feeling Stuck? Five Tips for Managing Life Transitions’ explaining that “the Italians have a wonderful expression for how our lives get upended when we least expect it: lupus in fabula… it means “the wolf in the fairy tale”… just when life is going swimmingly, along comes a demon, a dragon, a diagnosis, a downsizing—just when our fairy tale seems poised to come true, a big, scary thing threatens to destroy everything around it…”³
We must forever be our own hero/warrior against the ‘wolf in the fairy tale.’
Here in our Now it may possibly never have ever been so imperative… “today, for the first time in over a century, the entire planet is confronting the same wolf at the same time—in the United States alone, more than 130,000 families have lost loved ones; tens of millions of us have lost jobs, or may be rethinking our careers or where we want to live… we are reconsidering how we care for our families, what gives us meaning; the way we cope with such changes is called a “life transition,” and learning to master these challenging periods just may be the most essential life skill each of us needs right now…”³
❝How many things there are in this world that I do not want!❞
——Socrates
What Feiler learned through years of research and outreach and interviewing communities of people undergoing transitions can be explained through what he now refers to as ‘lifequakes’, which he describes “strike people in the core of their being—they create meaning vacuums, in which we feel frightened, overwhelmed and stuck… a transition is how we get unstuck—a lifequake may be voluntary (we leave a bad marriage, start a new enterprise) or involuntary (we get laid off, become ill), but the transition must be voluntary… we must choose to take the steps and go through the process of turning our fear and anxiety into renewal and growth.”³
Here are the recommended tools Feiler found to be effective… start with your transition superpower; identify your emotions; shed something; try something creative; rewrite your life story.
Feiler found that transitions have stages, of which he refers to as ‘the long goodbye’, ‘the messy middle’, and ‘the new beginning’… I couldn’t help but reflect these upon the celestial context toward my own titles of No Longer, Now, and Not Yet… Feiler says the superpower is found within the stage one is best at, though one must endure all of the stages to fully complete a transition, and once one’s emotions are identified in their essence—ritualistic gestures are typically applied to counter these or make sense of them.
Within ‘the messy middle’, or, how I refer to as the Now between No Longer and Not Yet—we shed things such as “mindsets, routines, delusions, dreams… it is a way to clear out some unwanted parts of our lives to make way for the new parts to come.”³
Creativity is the natural response to destruction and chaos.
Whatever the circumstances are for any individual—it is the meaning to be made through the chaos, and the strength of character willed through the stages of transition… “we are called on to revise and retell our life stories, adding a new chapter in which we find meaning in our lifequake—and that may be the greatest lesson of all: we control the stories we tell about our transitions…” and Feiler concludes the article so sweetly, by adding that “we can’t keep the wolves from interrupting our fairy tales, and that’s OK—because if you banish the wolf, you banish the hero—and if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that we all need to be the hero of our own story.”³
Speaking of creativity and self-authorship…
❝We can’t change anything until we get some fresh ideas, until we begin to see things differently.❞
——James Hillman
Mercury moved into Leo on Thursday and today Venus is moving into Cancer, after an extended tour through the connectivities of Gemini since April 2nd, (while Mercury had been in Cancer since May 28th) suggesting (and celebrating) something of an overall shift in tone throughout the collective and within our personal day-to-day routines, such as personalized creativity and self-inspired authorship…
While we have been thoroughly exploring our egoic desires and actual needs, and learning how and when to share these effectively—we will now seek to familiarize ourselves within new paradigms of effectiveness, and make necessary adjustments that allow for comfort and security.
Warrior or hero or self-empowered heart-space—call it whatever you prefer—we are upon the time to center ourselves within its archetypal wonders and conjure our strengths from within.
❝He who conquers himself is the mightiest warrior.❞
——Confucius
★It’s that time of year again—when we tidy up end-of-the-year goals and begin preparing for the next year’s goals… that’s where I come in—to help you strategize 2021—message me directly to book your reading
★If you’d like my undivided attention for an hour each month via phone or zoom call with personalized astro advice and horoscopic forecasts relevant to you—please drop me a line
¹Konnikova, M. “How to Beat Writer’s Block.” The NewYorker; ©2016.
²Psychology Today. “9 Ways to Calm Your Anxious Mind” via psychologytoday.com; ©2015.
³Feiler, B. “Feeling Stuck? Five Tips for Managing Life Transitions.” The New York Times; ©2020.
Image credit— @cult.class on Instagram