hero Tag

March 19, 2021 In Astrology, Relationships, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

Endurance—Sun in Aries—March 20th

If your nerve deny you, go above your nerve—Emily Dickinson.

The days stretch long in the north. In the south, autumn’s honeyed light spills over sun-bleached grasses. On March 20^th, the Sun slips into Aries, marking the spring or autumn Equinox. The start of the astrological new year.

Aries is associated with vibrant reds; with the purifying heat of fire; with raw vitality and with that heart-stopping, breath-holding moment when we take that terrifying leap forward. When we go above our nerve.

Aries is where we encounter our own autonomy, our ability to return to life, to find ourselves anew.

It is in Aries that we must dare to find the deeper meaning of courage and endurance as we wear our bravest smile, take the hand of our loved one whose light is dimming. As our own Aries planets are forged in the heat of the Sun, we may feel hope that comes in a heated rush; a surge of ardor that emboldens us to speak out, make a move, before it’s too late. As the Sun climbs across the equator, we may feel a sense of relief and renewal as a relationship unspools, leaving us heartsore and lighter.

Aries is a Mars-ruled sign. The raw energy of Mars is ignited by a goal; something to conquer or defend—the Romans pragmatically dedicated the month of March to war-god as they set off on their campaigns, certain of fresh supplies. We may notice Mars energy all around us this month. Survival, and procreation are embodied in the natural world as the urgent thrust of spring spills over the land in a cascade of colour and the sweetest song.

As Venus (relationships, what we hold dear to our hearts) moves into Aries on March 21^st and makes her annual appointment with the Sun (March 24^th), the words of author Isabel Allende may resonate as we burn for something new “we don’t even know how strong we are until we are forced to bring that hidden strength forward…” Venus and the Sun conjoin Chiron on March 28–30^th—an indication that for most of us, the road ahead may not be easy.

When the Sun enters Aries, a flash of light shines through an aperture—igniting the hero/warrior archetype, and its shadow, the destroyer. In myth and in fairy tale, the hero/warrior archetype is typically masculine. Heroes slay nine-headed dragons, rescue hapless damsels, defeat degenerate villains. Yet the destroyer lives amongst us, tattooed in the distortion of the Hero/Warrior depicted in the media, enacted in our homes, behind closed doors, or in the shadowy realm of cyberspace.

Aries’s shadow is self-centred and brutal as depicted by the cruel anonymity of trolling, the persistent violence of stalking and digital voyeurism, the misogynistic harassment and assault that is endemic in our culture. This patriarchal power-over behaviour—directed at “foreigners”, blacks, gays, women, and those people who live with disabilities, has seeped through society for eons. Barely a week after International Women’s Day, the killing of Sarah Everard sent shock waves of grim recognition through everyone who has clutched a can of mace or hurried coiled, contracted, through a subway or a park. As a primal fear and rage bled across the internet, the vigil on Clapman Common was met by acts of aggression by the Metropolitan police, reminiscent of the brutality inflicted on the Suffragettes, the police killings that ignited the Black Lives Matter movement.

The dark face of the Ram is testosterone-fueled anger, self-absorption, competitiveness, single-mindedness. Our self-directed quest to “find our voice” may deafen the voices of others; our need to be “free” may mean breaking the heart of someone who loves us.

As Mars moves through Gemini (March 4^th– April 24^th) our negative thoughts and beliefs may be obstacles to conquer. As Nasa’s Perseverance grinds and clanks across the arid surface of the red planet in search of past life, we may feel this same sense of grinding and clanking against obstacles that demand resilience and perseverance. When Mars moves through the element of air, words become blades, rhetoric morphs into bullets and the dark tide of anger rises, setting fire to old grudges and unexamined narratives.

As existential angst heightens our human response to threat and uncertainty, surveillance capitalism harvest our emotional bonds, sells our anger and our shame as “data.” “The goal now is to automate us,” writes Shoshana Zuboff, in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.

The motif of the Saturn/Uranus square—a cycle that began in 1988 with a Saturn/Uranus conjunction in Capricorn—infuses our lives with defining moments as regulations tighten, people push back. This year, three waning squares define the zeitgeist of disruption—the first was February 17^th, June 14^th is the second. In tandem and working in the darkness, the ominous Pluto/Eris square dredges up all that is putrid in our societies, as we wade through what Eckhardt Tolle calls “the pain body.”

The applying square of Saturn and Uranus back in 2000 brought recession after the dot-com bubble of the late 90s detonated. Alignments of staid Saturn and unpredictable Uranus mark economic collapse, civil unrest, radicalisation—the gain or loss of human rights and liberty. Martial law has been extended in Myanmar, a savage repeat of lethal confrontations between the military and the “’88 generation” of students that led the uprising in 1988.

As new lockdown measures are imposed in many countries, Mercury muscled into Aries on April 4^th. Frustration simmers. The passage of Venus (April 23^rd) sensitises the destabilising Saturn/Uranus square, followed by the Sun (April 30^th-May 4^th) and Mars adds fuel to the flames this year and next. (July/November 2021; March/April/July/ 2022.)

For most of us, our hero’s or heroine’s quest is not a muscular or spectacularly heroic response to the challenges of life. So often, it’s the austere grip of necessity that wrenches us out of our ordinary lives and gives us no choice but to dare greatly. Financial ruin, illness, the noxious fallout from a ruined relationship may ignite within our hearts the courage we never knew we had.

Cheryl Strayed writes, “you go on by doing the best you can. You go on by being generous. You go on by being true. You go on by offering comfort to others who can’t go on. You go on by allowing the unbearable days to pass and by allowing the pleasure in other days. You go on by finding a channel for your love and another for your rage”.

For some of us, an ordinary life lived with as much consciousness and courage we can muster is heroic. Our quest is cyclical, not linear: we so often face the same obstacles and foes along the way. And even though there are times when it takes every last spark of courage to unearth something positive, anything hopeful, to hold onto, we go on. And we do the best we can.

Please get in touch if you would like a private astrology consultation: ingrid@trueheartwork.com

May 8, 2012 In Astrology, Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

Dust in the Wind

Shall I leave my job, my relationship – can I afford not to? Shall I move home, live in the country? Am I ready to get married? Like mendicant dervishes whirling in the hurricane of our own confusion, we are blinded by the dust that swirls around the deeper truth of our questions. We falter, circle around the truth, obsess about the peripherals, back ourselves into the either-or, the no-escape corner, where we sit, huddled in the sandstorm of our immobilising fear.

It is tempting to hand over decision-making to our guru, our therapist, our rabbi, our priest. It is tempting to search for the answer to the dilemma that bedevils us outside ourselves. When we beseech someone out there to tell us what to do, we mute The Wise Man or Wise Woman within who know that the answers to the deeper questions are always found within the stillness of our own hearts.

No authority figure can ever know the sacred landscape of our soul. Their lives will be very different to ours; through the choices they have made, and if we follow their advice, our journey will be their journey, no longer ours. It is we who are the hero or heroine of our own story. When we reach the silence of surrender, that tipping point of acceptance of the situation, just as it is, we may come to a plateau of new perspective where we cease feeling sorry for ourselves, angry at someone else. Only when we stop blaming our partner, our friend, the organisation, or ourselves, can we sift through the chaff of fear and pain, our resistance to change; the guilt we may feel at “ letting someone down”, or the belief that we are “needed” by someone else. Only then can we know that our soul is calling us to new territory. “Whenever we seek to avoid the responsibility for our own behaviour, we do so by attempting to give that responsibility to some other individual or organization or entity. But this means we then give away our power to that entity. ” said M. Scott Peck. Observe the old scripts, the raucous voices that shout out their opinions. They may be the static that distorts the signal of our truth. When we close our eyes and connect with our full aliveness, tap into the perennial stream of our own power, we liberate ourselves from the shackles of indecision. When we cease wishing and hoping for things to be different, chaffing at our restraints, longing to escape, we can make a sober assessment of our situation, and reclaim our power to choose differently. Byron Katie says, “Suffering is optional. The only time we suffer is when we believe a thought that argues with reality… Which is more empowering –“I wish I hadn’t lost my job or I lost my job; what can I do now? ”

What we can do now is make a leap in passion and in trust. Witness the fleeting sandstorms of insecurity, conflict, loss, blame and guilt. What we can do now is to take responsibility for what it is we want, then commit to our wise decision, knowing that we are deserving of goodness and happiness.

Our lives, this world, are in a constant process of change, a continual cycle of birth, death, re-birth. The cycles of the planets symbolise above what is unfolding below: Pluto and Uranus, cosmic catalysts for change square up against one another again from June 7^th, provoking collective and personal change and new growth. Watch as political and economic events reflect the tension and metamorphosis. Feel the tension in our own lives, the need to slough off old skin, discard the mask, reclaim our original face.

A spiritual journey is a long process through desolate valleys, up steep mountainsides. Often it is our unhappiness or dis-ease that catapults us out of our entropy, arouses our quest for a more authentic life. We live in a state of paradox as we journey through the mystery and complexity of our daily lives, and deal with the consequences of the choices we make. “To proceed very far through the desert, you must be willing to meet existential suffering and work it through. In order to do this, the attitude toward pain has to change. This happens when we accept the fact that everything that happens to us has been designed for our spiritual growth.” – M. Scott Peck.

In those desert storms, clarity comes in moments of deep silence. Then we need to ask ourselves if we have the courage to follow the wisdom of our heart, accept the situation for what it is, take responsibility for the choice to walk across the threshold and enter a room we have never visited before.

Kansas

Now, don’t hang on, nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky
It slips away, and all your money won’t another minute buy
Dust in the wind
All we are is dust in the wind
All we are is dust in the wind
Dust in the wind
Everything is dust in the wind
Everything is dust in the wind
The wind

Artwork: Sandstorm by Rebekah Osorio

September 30, 2011 In Astrology, Relationship By Ingrid Hoffman

This is a Man’s World

Look around you at the boys pretending to be men: the conniving political leader, the indifferent school teacher, the pedantic priest, the sadistic gang leader, the vanishing father who leaves his wife and children destitute, the bully boss who ridicules his junior executive.

The world is teaming with boy-men. We extol the boyish behaviour of celebrities; we mistake threatening, controlling, hostile behaviour for strength, when the Tyrant is really the Emperor wearing no clothes – an angry, lost little boy. We have reached a tipping point, a collective crisis in mature masculinity.

Pluto in sombre Capricorn, sign of the archetypal Father, now heralds a new world order: a relentless breakdown of structures that no longer serve their purpose. Quantum physics sanctions what mystics and shamans have known for eons: we are all One and we live in an interconnected Uni (one) verse (song.) So what is necessary now, in this new age where sacred rituals have lost their potency, where rites of passage are medicated away, numbed down by distractions and addictions, is for us all to embrace our Masculine energy, and be hu-man. The word, man, means “human being, person.” And as Pluto, like a miniscule drop of purging homeopathic remedy, pervades the waters of the Collective Consciousness, we confront these ancient blueprints. Archetypes of Masculine and Feminine which are out of balance as we cross the threshold of a new awareness as foretold by the oracles of old.

Now is time for critical self-appraisal. If our governments and world leaders reflect the microcosm of our own lives, where are we out of integrity, acting as bullies, withholding or abusing power over the earth, or each other in our homes and communities? Says Neale Donald Walsch, “Stop looking all over the place for “the answers” – whatever they are – and start looking for the questions – the inquiries which are most important in your life, and give them answers. You do not live each day to discover what it holds for you, but to create it.”

This is the challenge we face today, in a world devoid of True Heroes, Wise Statemen, and Gentle Men.

We must collectively take responsibity for holding the Father Archetype and bringing Masculine energy into balance with the Feminine.

Now, more than ever in our human journey, we need mature masculine energy, as our civilization nears its great initiation into a Whole, more Uni-versal way of being. We’re being forced into the responsibility of making wise decisions— setting new goals, or we’re not going to survive as a species. As a culture of fatherless boys and girls, we must now access the Positive Father within to embrace the Postive Mother.

Patriarchy is not masculinity. Patriarchy is about Power, and patriarchy drains the life blood from the Masculine, and throttles the Feminine. So patriarchy will amplify the either/or. Patriarchy separates, divides, it amps up the dualty of black and white, right and wrong. It is always self-serving – like the Imposter King or Queen, it usurps power and tramples over dead bodies to get to the throne. Matriarchy can be just as vicious as patriarchy, as anyone who has worked under the an archetypal ward Matron or Mother Superior might have experienced. When we identify ourselves with power in any form – power over other people, power over nature, even power over our own bodies, denying the inevitablity of ageing with the insane quest for eternal youth, we are in the Venus Fly Trap of distorted patriarchy.

Goal setting is a positive masculine attribute, cutting away with the Sword of Truth things that are non-essential. So is taking action, being discerning, discriminating. These masculine attributes are positive when they are in relationship to the feminine. The masculine protects and honours the feminine, champions and celebrates the attributes and the values of the feminine, and these two energies are active in mature men and women. The feminine is chaotic, creative, and is the “being” energy of our humanness, while the masculine is the dynamic, the goal orientated, “doing” energy we must send out into the world to bring forth the fruit of our creation. We need a balance of both energies to be in balance in our lives. Says Marion Woodman, “there’s a divine marriage going on between the feminine and the masculine in every creative process. The more a woman develops her masculinity the more feminine she becomes, and the more a man develops his femininity the more masculine he becomes.”

We, as Women, need to be in our Mature Feminine to hold our men in their Mature Masculine. Pluto’s long passage through Capricorn these next sixteen years, will make us so.

“This is a man’s world
But it wouldn’t be nothing, nothing without a woman or a girl.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Fd8_gojNXc James Brown at his soulful best! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rh2Yxp6q2h0&feature=related Christina the Diva