Responsibility and Reflection

Responsibility and Reflection

Responsibility
One of the basic ideas of evolutionary astrology (EA) is that we each have responsibility for the circumstances of our lives, both internally and externally.

As an astrologer and teacher, I approach all of my clients and students with a grounding in the idea that everything happening to them in their external/day-to-day lives reflects their internal circumstances.  One way of saying it is that everything in your outer life shows you stuff you need to see about your inner life.  The truth behind this is that the energy within you creates the outer circumstances of your life.  If you don’t like an external circumstance, you can change it by altering your inner experience of the energy in question.  I’ve had amazing professional and personal results with this, and it’s the foundation of my work with myself and clients.

Putting this in practice can be difficult –accepting this truth requires taking responsibility for the circumstances of our lives.  Think about all the times you’ve felt wronged in your life and consider why you would have created that scenario.  What reason would you have had for creating a scenario in which you were betrayed?  Abandoned?  Abused?  Lied to?

Really get inside this idea and the difficulty is obvious: Why on Earth would we choose painful experiences, to hurt ourselves?  Who’d create pain and suffering for themselves?  Who’s that senseless?  It flies against everything we think we’re about.

There’s a spiritual perspective that has to come into play here to make this make any sense.  It’s the one that informs EA from the ground up, and that what we’re really dealing with in life is the journey of the soul.  That this life is one of many, and each life offers opportunities for the soul to learn about what it’s like to be a soul having a human experience.

All the themes of your life, what you’d name as the reasons you’re alive/what you’re doing on the planet, are the content of your experience.  You’ve at the soul level picked those themes as vehicles to help you learn what it’s like to be here, to be Spirit temporarily in the form of matter, bouncing off of others doing the same thing, exploring the same experience.

It’s fine to identify with those themes, to take cues to your identity from them.  Just know that they serve you as markers of identity while you’re here on Earth doing your Earth thing, learning along your soul’s journey – they’re not who you really are.

Transits
Transits are the contemporary movement of the planets in the sky and how they affect your chart/personal wiring.  They draw external experiences to you to show you your inner landscape.  This is how Saturn transits, for example, can be experienced as amazing learning and growing times for some, while others feel like they’ve slipped into something horrible and depressing.  Whatever you need to see about your internal assumptions and beliefs about an energy will be reflected in your experience of that planet’s transits.

Understanding that the not-fun experiences of certain transits are simply reflecting you, you have the opportunity to change the experience from the inside out.  Saturn transits, for example, ask us to grow up, introduce more structure, get firmer in our morality or work ethic, and work hard(er).  When a Saturn transit is difficult, it’s because we’re not responding the question.  This is not an opportunity to put yourself down for not doing it right, but an invitation to look deeper into the issue and your beliefs about it.  Going at this from a place of self-love, that you want to treat yourself better by really and truly understanding what’s going on (because once you do, your experience will become more filled with ease and grace), is really important.  We tend to get caught up in the difficulty of the external situation, dealing with complex emotions about it.  But we need to come back to understanding how it’s a reflection and seek clearer views into it.

If Saturn is asking you work harder, be more organized and willing to go the long way around an issue, and you don’t want to, ask yourself why.  Your homework will be in identifying the reason(s) and working through them.  The result of working to resolve that inner resistance is the greatest possible benefit you can create/receive from the transit: Allowing yourself to be changed from the inside out by getting that everything happening to you reflects the inner you.

Set an intention to be willing to respond to what any planet is asking you to do – it wouldn’t be coming around to ask a question if it weren’t time for you to be asked.  The difficulty of a question has everything to do with you, and the planet is simply a teacher reflecting what you could use seeing at any given time.

Other People
People go to astrologers all the time to try to sort out their relationships with other people.  Whether working out a relationship with a boss, friend, spouse/mate or other family member, relationships are a giant part of our lives.  They drive our growth – others in our lives are teachers for us critical along our journeys.

And yet in an important way, other people are imaginary.

All of our relationships reflect what we need to see and experience about ourselves.  Few want to hear that they’re being treated poorly in their relationships because of their own wiring or beliefs, but this is the truth.  Other people show up to reflect us to us, on whatever level we need to have reflection shared, and for as long as we need it.

When things in relationships are difficult, it’s helpful to come back to the truth that it’s happening so that we can see something about ourselves.  Doing this can help us fix the problem in the relationship – once you see the issue in you that creates the external circumstance, you can address it inside yourself and release the need to have someone else reflect it to you.  Then you can have relationships more based in enjoying togetherness and celebrating life and each other than teaching you about your inner garbage by throwing it in your face every five minutes.

Think about relationships that were or are difficult for you.  Can you accept that the difficulty is there to teach you about yourself?  Sit and work on this – work on accepting at least the possibility.  And then make peace with yourself for having created painful scenarios to live through.  It’s what we do, an important way we learn about life.  Once you’re working with the idea that you’ve made all of it happen, self-love, self-acceptance and forgiving yourself are critical.  You’re doing exactly what a ton of other humans are doing.  And even when painful, you’re learning exactly what you came here to learn.

Shifting Perspective
Shifting perspective on this will lead to releasing the need to have difficult external circumstances.  I speak from experience as someone who’s manifested vehicle and other accidents leading to various forms of trauma.  It took me years to accept responsibility for those painful experiences.  Now I can see them as a reflection of the inner belief that I held that I wasn’t safe.  Of course I’d manifest situations where I wasn’t safe – it’s what I felt deeply inside me.  People who know my history of experiencing car, bicycle, pedestrian and cooking/knife/sharp or hot object-related accidents are surprised to find out that my only vehicle now is a motorcycle!  For a while after buying the bike, I manifested people to tell me how dangerous it is – I was still drawing comments because part of me was still believing it.  I took them as a reflection, and worked on strengthening the belief that I am in fact safe, am not in danger.  Always coming back to working on the issue on the inside released the need to experience the less than fun realities on the outside.

By taking away the need for it to teach me about inner beliefs, I opened space to enjoy it for what it is, which is for me a ton of fun.  I love going places because I get to play in the wind and have a feeling akin to flying – something navigating around in a metal box with wheels I never had.  So, this is possible, each of us can turn these situations around.  It just takes a willingness to take responsibility for anything and everything that’s happening in our lives and working on things from the inside out.