Living in the Present Tense
A Heart-Opening Invitation Near the End of the Mayan Calendar
The end of the Mayan Calendar signals a shift in consciousness. The present time is full of invitations to adjust to the changing energies on Earth in preparation for that shift.
From my vantage point as a counseling astrologer and psychic medium, the invitations center on bringing our heart centers, our 4th chakras, back on line. The 4th chakra is a bridge connecting our various bodies, and when it’s functioning properly we’re able to feel across the full range of emotive possibilities, to participate in life as it comes to us in any moment without holding on to any of it. What we may not realize is that there’s a difference between living emotionally and living a heart-centered life. When we are unable to live the latter kind of life, it is often a combination of having not learned how to do so and being full of old emotional stuff I call “emotional debris.” This consists of unresolved, unprocessed emotional memories we carry and invest with meaning. They offer identity, as they often seem to stem from our families of origin and early life experiences; we can think they make us who we are, and it can be difficult to let go of identities even when we know they no longer serve us.
This debris is from our past as well as our past lives. We relive our past lives’ themes in any given life and as a result, the passions, dilemmas, fears and joys a person experiences in his or her life are repeated from previous incarnations. What thrills and terrifies us are reruns we choose to relive in order to learn or experience something about them we missed or skipped in the past. We are now creating more chances for resolution.
Being willing to feel all that we can, and learning to process and not hold on to feelings and imbue the best and worst with meaning, is the best preparation I can recommend for the present and upcoming shifts. The more wounding from our early life and past lives we carry, the less willing we will be to open up our 4th chakras and find out how they can serve us as tools to support us. When a person’s 4th chakra is online, it functions as his or her emotional guidance system. It offers constant feedback about the directions we’re headed in or about to, functioning as a simple circuit that’s either open or closed, opening or closing. Open or opening, of course, means that a choice, idea, experience or relationship resonates with our whole being. Closed or closing means that it does not. Using the 4th chakra as a feedback mechanism as part of our life guidance system leads us into creating experiences and pursuing relationships that further our self-knowledge and self-love, supporting us in resonance with our deepest selves.
I offer four stages of the process of emotional healing:
- Opening to the idea that everything that happens to us is necessary for our individual journey.
- Taking responsibility for whatever happened that hurt us.
- Feeling the pain, including grieving and mourning.
- Letting go of what we decided the painful experience meant, whether about us, others or life in general.
For any individual, this process hinges on a willingness to take responsibility for his or her life – absolutely and totally. As Pluto has made its entrance in Capricorn in early 2008 and Ceres has been promoted from asteroid to dwarf planet, the realities of who’s really taking care of us and who isn’t have been shifting. The ideal solution awaiting any individual is to learn self-sufficiency and self-love, which prefigures our imminent entrance into the Aquarian Age, after a couple thousand years of Piscean-Age direction taking and edict swallowing with little questioning.
To heal emotional debris to support people in adapting to the changing energy on Earth at present, I focus on four archetypes: Pluto, Chiron, Lilith and Lucifer. Exploring and learning to resolve and release the debris associated with each can support people in moving beyond living in states defined or colored by old wounding and learning to live in the present.
Pluto
Pluto in a birth chart represents the soul’s deepest wounding, what feels like it went wrong at the end of at least one past life, though probably a number of them. It also represents a soul’s deepest desire and intentions, yet because of the pain we remember and carry from the past, we may avoid doing the things we’re most passionate about or, even, identifying and acknowledging them.
The painful feelings associated with Pluto lead us to develop strategies to avoid repeating the original, wounding scenarios. We also work hard to keep the memories associated with Pluto out of consciousness, shoving them deep into our psyches and hearts to avoid having to see or feel them. As such, our Plutonian fears are subconscious, and healing them begins with admitting them into consciousness, which is learning to identify and face just what it is we most deeply fear.
Healing our Plutonian fears results in seeing how we can connect with and live according to our deepest sense of purpose. This is the most empowering journey a person can undertake, and results in living with clarity of purpose and access to our deepest source of energy and power, a kind of personal atomic energy source.
Chiron
The Chiron archetype can open doors into and help us shift our consciousness about the nature and purpose of wounding and our own personal wounds. As it emerged into the collective consciousness just 31 years ago, much of what we think about it at present should be considered part of its infancy stage in our awareness. Great work has been done on this archetype in the last 3 decades by thoughtful and aware authors, and yet when most people read about Chiron what they’re left with are a few keywords that don’t bring home the true possibilities of what work with it offers. It’s time for our collective understanding of Chiron to mature.
When we hear that Chiron represents a wounded healer, we must realize that the wound that lead to the end of his life is not the one to which this truly refers. His original wounding is the rejection at birth by his mother, who didn’t expect him to be a centaur. She was disgusted when she saw her little half-horse, half-human baby, and he was taken away to be raised elsewhere.
As we live this archetype, at first we’re wounded from the important rejection event, occurring when we’re very young, before we even have language skills. It happens when we take in a negative reaction to us by a parent or other primary caregiver. We internalize it as a valid judgment of our lovability, and remember that when we’re that young, the love of parents and other caregivers is everything. To ensure that we don’t lose their love, we begin to edit out the part of us that earned the negative reaction. Until we shift our understanding, we will experience the original wounding event over and over again; we recreate scenarios in which to experience it again and again.
To shift from being wounded to being the wounded healer, we have to stop waiting for others to validate the part of us that was invalidated. We must do it ourselves, which requires parenting now the little child inside who was hurt then, and who is still making a major contribution to how we live our lives. And when we do this we see how to help others who have the same wounding, thereby embodying the second meaning of the “wounded healer” label.
Lilith (The True Black Moon)
Lilith represents a wounding to the connection to instinct. She represents the primal instinctive wild, and a state of connectedness to self wherein one can’t conceive of denying one’s true nature. She’s wild and, when healthy in us, unapologetic about it. The Lilith archetype is also about our experiences of asserting equality and meeting inequality. When we live her stories we often encounter power plays. Lilith also relates to sexuality, both in how we understand our bodies as extensions of nature and operating according to cycles, and how we relate to ourselves as primal, instinctive beings.
When we live out the energy of Lilith, we often meet attempts to dominate us. Often, we see we have to leave a place in order to remain free, to avoid becoming enslaved to another in one way or another. The pain stemming from abuse in the attempts to dominate us and those from the separation we experience when we choose to leave such situations is often what awaits us to see and feel when we begin to heal our experiences as Lilith (and both men and women live Lilith’s stories in their own ways).
Healing Lilith can lead us to feeling a deeper personal connection to nature, to all of life as a whole. When healthy, an individual’s experience of Lilith enables him or her to greater levels of self-acceptance and self-love, understanding that the collective fear of the wild others may take out on us is not a valid statement of our worth.
Lucifer (Asteroid 1930)
The Lucifer archetype is about devoted service to a greater good and the experience of dissenting when that greater good seems to lack integrity. Lucifer’s rebellion/fall (his choice to leave God’s presence) is rooted in his devotion: God asks the angels to bow down before Adam, a being made of dust, and Lucifer sees this as affront to what God has said about the nature of creation; elevating a human above the angels is an indication that God is choosing to lack integrity.
As we live this story, we deeply desire to serve something greater than ourselves. We all have a sense of being part of a greater whole even as we experience individuality. When unhealthy, living Lucifer’s stories means withdrawing from supporting a greater good, and perhaps working against it. How we go wrong with Lucifer is, once our need to serve is rejected or we find out there’s a lack of integrity in whom or what we desire to serve, withdrawing into our heads in an effort to protect the deep sensitivity of our hearts.
When healthy, the Lucifer archetype in a person serves with purpose and dedication and great love, and we offer ourselves as gifts to the world, bringing our particular light to others in service of the greater whole.
Closing
Unraveling the emotional knots we carry from the past is a major step of self-love that enables us to live in the present moment, the best preparation for the Earth consciousness shifts we’re currently experience and are soon to experience.