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Two new classes in 2021

I write to you from a time of recovery and deep reflection, for me. In the weeks following my surgery, I have been so grateful to have space to rest and consider what it means to be alive in these times—what’s possible now that other things are impossible, and specifically what I want to move toward as an artist, healer, and teacher. I’m grateful for all of you for showing up in the hard work of sensitivity, vulnerability, social change, creativity, magic, and healing with me. And I'm particularly excited to start teaching again. I hope you join me in one of these new offerings!

Astrology 101, now live on Zoom

About five years ago I created a self-paced Astrology 101 class which now has hundreds of members. I’ve listened to those of you who love the materials but are having a hard time motivating to finish it on your own, and I’m now ready to do this with you. This eight-week class will begin in late January (date TBD by a scheduling poll) and is open to new and current Astrology 101 students.

Healers and Weavers: Astrological Mentorship 

Many of you have asked me over the years if I’m available for mentorship and I probably told you something like, “um, maybe soon…but not just yet!” I never seemed to have the time to create the container and take on the responsibility of such important work. Finally, I have the time. If you’re also ready to grow from being an astrology student to an astrological healer, I invite you to apply!

Applications are now closed for both classes!

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Final Balsamic Moon Blog: #9, 10, 11, 12

A final message on facing fear

Oh friends, it has been a year.

I’ve been silent more often than not since the pandemic began, and in that time I’ve been doing a lot of listening. I’m still enjoying a slower pace and being in a process of inquiry rather than reporting, but I want to close out this series and leave you with some final thoughts on what the process of turning toward fear has taught me. 

First, I want to praise anxiety. 

Self-help culture and its sibling movements within capitalism promise a world where if you’re good enough bad things won’t happen to you. If you work on yourself, if you know yourself better, if you deal with your anger and envy, if you learn how to communicate better with your partner, if you change your body, if you defy your body’s limits, if you take 15 minutes a day to balance your mind and body—then you’ll be in control. Then you won’t need to be afraid. This is an entirely fear-based narrative, and working with it will do nothing to actually face the root of the fear and accept the transformations it can offer. 

My philosophy as an artist and a healer is that there will always be times in our lives when we get lost, when we’re afraid, when we’re stuck. There’s no moral victory in never feeling fear. There’s no guarantee that as we get wiser our lives will get easier. And I don’t think we’re meant to stop feeling grief in the middle of a mass extinction, or in response to the uncountable black lives lost to state violence, or when genocide is still happening in Armenia, or when children are being torn from their families by ICE. And I don’t think we’re meant to not be afraid during a global pandemic that has killed millions, with the balance of power in America tilting ever more dizzyingly toward authoritarian hate groups, with the Amazon rainforest and the coral reefs dying and our atmosphere growing steadily warmer. Yet because these things are so big, the pain gets so big that we have to turn it off. And then, when we’re not aware of the depth of grief and fear we’re carrying, we act in ways that let that shit fester and grow. 

So what do we do about how big the pain is, how big the fear is, at this moment in history? On a day-to-day level, it can feel like way too much to hold. Especially when you map your own personal pain onto this larger cultural moment. And it is too much for anyone to handle alone. Humans aren’t made to work that way. We’re social creatures, and even if we’re practicing physical distancing we are still tightly interwoven into a web of relationships with humans, plants, animals, and both micro and macro organisms, from the bacteria in our biome to the ecosystems we’re part of. 

We tend to think of ourselves as outside of nature, and maybe even outside of history. Like there is a “you” that is unchanging and perfect, not part of your environment at all. This is, of course, total nonsense, but the fact that we can believe it says something really interesting about us. We’re great at escaping our particular realities when we need to, and sometimes we don’t even realize we’re doing it. Like when we think of ourselves as outside of the time and place that we are in right now, unaffected by all the things that affect us: the news cycle, what we ate last, the chemicals in the water we’re drinking, the stress of a deadline, the rush of love we feel when we get a letter from a friend. We imagine a continuity of self that doesn’t change in the face of all these changes because it helps us feel more grounded in a chaotic world. But there’s another way we can use this talent that takes just a little bit more effort. One really cool thing about being human is that we know how to become something other than just ourselves, our single selves, bound in our own skin and wearing our individual faces. We practice this by accident all the time when we watch a movie or read a book—for a period of time we become the characters whose stories we’re following. We can also practice this on purpose, when we’re really scared, for example. 

I was really scared this fall, when I got diagnosed with cancer and realized I would need emergency surgery. It’s the news we all dread getting, and it’s happening to more and more of us as our environment has become more toxic. When I was most scared about the treatment plan, I overheard my brain sounding like a little kid—just run away, just ignore it, just pretend it doesn’t exist and maybe you won’t have to do the hard thing. What stopped me from following that voice was the responsibility I felt to everyone who loves me and to the people whose lives I affect whether we know each other or not. And when I felt most alone, I needed only look at a tree or a squirrel twitching its tail to remember that I share an abundance of oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon with this entire earth. It takes effort to move from the theoretical understanding of our interconnection to actually feeling it. This is something I practice regularly, because it doesn’t always come naturally. I have my own ways of feeling into it—yours might look different, but I call this fear-facing practice Get Big. 

In some ways getting big is common sense, especially if you’ve been hiking where you might encounter a bear or a cougar. You want to raise your arms, make a lot of noise, do everything you can to make yourself seem bigger and more intimidating. This works with fear, too. But it can be hard to learn the trick of it when you’re in the grip of fear, because fear wants us to get small. Freeze. Hide. Pray it goes away. So it’s worth figuring out what you can collaborate with in order to get bigger. When you’re facing a bear, you might pick up your backpack or fan your jacket out between your arms. When your facing your own terror, you can also use external props and backup. Here’s just a few suggestions for making yourself bigger in the face of fear: 

Imagine your fear is a small child coming to you with a bad dream and it’s your job to turn on the lights in the bedroom and hold that kid till they fall asleep again. 

Imagine you have a direct line to your future self, the one who has survived this hard time, and they’re doing great. Picture them giving you a thumbs up from the near future, encouraging you. 

Imagine you have a direct line to your future self, but far in the future now, and they’re not only doing great they’ve incorporated the lessons of this scary time into how they live their life and it’s made them incredibly strong. 

Imagine that while you’re facing this scary thing, there are hundreds if not thousands if not millions of people across the planet facing the same fear. Imagine reaching out and holding their hands. Imagine how big you all would be, massed up together in a blockade through which fear cannot pass. 

Imagine that if you have to give up physical autonomy, say for a surgery, that your body is no longer yours alone but you have become a life form that exists in the beeping of the machines behind your head and in the hands of the nurses who bring you warm blankets and in the intelligence and skill of the anesthesiologist and all of this continuity is working together to heal and transform you. 

Imagine that your beloved dead, your healed ancestors, those who love you beyond all reason and have your best interest at heart, are sitting at the foot of your bed and loving you. 

Imagine that all the bacteria in your digestive tract is concerned about your welfare and forming coalitions to Save the Human. 

Imagine that you are a star momentarily taking on the form of a human and it is far more dangerous and confusing than being a ball of fiery gas, but also full of unexpected joy. 

My friends, I’m closing out this Balsamic Moon Blog almost exactly a year after a began it. It has been inconsistent and strange, just like some of my favorite people in this world. In this time of massive change and strangeness it feels like the perfect thing to offer you right now. 

I’m going to be taking time off from client work to recover from surgery for the rest of 2020, but I’m planning many exciting things for the new year. May it be one where we feel our strength in the face of all the damn things.

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The Balsamic Moon Blog #7 and #8

Deforestation of the Amazon rainforest in Bolivia. Photo by Rhett A, Butler.

Metabolizing Despair

I began this blog last fall as a way of sharing my own personal rituals about facing fear, loss, and change. As an astrologer, I knew 2020 would be a year of dramatic change, in which we’d all be dealing with Plutonian themes (death, transformation, despair). I didn’t anticipate a global pandemic. 

I published my last blog post while I was on a trip to New York and Philly in early March, but I’d written it a few days before—weeks before lockdown, weeks before we knew there was a deadly virus moving through the country. On the first day of our trip, concern about the coronavirus seemed overly paranoid. But each day the background levels of collective dread rose a little, and by the end of our trip every day brought exponentially worse news. Five days before we flew home and entered voluntary quarantine (a week ahead of the national shutdown), we were at the Natural History Museum with our sisters, touching dinosaur fossils and herding small children. I remember doing a dance with my sister, pressing our foreheads together and swaying slightly, like we’ve done since we were teenagers. My partner’s nieces were curious and tried it, too. We giggled the way people do when they’re acting oddly in a crowded place, full of families and tourists and people checking bags and buying tickets and eating lunch on the broad front steps. I’ve spent a lot of time in New York, and the joyous, chaotic throng of life there is familiar to me. A few months later, this memory of a sunny day in New York when my partner and I got to introduce our families to each other feels like a vanished world. 

Until the pandemic, I was doing these grief rituals monthly. I carved out a time during the balsamic moon phase, I called in protection and beauty and boundaries as I faced the shadows. Now—as we all face unprecedented, prolonged grief and fear—I’m praying all the damn time. Like many things during a global pandemic, the format that worked before isn’t going to cut it anymore. 

Moving forward, a lot of things won’t cut it anymore. We have serious work ahead of to liberate this world from the death cult known as business-as-usual. We need to push for a world where governments don’t relax pollution restrictions while people in the most polluted regions are dying faster from this virus. A world where we love and protect the most vulnerable instead of keeping them locked in cages, refusing them adequate care, and deciding it’s okay to prioritize the economy over their lives. We are not all affected by this virus equally. The people who are most vulnerable to this virus are already the most vulnerable under business-as-usual. This is why the US government is so cavalier about reopening our country while infection rates are still rising in many places. They consider the death of these people acceptable. Mere numbers numb the heart. Notice the absence of context in the phrase “3,000 deaths per day.” It’s not “3,000 people each day die painfully and alone, leaving behind children and spouses and collaborators whose lives will never feel complete without them, and traumatizing the care workers who are risking their own lives to save so many.” When we stay in numbers, we can stay numb. We can go back to normal. 

Before the pandemic, in a state of slow and quite despair that might have just felt “normal,” many of us gave up on fighting the genocidal, geocidal business-as-usual way of life. Maybe in peak moments we felt outrage, then time grinds on and we return to powerless, numb. We are in a peak moment now, and they’re trying to lull us back into numbness. 

And sometimes numbness is easier, because it hurts to love what’s dying—like the Amazon rainforest and those whose lives are woven through it, the indigenous protectors who are falling ill and can no longer halt the increase of logging. Humans are destroying this forest, the lungs of our planet, as a virus is destroying so many human lungs. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, lungs are associated with grief. Many of us in the US don’t have cultural grief practices, don’t know how to handle the pain of grief. We’re used to winning. Americans love a happy ending, a quick fix. We want to sign a petition or raise awareness. We like to be busy doing instead of stuck at home, feeling powerless in our grief. 

But this crisis doesn’t have a tidy, clean ending. Coronavirus is one among many indicators that we are environmentally out of balance. There will be more novel viruses as more animals are displaced from their habitats. As climate changes rapidly and we are in Earth’s sixth mass extinction, there really is no normal to go back to. What has seemed normal for centuries has been killing us (though unequally, some more than others) and the many species we share our world with. If we don’t have tools to work with the truly gigantic grief and fear this raises, it’s impossible not to shut down, go numb, and retreat to despair. We sink into despair, we feel powerless to climb out of it. Maybe this is where you are, right now. Sunk into it. 

Which brings me to the secret behind all these grief rituals: when we do have effective tools for experiencing grief, terror, and pain we can stave off despair. We can stay in touch with what is good and beautiful and joyous, without needing a guarantee of a happy ending. We can keep showing up for the hard work of being human. In the immortal words of James Baldwin, “I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter.” Or, to paraphrase Rabbi Tarfon: the work of transforming the world is not ours to finish but neither can we turn away from it. 

So, as someone who’s not currently in despair but has been familiar with it, I offer you a tool. I consider this a spiritual tool, but you might not. I’m sharing it the way it works for me, but you may need to customize it for yourself. As always, the more you practice the easier it gets. 

Metabolizing Despair. An Exercise. 

Despair tells us it is the only reality. In despair, our bodies lock up and refuse to be in connection with anything outside the despair story. Despair can be self-protective, though it might feel more like a nightmare.This pandemic itself feels like a nightmare, including the dream logic of life feeling strangely ordinary (for many) while something terrible has happened or is still happening or will happen. We can wake up from a nightmare, though. This is not to say the pandemic isn’t real, but rather that we are trapped in something that is only one version of reality. 

So, begin by acknowledging there is more to the story than you can currently perceive. Reality is more complex than you can perceive. This may not be comforting yet, but it’s a necessary first step. Don’t jump from this to trying to cheer yourself up with visions of possibly rosy outcomes. Optimistic fantasies aren’t the antidote to nihilistic fantasies. What you’re looking for is a different orientation to time itself.

You may be stuck in a story that tells you: “What I love is dying (or has died or will die).” Maybe it’s a loved one, or an ecosystem, or your own body. Despair freezes the grief process, ricochets the pain forward and backward into infinity. What I love has always died, what I love will always die. I am caught in the tenuous center in which I love—on all sides are death (if death isn’t your fixation, repeat this exercise with oppression or cruelty as the focus). Whatever you feel hemmed in by, I want you to focus on that sliver of present tense: “I love.” The center of the phrase. “I love.” This is what your despair is trying to protect you from: the pain of loving. Loving and grieving are two aspects of the same experience. You can flip them like you flip a coin—joy and pain, pain and joy. To be able to love is what you are here for. That love might look like playing music or studying physics or raising a family or having orgies. Love is a quality of attention and engagement that ripples out in all times and dimensions and creates the conditions for healing to happen.   

This is when you may need to cry. If you are able to cry, you are well on your way to getting unstuck. You might need to ugly cry for a long time. You might need to cry every day for months or years. Crying may become a practice, an exercise, like anything else you do to maintain your human life. If you are unable to cry, you will need to be gentler and slower as you ease out of despair and back into connection with what is alive in you. Remember, there is so much you can’t control—in despair, you have created a world of total tragedy because it is one in which you know what to expect. Staying in reality means staying open to uncertainty—arguably much scarier than tragedy. When you practice these exercises, you’re extending your ability to stay with what is real, even as it remains unknown and uncertain. In staying with uncertainty, you are bringing your attention and presence to what it means to be alive in a way that can only be called love. And when you practice love in this way, you feel it holding you up. This ceases to be a solo exercise. Loving and being loved cease to be separate actions. This is where it gets a little mystical, so if you’re not into the woo feel free to rewrite this part. But don’t omit it! Think about the reciprocity that exists in all encounters—Earth’s gravity pulling on me as my body pulls on it. Get as scientific as you want to, while understanding that love is the act of deeply searching to know—deeply enough to understand what all that you can never fully know. 

Support this blog: I have a Patreon page for those who’d like to donate to this blog, and subscribe for all kinds of astrological insights and expanded horoscopes.

(tentative) Balsamic Moon Blog Schedule: 

May 20: Ritual #9

June 5: Blog Post #9

June 19: Ritual #10

July 5: Blog Post #10

August 17: Ritual #11

September 2: Blog Post #11

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