Dealing with Illness

 

November 26, 2004 (with chart)

 

http://cainer.com/ericfrancis/nov26.html

 

Dear Eric:

I have been chronically ill for several years now. Every area of my life has been affected as a result of my debilitation. I feel destitute. What makes things worse is my long held belief that my condition could be managed, and my quality of life restored, if facilitated under the proper care of a competent, responsible physician. After employing dozens of physicians, in both the United States and Germany, I have only succeeded in reducing mine and my partners financial resources to the bare minimum, with no prospect of resolve.

 

I feel completely powerless, as if my life force has been wiped away. I cannot even begin to understand; therefore all is lost and nothing can ever be gained. Will you please take a look at my chart and see if you can provide any insight or explanation for my longstanding, obscure, disillusioned life.

 

April 11,1964 at 4:24pm in Wilson County Wilson, N.C. USA (I currently reside in Mühlheim, Germany)

 

P.S. I find that I share many of your views on the state and welfare of our home country. Reading your articles help me to understand the dynamics of it all.

With high regards,

 

Chase

 

 

Dear Chase,

I am truly sorry to hear of your struggle.

 

Without wading through a lot of astrology, here is the first question that comes to mind. In your letter, you present these doctors as being the presumed source of your healing. Not, for example you, or the decisions and choices you make, or the life you live. Even if you work with doctors, your healing always comes from you. What if you were to follow the principle of healing, "Seek not outside yourself"? Certainly, seeking everywhere but yourself has brought you little good, or if it has, you have not mentioned what you have learned in your whole process.

 

While I don't feel like I can explain the past adequately, I can tell you that you're right at the point where you can let go of it. This has, I'm going to imagine, never been a particularly easy theme for you, and if I had to explain your illness in a few words, I would say that it involves being attached or otherwise caught in the much that has happened before and, perhaps, much that has happened to your parents. The past weighs heavily in your chart.

 

How can I see this? In any question of health, it makes some sense to look at the 6th house first. The 6th is like control central of health issues, of healing and of healers. If we look, the information comes easily: you have the planet Saturn both ruling the 6th house, and occupying it. I say ruling because Aquarius is on the 6th cusp (see wavy lines next to the number 24. The wavy lines say Aquarius and Aquarius says Saturn, the traditional ruler of that sign) and Saturn is sitting right there in the 6th. But Saturn is in Pisces, not Aquarius.

 

Saturn in the 6th can certainly present obstacles to healing (he always presents the solutions as well, so no worries) and given his presence in Pisces in the 6th I'm going to propose that what you're suffering from has a spiritual or emotional basis and not a "medical" one. Pisces, to me, is what says spiritual the most loudly. Pisces also tells me your beliefs are involved.

 

This would give us a working hypothesis for why all these doctors have not been able to help you. They are working on the symptoms and not the cause. Doctors can be very helpful, but there are always multiple layers to healing. While doctors tend to work on the body level, the more subtle levels -- psychic, mental, emotional, spiritual, whatever you wish to call the involvement of energy, the psyche or the mind -- are usually completely ignored by Western medicine. You are very lucky if a doctor says to you, "How are you feeling today, Chase?" before diving into the lab reports.

 

Whether or not a doctor asks you this, it's an important question for you to ask yourself. Because what you are going through is all about feeling and the experience of life on the emotional, empathic and psychic levels.

 

If we look back through the houses, we see that Saturn rules another house: the 5th, because Capricorn is on the cusp of the 5th.

 

Now, you may be asking, "I thought Saturn ruled Capricorn and Uranus ruled Aquarius!" It is true that Uranus is widely considered to be the traditional ruler of Aquarius -- but Saturn is the modern ruler, and it's necessary to check Saturn first. And Saturn in Pisces in the 6th is saying you might be stuck on a belief in traditional medicine. And -- if we want to know more about Saturn's origins, we can look for where Capricorn is in the chart; we find it in the 4th house.

 

Looking into the 4th house, we find the south node of the Moon in Capricorn. I think this is the missing piece of the puzzle, frankly. The south node, the 4th house and Capricorn all have strong, meaningful references to the past. There is almost an obsession with tradition, authority and the idea that these things bring security (4th house). However, this does not always hold true.

 

Most people resist the idea of a psychic or emotional root for illness because it invokes the idea that they "brought it on themselves." I think this is harsh; another way to say it is that if we can find the cause of our own lives within ourselves, we'll find the solution there too. If we're not looking where the cause is, we're more likely to seek outside ourselves in ways that don't work, and are in truth depleting.

 

You also have Chiron in the 6th house. This is the "alternative," as is often the case with Chiron. Chiron represents all forms of healing, from surgery to homeopathy to hands-on work. It is a holistic energy, taking into account the holos -- the whole of reality. Chiron is also about awareness and transformation. These are the most available methods by which this energy heals us.

 

Alternative healing methods do many things differently than traditional ones. The first one is that they define wellness differently. It is not merely defined as the absence of symptoms, but rather has the presence of vitality, balance and clarity. They define illness differently, seeing it in the context of the whole system of life. And they define the healing process differently, seeking out solutions on every level of existence.

 

When you think of your healing process -- as shown by the 6th house -- consider that you have two methods to work with: Saturn and Chiron. One is not at the expense of the other. Chiron is like a full-spectrum version of Saturn, and at the time of your birth is moving much more slowly than was Saturn. But Chiron will open you up to other possibilities, other dimensions of yourself, and other ideas about both illness and wellness that you would be wise to consider, given that the long healing struggle about which you have written seems, in my view, to be pleading for a holistic approach.

 

The thing with just about any holistic approach is that while it may seem to be coming from a practitioner of some kind, you are much more intimately involved with the process. Your feelings, needs, and subtle changes count. The inner journey of the healing process is, with rare exceptions, acknowledged by healing practitioners.

 

Start with food and water. Move into other environmental factors. And then, perhaps, make an appointment to see a classical homeopath and get a constitutional remedy. Another possibility is to see a naturopathic physician, someone educated at National College or Bastyr University, or at an equivalent school in Germany or England. Please keep in mind that holistic healing works slower, and there are no magic solutions. But when it works, it does its job on a very deep level, and your whole life is better in the end.

 

It also costs a lot less, and its methods are generally non-toxic, non-invasive, and people dedicated to these arts tend to spend a lot more time with you -- not just your lab reports.