Expression is the Opposite of Depression

Light Bridge for Scorpio and Scorpio Rising

New! Scorpio audio presentation | Link to download | Listen to Light Bridge Audio on your iPhone

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Expression is the opposite of depression. You could take that as a theme not only for the next year but for the next decade or so. Remember every day. Write it on your mirror. Here’s some art, to set as the wallpaper of your phone. [Note, we will have your art/wallpaper ready Monday! I had no idea it was not posted. –ef]

Some of the most significant transits of the next two years (beginning in this moment) say that you’re embodying this change. Your psyche is shifting from a long phase of internalization to a new phase of expression. Am I implying that depression has been an issue? Perhaps — at the least, you’ve been living through a deeply complex, maze-like emotional time, characterized by a struggle for clarity and sometimes actually finding some.

I have a proposal for you to consider: that you’ve made greater gains toward clarity through experience than you have through pleasure. If you’ve had experiences that have shaken or disillusioned you, it’s because they contradicted a theory you had, especially a theory about how you’re supposed to feel, or how others are supposed to respond to a situation.

Experience has taught you about the nature of reality, and to the extent that you’re still confused or struggling, I suggest you listen to what your experiences are telling you. While it will not work to insist that something isn’t so, or that someone isn’t the way they are, or that you aren’t the way you are, it will work very well to acknowledge these things and adjust your life accordingly. It’s true that people change; it’s true that situations can change; it’s true that you change. But all change starts in the present moment, with the affirmation of the reality of a situation.

And of all the things in life that can actually change, your thought pattern is under the microscope right now. That in turn will lead to how much energy you have and how free you feel to express yourself.

I would like to take this in the context of two simultaneous transits, to give you an idea how different aspects of your psyche can work together.

Pluto in Capricorn, Saturn in Libra

Pluto, a modern planet associated with your sign (the traditional planet is Mars), has been working its way into Capricorn since 2008, and it’s collected some progress on that mission; there is now a history, and a more interesting story coming up in the next few years. For you Capricorn is your 3rd house or solar house, which represents your thought processes, your local relationships, your communication style and your relationship to technology.

Capricorn in this house describes how you’re inclined to think, and that’s a little old fashioned. This is not a bad thing in itself, but it can cause issues when you have expectations that things are supposed to be the way they were in the past. This is so natural to you that you may not know that any other mode of thought exists; it’s a background thing that you may not even see clearly.

Pluto, however, has commenced a demolition process, so in some ways you’re getting to see what’s behind those walls. In particular, a series of confrontations that you experienced over the past year to two years showed you some of what’s back there. You seemed to be in conflict with others, but in truth what you were contacting were your own cloaked tendencies, particularly involving your expectations about relationships.

Given how important relationships are to you, that’s pretty meaningful. What may have become obvious is that you can neither control nor change others. What may be less obvious is that you would attempt to do so as a way to avoid changing yourself, or coming to terms with your situation as it stands. In essence, attempting to control anything or anyone is the way you cut yourself off from your own power.

This involved extremely deep tendencies on which you may not fully have a grasp, which is fine — you have time, you have the freedom to learn, and you’ll go a long way if you remember that a happy learner cannot feel guilty about learning. Pluto in Capricorn may be stirring up all kinds of old guilt; my take is that the guilt is like the mortar holding together the bricks of your thought forms. If you want to think in different ways, facilitate this process of identifying the guilt that lurks in the crevices of your mind and shine the light there.

The transit that recently compounded Pluto in Capricorn, and may have brought things to a head, is Saturn in Libra or your 12th house. Saturn is of course connected to Capricorn, as its ruling planet, and Libra holds a special place in your chart as the zone that’s slightly behind the veil of waking consciousness. Being slightly concealed, all kinds of stuff can collect there, much like an attic where we keep stashing the useless contents of the past. Libra there suggests that much of this material involves relationships, and points to a set of hidden tendencies that you continually come up against.

So, while fateful, this meeting of Saturn in your 12th house/Libra with Pluto in your 3rd house/Capricorn, helped you at least crack open the attic door and figure out that something is going on up there, and that it influences your hour-to-hour thoughts far more than you may have ever suspected. This is a discovery process that is still underway for you, as Saturn and Pluto make their way across their respective signs.

I suggest you bear in mind that you cannot turn back the clock on certain matters. You cannot unknow what you’ve learned. Healing certain situations that have been damaged, or caused damage, is eminently possible — but that’s not about going back to the past, or restoring the way things were, or hoping that you can. Rather, it’s about finding a new way to exist and to coexist.

If your Pluto transit is working in a constructive way, you will gradually (or in bursts) liberate psychic energy as you dismantle the thought forms of the past. As you do this as a conscious act rather than as a change that is enforced upon you by your circumstances, you will find that your experiences become less confrontational.

As you look into yourself more often and with greater clarity, you will need the world to serve as a mirror that much less. That introspection process may be a bit lonelier than you’re accustomed to being; that is the nature of Saturn in your 12th house, at least at first. Wherever Saturn goes, it represents a process of coming to terms with the subject matter in that house. For you that is the hidden dimension; your hidden tendencies in relationships; and something about your orientation that sees everything relationally, or that wants to.

Here’s the thing about Libra: It’s the sign of balance, justice and equanimity. Whether you took a survey of New York Post readers on the D Train or at a top-shelf astrology conference, you would get few people to ascribe those tendencies to your Sun (or rising) sign. I’m telling you that they are there, alive and well within the depths of your psyche. You know that love is more about giving and sympathizing than it is about controlling.

There are reasons you’ve evolved into some other point of view, and most of them involve how you were treated as a child. It’s clear that love and control were blended into one product; it’s clear that you were put in a position where you had to conform to the emotional state of others around you, who were older and thus had more power. And it’s clear that you had to use a form of logic to make your feelings make sense, and to figure out where others around you were coming from. You did this, as a child, so that you could feel safe in an environment that did not inherently make sense, and moreover that may have been hostile to children. The distortions this created are the very things you’re working out now — in practice rather than in theory.

You have done a lot of theorizing the past five years with Chiron in your 4th house, Aquarius, and this is an emotional habit: attempting to make intellectual sense of the senseless.

I’m not suggesting you abandon your emotional theories — just that you be less attached to them, and that you directly begin to experiment with them rather than try to prove that they’re true.

Enter Chiron (and Neptune) in Pisces

Chiron is about to become a key player in your chart. It’s about to enter your fellow water sign, Pisces.

Chiron always moves us from theory to experience, and on a good day those experiences help us revise our theories. Human thought is nothing if not an ongoing field of interplay between the theoretical and the practical, but in the current version of the world we tend to get lost in concepts. This is usually a hedge against trying something immediate and authentic, with all its potential risks and rewards. To sum up, two planets moving from your 4th house (Aquarius) to your 5th house (Pisces) is about immersing yourself directly in the cosmos of tangible experience, come what may.

For many years you’ve been immersed in a theoretical world of your own feelings, trying to decide what would make you feel safe. What kind of home situation would be ideal for you? Where should you really live? Why do your emotions have the patterns that they have? Are these patterns permanent, or can you adjust them? Why is your relationship to your family the way that it is?

These are questions that have likely arrived with Chiron in Aquarius, your 4th solar house, the past five years.

Chiron was a help; it was an improvement over just having Neptune in your 4th solar house the past 12 or so years — on the one hand, an extremely confusing transit, one that was ripe with the potential for denial. Yet at the same time you’ve been able to wear away some of your sharper emotional tendencies like stones in a river gradually going from being jagged to being soft and round. To the extent that you were a ‘chip off the old block’ of your family environment, you may have been able to smooth out some of those edges.

However, I would not doubt that there are some situations you got yourself into that were based on what I can simply call emotional delusion, and you now, at least, have an opportunity to see those for what they are.

There is an old canard going around that women want relationships and men want sex. Taken as an absolute, both halves of that statement are false. Both men and women want both sex and relationships. That women are forced by social pressure to deny or lie about their desire for sex creates a lot of conflict. And that women in particular are compelled to pretend every sexual situation must lead to marriage is something that leads dependably to misery. This is all about patterning, and I would point out that the patterns exist in society and they exist in you; and you’re especially susceptible to the patterns of the groups of people around you.

It is very easy for the group you’re in to dictate how you’re supposed to feel — and often, you will fall for this. That has changed during the time of Chiron moving through your deeply sensitive 4th house. This has been a struggle, as you have figured out that the only hope for true autonomy that you have is observing and honoring your own feelings. Your emotional life is not a popularity contest, though many would have it be, and wanting love, you might have been inclined to fall for this.

Famous for its sexual nature, in our society, the basic energy of your sign is an argument waiting to happen. What I suggest is that this argument not go on within you; that you recognize a lot of what is changing about you is the fact that you’re coming to terms with your sexual nature, regardless of what people (any people, from your friends to partner(s) to your children) might think.

Chiron in Pisces is one way of describing the true nature of Scorpio — and that nature is about to emerge with rather profound strength. For you sex is not merely sex; it’s about creative love.

You have Pisces in the 5th house. You have to indulge yourself. The sexuality for which your sign is famous is in part because Scorpio rules the privy parts, which are all about the hormones. But these have a lot of help from the erotic imagination of Pisces. Good sex needs both Scorpio and Pisces energy; you have both and you’re about to add a lot — and I do mean a lot — of Pisces.

The crisis-oriented, emotionally intricate energy of Chiron in the 4th house and Aquarius is giving way to the expansive, imaginative energy of Pisces in the 5th house. Neptune in the 4th house and Aquarius is giving way to active imagination rather than fantasy and denial.

You are likely to be drawn into both new artistic and sexual experiences, and I suggest you follow the ones that feel right, even if that involves taking a slight risk. The risk might be emotional, such as daring to feel something that you don’t ordinarily feel; and it might be the modern kind of risk known as getting experiences. Remember the old AOL motto, Surf Safely! — as if one could really encounter danger on the Internet.

The risks you take will lead to the rewards you get. True, not everything turns out perfectly, but that’s the nature of experience. Don’t expect perfection as it might exist in a neat and orderly theory; that is a control device, and you are seeking freedom. Rather, go into your experiences seeking something real and organic and spontaneous — these things being rare commodities these days, but ones you will benefit from deeply.

Chiron’s role in this process is to give you the focus and the awareness to seek out what is new and unfamiliar. Neptune, which will dip into Pisces for four months or so and then go back to Aquarius for a short while, is about providing you with refreshed and renewed inspiration. If the feeling of Neptune in the 4th is subtle isolation, the sensation of Neptune in the 5th is everything having a slight sheen of cinematic fantasy. Yet at the same time, Chiron is giving you the means to explore those fantasies in a real way.

This will be a different experience from the constant search for security and safety, never quite feeling like you’ve got a grasp on it. Now, your sense of safety comes from stretching into experience, and into specific kinds of creative experiences as a healing process. This may seem a paradox — that daring to try something new offers you a sense of safety. But it’s no more of a paradox than expecting a theory about what makes you feel safe to actually do so.

For a while now, you have made many decisions on the basis of what you thought you were the safest doing. That in turn has created a kind of crystallized pattern in your life, which probably means in your relationships. And the kinds of experiences you are likely to be craving are going to draw you beyond what you felt in the past, into new experiences. Any relationships currently in your life may not be ready to go where you personally are ready to go, and you will need to address this tension one way or the other: by suppressing your experience, by challenging your relationship partner to grow, or by moving beyond the relationship entirely or in selective areas.

The bottom line overall is that you are indeed ready for new experiences, and that fact puts you on what, to others, may seem like a far edge of reality.

Sex: From Fantasy to Reality and Back

The 5th house is the first place we dive into experiences of sexuality with others. Pisces, which you have in this house, has a potent dimension of fantasy, and also of cosmic love. There is a strong overlay in your inner world between erotic fantasy and the real thing — though this is more difficult to manifest in tangible form.

We have all heard stories of how disappointed people are when they actually try out a sexual fantasy. That might be a threesome, it might be a bisexual experience, it might be sex with a friend or boss or someone ‘you would never have thought of that way’. Unfortunately we seem to be more informed by the experiences that don’t go well than we are interested in exploring till we find interesting, nourishing and pleasurable experiences.

While we’re on the way to doing that, we usually have some healing processes to go through. So to the extent that Chiron in Pisces and your 5th house is about exploration, it’s also about healing. This counts for Neptune, which will make a cameo in Pisces this year before settling in for the long run in 2012. Your healing process, in part, involves the interplay of fantasy and experience.

One of the problems with sex is that we project our fantasies onto one another unconsciously. Fantasy is great, but it’s healthier when it’s conscious and not oriented on creating expectations. It’s also healthier when we remember that the whole concept is meaningless unless we’re free within our own minds. Yet this is specifically why fantasy is controversial.

In my long investigation into why masturbation is taboo, I come up with about three plausible reasons, and one of them is that once you go into that zone, you’re entirely free to think of anything you want with anyone you want any way you want. This is particularly true for you. And this can be controversial, in that your thoughts may make others jealous and there are times when the thoughts of others have made you jealous.

A New Concept: Phantasy

Here is something you might find useful in your pleasure-healing process: the idea of phantasy. This has two aspects. One is the conscious, unfettered exchange of erotic ideas and desires in an erotic context, with people we trust or want to explore with; and the idea that there are times when erotic fantasy is so real that it constitutes an actual encounter on an astral (or other nonphysical) plane.

By the first concept of phantasy, we are invoking our desires and ideas in a way that brings them into dialog and thus into acknowledged awareness. You might think of this as sharing fantasy in an open and vulnerable state, with an emphasis on fully expressed honesty. This experience need not be just limited to one’s primary partner or lover. I understand that the realm of sexuality (as opposed to sex) is so personal that we don’t share it with anyone — including a lover. I am suggesting here that your craving for new experiences is likely to be strong, and it’s likely to be fantasy driven, and that as a result you create for yourself a field of exploration that you can move in freely and share with others.

Some form of erotic art or writing would be perfect. You could also host a monthly erotic literature reading in your living room, though I suggest that taking an active part in the creative process is what you may really start to crave.

The second concept of phantasy involves what happens on the subtle planes of consciousness, such as when our thoughts soak into the thoughts of others, or there are actual meetings. Many of us have dreams so vivid we wonder whether they are real, and this presents some interesting fodder for psychological discussion: where is the boundary of self, and is there even such a thing? Or is that boundary itself a figment of our imagination?

Some people will get squiggly about this notion, fearing that any creep might think about them sexually, and somehow it’s not confined to the boundaries of their particular ego. I have news for you. People’s sexual thoughts about you do contact you and your thoughts about others contact them. You may not notice it, they may not notice it, but we are in an extremely psychic environment and many people have imaginations far more vivid than they let on.

I suggest we create some boundaries here where there is typically anarchy, and those boundaries would start with the admission of what is so. One of the things that is so is that many people constantly interact with one another through their imaginations. Another is that these interactions may be dynamic. Another is that there are effects of these experiences, on many levels of reality.

While it’s not possible to have conscious, real-world agreements with everyone, and it’s not possible to control what other people think, I propose that we make consensual fantasy agreements with people we want to share with in this way. People are constantly getting hot for others where an actual experience is considered inappropriate, yet it’s still plausible to raise that interaction out of a state of unconsciousness or denial and bring it to a higher level of awareness.

The astrological connection here is the mix of Chiron and Neptune entering Pisces. This suggests deeply that you will be craving freedom, and that the freedom you crave needs to be responsible and, due to Chiron’s presence, be held with an intent of healing. Healing around sexuality means encountering and addressing the shadow material that holds so many people back — guilt, fear, the sense of being injured, the results of actual injuries, and our affinity for various oppressive situations.

In Western culture, we have a phobia around pleasure in general and sexual pleasure in particular — this is why we’re so obsessed with the kinds of pleasure that tend to shut us down. The healing process begins with embracing the kinds of pleasure that help us open up and discover who we are. And this begins with a relationship to yourself. If you are seeking closer contact with others, the place to start is closer contact with yourself.

Nessus in the 4th House

I have spoken a bit about the 4th house, which for you is Aquarius. While Chiron and Neptune are in the process of leaving that house, there is one significant influence that remains for several more years — the third centaur planet, Nessus. To cover Nessus, I will review a few of the concepts I’ve gone over before.

The 4th is the security base. In a modern human being this is a complex matter. We forget we need so much more than food and a sturdy roof to feel secure. Indeed, we might look at all the factors that make us insecure rather than what we need to feel safe.

Without fail, the things that undermine us come from the past. The 4th is one house that covers the past — not only the family of origin and much of the early childhood drama, but there’s this little thing called the nadir. Also referred to as the 4th house cusp, it’s like a taproot that takes us way back into ancestral material, often on our father’s side of the family. When I first figured out the 4th house the concept came to me this way: the experience of the past that influences the current emotional state of the person. We don’t really honor the ancestors in our society, but I’m suggesting this is in order now.

For many years you’ve had three distinct influences in this house. The first has been Neptune, which dates back to the late 1990s. Neptune is a feel-good influence (the craving of escape), but it can also be emotionally isolating. Yet that isolation can be invisible for a long time. In other words, it can be something you feel but don’t know you’re feeling. It can also represent a distortion in your view of the past and a made-up story about a happy childhood, despite whatever problems you may be aware existed: alcoholic, lying or absent relatives, to name a few.

Then two centaur planets entered your 4th house, approximately at the same time. One was Chiron, the first centaur (discovered in 1977, the harbinger of awareness and healing), and the other was Nessus (discovered in 1993, representing the cycle of karma, the effects of the past and healing extremely deep and painful matters of psychological and sexual abuse).

For years, Neptune aided and abetted our society’s obsession with denying the pain that we carry from the past, and our sense that the present is meaningless. For anyone who thinks our society does not have this obsession, please take a few minutes and tell me why there is a bar on every street corner, alcohol flying out of convenience stores like it was being given away, and a train carload of ‘antidepressant’ drugs consumed every 15 minutes.

As Chiron and Nessus moved through this house, they did two things: raise your awareness to the truth of your past, and push you to evolve beyond it. You can trust one thing: that what has been coming up has been doing so for one purpose — healing. Healing means encountering and resolving shadow material from the past, and moving consciously into the present.

With Aquarius here, we have a hint that something about your family environment was a bit aloof to your so-human reality. The movement of slow planets through this house has been a multi-level process of integrating the material, on the intellectual and emotional levels. Gradually you have claimed yourself back, and gradually you have changed. What was previously a psychological process is now becoming something you can express in a dynamic and creative way. Indeed, taking the opportunity to express yourself, and your healing process, in a tangible, experience-based way will set you free from the psychological maze in which you have so often found yourself lost.

The one slow-moving point that will be left behind in your 4th house is Nessus, and this, I trust, you will find to be a helpful development. It’s easier to focus on one thing in a particular mode than it is to focus on three of them.

So let’s consider Nessus. This is the sense that you’re living with the consequences of the past. This is likely to go right up to the present time in your life. The past might be a relationship or household choice that you made and must still live with now; the past you think of as your childhood; or a past so distant you have no idea where its roots really go. But Nessus always speaks of the sense of consequences coming back to you, often with the feeling that you cannot do anything about them.

You know that you are the way you are for a reason; now is the time to find out the reason, rather than having it lurk as a mystery that half-resembles a ghost and half-resembles the ruins of a foundation of a building from an ancient civilization.

What exactly are these relics and ghosts? Alice Miller has written about how, in Western culture, childhood is an inherently abusive and humiliating experience. We mask this in pleasant memories of a happy childhood and with material opulence, such as having had a lot of toys. But what about those toys?

I was checking out my groceries in the supermarket last night and heard the cashier describing how when her daughter leaves her toys out, she takes them away and doesn’t give them back.

“Tough love,” I said.

“The only kind,” she replied. Delightful.

“The truth about childhood, as many of us have had to endure it, is inconceivable, scandalous, painful,” writes Miller. “Not uncommonly, it is monstrous. Invariably, it is repressed. To be confronted with this truth all at once and to try to integrate it into our consciousness, however ardently we may wish it, is clearly impossible.”

She is right; it’s a process, and a slow one. That’s why these planets that so directly address deep psychology and shadow material move slowly.

“A child too, can never grasp the fact that the same mother who cooks so well, is so concerned about his cough, and helps so kindly with his homework, in some circumstance has no more feeling than a wall of his hidden inner world.”

You are a water sign, empathic and emotional. Aquarius is an air sign, suggesting that your early emotional environment may not have been so emotional. You may have adopted a tendency to turn your emotions, and those of others, into a psychology experiment.

I equate Aquarius with minerals; it has the sensation of something crystallized. This creates for you a strange ability to detach from your feelings, no matter how passionate you may be at the same time. This, by the way, does not really serve you. If you can address this tendency, you will become a much more unified person. It’s good to feel your passion while you’re expressing it, and to have a sense of both its source and its effect on others.

This morning, I started the day by taking a copy of my latest homeopathic book down to my local café. The book is called Sensation Refined by Rajan Sankaran. I came to a part where he was describing the homeopathic effects of remedies based in minerals. This started to ring bells in Scorpio charts. For example, he describes the way in which people with mineral remedy pictures tend to give up their power. He describes a client who might say, “I have to take what he does to me. If only I was independent, there would be no problem. It is my insecurity that leads to this problem.”

He also describes the feeling of losing an ability or capacity, such as telling oneself, “I don’t have it” or “I am losing it.” (What Nessus is suggesting, really, is that something was taken away or suppressed by psychological harshness or neglect that may have surrounded you as a child.)

What Sankaran suggests is that mineral remedies change in a specific way, which involves a theme of development. Think of how a crystal grows, in an orderly but unique way — and methodically. Because we’re talking about your solar 4th house, this would be emotional development. Aquarius can get stuck, but its real theme is the only constant is change. Now, that change is being inspired by a direct encounter with Nessus, who is saying: look for the causes of how you feel. You can no longer pretend that you don’t feel a certain way, or that something is not a certain way. Every effect has a cause, and it can go deep.

Anything that surrounds you in the present and physical world is an expression of an energy pattern, and the idea is to go as deep into that energy pattern as you can. I will give you a clue: it will be tribal in nature; it will be about the sense of being included or excluded; and you will be exploring the relationship between your need for individuality and your need to be part of the group. With that will be included the potential for being rejected. Indeed, if I had to take a guess, the essence of your psychological experience is walking this extremely fine line, uncertain of what will happen when you step out: will you be embraced as you are, or will you be cast off?

I will give you another clue. You didn’t do this to yourself, initially. Someone did it to you. But now, you’re the one who can stop doing it to yourself. You are the one who is in charge of your healing process.

And it boils down to a simple idea: Expression is the opposite of depression.