Today is Wednesday, Aug. 31, 2011. The Moon is in Libra all day, having just made a square to Pluto and an opposition to Uranus overnight. You may have felt that energy as some sort of challenge or surprise to your relationships or a surge in your sense of justice/injustice, if you happened to be awake for it. Today the Moon makes a conjunction to Saturn at 2:43 pm EDT and then a square to Mars at about 8:28 pm EDT.
Given the Moon’s tendency to act as a relay runner, passing the baton of energy from one planet to another, its aspects to Saturn and Mars bring an echo of the Mars-Saturn square of last week. For many of us that aspect was pretty painful and fraught with emotional landmines, and Mercury’s retrograde status at that time did not help in untangling interpersonal conflict gracefully. Again today communication is the key to resolving difficulties, as the Moon makes a sextile to the now-direct Mercury just after its square to Mars. A sextile tends to be a supportive and flowing aspect, so keeping any mutual goals in mind as you work through tension in a relationship may help keep you oriented on where you actually want to be in a way that gets you there.
Gary Caton recently explored another factor to keep in mind as you thread your way through interpersonal communication in these days: the relationship between Jungian communication “functions” or channels and the four elements of astrology. He writes:
Have you noticed how some people are just harder for you to relate to or communicate with? Is there someone at work or a friend of a friend whom, no matter how hard you try, you just can’t seem to reach? Have you ever replied with what seems like a perfectly reasonable and maybe even extremely thoughtful response to a question or idea for a project and you get no reaction? Sometimes this has nothing to do with the quality of your communication, but rather the ‘channel’ you are sending it on.
One of the first things I learned in my counseling internships was not to respond to feeling with cognition. If someone is telling me how they feel and I respond with conceptual information or practical advice, I may as well be telling them “I don’t care how you feel,” because I have essentially switched channels on them. Even if I just say something formulaic like “Wow, that must be hard,” at least I am acknowledging and validating their feelings.
There are four basic channels that we communicate on. Carl Jung calls these “functions” and likens them to cardinal points of a compass. In Psychological Types he tells us the basic nature of these four psychological functions: “Sensation establishes what is actually present, thinking enables us to recognize its meaning, feeling tells us its value, and intuition points to possibilities as to whence it came and whither it is going in a given situation.” These four operate in two dichotomous pairs whereby the functions of thinking versus feeling, and sensation versus intuition, form the core of the personality.
Just like a counselor should not respond to feeling with thinking, it is hard to see what direction something is going (intuitive) when you are examining its chemical composition (sensing). For each of these pairs, most of us tend to choose one of these functions over the other as our default position. For instance in the Myers-Briggs Personality Indicator, a person scores as either Sensate or Intuitive. So, most people have a personal preference for one way of processing over the other. The sensate person focuses on the details of what is there. The intuitive person focuses on movement. They are communicating on different channels, and so no matter how hard they try, if one of them does not switch channels they may not hear what the other person is saying. Some people call this talking ‘at’ someone.
In astrology, it is common to correlate Jung’s four functions with the four elements: Sensation = earth, Thinking = air, Feeling = water, and Intuition = fire. So, right now with Jupiter and Mercury both near stations (Jupiter is still in the midst of its station, through Sept. 1), we have a struggle between the sensation of what something is, or what it is made of (Jupiter in Taurus/earth) and the intuition (Mercury in Leo/fire) of where it is going.
Depending on what your default position is, you may need to change your ‘channel’. The Sensate types could stand to lift their head up from their microscopes to get a sense of directionality; the Intuitive types could stand to focus a bit and understand more about the basic nature of what has caught their eye. Both functions or channels are currently heightened but which one you need to communicate on will depend on who you are talking to and which is your naturally dominant function. If things are frustrating, try changing channels and see if somebody’s ears perk up.
Speaking of ears (and perhaps other body parts) perking up, Venus is coming up on a square to Pholus in a couple of days. Pholus has as a key phrase, “small cause, big effect,” and of course Venus is all about amore. Translation: don’t let your mind and emotions run away with you. Eric called it an “obsessive love thingie” last night. I thought it simply sounded like a fun band name, but he had a point worth tucking in your pocket in case you need a reminder as we head toward the weekend: “Express your love thingie in an understated way. You don’t need to rent the fire truck to present flowers on the third floor, just ring the buzzer.” And when the object of your obsessive love thingie answers the door, keep your eyes and ears perked. You’ll want to be sure you’re on the same channel as you explain how you feel, and hear the reply.
Amanda Painter
Notice and choose: in fresh horoscopes weekly and twice monthly, the current sky speaks through your Sun and rising signs. Eric unfolds the themes in Planet Waves subscriber edition and Planet Waves Light so you can notice your patterns and choose consciously.
Amanda, you of the beautiful heart and obsessive love thingie, I wanted to write you a note yesterday and then got sidetracked. I was reminded this morning of what I wanted to say when a quote from one of my teachers popped up in my Facebook feed and since he says it so well, I will just share directly:
“Don’t be afraid to be a mystery to yourself. So many times we do things or take certain directions that we don’t understand. It is only much later that we see how that action fit perfectly and inevitably to the overall pattern of our life. That is why it is so important to be willing to take a chance on our inspiration, our intuition, our hunger. When we override our deepest desires with ‘practical, ‘reasonable’ considerations we are not only wasting our time, we are passing up precious opportunities that will not come again.”
I realize that Pholus can be a powder keg or a spouting cask of wine and we don’t always like what we end up when we light it or uncork all that pressure. As for me, I have survived each such explosion in my life (though I didn’t always know I would survive when navigating the aftermath) and become freer for it. Trust your desires. Yes, some of our desires may be shaped by old wounds and attempts to get someone to heal those wounds for us. The desire also contains our deepest wisdom and the expression of all that is whole and holy.
Unless the object of the obsessive love thingie has said he needs you to take it slow, I’d chip in for the fire-truck rental, cheer for you when the fireworks go off and/or console you if it crashes and burns. Love loves you, girl. Don’t doubt it.
Thanks all you INFPs! Catching up a little late, as I was travelling back home yesterday. I’ll never forget reading the INFP description for the first time and breathing a sigh of relief on reading that we were highly communicative and empathetic (which people often mistake for being extrovert), but needed downtime to recuperate because we absorbed people’s energies easily. People have often been confused, especially if they don’t know me well, by the way I’m ‘out there’ – and when they want me to come out and play again, they can’t even smoke me out at times! And I recognise the ‘no’ thing, too. Good to know that i’m in such good company! Always reassuring, cos the pressure to conform can be great at times. And thank you so very much, dear astrologer friends, for your spectacular blogs! Liz xxx
Patty, oops, sorry…yeshetsomo03 at yahoo dot com.
Patty,
My heart goes out to you. I really understand wanting to shower your daughter with all of the love you couldn’t give her when she was growing up. My daughter is 25; I placed her for adoption when I was 21. Her adoptive parents at least allowed me to send her presents at her birthday and Christmas each year. I wrote long letters, too, but they never gave them to her until she turned eighteen. For years I poured my heart into finding or making the ‘perfect’ gifts. I embellished each gift with ribbons and bobbles. I did not know if I would survive our separation. I ached to my bones.
I am still more demonstrative in my love for her than she for me. She is contained in a way that I couldn’t be if I tried. As we have gotten to know each other over the past four and a half years, spending a good deal of time together, I have strained to meet her exactly where she is, at her pace. I imagine the process is a bit like a condensed and crash course in parenting, only most mothers get a solid 18 years to figure out how to meet their child exactly where they are. My daughter has loving adoptive parents, but she still wants me to parent her. *And* she wants me to parent her in a way that is within her emotional comfort zone.
What has helped me the most is being able to express some of the intensity of my feelings to supportive friends and lovers so that my own tendency to emote (and make her uncomfortable) has other avenues for expression.
By the way, I am also adopted and my own birthmother made contact with me for the first time last December. We have been writing, slowly getting to know each other. It has given me a whole new appreciation for how emotionally vulnerable I think my daughter has felt, how risky it is to trust the person who ‘gave you away.’ No matter that I intellectually understand the legitimate reasons that my birthmother couldn’t keep me, letting her love in opens old wounds.
I wish you much love and support and if it would help to have someone to correspond with about this, I would be happy to lend an ear via email. You could write me at yeshetsomo at yahoo dot com.
I’m hearing it all, folks, and just soaking it in. I forget what my Meyers-Briggs came out to be when it was done more than a few years ago, but I don’t think I would come out the same now. I was working for a major oil company then, fairly low on the totem pole, and doing the M-B was part of a team building/preparation for layoff exercise and no, the team wasn’t all that thrilled about the whole thing, I can assure you. Artificial cheeriness does not dispel long-term gloom.
The way I feel now would place me in another world compared to that one, and we certainly are in a different one now.
Glad all of our east coast PWavers made it through Irene intact.
great point patti, the path to biggest growth is in the direction opposite your dominant function. maybe that is why i love gardening, hiking and spending time in nature. when i think of sensate i think of that john denver song:
you fill up my senses, like a night in a forest, like the mountains in springtime, like a walk in the rain, like a storm in the desert, like a sleepy blue ocean…
Amanda:
better yet, I’ll buy a bullhorn for the occasion.
This was great in so many ways. My love thingee is a 43 year old girl I put up for adoption, who is a thinking Gemini. I am a feeling Pisces who sends too many gifts and too many flowery words, crossed with my Aries fire in Mars, Venus and Mercury where I express my watery feelings a little too strongly (both love and anger – make that steam heat please), scaring the crap out of her and all of her family. I understand me perfectly, it is everyone else that is crazy.
Oh boy. Where was this advice 10 years ago? She is Gemini at 28 by the way, a the nuclear degree. She is not speaking to me right now.
yay fe!!!
yeah, we all just really want love thingie advice, don’t we? 🙂
i was telling gary today i just barely managed to hold off on posting a photo of the object of my obsessive love thingie with this post. the one good-sized photo i have of him has him making a goofy face. but he’s still adorable. and lucky for him, is currently on the other side of the country.
(actually, fe… he’s in your neck of the woods. care to rent a fire truck on my behalf? i’ll pay for the gas and flowers….)
😉
Love Thingie advice!! Love thingie advice!!!
Thanks – since there is that tendency I have to be come overly enthusiastic, those words will be kept in pocket.
Besides, the unexpressed buildup is also a form of “communication” – as long as you don’t let it get out of hand.
Agreed, great to revisit the Jung. Thanks. I’m INFJ. When I first did the Myers-Briggs test I just thought ‘Oh crap’ – something else confirming how far outside the mainstream I am. Most days I like the view from the outside – others I just want to fit in. All of these labels come with limitations; we all possess each of these qualities in a unique ratio. And that ratio can change over time. Saying “I am this or that type” can sometimes work counter to the need to grow. Challenges in the functions or places where we are weakest often produce the most profound leaps in evolution. In terms of personal growth, a strong intuitive thinker, for example, can really make progress by exploring the realms of sensation and feeling even though they may feel much less comfortable there.
switching channels – i can do.
toning down the “obsessive love thingie”…. is so against my nature, it may be a touch more difficult. i shall try my bestest to cancel tonight’s fire truck rental. damn.
this was an awesome article. love the jung stuff on top of charts. in high school i won an essay writing contest offered my the local university with a piece on:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deptford_Trilogy
i won a dictionary. 🙂 my favourite book on earth.
my chart is much like my meyers-briggs results. quelle surprise.
still SO loving the images on this site. ALL of them.
ps Gary, yes, Thank You…I am looking at my natal chart with a new POV today. :)!
Darkmary – yes, that is how it is taught. However, personally I am energized by both alone time and social time. Too much alone is draining and I must re-charge with socializing. Too much socializing and I must have downtime to sort it all out, clean the closets as it were and get ready to “go again”….preferably before I am needy for company.
I’m sure, as with many things, one size doesn’t fit all despite our need to define and categorize.
I forget what my Myers-Briggs four-letter was but I do remember that it aptly recorded that I was keenly intuitive and got more and more focused as stress increased. I’m the one you call in a crisis – as in, I’m the one to call on in a crisis.
I presume that our MB test scores might shift over time, assuming that we learn, grow and become more balanced.
Another note of interest re “listening” and “listening differently” is how many people do not respond positively to “active listening”. Apparently they are not used to being heard and/or are afraid of actually being heard.
xo
gary & darkmary — right there with you on the introvert part. i *love* to go dancing to live music, let loose my social-butterfly sag moon at a party, talk to strangers easily, etc. but i need a *lot* of downtime on my own.
and that immediate, inner “no” also sounds all too familiar. i tend to actually notice when my immediate, instinctual response to something is “yes” — it really stands out in my awareness. and yes, i too often will come around to a “yes” with a little time & space to feel my way there. and it’s still a sincere yes — sometimes i just wish it took a lot less time to get there, though.
another INFP here, though most of my numbers were pretty low, if i recall.
omg, sometimes i wish i could just go off and find a really kewl squat and get high and read jung for weeks 😉
Right on! So feeling the transition, definitly turning the corner. Coming up on a year in my job ¬icing my influence for good but also noticing a tendency to let it go to my head. Resentments rising due to over-generosity to others while neglecting myself–codependentcy plus buying love operating to some degree here I think. But generally feeling more commitment, energy, & hopefulness than in awhile. Feeling like I’m in new territory for sure, with a little fear about possible relapse into addictions so am reimmersing myself in recovery literature. Accepting the few “Nos” involved in my addictions opens me up to receive the generosity of a loving creation!
Wow, Gary, that quote from Jung was so helpful. My former partner still gets frustrated with me. “Your answer to everything is always no,” she has complained for years. I often change my mind with time (sometimes even very quickly), but the ‘no’ response feels almost primal. When I enter a social situation, I often have to consciously/decisively flip a switch to override the reflexive ‘no’, although I would have never been able to articulate that dynamic until I read the quote. I haven’t read Jung in a long time. Now I really want to revisit his writings. Thank you.
lol, amanda that would be a way kewl name for a band
Hi All, happy to see this struck a chord 🙂 I’m INFP, with the iNtuitive being dominant function, and go figure -I’ve got 5 planets in Fire, 4 of them ruled by Mars (i’ve gone both ways on the T/F and J/P at different times, but INFP is most common)
Starry, from what I’ve seen, Extrovert/Introvert is generally thought to correlate with the north/south hemispheres of the chart ie -above/below the horizon
and yes, ime the definition of extrovert/introvert is not necessarily outgoing/shy, but more about where/how you get your energy. I can be VERY social, but then I need my downtime to recharge. 4/5 of my fire planets are below the horizon
By his own account, Jung spent ten years considering and reconsidering the criterion for classification. The first division formulated by Jung was the introvert-extrovert –now household terms. I find it very interesting what Jung says about the I/E axis.
It seems to have to do with how we encounter an object -the introvert has a negative reaction while the extrovert has a positive reaction. In Jung’s own words,
“there is a whole class of men who, at the moment of reaction to a given situation, at first draw back a little as if with an unvoiced ‘no’, and only after that are able to react; and there is another class who, in the same situation, come out with an immediate reaction, apparently quite confident that their behaviour(sic) is self-evidently right”
I am a strong introvert, and this initial “no” is often true of me. My wife has learned to break me in gently to new things (by first letting me get used to the IDEA) or to let my no sit and then come back a while later. Often upon reflection I will often change to yes.
Starrynight, thanks for getting me to chew on the correlation between/among planets, elements, and the 4 aspects of Meyers-Briggs. Thanks Amanda and Gary for the much-needed reminder of how we meet (or miss) each other in communication depending on which channel we use. I’m INFJ, off the charts N (intuiting). Years ago I co-facilitated a support group with a woman who was ISTJ, her S (sensing) off the chart. I struggled to see the trees for the forest and she struggled to see the forest for the trees. I learned so much from her, but it is so easy to forget when one type or function of one’s personality is particularly dominant.
aword: You can be outgoing and still be an introvert. If my understanding of the introvert/extrovert continuum is correct, Meyers and Briggs meant it as an assessment of where one gets their energy. Introverts are energized by down time–recharging our batteries while we are alone. Extroverts are energized by their interactions with others. Although it may be paradoxical, an extrovert can actually be shy or awkward socially (but still energized by social interaction) and an introvert can be outgoing, even gregarious, and yet drained by social interaction. This is certainly my experience of my own ‘introversion.’ I can do a party and switch on like a light bulb and am similarly adept at public speaking. But then I have to go home and recuperate for days and I don’t want to see anyone.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong; it has been a long time since I studied this, but this is my memory.
starry —
the entire block quote on channels/elements was written by gary (hence the block quote).
🙂
Woke up this morning with this subject in mind – not heavy but light and finally with a different sense-ability about not non-commital relationships but about some form of denial in them that dis-allows true partnership to shine through. So – I am Keeping in mind mutual goals, Working through Tensions with those in mind (even if the “mutual goal” be love, frienddship, etc ie something emotional).
My emotional sponge is still soaking Gary’s ideas. Thank you for this piece.
Starrynight – 😉 I’m mostly Water, with a lot of Fire, Earth is prominent and I gasp for Air.
Grew up thinking I was “introvert” because that’s my family’s MO but my naturally outgoing personality sort of precludes that definition. As far as Myers-Briggs; I’m a totally ass-back-wards-ab-normal “type”. Whatever. But I was for sure using “EQ” for management long before MBAs gave it a name. lol. Like Gary points out; communication/relating can surely be about how we are “listening” to others – on many levels.
i would offer that there are other more esoteric “channels” too – I often send “messages” to people but don’t force my time-line. I put the thought out for them to retrieve when they may like to. Sort of like intuitive emaii.
Anyway, back to work; the day has long started here in overcast SoCal. Heat wave out here was over with the passing of Irene back East.
Thank you All. Good reading as always!!
“Given the Moon’s tendency to act as a relay runner, passing the baton of energy from one planet to another, its aspects to Saturn and Mars bring an echo of the Mars-Saturn square of last week. For many of us that aspect was pretty painful and fraught with emotional landmines, and Mercury’s retrograde status at that time did not help in untangling interpersonal conflict gracefully”
Thought I got by ok with only one blow up (with hubby) during the mars Saturn square, but Saturday 8-27 had a most painful awkward moment with the 84 yo father. He made a hurtful disparaging remark I normally would have ignored (he tends to be hateful and I’ve learned to sidestep his random bullets). Instead,i nailed him in no uncertain terms with the info that his opinion and approval are meaningless to me. Since people in my family rarely if ever confront his nastiness, this was a historical moment and, most likely enraged, he left the scene, also a rare event. Sigh.
So do I wish him Happy Birthday on his Facebook page today?
Thanks! I’m a Jung lover from way back. 🙂 ENFP here. The most popular element in my chart is water (five planets), followed by fire (two), air (two Inc. Sun) then earth (one)
What would you correlate to the Extrovert/introvert types? Perhaps the E comes from Mars (earth) in the first house ruled by Jupiter. Although I’m considered an extrovert, I feel like an introvert (mars Rx?)
Good stuff, Amanda. (or is it Gary?)
Thank you! This was eye-opening (the channels part) and very helpful!
This is fascinating, positive, very helpful. If it wasn’t for these wonderful words I read every morning, I don’t think my life would be headed in such a good direction. I’m very grateful.
Fabulous! Thank you.
Thank you. Pretty darn cool and useful and easy to remember. A nifty kit to carry around.