That sense of need you’re feeling: is it real, is it realistic, or is it in your imagination? Whatever may be the case, it’s the Moon square Venus. This is the aspect that feels like the Dr. Seuss book, Are You My Mother? While it’s given a special designation in astrology, we all feel this one most of the time — but address the feeling different ways.
Some will figure out where their power is and use it on, with or against others. Some will ask for help. Most (because so many of us are so insecure) will quietly wait for something to happen; for someone to offer some nurturing; to pay attention to us in a way that we can benefit from. In a world that is more self-centered than nearly any of us usually conceive of, that last method is unlikely to work.
Generally we must assert ourselves against the environment, including the human environment. And with the Moon in Aries, a fire sign, that subtle sense of conceit (not the metaphysical kind, but the ordinary one) may be in the air: the fiery Moon will struggle with empathy; and that process may be unconscious. In other words, there is a struggle but it doesn’t have a name; and the awareness of the results is disconnected from the cause.
Venus is in Cancer. This is attractive, but it’s often emotionally self-serving. The Moon is in Aries and can have the same property. Both are a bit aggressive, in the sense of making sure their needs come first; not everyone is aggressive, so some of us will be transgressed as others do their thing, a touch oblivious to the world around them. This is a choice; the choice to feel one’s environment, to empathize, to sympathize, which is an actual gesture of submission, if momentary.
Here is the question: how do you learn to feel? How, particularly in the face of so many instances when we expect others (more sensitive than we care to be) to do all the feeling for us (Note, this is generally the role assigned to artists and writers: to feel and be vulnerable, on behalf of the rest of us. They are the canaries in the coal mine of society.)
The answer is: you recognize what you’re missing and you decide it’s time to learn. You would count the cost of not responding, and decide it’s too much for you and the people around you. As a cautionary note, most of what we will feel when we start the process is pain. There might be some remorse as well, because we can start to count the results of not having done enough in the past. Most people will be happy that you show up in the present. I don’t mean as their servant or one making a sacrifice: I mean as one who responds appropriately to a situation. And that appropriateness takes time to learn. This learning process includes noticing when you over-respond and give too much.
Most astrology books will count this aspect as emotionally needy, and we have a way in our culture of making that out to be a bad thing. You hear it all the time: to call someone needy is a kind of insult. But when do we have the conversation about what mutually works for all of us, or for the people involved in any one situation? I really mean that — when, exactly?
The answer to the question “why not” is easier to answer; which is generally because one person wants to avoid the issue, to avoid being needed at all; and the other one is afraid of provoking precisely that. If we wonder where our intimacy and vulnerability go, this is a fine place to start looking.
Jere writes: “My soul, and mostly my brain, just plain hurt from the evil shit I’ve allowed across my consciousness thus far… ”
There are two ways to hold your eyes. One is what we’ve been trained to call ‘neutral’ – but is actually passive/complicit. The other is slightly more invigorated (not too much at first or you’ll tire)-and this is seeing with a wave of Bright Love. You handle the thing with your eyes, you caress it, rotate it 360 degrees in space, you allow the standing wave of your vision to fully permeate what you are regarding.
It is the idea that we are helpless that guts us most of the time. We are not.
Don’t do this more than once or twice a day for the first 30 days.
After a while, you’ll see it displace the other mode of seeing.
It’s time is over anyway.
We’re moving on.
I want to throw out a couple thoughts before I go think some more on this. As far as drugs are concerned, some people (or maybe I’m the freak exception, though I doubt that) use not to numb out, but to go as deep into the territory the particular substance will allow. What I’ve noticed in my experience is that different drugs bring UP different material, the only drawback (besides addiction) was that I wasn’t able to constructively purge the matter, it just kicked it peripheral awareness side.
As far as the mass violence… I’ve had to start ignoring it. In a matter of seconds from being exposed to the nasties, my energy-being drains down to fatigue and I start to feel physically ill. I’ll walk away and go breathe by myself, or if I’m already zoned out and staring at a wall, I can fully ditch the airwave reality, and no amount of shouting in my ear will even phase me. I don’t get so much from the t.v. anymore, cut that out, but people in social settings… friends, acquaintances, strangers, random overheard boisterous conversations… I’ve got a ton of shit I want to do in this reality, none of which has to do with bullshitting about mass destruction (unless someone’s got a viable plan to end it). And THAT is my key: walk the fuck away and find some cats who want to make this space a good trip, who work towards collective lovin’ functional stability, and who do so by being aware (yeah, ya kinda gotta know how raw the shit is) of the present collective sociological state of ouch most folks are in, while operating from that inner core being. My soul, and mostly my brain, just plain hurt from the evil shit I’ve allowed across my consciousness thus far… I’m so freakin’ tired of it, I just want to play fun from here on out.
Back to thinkin’ and feelin’ and doin’ the Love.
J
Hi Eric,
The first dozen or so times you heard and/or saw carnage like what you describe, you probably did feel it and possibly threw up. For me it was road kill (squirrels, dogs, etc.). Then I learned to not look directly at it and not allow the reality to penetrate my mind.
Since you are a natural feeler, I think you can have empathy for strangers (the Aquarian Moon helps a lot) and genuine feelings for your family and friends even though you are exposed to the brutality of everyday life via tv and other media. The sub-human types who thrive on this kind of news are the reason it prevails. We demanded to be allowed to see pictures of the casualties of war as our right.
You and all the water types will always feel the pain for everyone, like the earth types will always keep us grounded, the air types keep us thinking clearly and the fire types will energize us. We all heal.
Today is the day local media “celebrates” the tenth anniversary at the JCC summercamp where both my children were directly “victims” of an attack by white supremist Buford Furrow (my son asked if he shot at kids because he hates his name? haha.)
I’m not surprised that my son has had sever stomach/intestinal problems the past few days – I suspect it will subside when the “festivities” are over.
I offered to him (now 15) that perhaps he needs to take this as opportunity to send that experience “back to God” once and for all and be done with it.
Certainly our sickening desire to wash ourselves in the blood of others can begin to end when we relieve ourselves of need to live out our fears over and over again through their tradegies.
I for one – and thick though the sludge may be – embrace my profundity of feeling and am moving on.
If you are not strong with military you are going to get your ass kicked.
Isn’t it true you get your ass kicked in 5 minutes if you show slightest weakness
in world just in day to day living? check it out….
Must kick ass and kick hard and take care of yourself…
Does seem crazy, but think about what happens when someone
jumps on you— You are gonna want that strength man… I’m not even
talking about war… just the way things are day to day…. war is just amplification
of day to day human nature…
Like, oh you want to f”’ with me? you just f”-d wrong person f”’er
(ala robert deniro taxi driver) It is a psycho world- just look at hillary clinton…
look at medical establishment ! – they will kill you !
I may be wrong. just positing this as question to think on….
have to kick ass at any second like Bourne in Bourne identity or something,
correct me if i’m wrong… just the way it is…. (unless terribly deluded… has alway
been my experience however..)
People will come at you — and you have to take care of yourself then…
“Venus is in Cancer. This is attractive, but it’s often emotionally self-serving.”
Hmm… I have been watching the Venusian/Aphrodite energy in my Sun sign for a few days, and this is how it feels to me (subject to other transits, of course): like sexual energy and nurturing energy have an opportunity to commingle without necessarily converging. The function of the square to the Aries Moon is to keep them ever-so-slightly distinct.
***
The Saturn/Mars square that is perfecting today has taken out my PB, the most important instrument I own – just as my son needs a new computer for school. So, we will do the selfish-Venus-in-Cancer thing and get it for him anyway.
(This is the one aspect under which I have been know to grow a little, hmmm, arch.)
Love,
M
How about this: I’m sitting in an airport lounge right now; and a headline just flashed across the monitor: a guy with a drug history was charged with killing his mother, burning her body and fleeing to Mexico. How exactly do you respond to that with feeling? If I actually felt that, I would throw up; and we see and/or hear about this stuff every single day.
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Ain’t global mass communication great – in so many ways.
Not in others – When folk used to live in caves and forests and fields as a mere part of the natural world rather than the synthetic one that has become an exponentially-woven cocoon against all that is natural, things were easier psychologically.
An impersonal media saturates us with images and horrors (like genocide, not ‘simply’ murder of individuals) and it becomes a diet of normality – it’s like when you tolerate abuse over time it becomes normal.
There is no way for the human psyche to transcend these difficulties on an individual platform. We need to ask collectively some serious questions around the whole issue of ‘news’ – like for one, how is it anything other than gossip? What do I NEED to know that really empowers me that might be described as ‘news’?
This is a matter for a responsible collective that is thinking of global self-interest. I can’t help thinking here about the Frankfurt School neo-Marxist Critical Theorist, Jurgen Habermas. In the Theory of Communicative Action he made a plea for rational, purposive, communicative, action within a collective. Our standards of personal and collective governance needs these four axes – badly. Without such a move, individuals will have to seek to bring up their kids without them being conditioned through societal, reality filters.
Dodging bullets and flak all the time is not pretty however and extremely exhausting.
There must be a culture shift. (I would say a credible counter-cultural movement that models an alternative mode of living that is healthy and productive – amounting to a viable social ecosystem). That would give people who were vacillating between authenticity and conditioning something to measure against, instead of the prevailing bullshit.
This question of “neediness” is really interesting, especially in the context of the balance of thinking and feeling. At every level, internally and within relationships, it’s like a razor’s edge: expressing neediness can be a courageous attempt to bring deeper honesty and meaning-until you tip too far into it and it becomes just more self absorption, and, effectively, a power grab. I’m interested in learning to recognize when and if I can find myself poised for a nanosecond on that edge, and then be willing to let it go.
We often admit that we are a numbed-out society: by everything from alcohol to mood stabilizers to bad parenting. But we don’t admit the other side of that: the self-centered attitude and its impact on others; and its impact on our ability to receive.
How about this: I’m sitting in an airport lounge right now; and a headline just flashed across the monitor: a guy with a drug history was charged with killing his mother, burning her body and fleeing to Mexico. How exactly do you respond to that with feeling? If I actually felt that, I would throw up; and we see and/or hear about this stuff every single day.
So what is the sane response? How do we treat one another as a result? In other words, when I numb out to this news, do I also numb out to you?
Needing, feeling vs. thinking, doing. Strive for a balance, over and over again. Feeling seems to follow its own “rules” and not conducive to control on its own. All ‘feelers’ know that pain is the biggee, but the lucky feelers know how joy feels too. Lots of feelers assume that is their raison d’etre; some like it that way, some don’t.
Can’t imagine having to learn how to feel, but if it’s possible, then patience, on the part of the teacher and patience on the part of the learner would be necessary. Courage too. Feeling can be breath-taking and scary. True, sometimes the feeler will be the caged canary in the coal mine, but sometimes the feeler soars with rapture, and, for sure, pity the poor non-feeler then!
As it is, the transiting Venus is conjunct my Sun and the transiting Moon is sextile my Moon at the moment. I’m more inclined to soar right now.