The Jupiter-Neptune-Chiron Conjunction
2009-2010
Part One
Finding the medicine within: healing ourselves and healing our world.
Throughout 2009 and into 2010, we will be living under the influence of the powerful Neptune-Chiron conjunction in the sign of Aquarius. This year, the duo is joined by Jupiter, amplifying the energy of healing, mysticism, and compassion. But out of fear or neglect, we could deepen our wounding through self-destructive behavior. Let’s make a decision right now to choose the first option and to practice non-judgment for those choosing the latter.
Jupiter and Chiron will be in exact conjunction on May 23rd, with Neptune very close at hand. The time is ripe to bring Chiron’s mythology into broader consciousness: the compassionate teacher and “wounded healer” living a life of service. Chiron was born half-horse, half human; his animal self connects him intuitively with the regenerative properties of nature and blends with his human self to provide skill and reasoning. Chiron mentored many heroes in the Greek world, including Asclepius who developed a widely popular practice of dream healing. This practice holds the seed truth that though we contain pain, we also contain the medicine to heal through ritual, therapy, and enlarging our sense of self.
When we identify with myths and dreams, we find our personal struggles reflected back to us in collective symbols. In his book The Practice of Dream Healing, Edward Tick writes about how identifying with myth “demonstrates to the sufferer that he or she is not struggling alone and unnecessarily, but rather is in a necessary ordeal with some eternal aspect of the human condition.”
Acknowledging our own suffering awakens compassion and moves us away from the allure of oblivion. Modern oblivion often takes the form of isolation, numbing out, or doing whatever it takes to feel good. We all probably have something that resembles a pure desire driving us to distorted actions. Shadow behaviors like addiction, manipulation, or victimhood, can actually be a cover story for shiny behaviors like connecting with the Divine, cultivating trust with another, surrendering to the flow.
With this conjunction, we have multiple opportunities to uncover the roots of our suffering, to move toward healing, and to amplify the vibration of healing for the whole planet. This union of Neptune-Chiron-Jupiter is already making waves. You might be feeling more emotional in general. Situations in your life could start mirroring your own sensitive issues and buried emotional pain. If we step up to the challenge, we can call Emotional Intelligence back into our culture. In our heavily mental society, feelings are discounted as irrelevant. But when this triad of planets goes to high frequency beginning in April, we can begin to see how our very survival depends upon our capacity to feel and to heal.
Here are some suggestions to tune into this powerful time:
Slow down. We need to make more space in our lives instead of cramming every moment with activity.
Read Mythology. Do some research and find one or two stories that really resonate with you – stories that relate to experiences in your own life. Let these stories guide you as you work to change your own story.
Listen to your dreams. If you’ve never kept a dream journal, now might be a great time to start. Spending time writing your dreams down could help you take a quantum leap in untangling the threads of your personal history and inner demons.
Listen to your body. Our bodies are often the first victims of our lack of emotional acumen. Is it time for you to change how you relate to your body? Great advances can be made right now in healing our physical bodies. The current planetary energy offers a chance to expand awareness of community healing and holistic remedies on a massive scale.
Offer your skills. Chiron shows us how wounds can become medicine, and how we all have something to offer to the world. Are there ways you’re being called to offer your gifts? Is it time to be a student or a teacher?
Part Two
The Body is the Ground
As we live under the influence of the powerful Neptune-Chiron-Jupiter conjunction in the sign of Aquarius, we are being surrounded by a super-charged vibration of healing that can help us break through emotional baggage and patterns of suffering.
One of the ways it does this is by increasing our capacity for compassion. In a recent study of compassion at the University of Southern California, brain scans showed that “even the most complex psychological emotions engaged many of the same brain systems that responded to physical states [like injury and physical threats]. That suggests these emotions go deep in our brain and they also go deep in our body, in our flesh.”
Science finally catches up with spirit yet again: our bodies, our emotions, and our minds are not separate compartments but parts of an integrated whole.
The study also found that engaging our compassion for psychological emotions can take longer than empathizing with physical pain, and that we have to learn how to do it. It is tempting to shut down our empathy and compassion when there is so much suffering in the world. We can feel paralyzed by the painful information we receive each day about bombings, viruses, homelessness, and intolerance. But when we pretend not to see or know, our bodies and psyches still sift through the information, and this can have long-lasting effects on our own health and the health of our communities.
What we are being asked to do now is take a jump forward in our ability to be with the suffering of others, and to see how our presence can create more possibility for peace and justice to prevail. If we open to our pain and the pain of others, we are actually acknowledging a source of our strength – that we are not separate beings but part of an interrelated whole. In this way, we can heal the world: by staying open, by being moved to offer help where we can, and by taking time to connect to the deep source of life.
Healing and exploring our own bodies can be a gateway to this enhanced awareness and evolutionary consciousness. The physical body is the ground on which all other work is built. If we are not tuned into what’s going on in our physical bodies, how can we accomplish all of the millions of things we expect ourselves to accomplish these days? This planetary configuration can help us make leaps forward in our understanding of how energy influences physical healing.
Our lifestyles and attitudes toward health and healing are shifting all around us. We are discovering new modalities and rediscovering old remedies for fixing what ails us. Many people in western culture are now receiving the benefits of acupuncture, massage, and shamanic healing to name a few. If you suffer from chronic health problems, you may find relief using methods outside of the mainstream model of medicine – fold remedies, dream healing, or Reiki for example.
In the coming years, we can expect a surge of health options to enter into the daily lives of more Americans. It looks like America might finally make steps toward National Healthcare. In the meantime, it’s possible that as we all make do with less income, we will seek out ways to heal ourselves and each other outside the cost-prohibitive grip of insurance companies, such as community clinics and DIY healing seminars. If you have skills to offer in these areas, you will be asked to be on the frontlines of this healthcare revolution, teaching others how to tap into herbal medicine, pressure points or energetic healing.
In the spirit of fostering compassion and connecting to the body’s natural resilience and connection to the whole, I’d like to close by offering a practice taught to me by Joanna Macy called “Breathing through.” It is offered here in an abridged form, but you can find the practice in its entirety by going to http://joannamacy.net/html/buddhism/practices.html#breathing
Begin by closing your eyes and focusing on your breathing. Notice that it happens without you making a decision to breathe. It is as though you are being breathed by life. Now see your breath as a ribbon, moving into your nostrils, down your throat, and into your lungs and heart. Following this ribbon of breath, imagine that it moves out of your heart through a space in your chest, entering back into the larger breath of all life that surrounds us. As it passes into your body and out again through your heart, the breath is now a loop that connects you to the web of life. See it and feel it flowing in and out again, in and out.
Now open your awareness to the suffering that is present in the world. Let concrete images arise, images of hardship and pain being felt by our fellow humans and other beings we share the planet with. Breathe in the pain like dark granules on the stream of breath, up through your nose, down into your lungs and heart, and out again into the world. You are asked to do nothing for now but to let it pass through your heart. Do not hold onto it or seek to change it. Just let it pass through you. If no images arise but only numbness, breathe that through. If what arises is your own personal pain and suffering, breathe that through. Numbness and our own pain is part of the grief of our world. Our practice is just to keep breathing. Trust it and keep breathing without having to do anything else in this moment but stay present with the suffering and with ourselves.
|
