“We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.” - Khalil Gibran

If Hallow’s Eve and All Soul’s Day approaches, we know we must be entering the dungeons of transformation in Scorpio.   The New Moon in Scorpio occurs Wednesday afternoon in the U.S. and can be felt more dramatically due to its aspects to Chiron, Pluto, Uranus, and Jupiter.  this week of the New Moon, Our healing potential is empowered through our willingness to deepen our commitment to evolution.  Adaptibility brings inspiration, letting go increases the need for faith and the trust that inner guidance will light the way.

With Venus squaring Mars, we can expect some relational friction, power struggles, and stubborn intensity, all of which can be channeled into enticing arousal if used intelligently.  It will be best to evaluate what our individual value system is as opposed to a value system determined by any kind of emotional, sexual, or relational dependency.  (For partnership guidance, my couple’s readings are still $25 off if ordered by Oct. 31.)

Scorpio is naturally the most psychologically penetrating season of the year.  We ask WHY and WHAT CAUSES for the behaviors of ourselves, our partners, and anyone we share resources or some kind of karmic strands with.  Naturally, our wounded parts ache to reach the surface from their shadowy caverns, and ache to be transmuted for the benefit of all beings.

WITNESS OF THE WOUND

Sometimes when our wound repeats, such as during a Chiron or Pluto transit, transits to our Eighth house of death and rebirth, or this Scorpionic time of year, we may experience a monstrous and overwhelming sense of defeat.  We may ask “Why again? Why won’t this pattern end? What’s the point, because I’m permanently scarred anyway?”

The purpose of recognizing the wound is not to feed the ego’s passion for identifying itself as separate, which is our identity-attachment to the wound.  Rather, the wound will reappear to test our ability to integrate our spiritual lessons, our epiphanies, our synchronicities, our training at cultivating self-mastery. Our spiritual practices and studies should help us perceive our wounds correctly: as gifts our souls offer your incarnate selves in order for us to become more conscious.  If we never suffered, how could you gain compassion for others?  Also, the sacred wound’s appearance invites us into multidimensional self-awareness, symbolized by the Buddhist and Celtic knots of interdependence.

Chiron, the wounded healer and honorable mentor archetype, instructs this shamanic hero within us about how to first recognize our wounded stories, and then cultivate what psychologist James Hillman calls “healing fictions” out of them.   

“Stories can make up worlds and transpose existence into these worlds...History is a way of musing upon oneself, and case history which too is an expression of Clio [muse of history] is one of the ways the therapeutic profession and the patients can muse therapeutically....the possibility for revisioning and enhancing who we are lies within the events of each case history, if we learn to read it as a fiction and its events as images of Memoria, and she needs remembering in order to create.

If we just study the popularity of online photo albums like Facebook and others––those windows into our souls––or the incredible attraction in the 21st century to personal memoir and bibliography, we can understand the value in allowing ourselves to be seduced by the muse Memoria and prying open our hearts enough to simply share our story.

But in sharing the story, we realize that we are both actor and director; we are playing out the drama, but we are also the narrator, and so we become both actor and director., at once within the story  and above and beyond it.

Each therapy we partake in is a technique in polishing our story, sculpting our personal mythos, crafting the song of our existence. “The psyche itself makes ‘history’ that is altogether fictional,” says Hillman.  “Historical necessity means rather we are caught in our stories, the souls’ histories, tragedies, comedies, its need to form its subjectivity as history.” We must dive deep into the fullness of our storied soul, to dance and spar with our inner characters.  To “individuate” is not to ‘transcend’ but to honor the pluralities playing within us.

Even as we study our astrology charts, we wrestle with a new level of self-awareness.  Simultaneously humbled and empowered, we must learn to accept the character’s callings within us, and activate the highest expressions of their birthscript, while embodying the most evolved potential of our current transits.

The archetypes, the patterns of energy, are malleable and fluid, and can be expressed on a spectrum from unconscious to superconscious.  Often their shadow expression, if not made visible, will try to dominate the situation.  Our interrogation into the cause is the medicine we need to process through the raw emotion.  Is it past life residues, birth trauma, a childhood soul-loss, an ancestral scar seeping through?

Evolution itself is dependent on responding to these questions, the serpent irritated with its skin, shedding and destroying the inessential layers.  Who will emerge from the innermost depths of this BatCave of the unconscious?  This is where we meet Pluto, the great trance-former, the King of the Underworld domain of Scorpio.  Whatever house Pluto is located, whatever house Scorpio rules, and whatever planets tango in aspect with Pluto all signify the areas, where the ego, riding upon the chariot of shadows, will resist its necessary death until it finally surrenders to its alchemical quest and crosses the threshold of fear to arrive into freedom.

PLUTO/SCORPIO: ASTRODRAMA

Give yourself permission.  Maybe once a week.  Maybe a few times more if life’s weights keep increasing their pressures. Take all the negative emotion–anger, frustration, disappointment, resentment––and just purge it out by belting out a huge primal scream.  Release it from the deep belly and blast it at the top of your lungs.

Then, put one some metal, goth, dub-step or some intense music that allows you to channel the raw darkness and become your Shadow-Dance.  

-Inhale deeply. Clench your fists, and then tighten the thumb within.  Exhale the hands and release.  

-Allow your claws to lash out.  Rake your claws against your flesh, as you scream out.  Transform your face and body into a monstrous demon and thrash the shadow all about.

-Then take in a deep breath.

-Move your head down and in.  Hug yourself and enter your shell.  Then break out with another scream.

-Take another deep breath in with your hands cupped at your Tan Tien, your energy center located at the intestines...Exhale out all the negativity as you press it down through your hands  hrough your legs and into the embrace of Mother Earth

-And then chant to Kali, goddess who destroys the illusory ego.

Kreem Kreem Kreem Hum Hum Hreem Hreem Dakshine Kaalika
Kreem Kreem Kreem Hum Hum Hreem Hreem Swaha”

In Scorpio, Remember: You have to go INTO in order to step THROUGH.