In losing my way, I find a more authentic self: how to ask for support from a transiting planet
I recently texted a friend and blurted out: “I’m just realizing I’m lost. Utterly. Alienated from my emotions. And need to find my way back.” It feels strange in the midst of recovery from a natural disaster (Hurricane Helene) to admit this kind of loss. There is so much to grieve, so much that is bigger than one’s self. I feel shame admitting that in feeling the pain of massive destruction — loss of life, home, livelihood, resources — I have become frozen, stuck, unable to cry. It is too much to hold.
My natal Moon is in Capricorn in a t-square with Uranus rx in Libra and Chiron in Aries. This is a signature of emotional repression as a result of soul level traumatic wounds to the self. Ceres is currently conjunct my Moon. What might Ceres be able to offer me in the form of emotional remediation?
Ceres (Demeter) was so overtaken with grief for her daughter (Persephone) that her mourning is considered to reflect the barrenness of fall and winter (when Persephone is in the underworld). Her unprocessed grief has environmental consequences.
Ceres — are you able to teach me how to process my own grief? What am I grieving? What am I afraid of? Losing touch with my soul or disconnect from my core due to the fact that the pain where I live is more than I can handle or process?
Was there anyone who could have supported you in grieving the loss of your daughter? Can I support you in that? You did not abandon her. The pain you are feeling is natural. It is okay to miss her. What if we held each other and allowed Persephone to speak?
Who is Persephone in this scenario? *Where is Persephone in this scenario? She is the one without a voice. The longing in each of us to speak what cannot be spoken. The truth each of us has to offer.
Persephone, come home. To yourself. It is okay to leave your mother and your husband. What would it feel like to just be you?
What if we allowed ourselves to just be? No more pressure to do or perform.
My breathing extends a little deeper. I can sense the saliva in my mouth. I feel the tension in the back of my neck releasing. There is light under a door beckoning me. To open it. What is on the other side of that door? Across the threshold? It’s very bright. I am not dying. It’s very bright. It might be about living. What does it mean to walk out of the shadows? To feel no more shame. To step into the same water that destroyed us. To swim in it. To be lost again and again. Because I can always come home.
Because Ceres is learning how to feel her own pain, she is able to let go. I too can feel my own pain. The pain of self sacrifice. Of feeling for everyone else to the point of self abandonment. I can let go of everything I thought I knew. In finding my own pain, I learn that existence does not have to mean abandonment. I can hold my own pain. And in doing so, I exist alongside everyone else. The living becomes bearable.
If each of us touches our own experience, speaks the truth of our self witnessing during and post Helene, we weave a way to recovery and revitalization for all of us. I look around at the solitary maple, leaves ruby red. The red haunts me. The red is so beautiful it hurts. What does it mean that I perceive beauty as painful? In the wake of this much devastation, beauty hurts. It is my deepest truth to hold and express the tension in this polarity.
*It just so happens that natal Persephone is in an exact opposition to natal Uranus rx, something I did not realize until after writing this!
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