Feelings are important and potent messengers. Just as our physical senses offer the wisdom of interpreting our outer world, our feelings map our inner world. Feelings are always valid, always important, but they are not always accurate to our present situations. Like inner scar tissue, our feelings can be filtered through our past, clouding our current perception. The ability to feel is one of our most incredible human superpowers and liabilities. The line that separates the latter from the former is emotional intelligence- the ability to respond, not react. It is in that space between stimulus and action we have the potential of choice.
“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” ~ Viktor E. Frankl
When I feel disillusioned or despaired, as I have many times this year, I reread Victor Frankl. If you have never read his work, I suggest you do. If he, an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, philosopher, author, and Holocaust survivor, can find the ability to not only define but embody love in the worst of hate-filled Nazi concentration camps. We can find it in ours.
“Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.” ~Victor Frankl
At this Full Moon in Cancer, expect to feel some things. The Moon’s opposition to Pluto suggests some of those feelings may be of the challenging variety. Challenging because we will feel the gravity of reaction rising in us, an old part of us will want to justify, defend, and act out of survival tendencies. The good news is it is in our face. The hard news is it’s exactly what we don’t want to see.
If you feel this shadow revelation and constant uncovering is a redundant message- you are not alone. I, too, am tired of shadow walking. But even if we feel over the learning. It doesn’t mean the learning is done with us. We are still in the initiation phase of new potential via the dark night of the ego, both collective and personal. The promise is major transformation. We cannot change what we cannot acknowledge. And in true Scorpio South Node/Pluto fashion, lessons repeat until we get them.
Remember…”What is to give light must endure burning.”~Victor Frankl
The goal of this Moon and the other current cycles is to remedy much current strife. Though we are moving through challenging times, we can employ tools, talents, epiphanies, and skills to find the most optimum path forward. In the case of this Full Moon, that medicine is Cancer. The force of feeling, empathy, connection, and heart-based understanding.
We humans cannot live without a heart. Neither can our nation, societies, or communities. Structure with no genuine genius lacks integrity in both our collective and personal worlds. Vision and leadership without sincerity lead to dangerous territory. When we forget the health and vitality of the whole must encompass the weakest among us, we have veered into selfish terrain. Empathy is the antidote to selfishness.
Life events that force us to feel profoundly are meant to awaken our hearts again, rousing necessary forces of empathy. Sometimes those moments require a shattering of protective armor, though, forcing the expansion. Rock bottoms are uncomfortable, but they get our attention.
“For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth – that love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.” ~Viktor E. Frankl
Love is a required force right now and one that is under pressurized recalibration (thank you, Venus retro). Love is also greatly romanticized and misunderstood in our linear culture. Often, we embrace love as a soft, gentle, supportive, and nurturing force, and it is that. There is another shade of love though, that is especially highlighted presently. Eris squaring the Sun and Moon reveals another side of love that is more counter-cultural and often misinterpreted. The one that asks us to stand up for that is right. To fight the good fight. The force that asks us to make good trouble.
This is where we must be extremely careful, though. Just look at history both, personal and collective, where terrible acts were committed in the name of “love” but were void of empathy, humility, accountability, or responsibility. In fact, there is no need to look back. Look at the world today. Because to really channel a true force of love, we need to get our egos out of the way.
“Freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.” ~Viktor E. Frankl
Otherwise, that force of assertive rebellion looks a lot like dogmatic fundamentalism and heartless truths centered on beliefs devoid of empathy. It can also look like the “love” of convenient truths, bypassing, and magical thinking. The cure for all of it, inner and outer, must always begin with reconnecting intent sourced in love because it can open closed systems.
It is the only force that can.
There is no way to move forward, heal the tremendous fissure we are experiencing without reviving this force. There is no force more fiercely formidable when it is sourced through the best of us and more woefully dangerous when it isn’t. In fact, the latter ceases to be love at all.
“A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes – within the limits of endowment and environment- he has made out of himself. In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.” ~ Viktor E. Frankl
The question we are living at this Full Moon is centered on a reassessment of love in all its many faces. The fierce and the gentle. The nurturing and the strong. Love does not mean a lack of consequences—quite the contrary. Consequences always tell the truth. Love implies understanding but not acquiesce. Love takes a side. That is the very point of it- to find the line in the sand between heart-centered right and wrong.
So, at this Full Moon bottom line your knowing. Take a stand for heart-centered empathic rightness. Life will offer plenty of opportunities to practice. Because life is a continued experience of choices between love and whatever love isn’t. It is a chance with every intentional action to focus more on how we show up to life than how life shows up to us. To give more than we receive. To help. Serve. To make the world a better place in our words, deeds, choices, and intentions.
“What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life–daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.” ~Viktor E. Frankl
Want to know what this time is revealing for you? Contact me, for more information.
*This is the 4th of 7 full Moons at 27° of a sign.
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