The Moon is in Sagittarius today, currently squaring Neptune in Pisces. Meanwhile the Sun in Cancer is trining Chiron today. Its a good day to talk about the phrase childhood trauma. Every day on my newsfeed I spot at least a dozen posts about childhood baggage, healing the past, releasing the past, purging the past, integrating the past, and so forth. Astrology recognizes the archetypal in everything, including this popular meme. With the Sun in Cancer trining Chiron in Pisces its an especially good day to look at childhood traumas, emotional hurt, and unresolved pain. No doubt a lot of folks will be doing this...looking to the past and trying to sort something out...but maybe there is something else for us to see here. Astrology recognizes the archetypal, but astrology also helps us to see through the archetypal, rather than to be possessed by the literalness of the archetype...in fact to take these archetypes too literally, some say, is to become possessed by the archetype, which is akin to a kind of spirit possession. Its occurred to me on many occasions that people who cant stop talking about the emotional work they are doing on their past, their childhood, etc, are actually possessed by the archetype. What happens when we see through this archetype of childhood wounding? We have to imagine alternative realities first. Heres a few. Rather than childhood healing, purging and integrating how about: 1. Shut up and get on with it 2. Focus on how everything you are today is reflected in your first crush or first kiss rather than whatever your parents did 3. This is life and the word trauma is often traumatizing, so stop using it so much 4. Try this mantra, The reason I work on all my childhood traumas is because I like it, not because I need to and not because its so enlightened. Once during an ayahuasca ceremony I puked out an obsession with childhood traumas...it hadnt come from childhood, it had come from reading too many bad memoirs in my MFA program, along with an obsession with Leonardo Di Caprios character in the Basketball Diaries. :-) This shortly after my own conquer your childhood demons memoir was published and compared by the blurb writer on the back of the book to The Basketball Diaries. It was a funny puke. Afterward I asked the medicine Does that mean my book is bad? And the medicine said, No, it means your book is imaginative. And it will especially speak to people who spend lots of time imagining about their childhood wounds. :-) So the natural question arises...certainly our childhoods contain horrors of all kinds..we cant deny them, right? So what do we do with them? Perhaps we learn to see them from the perspective of the soulful pride we take in who we are now. Not a perfected being but a soulful being, whose life story, good or bad, successful or traumatic, can be imagined in a dozen different ways at any given time. If I want to focus on myself as a writer, then all the pains of my childhood can become part of that story...part of the necessity or fate of my life as the writer. If I want to think about myself as an astrologer, then I can look backward and see stars and zodiac symbols hovering in my past. Because thats how free the imagination is and thats how deep our souls are. Prayer: Please help me to stop beating up on the past. Please help me to stop traumatizing myself with the word trauma. Help me revision all the parts I think need healing, or help me at least admit to myself that Im in love with stories about trauma and healing.
Posted on: Wed, 09 Jul 2014 14:36:34 +0000
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