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Greetings fellow dream animals. Welcome. This podcast is a place where silence grows a tongue and words turn into dharma bells: devotional tones that inspire and motivate orphaned egos to take off the crown of thinky thorns, and remember who we are: eternity-with-eyes, a psyche of cosmic dimensions itching for a chance to illumine this space-with-a-face play of personhood.
In this episode I ask questions: what if profanity is “aborted self-inquiry?” What if “Materialism” is the fear of disappearing? From there, we’ll dive into what astrology really is (a love story), examine the Taurus neck as a “somatic scripture” then engage in some Taurus self-inquiry practices. Next up: “Eclipse-o-Grade:” the title of this month’s Astrodharma Transit Report, followed by advice on how to navigate the Total Lunar Eclipse in Scorpio on May 16th. To close the podcast, I offer four powerful “embodiment catalysts”, some shrewd Scorpionic intervention techniques and a few tips on how to become a “mystical troublemaker.”
Inspired by this podcast? Please share it with friends and post on social media, To learn more about me and the courses offered at The Astrodharma Institute, check out the links in the show notes.
One last thing: To make the podcast more meditative and digestible, there will be five dharma bell breaks followed by thirty seconds of silence.
Okay, sexy sock puppets, let’s dance…
I’ve been thinking about the word, “fricken,” lately. The word has clearly gone mainstream. Here’s what it communicates to me:
“The world is turning into a drunk Halloween. Every day it gets a little more ghoulish and dark but I’m toughening up enough to keep a sense of humor and if survival demands the descralizing the most intimate embodiment of ego-dissolving love, well hell, I’m gunna frickin do it.”
To which, my heart responds:
I understand that, as Mark Twain once said, “under certain circumstances, profanity provides relief denied even to prayer.” And I get the need for thick skin to navigate this Robosapien dreamscape, but I can’t help but wonder if your language is summoning the very darkness you claim to be protecting yourself from. I wish you the best, but I cannot in good conscience join you in spreading this verbal STD, as it seems to further plunge the world into a place where visceral reactivity becomes the norm and the remaining shreds of what is vulnerable, innocent and sacred are accessible only via Tinder-swipes.
On the other hand, I also find profanity fascinating. I can’t help but wonder: Are curse words “aborted self-inquiry:” moments where heartbroken confession could have happened? Are the “frickin folks” looking at the space where God should be and having feelings about it?
Musings like these help me remember: I am not anti-profanity; I am pro-divine pauses.
Most curse words, of course, are censored out of basic self-respect. Everyone knows: collapsing into juvenile reactivity with any regularity points to an embarrassing lack of self-processing skills.
Still, I wonder, Is there is an art to this dark?
The most impactful expletives dress up as genuinely concerned clinical assessments: diagnostic warnings of something cancerous: a crippled morality or the philosophically bankrupt nature of a person. They “work” because they condescend with concern for humanity. I wonder… Do we cuss to remind ourselves and each other that every being- given the proper causes and conditions- has the potential to become a stain upon the human soul?
In this sense, even profanity has a conscience.
One such word (often ascribed to Taurus) is “materialistic.”
Materialism: Fear of Not Existing
Materialism is an easy quality to judge until you inquire into what it actually is: a way of coping with the fear- not of death- but of not existing, of having no dimensionality in any world– material or etheric. Confronted with absolute disappearance, mind-on-a-countdown grasps feverishly at the world’s apparently solid and satisfying “goodies-” not so much for the pleasures they deliver, but for the narrative that the “pursuing” of them provides.
Who am I? I’m the one moving closer to that enviably secure status, that sublimely sinful pleasure, that honorable, difference-making impact. Who am I really? Orphaned ego whipping up its conditioned brainwave activity into a frothing, mythologically macho me-story; a jumpy rockstar, numbing the sense of time eating him alive by staying “important and busy.”
How much of our life have we spent pushing matter around to flex a sense of identity and doer-ship? How much time have we spent honing and perfecting our archetypal role play to demonstrate, if only to ourselves, the existential heft of our separate somebody status? How many times have we entered complicated, high-maintenance relationships so we could get lost in the identity-hardening drama of fighting and making-up, being (or not being) committed, having chemistry, or not.
How long until we confess that most of our world-changing aspirations are crazed I AM-ing; a meditation-murdering, scenery-devouring restlessness designed to harden our edges and distract from the disorienting truth of who we: deathless being? Must we wait until our deathbeds to confess:
Klutzy or suave, me-stories are pathetic “beach-bumery.”
Notice that the goal of all this scenery-devouring is not happiness, but identity-hardening. This is key. To the endlessly evaporating ego, happiness is seamless “selfing,” the sense of solidity that arises when immersed in a story (happy or sad) about who we are, a chivalrous somebody galloping towards some fleeting treasure.
All of that, to arrive once again where our infant eyes began: silent seeing.
From the outside, silent seeing seems pointless, inconsequential. From the inside, it’s revolutionary, evidence of a mind infused with the perfume of death. Storyless presence exudes unrivaled potency because it does not seek happiness as a byproduct of fulfilled desire. It relaxes into the joy of simply existing, now and forever, as unborn, undying awareness.
From there, action naturally arises. Whatever goals we do or don’t accomplish, we are at peace with the person our work has turned us into.
I like how Stephen Jenkinson turns the “perfume of death” into prayer:
May the god of death, speak of our end to us every day, of every year, so we don’t come to death a grasping, desperate amateur.
(Tibetan Bell Break)
Astrology is a Love Story
Back to the so-called “materialism” of this month’s bovine earth sign.
The first thing to remember is that Taurus, as a single archetype, does not exist. It melts together with the larger narrative of the zodiac, a twelve-chaptered love story. To feel into the Bull, we must understand the archetype that precedes it. Why? Because each sign is a super hero sent down to the earth to heal the blind spots and imbalances of the sign that God created just before it. That’s right, astrology is a love story and a compassion practice.
Here’s how the love story got started.
Somatic Scriptures
To ram through the spirit/matter veil and allow boundless Being to take form, the soul needs a “Crash Helmet,” the Aries head.
Next, the head will need to plant itself firmly into the sensual soil of a body, the five senses and through them, to the earth around us, via a “Taproot,” the Taurus neck.
It took a courageous karma-donning Crash Helmet (the Aries head) to baptize us into separate somebody status, but without the downward plunging feeding tube (the Taurus neck), to slow down, ground and focus this energy, this otherwise courageous act of “selfing” would devolve into endless personality strutting and differentiation-through-conflict.
Enter the Taurus Taproot: the earth-pointing part of the body that tells our “I AM” drunk head that the time for identity strutting is over and what is needed now is the courage to be “in the body, on the earth, as it is;” to re-aim this incarnating gladiator at simple day-to-day life and the mystic realization that “Spirit is matter named.”
Taurus rules time-tested values. A true conservative in the “conserving” sense of the word, Taurus is the part of us that responds with a healthy dose of skepticism towards all ways of life untested by tradition, elders and a body of peers to keep ego and ethics in check.
In this context, the 5000 year old tradition of astrology is the epitome of what it means to be “conservative!”
But how does the form and function of the neck prod mankind to honor time-tested Taurean values?
“Time-tested” means “field-tested on the earth:” the day-to-day proving ground that the Taurus Taproot incessantly points at. It takes history, the arc of years (and, perhaps, lifetimes) on earth, to reveal the efficacy of any given value, lifestyle or worldview. For instance, abortion-related diseases are only now being identified in women. To accurately assess the karmic implications of any so-called “liberated” social value, we need to demonstrate Taurus patience and watch how it ripples out through the collective, over time. This requires slow, thorough chewing and unhurried observation. Is this not the essence of the Taurus bull?
Consider this: how many degrees can the average Taurus neck rotate the head? A mere 80 degrees. That’s less than half of the 180 degree field in front of us. The somatic scripture here is obvious: we must work within the limited range of possibilities directly in front of us. We must train our attention on “what is,” accept our immediate karmic lot and learn to rest peacefully as the undistracted, pulsing presence, in front of which the illusion of separation parades.
Three Names for the Neck
Here are three names for the Taurus neck designed to help you remember its encoded dharma:
1) Buddha Root
When you behold the human neck, imagine a taproot sucking secret, sensual messages up from the earth through the bottoms of our feet. This continually draws our attention earthward to the facts on the ground. In this context, the neck becomes a symbol of how to stay grounded and present with each intrinsically manageable moment: the essence of both Zen and Vipassana meditation and the essential means by which the Buddha (Sun in Taurus!) woke up.
2) Attention-Aimer
Taurus rules what we value. Not what we think we value, but what we actually, daily, routinely value. And how do we know what that is? Simple: By noticing what we put our attention on. Nothing abstract about that, says empirical Taurus. We are guided by whatever we give our attention to. And what body part actually points and directs our heady attention? The muscles of the neck. The head is filled with all kinds of grandiose beliefs and ideals, but the attention-pointing habits of the neck define our true capacity for soul-seeing.
3) The Bulldozer
Astonishingly similar to its animal symbol (the bull) the horn-shaped thyroid gland is located in the front of the neck, just below our Adam’s apple. Its primary function is to produce hormones that influence how quickly the body uses energy and regulate our overall rate of growth (metabolism). In an analogous way, the thyroid converts impulsive bursts of heady Aries willpower into grounded acts that are pragmatic, cumulative and sustainable: the essence of Taurean values. In this sense, our thyroid-equipped neck is a symbol of our capacity for sustained, bull-dozing commitment and follow-through.
(Tibetan Bell Break)
The “Wounds-Gifts” of Taurus
Taurus, like all the signs of the zodiac has its particular gifts and wounds, or “kleshas.”
“Klesha” is a Buddhist term that means, “states that cloud the mind and manifest in unwholesome actions.” Kleshas are what happens when we claim ownership of personality instead of abiding as the loving vastness in which it arises.
What happens when the embodied emptiness that the Taurus Taproot so steadily and brilliantly directs our attention to, is replaced by a desperate, dying, time-bound creature grasping for security, comfort and sensual satisfaction? What happens when Tantra devolves into titillation? In short, soulless sensuality. Here’s a list of the classic Taurus kleshas:
Possessive, stubborn, stodgy, dogmatic, materialistic, mercenary, superficial, risk-averse, attached to routine and not being rushed, lazy, licentious, gluttonous, hedonistic, greedy.
Know any souls ravaged by these kleshas? Want to help? Careful. Better to zip it until you increase your compassion and insight into the positive intention of this divinely ordained style of awakening.
Here’s two Taurus self-inquiry practices to get you started.
Taurus Self-Inquiry Practices
1) Tepid Tantra
People are not “too materialistic;” they are half-heartedly sensual. They are suffering from tepid tantra. If they were to fully, meditatively taste honey, they would become honey. This is what bodies are for. To the extent that we are fully surrendered and alive to the delights of the senses, the burden of the separate self dissolves, replaced by a worshipful awareness of the One Being beckoning to us in all the world’s beauties, comforts and pleasures.
2) Shivery Sweat Lodge
Imagine sitting naked in a sweat lodge with a pile of cold rocks at the center, waiting for something to happen. Eventually, you start to shiver. That’s what miserliness, greed and possessiveness are: symptoms of an unheated crucible. Security, comfort and predictability eventually weaken and sicken us until we use them as transformational containers in which to heat up some edgy ego-reckoning and feel our way past our conditioned me-stories. This is the healing sweat of Taurus intimacy – the cathartic currency that makes Taurus rich and comfortable.
(Tibetan Bell Break)
The title of this months Astrodharma Transit Report is,
Eclipse-o-grade!
Which is more fortunate: mindless abundance or revelatory loss? A bloated bank account or throwing bread over our shoulder as we make our way through a flock of pigeons? These are the themes of May, a month that challenges us to stand- come Hell or high water- for our Taurus values.
The month unfolds in the shadow of two eclipses: a Solar eclipse in Taurus on the last day of April and a world-rocking Total Full Moon Lunar Eclipse in Scorpio on May 16th. In addition, the entire month is impacted by Mercury retrograde in Gemini (May 10th- June 3rd). Together, this “Eclipse-o-grade” prods us to dismantle stagnation and make the preparations necessary to strike out into new life in June when Mercury goes direct.
Does something in your life feel stale, heavy, expired? With Eight planets in their final degrees, things are winding down and completing. Eclipse-o-grade transitions are notoriously rocky, but it’s all good if it helps us to become good.
This dismantling process isn’t mental; it’s visceral. Outgrown attachments must be honestly felt before they can be fully released. The good news: this breakdown of the old life is coupled with a wave of optimism and trust in a brighter future due to the Jupiter/Neptune conjunction in Pisces forming favorable angles to both eclipses.
Is a way of working or being in relationship wanting to die and be reborn? Great time to piggyback the May 10th movement of Jupiter into Aries, thrusting us into a new 12 year cycle of growth.
Awakened Taurus knows that the secret to graceful change is flowing with the signs and symbols of each moment. Why have faith in the invisible, says Taurus, when you can sense God beckoning in the play of form?
What does the world look like when seen through the awakened Taurus lens? This:
The oracle of the earth is talking to my body. I am on an animal sensing adventure and “coincidence” is the only sacrilege.
The Full Moon/Lunar Eclipse in Scorpio on May 16th.
Once a year, the moon turns into a blazing, axe-to-the-forehead ray of truth. This eclipsed moon in Scorpio is wildly shamanic and uncomfortably confrontational, more suited to ceremony than sinful indulgence.
A wound-releasing, phoenix-from-the-ashes time like no other, the days before, during and after this Scorpio Lunar eclipse are best spent on retreat or with beings you’ve already built trust with.
Scorpio corresponds to the hours of 8-10 PM. Why? Because Scorpio wants to be “awake in the dark.” Yes, a later time in the night would, perhaps, evoke a more forbidden (but sleep-fuzzy) aspect of our psyche. This is less interesting to the Scorpion part of us because it savors naked confrontation, the glistening textures of the forbidden. It wants those shadowy crevices lit up and fully confessed before night makes the brain go soft.
In its eclipsed state, the death and rebirth potential of the Scorpio moon is dramatically intensified. Painful stories and festering wounds grow momentarily more acute, then fade into a fantastical day dream so free of “self and other” that loyalty and abandonment appear laughably surreal.
So how about it? Are you up for some psychic surgery from Dr. Luna? Here’s some Scorpio Moon advice from Rupert Spira,
The test of whether we’re really welcoming our feelings is: Can I live with this feeling forever?’ If the answer is no, then we’re welcoming our feelings in order to get rid of them and that’s just more agenda for the separate self.
(Tibetan Bell Break)
Embodiment Catalysts
Don’t get caught up in “processing” this month. The probability of miscommunication is extremely high and the push back will just dig you in deeper. Instead: embody, feel and introspect. Here are my top four embodiment catalysts. Choose the one most alive for you and work with it for the month.
1) I trade in the future of humanity for the presence of eternity.
This one is best spoken aloud. With so many gloomy futures lurking, we need something to yank us back into this holy instant. Notice how it humbles and gives rise to prayer.
Taurus Prayer
Thank you, beloved Taurus, for this supremely manageable moment, this meditative attending to the facts on the ground. Bless you for your relaxing solidity, the stillness and density of the forms directly in front of us, unmediated by any interpretation, grounding us into the Presence that the 10,000 things rise and fall in.
2) Meditation happens naturally whenever the belief that something could be added to improve this moment disappears.
Thank you again, beloved Taurus, for reminding us that meditation isn’t some exotic add-on! It’s natural and accessible, like breathing.
3) Great river of selfsame moments, I’m tired. Please, float me home.
A few moments or years from now, nothing will have fundamentally changed. Nothing new will arise. Nothing new to chase after. Future moments will be just as mysterious and unfathomable as this one, should we dare to meet them nakedly, free of preconception.
4) Embodiment starts when we disappear.
Amazing, isn’t it? The more we sit on a rock and be three dimensional, the more the whole thing pixilates into God’s dream.
(Tibetan Bell Break)
Molecular Hummingbirds
What does one say to a mystically numbed psyche- a body/mind stomping around on a stage it sincerely believes to be solid and unquestionably real?
Best to stay playful. Wondering aloud is often the most effective approach. Remember, you’re not teaching anything; you’re inviting them to join you in beginners mind.
Here’s a playful poem to set the tone:
Amazing, is it not,
the price a soul will pay
to sit up in a cloud
of molecular hummingbirds
hovering for an instant
in the shape of a body?
Scorpio Interventions
Look around. Minds are starving for simple, embodied presence, the essence of Taurus medicine. What can we do? Simple. Become a living example by harnessing the ego-stripping power of the eclipse. Here’s six ways to say “yes” to this “confess and undress” Full Moon and rest into your now-drunk body.
1) Confess Your Predicament
From orphaned ego’s point of view, earth is, yes, sometimes beautiful- but often depressing. The sharp cut of space divides us. Our bodies are aging evidence of separation, and unless someone or something on the planet can help us meditatively mend this sharp cut of space and replace it with “the seamless field of sentience” we will continue numbing ourselves with gadgets and greed until we grind everything into dust.
2): Admit you don’t care
Mystics become mystics because they have to. Because they dare to confess: “The planet I see before me is not worth saving. Until these eyes receive a profound mystical upgrade, I am insufficiently invested in turning this Titanic around.”
3) Post this on your fridge:
“Ego is depressed by the belief in its own existence.”
4) Feel into the endless flight
Feel into the endless flight from pure awareness taking place all around you. Let your heart break. Just like you, they are suffering, longing for someone, anyone, to induct them out of this grim egoic countdown.
5) Awaken from the cult behind your face
Stirring in the shadows of every psyche is a mythical creature that Tibetan Buddhists call “The hungry ghost:” habits of mind that are, all too often, automated, unseen and undissolved by the merciful gaze of our soul. Most egos call this ghostly character, “my personality.”
Yes, it’s dark, but the good news is greater: We are all 100% committed to waking up as the merciful witness of this “cult behind our face.” How do I know? I see what you dreamed up. You whipped the passing clouds of mind into a frothing, Wizard-of-Oz psychodrama, swirled with imaginary “others,” and homeward-pointing flecks of astrological metaphor. You meticulously out-pictured the landscape of your ego so you could opt out of the sappy display and return to your true position as awareness, itself, having a personality. Bravo!
6) Be a mystical troublemaker
Stop participating in dream-hardening conversations and start inviting others into a field of collaborative self-inquiry. Be a mystical troublemaker. Derail opinion-drunk conversation with intervals of asking yourself, out-loud, As what am I speaking? Some will walk away. Others will draw closer. Congratulations. You’ve found your sangha.
May our thoughts turn into love letters from the beloved in our bones.
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