Astrodharma Transit Report: January 2019

2019: CURE FOR SUGAR SPIKE SPIRITUALITY

JANUARY LAUNCHES US with an energizing, proactive Mars in Aries (Jan 1st- Feb 14th). Stir in a few life-pivoting eclipses (Jan 5th and 21st) and season them with a series of Saturn/Pluto conjunctions in Capricorn and you have a curious brew: updated purpose and commitment to long-term goals on the personal level, and a barrage of disruptive, corp/gov power plays on the collective level. Don’t let the old farts disillusion your fresh starts!

Instead, tune in to the liberating theme of 2019: Balancing your spiritual blood sugar. How? By understanding the opportunities and challenges of the following two transits. (Notice how brilliantly they balance each other).

1) Jupiter Square Neptune
Challenge: Dream realistic dreams, don’t idealise teachers and practice what you preach.
Duration: Now until mid-November, 2019
Exact: Jan 13, Jun 16, Sep 21

2) Saturn Sextile Neptune
Opportunity: Material gain from spiritual pursuits & the successful structuring and attainment of a soul-inspired vision.
Duration: Now through November
Exact: Jan 31, Jun 18, Nov 8

Spiritual Blood Sugar

2019 is hellbent on balancing our spiritual blood sugar. How? By freeing us from spikes of idealization and disillusionment by putting us on a less spicy, more grounded diet of seeing the wound in everyone’s gift and the gift in everyone’s wound. Let’s call it the “flawed authority diet.”

Consider the news coming out about John of God. Can one be a phenomenally generous and gifted psychic healer and a sexual predator at the same time? Oh yes!

I know. It’s disturbing and disorganizing. That’s good news because it pushes us to ask: Why is my ego so desperate to stitch together a seamlessly dark or light narrative from the tangled threads of conditioned personality? Simple: So ego’s mythologically adolescent worldview (stuffed with superheroes and villains) continues to feel solid. Ego, it seems, will do just about anything to dodge the Deathless Being shining through the alternately clear and cloudy lens of personhood.

There will be many more John of God’s this year. Many more flawed political and religious figures tempting us to see them as all-good or all-bad. When will we stop eating from the garden of good and evil? Perhaps when we understand a bit more about the Virgo/Pisces polarity.

-Lower-octave Virgo judgement is a manifestation of bitterness and despair, stemming from a relentless, heartbreaking ache for something, anything, that is eternally pure, present and un-improvable (Pisces).

Note for fridge: Only frustrated mystics judge!

Higher octave Virgo, on the other hand, discerns the groggy and the lucid parts of each personality whilst celebrating the unsullied divine intent shining through. How? By becoming archetypally literate.

Does this mean you should avoid flawed teachers and authorities in 2019? Quite the opposite! 2019 is the perfect year to soak up wisdom from an alternately empty and self-important sage. In truth, we need bigger, more hearty servings of brilliant-yet-flawed spiritual guides this year. How else will our own inner flawed authority feel safe enough to come out and play?

To recap:

Jupiter square Neptune exposes misplaced trust. Saturn sextile Neptune steers us away from the opposite extreme: armoured skepticism. All year long, these two planetary sheep dogs keep herding us into a more mature, equal-opportunity kind of faith- not in some nebulous, otherworldly “force” or a flawlessly enlightened ego, but in the timeless presence flashing like lightning bugs in the shadows of every eye.

Ten Lousy Minutes

It’s nothing to be ashamed of; we all take turns deifying and demonising. They are the grab n’ go poles of every identity-grasping Trump-hating, Trump-loving ego. The solution is not to yank away both mental bookends by throwing ourselves into a 10-day Vipassana retreat before we’ve managed to mercifully witness our mind for ten lousy minutes. That’s called “practicing dullness and distraction.” Better to meditatively thin out the number of believed-in me-stories gradually so that when we finally do enter that grueling, existentially enforced Vipassana retreat (retirement) we don’t join the 1 in 5 people on psychiatric medication.

Here’s a meditation to get you started. Find a partner, set a timer for ten lousy minutes, close your eyes or stare straight ahead with your attention turned inward, and see how tenderly you can witness your conditioned habits of mind. When the timer goes off, face each other and spend ten minutes each exposing to the other the mess that just happened. Next, ask a few friends to join you. Viola! Instant sangha.

Jan 5th New Moon/Solar Eclipse in Capricorn
Building the foundations for a new life

Think of this eclipse as a new moon on steroids.

With half the zodiac (Sun, Moon, Saturn, Pluto and Mercury) conjunct in the sign of Capricorn, you couldn’t ask for a more opportune time to let go of an old life (Pluto) and proactively reorganize and restructure (Saturn) a new life. Exactly which part of your life? That depends where the sign of Capricorn falls in your birth chart. Great time to get a reading for the new year.

Curiously, there are no planets in the element of air in this eclipse chart. This turns out to be an advantage. It means we have fewer airy preconceptions and can, therefore, reach beyond our normal mental boundaries. Looking for the perfect time to rebrand yourself and pivot into a new career or disciplined course of study? This is it.

Jan 21st Full Moon/Total Lunar Eclipse in Leo
The Inner Game of Thrones

This lunar eclipse in Leo favors personal sovereignty- a time to take on real leadership by stepping beyond the self-conscious posturing that passes for confidence and radiate the meditative fullness of being that shines from our face when we honor our soul’s true voice and calling. Tibetans call this “divine pride.”

Why do so many egos get uncharacteristically mean spirited when talking about imperfect political figures? It medieval. “Bad kings and queens” redirect the soul’s healthy dethroning impulse away from ego and onto outer personalities.

By ramping up and intensifying the outer game of thrones, this Uranus-squared eclipse in Leo is taunting us: Will the Imperial’s dramatic struggle to rule over us eclipse your eternal soul’s ability to rule benevolently over the kingdom of conditioning you call “me?”

Should we resist the temptation to scream for the guillotine (via emotional outbursts and/or sudden changes in relationship) this Sun/Moon square to Uranus can motivate us to let an old role in the community “go dark,” so a warmer, more organically confident offering can radiate through us. We all come in with a crude vision for our life that gets defined and refined as we age. This eclipse stokes and reignites our smouldering soul-callings. To abandon them now is to abandon our chi, our very aliveness.

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