Welcome to the Astrodharma Podcast. My name is Hunter Reynolds and I invite you to join me as we sip the tea of self-inquiry, sit proud in our infinity and bask in the soul-seeing light of modern, meditative astrology.
This episode contains four dharma bell breaks and ends with three minutes of devotional chanting.
If you’d like to learn more about me and my online readings and mentorships, please visit my website: astrodharma.org.
We begin this month’s podcast with a bluesy proposition:
What if the purpose of life is to make ourselves vulnerable to the grace of “constructive heartbreak?”
Perhaps this twilight-friendly take on our ultimate endgame sounds uninspired: a sadly unambitious view of the potentials of the human spirit.
Our purpose is to “make ourselves vulnerable” to something? What about initiative, passion, self-determination?
Waiting for “grace to strike?” Sounds like a life mired in passivity and flatness. No thanks.
Notice how quickly Mr.mind pigeonholes and pathologizes our cracked vessel by assuming that broken open hearts can’t weep with joy or dance in wonder!
True, it’s a different caliber of celebration- less giddy and self-absorbed. Refusing to lose sight of our own and other’s suffering, the Himalayas of heartbreak behold peak and valley together as equally majestic parts of earth’s God-given landscape. Indeed, it is the function of astrology to help us warmly embrace the grace and grit of those we claim to know and love.
Jeff Foster concurs- defining “enlightenment” as, “a profound self-kindness that radiates empathy into the world.”
Said another way, heartbreak isn’t just a passing mood: it’s woven into the archetypal fabric of our psyche, our incarnational makeup. The wounds of this lifetime are not solely responsible for our reactivity and fear. We come into this world, a cracked vessel, and at a certain point, it is a sign of spiritual maturity to inquire into the karmic roots of these cracks.
Will this heady investigation into our misty, past life empower or distract from the ego-witnessing work allotted to us on this side of the veil?
Not sure?
Better not to dig into this layer of your birth chart and focus first on harnessing your archetypal strengths and compensating for your weaknesses. How? Understanding what a birth chart is.
–Dharma Bell Break #1
The Crucible of Personhood
Every ego has a “crucible of personhood” within which it cooks, called the “birth chart.” At the moment of death, forged by a lifetime of secret archetypal heat and unspeakably nuanced trials, our molten mass of me-stories pours into a new mold: a miraculously unique birth chart for a new lifetime.
Our job is to wake up as the merciful witness of personality (our own and other’s) and learn to shrewdly navigate- if not incandesce- the inherited habits of mind. It’s a beautifully perilous, ego-humbling odyssey.
Every soul is on a crash course with the broken heart of compassion, but some paths are more direct. Practitioners of astrology (and other empathic, soul-seeing modalities) are privileged to “peek (and sometimes fall into) other’s archetypal kiln.” These scalding falls into other’s karmic furnace can be overwhelming, challenging the practitioner’s faith in the fairness and beauty of life.
To preserve the innocent and empty “shine” of our soul-mirror we all need to realize what Gangaji called, “the bliss that doesn’t care fits blissful or not:” This is Himalayan Heartbreak in a nut shell.
Astro-empaths are tasked to see, with wicked realism, what humans actually are: part selfless slave to the Tao, part snarling dog with a hidden paw throbbing in the jaws of karmic law.
Is that a toothy smile or are they “baring their teeth?” The seasoned soul-seer (sensing both from the start) softens, scanning for ways to help.
Astrology pushes us to submit, and humbly acclimate to, our own and other’s karmic predicament: the uncomfortably narrow banks within which each fleshy emissary of boundless Being flows.
In the words of James Baldwin, astrology initiates us into “the doom and glory of knowing who we are.”
Letting grace re-wire our nervous system
–Dharma Bell Break #2
Okay, but why is it that the best we can do is “make ourselves vulnerable” to this life-affirming brokenness? Why can’t we go straight at the thing, get the job done, and wake up? Good question. One that that astrology is uniquely equipped to answer.
The short answer is that the Himalayas of Heartbreak must penetrate down into our nervous system, and this takes time. As Gurdjieff said, It is only by grounding our awareness in the living sensation of our bodies that the I Am, our real presence, can awaken.
Instinctively, and without mental effort, we must come to viscerally marvel at the soul’s inherited luminosity even as we weep for the ways mind twists them into an archetype slaves.
To love anyone over any length of time is to make friends with this “luminous slave.”
No surprise, then, that it may take lifetimes to weave lucidity and presence into our twitchy, “flight or flight” nervous system. But we can, perhaps, speed up the process by learning to tenderly accept who humans are:
“Mud people with a holy breath sweeping through us” ~Martin Shaw
What kind of happiness do Mud people have? Muddy happiness: messy mixtures of transparency and turbidity, the rascally play of the Imperishable mingled with ego-strutting automation.
For most people, it takes years of tenderly endured humiliation and ego-death- the kind encountered in meditation, prayer and other self-reckoning practices- to honestly celebrate this rough-and-tumble dream sport in a non-dissociative way; to let Grace upgrade our nervous system from desire-grasper into moment-savorer: “seeker of flickering happiness” to finder of the fullness of Being.
From an Astrodharmic perspective, “Being present” means being honest about the fact that up here in Himalayas of Heartbreak there never was such a thing as unblemished beauty. Outward innocence was always fading. The quality control on “organic” was always hit-and-miss and moments of intoxicating “trance dance” have value only insofar as they migrate into our unspectacular workaday life.
Who can hold this paradoxical blend of sobriety and intoxication? The answer is simple: who we truly are.
—-Dharma Bell Break #3
Only timeless presence can enjoy the process of satisfying a craving without expecting it to deliver happiness.
Why meditate? To realize precisely this.
Interested in leaving a sparkly wake behind you as you drift through this dreamscape? It’s possible, you know. Not just possible, but natural. We are designed to engulf others in the long, delicious vapor trail of “The Self.”
So. Ready to fumigate? Post this on your altar or fridge:
Only timeless presence can enjoy the process of satisfying a craving without expecting it to deliver happiness.
Welcome to mystical sobriety: the moment when grabbing at the dream stops and celebrating the One who’s dreaming it begins.
Walking through a world full of “wound-gifts”
One of the core tenets of astrology is that the psyche is made up of “wound-gifts.” Every archetypal aspect in the birth chart has a higher and lower octave expression carrying with it habits of mind inherited from past lives that predispose us to one or the other.
Right away, you can see how astrology spreads the seeds of “self-respecting heartbreak.”
In astrological terms, to “be present” with ourselves or another means sipping this face-screwing wound/gift cocktail. It’s an acquired taste, but if we stick with it, it turns into a fine wine: the dream of getting anything from anyone, replaced by the thought-murdering smile of the Merciful Witness: a sublimity that sees in the face of mortal weakness a vast unborn awareness in the throes of falling in love with itself.
This is the endgame of astrology.
Over time, assuming we have first developed a healthy, well-functioning ego, the quest for a positive self-image becomes isolating self-absorption, replaced by prayers to become an ambassador of Being.
Who am I? Deathless presence paying the bills with a soul-seeing heart.
Is it a compromised happiness? By ego’s standards, yes. It shaves off the sugar spikes in favor of more durable delights, increasing the sum total of joy over a lifetime.
How many more lifetimes until we admit it: life-affirming brokenness is the only flame that doesn’t flicker with each passing gust of mind?
However we define happiness, the real question is, Who wants to be happy?
–Dharma Bell Break #4
Who Wants to be Happy?
To a head full of random brain chemistry on a countdown, “happiness” is whatever numbs the the sense of approaching death and there is no limit to how much “Orphaned ego will grasp for higher highs and longer lives. Hello Artificial Intelligence.
What happens to little “Orphie” after years of grabbing at the world’s depressing evidence of separation to fill the hole of God within? In short, Tinder: the inability to stand long in front of any death-stinky mortal mirror, resulting in a a parade of personal and professional honeymoons gone flat, followed by absolute extinction.
Compatible Dysfunctions
What does a “good enough” relationship look like up in the Himalayas? One in which egos have “compatible dysfunctions:” Two people who see in each other traits that others would find “deal breakers,” that they find positively motivated and forgivable.
A Himalayan job? A way of serving that, despite its mundane, disciplined demands, naturally absorbs us, transforming mind-on-a-countdown into storyless presence or “energy moving.”
A Himalayan place to live? Anywhere you can honestly say, “This place and its people embody an acceptable combination of dark and light.”
This is what “awake” looks like: a self-respecting brokenness that’s made peace with broken people, broken society and broken landscapes.
Bifurcation Point?
Is there another option? Look around. So many faces etched by the absence of any meditative cross to rise from. Minus the “include and transcend” joys of the Merciful Witness we are fast becoming a Robosapien society in which “merging with machines” feels like an insignificant loss. Our best shot at the freedom of deathless presence: AI.
Perhaps this is the bifurcation point. The lifetime when we’re all forced to choose:
1) Walk the world as an ethereal masterpiece, the trembling growth edge of a psyche of cosmic dimensions incandescing our manic me-stories with the Merciful Witness, or…
2) Settle for the hollow victories of personality-strutting (the original addiction) as we grasp for death-numbing distraction and Heaven on a computer chip.
Communion Coaching
Ready to inch the world closer to option #1? Here’s something immensely impactful that you can do. Sign up for Communion Coaching.
Using specific archetypal insights from your birth chart, Communion Coaching consists of three online “Meditative Relating” practice sessions in which you will develop, via spontaneous, one-on-one role play, intervention and customized interpersonal homework- the skills needed to seize the conversational narrative, induct others into “relating as awareness to awareness,” and develop your own style of transforming standard egoic conversation into sublime soul-seeing communion.
It’s time. People are parched, desperate for someone, anyone, to induct them out of the matrix of time eating them alive, into mind-stopping self-inquiry and soul-seeing communion. And in return, you get something increasingly rare and priceless: genuine spiritual community.
Ready for more?
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–Learn about the Styles of Awakening online training
–Schedule an astrology reading with Hunter
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