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| Sailing into the Solstice |
What a difference a day makes!
The astrological Solstice arrives this evening (EDT) as the Sun shifts into Cancer, sign of the Moon.
The Moon herself is already there, having moved back home not long after the Gemini New Moon.
With Mercury already in Cancer, and visionary Neptune trining the Sun, we dive from the bright, buzzy heights of Gemini into the cooler depths of Cancerian waters.
This hinge of the year is a good time for making New Moon wishes. Those wishes will be most powerful if aligned with the New Moon's special energies (see yesterday's post). Our wishes are most meaningful when aligned with our deepest feelings––this is where today's Cancerian mood comes in.
When forming a wish or intention, the content, the words, the phrasing need to feel right, resonating with something inside us that says "yes." Will-based affirmations can have their place, but there's evidence saying things we truly don't believe works against, rather than with, the changes we long for. (Kelly McGonigal, PhD, explores this and other willpower topics.)
A key to crafting strong intentions is to focus on what we believe and build from there––and what we believe is tied to what we feel. There are lots of conflicting messages around about feelings: We need to control them, release them, ignore them, embrace the "good" ones and get rid of the "bad" ones. Emotions are inconvenient, poorly timed, and awkward––can't we meditate through this?
Yet emotions are ever-present survival mechanisms filled with messages. Some of those messages are mixed, it's true, and modern culture provides little help in learning how to understand and work with these body-based messengers.
All three recognize our feelings as natural, essential, and valuable. All three offer approaches for staying with emotions––especially difficult ones––to learn what they need to tell us. All three return again and again to the body, that place of the Moon, well of deep memory, and source of meaning.
Peter Levine's work fascinated me when I discovered his book Waking the Tiger years ago. His work with traumatized clients, and then research in animal behavior, suggested we often approach trauma 180 degrees wrong: Clamping down when we need to tremble, Shushing when we need to let someone cry, and sedating when the body needs to process.
Levine has developed his work into Somatic Experiencing, an approach to trauma based in awareness of the body––of what bodies typically do, and of what each of us individually experiences during trauma. His insights changed my understanding of my own responses in powerful ways.
Karla McLaren focuses on the messages of emotion, and everything we miss when we don't listen. She challenges the idea that we should stop being angry, sad, lonely or fearful, and the idea that we can stop simply by changing our thoughts.
McLaren presents compelling evidence that emotions are as vital as they are inevitable, and offers ways we can connect to the flow of emotion, understand its information, and channel that information into productive, life-enhancing behaviors.
Raphael Cushnir is my latest discovery. I'm reading his book The One Thing Holding You Back now, after listening to his interview with Tami Simon on Sounds True last week. Like Levine and McLaren, Cushnir invites us to connect with our emotions instead of ignoring or repressing them.
What I like about Cushnir's approach is the gentleness of his process, and the recognition of the many subtle ways we turn away from whatever is arising within us in the present moment. He talks about surfing emotions as a way to stay present without analysis or judgement, and I'm finding this enlightening if also unsettling.
On this day of the Solstice, as the Sun dances at the Moon's doorway, the Moon relaxes inside, and Neptune sends dreams through the windows, I invite you to explore these pathfinders in the emotional forest. Authentic, steady, compassionate connection with emotion leads to deep and powerful wishing.
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