Finding a stable spiritual home within us
And...some foreshadowing of Jupiter in Cancer
The image symbol received in meditation and offered for this week is:
In a prison cell, light filtered through the bars of a high window illuminates a person saying prayers over their meal.
Off the bat, I will admit I was resistant to this image. Although the feeling that came with it was peaceful and reverent, it seemed insensitive to the plight of the many people currently being whisked away by ICE to be held in who knows what conditions.
However, I trust there is insight to be gleaned. Initially, I pulled Oracle cards, but the cards felt like a heavy lift for me on this particular day, so I cast a rune from the Labyrinthos app instead. What came was the rune Othala/Home. Which was interesting because one of the three cards I had pulled was called “Coming Home”.
The Sun recently moved into Cancer at the Solstice, and Cancer is the sign of the zodiac most associated with home, as well as the mother and ancestry. Cancer is ruled by the Moon, which represents our emotional self, and as the closest celestial body to our home, reflects natural cycles our own bodies’ experience. Jupiter also recently entered Cancer and will be there for a year, so I expect to see an amplification of these themes. If Jupiter is a prominent planet in your birth chart, or you have prominent Cancer energy, you may feel this more intensely. With transiting Jupiter forming a trine with my natal Jupiter and my Ascendant, I am feeling it.
On that note, allow me to explain why I was feeling in need of a lighter lift today. I noticed recently I was feeling a bit off. This is understandable, given that I have been focused on supporting my mom through a cancer recurrence. However, I also know that my feelings are not caused by anything external, rather they are my internal reaction to my environment. This became obvious when something separate happened and I was triggered back to a painful time in my life when I uprooted my kids several times. I was aware, on the periphery of my subconsciousness, of that trigger back to an earlier time in my life, yet I still found myself reacting from that old desperate place because it was so strongly present in my body.
I suppose it is a sensitive spot underneath my shell, where some tender and shadowy feelings about home and motherhood had been poked, and I struggled to bring myself back to the present. So, too, might Jupiter in Cancer amplify past experiences for the collective. Our task will be to recognize when we are being triggered in order to respond from a conscious state.
Back to our image symbol and the rune. Here are some keywords for Othala:
Inheritance, heritage, ancestry, legacy, tradition
And some phrases from Labyrinthos:
Communal prosperity is highlighted here, as is the importance of your cultural and spiritual inheritance.
This can be a time to honor your heritage and to build upon the foundation laid by those before you.
I don’t know about you, but I feel a heaviness about heritage and the foundation laid by those before me in order to create material prosperity for only some types of people. There is quite a bit of shadow within the foundation of this country, and within the structures underneath the daily lives of people all around the world.
Within our individual families, many have a heritage of religion, but not a spiritual inheritance. It gives me hope to see many people are doing the difficult self-examination and associated truth-seeking work (thanks, Pluto) to change that, where necessary, in our personal lineage and for the collective.
The message in the guidebook about the card I pulled echoes this hope:
"Returning to the universal mother is the most profound way to heal our sense of shame. .. Our cosmic Mother reminds us of our inherent goodness and value. She invites us to release the shame we have been carrying for generations.”
An idea I have about the image symbol of the individual in the prison cell is that it is possible to have a spiritual home anywhere, in even the most trying circumstances. Sometimes, maybe the lift is too heavy to contemplate doing anything other than connecting to something larger than oneself and to feel grateful that a spiritual home is always available.
I would love to hear your ideas.
Select astrology for the week: A yod aspect between Pluto, Jupiter, and Mars on Monday.
I mostly want to explain what a yod is, rather than dive into the energy of this specific yod forming Monday. A yod is a specific mathematical formation, or aspect pattern, among three planets in a chart. Two planets are in a mutually excited state (60°, a sextile aspect), yet each is in the same very trying mode (120°, 150°, a quincunx, or inconjunct aspect), both pointing to the same third planet.
In this case, that third planet is Pluto, the planet relating to the power of uncovering difficult truths for the purpose of transformation. Jupiter in Cancer (think benevolent protector), and Mars in Virgo (think getting sh*t done efficiently), are the two planets easily touching base with one another, yet unable to see that Pluto’s agenda unconsciously greatly impacts theirs. Mars is moving pretty rapidly right now, and this energy won't last long, but I thought some may be interested in the basic energy of a yod in case they happen to have one in their birth chart.
The yod aspect is correlated with the tenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet (sometimes it is called “The finger of God”,) and with the following energy for the native of the birth chart:
“God seems to have high expectations of you and God is quite insistent about them. You are called to serve something bigger than yourself.” Steven Forrest, The Book of Air: The Art of Paying Attention.
“The yod promotes a knowing, a vision, an awareness from on high that is not necessarily consciously defined… It either leads to perpetual or transitory bitchiness, complaints, something’s always wrong, or making crises where non need to exist. It can lead into negative self-concepts because, in their own evaluation, they cannot actualize the vision from on high.” Jeffrey Wolf Green, in the EA Glossary.
I would love to hear if you have a yod in your birth chart, and how it has played out.
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Thank you for being here!
What a lovely read to start the week. I'm going to revisit this. Thanks for all you do, Maria.
Good for you for supporting your mom. Don’t forget to take care of yourself too.