SPRING: Nature's New Year

"At the top of the world, high above the clouds, twelve spirits sit around a campfire, arguing good-naturedly
about which season is best… each awaiting their turn to take the stage…."

Aries never looks before he leaps. His mother forgot to mention if you run with a stick you could poke an eye out. At six, he challenged bullies who were twice his size. When Aries built his castle, he made the ceilings tall as sequoia trees. He strung an acrobat’s tightrope from room to room -- sixty feet up, without a net. He flies a hang-glider from the bedroom to the library, where there are books everywhere. Biographies and autobiographies -- all about him. How he crossed the Alps with Hannibal, wrestled grizzlies, escaped from pirates; he’s even been to the Moon. Aries is popular with the ladies – the celestial ladies. They guide his feet up snow-bound mountains, snap trees in his opponent’s face, send magic rope, golden eagles and unbeatable swords his way, just in the nick of time. Ask them why and you don’t get the usual answers.
He’s handsome, of course, dripping with youthful enthusiasm. He’s got strength to die for. Sexy too. But it’s his heart they swear they love. So pure. Whatever he does, he believes in. “I wasn’t always this way,” he confesses. “I was reckless, an egomaniac. Until I burnt my house down by playing with fire. I spent the whole night studying the flames. By morning, I had learned its language. Fire leaps up with love, you know, and has more secrets to teach than a forest of trees. If you can draw it into your heart and contain it, you’ll achieve impossible things.”'

"WHO AM I?" is the quintessential Aries question. You won't get the answer by navel-gazing. You must get into motion. The work of the first month of Spring is to break out and break through. Like a green shoot pushing up through the ground after its silent winter metamorphosis. The plant is on a journey to find out what it can become – and so are you. Results are less important now than action. Seek new experiences. They’ll deliver what you need along the way, quickening the flames of young spirit, evoking your courage, building your strength and bringing a new awareness of yourself. Aries is pure life force rising through the body.

Only the dead—or those who live in high rises with shuttered windows—are unmoved by the energy of Spring. A revered ancient Chinese text, Inner Classic, describes the supernatural forces at work this season: These forces appear to us through the color green. They stimulate our voices to make a shouting sound: Yeeeehah!! and Aaaaiiiiiii! They careen through our emotional bodies whenever anger--or the yearning for new adventure--stirs. These forces shape our eyes, our liver and our tendons. They send wind through the Heavens and plant wood on Earth. They are within us and all around us. Nutritional expert, Paul Pitchford in Healing with Whole Foods, advises us to exercise these forces with yang activities —take brisk walks, rise with the sun, reflect the active ascending nature of the time. Our soul, he says, is nourished through the eyes by spring’s green color. And we often find that our appetite for food decreases naturally. Instinctively, we want to cleanse ourselves from the fats and heavy foods that warmed us in winter—as well as the afflicting emotions of dissatisfaction, impatience, and non-productive anger that have collected in our bodies. We crave live, energetic raw foods; our bodies want an inner spring too. When the liver is cleansed of its sluggishness, our perception also clears. We see life in a new way. Everything about this season sings of renewal. May you enjoy yours!

It's the SPRING EQUINOX! Equal day and equal night! How can you find balance between your inner world and your outer reality, your mind and your heart, your head and your feet, others and yourself?

May Spring feed the FIRE in your HEART! Much love to you at this SPRING EQUINOX!

The Damned Truth about Being WHOLISTIC!

 "I dreamed I had a child, and even in the dream I saw it was my life, and it was an idiot, and I ran away. But it always crept on to my lap again, clutched at my clothes. Until I thought, if I could kiss it, whatever in it is my own, perhaps I could sleep. And I bent to its broken face, and it was horrible...but I kissed it. I think one must finally take one's life in one's arms.   - Arthur Miller, After the Fall                                        

WHOLISTIC/HOLISTIC - is a common word with a distorted definition that has yet to be corrected and fully understood. Those who claim wholistic/holistic health ideals are just as in the dark about what it really means. We proclaim integration of mind, body & spirit, yet there is a significant element of truly being wholistic/holisitic that is often missing from the consciousness of those who attempt to practice this lifestyle, those who's professional titles include the word as well as the broader scope of society that illusively benefits from its usage. We can not be whole until we embrace every and I mean every single part of our being.

 According to James Bugental, author of The Search for Authenticity, any facet of ourselves which we reown, no matter how unpleasant it may initially appear to be, contributes to our empowerment and well-being. Holding onto a virtuous or competent self-image does not feed our self-esteem if that self-esteem inaccurately reflects our relationship to ourselves. As we regain disowned facets of ourselves, we gain self, and are less invested in our self-image. As a result we feel more complete, more open to pleasure and love; we gain power that we have previously invested in others; we become larger.

It's time to think without the box!

We need to be committed to our own wholeness, more so than to our own goodness. We get so stuck on wanting to be good, doing good, living good that we end up being lopsided, walking around with one side of our energy body being weighed down. Picture a scale that has unequal quantities on each side. What does it look like?

The Judeo-Christian ethic has influenced us to repress qualities in ourselves which do not reflect our religious and social ideals. Yet by attempting to be overly good, we relegate facets of ourselves to the dark closet of our unconscious, where without the light consciousness, they become twisted and distorted. Those of us who  are most are identified with our virtuous personas may even unknowingly, act out the evil that we so actively defend ourselves against acknowledging.

According to Erich Neumann, the Christian ethic based upon a one-dimensional virtuous God inevitably leads to the projection of evil; it needs to be replaced with a new ethic, which involves a multidimensional God who encompasses both good and evil and also requires each individual to take into himself all the ugly, distorted, and evil qualities he previously rejected. In my opinion the religious world was created out of the need to control mankind, to gain power as a form of mental slavery and entrapment that sought and succeeded in limiting the infinite capacity and power of humans while distracting and diverting our attention from the god/goddess force we already are and we already embody within us causing the greatest destruction to earth and humankind.

That's why when friends say to me, mostly in parting, "Take care, be good, don't do what I wouldn't do," etc.  I often respond by saying, "I don't want to be good all the time, I don't just want to be naughty, I need to be naughty!!"

According to Strephon Kaplan Williams:
 

Love is not the absence of fear.

Love is not the absence of hatred.

Love is the embracing of each aspect of life to transform it by integrating it within the whole.

I watched the movie, Henry's Crime last night. I've been picking some movies that really dip into and challenge the unconscious world and the established order of thinking. Henry was played by Keanu Reeves. It was a comedic love story about a man who since grade school was labeled as "The Most Nicest Person". He was the epitome of nice. And I mean to his detriment! He served time for a crime he did not commit, remained nice and never rattled on his friends. It was rather strange seeing Keanu play a role as such given his stardom in the serial film, The Matrix. But by the end, I could see why he accepted the role. The Matrix was also a deep movie. It penetrated my psyche. In the end, even in his nice role and demeanor, he created the perfect crime (activating his dark side) for the time he served and gained the love of a very hard cold, insensitive bitch who was a striving actress in the film. You've got to see this film with new thought. You can't approach it with the old.

In her book, Your Secret Self: Illuminating the Mysteries of the Twelfth House, Tracy Marks, shares that the paradox of our commitment to wholeness and our willingness to embrace our shadow self, is that as a result, the light of consciousness and compassion transforms these dark pieces of ourselves and enable us to become more capable of love. By owning our shadow, by refusing to project our evil into the world at large (we do that when we deny our own), we not only develop greater empathy for suffering humanity, but we also contribute to socio-political change. Wars are based upon projection; environmental pollution is based upon the repression and denial of our connection to the world around us and of the long term consequences of our actions.

Damn it!!! "We can't throw out the baby with the bath water!!"

Wake the f*ck up world! Awaken from your slumber! The world is both ugly and beautiful and so are you. Learn how to live with it! It's a new day, a new way! With the current planetary forces in motion the universal vibes are making sure that we all see our own darkness. No one is exempted!! And I mean no one! So strive for wholeness not goodness! Embrace all of you not part of you ....then you shall become and know what it means to be authentically WHOLE or WHOLISTIC/HOLISTIC!

We cannot stand the sight of our dark side, so we repress it, push it under, thinking we have thereby disposed of it. But we have not. We have simply pushed it into a place where it both has us in its grip and automatically projects itself on the person or the nation we do not like; so the tension and strife and anguish we will not stand in ourselves is carelessly and irresponsibly cast out to increase the tension and strife and anguish of our world.

                                                      - Charles B. Hanna