Swimming - Triggers + Resolutions
Grounding the body catalyzes all uncertainties
I hold my breath for a couple of laps while I swim, contemplating and feeling one word at a time, courage, service, trust, and value.
How does it feel to be swimming between the following experiences?
-The intimate versus the public
-Keeping knowledge for myself versus sharing it openly.
-Feeling comfortable versus feeling uneasy and not knowing
I am noticing I feel uneasy when I have the opportunity to share space intimately with myself since it is familiar for me to share it all. Now I pause before I jump, 1, 2, 3, Breathe
-Do I need to share?
-Can I keep this moment to myself?
-Am I feeling guilty about keeping this moment private and wholesome?
-When I share, will someone benefit without me knowing?
-How does that feel Monika, If they don’t credit you?
-What is it that enrages you dearest when you inspire others and they forget to acknowledge you?
Space to contemplate, The blockchain is a collective consciousness that requires “individuation” to understand its full power -
Having the courage of being with these uncomfortable feelings, finding out how it feels to be alone and intimate with my emotional needs? Letting go of the urge of sharing all knowledge or experiences allows others to find their space too, without me. That is perhaps one of the biggest AHA moments as I enter a quieter, yet richer intimate experience.
-Can I relate intimately to my needs and re-establish a new connection based on where I am right now and not where I was conditioned?
This full moon on May 15th/16th is a lunar eclipse, which is an opportunity to meet the attachments that impede evolution. Any sort of manipulation is no longer an option.
-Can things not evolve? -Yes! When there is resistance there is no growth-
-How to evolve then? -Confront, and transform the limitations by engaging in a new set of inner values that set the ground for self-reliance and let go of co-dependency.
Withdraw, go swimming in silence, trust the water, trust the emotional body, with its instinctual nature that can reveal to you what you are really good at. Trust and build from your own resources.
Additional sustainable ways can be achieved through curiosity, education, and embodied experience. The emerging digital decentralized ecosystems must be appreciated as the core for they are the imminent next steps in this evolutionary journey. Understanding their limitations and potentials can empower each individual to reconnect to what matters, themselves-
Relationship to self: Blockchain technology offers a myriad of ways to connect to ourselves, by getting to know how one relates to one’s own survival needs, finding resources within, and building trust thereafter.
Relationship to “other”: one creates meaningful inter-changes that allow emergent unknown experiences for collaborations.
Relationship within groups: In turn, an awareness reveals an ecosystem that is built by recognizing, accepting our differences, and supporting them in the collective consciousness.
All these are instrumental in getting knowledgeable about all aspects of life, our inner and outer authorities - not assuming that the Government, the Banks, the Church, or Educational or Marriage institutions are taking care of individual needs.
Because they are not -
Opportunities to meet the δαίμων, triggers, and potential for synthesis.
Part of meeting the South Node of the Moon next week in the lunar eclipse in my 10th house is recognizing those triggers that, since I was very little, have shaped me into believing things about myself that are not true. What is ‘self-love’, ‘self-esteem’, and relationship to myself? That’s a Venus function, that’s the North Node in Venus/Taurus right now. If you look at my chart, I have that area that is very prominent. My core wound is that I came to this life to take a path where I was going to be put into situations where I had to confront the lack of relationship to my own needs, therefore I created a persona that found situations or people or relationships where I could reinforce that. I could practice it, I could integrate it, synthesize. So the shadow that I get triggered by at times happens but now I’m almost able to put the whole thing in slow motion, so I can take small steps to work and embody that perception, that perspective, in the moment, and then do somatic practice where I do my breathing and I sense those feelings in my body. I’m then able to divert the attention and start feeling a completely different emotion because I understand that I am just living through my past.
One of my triggers is when I see that somebody I know expresses something creatively that I have thought of before, but I haven’t had the time to do it, so there’s competition there. I feel that I didn’t “win”, that I was not heard in time, so, therefore, I push myself down, I start labeling myself different things, that I wasn’t fast enough, I wasn’t clever enough… And I will do something else that is quite interesting. Let’s say there is a video that is out there and I kind of have a sense that it is going to cover something I’m writing on - I feel betrayed by my own self, like, “How could this person put this thing out there before me?” I used to label that content without even listening to the video (or watching, or reading the article.) I would not engage with it, would immediately dismiss it and say, “Oh, it’s not worth it, it’s bad, or stupid, or whatever,” and that would be my shield to protect myself from not dealing with it.
Pure raw ENVY*, -I see something in you that I want- ( I may have it but I am projecting lack).
I was afraid to confront the fact that it could be even better than what I was going to write… not really even judging if this creative expression is better or worse, but more about why this person is getting the attention. So the whole light that I’m bringing into myself now is that I don’t feel seen or heard, I don’t feel that I have the importance to be recognized, and that’s what has been hurting for a long time, especially in a profession like the arts. There’s a lot of competition, so if somebody else gets ‘your’ spot, those feelings get pushed even more because there’s a moment that you start feeling that what you create is not worth it. It took me years in New York to figure out that if I was not getting invited somewhere, or not getting an opportunity, it was not because my work was not good, but probably that they chose something more suitable for the moment. They didn’t choose me and that made me feel very upset because I missed the opportunity to express myself, I was dismissed, so I was taking it as a rejection. Remember? Don’t take it personally! ha!
I remember 10 or 12 years ago, I started really practicing not taking it personally. I understood that it was not personal; some opportunities are going to be given to certain people, some others not, so I started to focus on the creative part, not on the reaction if I’m getting one or not. I’m still excited by a reaction, especially when I get invited to a commission for public art, or I get invited to speak. Now when I notice that I’m being seen, I start feeling very humble, and as soon as I get the attention, it just doesn’t feel that that was what I actually wanted. It makes me feel embarrassed that I’d been having all those weird feelings towards others.
Yesterday I had a long conversation with B. that for a while triggered this sense of lack of self-love, and we interact a lot in groups, and I just couldn’t stand him getting all the attention. [I hope if you’re reading this that you know that I am so grateful for our conversations. The way the whole relationship has taken another light, as I shared with you the shadow that had you as a placeholder NOT as the cause.] I have confronted those moments where I realized that I was being triggered, and what I do now differently is I take some time and space. If it’s a person, I inform the person I’m going to step out for a while because I have just found a big shadow there that I need to work on, and I don’t engage with the person. I don’t fight, I don’t push, and I withdraw, and start working with the feeling. I have found so much compassion towards myself and the other persons who have triggered my wound.
It’s not why am I feeling it, but more the space that I create, the feeling, those sensations in the body, and then I just start opening up and what is interesting is like those feelings that I started having, of not being heard or seen, they really go down to my very very first impressions when I was a baby. I was left to cry when I was a baby. My mom had me immediately after she had her firstborn child, who was born 7 months into the pregnancy. My brother’s lungs were not strong enough, so he developed a sort of asthma and I’ve been told my mom and dad were many times scared that he was going to die– he couldn’t breathe, so he was taken to the hospital. My mother, already a very nervous person, developed asthma herself. She got pregnant immediately after and I swear I could feel all the nervousness in her womb, it was passed to me, but I was born a strong baby, crying a lot. I think my mom could feel that I was a different baby than my brother, she felt the strength I had and therefore was almost automatically asked to yield, and give way to others, giving my space to others.
I was even told when I was little, “Don’t cry, don’t ask for too much, you have a lot of stuff, you’re faster, you’re brighter, so you’ve got to yield for the others.” We were four, growing up, and I had a tendency that I had to yield, so I started feeling a lot of resentment because I wanted to be treated equally, to be held, heard, and I didn’t have that sensation in my house. Now when I do this practice, I always go back to me being a baby, and I end up holding myself when I’m crying. I remember this story my grandmother told me that I used to cry so much that the person who was taking care of me as a baby resigned, she said, “I’ll just come back when you have another baby.” I was crying so much, but I was not being held, so the less I was being held, the more I cried, and I think that drove a lot of people crazy.
One thing that I’ve noticed is that when I want something really bad, I cry. But I don't cry a little bit, I cry a lot. That made me feel very ashamed and very disconnected for a long time. One of the big win-wins I’ve been getting through the somatic practice I’ve been doing is I’m able to tell people what my needs are without having to go to the extent of crying.
Going back to Pluto, South Node, looking at the fear–I’m talking about this because this is the way to do some shadow work, really confronting those things that are very uncomfortable, allowing us to go further and open up a new space, and grounding them with other breathwork or actual practice, whether you do qi gong, meditation, breathwork…there are so many practices one can do right now to reconnect to the emotions in the body. It’s all about the emotional body and how it can be grounded so we can feel safe, and in that safety, we don’t have to ask for our place because we are in the place already. And we can live through our own authenticity, our own truth, our own sovereignty. There’s a trust that is needed, and the trust is in life itself.
The T-word– Trauma + Prometheus and liberation
I am going to relate a little bit about how the archetypal energy of Uranus/Aquarius/11th house can lead to understanding trauma from the objective perspective, and how we can connect back to our own memories that are embedded in or probably underneath our own consciousness. The archetype of Uranus/Aquarius/11th house corresponds to an unconsciousness that the individual holds that is related to their individuation. This deep state of unconsciousness that is symbolized by this archetype can at times be brought to light with an awareness that needs some attention and focus on the individual part of ourselves–not through the collective, not through the relationship to others. It is purely an “I am” situation. With things like dreamwork, journaling, intuition, and all kinds of regressions, we can really bring back the experiences and states that have kind of fractured in the psyche and remained as crystallized memories, which hold the key to how we’re going to correlate them in this current lifetime.
The archetype of Uranus/Aquarius/11th house understands and holds the memory of these traumatic experiences. But it is so fragmented that they can only be brought back to light in flashes, sudden flashes of memory, or sudden flashes of events, giving us the ability to connect to that doorway, liminal space, threshold. Mark Jones, in The Healing of the Soul: Pluto, Uranus, and the Lunar Nodes, writes this: “Just as this subtle mind can manifest trauma, so it can function as the basis for the realization of the field of reality in which we live. The subtle mind can be linked to a magnetic presence of a certain type of quality, existing within an overall vast, perhaps infinite, magnetic field. Trauma is an imprint on this magnetism and a distortion of its field. The individual magnet, this individual consciousness, can recognize the nature of the overall field and gain support from that.”
But as stated in previous articles, the process of individuation needs relationships. When we are aware that we are creating a relationship, with a person, a thing, or a situation, and we become objective in how this emerged, whether through conflict or triggering situations, that’s when both time and place should become still, and we can create an environment, or a container, where the emergence of the trauma can be worked upon. This is called holding space, and the shadow work can happen through somatic practices.
Trauma, as it has been defined by many people who are the experts in the field such as Gabor Mate, Peter Levine, and Bessel Van der Kolk or others that I’ll cite sometimes here, is not really what happens to you but how you relate to that event. There’s something that happens that shatters you and makes you become disconnected, dissociated, and the soul or the person decides whether to run away from it, hide from it, or dissolve into another situation or thing. It could be a substance or it can dissolve itself into a relationship with another human being. Therefore it creates this fragmentation of the potential for the person in this lifetime to be able to address and deal with it in natural ways. When the person evolves to a place of awareness, they can go back to this place and start looking at the situation that caused the trauma and go deep into the relationship of what is being triggered. And that is done through the body, by having Transiting Uranus in Taurus now, it is an amazing opportunity to tap directly into our traumas, disconnections, or attachments and embody a different perspective of how this perception is felt TODAY, that is the sole purpose of somatic exercises.
Richard Tarnas’s thesis linked the myth of Prometheus the awakener, to the planet Uranus as the leading the path of individuation. Prometheus stole the fire from the gods and gave it to the humans, he was punished by being chained to a mountainside where a huge eagle would visit every morning and eat part of his liver. The technology of fire gave humans some autonomy from their divine creators.
The myth also tells the reason why Chiron, the wounded healer was relieved from his own pain when he decided to give his own immortality for the liberation of Prometheus. Also notable and interesting is how Saturn, as Chronos, time, accountability, and maturation, is also linked to Chiron, and Uranus as a bridge towards individuation. In order to be free from Trauma, one has to be accountable, confront one’s vulnerability and cross the bridge towards self-authority.
Going through the path of the hero’s journey could be a painful one because we have to confront all our fears, and we become responsible for our destiny by putting ourselves in a vulnerable position. When we allow the creative part of ourselves, a spark, to come through, in the form of a Daemon, this is really where we can go from a breakdown to a breakthrough, as Carl Jung has pointed out through his work on individuation. This makes the Uranus archetype the Liberator, the one who frees ourselves from the known, frees ourselves from the depression that we can feel from Saturn’s conditioning, and it allows us to establish a field, a realm, that is uncharted, untraveled, and it’s wide open for to initiate a new way of understanding our truth without the constraints of society or relationships.
In terms of trauma, I have to say I have been closely watching what’s going on in society, and we have these trials going on TV, live, and as I mentioned very briefly, this has sparked a lot of mirroring. If we could see what’s going on outside of ourselves and see which part of ourselves we still have to integrate, it would serve a larger purpose than staying in a position of judgment. When we see that other people fail to accomplish something, either moral or big purposes in life, and we stay from that observation point of view, we’re judging (as opposed to being objective and understanding that there’s probably a possibility that when we observe these things happening to the people, we might have a part of ourselves being mirrored.) The mirroring is an opportunity for us to go deep inside and see if we can reconnect those parts of our psyche that have been previously shattered.
The whole scope of trauma healing is to be able to reconnect ourselves to that lack of connection to affection, and something that was needed while growing up in an environment that was depleted because our parents themselves and their parents were lacking, its ancestral, and they didn’t have their needs met. This is a cycle right now that we have the skies allowing us to re-encounter that subtle memory, which can emerge while we try to face our addictions and our limitations. And in that path, some sort of liberation and individuation may happen.
The idea of individuation can be confused with the word ‘individual’ — and it brings forth a lot of prejudice about what it means to be an individual. People tend to talk about selfishness, and in a way, we have to be selfish to find our individuation process. Being selfish doesn’t mean that I’m going to step all over your boundaries and take advantage of you. That’s something else, that’s abuse. Being an individual means I know my truth and I work for it, I know my needs and I also can see you and your needs and the needs of others. If I am an individuated person, it means that I can say ‘no’ and ‘yes’ according to my needs and not because I feel obliged to accept or decline a situation because I’m afraid of not being included or excluded from it. To arrive there, there needs to be some sort of recognition that this is the path we’re willing to encounter, and there’s also the choice of not being willing to do so, and that’s ok, too. If people want to live in the bliss of not being individuated and having other people make decisions for them, that’s also an option, and that’s an option that we each have.
*from late 13c., from invidere “to envy, hate,” earlier “look at (with malice), cast an evil eye upon,” from in- “upon” (from PIE root *en “in”) + videre “to see” (from PIE root *weid- “to see”).
Lunar nodes 23/43 channel, sun + earth on the 8-14 channel
There are major transits happening, the sun makes the annual meeting to the north node of the moon on Friday 13th and the potent lunar eclipse follows on the 15/16th - Mercury is already retrograde as of Maty 10th, so some new ideas may have to look for a solid ground before being able to be sent through the airwaves.
Share and deploy your individuality for the benefit of the collective, and overcome its boundaries by being fair, patient, and open to share insights when asked to. Ground the individual direction in your life with your sole creative power, there are abundant resources, remember all within, only make sure to be of service to the whole.
Big transformations are on the horizon - My aim is to keep supporting YOU reader throughout this phase.
More on individuation- sovereignty - eclipses- blockchain in previous articles.
Audio - Video whispers:
I intertwine between the spoken and the written word, hear my insights (different content) below. The written article is a companion (not a transcript) to theeo.
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I have engaged with your article, making my comments in my own article About Being Triggered https://johnstokdijk.com/2011-on/my-projects/emergent-commons/about-being-triggered/.