Author: Ingrid Hoffman

September 12, 2011 In Relationship By Ingrid Hoffman

The Kindness of Strangers

In folk lore and fairy tales little children are always told not to talk to strangers. Strangers denote danger, some form of awakening from the slumber of innocence. They can be angels in the guise of ugly old crones. They can be wolves in sheep’s clothing.

So often, these serendipitous encounters with perfect strangers can open our hearts to the generosity of soul-directed experiences that defy logic. Says Clarisssa Pinkola Estes, “In mythos and fairy tales, deities and other great spirits test the hearts of humans by showing up in various forms that disguise their divinity. They show up in robes, rags, silver sashes, or with muddy feet. They show up with skin dark as old wood, or in scales made of rose petal, as a frail child, as a lime-yellow old woman, as a man who cannot speak, or as an animal who can. The great powers are testing to see if humans have yet learned to recognize the greatness of soul in all its varying forms.”

If we trust our intuition, our wise animal-instinctual skills for survival, we will sniff out the predators, and open ourselves to encounters with strangers who midwife us through time of painful and lonely transitions, soothing with a smile or a single act of generosity. We will recognise those strangers who can awaken us to a new life direction. Those who bring a sense of texture and the comforting sense of continuity in our daily lives. Many people say that real friendships are not easy to forge in termite mound apartment blocks, lego land housing estates. We may ask, are these my friends or merely acquaintances? Does it really matter?

“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,” drawls Blanche du Bois in Tennessee Williams’ Streetcar named Desire. The Latin word for Kindness is Humanitas. Stranger is Hospes, also meaning, guest or host. How deeply significant are these more authentic meanings if we savour them and allow the essence of the words to infuse our psyche. So often it is a stranger who performs heroic acts of love and daring – answering a telephone call that saves a life, swimming out to sea to save a drowning child.

Ian offers his time in the service of the dying, sitting at their bedsides to write down the stories of their lives. Jessie visits Alzheimer’s patients who sit and stare. She gently holds their hands, combs their hair, and sings the old songs they may or may not recall through the gossamer veils and whispers of their memory.

We use the word “friend” loosely these days. We are “friends” with strangers we connect with on face book, those we meet at the yoga studio, or at a weekend workshop. A neighbour becomes a friend. There is a soulful kinship with the elderly lady wearing the red scarf, who walks in the park with her rotund dachshund. We smile and exchange pleasantries with the man in the video store. For me, these low intensity friends are like luminous pearls in the necklace of my life. Like angels, they enfold me in their wings in times of joy and times of sorrow. They bestow nods of encouragement when I feel the bruise of living. They reach out with silent “likes” and comments of acknowledgement on Facebook. In this circle of kinsmen and women, we all belong to an interconnected universe.

These are the friends that offer us the out breath in the sturm und drang of living with lovers, the soap operas in our families. These are the friends who dapple the shadows of our lives with small acts of kindness, honest caring, and gentle humour. It is the kindness of these strangers who offer us sanctuary amidst the tumultuous storms, the dry deserts, of our lives. So, each day, let us be in gratitude for the kindness of strangers who encircle us when storms rage through all that is safe and familiar.

“Smile at each other, smile at your wife, smile at your husband, smile at your children, smile at each other – it doesn’t matter who it is – and that will help you to grow up in greater love for each other.” Mother Teresa

September 10, 2011 In Astrology By Ingrid Hoffman

Astrology 101, Part 3: Two more Angles

In Part 2 of the Astrology Primer, we introduced the horizon and its end-points in the horoscope – the ascendant and descendant. This time we meet the other two angles and the houses, again using Marilyn Monroe’s chart to illustrate. As mentioned previously, the angles are the four “cardinal” points of the horoscope, the celestial North, South, East and West. We’ve met East and West already, let’s look North and South.

The Meridian Line: dividing East from West

The second major axis in the chart is the red line running from top to bottom. At the top of the chart is the Midheaven, sometimes called the MC (from the Latin for Midheaven, Medium Coeli). The other end of the line is called the IC (Imum Coeli, Bottom of the Sky) or sometimes the Nadir. This is the Meridian line, connecting the points directly overhead and directly beneath us. At midday, the Sun crosses the MC; at midnight, the Sun is on the IC.

The Midheaven is where we want to shine out to the world, representing our vocation in the broadest sense of the word, be it our job, our marriage or our visible status or role in life. While traditionally though of as indicating a goal in terms of career or working life, the meaning of the MC is not confined to this type of goal, and can indicate very personal or spiritual goals as well. In Marilyn’s chart, we see Taurus on the Midheaven, emphasising material things and security as a key to her vocation. It is likely that Marilyn identified with and aspired to the Taurean qualities of stability, calm and peace, however difficult it may have been for her to achieve them.

As the lowest point in the chart, the IC, represents our roots, where we come from, our home. This is the most hidden part of self, the part of the psyche seen by very few. For Marilyn, Scorpio sits on the IC, suggesting that she tended to keep her deepest passions and emotions even more well protected and hidden than most. Even her biographers would have struggled to access and understand this aspect of her personality.

Before closing this post, let’s take a quick look at the other divisions in the inner circle. These show the houses, numbered 1 to 12. Like the signs of the Zodiac, the houses are a way of dividing the sky up into twelve parts. Where the Zodiac divides the sky based on the yearly cycle of the Sun, starting at the spring equinox, the houses divide the sky based on the daily cycle, with the starting point defined as the ascendant and the houses numbered from 1 to 12 anticlockwise around the chart. Over the history of astrology, many methods of division have been devised, but in this series, we use the system known as Placidus, which is widely favoured by astrologers. The houses are another key tool in astrology, but that’s a topic for another day!

Next up: The First 6 Signs of the Zodiac

September 7, 2011 In Astrology, Relationship By Ingrid Hoffman

No White Flag

Nothing is more abrasive to the human spirit than being ignored or invalidated by the one you love. When a lover, or cherished friend makes a unilateral decision to abort a relationship, and “move on”, we remain behind, emotions cauterised: unheard, unseen, invisible. Very few of us journey through this lifetime un-scalded by the sting of rejection.

“She won’t return my calls,” Jeff told me, despondently stirring a third spoon of sugar into his cappuccino, as if to sweeten the sorrow in his heart, ameliorate the loss of his dream. “She says it’s over. She’s in love with someone else. There’s so much I feel I still want to say to her!” he says, staring despondently into the dark chasm of a future without his Kathy.

Deep attachments are excruciatingly difficult to release lightly, to unravel effortlessly. Especially if they come, not in a fit of pique, or a defensive cold shoulder, but as a deliberate closure, or when some fated event cracks us open, catapults us into the thunder ball of rage and grief. Of course, we can embalm the Love that once was. Conceal it like a precious pearl in our hearts. Defiantly refuse to raise the white flag and surrender. Or we can accept that these sudden jolts are critical moments in our spiritual life, in our evolution towards a new level of opening.

If we allow ourselves the Grace to experience the raw pain of loss and the darkness of depression, to sit, for as long as it takes, in the stinking sewer of our own self pity and anger, to allow the salty moisture of our tears to cleanse and heal – then, and only then, will our Wise Woman self emerge to garner the fruits from the dark Mystery of this experience.

Pathos, rather narrowly defined in the modern dictionary as “suffering” was understood in a far more sophisticated and subtle way by the ancient Greeks. For them, pathos embraced the profundity and enormous scope of human experience. We feel the breath of pathos when embraced by a powerful unexpected bolt of passionate love. Or when someone we love dearly leaves us or dies. Or when cataclysmic change occurs in our lives to shock and disorientate us, to fling us into the dark abyss of unknowing. Pathos is something outside us, bigger than ourselves. Joseph Campbell said, “It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.”

Our ancestors knew Pathos. They knew Necessity. They embraced the Mystery of Fate that realigned their lives and personalities. The shaman would travel to the Underworld to enter into the temple of the soul, to be dismembered by pain and suffering, to be born a-new. With our fundamental either-or beliefs in “facts”, our dumbed down, literal world-view, when Fate intrudes in a coldly detached way, we are so often left, entrails dangling, disorientated, stumbling in the darkness, searching outside ourselves for logical answers.

In my interpretation of astrology, I see pathos acitve in the birth charts of clients who are visited by fate in the form of life threatening illness, a devastating love affair, loss of a child, the seemingly inexplicable ending of a long friendship. It is a visitation of something non-ordinary, impersonal, supernatural. It is a breaking open. We face our own Armageddon when we succumb to our hidden longings, unfurl our crumpled wings, and free fall into the unknown – a new relationship, new job, a courageous move to a new country. Broken open, we allow our soul to shine through.

“White Flag” – Dido
I know you think that I shouldn’t still love you,
Or tell you that.
But if I didn’t say it, well I’d still have felt it
where’s the sense in that?

I promise I’m not trying to make your life harder
Or return to where we were

I will go down with this ship
And I won’t put my hands up and surrender
There will be no white flag above my door
I’m in love and always will be

I know I left too much mess and
destruction to come back again
And I caused nothing but trouble
I understand if you can’t talk to me again
And if you live by the rules of “it’s over”
then I’m sure that that makes sense

I will go down with this ship
And I won’t put my hands up and surrender
There will be no white flag above my door
I’m in love and always will be

And when we meet
Which I’m sure we will
All that was there
Will be there still
I’ll let it pass
And hold my tongue
And you will think
That I’ve moved on….

I will go down with this ship
And I won’t put my hands up and surrender
There will be no white flag above my door
I’m in love and always will be

September 5, 2011 In Astrology, Relationship By Ingrid Hoffman

To Begin Again

Endings can be unspeakably painful. Like a folding deck of cards, an ending can evoke a long-buried memory of a lacerating loss, open archives of ancient pain.

A friendship fades, a partnership dissolves, a Lover leaves, a life partner dies. Our default response is to ferret for some kind of logical reason; to dive into a chasm of rejection and abandonment; or find a balm to soothe the seeping wound. For years, we pick at the scabs of these endings, stew in the bitterness of our own bile, our ego waiting for an admission, an explanation, an apology that never comes.

We self-righteously blame the other for committing the savage crime of rupture. For answering their soul’s call to move on. Like a little child sucking her thumb, we latch on the unforgiveable flaws and non-negotiable behaviours, crumbs of comfort. It would never have worked means “I did not have the courage, or I did not love enough to …”

So often, the astrological symbolism in a client’s birth chart suggests that unconsciously it was she or he that felt the call of her soul to break free from the putrefying corpse of a relationship long deceased. The composite chart, which contains the soul of the relationship itself, with all its fateful twists and turns, may reflect this need to part, or to re-invent the relationship, some time before it actually happens. Relationships, like the orbits of the planets, cycles of nature, have seasons too. Some never survive the cruel frosts of winter. Others thrust new green shoots after vigorous pruning.

We all have our own narratives about times of endings. One of the great challenges at these times is to look at the stories we tell ourselves with gentleness and compassion. To acknowledge what is, to imagine what might be. To accept the initiation into a new soul-ful experience, which always comes through a death in some shape or form. Perhaps only one of us feels that the relationship has become lifeless. And the heart rending decision to leave must be carried alone. Is this being callous, selfish, or honouring of the relationship and the one we once loved? Out of the seed of Love blossoms Death, so that Love can grow a-new.

Our relationships, our lives, demand courage and endurance. Courage to Hope again. Endurance to gracefully embrace the cycles of life and death. The wisdom to breathe, and embrace a new beginning.

“After all, computers crash, people die, relationships fall apart. The best we can do is breathe and reboot.” Sex and the City

September 1, 2011 In Relationship By Ingrid Hoffman

Wild Love

Nothing strips us as soul naked as Wild Love. Nothing shatters suburban lives, unmasks our shadow, nullifies our fear, lifts us on the wings of Angels, as Wild Love.

Provocative choices, profound turning points, soul-directed impulses – when we begin to see everything as energy consciousness, there can be no accidents, no coincidences. No one out there who can keep us in the gilded cage, as it is we who hold the key. We are the heroines of our own story, we write our own scripts. It is we who can dare to go to the ball wearing the glass slippers. We who choose to stay alone, sitting in cold ashes at the hearth. When we dare to love wildly, there are no victims, no-one to blame, just an interconnected web of constantly changing energy, new experiences to deepen and to grow into our Authentic Self.

“Passion is truth’s soul mate,” says Sarah Ban Breathnach, and as I see the tears of joy shimmer in my friend’s Siobhan’s lovely brown eyes, my heart sings. “It’s a meeting of souls,” she says. “This feels so right.” Siobhan lives her own story. Always has. Her life has been a trajectory of passionate, rather than passive, loving. So she soars to her new lover, transfigured, illuminated, true to her wild, authentic self. So she experiences a-new, deepening spiritual growth, another chance to bathe in the dewy-moisture of Love.

So many people say they fear intimacy; they’re commitment-phobic, as if this is some badge of honour.

Fear is the opposite of Love. It constricts, keeps our light dim, and mutes our cry of Joy. To love fiercely, we must overthrow our crusty beliefs about the material world, and answer the call of our soul song.

Cor, root of the word, courage, means heart in Latin. Do we have the courage to Love ourselves, and another with all our hearts? Do we have the courage to embrace a fierce, instinctual wild love that will change our life, our world, irrevocably? Do we have the courage trust our intuition, the messenger of the soul?

“The way to maintain one’s connection to the wild is to ask yourself what it is that you want. This is the sorting of the seed from the dirt. One of the most important discriminations we can make in this matter is the difference between things that beckon to us and things that call from our souls. Nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in the choice of mates and lovers. A lover cannot be chosen a la smorgasbord. A lover has to be chosen from soul-craving. To choose just because something mouth-watering stands before you will never satisfy the hunger of the soul-self. And that is what the intuition is for; it is the direct messenger of the soul.” — Clarissa Pinkola Estés (Women Who Run with the Wolves)

August 30, 2011 In Astrology, Relationship By Ingrid Hoffman

It must have been love

Sooner or later we encounter the bully boss,conniving colleague, abusive lover, controlling sibling or friend. Our relationships can be fonts of deep joy and growth; mirrors of our dis-owned shadow, as well as sharp shards of glass that make us bleed, and leave.

For five years now, Jenny and Ron have been locked in an abusive relationship. They fling criticism and blame at one another like poison arrows. Their marriage is a battlefield and they, the walking wounded.

It feels familiar on an unconscious level, to repeat family patterns. We glue ourselves firmly into unhappy relationships, because the reptile brain wants to keep things as they are. So an abused child may cling to the abusive parent, a battered wife may open the door that one last time. In chronic stress, we mistake the familiar for love. We abuse ourselves by not acting in our truth or our integrity. We deceive ourselves – we cannot make it alone, we will not survive financially, we will fail. Often the more painful a relationship is, the harder it is to walk away, even though it poisons us and stunts our growth. Instead, we circle each other like snarling tigers, or dim our Light, become invisible. In our stress response, adrenaline pumps through our bloodstream, devastating our body.

The drama triangle is a much-cited psychological model. Every painful emotional drama in our lives emanates from this triangle, so the theory goes. Most of us unconsciously choose to re-enact childhood dramas, and replicate a template of neglect, criticism, martyrdom, insecurity and fear – the neurochemistry of pain. So, if you are locked in a power game of attack and defence (two people can play a role in this triangle) you might be playing either one of these roles: Persecutor, Rescuer, or Victim. We all have these inner voices. The Persecutor is the critical parent; the Rescuer is the over-responsible parent, and the Victim is the powerless little child.

Venus, planet signifying our relationships, is in Virgo, with the Sun and the New Moon (August 29th) suggesting that we go within, look at areas in our lives where we are out of integrity. Where do we deceive ourselves, make ourselves right, the other person “wrong”, deny our instincts and the signals from our bodies? Only we can change the dance of destruction in our homes or offices. We can walk away, or we can choose to begin to learn the steps of a new dance this new Virgo Moon. The counterpoint to Virgo is Pisces, which can hold the energy of Victim, Martyr, and the sacrificial one. Use the energy of Virgo – self-containment, essential right mindedness, and purity. She is Goddess, honouring all living things – and Herself.

Human beings are infinitely complex, mysterious and defy labels. Einstein is often quoted as saying that you cannot solve a problem from the same level of thinking that created it. So as we make a decision to shift from fear-based, battle mentality, to a new expanded awareness, we can today embrace a creative solution that opens up the possibility of respectful, loving relationships.

It must have been love, but it’s over now
It must have been good, but I lost it somehow
It must have been love, but it’s over now
From the moment we touched till the time had run out. Roxette

August 26, 2011 In Astrology By Ingrid Hoffman

Astrology 101, Part 2: The Angles

In Part 1 of the Astrology Primer, we introduced the horoscope as a map of the sky at a particular place and time. This time we introduce the angles, again using Marilyn Monroe’s chart to illustrate. The angles are the four “cardinal” points of the horoscope, the celestial North, South, East and West.

The Horizon: where earth and sky meet

If you stand out under the stars for a while, you’ll very soon become aware that the stars of the Zodiac and planets rise, move from east to west and finally set. Where these bodies rise and set is on the horizon, and its importance in astrology springs from the symbolism of this rising and setting. In a horoscope, the horizon is shown as a horizontal line across the centre of the wheel with an arrow on the left pointing east. That’s the Ascendant, and the sign on the ascendant is known as the Rising Sign. The Sun, Moon and ascendant comprise the three most important points in the horoscope and often allow you to get a quick entry into the meaning of a chart.

Let’s use this method to look at Marilyn’s chart again.

Leo ascendant: The bright, shining movie star
Sun in Gemini: Talkative, humorous, inquisitive
Moon in Aquarius: Somewhat cut off from her emotions

The ascendant is interpreted as the face that the person shows the world. Marilyn was very clearly seen as a queen, her screen presence that of a brightly shining star, as shown by Leo, the lion, rising. Even today, more than 40 years since her death, she continues to have pop idol status, a level of fame that would satisfy even the most attention-demanding Leo. Often, of course, the face you show the world is not your true self, but rather a mask you hide behind. And Marilyn, as we all know, was deeply vulnerable as well.

The Sun stands for the person’s identity – how they shine in the fullness of their being. Marilyn’s identity is represented by Gemini, associated with versatile, talkative, sociable and inquisitive personalities. We see this in Marilyn, especially in the comedy film roles she played, but, as we’ll explain a little later in the series, Marilyn found it difficult to fully live up to the true meaning of this Gemini identity. For Gemini is not about just talking; it’s really about communicating. Not inquisitiveness but really a quest for the other half of the story – the signs that will lead back to the lost Twin. Marilyn tended to lean towards the more negative expression of Gemini: for example, she was notoriously unreliable, often turning up late on set.

Finally, the Moon stands for the emotional, reactive part of the psyche. Aquarius, however, is an airy, intellectual sign, and a person with a Moon here often has difficulty in accessing their emotions directly or distrusts their own and others’ emotions as irrational or unpredictable. The Moon also represents the way that mother is viewed; and Marilyn’s mother was far from a stable influence in her child’s life, eventually suffering a nervous breakdown, leaving Marilyn to be declared a ward of state and to grow up in a succession of orphanages and foster homes.

The opposite end of the horizon line is called the Descendant; it’s the setting point for all the planets and signs. While the ascendant represents the part of ourselves that we most likely display to the world, the descendant is the part of which we are most unconscious. In many cases, of course, we then project it out onto our partners in relationships and it is in this unconscious sense that the descendant often shows the type of partner we attract into our life. In Marilyn’s case, her descendant is, like her Moon, in Aquarius, showing the men she attracted – men who were largely incapable of giving her the emotional support she needed. Her first marriage, at the age of sixteen, was arranged to ensure she wouldn’t have to return to an orphanage. Joe DiMaggio, her second husband, was reputed to have been jealous of the sexual attention she received; they divorced within a year of marrying. Her third marriage to playwright, Arthur Miller, lasted less than five years, and seemed to provide little emotional support for her.

Together, the ascendant and descendant form the personal axis of the chart, running from who we declare ourselves to be in the eyes of the world to the part of ourselves with which we are least comfortable and tend to project on significant others in our lives. This axis also divides the chart in two. Above the axis lies the visible sky at that time and place; from a psychological view, we can be objective about the characteristics represented by the signs and planets lying above the horizon and this part of our psyche is visible to and shared with the world at large. Anything below this axis is invisible in the sky and is thus hidden, internalised and subjective. Somebody with a preponderance of planets above the horizon tends to be more influenced by external events and wants to be more out in the world, than somebody whose planets hide below the horizon. For the latter type, the inner, subjective world is where they live and growth comes through solitude, introspection or meditation.

Next up: The remaining two angles.

August 25, 2011 In Relationship By Ingrid Hoffman

You look Wonderful tonight

“You look wonderful tonight”
“Humph, it’s the candlelight!”
We brush off compliments like bread crumbs, add ice cubes to the warmth of pure Bliss. All the while, diligently saying our affirmations, making wish lists, journaling, signing up for “Manifest your Soul Mate workshops”. And yet, when we get that great job offer in New York, meet an attractive person in a coffee shop, we flee as if pursued by the hound of the Baskervilles!

Giving is far easier than receiving for most of us. We stay in control. Get that warm fuzzy feeling which says that we are “good”. Imago Relationship theory posits that the people we pick in our relationships mirror the traits of our childhood care-givers.

It is in the eyes of our Lover that our original yearnings are reactivated. We attempt, in adult life, to get what we did not get in childhood from our parents. Through our filters, we see that our partners respond as our parents did and this recreates the original childhood frustration. In his book, Receiving Love, Harville Henricks talks about a “receiving deficiency” which contains, at its root, a memory of not feeling worthy of being loved. “The desire, which originally was free of conflict, is now contaminated by the caretaker’s rejection.” This might have been subtle, or overt.

“My mother used to say that I was greedy for love. I wanted too much,” my friend Sue shared over a latte at the Waterfront on Sunday. Sue deflects compliments and appreciation like a pro, and when her lover praises her, she sets the bar higher and higher, nothing is ever good enough – she says she doesn’t believe him. “He tells me what he thinks I want to hear.”

So we make an unconscious decision not to ask for anything, as we feel that to want is bad. Until we dismantle the inner drama from our childhood, we remain deprived – still hungry!

“The fear of receiving resonates in the deepest levels of the psyche. To receive is to let life happen, to open to grief and loss, to open to love and delight,” says Jungian analyst, Marion Woodman.

So take some quiet time today to review your life. Think about those gifts or acts of kindness you received in your past that were valuable to you. Replay the scene like a movie. How old were you? Who gave them to you? How did you feel? Allow yourself to re-experience and savour the good feelings connected to the gift and the giver. Notice your resistance, the voice inside your head. Check in with your body. What comes up for you?

So many of the little gifts we receive each day are engulfed in busyness and self-absorption. Like snow white feathers, they fall onto our path, and so often we hurry on, too hasty to pause, to pick them up.

Open your heart today, and notice these little feathers. The acts of kindness. Your partner brings you a cup of tea, your neighbour waves as you drive to the office, a cashier greets your presence with a warm smile. Attune to a new level of awareness as you experience the softness and abundance of The Universe. Experience the gifts you receive in every cell of your body. Notice acts of kindness and generous behaviour in your partner’s efforts. Encourage the giving so that you can learn that it is safe to receive.

Know that you look wonderful tonight!

Harry I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and the thing is, I love you.
Sally What?
Harry I love you.
Sally How do you expect me to respond to this?
Harry How about, you love me too.
Sally How about, I’m leaving.

(When Harry met Sally.)

August 22, 2011 In Astrology By Ingrid Hoffman

Round like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel

Fear can be contagious. Like sex, it sells newspapers. News channel ratings rocket. Do we really have to buy into the collective paranoia?

Three of my closest friends are going through challenging times right now – ill health, relationship in grid lock, financial fear. Sue called me today, panic permeating her beautiful voice, “What’s this Fifth Night thing I’m reading about? Is Tripoli going to fall? Stock markets going to plummet again?”

Fear multiplies exponentially like germs in Petri dish. Collectively, we seem to swarm like flies to rotting corpse, to things that go “bump in the night”. End of World prophecies abound as 2012 draws nearer… the end of the world as we know it? The “what ifs” that make us strut and fret, worry ourselves literally sick about what might be …

I reminded myself of a quotation from A Course in Miracles, “Only the Mind can create Fear”. And I thought of all the times in my life when I have scared myself with things that never happened. Terrorized myself in the darkest hours before dawn. Now I know better (mostly!), I do better, and focus on the in-breath and the out-breath, in the certain knowing that it is only from this moment in time that I create my future.

The symbolism of the astrology at the moment suggests we are, indeed, in the crucible of great change, a death and rebirth cycle. This cycle is a time of break-down, a time of metaphorical, or literal dying, to make way for new birth. In the cycles of Life, nothing truly dies, only changes form. Like the mythical phoenix rising from the ashes, so often the endings in our lives bring new and even more vivifying experiences.

According to Mayan mythology as interpreted by Carl Johan Calleman, on August 19th, we crossed the threshold into the fifth night of the final level of the Tzolk’in, calendar. This fifth night is ruled by Tezcatlipoca, Lord of Darkness, and will bring destruction, and certainly change, either in our personal lives, or collectively. The last time we experienced this wave was in 2008, which marked the beginning of the global financial crisis, and the burst of the housing bond bubble. In my own life it was a year of final endings; and a conscious choice to open the door to a new direction for my life journey.

Astrologically, Venus moves into the earthy sign of Virgo today. She is a celestial signpost that alerts us to be more discerning in our personal lives, to avoid ingesting “toxins” which contaminate our psyches. Virgo energy suggests that we get things in order, clear out the clutter, focus more precisly on what we value in our lives. On one level this can be as simple as re-organising our email inbox, clearing out the beyond sell-by date food in our refigerator, decluttering the wardrobe, taking charge of our financial affairs. Changing to a bank that offers better service, better interest rates.

On another level it is about staying in our integrity. Eschewing “junk food” – gossip, toxic relationships, fear-based news stories, all the dramas in your own life or the lives of those around you. Setting aside time each day to focus on those things that nourish your spirit. Opening your heart, embracing changes and challenges in your life with a sense of curiosity and wonder, and an awareness that we are held and supported on a Higher Level.
“Seek not to change the world, but choose to change your mind about the world.”

A Course in Miracles

August 18, 2011 In Relationship By Ingrid Hoffman

Baby, I have been here before

Strange, isn’t it, how a frisson of a fragrance, a sliver of a song, can reverberate like the striking of a bell, redolent across the veils of time. Long after my tears have dried, I cannot now listen to Imogen Heap’s haunting voice singing Hallelujah, or Mark Knopfler’s Romeo and Juliet, without connecting instantly to two men I have loved with wondrous, wild abandon.

“Baby I have been here before
I know this room, I’ve walked this floor
I used to live alone before I knew you.
I’ve seen your flag on the marble arch
Love is not a victory march
It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah” (Leonard Cohen)

Love. “A broken Hallelujah”. Or a place to rest in the Heart of God.

Love. One syllable, that has divided kingdoms, fractured families, glorified, bankrupted, enslaved, enraptured, broken open, annihilated, made holy, triumphant with Joy.

Love. An act of courage and truth that pierces the darkness of separation and time.

“It’s been seven months now,” says my neighbour, a stoic veteran of several over-40 online dating forays. She has garnered enough first-and-last dating experiences to hold a dinner table in stunned disbelief. I admire her courage and fortitude; her resolute belief that she will find her Prince if she kisses enough Frogs.

It’s easy to become shut-down, cynical. To barricade ourselves behind emotional barbed wire. Love hurts, love scars, love wounds and marks… movies, songs, literature, portray Love as the sacrificial Flame that consumes. Passion always means pain. And anyone who has loved and lost will say that it bloody well does.

The day-to-day minutiae of committed relationships seem sawdust after the intoxicating ambrosia of a passionate, heroic love affair.

We have assimilated the belief that True Love is a form of suffering that paradoxically vivifies and “completes” us. And so, as dangerous, magnificent, desperate and tragic as Love is, we find this an irritable impulse that draws us to the sacrificial flame. Western culture has no history of romantic Love within the convention of marriage. The concept of romantic love did not even exist until the 12^th Century.

Only in Hollywood do the love stories (mostly) have a happy ending. Watch a French movie to find out that life and love are more often messy and always open-ended! Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, Lancelot and Guinevere did not grow old together, or live happily ever after.

Historically marriage was a social, economic, or political construct, usually involving some exchange of Power – land, livestock, jewels and gold. As we evolve spiritually, this old paradigm is just not working any longer – witness around you the age of Disposable Marriage and Broken Hallelujahs.

According to spiritual teacher, Gary Zukov, we have now crossed the threshold to partake of the sacrament of Spiritual Partnership. He writes, “spiritual partnerships have four main requirements—commitment, compassion, courage and conscious communication.” Gary says a spiritual partnership is a dynamic that can be entered into with just one intention…spiritual growth. “It doesn’t mean you go out and you say, ‘I’m going to create a spiritual partnership,’” he says. “It means that your intention is to become aware and responsible for yourself.”

It requires a heroic heart to nail your colours to the mast of a marriage or committed union. Setting sail on a spiritual partnership comes at a cost – personal growth and differentiation always does. Your well-polished beliefs, the stories you tell yourself about the world and The Other, and the “self” you thought you were, will transform with a seismic shudder. Being in a conscious partnership is not for the faint-hearted!