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Freud Tag

By Your Side

 

By your Side 2Plato said that Love is a kind of madness. I imagine he was describing the heated arc of light that wraps its comet’s tail around our heart when we tumble into Love. That ferocious Love that ambushes us, unbuttons and unbolts us, throws us on the floor. It’s in a Love like this that we drink from the elixir of youth. It’s in a Love like this that we are re-birthed in the font of forgetfulness, swaddled in the white robes of Hope. It’s in a Love like this we become adolescents, young and energetic again, despite our age. It’s in Plato’s kind of Love, that we’re radiant, filled with the sweet green sap of confidence. Utterly mad.

In our fast food culture, we expect instant gratification. Yet, like the weather, the outcome of our quest for Love is hard to predict or even to define with any certainty. Qualities like devotion, allegiance, dedication and loyalty, are often shadowed by a sense of what’s in it for me? And we find, to our disappointment, that it’s hard to give and receive Love that lasts.

Our definition of relationship has shape shifted in the twentieth century.  We can love, but never live together. We can uncouple, and still remain good friends, co-parent our children across continents.  We can enter into a spiritual partnership with the intention to use our relationship as an incubator for our own spiritual growth and self-awareness. We can fall in love with the same person over and over again as our relationship cycles through the Life-death-rebirth spiral.

By your Side 4Our Love relationships may require periods of spaciousness, solitude, emotional or physical distance. They may demand acceptance of the aberrations, a baring of warts and all kinds of foul-smelling bits. Our relationship may end in literal form and yet continue in our dreams, in the fragments of memory that float like dust motes across the lyrics of a song.

Relationships are supposed to deliver love and happiness…aren’t they? Yet over the years, the Love that settles into the sofa near the fireplace, the Love that parents children, moves to a new home, euthanizes the family dog, visits the bedside of a dying parent, is a Love that is so often is tinged with sadness or disappointment. It’s a Love that lies forgotten, rusted, tarnished by years of neglect. “Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new,” writes Ursula K. Le Guin.

By your Side 23There’s a nobility in loving despite fortune and circumstance. It takes courage to reclaim disowned feelings, modify behaviours that wound and flay. It takes courage to revision our own life and take back the projections so easily screened onto someone else’s life—“she has too many issues”, “he cannot do emotions”, or the classic cop out—I’m not “in love with him anymore”. Love is a paradox, a labyrinth where we may meet the Beast in the centre.

There’s nothing glamourous about resurrecting Love. There’s nothing glamourous about starting over, fixing the cracks, battling the urge to run. There’s nothing easy about reassembling those parts of yourself that you have hidden away for so many years. There is nothing as painful than repairing a heart that has been broken. The pathologies of love are portals into a rich landscape of vibrant colour where the soul can spread wings of splendorous colour. Re-pair, healing, forgiveness so often take time.  But perhaps we can leave behind the notion of work and repair. Perhaps we can replace our Puritan work ethic, our stoic fortitude, with a stillness that comes from some immensely powerful immutable loyalty to the sacred space in-between our relationship.

By your Side 3Robert Frost wrote in his glorious poem “the best way out is always through…”  And, as we prepare to engage our energies for the long haul, as we clear away the thorny brambles that obstruct our path, our hands will bleed and we may thirst for something sweeter, cooler, easier. Our impatience will be tested. We will become discouraged and disheartened. And yet, when we stop looking for the epiphany, we may feel that with each new day, with each new awakening, with each new stumble, we are moving a little closer.

Freud believed that Love involved a transference of our early childhood and family relationships to the preset relationship. That our parents and our siblings influence the way we love, and that when we love, we stir memories and images of an older love.

8bc293e23a0ea66c67e149e4111f7fefWhen we fall into Love, we fall into the imagination. Modern psychology echoes this belief and scientific research now “proves” that our nervous systems are not self-contained.

Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini and Richard Lannon write in their collaborative A General Theory of Love“from earliest childhood, our brains actually link with those of the people close to us, in a silent rhythm that alters the very structure of our brains, establishes life-long emotional patterns, and makes us, in large part, who we are.”

We can reduce Love to synapse connections and scientific observation, and yet Love, in all its permutations remains a Mystery, a Many Splendoured Thing.

In the 13th Century Rumi knew that “both light and shadow are the dance of Love. Love has no cause, it is the astrolabe of God’s secrets” …

We are relational beings. The plethora of new apps on the market are driven by our need to connect with one another. To talk, to tell our stories, to listen and to be heard. In our so often over-whelmed, over-committed lives, apps and social networking sites offer a substitute for the soft eyes and tender touch of a lover. Touch sensors in paired devices allow wearers to “feel” one another wherever they are in the world. Androids and operating systems simulate “reality”, yet may still lead us through Love’s labyrinth, where we must take the final turn in the pathway and find that it is our Self we meet bare-faced, soul naked without the artifice of appeasing smiles, without the heavy jacket of excuses we have worn for so many long years. In the kind of Love that’s made and re-made, we embrace all our human foibles. And we celebrate our very human longing to be seen and accepted, just the way we are. By your Side 100

Sade—By Your Side

Upcoming: Bonded by Blood. The Astrology of Siblings. Cape Town, July 22nd 2017. 

Please email: ingrid@trueheartwork.com for more details.

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By Your Side

beautiful_photographs_of_rain_53Plato said that Love is a kind of madness. I imagine he was describing the heated arc of light that wraps its comet’s tail around our lives. The kind of Love that ambushes us, unbuttons and unbolts us, throws us on the floor. It is in Love like this that we drink from the elixir of youth. It is in Love like this that we are re-birthed in the font of forgetfulness, swaddled in the white robes of Hope. In Love like this we become adolescents, young and energetic again, despite our age. In Love like this we are self-absorbed, radiant, filled with the sweet green sap of confidence.

In our fast food culture we expect instant gratification. Yet, like the weather, the outcome of our quest for Love is hard to predict or even to define with any certainty. Qualities like devotion, allegiance, dedication and loyalty are often shadowed by a sense of what’s in it for me? We find, to our disappointment, that it is hard to give and receive Love that lasts.

Our definition of relationship has shape shifted in the twentieth century.  We can love but never live together. We can uncouple and still remain good friends. Co-parent our children across continents.  We can enter into a spiritual partnership with the intention to use our relationship as an incubator for our own spiritual growth and self-awareness. We can fall in love with the same person over and over again as our relationship cycles through the Life-death-rebirth spiral. Our Love relationships may require periods of spaciousness, solitude, emotional or physical distance.  They may demand acceptance of the aberrations, a baring of  warts and foul-smelling bits. Our relationship may end in literal form and yet continue in our dreams and in the fragments of memory that float like dust motes across the lyrics of a song.by your side

Love that settles into the sofa near the fireplace that parents children, moves to a new home, euthanizes dogs and visits the bedside of a dying parent is a Love that so often is tinged with sadness or disappointment. It lies forgotten. Rusted and tarnished with years of neglect. Relationships are supposed to deliver love and happiness…aren’t they?

There is a nobility in loving despite fortune and circumstance. It takes courage to reclaim disowned feelings, modify behaviours that wound and flay, revision our own life and take back the projections so easily screened onto someone else’s life – “she has too many issues”, “he cannot do emotions”, or the classic cop out – I’m not “in love with him anymore”. Love is a paradox, a labyrinth where we may meet the Beast in the centre.imagesAN2L7VLZ

There is nothing glamourous about resurrecting Love. There is nothing glamourous about starting over, fixing the cracks, battling the urge to run. There is nothing easy about reassembling those parts of yourself that you have hidden away for so many years. There is nothing as painful than repairing a heart that has been broken. The pathologies of love are portals into a rich landscape of vibrant colour where the soul can spread wings of splendorous colour. Re-pair, healing, forgiveness so often take time.  But perhaps we can leave behind thoughts of work and repair. Perhaps we can replace a Puritan work ethic and stoic fortitude with a stillness that comes from some immensely powerful  immutable loyalty to the space that surrounds our relationship.

imagesP9E4J809Robert Frost wrote in his glorious poem “the best way out is always through…” as we prepare to engage our energies for the long haul. As we clear away the thorny brambles that obstruct our path our hands will bleed and we will become discouraged and thirst for something sweeter, cooler, easier. Our impatience will be tested and yet when we stop looking for the epiphany, we may feel that with each new day, with each new awakening, with each time we stumble we are moving a little closer.

700-00030449erFreud believed that Love involved a transference of our early childhood and family relationships to the preset relationship. That our parents and our siblings influence the way we love and that when we love we stir memories and images of an older love. When we fall into love, we fall into the imagination. Modern psychology echoes this belief and scientific research now “proves” that our nervous systems are not self-contained. Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini and Richard Lannon write in their collaborative A General Theory of Love:“from earliest childhood, our brains actually link with those of the people close to us, in a silent rhythm that alters the very structure of our brains, establishes life-long emotional patterns, and makes us, in large part, who we are.” We can reduce Love to synapse connections and scientific observation and yet Love in all its permutations remains a Mystery, a Many Splendoured Thing. In the 13th Century Rumi knew that “both light and shadow are the dance of Love. Love has no cause, it is the astrolabe of God’s secrets”…

imagesHIM5I6DIWe are relational beings. The plethora of new apps on the market are driven by our need to connect with one another. To talk, to tell our stories, to listen and to be heard. In our so often over-whelmed, over-committed lives, apps and social networking sites offer a substitute for the soft eyes and tender touch of a lover. Touch sensors in paired devices allow wearers to “feel” one another wherever they are in the world. Androids and operating systems simulate “reality”, yet may still lead us through Love’s labyrinth, where we must take the final turn in the pathway and find that it is ourself we meet bare-faced, soul naked without the artifice of appeasing smiles, without the heavy jacket of excuses we have worn for so many long years. In Love we must embrace our human foibles and celebrate our very  human longing to Love and be Loved in return. In Love we discover Compassion.ff_robot5_large-660x713

 

Sade – By Your Side

 

 

 

 

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Show Me Heaven

How do we become exiled from the inner sanctuary of our own essence?  How do we stay too long in situations, in relationships that bruise and scar.  For so many of us, life becomes a bleak winter of lacklustre, habitual behaviour, where we respond like laboratory rats to cues that trigger the reward centres in our brains, numb to the call of our bodies, the weeping of our souls. Pinned on strips of green felt, like jewel-winged butterflies, frozen in long-forgotten flight.

In her exquisite poem, Wild Geese, Mary Oliver extols:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

In our guilt-steeped Judaic Christian culture, we dishonour our instincts, cage the soft animal of our body. Inhabit only our heads, blindfold our eyes, oblivious to our own specialness.  From early childhood, we anesthetize our feelings; grow up, crippled by unworthiness, stunted by shame.  As adults we live captive lives. Senses dulled by the drone of the hive mentality, the tainted taboos ancient repressions. Too often we deny the jalapeño desire that heats our bellies, sets our hearts aflame.

Here is a poignant story, told by Antoinette Liechti Maccarone,  of an old Mexican woman whose husband lay dying.  Her granddaughter had come to assist her beloved grandmother with the rituals of bathing and preparation for the finality of his death. The old woman was terribly distressed at seeing her husband’s frail naked body. And her granddaughter asked, “What troubles you so, Grandmother?” Her grandmother replied, “My beautiful child, from our wedding night we kept our bodies covered from one another, always wearing our long cotton night clothes. I feel very sad now. He is such a handsome man even in his dying. I wish I had seen him fresh.”

And so we wait, we harness, we restrain our lusty natures until it is too late.  Freud believed that the Id lived in dark, inaccessible realm of our subconscious. It was Id that drove our archaic impulses, our unchained desires.  Rumi knew this voluptuous, dewiness of appetite, as he wrote, breathless, “There is some kiss we want with our whole lives, the touch of spirit on the body. Seawater begs the pearl to break its shell. And the lily, how passionately it needs some wild darling!”

Many cultures have “inversion rituals” that overthrow the social norm. These manifest in the form of bawdy carnivals, gay pride parades. And so to unleash our desire, to touch the warm wetness of our own animal softness, we may need our own inversion ritual. A little transgression to encourage the seed of fecund desire to grow in the garden of our delicious delight. This may be as risqué as wearing no underwear beneath a silky dress, dancing naked bathed in moonlight, making love under the stars on the beach, licking melted chocolate from the soft hollows of the one you love…or staying in bed all day, decadently dining on strawberries and cream … Perhaps today might be  the right time, the  perfect moment,  to break free from  the trusses that tie us all to beliefs and customs that cover our smiles, hush our laughter.

What little transgressions can you conjure up to bring novelty and magic to your erotic nature…. what sublimely sensual pleasure, what wanton playfulness to nurture the red rose of your uniqueness and joy this new day?  Allow the lantern of  the imaginal realm to light the landscape of your unchartered desire.  Gorge greedily from the banquet of life, with shining eyes and hungry heart. Climb out of the window, and feel the moonlight caress your skin. Says Rumi,At night, I open the window and ask the moon to come and press its face against mine. Breathe into me. Close the language door and open the love window. The moon won’t use the door, only the window.”

This is dedicated to Sophie: May you step onto the path of your own incredible beauty. May you press your brave heart upon the loveliness that is you. Maria McKee sings Show Me Heaven

 

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Another Day In Paradise

 For most people on this planet, 11/11/2011 will be just another day of routine chores. The commute to work, the myriad modest tasks that call for our attention. We will  hasten about the minutiae of our daily lives, not pausing to gaze skywards at the glittering stars or to marvel at the moon tonight, as she spreads her numinous milky shawl, bringing magic and mystery to the landscape.

For most people on this planet, this new day will involve finding sufficient food, water, a safe shelter before nightfall. As a world financial crisis looms, this day many people will face bedrock fear about physical survival.

11/11/11 has been heralded in blogs and movies as a day of foreboding, as we indulge our perverse addiction to drama and the horror of death and oblivion.  

For others, today is a day to meditate, to pray, to acknowledge that this day has special significance for our planet.

Many of us live divided lives. Longing for fulfilment in our work, more passion in our relationships, more depth in our friendships, more money, love, and eternal youth. We strain against what IS. We neglect our own natures and yearn for some ideal of perfection, somewhere over the rainbow….Modern psychology and allopathic medicine attempt to redeem us from the messiness of our lives, to fix, cut out, remove those things that cause us pain. Those unhealthy compulsions, painful choices that make us fully human, in all our complexity and in all our suffering. So maybe today we can be fully where we are. Working at our daily tasks no matter how mundane and humble they may be, entering our Fate and honouring the ebb and flow of our emotions, so that we can fully savour our brief lives, in the dappled light and the terrifying shadows.

The astrological chart for 11:11am in Cape Town on November 11th 2011 places the Lord of Karma, stern Saturn, ruler of the Ascendant conjunct the Midheaven. This represents a pinnacle, a time of responsibility and duty, a culmination of what has come before.  In other places, the event chart will reflect a different sky story. In the microcosm of our personal lives, this might suggest that 11/11/11 is a day to reflect on our life direction and the choices we make from moment to moment. The Full Moon in the sign of earthy Taurus yesterday, trail-blazed a solid grounded, realistic energy that echoes my feeling that today we need to honour the simple things in our lives. Come down to earth in some symbolic way. Perhaps we might see the beauty in the smallest things that make this world a paradise of delights if we choose to perceive it in this way. So you may wish to take some time today to marvel at a jewel dewdrop on a blade of grass, or breathe in the fragrance of a flower. And “to see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour,” as mystic and poet, William Blake inspires us to do.

Our ancestors were star gazers, who observed the cycles of the planets and the Sun and Moon. Astrologers use these celestial time markers to track the unfolding of our lives and world events. Pope Gregory XIII is credited for the reformation of the Julian calendar back in 1582. We use the Gregorian calendar in most parts of the world today, a system that marks time, in a linear manner. So 11/11/11 is just a number in a man-made system of ordering the passage of time. We can choose to give it meaning, or not. “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” Freud is purported to have said. So, for some,  11/11/2011 will be just another day in the wheel of the year, in the saga of an individual life, in the colourful  tapestry of human history, as  “we come spinning out of nothingness, scattering stars like dust” (Rumi).

If we choose to be in this moment, in this precious day, today will be like a birthday, an anniversary, a holy day, to celebrate in the knowing that long after our bones have disintegrated and we are without form, there will be an unceasing pulse of life in this vast universe, in a timeless space without beginning and without end.  “The clouds preceded us… there was a muddy centre before we breathed. There was a myth before the myth began, venerable and articulate and complete,” writes the poet Wallace Stevens.

Rumi said that “only from the heart can you touch the sky”, so in gathering together to pray or meditate, or to light a candle as a ritual to set a heart-felt intention, there will be, as Noetic scientist, John Hagelin, describes a profound shift in a field of pure, unlimited, creative potential. This will ripple through the quantum field and influence our individual lives and our planet in powerfully positive ways. So today, I will honour the brevity of life here on earth, the miraculous joy of a synchronistic meeting of a kindred spirit, and the comfort of knowing we are never alone.

Gone “viral” on the internet – watch and be inspired! Murmuration: http://vimeo.com/31158841

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_f7WyUnf_A8  Phil Collins sings Another Day In Paradise.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sghNjGaDbJ0 Johnny Clegg, It’s a Cruel, Crazy, Beautiful World.

 

 

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