Love Tag

February 15, 2012 In Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

Set Fire to the Rain

There comes a time when we know for sure that we cannot go back to where we were. We pass the point of no return. Make a choice to watch the wild fire burn away all that is irrelevant in our lives.

And with that first unsupported step across the threshold into the charred landscape, the unthinkable becomes thinkable. What we believed was true detonates in the heat haze of our new resolution. We finally realise that the one we adored was not the god or goddess we thought they were. That the job we strove for does not feel as exciting or expansive as we’d imagined. That we have to face the finality of a relationship that is over, a friendship that will never be the same again.

There comes a time when we stand soul-naked in the first light of the morning and watch as our dream dissolves on the gossamer shawl of the dew-spangled new day. The mirror on our wall finally reveals who we really are. There comes a time when we surrender, battle-weary, to take ownership of those parts of ourselves that are encased in fear. We witness the distrust that writhes like a worm on the cruel hook of our unworthiness and shame. We observe the ways we place trip wires across the landscape of our relationships, setting ourselves up for the inevitable fall… It takes an act of great courage to stand soul-naked in what we feel is our truth. To uproot the mandrake of blame that grows from our belief that it is our crazy mother, absent father, our belligerent teenager, the buffoons in government, or the lover who did not choose us, fight for us, beg us to stay…

In the landscape of self-responsibility we grow up fast. No soft blue blankets, no bottles filled with sweet creamy milk. No one to clean up the mess of our lives as we rant and wail. Our pain becomes our choice. To choose to stop the pain, to wearily dismount from the Ferris wheel of our own suffering, we need to do excruciatingly laborious work on the lies we tell ourselves. We must change our need to be right, to be in control, to dominate, or to play the Victim trump card. We must to stand on our own two feet. Straighten our spines. Not fold like a soufflé when we don’t get the approval we crave. Not petulantly push away the gentle hand of friendship when we know it is the only hand there is to help us across the crocodile-infested river of our self-undoing. Not sigh as the world around us burns, when it is we that participate in and perpetuate violence by proxy in our very own homes with our flaming arrows of spite and sulphurous silences.

It is excruciatingly difficult to abandon the ship of self-righteousness. To forgo the familiar thrill of pleasing others so they will love us, need us, never let us go. We grow comfortable in our rusty armour of judgement that pinches and chafes. We feel familiar in its painful tug of constraint. Only when we make the choice to see with clarity and compassion the violent parts of ourselves, the parts that judge, and condemn, the parts that execute others with sharp-shooting precision, can we nurture those parts that stretch our capacity for endurance, forgiveness, generosity in Love, bravery in Loss.

Gary Zukav tells the story about the man, blind from birth whose only experience of this world was darkness. Well, new technology offered him a chance of sight, a miracle beyond his imagining. He asked his family, his friends, and his surgeon what it would be like to see, and of course, nobody could really explain to him what it was to see the turquoise sea, the tangerine colours of the sun set, the silvery moon and the diamond stars, the colour of his own blue eyes. The more he talked to his friends, the more fearful he became. He called his doctor and asked, “Doctor, will I still be able to use my cane to see? I don’t want to see if I can’t use my cane.”

In the terror of losing the comfort of our white canes, we clutch what we know, even though it limits our movement forward and darkens the light of our souls: the terror of being vulnerable, of being used, of being loved, of loving and losing, of having more than our parents, of being ridiculed, humiliated, of asking for what we want, of being “needy”, of losing our identity, of being judged… so we stay small and quiet, stuck in the darkness of our blindness and our fear, afraid to set fire to the rain, afraid to turn towards a future, without the cane, and say, I AM.

Set fire to the rain today… and celebrate Love and Life in all it’s wonder.

Adele … Set Fire to the Rain.

January 24, 2012 In Astrology, Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

When All is Said And Done

Loss can be a seismic shock that cleaves us open to release a torrent of pain or anger. There’s an art to grieving, I believe. An art to embracing the conflicted feelings: shock, denial, bargaining, anger, and the bleak finality of acceptance. To grieve well requires patience and enormous courage, in a culture which has few rituals to swaddle the weeping heart, to embalm the wound till we grow scar tissue to venture into our lives once again. We are not taught how to grieve. We are taught how to name, categorise, label, mostly, not how to deeply feel in our fast-food culture of “closure” and “moving on” as if Love and Loss were malls, or drive-thrus. Many of us don’t do “closure” easily. We find it excruciatingly difficult to cauterise, tie a torque around seeping lamentation. We lack the will to dam up the tears that flood the excruciating emptiness. We stand naked in the winter of our discontent. We sit, immobilised, in the ashes of our grief. The salt of our tears lubricates the keening of our aching heart.

A young woman client arrived today, bowed with grief. She raged with Tiger-fierce anger, then imploded, numb with disbelief, as she told her story of betrayal and humiliation after a unilateral break-up. Her lover’s masochistic behaviour made her realise that she was still loyally clinging to old stories she had told herself about love. Still playing the powerless Victim, still meekly turning the other cheek, afraid to ask, afraid to want. For some of us, part of the soothing balm of healing is the realisation that we can be angry when our former lover slithers up to us at a party, arms outstretched in a pseudo hale-and-hearty-greeting, hapless trophy-girlfriend firmly in tow. It is permissible to recognise that the plume of white hot indignation that rises means we are still triggered, and that our pain does not have a short sell-by date. We do not need to be the compliant “good girl / boy”, and force a friendship with someone who has behaved despicably, or go through the motions of “learning lessons” when our inner brat wants to scream obscenities from the abyss of our pain. We might need to knead and roll out the resistance patiently and creatively. Self-soothe, rather than push down further the bloodied blade of “whys” and “what ifs”.

New Age psychobabble has a lot to answer for sometimes, I feel. And, as for the much extolled virtue of “turning the other cheek,” or the misguided belief that our feelings are infallible truths, or we must think only “good and positive thoughts” lest we do ourselves harm, energetically, I have found that we often muddy the healing waters and prolong our wretched agony. Seeing things from your partner’s perspective can be useful – up to a point. But all we can really change is our own perspective – with a no-nonsense, “is this true?” as we question the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and the one who did not, could not, want to love us. Even this takes some doing, and can be just another form of self abuse if we have not allowed the anger to rush up and release.

Anthropologists guess that humans first developed language and a bulging cerebral cortex about 1.6 million years ago, taking us down a very different evolutionary path to our close cousins, the chimpanzees. We developed, according to anthropologist Helen Fisher, a sense of self, and importantly, a reflected sense of self, which shapes our choice of partner, as it is reliant on feedback from others. So, being humiliated, abandoned, or betrayed by the one we love has a devastating effect on our neurochemistry. Emotions like anger and deep grief can hijack our positive self-talk and blaze through the libraries of books we have read on self-growth and spirituality, leaving us charred and utterly bereft if we do not have a solid sense of Self; and very few of us do. “Forgiving before you are ready is an act of violence against yourself. And, you may never be ready” says Nicole Urdang. Yet, once we are aware that all our long-term relationships and brief encounters are mirrors of our inner beliefs about ourselves, mere shadowy reflections of our shaky sense of Self, we can “love our neighbour – and ourselves.” No more pathological childhood trauma – wallowing in how your parents disappointed or abandoned you. The gift of grief and anger is another step in growing up. And if you honour the process, take your time to self-reflect, not self-flagellate, your tears will turn to pearls.

Astrologically, the transits to your own birth chart may suggest that this drama of grief and pain is happening through you, not to you. You have constellated the actors on the stage of your life, and you can access the power to change old patterns, even short-circuit family fate that has been mired in your ancestry for eons. If you can see your own collusion – not trusting your own instincts, perhaps “settling for” a lover who does not desire you enough to move from gridlock, who does not value you enough to commit to working through the power struggle. To observe your own stonewalling, withholding, fear, criticism that has polluted the space between you, to have compassion for yourself as you revert to old default buttons, replay threadbare scripts. Only then can you begin to allow the cool tears and the hot anger to cleanse your heart, and make ready to Love again. Astrological Mars, representing anger, libido, fear, the Masculine Principle and our ability to fight off disease stationed early on Monday morning, then moves into retrograde motion on January 25^th, reversing through Virgo for the next three months. This suggests that globally and personally, this is a time of turning points, of critical tipping points. A time that it might be helpful to examine how we betray ourselves, deny our intuition, stuff our anger and indignation down, tyrannize ourselves through negative self talk. A time to accept that the soul contract you had with your Lover-Betrayer was one of forgiveness and compassion.

Last word goes to Abba in that tremulously poignant song, When All is Said and Done:

“Thanks for all your generous love and thanks for all the fun
Neither you nor I’m to blame when all is said and done…”

Abba – When All is Said And Done

November 21, 2011 In Astrology, Relationship By Ingrid Hoffman

Moon River

“Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls” urges Joseph Campbell. Following our bliss has become something of a cliché, a well worn, gung ho, onwards and upwards kind of thing we toss out. For most of us it signifies nothing.

What is your Bliss? What makes you truly Happy? How do you know what your bliss is, really? And when you awaken, carpe diem, how do you consecrate your Holy Longing?

The Hero archetype is much misunderstood. Psychologists say it is the immature adolescent that blocks men and women from full maturity. In its purest form it is the impetus that squeezes us from the too-tight bud of our yearning and gives us the courage to dare to take the risk to open. Myths and fairy tales describe the Heroes’ journey – the journey from innocence to experience: our heroes and heroines follow trails of bread crumbs through dark forests. They slay fire-breathing dragons. They discover who they truly are when they leave the quacking ducks and find the slender-necked swans.

When we set off on a journey, either literally, or metaphorically, we dismantle the brittle structures of a life outgrown. We discard the coarse dullness of our timid perceptions. We quicken with a molten life force. We set sail in the open seas, take the road less travelled. Johann Von Goethe writes of this spark of courage that rekindles the heart, illuminates our lives, brings the Magic. “Distance does not make you falter. Now, arriving in magic, flying, and finally, insane for the light, you are the butterfly and you are gone. And so long as you haven’t experienced this: to die and so to grow, you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.”

This is the adventure of being fully “alive”. The daemon–the driving spirit that invites us to experience passion, fantasy, emotions and our imagination–is as vast and as mysterious as the night sky. We may feel this aliveness when we are kissed awake by Love or when we break through our imprisoning walls of self doubt–the shoulds, the musts. When we finally turn towards initiative, creativity, and embrace Hope and Faith.

So my heart bloomed, when, I read a blog entitled When a Frenchwoman meets an American man … excerpts from the adventures of Elise and Scott as they explore the world by sailboat. Elise and Scott’s response to this ancient impetus reflects the new zeitgeist of Pluto in Capricorn times, in that they have taken the heated rush of the Hero and transmuted it into the Warrior Archetype. They aren’t rushing off unprepared into the high seas. They are doing this with the slow hand energy of the Mature Masculine and Mature Feminine.

It is a timeless Love story that presents the luscious full-flavoured ingesting of Life. Like all good stories, it describes a fated meeting, and begins, Once Upon A Time…. So I share with you the beginning of the story of Elise and Scott this new day.

Elise: “Once upon a time, a French Woman who had been living and working in Paris for many years and who was fed up with the daily grind and both the gloominess and selfishness of Parisians decided in October 2010 to go to a place she has always dreamt to go to… TAHITI, in FRENCH POLYNESIA…”

Scott: “I went to Polynesia alone to rediscover myself and as a sort of ceremonial re-launch of my new life. Elise and I ran into each other on Huahine a few days before the end of my Polynesian adventure. Since then, we’ve spent about 3,000 hours together… The only way I can describe it to you is the word “harmony.” We found that we both shared the same ever-deferred-dream: to explore the world by sailboat.”

My soul stirs as I celebrate this impetus to embrace happiness, to answer the call to adventure. This daring to write the poetry of Big Love, to rearrange their lives so that their hearts sing and their souls may soar. I honour their courage to set sail at the anointed hour. To de-stigmatise the norms, conventions, rules that tether them to the lives that have grown too small for their soul song.

“Doesn’t everything die too fast and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” asks Mary Oliver.

Scott responds: “We spent our first evening together in Huahine on the beach staring at a full moon and a million stars, above and on the water. It was a magical, mystical conversation about life and self and others… And, we both felt inspired- – by each other, life, whatever. So, the moon has become a bit of a symbol for us. Anyway, we chose the name Mystic Muse for our boat in remembrance of the moon’s inspirational power.”

I dedicate this to you, Elise and Scott, and to your dreamboat, Mystic Muse, as you discover new depths of Love, and a new perspective on Life.

Carpe Diem!

Scott and Elsie, this is for you:

Moon River, wider than a mile,
I’m crossing you in style some day.
Oh, dream maker, you heart breaker;
wherever you’re going I’m going your way.
Two drifters off to see the world.
There’s such a lot of world to see.
We’re after the same rainbow’s end–
waiting ’round the bend,
my huckleberry friend,
Moon River and me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOByH_iOn88&feature=related

November 14, 2011 In Astrology, Relationship By Ingrid Hoffman

Stand by me

“Everyone wants to be in a relationship,” declares my vivacious friend, Julie, as we supped on smoky noodles at Saigon. Does everyone yearn to be an us? Cosily coupled, snugly secure in a twosome, I wonder?

“We’re relational creatures,” she continued, as we finished off the bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, “which is why we all keep on searching for our soul mate.” We do?

The astrological birth chart, which is the acorn of our life’s potential, the daemon of our fate, suggests otherwise. Not everyone wants to be in a relationship. Many of us pay lip service to love, and choose to end it with the well worn “you’re too good for me” exit line when intimacy beckons. Like Pandora, we open the box and release a screeching swarm of demons that devour us with fear, turn us to pillars of stone.

Many of us hunger for Love with an appetite so voracious that we gorge on empty encounters that leave us starving and malnourished. Many of us fasten our hearts with love-proof padlocks and swear to never love again. Like the poet W.B. Yeats, who loved an Irish beauty for 30 years with a passion that was never consummated or returned, “we fed our hearts on fantasies” and ache with the memory of broken promises, still-born dreams.

Intimate relationships can be messy and convoluted, often disappointing. Relationships with friends, colleagues, a beloved cat or dog, are often far less rigorous in their demands. To form a committed bond with another, to take the necessary actions to set up home or parent children demands courage, endurance and a sense of safety as we rest in one another’s arms, for better or for worse. Real relationships require the ingredients of two willing people who love each other enough to stand strong as the cruel winds of doubt, fear and hopelessness buffet the bond of commitment.

But, if you have the soul of a gypsy, or the heart of a hermit, you may choose, consciously or unconsciously, to defy social convention and never become “an us”. As the years pass by, the thought of sharing your home with another person, of stretching wide to accommodate differences that jostle you from your routine and entrenched beliefs becomes too big a stretch. So, you stay safe, eschewing the tantrums, the misunderstandings and compromises that polish us smooth in intimate relationship. It’s easier to stay contained, to shop for one, to keep things neat and simple – uncomplicated. Many of us have loved boy-men, or girl-women who fell asleep when we beckoned them to enter the fragrant Garden of Love. They did not – could not – love us enough to make space in their orderly lives for fierce love, for the chaos of the Feminine or the pointed vision of the Masculine. They turned their heads away and walked towards another destiny.

It is when we nurture, trust, encourage, and truly value ourselves, with all our complexity and contradictions, that we begin to dance deeper and deeper into Being. It is then, if we are willing to lower the red flags of fear and judgement, that we will invite The Beloved into the sanctum of our passionate heart. It is then that we discover the comfort and the joy of saying, darling, Stand By Me. And we just know that the answer will be OH YES!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4_ghOG9JQM

When the night has come
And the land is dark
And the moon is the only light we see
No I won’t be afraid
No I won’t be afraid
Just as long as you stand, stand by me

John Lennon.

November 7, 2011 In Astrology, Relationship By Ingrid Hoffman

I Wonder

“I know he still loves me,” my friend with the luminous green eyes declares, deftly lifting her sashimi with ebony-varnished chopsticks.

We can never know what is going on inside someone’s head. We can wonder. We can make up stories, soothe, or torment ourselves with assumptions and lies. The best we can do is to visit their world, invite them to share their thoughts and perceptions with us. Listen with our hearts; even though we may not agree with what they are saying, we can imagine what it must be like, living in their world. We can savour the fragrant dishes of their experiences, vicariously visit the library of their memories, and embrace the wonder of our uniqueness as human beings. Rupert Sheldrake, Lynne McTaggart, Bruce Lipton, Greg Braden, and other prophets of new consciousness talk of a new science of Life. Sheldrake talks of Morphic Resonance, Gregg Braden refers to a “Divine Matrix” that surrounds us all. A matrix of energy without beginning or end, no cause or effect. On some level we all sense that field of energy when we enter a home, walk into an office or visit a sacred site. You may feel it between the couple you invite to share a meal with you. A field of energy that lies between them – warm and connected, or heavy with unshed tears, or seething with anger and the bitterness of betrayal.

So, if we come from a lineage of ancestors who lived in dire poverty in a war ravaged valley, we have a blueprint, a template, that life is hard and dangerous. Our sponsoring thought, as Neale Donald Walsch calls it, may be that money is scarce, strangers are not to be trusted, and we are unworthy of being loved in our totality. If we are unwilling to consciously shift this consciousness, we will keep doing what we’re doing, and keep getting what we’re getting. The story my friend tells herself (unconsciously) is that she is not worthy of Love. She seeks out the married man, the boy-man with Will Never Commit invisibly tattooed on his forehead.

I do not believe in the old model of Nature/ Nurture any longer. Too simplistic, as we cross the threshold into this new paradigm, this new awareness of our unlimited potential to change our perception of what we see around us. The Field where we meet each other on our journey through this life time is the Universal hammock where we writhe or lie, enraptured by the magnificence and Divine potential of each human being to Greatness. Says Neale Donald Walsch, “It’s time, in fact, to re-create ourselves anew – in the next grandest version of the greatest vision we ever held about who we are.” The astrological birth chart depicts The Field, and the transits and progressions, our evolving consciousness, if we choose to meet each other there, to truly listen, and take action.

As science converges with the wisdom of the shamans and sages, we now know that what we think is “true” is seen through a glass, darkly.

If we believe that all our relationships are simply our perceptions, that the stories we tell ourselves about the Other, and the thoughts that torment, or soothe, are our own imaginings, and that “life is but a dream”, then we can exhale. What we think about the other person may not be their truth at all.

The Trompe-l’œil of relationships, the subtle ambiguities, the mystery of the human heart, continues to intrigue me. What is real? It depends upon our perception. Did those doomed men and women of the Americas really not see the tall death ships of the Conquistadors as they sailed close to shore? Or were they great butterflies, harbingers of a new Messiah? We can wonder. And we will never know what they were thinking, and like all of his-story, we can make up the stories that suit our perceptions, as well as those of the place and time we’re living in.

My beautiful friend knows he still loves her. I wonder, don’t you?

Sixto Rodriguez – I Wonder

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMHdq4jm0oQ

November 4, 2011 In Relationship By Ingrid Hoffman

No More I Love Yous

Love never dies when soul meets soul. Our souls never stop loving the significant people who appear as actors in the various scenes in the play of our lives. Because once we ignite the flame of love, no matter how briefly, or how fiercely, devastatingly, that flame burns and chars, Love endures, long after we part, long after we die.

I met my former husband for lunch yesterday. He appeared taller, younger, and happier than I have seen him in years. “She’s the One,” he said, eyes sparkling. “I’m going to ask her to marry me.” Still sprinkled with the glitter of his happiness, I left this man I had lived with for 26 years, my heart a – bloom with flowers of joy for him, for her. There are never No More I Love Yous. The container of marriage may fracture and break under the avalanche of an affair, a cot death, an intrusive in-law. Love affairs are extinguished not with a bang but a whimper, realtionships stagnate as the current of passion dwindles to a trickle. Even in the No More I love Yous, are small seeds of renewal. There are really no “lessons” to be learnt so we do not make the same “mistake “again. Our marriages are the holy sanctums for the in-breath and out-breath, the cycles, and twists, of our soul. From the moment we say our wedding vows, through all the in the years we may spend grinding off each others’ rough edges, even in the heartbreak and despair of the endings, are our soul’s rites of passage; our circling Home.

A divorce can be a sacred act of renewal, if we transcend the power plays, the anger, discard the role of Victim. Love can be transformed into a caring friendship if we are willing to step into Gratitude for all the memories, and experiences of our past, that have made us who we are today. When we are able to look into the eyes of our former tormentor-husband, wife, lover, mother, father, friend – and feel the lotus flower of compassion blossom in our heart, then we will know our own Wholeness. The ancient Greeks knew that Love wears interchangeable costumes: Agape meant the deepest sense of true love, that sense of contentment and mellowness, the holding of another in the highest regard. Eros was understood as passionate love, sensual desire, and intimate love, which did not have to be sexual – it could be the power of beholding something beautiful within that person. Philia was the love of friendship we feel in community and family. So what is this thing, called Love? Even after death, divorce, frozen years of separation, the sacred vows reverberate. We may find, after the atomic fallout, the love we never dared admit, even to ourselves, is there still. We find a wedding photograph, a piece of jewellery, a gift given in the innocence of that love that carries a fragrance of sweet memory. There is remains a fragment of something noble and pure in the the vows we made all those years ago.

These days when I go to weddings, what I celebrate is the Hope that comes, an invited guest, to the bridal table. The noble belief in a love that will endure as the dark storm clouds gather on the horizon. First marriages are sprinkled with Hope and Great Expectations that we believe no man will tear asunder. Second and third marriages are more sober affairs. Jean Kerry said wryly, “being divorced is like being hit by a Mack truck. If you live through it, you start looking very carefully to the right and to the left.” We are not always wise in the choices we make. We do not always listen to our inner guidance. But in our fumbling, in our folly, in our delusions, will always be the seed of great passion and enduring love.

Says Marion Woodman, “real love happens when soul in the body meets soul in the body. Not in that disembodied world of spirit where we want to be perfect, but in life, where we’re changing the diapers of the one we love who is dying, swabbing the lips, doing things we never thought we could do. Stripped of all pride, of everything unreal, we have no false modesty. Where soul meets soul that is Love.”

How can there ever be No More I Love Yous when Love never dies. It simply changes form.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5z7R-5Znoc

October 25, 2011 In Astrology, Relationship By Ingrid Hoffman

Nothing Compares

Nothing compares to the passion, pain, the alchemy of unrequited love. The obsessive love of an extraordinary relationship may quench our soul’s thirst for drama and intensity. It may be the conduit for the fantasy and the creative Muse that is lacking from the soft comfort of our daily lives. When soul meets soul across time and space, this is no aberration, no psychological projection, and no insane fantasy.

In the realm of the soul, falling in love with someone we see everyday at the office, connect with on Facebook, or meet by “chance” at the video store, is beyond the crassness of words, the literalism of psychology. It is a process of wonderous self-discovery. Each relationship that touches our soul leads us into dialogue with the Divine. “The fiery moments of a passionate experience are moments of wholeness and totality,” Anais Nin says. We may smugly moralise about obsessive attractions, narcissistic impulses, selfish behaviour, or in psychological parlance, talk about “withdrawing projections,” as we find the qualities that draw us to adore the Beloved, are of course, within ourselves. All very white picket fence, manicured lawn. Pleasantville. Nothing compares to the white hot passion of erotic obsession. Nothing compares to the Phoenix Love that leads us into a deeper, more soulful life. What we feel in our hearts, in our bodies, cannot be captured by cliches, emblamed with words.

Erotic love is not to be demeaned as merely a projection for our unlived life, but celebrated as an Angel of Awakening to the Countenance of our boundless Imagination. Our soul hungers for the Beloved, and our imagination lures us into the fathomless ocean of desire embodied in the flesh. The symbolism of astrological transits from the outer planets to personal ones often suggest that passionate obsessions are not aberrations to be caged or cauterised. They are the wings that carry us to a life of more connection, to an acceptance of Who we are. W.H Auden writes powerfully of the crooked heart in each one of us that we must confront when the firebird of passionate love blazes through the dark depths of our psyche: “O stand, stand at the window as the tears scald and start; you shall love your crooked neighbour with your crooked heart.”

Many of us are now experiencing a sense of living on the edge of a world on the brink of great change. Like two tectonic plates, Pluto in earthy Capricorn squares off against Uranus in fiery Aries, a crucible of heated, irrevocable change in our lives, in society, in the way we embrace the urge towards authenticity. The emergence of the new always coincides with the breakdown of the old, so be awake to the whispers, the coincidences, the power of attraction, the wild song of Passion in whatever form it appears in your life these coming months.

I watched The Bridges of Madison County (again) and cried (again) for Francesca and Robert, these middle-aged soul mates. I cried for the choice Francesca made to shackle her desire for Robert Kincaid to duty and responsibility. Throughout history, men and women have made heart-wrenching choices to honour duty above the authentic call of their soul. So many of us have been raised in family awash with the tears of unspoken secrets. Lovers kept hidden, passion doused by fear, authenticity shamed into submission. Says John O’Donahue, “your soul alone has the map of your future, therefore you can trust this indirect, oblique side of yourself.”

As Neptune swims into the deep waters of Pisces in February 2012, will we be willing to be still and listen to the passionate pieces of ourselves that call to us through music, poetry, the whisper of the wind? As we loosen the bonds of reason, will our souls ignite with delight in our Beloved who may be Clark Kent, Superman or Superwoman? Our liquid light diamon that urges us to open our hearts, and sing our song.

What is your Passion, what calls you today to celebrate the Authentic You? “Passion is part of Real Life’s package – we were created by Love, for love, to love. If we’re unsure of our passions we must continue excavating until we rediscover them, for it we don’t give outward expression to our passions in little ways every day, we will eventually experience self-immolation – the spontaneous combustion of our souls,” says Sarah Ban Beathnach.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2cdyy_sinead-o-connor-nothing-compares-2_music Sinead O’ Connor

October 20, 2011 In Astrology, Relationship By Ingrid Hoffman

White on White

Fairy Tale Weddings are compelling in their sentimental perfection. The flowers, cake, months of meticulous preparation. The dress, tiara, spray-on tan, flowers in the button holes.

In our desire for the perfect wedding we so often find the golden apple of Discord. TheTrickster appears to knock the bouquet off the altar of tradition. The fainting bride, the lecherous uncle, the little page boy who squeals just as the vows are pronounced. A flaw in the perfection of the meticulously planned occasion that brings laughter, the prelude of a profound agitation of two entwined souls. Think back to your own wedding day. Was theTrickster at play? I was a guest at a beautiful wedding ceremony recently where there was a glitch in the sound system. No music at the wedding, and a brief, tumultous marriage, with no music to bring joy and levity into their troubled relational space.

“Marriage is not a ritual or an end. It is a long, intricate, intimate dance together and nothing matters more than your own sense of balance and your choice of partner,” says Amy Bloom. There is a celestial line-up in relationship orientated Libra right now. The Sun and Saturn, spotlighting the importance of mature and committed relationships. Inviting us to clarify, define, strengthen our identity by confronting us with limitations. Challenging us to grow up, make our dreams real. Commit to honest self-appraisal, compromise, acceptance of reality.

For me, the compelling mystery of Marriage is that it can flay and brand, or softly kiss our soul. It is through our sentimentality, our innocence, our insistence in the “happily ever after” and the romantic dream of the marriage made in heaven, that we meet the dark challenges that a soul-ful union will always toss, like a gauntlet, before us. It is through the difficulties, often the sojourns in hell, that we refine the prima materia, the raw stuff of life, and learn the phases of Love in all their complexity. Like actors on a stage, bride and groom, play out the old scripts of the marriages before them. In their own lives, or in the matrix of their family history. Their unconscious roles as little children, keeping warring parents apart, holding psychic secrets, plugging the grief that spills under doors and carpets, the dissappointments, the frustrations, the bitterness. We hold this energy in the etheric, in our limbic and nervous systems, in the fascia of our bodies, and play it out with the men and women we marry. Our mother who married “to get out of the home,” our grandmother forced into wedlock before her belly ripened, our father who married “beneath him.”

Today, we think we have free choice in the men and women we wed. We believe we marry out of our own free will. In the West, we have inherited an ancient world view based on a biblical view that marriage is sacrosanct, in juxtaposition to the view of the ancient Greek philosophers and French rationalists, where the right of the individual to happiness is enshrined. So we have the challenge of delineating our personal identity within the structure and boundary of marriage – a tangled web of roots that dig deep into our personal and collective history!

Marriages based on love are as fragile and fickle as the gossamer thread of love itself. Few of us thoroughly modern women need a partner to protect us physically, to provide for us financially, or to give us the social status of “married woman”. Many of us do not choose marriage to sanction the birthing of our babies, or to provide us with clan. We marry for love. Yet the cost of failed love can cleave hearts and families. Divorce is an emotional and economic apocalypse. No one walks away unscathed. There is always a great gaping hole and scar tissue in your heart, no matter how much you loathed the bastard. The dismemberment of divorce ranks next to the death of your spouse, as the most stressful event you will ever endure.

So if we marry for love, we gamble with the fragility of our hearts. As Mignon McLaughlin says, “a successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.” On a metaphysical level, the ritual of Marriage is sacred. It is a rite of passage, through which we metamorphose into a deeper, more soulful self. We integrate the masculine and the feminine within; we discover that he or she is not the god/goddess we thought they were. We discover we cannot depend on our partner to make us whole, to love us forever and ever. Perhaps we could see marriage as a threshold into a mansion of self discovery. An archaeological dig into the layers of our ancestral past. A calabash that holds the milk of compassion and forgiveness for ourselves and for each other when we make mistakes, behave appallingly. Perhaps we ought not give up too soon, stand on our soap boxes pontificating about the flaws and weaknesses of the other. Perhaps we will learn to truly love one another and not make a bond of marriage, but a circle of love that protects those who dwell within. “You were born together, and together you shall be forever more. You shall be together when the white wings of death scatter your days.” Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet.

Remember Danny Williams from Port Elizabeth? Today he sings for us White on White

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edmej2DOiLM&feature=related

September 19, 2011 In Astrology, Relationship By Ingrid Hoffman

Love Is All Around

Nothing much has changed when it comes to the map of the human heart. Two dressed-for-success business women are engaged in serious conversation between nibbles of a warm mushroom and ricotta cheese salad. They lean towards each other over the restaurant table, talking not about the crisis over the euro, or the latest merger. They are talking about Love.

Much in the same way, I imagine, our ancestors sat around fires, in mossy caves, talking to each other about their children, their men. Much in the way women of the land laugh from the depths of their bellies, as they pick tea, hoe the red earth, peel the leaves off maize, talking about the people they hold close to their hearts.

Just like the stars that shine even when we can’t see them, Love is all around. It’s the Field, the Matrix. And when you connect to Love, miracles happen.

Love is all around at airport arrivals, in the cancer ward. Love is in the eyes of our lover, as we lie, limbs entwined. Love is all around when the parent we have been at war with for years, now lies, just like a little boy, breath rattling in his sunken chest. Love is the flowering of our heart when we hold our first grandchild. Love is the aged family dog, now deaf, almost blind, tail still wagging, warmly welcoming us home. Love comes softly sometimes. And there are times when Love strips us naked, flays us bare to the bone. Love is boundless, arching over barriers that divide race, gender, age, or social status. We fall in love with the married man, the gardener, boss. We find the love we have been searching for all our lives in the soft arms of another woman.

Aphrodite, or Venus, as the Romans named her, is goddess of love, beauty, and lust. She was once a creator-earth goddess, and like other feminine deities she delighted in lusty pleasures, found her Joy in the embrace of handsome young men. She is Woman, relishing the curves and fullness of her body, finding beauty and pleasure in all things sensuous and playful. Her gutsy call to pleasure and beauty is enticing, and her siren call draws us, to the vortex of our desire. Love brings lasting happiness and soulful partnerships. Love also detonates marriages, divides families, destroys kingdoms, ravages our bodies with venereal (Venus) disease. Our quest for youth and sexual allure disfigures our faces and bodies, depletes our bank balances. “The course of true love never did run smooth,” Lysander laments in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Ask anyone who has tried to navigate the stormy seas of long distance relationship, or who has loved someone who has committed to be with another. Yet if we honour her respectfully, and connect with the Aphrodite essence within, she always brings us just what we need at just the right time for our soul’s sorrow or joy.

Each one of us has a Venus in our birth chart. Unique by her position in sign, element, and aspect. Our Venus longs for her own distinctly unique expression. Some of us deny our Aphrodite energy. Or allow our partners to carry it for us. We cage our primal sexuality, wage war against our bodies; bridle our lusts, disconnect from what makes us feel sensual, feminine, and alive. Aphrodite’s essence has become split in our Judaic-Christian world view, where femininity, sexuality, our bodies, have been smeared with morality and judgement. Yet, centuries on, Aphrodite lives in art, in advertising, literature, and in the characters of soap operas. Modern Aphrodite’s appear in movies, on the pages of fashion magazines. She is the diva of song. As distant as the Evening Star, she is the wet and wild porn star – Aprhodite the insatiable Harlot. As the chorus in Euripides’ play, Hippolytus sing, “neither fire nor stars have stronger bolts than those of Aphrodite.” When we are struck by Aphrodite’s bolt of Love, we experience a profound stirring of the loins and the soul. Aphrodite initiates by piercing the armour of our defences, dishevelling our lives. Challenging us to go within and connect with what we value, what feels lovely, delicious, what brings us pleasure. Love is all around, so dance today with Aphrodite! Allow her to caress you, and delight you with her charms. Love and honour your body today. Tune in. Listen to what it says to you, so you can listen to the call of your soul. Love yourself, then be truly willing to receive Love – it is all around.

Carrie: Have you?

Mr. Big: Have I what?

Carrie: Ever been in love.

Mr Big: Absofuckinglutely.

Sex and the City

The Troggs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ut5uC91FcbI

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)