March Healing New Moon

New moon today offers a powerful opportunity for self-healing especially for healers! It is a moment for seeding a new passionate inclusivity, for embracing whatever is happening without inner or outer rejections, for dissolving the barriers created by our very definitions of ‘self’ and ‘other’:

You, darkness, of whom I am born I love you more than the flame that limits the world to the circle it illumines and excludes all the rest. But the darkness embraces everything: shapes and shadows, creatures and me, people, nations - just as they are. It lets me imagine a great presence stirring beside me. I believe in the night - Rilke ‘Book of Hours’ 1 ii

Observing what is arising now and over the next weeks with absolute healing intention – desireless awareness – can transform the outcome of the coming times, especially as through late April into May there is a cosmic push towards manifesting a pristine energy of new alignment of consciousness on a personal and global level.

At the moon’s seeding point today both sun and moon are exactly aligned with Chiron in Pisces. Chiron represents the wound coming to the surface for healing. It shows us how the process of healing is a circle or spiral, as represented in the ancient healing symbol of 'ouroboros', the serpent biting its tail. In this cycling of existence however we may feel endlessly caught in a loop with no way out. Then there is a tendency to react like the scorpion who stings the frog carrying it across the river, dooming them both:

"Blame me not," said the scorpion, in a supplicatory tone, "it is not my fault; it is that of my nature; it is a constitutional habit I have of stinging."- fable of the scorpion and frog

Now is time to check on any hidden excuses of ‘constitutional habits’ and notice how they create repeating patterns, to ruthlessly see how any fixed sense of inner or outer identity becomes a recurring trigger of karma. Seeing through the illusions hidden in our descriptions of ourselves and our world is claiming our freedom:

‘Description fails’ – Manuel Schoch

‘The foolish reject what they see, not what they think; the wise reject what they think, not what they see’ - Huang Po

As healers we are in service to dissolving notions of black-white dualism. If we maintain dualism we project darkness outside ourselves and thus we cannot claim not to be black magicians. For an average person this causes problems, for a person cultivating consciousness this inevitably backfires with the force of all their own healing/wounding power! This is the toughest ongoing challenge we all carry on our pilgrimage to return to Source. Any labels of ‘right – wrong’ take us into the dangerous and endless spiral of conflict we see destroying the world around us.

So whatever calls for healing in this period can reveal the roots of old (un)consciousness attitudes within us. We are asked to ruthlessly let the past go and with it any emotions clinging to what could have been different, to what happened and ‘shouldn't have’ happened, to what didn’t happen and ‘should have’ happened. Forgiveness, inner and outer, is the key.

Both serpent and scorpion are archetypes of the sign Scorpio which is highlighted at this new moon through Jupiter, seeker of meaning and of justice, as it retrogrades back through the emotional depths of Scorpio over the next four months uncovering wherever our grasping and attachment has created karmic hooks which may drag us back into the old way of being.

This is a special time of soul searching. We are still under the effects of the Chironic super blue moon eclipse on 31st January and also of the last full moon on 31st February which fell exactly opposite Neptune, bringing deeper downloads and spiritual realisations to inform our experience of healing. Confusion and misunderstandings as well as finer energy flow through the open doorway between the worlds at this time. Let the confusion dissolve the old ideas of knowing. This is its purpose: to set us free from who we thought we were and how we thought we were meant to be! Bemusement is sometimes the greatest wisdom out of which duality can tumble into deep insight. Perhaps we are right that we are wrong, or wrong that we are right!! Melting descriptions in order to return to the emptiness-luminosity of Source is the message of Neptune and Chiron in Pisces.

‘There is no demon becoming a god. Non-recognition IS the demon. Realising IS the god. Gods and demons are primordially inseparable. If we realise the primordial view we realise their inseparability. A god degenerates into a demon by being bound’ - Adzom Rinpoche

At this new moon Mars (energy/conflict) is inciting Chiron to channel inner pain outwards in blame or attack. Fiercely observe and guard against this tendency of unconsciousness now! Mars can bring energy to either the full spiral of healing or it can hit out and sting anyone unfortunate enough to try to carry us across the river at the wrong moment. Through late April to May (and beyond) we will reap what we sow now. So let us sow sweet flowers of patience, bright buds of clarity and tall trees of empowerment through which Source can flow, by maintaining a vision beyond the tight emotions bound up in whatever kind of blame or resentment our situation may provoke in us!

Chogyam Trungpa: ‘Drive all blames into one… means that all the problems and the complications that exist around (us) are not somebody else’s fault. All the blame always starts with ourselves… You can actually say, ‘I take the blame…’ You can actually communicate with somebody who is not in defensive mood, since you already took all the blame… Quite possibly the person you are talking to, who might be the cause of the particular problem, would realize that he has done something terrible himself… Everybody is looking for someone to blame, and they would like to blame You… Once you begin to (take the blame) it is the highest and most powerful logic, the most powerful incantation you can make. You can actually make the whole thing functional. You can absorb the poison – then the rest of the situation becomes medicine. If nobody is willing to absorb the blame it becomes a big interrelational football filled with a lot of glue.’

We are experiencing the last ripples of healing processes set in motion by Chiron holding us fast from the same spot in Pisces since June 2016, repeating his lesson over and again, intensified during a lunar eclipse on 16th September 2016, again checking if we got the message through April and October 2017, and yet again revealed at January’s eclipse. Disconnections, reconnections and new connections keep coming. The true gift as we do our work is discovering how healing blessings can fill the empty space that we are creating through letting the old pain go.

So if we can recognise that what arises now is an opportunity to release an old identity of suffering, of un-forgiveness, this period can be full of soul nourishment, a leap into a new era. Perhaps, if we can take the long view, we may even start to glimpse the Neptunian-Chironic chaos and suffering surrounding us from another perspective – as a soul-renewing challenge to awaken us all from the illusion of separation.

When the limited mind enters blessed companionship with limitless Mind, indescribable freedom dawns – Tilopa ‘Song of the Mahamudra’