What Is Your Insight?
Death, Life, and Rebirth
Q: What Is Your Insight?
A: Right now I feel a feverish high. So much is in the air. Like sparkles in a snow globe, my life is full of things to celebrate yet you can’t quite see what is happening, momentarily. My body is a vessel for process and goodness, a process I am in. Have you ever rebirthed yourself in every area of life all at once? I thought I did this already. 5 years ago I experienced such radical upheaval that it felt like a wildfire moved through my soul, but I missed some key pieces that were unconsciously lodged inside my mind.
The changes I lived through then were very dramatic in nature externally. The changes now are so deeply psychological that there is literally nowhere to run but through them, from the inside. It is so wonderful and a bit torturous to love transformation and change so much. I have been sharing recently with my near and dear ones how, although I love to change my mind more than most people I know, it is still so epically hard of a task. I have to hurl myself across the invisible thresholds once I am brought to my knees by some external or painful circumstance. It is rare that I can boldly walk across into ‘change’ without some forced function to precede it.
JILL BOLTE TAYLOR’S TED TALK
Have you ever seen Jill Bolte Taylor speak about her Stroke of Insight? Much like her, I am a researcher, an investigator. I am not a neuroscientist, however, I am a ‘scientist’ of the nature of mind. I was recently inspired to watch her TED talk, and immediately felt a resonance of experience. At one moment in time, she felt her eye twitching leading to a migraine of sorts, leading to numbing in her limbs. When she realized that she was having a stroke, she was literally of two minds.
On one hand (or side of her brain) she was in a typical state of ‘oh no, something is wrong - I am having a stroke. On the other, she was in another state of being, the state of complete awe that she was having a stroke and could study it from within her own experience. What a miracle, she thought, to be a neuroscientist and to be able to study your own brain during a stroke! Do you love her mind(s) as much as I do?
TWO MINDS, MANY TRANSITS
Now, how does this relate to me? Many of you know I am an astrologer and that I work with this language of the stars for deeper psychological understanding through archetype. Currently, I am living through several challenging transits but the strongest being that of Pluto conjunct my Sun/Venus. In layman's terms, this is a full death and rebirth cycle of the identity, of who I’ve known myself to be in the realms of self, relationship, and resource. It is perhaps one of the strongest transits we can walk through as humans and doesn’t occur for everyone in a lifetime.
And here I am restless, writhing, shedding, and transmuting myself as gracefully as I can on the inside while forging ahead on the outside. I am of two minds. One is of the past and is slightly panicked by the task of change that is mine to do. The other is absolutely astonished by the brilliance of what is occurring as elements of my psyche are brought into compost, allowing new breath, new light, and new understanding to flourish where my old mind used to be.
Much like Jill, I am experiencing the daunting reality that there is an urgent need for support, and in my case that can look like extra love from friends and family, deep and powerful bodywork to help the process move ahead, as well, and most importantly, communing with the true resource that lives within me. And also like Jill, there is no place I would rather be. The chance to actually live what I have only dreamed of and contemplated from my studies. The opportunity to embody previous mysteries unfolding that I can now understand from lived experience. The miracles of transformation and mercy that are possible in a human life lived extraordinarily.
There is nothing more treacherous, there is nothing more beautiful... than dying before we die. Why is this full moon in Aquarius conjuring such profound inquiry? There is a restless nature to this moon, an unbridled portal of shaking off old and contemporary ways of being in exchange for the stepping into new ‘clothes’ altogether. What does it mean to me, to die before we die? It means shedding skin and becoming anew. It means diving deep into the transpersonal layers of mind. It means to grasp authentic understanding by the horns and integrating it into my learning to become the steps I take into my future. A brilliant one at that, full of possibilities unlocked with each courageous leap of insight.
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We cannot change the world until we accept we are the world. This is the new conversation.
