Releasing Yourself From The Dead (which once were buried)

Have you ever found yourself doing things which you were certain were things you did not do? Over and over you told yourself – I don’t do that, I can’t do that, I’m not the sort of person who does that…

Have you ever done something of which you were afraid, terrified of the consequences of doing it, of losing the tenuous control you have on the shit which happens in life inside and out, but more fearful of not doing it and staying stuck where you are and have been… only to realise that that of which you were so afraid to do released you from the death grip of your fears into a mysterious new way of seeing, feeling, and being?

That’s a brain teaser not a question, this is a question —> Which famous painting really reflects your soul? (via HowStuffWorks)

And below is the result I received when I took that quiz last night (while I was very tired which causes my dyslexia to increase in potency which turns reading into a series of farcical misunderstandings):

 

quiz result from Which Famous Painting Really Reflects Your Soul? 

 

That’s a surprisingly accurate result. I would add that my own behaviour makes me cringe and want to scream out loud but mostly I scream internally at myself.

Lately I’ve been making some changes internally and externally. Tackling some of my behaviours which make me cringe, stretching myself out of the cringe position. Some of those changes are things I told myself over and over that I didn’t do, couldn’t do, am not the sort of person who would do that…

Why? Why, indeed, when not doing them made my life harder and doing them has, thus far, made my life easier. Yet I told myself that doing those things would make life harder for me – why did I think that?

The answer can be found in my astrological chart (and yes, this is an astrological post, but as with all of my posts it sort of is about that but it sort of isn’t about that).

 

moon in 12th house transit interpretation via Astrodienst

 

The (image) above describes a transit which is also my natal Moon placement. Throughout my life I’ve struggled to express my emotions, share my feelings with others, and very often I had no idea what I was feeling and couldn’t access that information because I had buried it somewhere within where I couldn’t find it.

It’s funny, I was thinking the other day while writing a post…

(yes, I can think and write at the same time even though I mostly write without thinking – I described that process to someone in a comment on their blog, and yes, I am now commenting on the blogs of others more frequently than I used to because I’ve realised that they quite like that, as I like it when people comment on my blog, as channeling communication… and later I cringed at my description because it could sound as though I think I’m a medium channeling some being from the beyond, a being from the beyond wouldn’t get a word in edgewise inside my mind and if it did somehow manage to do so it would get mercilessly interrogated and what it said would be thoroughly investigated until it decided that trying to possess me was a very bad idea and it would exorcise itself away screaming, what I meant was that I let all the conversations in my mind flow through my fingers onto the cyber page)

…that those who read my ramblings may have the impression that I’m as expressive, emotionally and verbally, in person as I am on cyber paper. I’m not. The people around me offline often say to me: “I have no idea what you’re thinking or feeling”.

I can get very passionate in my posts, sharing my frustrations, ranting, getting easily riled and screaming out loud about the behaviour of others which makes me cringe and then want to pounce onto them to rip them to shreds with bare hands and bared teeth (I have natal Mars in Scorpio = don’t mess with me, Pluto in the 1st house = seriously, don’t mess with me or I’ll drag you to hell, Lilith in the 10th house = Well, hello there, you’re not in Sparta anymore, this isn’t Mordor either, welcome to the island of Circe where I turn people into bacon. Yummy!).

 

 

All of that may create an image of someone who lives up to the reputation of the colour of their hair, has a red-hair-trigger temper, and shouts and screams at people all the time. I’m only doing that in my head, on the outside I’m calm, placid, like one of those lakes in a horror film which invites you to go swimming: “Come on, go into the water!”.

Am I joking? Maybe… it can be hard to tell with a Capricorn, especially one with Virgo rising = a little Bo Peep with her sheep (okay, it’s a goat wearing sheepskin but you see Bo Peep lost her sheep and… found a goat who was into wearing sheepskin, it can get very cold on craggy mountains).

Which reminds me of that guy who was so pissed off (with good reason as my mother had interacted with him and she was exceptionally gifted when it came to leaving people frothing at the mouth). I was left with the task of unraveling the knot my mother had made of someone (and she was able to blissfully ignore the consequences of her words and actions, and continue to tell herself what a wonderful person she was, a saint, and a martyr who was always having to tidy up other people’s messes).

I was used helping people untangle themselves. I was also used to standing still, quietly and calmly, as someone screamed, shouted, and stomped their feet in anger (both of my parents did this regularly, it was pretty much how they communicated during my childhood when they weren’t in silent treatment mode, or in cajoling mode – which is why I developed a dislike for compliments as they were invariably part of a contract which would not benefit me, which would require that I submit myself to someone else’s control and the consequences left me having to untangle myself from another trip to hell). I walked him with very little talk from fury to calm, and at the very end he told me that he wanted to introduce me to his son because he would love to have a daughter-in-law like me (that kind of thing happened to me fairly regularly, so I knew how to get the son off the hook and out of a parent-induced awkward situation).

I’ve always been better at dealing with the emotions of others rather than with my own, partly because my emotions had to be repressed, suppressed, were oppressed by the emotions of others, had to be dead and buried (every now and then they’d wake up in their coffin… which is probably why I was deeply affected by Poe’s The Premature Burial).

“The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?”

― Edgar Allan Poe, The Premature Burial

That skill of sorts has helped me to attract those supernal beings known as narcissists. They see me as a void, and narcissists abhor a void, they feel an urgency to fill it up with themselves.

Once a narcissist has filled you up with themselves, they then proceed to fix what is wrong with you. Everything about you is wrong and must be made right by them.

Sure, they complimented you on some talent which only they could see in you, which only they know how to appreciate in the way it deserves, and which made you feel special, but that compliment had barbs on it, and the moment you accepted it they had you on the end of a chain, a leash which will get shorter and shorter. Kiss your delusions of independence and individualism goodbye, they’re dead and buried. They will control you from now on because you’re out of control.

They can make you a better you, but first you must get rid of all this stuff, junk, garbage, known as your self, and replace it with their new, improved, version of your self.

 

moon trine saturn transit interpretation via Astrodienst

 

It has taken me many cycles of life, many walks around in a circle, repeating the same old patterns over and over, making tiny shifts here and there, testing changes to see if they were real or illusions, attempted escapes, being recaptured, jumping out of the pot and into the frying pan, and so on and on and on… to get where I am now, but where is that?

It is a strange place, one of my own making (although many others have contributed materials to the structure), one which I quite like and willingly choose for myself…

I more than ‘quite like’ it (those words reflect old issues and fears connected to my Moon in 12th, and my Chiron/NN in the 7th, which I am gradually putting to rest by gently challenging them bit by bit), I love it, I am happy here… and I know this too will pass, change, shift… but for once I look forward with… without the sense of foreboding, without the tightness in my chest (which I affectionately nicknamed – The Grip-Tight), without the feeling of being hunted by those who want to steal your happiness away from you, how dare you have it when they don’t, if they can’t have it then neither can you.

It has taken me many Moons to finally know my emotions, converse with my feelings, express them more openly, share them more freely…

And while I am still concerned about the consequences of doing so… of whom it may attract, and how they may react… and that one or two may want to kill me, silence me, cause me to be dead and buried…

That fear once made me retreat from others, from the world, from myself, from being myself as I am, until I lost myself, silenced myself, killed myself off, buried myself, might as well have been dead rather than the walking dead. And it didn’t stop those types of people from hunting me… from wanting to take what I had which they envied. Even when I had nothing, they envied that nothing, wanted that nothing from me, how dare I have nothing to give them.

 

 

you can choose to play as a male or as a female

 

I am finally learning how to use the Spear of Leonidas, in my own time and my own way – “You carry the blade of Leonidas. Act like it!” (this is dialogue in the official trailer above)

I have done many things recently which before I used to shy away from doing to protect myself from the possible repercussions (not all of those were imagined worst case scenarios which had never happened and never would, some were from real life experiences I had had multiple times – I grew up with narcissists, the worst case scenario you can imagine is your daily bread happening – and like a lab rat who repeatedly gets painfully zapped when it tries to eat, eventually it stops eating so as not to be painfully zapped or it adapts to the painful zapping and learns how to like it until it can only eat when being painfully zapped).

In the past it didn’t matter how many times I observed that protecting myself from certain repercussions in this manner didn’t actually protect me at all from those repercussions. Sometimes it even attracted them and increased their likelihood. I was stuck in a fear rut, and my fear kept telling me I was safe there. But I wasn’t safe there at all.

Blogging, in particular, has been very useful and helpful in showing me the error of my past ways, and in allowing me to discover new ways which work better for me. I’ve been experimenting a little bit more…

My apologies to anyone who feels as though they’ve been experimented upon by a mad scientist (I have natal Uranus conjunct Jupiter trine Mercury in Aquarius = what happens if I jump off a moving vehicle wearing rollerskates…? Next time I’ll use an open umbrella as well… perhaps I should get skate wheels which can swivel… although maybe that’s a bad idea, what I need is ankles that can swivel…). I’m really just experimenting on myself, with myself, but sometimes I need the unknowing participation of others. I try to do it gently.

For all of my life I’ve always been concerned about my impact on others, that isn’t going to change, but how I do it is changing. Having grown up with narcissists, and been a magnet for them (because of the training and programming of those I grew up with), I ended up perceiving all people as being incredibly fragile, overly sensitive, easily triggered into volatile drama, as though they were an explosive device which I needed to defuse (possibly by not going anywhere near it, definitely not touching it, being careful about the vibrations of my breathing, and paranoid about the effect of my voice upon it especially if I said the wrong thing, what it didn’t want to hear).

I was always worrying about upsetting people and trying not to upset them… which often upset them. It took me a long time to realise that most people aren’t narcissists, they can take care of themselves, they don’t mind if you make a mistake, they don’t need you to cater to them, they can handle the truth, and… they actually quite like me as I am and won’t hand me a list of required changes to suit them, won’t threaten to kill me, abandon me, put me in the stocks and get everyone to throw rotten fruit at me, chop my head off, disembowel me, and other cute things narcissists say when they’re only joking and I have no sense of humour.

  

even video games have narcissists, this one has quite a few (Odessa is the funniest) and you can kill them if you want to

  

This will be the last post in my recent series of Moon-ing – watching the Moon transiting around my natal chart – as it has come full circle.

These are the posts in the series:

• The Many Faces of the Moon (this is where the series started, and includes a look at the posts I wrote under the influence of this cycle of the Moon, as well as some musings about being a woman and my relationship with other women)
• The Full Moon and Uranus: I shall not defeat you – I shall transcend you (this… what was this about again?… oh, that, shit I’d almost forgotten about that and yet I haven’t solved the puzzle yet, and it includes a look at predictions about that particular full Moon from various astrologers, and how it dovetailed into what was going on with me)
  
• Repost: A Party at MoonVooDoo (this is sort of part of the Moon series as I do mention where the Moon was transiting at the time… it’s the repost of an old post about a vivid dream I had plus a long intro where I talk about some things, like my now dead deviantart, which include Assassin’s Creed Odyssey – that bit ties in with what I have said here about it)
• Venus Rx and Lilith: Wild Women Spilling Secrets (this isn’t part of the series but it ties in with it, when it comes to using astrology to explore yourself and life, it’s always more complex than just one planet causing or affecting this or that, you, your life… for instance everything I’ve written here, the changes I am making, the channeling communication in particular, are also connected to the transits of Jupiter and Mercury which are on my natal Neptune… although Mercury is moving on quickly)
  

I might play with Mercury next…

Since it is my dominant planet both by Ascendant method and Pullen…

(if you want to find your dominant planet/sign, I wrote a post a while ago, in 2013, on how to do that: What Planet Dominates You? – it’s one of the top posts of my blog because it filled a How-To gap)

…and I have noticed my mind works differently depending upon the sign transiting Mercury is in.

When it’s in Scorpio, as it has been recently until today, I get more focused, am better able to solve puzzles and problems by cutting to the chase, can dig deeper and fiercer into the root cause of things, and spot lies (the lies people tell others, me, themselves, and the lies I tell others, and myself) with more acuity. I find calling bullshit on myself to be very liberating!

 

    

That’s it. Thank you, Moon, for sharing yourself with me…

And thank you to those who have allowed me to share myself with them, and those who have shared themselves with me.

Here’s a song for you (I was going to say this is a great tune for Mercury moving into Sagittarius, but then I checked Sara Bareilles’ chart and she has natal Mercury in Scorpio conjunct Uranus… ah, but Sun and Nep in Sag):