9th September 2018 at 19:01 BST in Dublin, Ireland
Are you listening?
Amidst the excessively busy life that you are currently leading, conscious of time passing like cars on the outside lane of a German Autobahn yet your list is filled to the brim with things to do – tasks to perform, targets to reach, people to support, friends and family in need, problems to find solutions to, future plans to streamline and figure out how best to achieve them, good, slow food to cook, the gym to get to, enough sleep to rest your increasingly weary body and so little time to fit everything in, are you listening?
Lost to your own inner processing, no longer wishing to be defined by limitations of your past, hungrily seeking the answers to ‘why’, deeply immersed within a self-reflective space, ever seeking to consciously engage with others whose vertical conversation stimulates your sOul, consumed with ‘getting on with it’ so that you don’t have to ‘come back here’, are you listening?
Mind consumed and working overtime, pulled in so many different directions, reduced to the concentration span of a goldfish, eyes magnetically drawn to the wrong blue light and can now only able to read two paragraphs before getting distracted and move on to the next titillation, so tired you are in the morning that you have fed into the illusion that coffee actually wakes you up, so jaded you are in the evening that you need something to relax you, the busyness has so removed you from you that something has to give…
Are you listening?
Three and a half years ago, I held my mother’s hand as she was been wheeled into surgery to have a stage three tumour removed from her lower bowel. As we sat in recovery over the following days, I asked her “Have you talked to the cancer and asked it why it is there?” Mum didn’t know how to reply to that, irritatingly stating, “I’m just unlucky”. I let it be and didn’t explore further what she had been unable to let go of, after all, who I am to impose my beliefs upon another?
Nine months ago, when Mum was told that there was nothing the medical profession could do for her, I suggested that we explored plant medicine as an option for pain relief, given that her body could not take the standard medical intervention and being reluctant to take morphine that would reduce her quality of life. I asked her to talk to the plant before taking it, telling it what she would like it to do. She thought I was being a little ridiculous. Six weeks later, over breakfast, Mum spoke to Karen about a strange dream she had had, as she recalled lying on a sun lounger in Malta talking to Karen, then noticing that Karen had disappeared and she was surrounded by two green leafs, both of whom said in unison, “what you do want from us Jean. Will you please take what we can offer you and our healing seriously.” Mum asked, do you think the plant is talking to me?
As strange as it may be to read, I believe that my mother’s cancer was rooted in a deep emotional trauma that took place some 23 years ago and the not-unsurprising difficulty she had in letting that wound and hurt go. The cycle during which she fell ill, was the same cycle that was unfolding back in the early to mid 1990’s when time stood still for Mum. However, Mum was a person who internalised and ‘got on with it’ and never really willingly went to that painful place to heal. That her cancer was initially located within her lower bowel, a form of the disease the medical profession dismisses as being the cancer of old age, to someone who seeks a deeper meaning from the body part wherein illness arises suggests that Mum had not let go of emotional material that had become toxic and needed to be released. So removed had Mum become from the pain of her experience, over time it somatised into something physical. It was that physical experience, in the end, which created a tangible opportunity to face down her past and ‘forced’ her to find a way to truly move on from that which held her fast to her past.
Had she listened, would she have needed to journey with the Plague? Who knows! But Mum had a remarkable ability to ignore her body, as many of us do, getting on with things, as opposed to truly listening to what is going on within us. Your body is conscious. It is not an inanimate entity that is merely is controlled by your brain. Even though we are becoming increasingly more mind and less physical; even though time feels as if it has speed up and we have more and more stuff to do; even though we have so many pulls on our heart; even though we are moving through this Kali Yuga time, as we witness the profound redistribution of power that our world is preparing for, ahead of January 2020; even though we have more knowledge at our disposal, greater awareness, better quality of material life than 50 years ago; even though we know what is good for us and what is not, do we listen?
No. Moreover, in a world that has become increasingly disenchanted, consciousness has become merely a human consideration, existing only in those fortunate to be born bi-peds. Plants do not have consciousness, despite Clive Backster’s research; water is just water, despite Masaru Emoto’s publications; trees are for construction, despite stories like Anastasia in the Cedar forests of the Russian taiga, and your body is merely a machine, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Despite the genuine and positive technological advances that the Age of Reason has brought us, as a society we have been conditioned to detached ourselves from the world around us. We have been seduced by technology to abdicated responsibility for our well-being, preferring to trust a clock on your wrist to tell you how many steps you have walked, how long you have slept at night, what tablets are needed to compensate for the lack of minerals ingested by an increasingly highly mechanised food industry. The list is endless. But the end result has been we don’t listen until it is too late…
And given the inordinate amount of emotional stress that has been building around the world, given the transition towards a more inclusive society, a move away from the ‘pyramid’ to the ‘circle’, the rise of the feminine, the breakdown of relationships, the intense (but natural) Earth (climate) changes , the restructuring of the fundamental pillars of our community, and the intense spiritual awakening that many are undergoing, it is no surprise if you didn’t truly feel as if you had the time to truly listen.
Not just observe, but listen.
Have you listened to your body recently? Truly listened? Have you asked your stomach what it really likes? Have you listened to what arises within you when you have a hormonal flush? When you are feeling tired, do you take time back to rest, or do you push through the fatigue as if it is a sign of weakness? Do you truly listen to what food your body needs? Not just the cravings of a body used to being topped up with carbs and sugars? But really listened to what it needs? Have you listened to the food itself and what it has held within its matrices? Have you thanked the food for what it is giving you, as the Essenes did back a couple of thousand years ago? Try it, and see the differing quality of energy released thereafter!
If you have had the discomfort of journeying with serious illness, as my Mum had, have you truly listened to what your body is telling you, what it has stored, why dis-ease has visited you and what you can truly learn and heal from the experience?
Have you constantly fed your body with negative thoughts and feelings, telling it that it is too fat, too skinny, too saggy, too inflexible, too grey, too old, too… And you wonder why your body has morphed into the very thing that you are telling it?!!
In the astrological lexicon, the intelligence of nature and the two way conversation between that which is regarded as being inanimate and animate is called Virgo, one of twelve modes of consciousness that exists within you, regardless of whether you were born within the solar month wherein the Sun ‘moves through’ this imaginal space.
All astrological signs arise from the combinations of two fundamental building blocks – an element and a mode. The four elements used within the Western Tradition essentially describe four primary states of being, which in turn has one of three ways into which it is directed or expressed – outwardly, inwardly or as a mixture of both. The combination of both element and mode gives rise to the 12 signatures of consciousness, or the 12 signs of the zodiac. The zodiacal sign of Virgo is derived from combining the Element Earth with the Mutable Mode. Taken at a very basic and literal interpretation, the Earth element fundamentally deals with the solid, physical world, whereas the Mutable Mode refers to the two way inter-dynamic of consciousness arising from within to without and responding from without to within. In other words, Mutable Earth is about the two way exchange of information between anything that has physical form, be it a plant to a plant, a rock to a rock, a body part to your mind or a plant, a rock or food to you!
You do not have to be born with the Sun in Virgo to get this fact.
The archetype of Virgo exists within everyone therefore you too can listen and tune into what nature or your body is telling you. But you have a choice to listen or not. You can choose to ignore what your body is telling you; what foods you should or shouldn’t eat, over riding your bodily instincts with your mind, ingesting a Rennie tablet until a physical crisis forces you to stop and re-evaluate. Your body knows when something is not right for you. That wrongness pulses through you with an incredible dizzying pressure, filling every pour in your body. Yes, your mind can override what is going on within you, rationalising and reasoning it away, but your body cannot lie. Not listening to your body’s reactions creates anxiety and illness and in turn that prevents you from being truly you since you have to direct your will, time and energy into saving your failing energy.
I suppose what I am asking you to reflect on in the days leading up to the Virgoan New Moon is whether you believe that the individual organs of your body talk to you? Whether you notice a difference to the quality of the food you ingest when you thank the food for the nutrients they will release into your body? Whether you are truly taking the time, during this emotionally busy time in your life, to truly listen to your body and what it needs, or what it is saying to you? Or do you need to breakdown, to get exhausted, to start making mistakes in your professional life as a result of physical discomfort before you truly listen?
All rights reserved – www.andrewsmith.ie www.cosmicintelligenceagency.com and Andrew Smith. Completed at 08:57 BST, 2nd September 2018.
