We are living a weird kind of summer here in Italy. It’s called “Estate di San Martino”, Saint Martin’s Summer. This because it’s not unusual to have a mild weather for a couple of weeks in November. But for some reason this year it’s lasting way more than expected, creating a weird time-shift effect.
And it gets even worse. Days are getting shorter and shorter. It gets dark so early that I literally find myself cooking dinner half an hour earlier. And of course lockdowns are back. It’s confusing. We are all confused. And in my opinion we’re going to be even more.
Why is that? Because we are approaching Christmas. The time of the year when we usually start feeling a sort of nostalgia. Darkness grows deeper all around us and we feel the need of connecting with other people. Our need of belonging gets stronger. How are we going to be able to hangout with others during the second wave of the pandemic?
Shadow Work Retrospective
As we’ve said in a previous article, last month we expected to deal with the shadow parts of our soul. As you might know, this process of recognizing, processing and integrating back those aspects of us is called Shadow Work, a term inspired by Jungian psychology.
So, how did it go? What are the challenges that you’ve been experiencing, and what are the parts of you that emerged? Personally, I’ve been processing different elements of Venus, most likely because a Venus-Mars opposition we had last week. What about you? Leave a comment down here if you’d like to share your experience.
Mercury and Mars both turned direct this month. Mercury on the 3rd and Mars on the 14th. This concluded this shadow work process, at least from an astrological perspective. I say so because we’ve been facing—and we still are—very challenging moments that are still going to badly trigger us. So let’s take confort in thinking that it could have been worse.
Control of Speech becomes Feeling for Truth
The virtue of Sagittarius given by Rudolf Steiner is Control of Speech: minding our tongue. Working on Patience, the virtue of Scorpio, we might eventually start feeling growing our inner space. Haste in fact has the effect of reducing both the space and the time between a stimulus and the response. It’s like having shortness of breath, but on an inner level.
In this sense, we don’t have a choice. A stimulus is given and we immediately respond. Sometimes even though we don’t want to. And we all know how many times we end up regretting it. Once a decent amount of patience has grown inside of us, we might start feeling that we don’t have to respond right away. We can choose.
On top of that, we become better listeners. Our discernment expands. And we are able to judge what we are listening more clearly. We are not misled by our responsiveness. We learn to recognize the inner movements of our interlocutor. And with them the truth in their words.
If you have a very strong Jupiter in your Natal Chart you might find this exercise difficult. Jupiter is indeed a real talker. But this would make it more challenging, and maybe also more interesting for you to try.
Connection and Belonging in the Time of a Pandemic
When Christmas approaches we all need to connect to other people. And by connection I don’t mean randomly text someone we haven’t heard in a while. We need to have other people around. You might think that’s just a sort of ancestral feeling related to the lack of sunlight. Since ancient times men gathered together to face the fear of darkness and the unknown. It could be.
But I’m trying through these posts to bring a different perspective here. In fact the forces of the Sagittarius are the ones at the very foundation of community life. Trusting people who shares with us common ideals—this is what the Sagittarius is about. So it’s not by chance that during the advent period we can feel this warmth, this openness to others.
And yes, people go crazy at Christmas—we know that. But in early December there is this space of peace (right between Black Friday and the moodiness of the holidays) where this energy can be spotted neatly. And especially this year we need to find a new way to nurture this feeling.
Hope you can all find a way to be close to your loved ones in these crazy times. And as always if you enjoyed this article please subscribe to the Astronomicon Newsletter with the bar at the top of the website to receive weekly updates. Thanks for reading and Happy Advent to you all.
I consider myself a free researcher in western spiritual disciplines, in particular Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy and the Neoplatonic Hermetic tradition. I have a three-year training in Astrology at the CIDA delegation of Trieste, the Italian Center for Astrological Disciplines. I graduated in Computer Engineering from the University of Trieste.
Thanks Rob
Yes the big part of the Shadow i worked on was letting go of a powerless self and so now I am reclaiming latent and suppressed power. Now that life has humbled me to the most it should be good for the world. Looking forward in helping in a new way.
Blessings
Hey Devta, thanks for sharing your experience.
I think you’ve described exactly what usually happens with the shadow: our repressed parts put us into external situations where we are almost forced to reconnect to them, since it’s the only way out.