Hello, beautiful souls! In my previous January Patterns and Energies post, I promised to pull an oracle card to help us navigate the month with presence and grace. Well, voila, here it is! I will admit that I’ve been so immersed in the flow of my own life this month that I can’t honestly say that I’ve kept up with “the pulse” of the collective. I haven’t been quite as “tuned-in” on that front as I would like to be. Even so, I do get the sense that life continues to increase in intensity for all of us. If you’ve been experiencing a lot of pain and suffering, it’s probably intensifying. And if you’ve been feeling a lot of ease, grace, and pleasure, you’ve probably been enjoying its amplification throughout January. *Please see my previous January blog to get more specific astrological insights about January patterns and energies.
January patterns and energies: “shedding”
What’s with this intensification? One perspective is that there are a bunch of old structures and ways of being that have reached their end. They are ready to be shed like a snake shedding its skin. We can’t carry them forward without creating more pain for ourselves. They just don’t serve us, anymore.
Overhaul, across the board
This “shedding” seems to be impacting us across the board: our social and political structures, economically, environmentally, physically, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually. It seems that the fundamental way we see and relate to ourselves and to each other is in need of an overhaul.
If you’ve been enjoying greater ease, flow, and fulfillment over January, keep doing what you’re doing! Continue to open…to open to love given and received. Continue to nurture your creativity. Continue to be curious, to learn and grow. Continue to share your voice and your genius in those ways in which you feel inspired. It’s obvious that The Divine/Love/God/Goddess/Tao/Life/Beauty/Great Spirit (call it whatever you like!) is using you and wants to use you even more to help make the world a better place.
Pain and suffering
Now, this is where it gets tricky; if you’ve been experiencing more pain and suffering over January, should you keep doing what you’re doing? This is very complex territory, and I don’t know that there are any simple answers. Everyone’s reality and circumstance are so unique.
I like the idea that pain and suffering are not the same thing. Pain is natural. You stub your toe, and it hurts, naturally. But let’s say that after you stub your toe, you begin to berate yourself for having stubbed your toe: “Great! Look what you did, you idiot! You’re so stupid! Why can’t you do anything right?” Now, you’ve crossed over from pain into suffering, and you’re doing it to yourself.
What story do you create around your pain?
Sometimes the pain of life cannot be avoided. And maybe sometimes it can, but if it’s already there, what are you gonna do about it? Do you want to add more pain on top of the pain you’re already feeling? Chances are you probably want to lessen the pain! If that’s true, then there is one way to begin doing that (beyond physical intervention if you are in physical pain!) and that way is to start paying attention to how you interpret the experiences of your life and to what you have decided is true about yourself and life.
Suffering and genius
Your interpretation of life experience is the critical factor that stands between suffering and the relief from suffering. Back to the hurt toe scenario: maybe you didn’t stub your toe because you’re an idiot. Is that perspective true? Is it helpful? I’m pretty sure geniuses also stub their toes from time to time. Instead of being an idiot, you could simply be a genius who stubbed his toe! I know you may be thinking “I’m definitely not a genius!” But if you aren’t already aware of genius pouring through you, it might be because you’re busy blocking it through so much self-generated suffering. Your gifts of genius may never be expressed if your interpretation of yourself continues to be so unkind, so lacking in compassion.
And by the way, I do think it’s possible to chronically suffer due to an unkind interpretation of yourself and still manage to express genius. I think the difference is in how much you are able to enjoy your genius along the way. We probably all know someone whose genius can easily be seen, yet that person has a hard time actually believing and enjoying it. They seem to “have it all” and to acknowledge their gifts on some level, but deep down they believe they are somehow unworthy of their genius, of love, of pleasure. But I digress.
January patterns and energies: life wants to use you!
If your pain has been intensifying over January, Great Spirit is seeking to use you! But something is getting in the way. You can enjoy much more ease, grace, flow, love, abundance, and fulfillment, but something has to change. Something must be shed and let go. Is it your ideas and beliefs about yourself, about others, about life? Are there habits and routines that are ready for release? Is life inviting you to forgive yourself or someone else? Now is a wonderful time to pause and reflect on what is ready to die in your life so that you can be reborn anew and be used more fully by God/Goddess.
You are learning how to love
And one more thing, if you are in pain and suffering, you are not doing anything “wrong”. To think so would be creating more suffering for yourself! So, you are not wrong, it’s not your fault, and there is no one to blame. You are exactly where you “need” to be in your process of learning. You are where you are.
And what exactly are you learning? You are learning how to live and how to love. This is Earth School, and we are all learning. But how wonderful that it’s not at all like the schooling most of us are used to! There are no grades given at the end of the school year, only eternal reflection on how much we were able to love and be loved.
Divine resources for January: compassion and healing
This brings me to the resources that are available to us which can help us navigate the January patterns and energies as we close out the month. Our invitation for the rest of January is “compassion”. As I was gathering up the cards, “healing” also grabbed my attention.
I can’t think of a more divine response to pain and suffering than compassion and healing:
Compassion and healing are for all of us, not just those of us who may be having a hard time at the moment. I don’t know about you, but even when I’m “up,” I still have unexpected moments of pain and self-imposed suffering. On the flip side, whenever I am am “down,” I can still experience unexpected moments of ease, grace, pleasure, and laughter. In fact, compassion for myself opens me to these unexpected gifts.
See more…farther, deeper, wider
My non-physical teacher, The Michael Entity, once defined compassion to me as “the ability to see beyond the superficial”. Isn’t that beautiful? I think we are all familiar with the idea that compassion is our ability to resonate with another’s pain and suffering, to “stand by others without judgment,” to feel empathy for others. And many of us are aware that compassion can and should be felt for ourselves, as well. But the idea of compassion being our ability to “see beyond the superficial” really teaches us how to have compassion for ourselves and others. We have to consciously invite ourselves to see more, to look deeper, to see beyond the superficial appearance of why things seem to show up the way they do.
Opening to Love
I can’t help but notice the soothing color of green in both of these cards. Green is associated with the heart chakra or 4th subtle energy center of the body, the symbolic balance and integration point between our “higher selves” and “lower selves”. This is where we feel love. It’s where we open or close ourselves to love and how we are able to give and receive love.
This says much about how we can allow the compassion and healing that we might need at this time; it is all about giving and receiving love. Compassion is an aspect of love, and healing is the result of opening to love, both given and received.
If you are struggling, go within, get still and quiet, and ask Great Mystery how you can be more compassionate with yourself. Ask love how you can surrender to its embrace and heal.
Opening to The Divine
I’m rereading a wonderfully helpful and inspiring book called “It’s Not Your Money: How to Live Fully from Divine Abundance” by Tosha Silver. The title is deceiving because the book is about much much more than learning how to increase the money in your bank account. At its heart, it’s about opening to life and love and being in the divine flow that is always, gently calling to us. If you are feeling “stuck,” in pain, and suffering, I highly recommend reading this book and working with its principles. It may be just the right key to unlock many new and wondrous doors for you on your way to a more meaningful and fulfilling life.
January patterns and energies: surrender
Death and rebirth are intense, messy, miraculous experiences! Sometimes, all we can do is let go of our struggle, our resistance, and surrender to the embrace of something “bigger”: bigger than what we think we are, bigger than what we think we know. In that embrace we can open to love, compassion, and healing, and all of our suffering can be washed away.
I wish that for you, for me, and all of us as we close out January.
Oh, and I so wanted to share Michaels’ insights about how to navigate January patterns and energies, but alas, my channeling circuits have been overworked. Hopefully, I will be able to communicate with Michael to gain their insights for February.
Goodbye for now, beautiful, phenomenal creatures!