| | Life's Greatest Adventure!
| | | | | | Hi Friend,
One of the most beautiful things about astrology is it's ability to support our journey of spiritual awakening by providing a 'lens' through which we get to observe ourselves. The fastest and most effective path to spiritual awakening is by becoming an exquisite observer of you.
Last week I mentioned how your conditioning can obscure the subtle impulses coming from your Soul and this week I wanted to say a bit more about the mechanism of how that comes about, and how your conditioning becomes your personality...
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| We are born happy. 'Happiness' is our natural state (and by happiness I mean a natural relaxed state in which we experience joy, love, peace, and compassion). Then 'stuff' happens! Somewhere along the way we get caught up in everyday living, and ‘forget’ to be happy. How does this happen? Through our conditioning, which happens as a result of association (as we mentioned last week).
I once lived in a town where the Postmaster was known as ‘Grumpy Bill’. How did Bill get to be grumpy? He wasn’t born that way. Understanding our mind and emotional patterns gives us a clue. The answer lies in self-awareness – in becoming aware of our habitual emotional patterns.
Look at very young children playing in a nursery about 2-3 years old. They experience emotions as an energy that passes quickly. One minute they are happily playing. Then one takes anothers’ toy. There may be unhappiness, sadness, anger, rage, despair. They can run the whole gamut of the emotional scale within minutes. Then the carer asks: “Who wants Ice Cream then?” and in a split second they are all happy again!
Happiness is your default position. It is your natural state. You would naturally experience happiness most of the time if you knew how to stop your conditioned reactions getting in the way. So how does your conditioning get in the way?
Let’s say your boss calls you on Sunday afternoon to ask if you’ll come in early tomorrow. You miss 5 minutes of the football game that you'd been planning to watch all week. Now you turn to your partner and rant. “Can you believe he did that on a Sunday?” Okay so maybe you felt anger for a moment but now you’re putting fuel on the fire. You’re now going to feel angry for a lot longer, possible all day, possibly even all week. It all depends on how long you keep telling yourself the story that is feeding your anger.
An emotional reaction to something, is the result of your conditioning (either from this or a past life). Whatever your reaction is: anger, sadness, fear, anxiety, frustration, it is the result of your conditioning. Two people can experience the same event, and have completely different emotional reactions, because they have different conditioning.
This initial reaction lasts for only a few moments. By nature, emotions pass quickly, and your natural state of happiness should soon return. But if you ‘feed’ the reaction with your thoughts - you keep it going. Then an emotion becomes a mood, and a mood becomes a temperament. If you’re not careful a temperament becomes your personality. It becomes how you are, and how the world sees YOU. As the Taoist Master Lao Tzu pointed out, your personality then becomes your destiny:
"Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny."
- Lao Tzu
Before you know it you are no longer ‘Sunny Jim’ and your friends are calling you ‘Grumpy Bill’. You missed the football game and your whole day was ruined. Not because your boss called an hour ago, but because of what you are still telling yourself about the boss calling.
When we experience emotions fully in the moment as children do, allowing them to pass without a story, we can have our experience and be over it in a matter of moments. Then return to our default state: Happiness. Not because we saw the football game, but because we knew how to experience our emotions and discipline our thoughts.
If you study the quote from Lao Tzu you'll see that it is much more than just a quote, it is a spiritual practice. If you begin observing yourself, you will notice the traits that he mentions, in reverse order, as you become more spiritually aware. So at first you may be aware of your destiny, and you may be wondering, 'why does this keep happening to me?'
As you become more familiar with your own patterns, you will see the connection between your own character and your destiny. A little more experience and you begin to see the relationship between your habits and your character. Further still and you begin seeing the connection between your actions and your habits.
Now you're getting good! You will begin to see the connection between your words and your actions. This is what we were talking about last week with the example of putting honey in tea. You may notice the thought and choose not to act. Then you notice the connection between your thoughts and your words. You may notice the connection between your thoughts and your emotions.
Keep watching and you will notice your thoughts
eventually subside and your mind becomes quieter.
You will notice less emotional reacting,
as your mind settles into silence.
The reason astrology works, is because we use astrology to describe the most common personality types in people: in other words we are using astrology to describe the underlying energy patterns inherent in different habitual reactions! So if you have difficulty in observing your own behavior directly, you can use your horoscope as a clue to the underling energy dynamics that are being acted out in your life.
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That's all for now! See you next week and, in the meantime... happy exploring!
| | | | Ruth Hadikin, B.Sc. specializes
in the science of Soul Astrology, as applied to living our Soul Path
and Life Purpose. She is dedicated to supporting people to live from the
Soul in 'Life's Greatest Adventure'. |
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