compassion

Sunday inspiration: The Neptune station and finding compassion for ourselves

art by Rita Loyd. If the last week has taught us anything, it’s that we have no idea what’s going on inside the minds of others.  A client told me yesterday, “everyone else I know is having so much fun.”  In today’s glitzy social media world, it’s so easy to look at the Instagram feeds of your friends and think that everyone is having a perfect life. That’s the curated version – the one that we choose to show the world.

Often the real version, the life that we are actually living, is quite different.  And the gap between how we really feel about our lives and how we see the lives of others is growing thanks to the power of social media to amplify the ideal and hide the truth.

Social media is the 21st century equivalent of the Christmas brag letter. Quite a few years ago my husband and I laughed over such a letter – one of the sons had been arrested that year and the other had had a bad acid trip and ended up in the psych ward.  These two events were completely transformed in the Christmas letter to make it appear as though everything was just fine.

When we look at the life of someone we don’t know and assume their life is perfect, we are missing the point and hurting ourselves.  We don’t know what kind of misery that person may have gone through to get where they are today. We don’t know what their happy exterior might be hiding. But most importantly, envy and resentment close the heart and keep us from happiness.

Neptune is at a standstill right now as it prepares to turn retrograde on the 18th.  Neptune […]

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By |2019-11-10T19:09:05-05:00June 10th, 2018|Inspiration|1 Comment

Saturn and Neptune and the boundaries of compassion

reposted from February 2007

Last night I watched part of a Dog Whisperer episode that I missed about Howie, the (adorable) rescue dog that lived at an animal hospital in Atlanta because he was “unadoptable.” Howie had been terribly abused before his rescue, and while his body had healed he was still terrified and growled whenever anyone new came near him. The ladies who cared for him were very protective of him and did all they could to keep him safe. He lived at the animal hospital for two years before Cesar Millan came to help Howie become adoptable.

When Cesar arrived, he found that Howie had been indoors for two years. Because of his abuse, his foster moms had been afraid to put a leash on him for fear it would bring back memories of the terrible times. They felt he had been through so much, and they just wanted to keep him safe and loved. Cesar always says that dogs live in the moment, and that if we keep living in the past and reinforcing that for them that they will never heal.

Chiron teaches us that our desire to heal others often stems from a wound within ourselves. In the highest form of this “Wounded Healer” archetype, we wait to heal others until we ourselves have been healed. Once we have walked into the fire and shadows of our own wounds and the energy held in the cellular memory has been released, we then experience the empathy to be able to help others heal. However, there is a shadow side to the Wounded Healer in which the wounds of the patient activate the wounds of a healing provider who has not yet fully healed. Jung called this phenomenon “countertransference,” and in this circumstance the patient and […]

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By |2019-11-10T19:04:59-05:00April 16th, 2012|Favorite posts|6 Comments