Let the Sunshine In!

You are the temple.

The Spring Equinox arrived! This fulcrum of year marks the increasing of the light. As the sun claws back its dominion over the sky from the night, so the soul’s voyage moves from the primordial waters of Pisces into the hungry fires of Aries.

Aries burns away the remaining amniotic fluid that binds us to previous understandings of who we were and serves as a firebrand, guiding us through the terra incognita of who we are NOW and who we are BEcoming. The sun here is exalted the same way a new baby is in its family — as both the culmination of all of its ancestors’ dreams and actions yet full of unknown potential that has to be carefully nurtured into manifestation.

Our astrological “new year” begins with a new moon in early Aries, bringing the luminaries into the same part of the sky as Mercury and Jupiter. (Btw, with Mercury now visible at night, we’ll be able to see it along with Venus, Jupiter, and Uranus — if you’re somewhere devoid of light pollution — creating an arc in the sky. March 28th, according to this Thrillist article is the best time to catch this sight.) With Mercury and Mars now in mutual exchange, this promises to be a heady (ha ha — a little Aries humor) stellium that breaks open that nut you’ve been trying to bust open for year.

It’s the sun’s co-presence here as Aries’ exaltation lord that’s the key. Why?

Who is the Sun? So many of us get into astrology via our sun signs. (My own origin story involves consuming Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs to better seduce men once I’d broken free from all girls’ Catholic school.) Then, as you get deeper into astrology, so many people poo poo sun sign based astrology as too simplistic or too egoistic. It’s a butter knife for delineating personality or life pattern when other placements function as scalpels.

In jyotish, the Sun is the permanent “atmakaraka”: “Atma” means “soul” and “karaka” translates as “significator”. A lot of ink has been spilled on what the atmakaraka is but the consensus is that it’s the motive force behind one’s life. Now, if you agree with Pandit Sanjay Rath’s assessment that the atmakaraka is the “biggest pile of trash you’ve come here to burn away” or the more Western delineation that it’s the self you’ve come here to become — well, I’ll leave that debate to wiser people in the field.

However, for my money — what you can use in your life — when you drill down to the basics: The Sun represents that divine spark that you carry within you — that pure expression of the stardust from which we have arisen into consciousness. It is the part of you that is indeed the Universe made conscious to witness itself.

Your body is the temple in which this spark resides.

Your body is the temple in which this spark resides.

The Innocence of Youth.

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Take yourself back for a moment to your childhood: Remember a time when you were presented with something new that you’d never encountered before. Maybe it was trying a new food, meeting someone’s pet, jumping off the top of a jungle gym, going to nursery school. Conjure up that moment of anticipation — curiosity about the unknown. However, feel the butterflies, the fear as well. Where is that coming from? Is it being scared that the thing will be horrible? Or that you aren’t up to the challenge? Or that you’ll get hurt? Maybe it’s just because it’s an unknown entity.

Then, remind yourself of what it took to get you to step off that ledge of fear into the experience.

As one of my clients, who teaches stunt driving for camera says (and I’m paraphrasing because he says it much more poetically),

“You have to feel the fear to find the courage to realize that fear has no bearing on whether or not you can do the thing.”

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Books are Open!

Lots of light,
Anak.

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