Today is my ‘Other Birthday’: the day I woke up eight years ago with the world seeming different, and yet the same.  It was the beginning of the awakening and individuation process I have been undergoing since that momentous day.  It has been a wild ride, one that I don’t think is completely finished yet, but I feel as though a major portion of that ride is over, and now I’m shifting to a different kind of ride.

From an astrological perspective, the planet Uranus has just shifted from Taurus into Gemini, indicating an energy shift from physical manifestation into one of intellectual contemplation of that manifestation.  My awakening began mere days after Uranus last shifted signs, from Aries into Taurus, and so I find it deeply appropriate that as it indicates passing into a new energy, so too do I find myself doing just that.

Over the last couple of weeks, I found myself working on a book project I had been contemplating for some time.  I’ve wanted to tell my story for years, but my attempts to do so fell flat.  I realized with a start that most of what I wanted to say had already been written in this blog, and so I went about the process of selecting appropriate posts to organize into what became a 500-page book.  How fitting for Gemini.

Something about doing that provided a sense of completion and closure to the last eight years that I wasn’t anticipating.  I have a feeling of accomplishment and fulfillment that I also was not expecting.  As such, since finishing an Advanced Reader’s Copy, I find myself in contemplation mode, but not in an obsessive way as I’ve done in the past.  I’m not depressively ruminating over the events of the past, I’m engaged more in a process of simply acknowledging the past, tying off threads, and moving on.  After nearly 55 years of life and eight solid years of therapy, I believe I am finally done dragging many of my worst bad feelings behind me.

I don’t judge myself for having done so, it’s what the brain does with unresolved emotions.  I’m very glad to be done with carrying so many burdens, though.  I still have some, and I imagine I always will, but I’m feeling much better than I may have ever felt in my entire life.  I’ve finally achieved a level of, if not outright happiness, then at least contentment with a life in which feeling happiness is easier and more frequent.

It isn’t just the last eight years I’m putting closure on, it’s the last fifteen years, ever since I was first potentially misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder, or at least incompletely diagnosed, and subsequently fell into the Zombie Years shortly thereafter.  There were so many bad feelings associated with the years before my awakening on top of all of my trauma from earlier in life that I despaired at ever processing it all.

I seem to be doing the last of that now.  Once a crisis is finally over, the brain takes all of the feelings you shoved aside to deal with the crisis and hands them to you to process, and that is what I’m doing.  I have a very definite intuitive sensation of “doneness” on a number of levels, and as a result, I find myself frequently bursting into uncontrollable tears for no apparent reason, unable to stop until the inner flood subsides.  I always feel much better afterward, though.

There is a Jewish proverb: “Tears are for the soul what soap is for the body.”  I’m finding that to be very true.  I always feel ‘washed clean’ after a good sobbing session, and unlike years ago, when I hated crying more than I hated puking, I actually look forward to a good cry because I remember the sense of release and relief that comes with it.  I know that it’s a good sign I’m processing something old that needs to be let go of.

I can go even farther back to a negative milestone that I’m completing and putting closure on, and that’s the year my son was born.  Which has absolutely nothing to do with him, of course, I adore him to bits, but with the horrible birth experience I had to endure along with all of the subconscious dysfunctional programming I was horrified to find surging from me as it was activated by being a parent.

Again, I can point to astrological factors indicating shifts in energy that parallel what I’m doing in my life.  15 years ago would be roughly half a Saturn cycle, indicating a restructuring of some kind, which I have definitely been undergoing.  24 years ago, when I became pregnant, indicates a Jupiter Return to the energies of that time of my life.  I’m a Crone now so I can’t have any more biological children, but I did just ‘give birth’ to a book.

More importantly, I’ve given birth to Myself.  After eight long years of reconstructing myself after being mentally and spiritually shattered by the Universe, I can say that I’ve achieved a level of wholeness heretofore not experienced.  I still have work to do in that regard, however.  My rational Self is fairly complete, but my emotional Self is still divided into seven pieces at the ages of 3, 7, 11, 14, 16/17, 23, and 31, as indicated by their presence in my Inner House.

This wouldn’t be a problem if they didn’t sometimes hijack my driver’s seat, as it were.  It’s a bad day when the 3-year-old is running the show.  However, now that I am done with this particular chapter of my life and I have begun processing all of the emotions I’ve stored up from the various crises in my life, I suspect these disparate emotional parts will begin integrating with Me, my True Self, which is the goal of the individuation process.

This means getting in touch with those emotional parts and finding out what they need, then giving it to them, whatever it is within my capability.  I did this recently with one of my inner children by giving them a stuffed animal: the Cat Bus from My Neighbor Totoro, which is a magical creature that serves as a rescuer when needed.  I watch movies they want to see.  I eat foods and wear clothing they like.  I listen to music they like.  It all helps to heal them, and therefore Me.

I am looking forward to being whole on an emotional level as well as having a fully integrated rational-and-emotional Self.  I sense this will happen on a piecemeal basis, with each emotional fragment integrating with my rational half one by one, and not overnight.  It will be a gradual process.  This is going to require cultivating the ability to name the emotions I’m feeling along with what part they’re coming from, which I have more and more difficulty with the deeper I go into my psyche.

However, as I said, I’m looking forward to it despite knowing I’m going to feel some negative emotions, because I have enough recent experience with positive emotions to know that the process is rewarding and liberating.  It’s painful, yet satisfying somehow.  Perhaps because I’m willingly engaging with the process rather than resisting it.  I want to be done with whatever is preventing these emotional parts of myself from residing peacefully within my True Self and have enough experience with banishing inner demons that it doesn’t scare me anymore.  In fact, I’m practiced at it.

Prisoner: You are in Hell, little man, and I am the Devil.
Bruce Wayne: You’re not the Devil, you’re practice.

Batman Begins

And so I’m completing a huge volume of the story of my life, which is allowing me to put closure on a wide variety of things, as well as be pointed in the direction of continuance into my future as New Me.  I am literally a completely different person than I was eight years ago.  While I possess the memories, desires, passions, and experience of Old Me, she is now essentially ‘dead’ unless she is triggered into being resurrected for the usually misguided purpose of defending me against a perceived threat.

The last four years of my life have been all about stripping away from my life anything and everything that I did not need or want, and I have finally been successful in that endeavor.  Despite my fragmented emotional Self, I do feel more healed and whole than I ever have at any time in my life.  Part of me wonders how I’ve been functioning all this time, and the answer is “not very well”.  I feel as though I’ve been operating with the equivalent of two broken legs and a broken arm all this time.

Well, my legs appear to be mended, as well as the arm, although they still pain me on the emotional equivalent of rainy days.  I feel like I’m well positioned for moving forward with my life after spending so much time contemplating the past.  I needed to do that in order to move forward, but now I’m mostly done with that part of the Process.  Now it’s time to feel the past, which should be a lot easier now that I’ve both rationally and spiritually processed so much of it.  It has been largely defused such that my emotions about the past are no longer explosive.

Feeling the past will go hand in hand with living in the present aimed for the future, for as I go through daily life, I will encounter situations that activate my Inner Selves on an emotional level.  Much of the work I’ve done for the last eight years hasn’t just been on a rational level, but on a conscious emotional level.  My Inner Selves largely exist on a subconscious level.  My conscious Self can willfully access them when I want to, but unless they’re triggered into surfacing, they largely exist in the background.

Astrology is a factor yet again.  Pluto rules the 8th House, which primarily represents transformation, amongst other things, and in the Fall of 2017, it entered my own 8th House, signaling the beginning of a roughly 11-year-long period of personal transformation.  That was over eight years ago, and I find it fitting that I have roughly three years left in which to finish processing these disparate emotional fragments for the purpose of transformation.  Given the amount of inner spiritual and soul work I’ve had to do over these eight years, what’s left to do is a small fraction of the bulk of that work.  I’m definitely over the hump.

During this roughly three-year-long period over which Pluto will continue traversing the rest of my 8th House, Uranus will come into play yet again as it conjuncts my Saturn in the 12th House.  For those of you ignorant of astro-speak, that indicates a huge restructuring of my life on a subconscious level.  I can only hope that parallels the inner emotional work I am wanting to do, for what ails these emotional parts indeed lies on the subconscious level.

Both spiritual awakenings and the individuation process take the same course, generally speaking.  There is the initial awakening, followed by the proverbial Dark Night of the Soul, during which one descends into one’s own psyche in order to confront one’s Shadow and discover one’s Self, after which one emerges transformed from the Dark Night into a world of Light.  The year that I am taking off from the world to focus on myself is the manifestation of the emergence from Darkness into Light.  After nearly seven years in Darkness, I can already see the Light, I just need to keep walking towards it.