THE CARE AND FEEDING OF A PLUTO SOUL

14 Jun 2019 7 Comments

by writingforselfdiscovery in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , ,

When you have a Pluto soul…

Wait. Back up…

You know you have a Pluto soul when your evolutionary astrologer reveals that tidbit of terrifying information during a birth chart reading. She says it matter-of-factly, then adds, Oh, and by the way, the god of the hell realm also opposes your Venus and resides in your fifth house of sexuality, creativity, and…children.

I had my first reading when I was sixty. It was a telephone session. The person didn’t know anything about me. After an hour of listening with my jaw hanging, the dear woman said, and I quote, “Sherry, if you don’t change the direction of your life now, you’re nailing your coffin shut.”

It was harsh but she got my attention. I took her advice to heart and two years later, when my divorce was final, I retired and moved to Bali. It was as though I’d been bound and gagged my entire life and now the fetters were off. Every day was an adventure. Everything was new. I was in love with life, in love with Indonesia, and a bit more in love with myself than I’d dreamed possible.

I’d lived abroad for three years when, at sixty-five, I had my second reading. It was from this practitioner that I learned how significantly Pluto figured in my chart. With Pluto opposing Venus, she told me, it was almost impossible to have a successful romantic relationship. By that time I’d accumulated a distressing number of failed marriages.

To complicate matters, Pluto sat conjunct my moon. I had to find healthy ways to feed my shadow otherwise it would manifest catastrophe and dysfunction. The dark is so much a part of you, she said with an earnest, concerned look, if you don’t get enough excitement in your life in positive ways, you’ll create your own destructive chaos. Ouch. I won’t even go into how that tendency haunted my past. But nurtured appropriately, she assured me, your shadow is the truth teller. It can be a powerful ally.

I found much of that necessary nurture on the Island of the Gods. Bali, a paradise of sunlight and smiles, knows how to honor the darkness. It isn’t dusted off, polished, and shoved under the rug. Death is on display. Gamelan pounds in frenzied discordant percussion as sweating men carry the tower and bull to the cremation site. Smoke layers over the town while the body burns. On New Year’s Eve, monsters parade the streets enticing evil spirits to enter them. Ritual trance dance, ceremonial cleansing, shaman healers, black magic – they’re all just business-as-usual here – Pluto soul-food. Perfect for me. And the perfect place to write.

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I noticed, however, that Pluto didn’t fully appreciate the need for quiet in my writing life. It’s a silent, solitary business and I spend many hours inside my head with imaginary characters of my own devising. This morning, try as I might I couldn’t focus. Lead-gray clouds poured rain. So I burned incense, turned on lights, did yoga and meditated, drank coffee, but restless itchiness persisted. Pluto grumbled. As torrents pelted down, the noise provided a rare opportunity. I scanned YouTube, hooked up my sound booster, and blasted, really blasted, music.

Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about, Pluto seemed to say. I followed up with Leonard Cohen: “You Want it Darker,” “The Traitor,” “The Waltz.” So I waltzed, spinning through the house, one two three, one two three, one two three, whirling and dipping and letting go. Cathartic. I feasted on sound for three solid hours and sated my Plutonian appetite.

Evolutionary astrologers don’t mess around. When my second reading was finished I was stunned. How could she know me so well? She told me things about myself that hadn’t been clear, even to me, until she spoke them. I felt affirmed, seen and understood.

Beyond that, she showed me what still hung on from my karmic past, the snares that continued to trip me up, the tendencies that seemed to repeat in a never-ending loop. And she gave direction for the way ahead, the path of evolution to my highest, happiest, most fulfilled self.

Only evolutionary astrology accomplishes that. Many say it’s better than years of therapy. I wouldn’t know. But I do know the information I received in those two readings gave me the motivation and the awareness necessary to change my life.

Pushing the Reset Button at Retirement

26 Aug 2018 10 Comments

by writingforselfdiscovery in Bali, Uncategorized, wisdom, Writing Tags: , , , , ,

I’m catching the sunset on Jimbaran Beach – in more ways than one!

Before you slam your hand down on that button and set off buzzers, bells, and alarms, let’s back up for a minute.

It’s better to begin in our fifties, a few years before retirement.

I was 59 when I had my first evolutionary astrology reading. I didn’t expect much. I’d been checking the weekly Capricorn forecast for years and it was vanilla pudding — never bleak but never celebratory either — a one-size-fits-all dispatch that could mean anything.

Imagine my shock when after an hour of recounting what nobody could possibly know about me, the astrologer, whom I’d never met and whose only access to my character was through my natal chart, issued this ultimatum: If you don’t change the way you’re living your life now, Sherry, you are nailing your coffin shut.

Gulp! Had I heard right?

It was the end of a Saturn return, she said, an event that occurs approximately every 30 years of a person’s life and whatever I put into motion or left unchanged in the next months would set the pattern for my final stage.

Now let me guess…you’re asking why I believed her?

It’s like this: when you’re on opposite sides of the country having a reading over Skype with someone you’ve never met and that person affirms everything you think you know about yourself, your tendencies, your f-ups, your sterling qualities, and all they have is a time, date, and place of birth, it’s hard to pooh-pooh any advice that comes forth.

Her pronouncement was especially disturbing since the litany of grievances I was managing at the time would have filled Santa’s better-watch-out list. I prided myself on my ability to handle just about anything. I was strong, stoic, unflappable. But when I heard nailing your coffin shut, my blood turned to ice. Mortality was a fact I didn’t want to look at and this stranger had shoved it in my face.

The session ended and I sat for a long time staring at the wall.

I’d pushed my desires and dreams to the side to be who I thought I should be for everyone else. The gravity of her damning words sank in while I searched for a shred of happiness in my work, marriage, friendships, and found none. My daughters had moved on after college, one to New York, one to California, and one to South Korea. Without them I ground along on a treadmill of monotony, lonely, disillusioned, and numb.

Questions floated through my mind:

Why was I still enduring Minnesota’s nine months of winter and three months of mosquitoes?
Why was I hanging out with people who shared none of my interests, calling them friends?
Why was I selling real estate when everything about the job sucked me dry?
Why was I married?

But the biggest question of all was: If not this then what?

What did I want? It took the next two years to figure it out and another year after that to execute the new plan. But at sixty-two my social security benefits kicked in and I was ready. When I left for Bali I left alone and I’ve stayed alone. I paid for a fifteen year lease on a house and remodeled it to suit me, using every dime of my retirement savings to do it. At my age that was risky and I wouldn’t recommend it but it worked for me.

Living here, surrounded by people as quirky as I am, I’ve found my tribe. I’m doing what I was meant to do in this lifetime which the astrologer defined as my north node karmic future. I’m creatively sharing wisdom, or kata mutiera — word pearls — according to the melodic Indonesian language. I write about the lessons I’ve learned along the way, and model an unconventional approach to aging. It’s not something I set out to do. It’s what naturally evolved as I allowed a future to unfold that aligned with the desires of my heart.

An unexpected gift came as a result of pursuing my north node path. My serious Capricornian self was set free to embody radical happiness. It’s a state of being I never would have known had I not been issued a dire wake-up call…and listened.

 

 

 

 

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