Hello and welcome to Embodied Astrology, a podcast and
learning community where we explore the growing edges of
astrology and its intersections with healing, arts, activism,
relationships, and personal growth.
My name is Renee Sills and this is your week ahead forecast.
The audio that you're about to listen to is from this week's
Somatic Space, A weekly virtual class that Ioffer every moon
day, where we explore the astrology of the week ahead
through meditation, visualization, and gentle,
accessible movement. These sessions offer the
opportunity to cultivate presence with self, heal and
tend our bodies, hearts and minds, and move through life's
ups and downs together in community and with the
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Last month we launched a new monthly series on the astrology
of Spiritual Warriorship with Aziz Bisance.
Aziz is a somatic therapist, cultural worker, organizer,
performer, and astrologer, and he's joined in collaboration
with guest facilitators from Minneapolis, Palestine, and
other sites of resistance around the world.
This month's session, which takes place on Tuesday, April
28th with Aziz and Alana Kwok, will explore Neptune's
relationship with the dream state and pineal gland.
We'll practice finding body states that open different ways
of seeing and knowing, work with impulse as intelligence, learn
to differentiate vigilance from deeper knowing, and drop into a
navigation system that is ancient, ancestral, and guided
by spirit. All sessions in the series are
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today's episode. Thank you so much for being here
for all of it. I wanted to start with a poem
written by a friend and colleague, Anna Denalo.
Anna is a doctor of Oriental medicine and a somatic therapist
and meditation teacher who I met in February and March.
We were part of the Oceanic Maroon States Astro Afro Futures
Festival in Europe University, so I shared in the chat a
picture that she shared with this poem.
I'll describe it for those who are tuning in later with the
recording. So this is a picture of twilight
time. Dusk and Venus has risen, so you
see a beautiful sky, a twilight sky.
It's full of blue shades. There's dark Blues and
periwinkle Blues and light Blues and some darker shadows of
clouds. And you can see the glowing of
the setting sun above the horizon line, which is pure
black. And in the Earth you see
outlines or silhouettes of trees and and shapes of plant life and
earth shapes. And then above the horizon line
in the middle of the twilight sky is the shining aura and body
of Venus. And so Venus is in her evening
star phase. She's recently become visible
again in the western sky. Maybe some of you have seen
Venus shortly after sunset. Venus is very visible right now,
as is Jupiter. So we have the presence of both
of the benefits in the evening sky.
So this poem was written by Anna Donalo, and it was sent with
this picture. You asked me to tell you a story
about my lovers. After a long day of Saturn's
heavy rings on my back blocking sunlight, magic requesting
stillness, fortitude, service and karmic repayment, she greets
me with beauty. The colors of her skin move from
blue to night sky, streaks of pink in her hair.
I immediately feel my breath change the same way.
It rises with pleasure and ecstasy and falls, desiring
another breath in. More love, more sensation, more
pleasure. I do not need to touch her body
because it already wraps me, embraces me.
Her orgasms bring me to tears as I sit on a stump.
I feel silly for trying to take her picture, knowing her body is
formless, her love is endless and the moment I see her dressed
in this color again, I will orgasm till it brings me to my
knees, until my tears flow down my face and remain in my heart.
This is what it is like to sleep with Venus.
This is what it is like for my body to sleep with a woman who
has taken shape in the form of a * That poem by Anna Dinello felt
like a really loving and lovely incantation.
And. Welcome into Taurus season.
Taurus season began yesterday and Taurus is a Venus ruled
sign. And so as we enter into the
season. I know there's a lot happening,
but I hope that in the midst of all of the alotness, there is
also some moments of pause that you might have with Venus and
with your Venusian sensibilities as we enter into this season.
Last week I began with a movement practice and then was
talking. But I encourage you to really
feel into your choice as you engage with me as the person
who's speaking. We're all really used to power
dynamics where when one person is speaking, we give them
attention, and that's great. That's a gift to the speaker to
have the attention, you know, really allows us to to be in
what we're channeling. But let's TuneIn with the ways
that we're offering attention and really think about attending
to our own body as we're also making ourselves receptive to
what is coming through with today's channel.
So before I even begin, I want to invite you just to close your
eyes. And if closing your eyes doesn't
feel good to you, then allow your gaze to fall.
Turn your attention inward, take a couple of breaths of arrival
and let these breaths touch your inner body in ways that bring
more attention and awareness to how you're feeling physically,
how you're feeling emotionally, how you're feeling
energetically, and then extend some curiosity into your own
body in the form of questions that you can ask yourself.
And let's start with the energetic body.
And as you tune in with your energetic body, you might even
imagine it. Where is your energy right now?
And your energy can include all kinds of things.
It definitely includes the various aspects of your
attention. So it's possible to be paying
attention in One Direction and also have a lot of attention
somewhere else. You might feel your energy
pulled towards different times or places or situations.
And then the question that we'll pose to our energy bodies is
where do we want to be right now?
And if you've made the choice to be here and you want to continue
to make that choice, then see if you can invite your energy body
to be here. And here is your time, your
space, your location. You might imagine reaching with
your awareness and with your attention into the space above
and below and around in all your directions and gathering up that
subtle stuff of your energy and awareness.
And just like you might with a young child in a way that helps
them to be here, to be present, if their energy is big or
dispersed or moving in lots of directions, see if it might feel
good to imagine holding your energy body, inviting them to
settle. And then as the energy body
arrives, allow your breath to spread out into your belly, into
your chest. And if you're imagining holding
your energy body or holding the parts of you that may have been
in all kinds of places, let's just do a little bit of
emotional body check in and let's do a little bit of a scan
and notice what emotions are present.
And our emoting bodies are deeply relational.
And so as you feel into your emotions, you might also be
feeling into connections with other beings.
Cross time and space. And just as we did with the
energy body, let's greet the emotional body, and let's
include all parts and feelings and connections that are here in
ways that just simply validate and affirm that they're already
here. So we don't need to change them,
and we also don't need to really go deeply into any narratives or
explorations of them. Now.
They can all just be here. What shape or shapes does your
emotional body, your energy body want to take in your physical
body right now as you tend to your energy and emotions?
Are there physical shapes that would feel congruent, that would
feel honoring of where you're at emotionally and energetically?
And if a physical shape emerges for you as a direction to move,
I really want to invite you to not judge it and just go ahead
and try it. So if all of a sudden you're
like, I got to do something that I've never done before.
I need support of a pillow or cushion.
I want to put something over my eyes.
I need to touch myself in a certain way, go ahead and try.
Just do that. And as your physical body meets
your emotional and energetic bodies, try to stay really
present with the subtlety of the emotional and energetic realms
and the pure sensations of the physical response.
And if and when your mind comes in and it starts making a plan
for what you're going to do next, or it offers a critique or
analysis of what you're already doing, you can appreciate that
your mind is doing what minds do, and then invite it to quiet
down and rest back, making a conscious decision to prioritize
your felt sense, your subtle senses.
And we'll just be with this practice for another 2 minutes
or so really intentionally. Letting the planning mind, the
critiquing mind, the analyzing mind get quiet.
Resting awareness in the subtlety of energy and feeling.
Following your own feeling. When you have an impulse to move
or be in a certain way, if it results in a change of your
physicality, give yourself ample pause and notice.
What are the effects of that change.
How does it feel to actually receive your own awareness and
guidance and choice? Then let it keep evolving, Keep
coming back to the present moment.
What's next as energy and emotion do what they do,
Flowing, shifting, changing, inviting the physicality of your
body to follow them. Now I'm going to offer you a
choice and a challenge. And 1st, there's the choice so
you can stay with where you are and what you're following and
allow your experience to remain maybe below or beyond the realms
of language, just in the feeling and sensing and being with.
If you feel compelled to make a choice for this challenge, the
challenge that I want to offer you is to make a bridge between
this felt sense that you're exploring and language.
And the question that I have for you is what are you noticing?
What are you noticing in your felt sense and the ways that it
is to respond from your physical body?
What are you noticing about the interplay between feeling, tone
and mental consciousness? You might be noticing how deeply
good this feels, and wow, it feels like it's been a long
time. You might be noticing that it
feels kind of impossible to settle in or sense or anything
in between. And the challenge now is to
offer your words to our collective space.
And this is just to build our collective body awareness of
what we're all noticing. And there's an additional
challenge of then engaging with your device, with typing, with
adding your felt sense into the chat.
And if anything comes in, I'll read it out loud and I'll only
say the 1st letter of your name to identify you.
Keep your confidentiality in the recording.
Now I'll begin to read what's being shared in the chat.
And so as you take in these words, there is also a challenge
and an invitation to be in the listening and the receiving of
information as you continue to tend your energy and emotion and
physicality, your somatic awareness, E says.
It feels like I want to scream, have a lot of energy to put
towards something that there isn't a place or direction
available to put it towards yet. F says hope, excitement, new
journeys, feel energized, fruits are coming.
Noticing resonance as words come in and meet our mirror neurons.
C says I'm noticing a fluid sense of expansion and
contraction of energy and physical body.
O says Eros, energy in connection with the earth, the
soil slow down, feel I am received and I am receiving.
A says my mind is pulling at what is ahead for this day, this
week. My body feels heavy and energy
is low. Being with the subtle feels like
a pause. It's taking a kind of energy and
also giving it transformed, she says.
Touch is reassuring my compulsion for control.
Control melts, loses its rigid identity.
Control is no longer control. Control is taking a step back
and witnessing, asking itself, Can I just be present?
Can I just grieve? I'm tired.
I'll just sit here. I'll just watch.
I'll just breathe. A quiet betrayal, abandoned,
that lives between my temples as I witness.
I stay with my body. I am not the abandoned E.
Everything is textured hills and valleys, fractal.
Smoothness is about distance and relationality, about focus and
perspective. I blur the edges to be with them
more easily. I zoom in to investigate and
grow, returning to softness and distance to hold the big
picture. Something isn't as painful as it
used to be. Emotional body in transition.
Some wounds have healed and the lessons are being integrated.
My jaw feels softer now, tingling in the forehead.
Physical body feels held in this space, A safety and coming back
again and again. Let's digest.
Let's digest all of that. Let's breathe with it.
Let's stretch with it. Let's touch our bodies in any
way that feels integrating. That was a big full meal of
information that we just took in.
As you digest, honor yourself for arriving.
Give yourself thanks and gratitude for meeting this
challenge, the challenge of presence, the challenge of
articulating and sharing. And I want to invite you to
continue to meet the challenge of staying present.
And I'll articulate a little bit about the astrology of this
week. And so as I share, stay with
your body, stay with your energy and emotion and physicality, and
don't worry about getting all the words or getting all the
ideas. Let them flow into you and make
the meanings that are meaningful for you, which might be beyond
the realm of thought. The meanings that you make might
be an impulse or an urge to move or a feeling that you have that
you want to stretch into. OK, so we're entering into this
week of April 20th. Happy 420.
If that's the thing that you like to notice, we're coming out
of a really intense new moon. So there was a new moon on
Friday last week in the very late degrees of Aries conjunct
with the Centaur planet Chiron, and yesterday Mars and Saturn
were conjunct together in Aries. And the influences of the New
moon conjunct with Chiron and Mars and Saturn together all in
Aries in my feeling body are bringing an incredible amount of
weight and restriction. And I'm going to say just like
stuff like there's a lot of stuff in the feeling of what it
is to be alive in existence as an individual and as an
individual that is also shaped and entirely embedded inside of
relationships. So the sign Aries is about the
self, but there are no selves without relationship.
The opposite of Aries is Libra. Aries is the one.
Libra is the 2 on the Cardinal Cross with Aries.
In Libra are Cancer and Capricorn.
These are signs that have to do with the implicit embeddedness
that we have inside of earthly relationships, families and
lineages and bonds that are human and more than human.
We belong to each other. We don't exist here without
everything that feeds us and nourishes us and creates us and
challenges us and tends us and grows us, right.
So the I feeling in a lot of ways is a deluded state.
It's a necessary orientation to exist on planet Earth because we
live in differentiated bodies and we all have our different
needs and unique experiences, but none of us exist inside of a
vacuum. And we live in a world that has
been shaped so deeply by toxic individualism, by narratives
around freedom that are completely unaccountable to
interrelationship ideas that freedom could be doing whatever
you want whenever you want to whoever you want, and it doesn't
have an impact. You don't have to deal with
anybody else's feelings about it or the consequences of what you
do. We live in a world where there's
a very small percentage of people that have asserted their
right to act like that, do what they want, as they want, with
whoever they want, and anybody else's feelings.
Any impact that makes be damned doesn't matter.
The results of toxic individualism for all of us,
everybody, is that we don't belong, right?
Something in the wholeness and the complexities of who we are
means that we don't belong. We're not safe here.
There is a deep severing and disassociation that creates the
societies that we live in and that then gets coded into our
bodies and into our minds and into our relationships.
So Chiron as an influence speaks to the intergenerational
patterns of pain. And inside of these
intergenerational patterns are healing crises, crises of
healing. This is 1 of Chiron's main
themes. And so a lot of times we don't
know that we're resonating with injury until the parts of us
that were always weak give out. OK, so I'll offer an example for
myself. I have a intergenerational
pattern of weakness in my left foot.
I have a very clear, distinct memory of looking at my
grandmother standing with a kind of lot of weight in the inside
of her left foot. And this created a pattern
through her body of weakness in the left knee and a kind of
sunkenness in the left hip and a scoliosis in the spine.
And I've inherited that pattern. That's a genetic pattern for me.
It's not a pattern that I created.
It's a pattern that I inherited. As a younger person, I didn't
notice that pattern. I'm in my 40s now, and the
consequences of living on a planet with gravity and living
in a body that has inherited patterns in my bones means that
I'm starting to now feel that pattern in very different ways
than I ever felt it before. And how I'm feeling it is
through pain. And so the pain that's emerging
in my body is a pain that's intergenerational.
I did not create it. My grandmother didn't create it.
Who knows where it's from, but the crisis of my own pain is an
opportunity that I have to work with that pattern, right?
So I live in a body and at a time and in the midst of choices
that I've made to be someone who's interested in movement
repatterning. So I know that I can actually do
things like strengthen the intrinsic muscles of my foot and
wear toe spacers and not wear pointy narrow shoes, right?
I know that there are ways that I can work energetically and
emotionally with the psychosomatic inherited patterns
of what it means to have a collapse on my left side.
There's a whole world of possibility there for me to
explore. I will not entirely heal this
pattern. And if I was a person who was
going to have a child, and I have not made that choice, but
if I had, there would be a good chance that my child would
inherit that pattern as well, right?
This is deeply genetic. But if my child did inherit that
pattern, they would also inherit my awareness of that pattern.
Because if I saw that my child had that pattern, then what I
would do is teach them really early on how to strengthen the
intrinsic muscles of their foot and how to be in deep listening
with their left side. And we might even do things like
create an altar to my grandmother Clara and TuneIn
with her and her lineage and what she has to offer about
wisdom and support for the left side and the foot and the place
we meet the ground. So my child, hypothetically,
would be raised with a lot of awareness and healing gifts that
come from this pattern of pain. OK, so that's my story.
I bet you have your own anybody here who's who's sure that you
don't have an inherited ancestral pain pattern.
You're like, Nope, I missed that.
So I don't see anybody throwing up an emoji, don't see anyone
nodding. OK, so I think it's safe to say
we've all inherited pain patterns, and pain is a teacher.
Pain is a lesson, right? Pain is an opportunity for
awakening. We don't live on a planet
without pain. We live on a planet that
guarantees pain. This is actually what we sign up
for when we come to Earth. Pain, gravity, suffering and
death, right? That's your guarantees.
And then all the beauty and all the learning and all the living,
that's what we get to make out of it.
So when pain shows up, pain is a teacher.
And this is what Chiron is offering to us.
Chiron is a symbol of healing journeys and healing crises.
And Chiron and Aries, I'm just going to say, because Aries is a
symbol that associates us with individualism and also with
masculinity. And anybody can have
masculinity. You don't need to have
particular genitals to be, you know, able to express masculine
energy. I'm just going to offer that
Chiron and Aries themes might really resonate with wounds of
patriarchy, the wounds of toxic individualism, the wounds of a
kind of toxic masculinity. And inside of this larger wound
pattern that is cultural and that is systemic, there are all
the ways that we've absorbed it, all the ways that the
generational healing crises that we might be resonating with have
absorbed it. OK, I see something coming into
the chat. So R is saying on the flip side,
some of us have never embraced the power of being an
individual, always orienting to others needs as primary
priority. Also toxic to automatically
submit relationally. Feels like the healing available
is available by bringing individualism into balance on
the other end. Absolutely, absolutely so.
People pleasing and enmeshment and codependency and not being
able to feel ourselves as individuals is also part of
toxic individualism and patriarchy.
It's absolutely part of it. OK, so today as we enter into
this week, Mercury is now with Mars and Saturn in Aries.
And by the end of this week, Mercury will be squaring Jupiter
in Cancer. And Mercury is coming out of a
retrograde in February and March when it was trying to Jupiter in
Cancer. So I'm going to say that over
the last several months with Mercury's retrograde with
February and March, Mercury's trines to Jupiter, it happened
three times. We worked with it a ton in
somatic space. I'm just going to say, I think
that a lot of us have learned some new things about ourselves
and our feelings and what's actually present here and what
needs to be felt and what needs to be included.
And so over the last few months, some of some of you, maybe all
of you, I know I definitely have.
I have encountered parts of my being that I'm like, oh, OK,
you're here. These are intuitive parts, these
are emotional parts. These are pain pattern parts.
They're also the parts of me that are deeply healthy and
really need to assert themselves and come into more clarity and
and consciousness. So Mercury is the mind, Mars is
action, and Saturn is discipline, right?
One way we might think about working with this energy this
week is through coherence practices, through the fortitude
and determination that is required to bring our thoughts
and our cognizance into deeper alignment and coherence with our
bodies and our energy and emotions so that we can be more
honest and accountable and how we communicate.
In the beginning there was the voice.
What we communicate has immense power.
What we pay attention to and where our thoughts are going
grounds our communication. So if I live inside of a
cultural wound pattern that has me self abandoning and erasing
myself to be inside of relationships because I was born
into a body socialized female and all different kinds of
conditions have acted so that my toxic individualism story is I
don't get to exist, then I'm going to have a whole inner
narrative about that. That then manifests as
communication, right? And in my communication, I'll be
vague. I won't really speak to my
needs. I'll prioritize somebody else's
feelings. When it comes time for me to
speak my truth, I might entirely lose my words.
Where do I go? What happens?
So building coherence and integrity then for me might be
the discipline and the commitment of practicing,
noticing my energy, body and emotional field and coming into
my physicality and really slowing down to be with the
challenge of speaking from my felt sense in real time.
Noticing the energetic and emotional patterning that has me
spinning out and objectifying my selves and externalizing seeing
myself from the other person's point of view.
OK, so stories are spells, and if you speak English then you
you are speaking spells all the time that are spells of
colonization and patriarchy. English is a language that is
infused with objectification. It nounifies the world, right?
It is not a living language. And so much of this language is
actually deeply violent. So pay attention to how you're
crafting words and what the energetic and emotional impact
of those words are. Let this be a week and a rest of
your life and season that brings you into the felt sense of the
resonance of your words. And then do the practice that we
were doing already, right? How does it feel to hear and to
resonate with those words? This happened to me the other
day. I was telling a story about
mythology, and I called Zeus a son of a bitch.
I was like that guy. And then I said those words and
I was like, what are those words?
What is that phrase that is so deeply violent?
That's such a deeply misogynist phrase.
Why is that coming out of my mouth?
Why is that how I'm expressing my disdain and dislike for this?
Mythic character that's acting in a way that I deeply disagree
with. Why is it that when I want to
use an expletive, I'm often denigrating the body?
I love bodies. Why are swear words body parts
and most often female body parts?
What's happening with that? I want to decolonize my language
because when I do that, I'm going to decolonize my
consciousness. So this week also is a huge
movement week. It's a big week for for big
movements. OK, first on Thursday at Venus
is at the very last degree of Taurus, Venus's home sign 29° of
Taurus. And on Thursday Venus will be
sextile with palace in Pisces at the very last degree of Pisces.
And Venus will be conjunct with Uranus, also at the very last
degree of Taurus. So Venus is again the ruler of
Taurus or the associated planet with Taurus.
And both Venus and Taurus have a lot to do with the values and
aesthetics. OK, so values and aesthetics
shape culture. What do we prize?
How do we define beauty? How do we define what's
valuable? And so inside of patriarchy,
beauty is often especially feminine.
Beauty is unconscious. It's disembodied, it's starving,
it's self harming. OK.
Inside of patriarchy, beauty is an absence of queerness or
gender fluidity. Inside of patriarchy, beauty is
the the type of machismo that is completely boxed in so the
masculine can only really express dominance.
And on Earth, you know, this looks like disposability
culture. So it's not the deep beauty of
craft or repair, but it's new cheap trash and more and more
and more and having more than others.
But we are alive at a time of shifting values and shifting
aesthetics. And within our lifetimes, we
have been part of values and aesthetics changing, right?
Beauty norms are shifting, beauty norms are changing.
And blessings to the Queer Liberation Front, you know, for
doing heavy lifting on helping beauty norms change and the
feminists and the men who are out there claiming more of their
wholeness. On Thursday, Venus leaves Taurus
and moves into Gemini, and Gemini is a sign of
multiplicities and queerness and variety.
And then by Sunday, Venus will make a sextile with Neptune and
Aries. And I'm going to say that this
is great energy for helping us dream into new dreams of beauty.
And it's also really supportive for querying our values and
aesthetics, getting outside of the binaries.
And that includes outside of the binaries of gender norms.
And it also includes getting outside of the binaries of good
or bad or valuable or not valuable or something like that.
On Saturday, Uranus leaves Taurus and moves into Gemini.
And that's a big deal because Uranus is an outer planet and it
doesn't change signs often. It entered Taurus in 2018.
It's basically been there since. It had a little bit of a
departure last year between June and October.
So you might consider where is Gemini or where are Taurus and
Gemini in your chart? What was happening for you
between June and October last year?
How were new changing, surprising kinds of sensations
starting to manifest? Because as Uranus shift science,
we're all in for a big change, and Venus is leading the way.
So Venus is with Uranus conjunct at the very last degree of
Taurus, and then they're both moving into Gemini.
And I'm going to read this as a symbol of changing values and
shifting aesthetics and conscious participation with the
ways that values and aesthetics can change and what that means
for culture and what that means for the world.
So let's be strategic in what we uplift to this week and in the
directions that we are pointing our gaze and attention and where
we're letting our senses rest. OK, So we can topple the empire,
y'all, fairly easily by defunding it.
And it eats our money. That's how it's continuing to,
you know, do its thing as an empire.
It's feeding on consumerism and a diluted sense of what we need
in order to be safe and beautiful and valuable and to
belong. So the revolution happens in the
subtle realms of our sensory preferences and the stories that
we're telling, as well as on the front lines of direct action.
But in order to take direct action, we need to have our
subtle support foundations. So we're going to get into our
movement practice now. And, and what we're going to
work with somatically this week is noticing the Taurus parts of
our bodies. And Taurus rules the jaw and the
mouth and the tongue. And when our tongues do anything
at all, it moves our spine. And we're going to work in the
place where Aries meets Taurus. And so Aries rules the upper
head and Taurus rules the lower head.
Aries rules from the nose up to the front of the brain and the
frontal lobe. And then Taurus rules the the
mandible and the mouth and the tongue and the base of the
brain. And so this feeling of I exist
is completely connected to the feeling of I need, right?
And this is Aries I exist and Taurus I need.
And those two are completely connected with Gemini, which is
I relate, right? I'm here as part of Mini.
And so we're going to work in this space to notice what
happens when desire leads us and also what happens when we
connect in with the ways that our mouths and our senses reach
towards what we're wanting or what we're attracted to.
It's a gift to be here with all of you.
Thank you for making the time and space.
And I'll see you next week. Bye for now.