Wednesday, August 27, 2014

A Very Cosmic Vision


My Preview of Universal Meditations for Peace


© 2014 by Joyce Mason




I follow a Facebook page, Universal Meditations for Peace. The premise is simple. We create our world by our thoughts. The organizer, Sokhna Fatima Fall, invites as many people as possible around the world to meditate together for 10 minutes weekly. The intent is to envision and help manifest a peaceful, beautiful world that works. You can read the full concept and directions on Facebook.

The next Universal Meditation for Peace is Thursday, August 28 from 4:30-4:40 EDT. Adjust for your time zone here, if needed. “Like” the Meditation page for notices about future meditations.

I’m often told I’m a woman ahead of her time. Today, it was literal. I inadvertently misread both the date and time zone, so I meditated at 4:30 pm PDT today. My visions were so comforting, strengthening and full of hope; I want to share them with you.

I see the Earth from space in that classic vantage point from the Moon. It’s surrounded by misty, flattened and curling figure-eights, shimmers of light that remind me of the Aurora Borealis. They are pink and green in color, the colors of the heart chakra. In a layer beyond the pink and green is a pure, white pulsing aura that encircles the earth, protecting and literally en-lighten-ing it.

An amazing thing has happened. It’s tomorrow morning, and everyone on Earth has woken up to a new vibration. The world is literally different. Wars have halted, hate has melted. Everyone sees the humanity in each other and is tapped into the love in their hearts. The whole human race knows that we are One. Everyone is their brother, sister, mother, father—friend.

President Obama and the Congress actually cooperate and get things done together—more than in his whole term of office put together. Respect and a sense of family prevail. People stop arguing about health care and come to view it as a humanitarian right. They go to work to put together the best ideas for an effective delivery system.

For the whole world, the United Nations has become a vibrant organization tantamount to a mediation cooperative. The whole planet respects and follows the democratic decisions they make together via this organization. It makes the world work better and allows no squabble or lapse in consciousness to escalate into violence.

One of the wonderful features of this brighter world is a new type of community I have helped organize in California that will soon spread nationwide, perhaps worldwide. (In our new world, it’s easy to “sign up” to work on any cause that interests you and taps your personal talents.) We created Elder Villages, a kind of unique 55+ living arrangement for people with spiritual and metaphysical leanings. Rather than isolating older citizens with the most wisdom on the planet; the “elder pods” are a center of activity where people come freely to their local wise ones. They are an integral part of every community. The elders teach children about things spiritual and practical—they are group grandparents and godparents. They serve in countless capacities. One of them resembles an Officer of the Day (OD) that we used to have at my agency when I was a social worker, only it’s a Team for the Day. They are there for people in crisis who are hurting and needing help, offering a friendly ear, to do an errand or anything the TOD is able to do. Anyone  can call in for comfort and a place to hang out at the pod. So often nowadays, we want to be there for our friends, but life is busy and complex. Your local pod is a place where someone is always available to serve since so many others are still in a phase of their lives where being Johnny or Susie on the Spot isn’t as easy. The Elder Village is a favorite place for families and groups to host events with an open invitation to any residents who want to join in. Instead of missing a variety of age groups and types of people, the villagers are the center of a new kind of gathering place. Age and experience are revered—so Native American!

The new world isn’t a bit boring, as all of humanity is having a great time enjoying how many ways we can meld our creativity and to do millions of fun and practical things. Amazing how much more satisfying cooperation is than competition! Every person has an opportunity to express his or her creativity and passions. You never know when your particular juice might be just what the doctor ordered to heal your corner of the world or solve a problem no one else has been able to crack.

The new world deals with antisocial behavior in ways it has borrowed from indigenous cultures. One major borrow is from the Himba tribe of Namibia whose mothers create a special song for each child from meditating on their child’s energy prior to birth. This song is taught to others and sung throughout the child’s entire life in both triumph and pain. If the child ever does anything antisocial, as a kid or grown-up, the villagers sing his or her song until s/he comes back to his or her true vibration and behavior. The song is sung at even at death—an amazing vibrational healing tool of a lifetime.

Divisions of religion melt, too, as various religions borrow from each other to create spiritual support rituals and systems that meet the current needs of their people. A world of eclectic spirituality evolves where the teachings of the great masters go without saying.

Lastly, much like the N’avi in the movie Avatar, the whole human race “gets it” about being an ecosystem. People, animals, plants and all living things are seen as sacred and mutually supportive. Respect abounds, and global warming diminishes and the earth is green and healthy again, along with everyone and everything on it.

No wonder something in me couldn’t wait till tomorrow!


 ~~~

 Photo Credit: © Elenarts - Fotolia.com



Tuesday, August 26, 2014

COMING ATTRACTIONS! Thrival Kits for the PUNC Planets

How to Navigate Outerplanetary Transits and Birth Chart Pressures of Pluto, Uranus, Neptune and Chiron (The PUNCs)

© 2014 by Joyce Mason



In my last post about the Harmonic Concordance Blog, I talked about the importance of the last step—the action we need to take in order to materialize the promises of the heavens. To make our lives and their astrological ups-and-downs meaningful, we have to work with shifting planetary tides. In celebration of that idea and to help make that work easier for you, I’m putting together a short “kit” with ideas for navigating transits of the outer planets, the ones that ask us for the deepest changes. The practices and core concepts in the kits (posts) can be applied not just to transits but also to natal overloads of these energies … or any time a transit of another planet is lighting up the natal outer planet.

Over the years, I’ve had a calling to work with the PUNC planets. (You can read more in the eBook, Outerplanetary [Extraordinary] People, available in the sidebar, or start with Part 1 of a series of posts on the subject to learn more.)

The Thrival Kit posts are thrival kits rather than survival kits. The reason? Surviving has a barely out of victim consciousness ring to it. Most of us don’t want to scrape through change by the skin of our teeth. If we can navigate a call for personal evolution, the outcome is to thrive or “thrival.” These concepts come from the work of Richard McKnight, Ph.D., and his workplace classic, Victim, Survivor, or Navigator: Choosing a Response to Workplace Change.

For many of us, fulfilling the promise (despite what sometimes feel like the perils) of our astrology charts make our horoscope the ongoing workplace of a lifetime. Dr. McKnight’s call to become a navigator fits the human longing to become all we can be. Thus, I’m hoping the Outerplanetary Thrival Kits offer practical tools for helping you feel like the captain of your own ship in the sometimes stormy waters of inner growth.



There will be four posts, one each for the four PUNC planets. I’ll be posting two a month starting September 2, 2014. The “kits” will have the following features across all four, though some will have planet-specific extras:

  • What this planet asks of you
  • What you may be resisting 
  •   The shift needed to thrive 
  • How to dance with this planet’s change of tune 
  •  Music and entertainment (books, plays, TV, movies) that help you release resistance and embrace the adventure 
  •  References for more reading 
  •  Share your own tips, successes in the Comments, a community learning experience


Think of the Thrival Kit posts as an outline on a clipboard when you come for orientation to a new transit with any of the PUNCs—or a tune-up when your natal encounters with these giants of change seem overwhelming. They are tips to help you navigate your learning environment and to help you do your homework more easily. These are meant to be succinct notes, covering the main points and tools that can help you navigate outerplanetary transits.

Don’t forget your space suit! While the PUNC acronym puts Pluto first and Chiron last, I’ll approach the Thrival Kit posts in their normal planetary order from the Sun: Chiron, Uranus, Neptune—and, finally, Pluto.

~~~

Photo Credit: © alphaspirit – fotolia.com



If you don't already subscribe to The Radical Virgo posts, now's the time to sign up in the sidebar so you don't miss any of the Thrival Kits.





Monday, August 18, 2014

The Harmonic Concordance Blog: A Metaphysical Meeting Place




A Concordance of Voices in Spirit

 Click to enlarge

For over a decade, I’ve had the honor of being part of something “bigger than the sky,” my favorite hyperbole—only in this case, I’m not exaggerating. I want to introduce you to a place in cyberspace that’s dear to my heart, one that I also hope will become dear to yours.

Some of you might already be familiar with the celestial configuration we’ve come to know as the Harmonic Concordance. This event, an amazing astrological point in time, took place November 9, 2003 at 1:13 AM, GMT. The key feature of the chart is a Star of David pattern, two interlocking trines all laced by sextiles on their outside edges. The first trine involves ASC/Jupiter, No. Node/Moon and Chiron—the second, Saturn, Sun/So.Node and Mars. 

But here’s the thing, and some of you may have experienced a similar phenomenon with this year’s Cardinal Grand Cross. Unusual geometric patterns in the sky rarely lead to dramatic changes the second they wax into their highest point of exactitude. They are seed patterns that represent a tipping point and are a call to our next point of evolution.

The Harmonic Concordance was discovered and promoted by astrologer Johnny Mirehiel who very much “got” that the Concordance was bigger than a moment in time. That’s why, a decade later in honor of the 10th anniversary of the Concordance, he assembled an eclectic team of spirited peacemakers to continue its call--for us to become humans co-creating with Spirit to make the world a better place. That assembly is The Harmonic Concordance Blog.

If you’re a regular reader of The Radical Virgo, you probably know that I’m a woman of action. It’s not just finding out what a cosmic hint means—it’s what we do, change or how we evolve because of it that’s the final step of completion, the one that makes the promises in the heavens materialize. When we take action, we’re leading truly radical lives, radical referring to its literal meaning, root

We take in the change required down to the bottom of our being and send out a taproot to solidify it like a giant oak or redwood tree. Roots normally grow in clumps, and it takes several of us “rooting together” and rooting for each other to pull it off. That’s the purpose of the Harmonic Concordance Blog, of which I am proud to be a writer, reader and rooter.

As Johnny likes to say, being human spirits and part of all Creation is a mission that has both a carrot and a promise: 


The more we accept and activate our partnership with the holy and sacred Spirit that animates the All That Is, the more clearly we will see that we ourselves are the Creators of this daily 3-D experience.


And further notes from Johnny from the Concordance Blog’s opening page:

“Universally speaking, however, the first and last key is to “know thyself,” for as it has been said that, “…to know thyself is to know the Gods.”  The Harmonic Concordance Blog is a clearing house for a select and diverse group of authors who are willing to share the insights and knowledge they have gained from their quests by offering their piece of the pie in service to what may be called our “Spiritual Literacy.” 

These “Conversations with Spirit” represent that which speaks to them and for them and their essays can be found on this blog, by author or by theme.  Additionally, newly featured “Conversations” will be introduced here each Monday…”

What will you find there more specifically? The diversity alone is a thrill with 24 topic areas (with more to be added as the months roll by), such as Alchemy Today, Animal Communication, The Ascended Life, The Breath, The Chakras, Crystal Wisdom, EFT and Spirit, Medicine Ways, The Sabians Speak—and that’s, literally, not the half of it. I write a quarterly post, Spirit at the Crossings, which offers interpretations of each seasonal change at the Cardinal crossing points along with rituals and activities to celebrate these changes. The changes of season, with their clockwork regularity, teach us how to process larger changes, always at work in our constant dialogue between Earth and Sky.

Some of the other writers include Lynda Hill (Sabians), Maria Kramer, Deborah Burton, James Dempsey, Elizabeth Tobin—and many more. There are now two Voices (featured writers and their posts) per week with plenty of inspiration to get you through even the toughest transits, not to mention those Moony mood swings.

The Harmonic Concordance began as an astrological signature in the sky. It continues as a vehicle for literally being the handwriting on the wall of the Hopi prophecy:


We are the ones we have been waiting for.


Visit the Harmonic Concordance Blog and join us in being the change.


Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Robin Williams (1951-2014): Cosmic Cancer Goes Home



 Article © 2014 by Joyce Mason on The Radical Virgo



By making the voices in his head so public, Robin Williams was the one human being who assured me that I’m not crazy … or if I am, it might just be a gift. He’s the first person I ever encountered whose mind works like my own and then some. A psychic once likened my mental energy to “a flea on a hot griddle.” Robin was a flea pinging off the griddle so fast and in so many directions; it was like watching a swarm of them on speed in mating season.

Robin would have held major real estate in my heart just for how much, hard and how often he made me laugh, but this secret link to my wild mind and imagination—one my Capricorn Moon keeps under wraps until I really trust someone—made him feel like my brother. With Sun, Vesta, Mars and Uranus all in Cancer, there was something familial about Robin. He felt very adoptable, very ours. Even though he was an international celebrity, he was such a treasure to our Cancer country; even President Obama eulogized him on the day of his death for all his contributions.

Even so, I think people the world over would want to claim him as theirs, too. In that respect, Robin was a cosmic Cancer, uniting the world, even if only for moments, as one happy family in the love of laughter. To gift someone with seeing life through the lens of humor is the most loving thing parents can do for their offspring. True to his Cancerian core, one of Robin’s most famous roles was in Mrs. Doubtfire, a movie where he plays a cross-dressing father so eager to spend time with his children after a divorce, he impersonates a nanny. He manages to get his ex to hire him, and we’re shown once more how far we’ll go and how many laughs often come out of what we’ll do for love.

Like many others, I am deeply affected by the loss of this great performer and human being. It has caused me to ponder many things. One of them is the expression about how there’s a fine line between genius and madness.


What people don’t talk about nearly as often, and what Robin’s suicide underscores, is that that cutting edge of genius/madness is often sharp with depression.



How many great artists, writers and performers who, like Robin, gave us the divine comedy as a direct channel … how many of them have struggled with depression and lost?

The internal chemical cocktail that is clinical depression leads to a hangover of heaviness that taking two aspirin and calling the doctor in the morning will not touch—nor will all the positive thinking in the world. It is one of the trickiest medical conditions on earth, and having lived through it with a spouse (who I’m happy to report lived through it himself); I have some idea of the agony it wreaks on the depressed person and everyone around him. I’ve also got my own overdose of sensitivity and my own experience with acute, short-term bouts with the bad blues. Frankly, knowing how painful that feels for a few days; I can understand why someone is unable to bear it when it persists without relief. We have so much more to learn about healing this plague for anyone who suffers from it, including saving the sensitives that make all our lives worth living for the beauty and laughter they share.


 Click to enlarge

Much will be said of Robin Williams’ chart over the next days and months, but what stands out for me is all happening in his 4th House with his Pisces planets. I attended a workshop with astrologer Maurice Fernandez recently, where he pointed out that though the signs of Cancer and Pisces are in trine, they are very different. Cancer loves personally in its own little nest. Pisces loves everyone in a home without borders, a more diffuse and impersonal love of all. Robin had strong expressions of both of these energies in his natal chart. This is probably why we’re hearing in various interviews that many people who actually knew Robin didn’t feel like they really knew him. In paradox, fans the world over who didn’t know him felt as though they did.

Maurice also talked about how it takes Pisces planets or a 12th house focus to be able to give yourself to the public as a performer, politician or anyone whose life is permanently onstage. Robin gave himself as if we were all family. We were his 4th House. His natal Chiron is at the Galactic Center, highlighting his mission to bring healing laughter from the heart of space, first landing in our consciousness and living rooms via an egg-like spaceship from another planet on Happy Days.

Robin died at a very Neptunian/Moon time, a time when the veil between Here and the Other Side is thin. He was waxing into a Lunar Return at the time of his death with Transiting Neptune approaching his Pisces Moon as well. Most evocative is nearby T-Chiron. Without eye witnesses, his death chart will never be exact. Even a completed autopsy will only provide an estimated time of death. Still, the closeness of transiting Chiron to Robin’s natal Ceres will be retained; whenever it is determined he passed between 10:30 pm on August 10, when he was last seen alive, and 11:45 am on August 11, when his body was discovered. At the death pronouncement moment, when his death became public, the T-Chiron to natal Ceres conjunction was within a second of arc.

It’s as though the shaman/healer Chiron brought Robin Williams to the cusp of the Ceres myth where one possible outcome was being abducted by his demons to the underworld, just as Pluto snatched Persephone while her mother Ceres wailed her loss. Another possibility was shamanic reassembly of the lost parts of his soul. Robin’s natal Ceres is the apex of a yod with Pluto and Neptune, so all the outerplanetary cast of characters were present for the turning-point moment.

For all these years, Robin Williams has given himself to us in spite of any personal pain (including addiction and depression) and like Chiron, Robin traded places with Prometheus (society), willing to offer up his suffering to make us laugh and lighten our load. In the Chiron myth, the gods are so impressed with Chiron’s altruism, they free him from the bonds of his immortality and allow him to die and leave his pain behind.

I know it’s a poetic rendering of a terribly sad passing. (Robin’s part in Dead Poet’s Society seems ironic in the middle of this thought.) I’d have loved to have decades more laughter with Robin Williams …

… but I am called to accept what-is with the hope that such a high profile ending will urge others to take depression seriously and to seek help.

Meanwhile, I will remain forever grateful for the whirlwind of energy that was Robin Williams and for the films and small screen footage that captured his work for our continued enjoyment.

To borrow from another movie he wasn’t in, combined with our wonderful first exposure to Robin as the alien Mork from Ork, our ET has gone Home.  

~~~
      
Photo Credit:  WikiCommons, Robin Williams at Happy Feet 2 premiere in Sydney