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Most of us have grown up in a culture that promises us anything and everything.
That teaches us to be resentful of ANY limitations.
That teaches us magical thinking, the belief that everything we dislike or that displeases us can be overcome.
That everything painful, confusing, difficult, or simply effortful is a problem that can be solved – and that if you haven’t “solved” these things yet, you’re really just not trying hard enough.
Western astrology has a great deal to say about pain, difficulty, effort, and discomfort – which unfortunately has been presented in a starkly literal, predictive, inflexible way that has created a great deal of unnecessary suffering.
Western astrology has also (in the past 150 years) been infused with a number of other spiritual practices and beliefs, as well as distortions, misunderstandings, and appropriations of other spiritual practices and beliefs, that have resulted in a version of astrology rooted in magical thinking and spiritual bypassing.
The archetypal, depth-psychological lens reorients our view towards integration – the awareness of both/and.
That change-of-frame actually removes the entire structure of problem/solution, as well as good/bad, right/wrong, strong/weak, benefic/malefic – it removes the lens of binaries altogether.
There are many facets of human nature that are difficult to inhabit, and that carry a lot of pain with them.
It’s also, always, possible to learn to live with
that pain, that struggle, that difficulty in a generative way – one that fully acknowledges and honors the pain without bypassing, and also acknowledges and engages our agency to work with the pain constructively.
Some pain absolutely can be “healed,” although I put that word in quotes because I am wary of it.
I don’t think most of us know what we actually mean by it, and many of us mean radically different things by it, so it’s hard to have a clear and useful conversation about it.
I’ll say it this way – a lot of pain can be reduced, anywhere from a little to a lot, and sometimes it can be eliminated altogether.
What remains must be carried, and learning to carry
our pain, our struggle, our difficulty well is an art unto itself.
A lot of what we talk about in The Paradox School is how to understand where those painful places live right in our archetypal nature – built into our bones – as opposed to where pain is layered into us through socialization and life experience.
The latter category can often be fruitfully de-laminated from our core selves, and while that process can take awhile and often requires multiple modalities, it’s well worth the time and effort.
Our essential archetypal paradox, however, remains with us always, and those places where pain or struggle is built into our bones requires us to approach with respect.
Our own archetypal pain is not a problem to be solved.
It’s entirely human to hate those painful places, to resent them, to feel shame about them, to feel betrayed by them (and betrayal is archetypal too, as it turns out.)
What is not so helpful is the belief that we should, or even that we can, get rid of them.
Our worldview at The Paradox School deeply questions the modern psycho-spiritual-self-help beliefs that everything uncomfortable is standing between us and our “best life,” that it “shows us where we haven’t done our work yet,” and similar ideas – all of which have an underlying premise that says if you were doing it right you wouldn’t be feeling this pain.
Instead, our focus in on learning to hold all of it together, and drop more deeply into the living conversation that our paradox actually is.
We ask ourselves, and we deepen our ability to ask our clients and the others we work with, how to become more of who we actually, already, are.
We look at the painful, struggly places in us with respect and honor, knowing that on some level they’ll be with us always – and we also engage them in conversation to see how they can shift, how we can learn to live better with them rather than trying to escape them.
When the astrological language is brought to this purpose, it turns out to be an extraordinarily precise, effective, and sophisticated map for this kind of work.
The worldview tells us what we are doing, and the astrological language is how we get there.
If this is something you want more of, either in your active practice or to develop towards a practice, I hope you’ll join us at The Paradox School.
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