S3 Episode 19 Navigating Spiritual Awakening and Unconscious Pain with Vedic Astrology
Navigating the Pain of Spiritual Awakening with Vedic Astrology
Embarking on a spiritual awakening can be both a beautiful and turbulent experience. If you’ve been feeling overwhelmed by the emotional and psychological pain that often accompanies this journey, you’re not alone. In a recent episode of the Vedic Astrology Podcast, I interview Dustin Cormier about valuable insights and tools to help you navigate these challenging times.
The Pain of Awakening
Spiritual awakening often brings a wave of psychological pain that can make you want to retreat to your old ways of being. We both acknowledge this upfront, reassuring listeners that this pain is natural and even necessary for growth.
"Managing the pain of coming into awareness is crucial," says Dustin. Vedic Astrology can serve as a friend and a tool to help manage and transcend this pain.
The Role of the Unconscious
One of the key elements of spiritual awakening is confronting the unconscious parts of ourselves. Dustin explains this using a Jungian perspective, describing the unconscious as inherently good and integral to our soul. He uses the metaphor of fish being pulled out of a bowl to see the vast world beyond, illustrating how astrology can expand our limited perceptions.
I shared with Dustin a football analogy to explain the role of the ego. In this analogy the ego as a jersey we wear to play the game of life. While it's useful for identifying our roles and interacting with others, it's crucial to remember that we can take it off and experience life differently. "Ego is just the jersey we wear to play life’s game," I note. "But we can take it off anytime and just enjoy being."
Individual and Universal Awakening
We also delve into the concepts of individualized karma and the universal awakening of God. We frame personal pain and struggles as part of a larger, divine journey. Dustin emphasizes that "duality is how the singularity of consciousness expresses itself," suggesting that both suffering and joy are integral to the divine plan.
Vedic Astrology as a Guide
In this context, Vedic Astrology is a versatile guide and therapeutic tool. It can help you understand your karmic blueprint, allowing you to navigate the highs and lows of spiritual awakening with more grace and wisdom. Dustin generously shares how to use Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras as a practice to navigate through this transformative time.
“There are many ways to reach bliss or come to peace,” I said encouraging listeners to leverage astrology as part of their journey.
Conclusion
Spiritual awakening is a path filled with challenges and rewards. The insights shared by Dustin Cormier in this podcast episode can offer you much-needed guidance and comfort. Remember, the pain you experience is a natural part of your journey toward greater awareness and self-realization. With tools like Vedic Astrology, you can navigate this path more effectively, finding peace and understanding along the way. If you’re struggling with the pain of spiritual awakening, consider tuning in to the Vedic Astrology Podcast for wisdom, support, and tools to help you through your journey.
Navigating Spiritual Awakening and Unconscious Pain with Vedic Astrology Transcript
[00:00:00]
Introduction and Welcome
Fiona Marques: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Vedic Astrology Podcast. My name is Fiona Marques.
Dustin Cormier: Today I am in discussion with Dustin Cormier, a fellow astrologer, a friend, a fellow graduate from the Asheville Vedic Astrology Apprenticeship. Hi, Dustin. Welcome to the podcast.
It's always a real pleasure to see you on this podcast. To see you in general. You and I been pals ever since we were both going through Asheville Vedic Astrology. Every time I get to talk to you it just fills my heart and it fills my brain.
Fiona Marques: We've set ourselves a bit of an open topic.Dustin and I are talking about the unconscious and the pain that one can feel when one begins on a path of awareness and awakening, there can be psychological pain, that almost wants you just to crawl back into your shell and give up on this idea.
So talking about the unconscious, about pain, and how [00:01:00] Astrology can be a friend, a tool through that process of gaining more awareness.
Dustin Cormier: I'd almost say managing the pain of coming into awareness.
Fiona Marques: Dancing in the experience of becoming more aware.
Dustin Cormier: Dancing in the fire.
in the water,
Fiona Marques: Swim in the joy of more awareness. So Dustin, let's dive in by talking a little bit about the unconscious, the soul, the ego and see where it takes us.
Defining the Unconscious, the Ego and more ...
Fiona Marques: Can we define some of these terms? Because there are Western ways of looking at them and Eastern ways of looking at them. When two Vedic astrologers here talking about the unconscious, how do you feel comfortable defining all of these terms, unconscious, awareness, consciousness and ego and the soul.
That's a great question. The way I use the unconscious, I consider it in the Jungian [00:02:00] sense
Dustin Cormier: where there's an inherent goodness in the unconscious. In some ways I would correlate it with the soul
Fiona Marques: and even with Ketu. The unconscious is like Vishnu in the end, where the nature of your soul was one thing the whole time.
Dustin Cormier: The unconscious contains the bad and the good.
I've been up here writing at my cottage and so I'm writing a lot about dealing with the unconscious. And one of the ways, we can imagine that we'rea goldfish inside of a fishbowl. And every client that comes to us is a little bit like a fish inside of a fishbowl. And a good astrologer can grab that fish by the tail and pull them outside the fishbowl and make them look all around so that the person says, "Oh my gosh,
there's so much outside of my limited comprehension". And the astrologer will, gently guide them through it.
Fiona Marques: What would happen [00:03:00] ideally is that they would then put back in the bowl or that they would realize there's water outside of the bowl and they would be free from a bowl?
Dustin Cormier: The end is definitely to get out of the fishbowl.
Fiona Marques: Then you would lose individualized consciousness when you're in the ocean you're just integrated into the ocean. You are the same as the ocean?
Dustin Cormier: Yeah, yeah, I would say that you are liberated from your small experience of water. You are emotionally open to what the world truly has in store for you because you are not limited to a smaller basin of emotional comprehension. The water being a key part of this metaphor.
Fiona Marques: Where has the unconscious gone in this analogy? When we're in the ocean, where's the unconscious? Has it ceased to exist or we now can explore it freely?
Dustin Cormier: It's more like the second one. Because the unconscious is inside the fish. The water that you can open yourself to is more like the subconscious.
Fiona Marques: And was the bowl?
Dustin Cormier: The bowl [00:04:00] is like ego. It's like an emotional attachment to a limited frame of emotional comprehension.
Fiona Marques: How I would explain my understanding of an Eastern view of the ego. So when I want to explain it to Westerners, I explain football, living in Portugal, a football crazy country. That if you ever get a chance to see four year olds or five year olds playing football, you just see this clump of children, and you can't even see the ball. And the ball moves and the whole clump of children moves. And it's not really as much fun to play football that way, cause one can't really play. So as one grows older playing football, you get to learn the positions and in order to own a position or to understand that I'm that player, you put on a jersey that marks you as being different from the other team.
"So I'm on the blue team. The other team's wearing red. Okay, cool. And I've got a number on my back and that tells me I'm a forward. That's my job is to kick the ball towards the goal. I'm a midfielder. I'm trying to pass it through all of the, back and forth, or, like I'm the goalkeeper. My [00:05:00] job is no matter how exciting it is down the other end of the field, I actually see stay here near my goal and wait, and then my job will happen". And if we can all play those roles, then this game of football becomes endlessly entertaining because everybody's put on a jersey that identifies what they're supposed to do.
For me that's what the ego is. It's just the jersey. We just have the ego on in order to play the game of football. but, Wow. But we could take off the jersey at any moment and be a bunch of kids around a ball and just be in the bliss of, "Oh, we're playing, there's a ball. Wow. It's so cool!" But if we want to actually enjoy the game, we put on a jersey and play a role that allows us all of the psychological things. Allows us to project things onto other people and allows people to project things onto us. And through that process, we identify what jersey we have on and how we should play.
Dustin Cormier: And it is a game. That's a great way to put it. It's God's Leela.
When I talk about the football analogy, [00:06:00] to me, it's very easy to take off the jersey, right? We just put on a jersey to play a game. And that's kind of like the ticket to ride. "I want to play. So I got to come in here and I've got to be a defender and, try to stop these strikers coming through. That's my kind of, what I got to do for the leela, for the play. And I can really see myself in this oncoming player with its own agenda, helps me to see myself". So it's that self realization thing. But I guess in my I'm seeing that we would easily put on and take off these jerseys so that the game is just when you want to play, come in and play and when you want to take off your jersey.
Fiona Marques: Butwith the analogy that you're sharing around the goldfish and getting out of the bowl.
The bowl is like ego. It's like an emotional attachment to a limited frame of emotional comprehension. It's the subconscious. The subconscious keeps the [00:07:00] unconscious limited. But the unconscious and the joy that it can experience is vast, as long as it is willing to transform what it's used to. What is familiar. That's the subconscious in my reckoning.
The bowl is the subconscious.
Dustin Cormier: Yes.
Fiona Marques: The restriction around the water that keeps it small.
Okay. So then talk to me a little bit about what you think of individualized karma and like samskaras, like "I've come here with my whole backpack full of individualized karmas that I must burn and, let go of the seeds of all these karmas, so that my backpack gets lighter. And at some point after many lifetimes, my backpack will be empty and I'll", I, whatever.
And what about the contrasting view that all of us are God right now who is having a dream and wanted in the dream to explore the experience of waking up. And little by little these [00:08:00] eight and a half billion or 11 billion or whatever we are, bits of God's consciousness are all waking up little bit by little bit. And eventually God will be fully awake.
And it won't have anything, it won't have anything to do with "I, Fiona and my backpack of stones". It's just in this particular lifetime, the sleeping God, little bit of consciousness that I have is in these particular DNA skin bag. But after I finish this skin bag and I leave it, and I, get the chance to play in another skin bag. I won't necessarily bring along my individualized karma. I'll just be another part of God, playing in a whole different skin bag and gradually being more and more awake.
So let's, let's contrast a little bit that whole individualized versus, I don't know, universal waking up of God.
Dustin Cormier: Duality is how the singularity of consciousness expresses itself. If there was no duality, then there would just [00:09:00] be nothing. There would just be oneness. There would just be "OM", which is what it is behind the curtain.
But there needs to be a front of the curtain. There needs to be karma. There needs to be the movement through the elements, the tattvas, and the pain of not quite being there yet. Although, ultimately, again, the game of awakening is to recognize that the journey is the destination, as it's classically said.
In the long run of things, samsara is the originating point. It's what we are again when we're kids, or children. We go towards the breast and we go away from the bad spiky things.
Fiona Marques: Samsara is essentially suffering. Why is there suffering in the world? Samadhi is the North Pole of samsara. If there is samsara, if there is suffering, it implies by [00:10:00] contrast that there is Samadhi.
Dustin Cormier: There can only be a top of a mountain if there's a bottom of a mountain. So we need Samsara in order to experience the deliciousness of Samadhi. This is how Divinity has decided to set itself up for itself. Because divinity is there the whole time. "AUM" Divinity is all one. But in order for the Divinity to experience itself and needs to separate itself from the originating point and go to the west. West is where we become subdivided into an individuated being. We become not God in our experience in order to come back to the realization of the God that we've been all this time. So samsara and suffering [00:11:00] is necessary for God to experience Samadhi.
Saying Yes to Life
Fiona Marques: What we are truly trying to do, is to develop a sattvic lifestyle where the programming that we have is consciously, constantly illuminating rather than putting us into shadow of a unworthy pain. Of the darkness of the non self. Of who we aren't, of who we truly are not.
Dustin Cormier: The tricky part comes when we grow emotionally attached to the rhythm of bliss and pain and expect it to go a certain way.
Clients of astrologers have two things they do. They either ask to be massaged within the fishbowl or occasionally, you'll get one of those good clients.
And those good clients of course are also only going to advance as much as the astrologer. An astrologer has to be willing to go to this place as much [00:12:00] as the client is. When you have a good client you have a client who says, "I want to acknowledge that I'm stuck in a fishbowl. I want to acknowledge the pain of being limited in this fishbowl". And what happens is a good astrologer can grab that fish by the tail and pull them outside the fishbowl and make them look all around so that the person says, "Oh my gosh, it's so painful. It's so dry. It's so big out here. I don't know if I can deal with it. There's so much outside of my limited comprehension". And the astrologer will gently guide them through it.
Fiona Marques: I think we need circle back to when you were talking about good clients, because it kind of implied that maybe it was a "bad" client who wanted to come for a "massage of their ego", and it was a "good" client who wanted to come for a "tooth extraction"?
Coming from a completely different perspective, I'm horrified at the idea that there are good or bad clients.
Dustin Cormier: There really [00:13:00] aren't. You're right to say that. You're right to say that, Fiona.
Fiona Marques: And that coming for a massage, as an Astrology session might relax that person's nervous system enough to get them a little bit closer to something that they could maybe trust to open up towards.
And some people are going to want to come straight in for the tooth extraction. And in fact, some people are going to be like, "The more painful, the better". And "It doesn't work if it doesn't hurt!" Or whatever. And you've got to, you've got to meet your client where they are.
But I don't want anyone listening to the podcast to take away the idea that a good client is a tooth extracting client because where you are right now is exactly where Astrology can meet you. And
therapeutic Astrology can be almost just at an archetype level. Just like at the mythological level. Mm mm You might have a session with someone and tell them that Icarus story or tell them that [00:14:00] Indra Thunderbolt story. And neither of those stories is painful to the client. But they take it away and at that archetype level, there is a chance to reprogram. And then maybe that person comes back with questions about, "Okay, so where's my thunderbolt at? And let's have a look at my chart. And how could I work with that?"
So for everyone who's listening,Astrology has something to give to you that is enlightening, wherever you are, and you could come to a session, have a great session, feel better about yourself, and that might lead you to have the confidence to perhaps have a bit of deeper dentistry, if at any time you felt that you needed to do that.
Dustin Cormier: That will always be based on what the client feels. On what they want to be ready for what they are ready for. Ultimately, this does bring us around to this, what the nature of this whole conversation [00:15:00] is, which is that the only way to deal with this pain that we're talking about, the pain of coming into awareness, is inviting the person to understand what that pain means for them and whether it even needs to necessarily be pain.
Fiona Marques: Yes.
Before I was an astrologer, I was a massage therapist. 14 years, I was a massage therapist. So I've seen a lot of people. And I think that it is easy to pigeonhole massage into being an escape or like a soothing, "I'm not really dealing with anything. I'm going to have a massage". And that's the context of which was brought up earlier in the podcast was, "Can I have my ego massaged?" I do understand what you were driving at, but at the same time, massage is a time when people will breathe more deeply than they have breathed all day [00:16:00] and all week, and maybe all month. Depends how regularly they come for a massage.
Massage actually helps the cells breathe, right? Because it distributes blood into the oxygen. But it also helps the person breathe. And in those moments in massage, a person may well solve a problem that they have been having all day or all month, because finally the lake settles, all of those compulsions for a moment. And, we're talking, it depends what message you're going for, et cetera, et cetera.
Butthere are many ways to reach bliss or to come to peace.
Dustin Cormier: Right.
Great.
Fiona Marques: And some ways to come to peace are perhaps these intense extractions of rotting teeth. Perhaps that for some people is the way. But sometimes in a massage, people are going to come to peace and their mind is going to settle and it's going to be integrated through the breath [00:17:00] with breathing. And that is going to move them through something that they will then exit that room with a little bit more bliss. And when they see their partner the next time or their child or their boss or whoever it is, there's just going to be a little bit more ease and they're going to smile or be open or be relaxed instead of reactive. And that's going to be the grace that will transform that relationship.
Dustin Cormier: Absolutely right, Fiona. And I love that you can bring this what I would call the goddess aspect this conversation. I've had many cathartic transformative massages. Where I felt tight in one leg and it's like a little painful but way more blissful than painful. And that bliss of encouraging the movement of those things in my body are not a tooth extraction. It's the exact opposite. And my life is all the better having gone through those [00:18:00] experiences.
Fiona Marques: And the people that really get benefit out of massage, and it's probably goes across life, is those people who've made friends with the process of massage. And this is what we want with Life as well, is that we are friends with the process of life. We are in a good relationship, a yes, relationship with life, even when it's the muscles being, worked by the massage therapist. So that is what
Dustin Cormier: Beautiful
Fiona Marques: Yeah, that's where we want to be.
Dustin Cormier: Being in that yes relationship with Life. I feel when we've began this kind of talking about pain I think a better way to conceive of the whole conversation is getting in conversation with Life. Because life has bliss and it has pain, it has whatever it is. So to say yes to Life. To say yes to truth. To say yes to the unconscious.
Fiona Marques: Yep.
Dustin Cormier: This is the direction that we're all moving in. And Astrology will [00:19:00] provide the light of that truth, of what that truth means each individual person. And can act as an engagement with that process for the individual person.
And it will be a joyous expedition of pain for some people. It will be a joyous expedition of pleasure for some people. It all depends on the individual karma of the person. And that's why we come to Astrologers is to illuminate our own karma in
Fiona Marques: our own
Dustin Cormier: relationship with life.
Fiona Marques: Yep. And there's almost nothing better in that individual way because Astrology can get to that very fine detail about each individual person. So it's such a great tool to accompany you. To hold your hand as you go through your process. It will match you wherever you are on your journey.
Dustin Cormier: I'm very into Carl Jung. Carl Jung was a sort of person who would say, "Okay, I'm grabbing you by the tail now. [00:20:00] Okay, I'm lifting you out of the fishbowl. Okay, so you're seeing what's outside the fishbowl. It's okay. I'm holding your hand. I'm with you". Whereas Freud was a little bit different. I always see them as being "mother" and "father". Carl Jung was the mother who gently guided you outside of the fishbowl. And Freud was the one who basically kicked, toppled the fishbowl over and said, "Yeah, where are you at? You better sink or swim because this is the truth".
And I think Freud got into bit of trouble for being not as empathic, let's say, as guys like Carl Jung. Both of these gentlemen were practicing psychoanalysis and doing the work of bringing the client into awareness. And, both of these men are giving you a message, a transmission from your unconscious of how limited your life is.
Navigating the Pain of Awakening using Patanjali's Yoga Sutras
Dustin Cormier: It's inevitable that coming [00:21:00] into awareness is going to bring us pain. It has to. That's how the unconscious works. When we're young, we are looking to go towards what feels good and get away from what feels bad.
As time goes on we have to integrate what exactly is truly good for us. So we've been going instinctively on what has felt good, now we have to use discernment.
"Has my feelings of attaching to the good, led me to ultimate good? And has my feelings of evading the bad, led me to ultimately good? What's the ultimate good and joy that the unconscious wants to experience in order to attain samadhi?"
Fiona Marques: And in order to experience Samadhi so far as I've experienced it, it seems the most important and best way to do so [00:22:00] is through Patanjali's Yoga Sutras.
Dustin Cormier: Of course there are many ways to get through the game, lots of spiritual traditions. The way that I have experienced it as best through my knowledge and what I've gone through is Patanjali's Yoga Sutras. So Patanjali was 500 BC, like this is like Jesus's time text, right? So long time ago, this is long before even the horoscope was invented. People were trying to figure out how do I get out of the game. And of course the answer would be not necessarily to get out of the game, but to master the game. That's a better way to put it. How do I master the soccer game? I don't want to get out of the soccer game. I want to make it meaningful. I want glory. I want the truth of the joy of what I'm designed for.
And so Patanjali gives us [00:23:00] one enigmatic phrase that really sets up his whole philosophy. He says, "Yoga chitta vritti nirodha". Yoga is chitta, vritti, nirodha. So chitta is the unconscious. Remember when I said the unconscious? Involves the good and the bad so that's chitta. It's pure mind. Beyond time. You know when we're about 60 years old. We've gone through the whole we've gone through the left and right of Rahu and Ketu several times. The leaves of the season are giving their color. The rocks have been bleached by the Sun over time. And now who we truly are is emerging.
They had to go through what they were not in order to become realized in [00:24:00] what they truly are.
It's like it says in the Bhagavad Gita "It's better to suffer in finding your own Dharma than to have an easy time emulating someone else's Dharma." Because the pain the fire of moving towards what's true for you, being lifted out of the fishbowl a bit, it's poison in the front, but it's nectar in the back That's what we say about sattva and self illumination.
So Chitta is who you get to be when you're 60 years old. It's who you truly are. It's after the pain, "I've suffered enough in this and now Rahu is pulling me towards this, but now I've gone too far into Rahu, gotta come back to my roots in Ketu, then another 9 years later. Oh, I'm stuck in Ketu again. Now I've gotta move back into Rahu." This is the churning of the ocean of milk that brings us the [00:25:00] amrita of who we are truly at the center of ourselves, regardless of the program.
So when Patanjali says "Yoga chitta vritti nirodha", the vritti is the subconscious programs. It's the habits. The habits aren't necessarily a bad thing, but when we experienced chitta and its purity, then there's no vritti. Vritt i is connected to the word Vritra that word in the story of Indra.
Vritra is the demon that Indra kills. Indra is the inherent intelligence inside the soul. It's the wisdom of the lightning bolt of Jupiter, of Zeus that comes through the chakras from bottom to the top. It's the intuition, it's the superconscious. It's Jupiter. It's ether. Space.
So when Indra's thunderbolt goes from the [00:26:00] root to the crown, we experience the harmony of the rays of the chakras and the planets that we are meant to experience.
Indra is essentially soul intelligence
We're attracted to it like a magnet. We are attracted to samadhi like a magnet, because the ringing of samadhi is "OM". And it's dragging us towards the perfected point.
The power of the intelligence in the soul eventually kills the bejeweled serpent Vritra. And Vritra is the distracting compulsions of biological living. Again, it's when we're a kid. We want to go to what's easy, what feels good. But what feels good is Ketu, and that eventually doesn't serve us anymore. So then we have to go into something that's a little bit challenging. A little bit difficult. A little bit harder on us. Because we know we've grown soft in moving towards the breast. We have to harden ourselves with some [00:27:00] painful awakening into the consciousness of who we truly are. And this is Indra's thunderbolt. This is the soul intelligence that is looking to slay the demon Vritra. And Vritra again is compulsion is the word that it tends to be described as, and the essence of Vritra is contained in Patanjali's statement, "Yoga chitta vritti nirodha".
Nirodha means the negation of vritti. How it's described is that the chitta, who we're supposed to truly be is like a lake and the lake when it's calm is perfect. It's who we're supposed to be. Even when we're going through the pain. Even that trouble is closer to who you really are than sticking to the fearful pattern of who you've been. [00:28:00] This is part of the Chitta. Now, when you move into Rahu and Pisces, there's going to be waves, there's going to be compulsions, there's going to be vrittis, but you have to experience the fullness of who you are in order to slay Vritra. In order to slay the Vritis. In order to come into the truth of what you truly are. And this is listening to the unconscious. Even when it's painful. So this leads us to the unconscious. The unconscious is the soul.
It's the parts of us that are operating beyond our karma and within our karma.
I'm looking to almost get a little bit beyond specific astrological significations.
Regardless of Astrology, there is a need for all of us to tap into the unconscious [00:29:00] to listen to it, to come into bearing with being fully present with chitta. The true nature of reality, of vidya, of the soul. So this is the tricky thing we're kind of going above and beyond the astral karma in order to talk about astral karma with the tools that are needed to integrate the Astrology chart no matter what the Astrology chart is, right?
That's what we're that's what we're trying to discuss here.
And it's the pure joy inside the self that wants to come through. Of course, again, the unconscious is what leads us into pain and suffering as well as into bliss. The only way to get in touch with it is to, we have to start asking ourselves, "What's the right pain? [00:30:00] What's the right suffering for me?"
And that's Dharma. There's a difference between the Dharma and just fear or attachment and that type of pain. Pain is funny because pain happens when we suffer for the wrong reasons and pain also happens if we suffer for the right reasons. The difference is that the pain we experience by suffering for the right reasons brings us closer to ourselves and it brings us closer to joy. We can't exactly get away from pain on our way to joy.
Question 1 - Why does coming into Awareness bring Pain?
Dustin Cormier: There is a self what we call self realization. When we come into Astrology, we come to see an astrologer. Let's talk about the client that wants to confront the truth and they want the ultimate joy of [00:31:00] the self. And they're willing to go through the suffering of transformation, the pain of letting go of their emotional attachments, their tiny, comfortable little fishbowl. They're willing to suffer in the right way.
And they want to ask, what is the right way for me to suffer? What is is my dharma? What is my meaning? What is my deeper purpose in life? For any healing, there's three basic things that they're dealing with. And we'll go through these points, but let's start with the beginning.
Why should coming into awareness bring us pain? It's especially because most people are not used to listening to their emotions. What's within. It's listening to the sound of their feelings, of their chitta. Because it's painful. The vrittis, the [00:32:00] compulsions of life, distract us from listening within, from listening to what's the truth. "Am I really happy in this situation? Is this situation going to bring me happiness? What can I transform in order to bring me closer to who I truly am?" This is the main question.
I often say that emotionally we have our hand on a flame. Now the nervous system tells us if we put our hand on a hot burner when we're two years old, "Ow! Wow! Okay. Not going to touch the hot red thing anymore". Now it would be sad if our nervous system was not online, because then a child could easily go, if they don't have their nervous system, they'll touch the red hot thing and they'll melt their hand and then their hand will be crippled by the heat. And it'll harm them more than it'll do good. That's trauma.
Now, emotionally, when we experience trauma, [00:33:00] when we experience something that emotionally causes us pain, you'd think you'd want to keep the nervous system on. But what happens to us with our emotions, because we can't see them, we can't make the conscious connection, "Ow, I touched the red thing and pain came, so I shouldn't touch the red thing anymore". With emotions, it's different because we can't see it. It doesn't operate on our nervous system in the same way.
So if you've got a two year old and their parents are fighting. And the dad's yelling at the mom. The child says in their brain, "Wow, it's causing my mom pain and it's causing my father pain when anger happens. So I'm going to turn off my nervous system with relation to anger". Now, years later, when it's a healthy thing for this child to express anger, they turn it off. Because they've got trauma there. They've turned off that part of their nervous system.
That [00:34:00] person has been experiencing anger all around them. They don't even realize it. Every time they're in line and someone cuts them off in line, they feel an upwelling of their dignity being somewhat stomped on and they should communicate and say "Oh hold on. I'm here. I'm a part of this situation". But they've been traumatized towards their own anger since they were two years old. And so their hand is on the burner and they're melting their energy field a little bit, but they don't even realize it.
If they were to come into awareness of that, of how they need to integrate their anger, going to be painful. They're going to realize how much pain is happening all around them. And they have to transform it. They have to come into that pain in order to transform the habit. They have to come into that pain in order to start healthily expressing their anger. And this has to be painful because their hand is on the burner.
Life, the [00:35:00] ocean outside of their comfortable little fishbowl is loud and bright, just like coming out of Plato's cave. It's loud and bright, and it might make you want to just go back into the safety of the cave. You might think that's the way to do it. So this is my answer to this question. Why should coming into awareness bring us pain?
Now, the tricky thing is that there's a difference between light and sound in the world of wisdom. Light is like fire. And sound is like water.
So the truth of Indra in a lot of ways is connected with the water and with the sound. Whereas Agni and even Shiva in some ways, the purifying light of Tapas of the fire is, it has to be in the flow with the water. So what this goes to say is that, we can [00:36:00] see that pain and pleasure, just like Rahu and Ketu, we can see the duality of these experiences as existing.
Now the question is, how do we as healers, take a person who's been traumatized towards anger and now we know this person has to healthily integrate their anger so what should we do? Should we tell them? "Okay, so that little bit of pain is good for you so why don't you stand in the middle of Hong Kong and exercise and practice your anger and By poking people in the eyes and seeing their reaction and make them get angry with you. Because we know you have to integrate this and that pain is good, so go and get angry".
We're not exactly going to tell them that. What we need to tell them is, "You know in the light, you see that you have to integrate your anger. Now you have to listen [00:37:00] to your personal reaction to this process".
And this is the other side it. Listening is the yin. Light is yang. You need to do this hard thing in order to experience this pain, in order to come into awareness. Now, the next step is listening. Listening to how much pain you can take in each instance.
And also communicating with a well trained therapist who can hold you by the hand and say, "Okay, we're going to go towards your comfortable edge now. Now, breathe. Be with me, we're gonna do an exercise that involves you integrating your anger and your pain right now. Let me know when you feel like it's too much".
And at that point, when you're listening to how much of the pain you can take, this is when proper healing can occur as opposed to just [00:38:00] introducing more trauma.
How many times have you had Astrology clients where you know that they got something going on with their 4th House and their 9th House? Their parents are still alive and you know that their parents are an energetic anchor for the trauma that they experienced when they were young, related to their 4th House of their mother and their 9th House of their father. There's trauma there. Now, we can't necessarily just tell them.
"It's simple. All you got to do is be happy with your dad, go and talk with them. Just be honest, roll your shoulders back and just be honest about who you are". It's tricky to just tell a person to go and fix your relationship with your mother, and that will help a lot of what's going on with your 4th House.
And then they go and talk to their mother, and we don't know that relationship is like. The mother could be full of trauma that actually does ultimately bring that person down more than it elevates them. And we as an [00:39:00] astrologer just told them to do something that is now causing pain that is actually making the unconscious flinch. And this is leading us to the next thing,
Question 2 - Why does the Ego Flinch?
Dustin Cormier: The next question is how might the unconscious flinch at the prospect of this increased awareness that heralds pain?
Fiona Marques: Let's say that the mind or the ego, the person, is flinching at what the unconscious is heralding.
For me, the ego is that the glass around the fish that was in the fish .Bowl It intuitively knows that it's going to cease to exist if we actually go down this path of waking up, then "I won't be the glass holding this little bit of water around this fish. The fish will be free and I won't exist". So the ego is pre programmed to ensure its own survival and there is [00:40:00] nothing like drama and suffering for continuing the existence of the ego.
Dustin Cormier: Classic. That's how it happens for everybody, the ego is it's a fickle, tricky thing. Although I would say that the ego, doing what it does, is ultimately a part of the apparatus of the human spirit.
Fiona Marques: That's right. And that's that football match like you can't play football without a jersey on. It'll just be a whole bunch of people. So it's great to use your ego for what it's for. Fantastic. But it's not often that the ego wants to take the jersey off.
It just wants to play all day long.
Dustin Cormier: Yeah, and it often gets stuck. It gets stuck on favorite way to play, Yep. on its favorite team.
Fiona Marques: And the players it hates, like "I'm not getting off this field until I score more goals than that person over there. And I've been in a battle with this person since we were whatever, and I'm going to be the greatest of all time". The ego doesn't want to take that [00:41:00] jersey off.
Dustin Cormier: Because even the game, every game that the ego plays at every step along the way is,
going to teach the talents teach skills. Sometimes we have to run through our ego and experience the suffering there in order to recognize that there's parts of this that are good for me, but there's also suffering here. So I need to take the good and extract the wheat from the chaff, right? So this is part of the nature of ego in a lot of ways.
Now, this is why the tricky thing is us as astrologers we have to lead people to a universal objective path of wisdom, of jnana, of self realization.
And that's what we do as astrologers. We see in the chart. "Okay, this is kind of where this probably wants to go, right?" And then we talk about it with the person.
"How have you experienced this to be?" [00:42:00] And the person says, "I agree. I want that. That does seem like a good life for me." And we have agreed upon that, "But I can't because of these reasons." And they've, they're stuck in, in, in this ego story.
Now the person wants to be a great profound artist, but right now they're working at a cracker box factory in order feed their kids. We have a problem where what the unconscious wants to is different from what unconscious literally can do in this moment because the other responsibilities that it has. Happens all the time.
So a lot of the times it's just a matter of allowing the person to bring in as much of their desire of their true life into the life that they're living now. But ultimately when you get to down to objectivity, a lot of times you have to tell the person that "This is where your soul has gotten you to in this moment, in this life. And the sooner [00:43:00] you reckon with that, the sooner you come into the experience of what you've set up for yourself, the sooner you're not going to feel antagonized by it."
If a person wants to be a basketball player and they lost two legs in the war and this is what they're telling you, sometimes we as astrologers have to explain that "There's a reality that you're living within that you're going to have to integrate with your desires. And it's not always going to go perfect." Sometimes that happens in life and we as astrologers have a responsibility as astrologers, psychologists and healers.
Sometimes it's good for us to just ventilate the hope that they can do something that they are not actually destined to do. Sometimes that's painful to do, but this is part of the pain.
The pain of a person with no legs, desiring to be an NBA basketball player, and just [00:44:00] loathing the fact that they're victimized. "This happened in my life, this brought me to the war, I was on these drugs, my parents said go, I didn't want to go, and now I can't do this thing that I wanted to do."
Sometimes we have to introduce them to the pain that they're putting themselves through. It's And it's like extracting a tooth. Telling them just to get to recognize and listen, "What can you do with what you currently have?" They're going to say, "No, I don't want to do what I can do with what I currently have. I want to have what I want in order to do what I want to do." And this is the tooth festering. "I want this and I can't have it."
We have to remove that tooth through pain, through the pain of recognizing what actually is, "What is the truth of your reality? Let's be objective."
But again,you could be halfway through a conversation with a person who lost their [00:45:00] legs the war, and you try to explain to them that reality might be different from what your ego expects it to be. And they say, "You know what? This is not what I expected from this conversation. Give me a refund. I'm turning my computer off!" And they're running away from this truth. And then they're going to go away and they're going to live their life and eek their way through it without chasing the deeper picture.
That would be like the person flinching at what their unconscious is trying to tell them. Us as astrologers, we're halfway through the extraction process and this person's shaking and saying, "Ow, my nervous system cannot take the pain of this realization. I want to abandon it. I want to get out halfway through it. It's too much for me to experience. do not want to go through this pain.
Fiona Marques: And I think that's where yoga, meditation, what we're talking about, Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, one [00:46:00] does want to train. Have a training program where, little by little, we are listening in a more relaxed way to the ups and downs of our somatic experience or emotional experience. So we could say, "We're increasing our capacity to be relaxed in an emotional experience". But often these feelings are sensations they're, like you were saying, shaking, or people feel very cold or very hot or nauseous. There's lots of physical feelings that we have. And so one wants to be on a training program, as any athlete, to get stronger and more and more capable. And that's what yoga is really offering us is the chance to be athletes. To be at the top of our game for this game of life.
And
that training is about breathing.
integrating, that barely [00:47:00] manifests, those thoughts and sometimes emotions through the breath. With our physical cells that are opening and closing and exchanging potassium and, doing physical things. Breathing is just it's so wonderful. It's like our lifeline. We have to breathe to be alive. But it's also so much more than just taking in oxygen. It is helping us to integrate all of these various levels of the body the energy bodies and the somatic bodies and the physical bodies.
Dustin Cormier: That was where I was leading to with this.
Question 3 - From Illumination to Enlightenment
Dustin Cormier: The third point that I would bring up is "How do we as healers deal with another person flinching at the prospect of the pain that awareness brings?" And you've answered exactly the way that I've got written. Is that there are practices that will necessarily be involved in taking a person from illumination [00:48:00] to embodiment or enlightenment. Enlightenment and illumination are two different things. Illumination is just, knowledge. But it's a very different thing to know life than to feel life. And many people on the path of self realization, they dig themselves through psychology and they read all the books. And they know what yoga is. What is yoga? "Oh let me just point you to Patanjali." me just point you to Patanjali."No, no, no, no, no, no. What is yoga?" When you ask a person, what is it? When you really get down to it, it's going to be a listening to yourself. How do I navigate the knowledge through my own energy field? What does the knowledge mean to me?
And the only way [00:49:00] to do that is to listen, to practice mindfulness, to practice presence. And especially to breathe, as you've said. Essentially, what we have to do is encourage a person to find joy in meaning, Dharma is the big one. To find meaning and joy in the suffering that they're going through right now. In order to recognize that if they are conscious, and if they develop a sattvic lifestyle, they will have the energy to constantly contemplate. And constantly, every day, have some kind of session where, number one, you're training your compulsions to come into focus. That's chitta vritti nirodha. Once the vritti has had nirodha, once the vritti has disappeared, once you've exercised restraint [00:50:00] on your compulsions, what happens is that energy comes inside of your energy field. So once this energy is there, the question becomes, "Oh gosh, what do I do with this?
Now I have develop new habit patterns. I have to develop new things that I want to do with my energy." So the ideal number one, is to practice the yamas and the niyamas. And we get ,into asana, which sitting still, and we practice pranayama, which is circulating energy through our bodies. All of these things are putting our energy in a constructive way.
Once this happens, a lot of energy comes through. This is the bejeweled lizard. This is Vritra. As soon as you bring in the energy your energy field, all of the distractions are all a sudden much more distracting than they've ever been. Because now you've got the Indriyas, now you've got Jus, now you've got Jing. Now [00:51:00] you've got more energy. And you're in high stakes karma at that point. When your karma can even drill you even deeper into your attachments.
This is the classic thing for every yoga person. Especially people who are young, they get into yoga, they start training their mind, and then their vices groove much deeper. Their vices groove just as deeply as their virtues. Because ultimately it's kundalini, energies coming in, and it goes from tamas to rajasic, where the highs are just as deep as the lows.
The next thing is to get into contemplation practice, the higher end of yoga, which is going to evolve devotion. This is what gives a person joy in being present with the pain. You got to kind of fast a little bit. Again you're not doing any of the bad distracting things, but that energy is still [00:52:00] there. How do you align it so that you are gaining? You have faith that this austerity of sitting and meditating and practicing, writing in my journal, contemplating who am I truly, who do I want to be? By devoting yourself to that truth, to the light, to the inner light, to self realization is really a key.
Bhakti, this is why they say bhakti in yoga is very key because it's love, it's devotion to the deeper truth of what you are and what you want to be.
The answer is being present and listening to the pains inside the body and loving it, forgiving yourself for where your unconscious has taken you, rolling your shoulders back, feeling when you get angry and you get upset and listening, truly listening. When you get into [00:53:00] contemplation. And you think, "Okay, gosh, my astrologer has said that there are happinesses that I should be doing, but I'm still stuck in these karmas. I try to move towards what my astrologer said I know that I can be that artist. I know I can get a meaningful wife and children and I know I could do all these things. But I'm stuck drinking. I'm stuck with my loser friends. How am I going to get from A to B?"
And It is through this ability to sit with the pain. Like you said, I think when you were talking about breathing, you were talking about how the mind wants to squirrel away into its Vritras. We have to train and dedicate ourselves to an everyday circadian rhythm of a sattvic lifestyle, where we're eating proper food, eating things that [00:54:00] are in a rhythm, a kind of big breakfast, big lunch, and then not too big of a supper. And eating healthy food along the way. Giving ourselves at least twice a day time to practice some kind of energetic Pranayama. And then sitting for Svadhyaya, which is contemplation. I try to do it at least twice a day if I can help it, once in the morning, and then once at the end of the day, or instead of flicking on the TV and letting destiny happen to me, I roll my shoulders back and I contemplate "What that astrologer said. And what do I have to do in order to slowly, patiently come into that? How do I enjoy my experiences with my friends and my loved ones? Work out the complications between us?"
All of these things, you write them down. You sit with them and it's going to be painful to think about these [00:55:00] things. It's going to be more painful than just drinking your beer and smoking your cigarette and watching the Jetsons. It's going to be more painful than that.
But as astrologers, we can encourage people to recognize that Joy comes when you are engaging discerningly with your pain and pleasure. Greater joy can come if you are present, if you are here, if you are mindful. And if you have a therapist, whether it's the astrologer or just a therapist, to help you move through coping mechanisms and techniques that allow you to recognize when you're getting lost in a pattern of attachment to goodness or attachment to pain.
When your lover is trying to tell you that we're not, that you are blocked in your emotional intimacy and [00:56:00] you hear them and you know it, But you're still evading that pleasure. You're still evading that joy inside yourself because you don't trust them. Because when you were two years old, you saw how your mother and your father abandoned each other and abandoned you. And you don't want to through that abandonment again. So you don't allow yourself to emotionally develop deep bonds with that partner. So that's a pleasure. That's a joy that's right in front of you that trauma can cause us to run away from.
Essentially, the answer to this third thing, how do we deal with the flinching of us towards the illumination of the unconscious? is to listen to ourselves. To listen to our pain. Write it down, meditate on it, contemplate on it. Contemplate our chitta. And have faith that [00:57:00] healing and the self is there for us. Once we can sit with pain, then we can make the best use of what an astrologer can give. Then we can make the best use out what psychedelics can give. Then we can make the best use of anything that brings illumination of the unconscious and of the pain of our psychic limbs being on the red hot burner of things that aren't good for us.
Fiona Marques: It's really interesting that the 6th House is our daily habits, right? And the 6th House is also our enemies. And conflicts. And obstacles and all of those hard things that are getting in our way. But the 6th House is also, if we go to the football analogy it's that adversary in the other football player is what makes football so much fun and so enjoyable is that we have someone who's willing to play with [00:58:00] us. When you kick a football against a wall, sure, maybe you can keep that up for whatever, an hour or something. But when you have another person who has signed up and agreed that they are going to try and keep this football away from you, and you are equally signed up that you're going to try and keep the football away from them, There's this mutual play that turns an enemy, which is what teams are in opposition to each other, but it turns enemies, it's into a game. And then we want to train and we want to get better. And so I think that a really big part for me in my journey was saying yes to life. I think that when you talked about Plato's cave and coming out and it being very bright and very noisy, I don't really know about Plato's cave, but it reminds me of the birth canal. You can just imagine that baby, is like being in this kind of lush, warm, temperature controlled, fluid environment with a nice to tunk, to tunk of the heartbeat all the time. All of the food is being provided. All of the waste is [00:59:00] being taken away. It's just fantastic existence, perhaps. And then you arrive. out of the birth canal and I bet you it feels bright and I bet you it feels noisy. And there are other experiences like you're saying that can be traumatic either in childhood or anywhere along the line, that can switch us over to saying no to life.
That we're like, "No, I don't want that. I don't want that pain. I didn't want that to happen to me. I don't want this to be the reality". And every time that we say no, at those levels to life, we are cutting off that energy field that we've been talking about. And then there's not as much life pranha flow to come through us because we're saying, "No, I don't want that". It's like we're putting up a shield or we're cutting off flow there. And
Dustin Cormier: It's like God is knocking on the back of our heads we're saying "No, no, that's not what I'm looking for right now. This is all I know. This is too unknown.
Fiona Marques: [01:00:00] And painful". And I think that's where the saying yes to life is part of realizing that it's not wrong to feel pain. So when you accept that, "Yes, I'm feeling pain, okay, good. That's part of the ride. So what can I do with this pain? Is it a get out of the way type of pain or is it a breathe through and integrate?"
So it's like what you were saying, is it a, light I can see it and I need to take action and get away from it. Or is it a water? I have to listen and integrate this pain. But when we accept that, "Yes, I am signed up for the experience of life, because actually everything that's coming to me through the 6th House of enemies and obstacles is actually the dream opponent that I want to be playing with. They're my Ronaldo to my Messi"
So when we can say yes to the 6th House, then we can really transform our life. Because for so long, as we say no to the 6th House, the 6th House gets to rule us and just it's a paper tiger. It puts up some kind of [01:01:00] difficult obstacle and we cower and turn in the opposite direction from where we really, truly wanted to go.
So saying yes to the 6th House and saying yes to life, like the contract of life, which is to come here and experience. That is what consciousness wanted to do when it incarnated here was to experience. Full stop. It wasn't to experience joy or to experience bliss. I mean, nice. Great. If you can get it. It was just to experience.
"So am I experiencing anything?" If the answer to that question is yes, then you are on track and alive. And if the answer to, "Am I experiencing anything?" Is no, it's probably because we have said no to life. We've shut down so many energy channels that life, the experience that life is can't get in there.
Dustin Cormier: And that would be the worst, that would be the situation.
Fiona Marques: when But it might feel safe. And, when one is bleeding to death, you have to stop the bleeding. So there is, there is [01:02:00] an emergency break. And it's called no. But once you're back in a stable situation, then life is going to keep knocking at that door to try to get the flow happening again. And that knock may feel painful, but it's actually the invitation to open up to life.
Yin, Yang and an Updated Story of Icarus
Fiona Marques: As I'm listening to all that you've generously shared and it's been wonderful to have in this conversation, some of the places where I'm diverging is I'm just not so sure that this experience of being alive is about getting somewhere as fast as possible. "That the goal of life is to burn through my individual karmas and get to the top or win or be free because I have put in the hard work [01:03:00] and I've paid my debts and I've been really serious." That maybe it's, I'm much more, it's a leela, it's a play, it's an experience to be had among the joy of other loving, vibrating, little pieces of God that are in individual bodies. It's a play to be enjoyed and experienced in a loving way, not a battle to be won or beaten. Yeah.
Now that could be me with my own chart and everybody's got their own chart. I do agree that it's wonderful to have the god and goddess, this beautiful circle, that everybody's on a continuum somewhere around there. But I think I came into this incarnation very determined to escape suffering and saw spirituality as a way to progress quickly, [01:04:00] to burn through and almost detach oneself as if one could be immune or something. And now I see it much more as the joy of being alive with no destination in mind of just loving being here. Let's just say yes to, to this and that when God in the little pieces that we all are all awake enough, we will reconvene in one gorgeous ball of bliss, that doesn't need to be on planet Earth. But that while we're here, there are many things to be enjoyed in the same way that one would enjoy a tough game of football or tennis. That's, it's very testing, but it's very engaging.
Dustin Cormier: Beautiful Fiona I think it's very relevant that you've brought up this dimension of it because I do think that each person [01:05:00] is going to take to either the feminine or the masculine approach to self realization. And I think that each person has to step into both at some degree, but there will be those who are more one way.
Who are more yin and are well served to integrate the yang, and there are people who are more yang or very well served to integrate the yin. In today's time, most people can do a lot of the yin that you're talking about. The receiving, the listening, the enjoying the game.
Fiona Marques: Spirituality can become competitive almost kind of, it's kind of like it becomes your own ego becomes attached to how fast am I getting through this? And am I progressing faster than that person started meditating when I did? And, like it's, it can become its own illusion.
Dustin Cormier: It can.
But you know, there's a great metaphor that I've come into. Ryan Kurczak does so much of the good stuff that I get [01:06:00] into and he kind of led me into this idea of do you know the story of Icarus?
It's the winged fellow, he had wax wings. And his dharma was to fly close to the Sun. And he wanted to get as close to the Sun as possible.
Let's consider the Sun in this to be the red hot burner that our psychic limbs have touched and they can become traumatized towards. Remember, this is that truth that we were talking about. Now the masculine humor of the consciousness just wants to go towards the Sun as hard as it can. And this is what Icarus does at first. When we're young we say, "Oh, okay. That's what I want to do with my life. Great. Got it. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. I'm going to go for this thing. I'm going to go for this thing. I'm going to go for this thing."
And what happens is that Icarus flies very close to the Sun. But his dharma is to spend as much time as close to [01:07:00] liberating action as possible. So he wants to sit in the heat of the Sun for as long as he can. So what does he do? Is he goes right for it, he basically dives into the Sun itself. And what happens is that he burns himself out.
He burns himself out of facing his Dharma. Just like many of our clients do. They come to us as astrologers and we say and it accords with their consent, this is where you're going, right? Okay. So let's get you on the path of going there". And so the person gets in their head, "Oh, Dustin said, my astrologer Fiona said, I've got to go in this direction. I've got to push really hard to do it". Of course a good astrologer will combine the feminine and the masculine.
Because what happens is when people get that there's pain in my unconscious and I have to extract the tooth. They want to just extract tooth. They want to get it out of the way. And something I've recently written is that it's our desperation to get out of [01:08:00] suffering that keeps us stuck in it.
So what happens is just like Icarus, the person moves towards their dharma, they burn themselves up in it. Forget the water. They forget to enjoy the journey along the way. And what happens is that they melt they crash down to earth and for three years Icarus having crashed down to earth that he tried to face his Dharma. He went he was 18 years old he went into Rahu and he got to about 27 and the node switched its route and said, "You know what, Rahu, this experience of facing my dharma is too painful. It's been too much for me."
He traumatizes himself towards the idea of dharma. This again, it's the same thing. How many people have you counseled where they wanted to be an artist for a long time and they put all their eggs into that basket. They didn't take care of their love life. They didn't take care of anything else. They just did [01:09:00] it full heart until they're about 25 Saturn return comes. They're traumatized because it didn't work in their mind and they come back. They get a wife, they get a husband, they get children. They say, "Yeah, I had a dream to be an artist, but I went too close to the Sun. I burned myself out. I got traumatized by it. Now I still have that desire, but I'm afraid of it because I failed last time."
It's Icarus went towards the Sun, crashed down to earth. What happens after about three years, Icarus starts to get antsy again. He says, "I want to face my dharma again, but I know I crashed last time. It's painful me now, but oh, I still got to do it."
So he goes and does it again. After three years, he regenerates himself, pushes himself up, runs into the Sun again. And what happens, just like last time, he know how to rest, he doesn't know how to enjoy his process along the way, and he burns himself out. Falls, [01:10:00] crashes down to the Earth again.
And as the story goes, this is how I like to tell it, one day a woman comes to him and recognizes the back of his psyche, the shadow of his psyche. She simply says to him, "Why don't, instead of just diving for your dharma and burning yourself out with it, why don't you get to a comfortable edge, where you feel safe, you feel supported, you've got my love, got your water, you've got the people around you, you've got support, you feel nurtured, you're going to therapy, you have developed a presence of yoga, where you can sit with that pain, but don't need to flagellate yourself. You don't need to put yourself into undue suffering. You push yourself so that karmic action is meaningful. But then you come back. Cool off a little bit, relax, enjoy the journey along the way. Have an experience of the joy [01:11:00] along the way, and then move forward."
And then what happens is instead of a wide spectrum of lots of Dharma for a bit and then lots of non Dharma, Adharma, lots of pain, lots of distraction, lots of vrittis, lots of hitting rock bottom as people do. And then they go to climb up again. And then they, the pressure of the heat at the top is too hot. So then they fall down just as hard as they climbed up. And the amount of time close to the Sun is minimal.
What you want to do is come to the middle path, and it's once you're in the middle path that you can edge towards your dharmic action. You move towards it, you enjoy it, but you don't feel like a failure when you can't hold it. You don't feel like a failure when you can't hold that pain. You have to forgive yourself. And enjoy the journey along the way, as you Fiona being [01:12:00] our goddess in this conversation has reminded us. This is part of this journey.
And I think that we can't really come to be fully aligned with our dharmic action until we can be in this state of peace.
Fiona Marques: I think in the end, there will be those who are well served by more of that masculine hardness, and there will be those who are well served by more of the feminine softness by the receiving. We all need both. This is the universal path. We all need the yin and the yang, but the individual path is listening to what it means to me.
The Importance of the Guide you Choose
Fiona Marques: It's very important I think for people these days as astrologers for us to invite this kind of intimacy. This kind of real knowing of who a person is whenever we have a session with them. I think that a [01:13:00] good astrologer will know how to balance looking into the right information with sitting and listening to the heart of the person in order to make, not just a message, but a confrontation, a healthy, sound, patient confrontation with the person's Unconscious.
Dustin Cormier: Engagement.
an Engagement.
certainly.
Yeah, that's, that probably is a better word. Maybe it's cause I'm a Leo rising I like to use the word confrontation. And that might just be a different astrologers. Cause I often find myself acting as a, confrontational agent in my sessions with people as an astrologer. I think it's because I'm a Leo rising.
It is very important for anybody that I work with I explain this and say, "This is how I'm pressing buttons to say does that hurt? Did you know that this is a soft spot right [01:14:00] here?" And I think that different astrologers are going to yield different results based on how they like to approach these things. Because ultimately this is the importance of the astrologer making the connection with the individual client and going beyond just giving the light. The astrologer also has to listen to how much of the light the client can take and what's the best way for the client to take that medicine?
Fiona Marques: Yeah. I think we, we do need to be adaptive to the reality of that vibrating person in front of us and where they're at right now. So yeah, that's very much part of what I, what my practice is about,
Conclusion and Farewell
Fiona Marques: Okay. So as we get to the end of our conversation today, Dustin of course, I just want to say thank you so much for your generosity in preparing this topic for us. In showing up and bringing so much wisdom and [01:15:00] stories and colorful analogies that help us grasp what is a really profound and sometimes intangible topic.
So thank you, Dustin.
Dustin Cormier: absolutely, my pleasure fiona,
You have a way of expanding me every time I talk to Fiona in every single way, not just knowledge wise, but just in my heart. I love talking to you.
Fiona Marques: Right back at you! Can't wait till the next time you're back on the Vedic Astrology podcast.
Dustin Cormier: so great to me.
If we're lucky, there will be plenty of time for more joyful podcasts. Thanks so much, Dustin. And thanks everyone for joining us.
Fiona Marques: And look forward to, yeah, next time you join us on the Vedic Astrology podcast. Bye everyone.