NO ONE ELSE KNOWS BETTER THAN YOU
Imposter Feelings, Ancestry, Full Moon in Cancer, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Inheritance, Winter Solstice
On This Movement from Sagittarius to Capricorn
On This Movement from days getting shorter to days getting longer
On This Movement
“There is a kind of (very human) blindness we can have towards each other, a reactivity, where we don’t question our judgments enough, we foreclose on each other. Foreclosure … when we lose credit, credence … when a generalized system (a rig) overtakes a particular situation (lives). … we are strangers to ourselves and to each other, we are so mysterious and unpredictable, and that mysteriousness, which we want to protect ourselves from, is actually so enabling. Surely it is hard work and slow going, but we can change; we do change; we are changing. But only if we don't let our assumptions about what we or others are, or are capable of, calcify."
These beautiful sentences from Miranda Mellis are just so important right now. (I am reading writing with her and Kelly Murphy on December 22 in San Francisco). We need all of the elements to survive, both physically and spiritually, and this week embodies a shift from the visionary and vast energy of Fire into the practical and on-the-ground energy of Earth.
There’s a theory of astrology that each sign in the zodiac is a response to the one that comes before it, you can think of it like nature’s movement toward equilibrium. So it’s as if this Earth energy of Capricorn is asking Sagittarius, “But how are you going to make the vision happen? How is this actually going to show up on Earth, in form?” Questions that Sagittarius often finds tedious or limiting. These energies need each other, or we need both of them, or we learn through both of them. We learn how to not foreclose on each other (or ourselves!) due to our own zealotry (Sagittarius) or our own skepticism (Capricorn), by understanding and including vastly different energies.
This Earth question of how do we embody and manifest is very important because we live on the Earth and we live in bodies. We are subject to the rules of incarnation, the limitations of a body in this atmosphere on this land. Which sometimes feels terrible and sometimes beautiful.
One of the struggles that comes up a lot for people heavily influenced by Earth energy and when Earth energies are acting on us through transits and astrological cycles, is the sense that they aren’t qualified, that they are an imposter of some kind, and that somehow other people aren’t. Capricorn shows us what the rules are, and insists that we follow them. Rules help us! Like the rule / law of gravity, for example. Or the rule of seasons, how life on earth functions based on these cycles. But then some rules can oppress us (which is where Aquarius comes in after Capricorn to break all the rules).
Pluto is moving through Capricorn in the sky right now, and so is Saturn. These are huge influences which we see in the political and financial sphere where corrupt power structures are being exposed and broken up. Light is being shed in a huge new way, on what is not working. How so many of things we thought we were supposed to be aspiring toward are actually empty and or directly harmful. But just because we are seeing this, doesn’t mean we aren’t still subject to these old rules and are very much still engaged in a struggle with deciding for ourselves what works and what doesn’t, what we are really going after in life.
The feeling that I’m somehow an imposter has resurfaced lately in my work as a writer and astrologer and it feels like such an important thing to speak to right now. The very possibility that one could even be an imposter is based on the assumption that there is such a thing as a “real” version, that someone else somehow knows how to be, and that this knowledge or ability is perpetually unavailable to me.
I can’t help connecting this to what I’ve been learning about the history of birth, how many hundreds of thousands of women were literally burned by the church through Western Europe for their “witchcraft” of healing and midwifery. This points to a kind of power that is maintained by exactly this strategy of insisting that you are not the expert, that someone else is. I bring this history up because we don’t grow up outside of or separate from our ancestry, we grow up within it. We inherit it. This feeling that someone else is the expert, that someone else really knows, through all the layers of its resurfacing, feels older than me, because it is. It is inherited. And this is why “personal” healing is so essential for “collective” healing.
At the end of this week right as the Sun moves into Capricorn, the Moon moves into Cancer, its opposite, for a Full Moon. These two signs are most associated with the past, tradition, inheritance. The Full Moon is a good opportunity for releasing, shedding. Here are some questions to contemplate for furthering this practice:
What are the Saturn / Capricorn / emperor archetype voices that frequent your mind most often?
Where do you feel this sense of being a fake or that someone else holds some power that is unavailable to you?
What stories, situations, and people from your past contribute to these feelings today?
What stories, situations, and people from your past offer you life-sustaining traditions and empowering beliefs?
What part of collective fear and inadequacy can you be responsible for?
Suggestions for meditations / practices as antidotes to feeling like an imposter:
Write a list of what and where you feel competent and capable
Write a list of people in your life who affirm your capacity and potential
Spend more time with those people
Write a list of the specifics of what makes you feel like an imposter or inadequate in one column
Write a list of how these specifics might not be or are not true in the next column
If you need help with the last one, get a trusted friend to contribute to the list, sometimes someone outside of you can remind you of your capacities with more perspective
Meditate on nature itself and its beauty and aliveness, and invite more and more parts of yourself into what you include in nature. Take notice of any parts that it feels hard to include in your version of nature. Don’t force them, just notice, and let (your) nature include these parts in their time.