Blocks To The Flow of Love: Air Signs
Okay so we think of blocks as stopping / intervening / impeding. And they do! But the magic thing about astrology is it describes places within us that block, and places that flow. And through describing, a form appears where we might not have even known there was a form. If there is a form, there can be another form, it can change, it can die, there can be a new one, it can shift. So I’m interested to talk about blocks not as an end point, but within a process (which you are, me too).
In astrology, blocks point to pathways. Blocks usually come with pain, and pain is sacred because it points us where we need to go. Pain offers us growth momentum. I didn’t say pain is good, or even welcome, I just said, sacred. That word, sacred, is as close as I can get to the feeling of magic that equanimity can open up for me. Astrology helps me access equanimity because it paints a really detailed, loving, impersonal portrait of our specificity.
One of the blocks I’m personally intimate with shows up with a predominance of Air signs. Especially Air signs showing up in the emotional planets - Moon, Venus and Mars. (What is going on with these planets in our charts help us understand how we try to get our emotional needs met.) For Air signs, a block or obstacle to the flow of love — which can be toward others and oneself — has to do with concepts. Air signs love concepts, concepts are their home. Concepts, strangely, are the most real thing to Air signs. So Air signs tend to orient their lives around concepts of what people should be doing. Concepts of what is right and wrong, what is equal, what is just. Air signs seek a view above the mess of emotions, and therefore love systems thinking and categorization. This is a paradox of Air signs — they can be so flexible in that it’s hard to know what decision to make, because every path is valid, but then they also can be really rigid. The rigidity comes from an idea as god. So when someone (including themselves) doesn’t follow the idea, the concept, the philosophy, the sensation for both parties can be a block of love. The people you love feel that you withhold in some way if they don’t match up to the concept of how you think they should be. Or you don’t grant yourself love if you don’t follow some philosophy you think is the best. You might not even call it a philosophy, it might be invisible in that way.
One indication there might be a philosophy or a “should” involved is when there is pain around how people are being. Perhaps a way of removing (or going around) the block is looking for the concepts that cause suffering, especially in how they affect your feelings toward others. If you find yourself constantly lamenting how people are (including yourself), a concept might need adjustment or abandonment.
Concepts are a key way we use our magical minds to learn. We develop or absorb a concept, use it in application in our lives, and often benefit from that. But another key part of the growth process is letting concepts go after they serve their purpose. Sometimes we cling to them long after they’ve expired.
Another block to the flow of love for Air signs is overthinking. Spending too much time in the thinking mind and not enough time in the body. Again we have these magical minds which can transport our awareness away from our bodies and that has all sorts of uses and pleasures. But when we time and space travel too much away from our bodies, usually we suffer, and we often don’t feel sensations of love, by which I mean, the flow of love. To feel requires a body. To work with this block, don’t overthink it! Just do hip circles, drink water and know that you are drinking water, get into child’s pose, walk to the bathroom and pee without your phone. That kinda thing. Keeping it simple. The body is lovingly waiting for us to return all the time.