Regulating Levels of Aggression
the God of Death has composted and transformed structures
Lately I’ve been mulling over this question:
Why is your anger everyone else’s job to navigate? Versus your job to regulate?
and wondering about how:
Conflict is inevitable, but violence doesn’t need to be.
As a younger person, I played basketball, but briefly. I quit because I couldn’t regulate my levels of aggression. I was either tackling the other team, or too hesitant that I might overdue it. So, in the middle ground, I wasn’t effective at all. Either balls were getting through or I was fouling all over the place.
Instead I stuck with running, which I’d been doing competitively since I was 9. By age 12, I was running with the high-school Track & Field team. In Cross Country I was the only girl one year and only 1 of 2 the next, which was problematic on the training runs because the boys were faster and I’d often get lost out on the rural roads.
When my track career was obstructed, I switched to karate and volleyball. Karate to learn effective channels for my anger and volleyball as a team sport with boundaries. On a volleyball court the 6 players rotate and get to play all positions, yet while you’re in any one spot it’s meant to be your terrain. There’s lots of calling “Mine!” for balls you intend to pass to team members in a play, or sink over the net to the other team. That bit of protocol made all the difference for me.
Still does.
What’s behind the anger of the boys in the trucks? What personal catharsis or collective training in conflict navigation is missing in our aggression-fraught world?
Recently I experienced a deep deception by someone that led to violence, not for me but for another woman. The violence was close enough though to still be horrifying. Looking at a person’s chart helps me make sense of otherwise confounding circumstances, so when I was able to check the perpetrator’s birth chart I found he has his moon at 29 degrees Capricorn. The anoretic or last degree of any sign, in traditional astrology, is ruled by the God of War, Mars, and is considered a difficult degree because of that and Pluto has been rolling back and forth over this point the past few months.
My Sun is at the anoretic degree of Aries, a sign ruled by Mars, so with a double dose of war-like energy in my essence, it’s no wonder I’ve been navigating aggression within and without. Another way (aside from athletics) I’ve found to channel strong energies like anger was through acting and, in particular, through a spate of anger-driven characters I played onstage and in film—vampire, zombie, orc, serial killer, Medea…
With consciousness we can transform anything.
Without it we are puppets to those unconscious drivers.
So when people still ask, “Do you believe in Astrology?” I have to laugh, if only inwardly. It’s not about belief. Languages don’t require belief. They require familiarity and skill to wield effectively. Either you speak Swahili or you don’t. It exists and your belief in it is irrelevant. Wrong question.
The right question is how are you going to wake up? How are you going to contend with your unseen, yet active, even seething, angers and griefs? How are you going to cultivate your potentialities, potencies and super-powers for the benefit of all?
Astrology provides a language and a road map to befriend and navigate the terrain of your own vessel and trajectory in this life. It exists whether you believe in it or not. There are other such tools and languages for cultivating self-awareness and self-actualization. Use what works. Please, for the sake of us all, use what works to grow up and become the gods we so idolize.
In this moment, as I write, the planet Pluto is shifting into the sign of Aquarius, a sign known for its originality, innovation and emphasis on unity in diversity. With its 248 year orbit around the Sun, Pluto’s 16 year journey through Capricorn that started in 2008 is finally coming to an end and he won’t be back there again for another 230-ish years. So we’ve had our Capricornian systems, hierarchies, and structures transformed.
Think back to 2008 for you. What began then? Or what began being transformed then?
I started MYOGA and Powa Centre that year. I remember going to the bank in Wellington, NZ, and being denied support because, to them, yoga was not a viable business.
For me the journey of transformation has primarily been in the realm of my public face (from demonic-character player to yoga studio owner and beyond), my own resources and my self-esteem. I went ahead with the business even without the bank’s support. Later, kind and generous believers in what I was doing chipped in with loans that made it possible to continue. The whole process of creating brands, locating a suitable space, negotiating a commercial lease, and marketing the businesses of MYOGA, freedom to unfold, and its home studio, Powa Centre, the beehive of wellbeing, was a huge part of my experience of Pluto in Capricorn.
The God of tranformation, of energy and life changing forms, who rules the underworld and all riches that rest deep in the dark of the Earth (for plutous means wealth in Greek), has been methodically reworking the sign of structures and of doing things step by step. Like the goat making his way up the mountain one little hoof at a time.
There was a day when I taught 5 yoga classes and the material weight and responsibility of what I had taken on was so tremendous, it was all I could do to trudge back to the studio, bone-weary, one little hoof at a time. To get myself there I counted the steps it took and made note of how many until I had “turned a corner” and how many more until “it was all downhill from there”. I took these metaphors very much to heart as prophecies for the days ahead. Each step became a lantern to walk towards in the challenging, transformative, and ultimately empowering months and years ahead. Out of it emerged my mantra, trust the longer journey.
Not long after that prophetic walk, I cobbled together the Seasonal Structure, a map of MYOGA’s teaching over a whole year that weaves the chakras into each seasonal sadhana. This was my own personal iteration of the transformation of structures that Pluto in Capricorn demands. By fusing together what worked and was effective, I bypassed the guru trap of the yoga world which was soon to be revealed by Pluto’s unblinking gaze. Part of MYOGA’s stated ethos has been from the start,
“We empower you to empower yourSelf.”
As happens when we enter the underworld, we strip off all we thought we knew and leave behind what cannot be carried into the nether realms. So now, today, The God of strip-down rigour steps over the threshold from all the seeming destruction he’s wrought to our financial, educational, and social systems and hierarchies.
Yesterday I walked with some wise folks in the rainforest and we saw fallen and still-standing “dead” trees. Yet our ideas of dead and alive are just that—ideas. Ideas seated in polarity (reflected in political systems of seeming “sides”). Reality is more nuanced and requires greater skill from us to re-cognize.
A tree is not only the emoji version of trunk and branches. It is the seed, the unseen roots, the seedling, the sapling, the mature fruiting tree, the fruit that falls or is plucked, the lightning-struck tree, the hollowed out trunk, and the fallen trunk re-integrating into the Earth. We could say the mycellial network is the consciousness that links the spirallic stages of existence, as they transform from one to the next.
Looking back and seeing what has transformed in you since 2008, fellow Ent, fellow tree-being, what will you intend to transform in the next 20 years that Pluto spends in Aquarius? Having composted what is dying in our structures and particularly in our patriarchies, and through that process given us clarity on what true power is,
How will we empower unity in diversity?
What aspects of our human ingeniousness and innovation need transformation?
What will you transform within the only vehicle you have—your own life?
These are key questions to contemplate and bring up into your conscious conscience, because the sooner we can transmute poison into potion individually and collectively, the better. For who wants to live in a world of poison? Look around, in the name of safety we have poisoned and strait-jacketed ourselves with plastic, as only one example.
I suspect to get to true safety we’ll need to take responsibility, individually and collectively, for our anger. Only then can we better regulate and channel the raw energy of anger into teamwork that goes beyond sports and into the co-creative and interstitial spaces within and between us.
