| View Blog
|
|
|
An astrologer friend of mine wrote a great email to a sister grieving over her alcoholic brother who will surely die. The brother Xxx is 40.
I thought this was such a wonderful description of the self destructive process.
Astrologers must deliver their information with tact, precision and compassion
Xxx has an extremely difficult chart ... He has Sun in Gemini, but he also has almost all the basic character-constituting planets in Gemini as well. You know what Gemini means -- words, play, lightness but also discomfort with heavy emotion. He's a Russian Gemini of course, so that makes him slightly more comfortable with drama and intensity than an American or Danish Gemini, but generally the sign doesn't like that stuff. He also has a Pisces Moon, highly sensitive and impressionable, permeable -- low defenses and porous boundaries -- and Pisces is traditionally the saint or the mystic or the escapist or the drug addict or the alcoholic.
But the Pisces Moon alone doesn't account for the kind of painful alcoholism you describe, though it's a classic indicator. Xxx has a difficult chart because underneath the Geminian lightness and Piscean sensitivity he has, not even an undercurrent, I would go as far as calling it a foundation even, of great rage and destructiveness. Because his delicate external persona isn't comfortable with that, alcohol may be the way that allows him to express that rage. But primarily it's probably a way to turn that rage against himself in a long, drawn-out process of self-destructiveness.... I can understand that you wonder if he loves anybody.
It's probably no great consolation to know that there are astrological, cosmic reasons that this is a particularly difficult time for him. Things must have gotten pretty rough in the late 90's – 98, 99, and then again around 2005 or so... I can't make predictions. The toughest challenges lie ahead but if he can make it through this year he has a good chance of things getting slightly easier. Xxx's rage isn't personal resentment or bitterness. He's not mad at your parents or simplistic pop-Freud stuff like that. It's something more primal than that.
I understand thinking a Buddhist retreat might help, but I don't see how that would put his destructiveness/self-destructivenss to use, because it's potentially the capacity for great creativeness.
You might see him as governed by the destroyer/creator archetypes of so many mythological systems. I don't see how what I know of modern Buddhism would be of much help really using that energy or using his the electrical energy of his highly strung nervous system either. I don't have any practical advice. But I think he needs ENGAGEMENT rather than DETACHMENT.
His wildness needs to be given full expression before it can be tamed into something more productive....
|
|
Posted by HighPriestess on 2008-06-22 18:15:03 | Rating: | Views: 36
|
| |
|
|
