Hi friends,
Happy Solar Eclipse! How are you all doing out there?
It’s been a lot, hasn’t it? This eclipse is definitely the most talked about eclipse I’ve ever encountered, in my life at least, by so much. The amount of articles and videos and theories that have been flying around about this day are wild- just the sheer quantity.
I don’t know if this is just because I’m in a bubble of meaning-making practitioners like astrologers and human design folks, but I definitely feel like a lot of the chatter this year has gone from the edges into the center with this eclipse. You may be feeling already innundated with information about this eclipse, but I hope to bring in a little bit of a new perspective today and throughout the course of the week about where this eclipse is landing in the cycles of time!
I remember the first eclipse I ever saw. I was 8, and my gymnastics class all went outside in our leotards to glimpse the amazing phenomenon through pinhole cameras we had built out of cardboard boxes. ‘Eclipse glasses’ weren’t a readily available thing back then, so all we could do is take turns looking at the ground as the sky around us got darker and the air got cooler. I remember it clearly because of how strange it was to be looking at the ground instead of the sky!
Whether you’re looking down, up, or inward, today marks the moment we’ve all been waiting for, the Great American Solar Eclipse in Aries. I’m recording this a couple of days before, as I plan to sit in meditation during the eclipse itself (and maybe set up a timelapse on my camera…)
Eclipses are big shifts of energy, any way you shake it. This eclipse may usher in endings of what has become stagnant in your life, and open the door for new beginnings, new potentials to heal old wounds, and a time-bending quality to time.
Here’s your weekly overview of this week’s Cycles of Time. Scroll down to read the transcript from the Episode, or listen by clicking above- or wherever you find podcasts!
Your Weekly Overview:
Medicine Wheel Direction: East
Wuxing Element: Wood
Pagan Season: Ostara
Zodiac: Aries
Moon Phase: New Moon Solar Eclipse in Aries (April 8)
I Ching Hexagram/Human Design Gate: 51 (April 5-10) transits into 42 (April 11-15)
51 = Thunder over Thunder (Zhen: “A Powerful Jolt”) or The Gate of SHOCK
42 = Wind over Thunder (Yi: “Increase”) or The Gate of GROWTH
Let’s get into the week
I’m calling this episode a Shocking Solar Eclipse because today the sun and moon are meeting in the Human Design Gate of Shock. We talked about this a bit last week, as the sun entered the Gate of Shock last Thursday, and will remain here until this Wednesday, when we’ll transition into the Gate of Growth.
The eclipse is in the Zodiac sign Aries, and so I made a little social media carousel post and reel about all the gates the sun transits through during Aries season. A big part of this podcast is seeing how these different philosophies relate to each other, so it was cool to get a birds-eye-view of the ordering of the Gates in this first Zodiac month of spring. Check that out on your socials by following @cyclesoftimepodcast or @astro.somatics. It’s a review of the energies of the season of the ram through a ram’s point of view!
The Gate of Innocence is the freshly-born, wide-eyed infant ram..
The Gate of Opinions is the baby ram finding its voice and bleating for all to hear.
The Gate of the Hunter/Huntress is the young ram growing in horns and setting his sights toward a goal.
The Gate of Shock is the older ram discovering that the world fights back.
The Gate of Growth is the adult ram realizing that the world is made up of a cycle of actions and responses.
The Gate of Ordering allows the elder ram to distill all of the lessons from Aries season, break out of reactive patterns, and initiate something brand new.
Click below to view on Instagram :)
Shock Leads to Growth
With the eclipse in mind, I spent a good amount of time last week thinking about Shock and how it relates to Growth. This eclipse itself promises some kind of shocking story on the news or some kind of shocking inner revelation, so I want to focus this episode on that evolution of how something shocking ultimately helps us grow.
I was thinking back to the last time I truly felt shocked, and couldn’t really put my finger on it. Shock is something that comes out of the blue, a poignant moment of awakening. You feel shock in a sudden moment, but the electrical current that was leading up to that shock- a live wire or a lightning bolt- didn’t necessarily come out of nowhere. Shock pretty much always reveals something that has been hidden for a time, and the length of time that it has been hidden from us makes the shock cut all the deeper. How long did you know about this? How long has this been happening? Why is this new to me?
I think if I slowed down enough, I would have to admit that a lot of things in this world, everyday, are shocking to me. I think so many of us have become jaded, and that jadedness is our bodies way of insulating us from a near-constant barrage shock. Today, with access to so much violence at our fingertips, that ‘shock’ isn’t quite the word we come to when we hear news that could otherwise break us to our core. It’s more like, “Oh, shit. I can’t believe that. Well, actually, I’m not that surprised…”
Over our lives, we have developed thick skins, especially when it comes to hearing about things that are not immediately affecting our immediate skin and bones. We have known of war and been at war to some degree, in some far off place, almost constantly for most of our lives.
But it seems that we’ve finally reached a tipping point, where the amount of unconscionable events and actions that we’re surrounded by are unable to stay hidden, and unable to stay numb to. I think a lot of that has to do with the way we consume media today, with the skin and bones of people from all over the world at our fingertips. When I was growing up, a British accent on BBC news telling about the bombing in Yugoslavia or a talking head on CNN felt so far from my day-to-day life that even if I was old enough to understand it then, I would have still felt sheltered and numb.
But now, we have TikTok and Instagram and Youtube and dozens of other peer journalists showing us inside their living rooms and inside regions where a genocide is actively taking place, paid for by our tax dollars. It is impossible not to feel shocked at this moment in time, shocked into disgust. The images and videos I saw of the World Central Kitchen humanitarian aid trucks in Gaza deliberately targeted by 3 Israeli bombs definitely penetrated my defenses, my curated thick skin. The news that $18 billion worth of bombs was approved by the US government to be sent to Israel on the same day shocked me to the core.
Feeling shock is good for us, it’s good for our growth. If we insulate ourselves from shock by burying ourselves in the sand, we will get stuck there. If we play it cool or smart or whatever and tell ourselves that something doesn’t shock us, we take steps backward, away from meeting the shock head on, and it’s likely to be reintroduced to us again down the line, through a different messenger.
I have really been feeling into the lesson of the young ram being shocked and offended by how the world butt’s back against him up sometimes. In this metaphor, and this telling, spring arrives with innocence and hope, and soon we inevitably discover how much the world can hurt. But it’s that innocence and hope meeting up with shock that helps us grow.
Something is shocking because it goes against our assumptions about how something should be. And in Aries season, I believe that these hopes and assumptions are coming from somewhere deep, somewhere connected to the purest truth. Although it feels like years ago already, it was only a few short weeks ago that we were in Pisces season, the archetype of the two fishes swimming in the sea of eternity. Pisces represents the time after death and before birth, the merging together in dreamspace of all the lessons we have accumulated over our last lifetime, all of our lifetimes, throughout the collective consciousness of humanity.
So the hopes and assumptions that the little ram comes in with in Aries season, the desire for love, for us all to just get along, come from a place that is rich with the wisdom of timelessness. The hope and assumptions that the shocking event is trying to take down is not based in idealism, or selfishness, but instead in the desire for wholeness, and the desire for unity.
So, recoiling against the shock is not a bad thing. It’s natural to move away from what shocks us- all animals do it. But the growth comes in when we realize that we can only overcome shock by not recoiling forever, but instead letting it strengthen us and responding to it as an active player. In the I’Ching, the Gate of Shock is called Thunder. When we unexpectedly hear thunder, we first may feel fear or shock, and then we have a sharpened vision, to temporarily seek shelter.
Chiron and Mercury Retrograde influence this Eclipse
This eclipse means that the sun and moon are both in the Gate of Shock, and I also wanted to talk about a couple more planetary players who are also currently in this gate. The comet Chiron, known as the wounded healer, is here too at the exact degree of the eclipse, and Mercury is retrograding back through the gate of Shock as well this week. The energy of both Chiron and Mercury retrograde in the Gate of Shock are adding an element of deep reflection, review, and reconsideration of our personal wounds, so that we may heal them.
When Mercury is retrograde it simply means that based on the different orbital speeds between the earth and Mercury, Mercury is appearing to go backwards across the ecliptic from our POV on earth. Mercury retrograde is a kinda pop-culture astrology hot item, where people are afraid of traveling and sending the wrong email, and this can be true- if we’re trying to move too fast during a Mercury Rx, the universe is going to let us know. But retrogrades can also be great times for intentionally slowing down, and implementing the “re”-words into our lives. Redoing, renewing, revising, recalibrating. We all need times within the year to edit and look over the direction we’re going, and Mercury goes Rx 3 times a year, giving us time to do that.
But this one is conjunct the eclipse and also the planetary body Chiron. Chiron used to be considered an asteroid, but is now considered a comet or a planetoid in the scientific community. Chiron has an elliptical orbit between Saturn, the planet of tradition and structure, and Uranus, the planet of the future and revolution. In a way, he is considered a bridge between the two energies, between the past and the future.
In mythology, Chiron was a centaur who was rejected and abandoned by his mother. Some renditions say that she rejected him because of his beastly appearance, being half man and half horse, but others tell that it was because his mother Philyra, a sea nymph, was raped by the Titan god Cronus, who was in the form of a horse. Chiron was found and adopted by the god Apollo, and he became a famous teacher and healer, known for his profound abilities in math, science, and arts. He healed and taught many students, but in the end, he couldnt heal his own deepest wound.
Chiron got wounded by an arrow dipped in hydra blood shot by Hercules, in a battle between the god and a group of Centaurs. Centaurs were known to be bestial, lusty, and uncivilized, and they approached a cave where Hercules had convinced another god to open a bottle of wine. In some tellings, this was a sacred wine bottle that the centaurs vowed to protect. They smelled it being open to drink, and a battle ensued between the gods and the centaurs, where Chiron was caught in the crossfire.
He tried but couldn’t heal this wound. I believe it’s because he witnessed and couldn’t reconcile the polarities that existed within him: animal vs. god, past vs. future, nature vs. nurture, and body vs. mind. In so much pain, but unable to die, he gave up his immortality and Zeus placed him among the stars for eternity.
Chiron being highlighted and revealed by this eclipse is asking us to look at what seems irreconcilable within our own selves, at which wounds have become blind spots to who we want to become. In order to grow, we must look at the things we have been hiding from ourselves.
So, during this eclipse, if an old emotion or pattern comes up for you, it might be shocking to you that it’s still there, still something to be contended with there is a tendency to retreat. “I already knew that”. But instead, in order to grow, we can take something that shocks us or resurfaces and consider how much we’ve already grown since the last time the pattern arose. Chiron tends to deal with childhood and ancestral wounds, wounds that are the most invisible to us. They’re like blind spots, things that have felt so intertwined with our very being that we create mechanisms not to look at them.
This eclipse asks us to look at them. Some questions you can ask yourself this week are:
“What parts of your past do you still believe are irreconcilable with your desired future?”
“What truths do you feel in the wisdom of your body that you still believe are irecconcilable with your ego, with your mind?”
“What parts of you still believe in the hierarchy between animals, men, and gods?”
This week, I invite you to drop these binary ways of thinking. It’s time to show your shadow side some love, and accept yourself in fullness for all that you are.
The great poet Rumi famously said “The wound is the place where the light enters”, and this feels especially true this week. Allow your wounded areas to show you where you are growing.
I have been reading a couple of books about the Wuxing Cycle, the 5 element cycle of Taoist origin, and they reiterate something that I wanted to talk about here. Throughout this podcast I refer to the stages of the year as elements or parts or slices or pieces, but this can be very misleading, actually. In China, the Wuxing Cycle is referred to as the 5-phase cycle, highlighing the fact that the elements are constantly changing, evolving, bleeding into one another, affecting one another. It is a relational cycle, rather than a cycle of 5 distinct and closed objects. The chinese character Xing is actually a verb meaning “to act” or “to go”. The wood element in this season of spring is not dead wood, of course, but a tree filled with upward flowing life, given to it by the depths of the water season before it.
As we enter Gate 42, the gate of growth, on Wednesday, I think this is something to contemplate. The lesson of the gate of growth is the realization that life is nothing but a cycle of actions and reactions, calls and responses. We are always in motion, always in flow. Like the image of a ball with a person standing on top of it- in order to stay upright, we must keep moving. We take the wisdom of the gate of the hunter and the gate of shock in combination, to know that we are indeed actors on the stage, but the world is our stage, and the world is filled with events and people to respond to, and to be in relationship with.
Growth: All that you touch you change. Everything you change changes you.
It almost seems cliche at this point because I’ve referenced it so much, but I’ll leave you with a quote from the amazing sci-fi writer Octavia Butler, in the book Parable of the Sower
In a dystopian future where America has supposedly been “made great again”, the main character, a teenage girl named Lauren Olamina, has discovered a new religion, called Earthseed.
God is change. This is the first tenet of Earthseed. “God is Change” is literal truth.
The God of Earthseed is not a person. The God of Earthseed does not love us or hate us or watch over us or know us at all. The God of Earthseed just is.
God is Power—
Infinite,
Irresistible,
Inexorable,
Indifferent.The one irresistible force in the universe is Change. Everything in the universe Changes. Every living thing, every bit of matter, all the energy in the universe Changes in some way.
All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God
Is Change.Whether youʼre a human being, an insect, a microbe, or a stone, this verse is true. Everyone knows on an intellectual level that Change is inevitable. But many people don’t feel it on an emotional level. And so they create gods, supernatural authority figures, to stand between them and Change — big-daddy-God, big-cop-God, big-king-God. For many people, God is just another name for whatever makes them feel special and protected. Earthseed deals with ongoing reality, not with supernatural authority figures.
As wind,
As water,
As fire,
As life,
God
Is both creative and destructive,
Demanding and yielding,
Scultpor and clay.
God is Infinite Potential:
God is Change.The God of Earthseed is wildly dynamic. It is faceless, implacable, and sometimes terrifying. But it is also malleable.
God is Change.
Beware:
God exists to shape
And to be shaped.This is not a very comforting religion. Change can be frightening. Earthseed empowers us to Shape God when we can and surrender to God when we cannot.
However you’re spending your eclipse, I hope that it delivers the shock and the growth in your life that leads to lasting peace, love and kindness. I’ll see you next week, as we delve into more spring themes with the Gate of Ordering, which will help us organize all these learnings and initiate a brand new chapter.
Until then, all my love.
Alison
PS. I’ve started a Cycles of Time community discussion group on Facebook! Click here to join and chat with me and other listeners about astrology, human design, the i’ching, and the energies of the season. <3 <3 <3
PPS. If you got anything from this episode/article, please consider sharing with a friend or leaving a comment here or a review on Spotify!
Shock Leads to Growth: Weekly Forecast for April 8-14