7 minute read
Integration Journey
Photography & Illustration: Getty Images
Experiential 2
An exploration of mind
Welcome back to your integration point, where you get to experience the knowledge in an embodied sense. We possibly live in the most “Mercurial” time known in history, driven by excess thought, media and technology, cultivating the attachments and stories of the mind that keep us stuck in the fear response. I have chosen a practical focus on the mind and our communication as, in our current reality, we are faced with an extreme level of information that is not coming from our own mind each day.
As long as we are faced with endless stimuli — endless externalities — we cannot focus on the less tangible planes of existence: the unmanifest. This is the space that we can all access and create freely from. But we are normally kept in stress, in habituated patterning: waking up, mindlessly going through the motions, going home, too stressed to do anything but be in freeze mode. We adopt behaviours that perpetuate the stories of the past and what is “familiar”. The stresses of adult life can seem endless: bills to pay, a job that we don’t like and a general fear of change. This is all a story and, normally, we perpetuate the pain of the past as we do not know what else to look for or any other reality. The truth of our own embodied existence begins within the mind, the body having no real way of knowing what is real or what is not. So when we feel into the technology-driven age we live in, we not only have our own perceptions and mind clutter to fi lter through, but we are layered up with the narratives fed to us by society and culture. Our nervous system has no idea whether we are running from a bear or sitting in front of a screen watching someone else run from a bear.
Most of us are in the fi ght or fl ight response at all times — putting our foot on the pedal and the brake all in one. Through this, our heart functions incoherently and energetically closes. We stop trusting ourselves and we are in a state of disease and imbalance. Science shows that initiating feel-good hormones such as joy, love, gratitude and peace increases our immune defence by up to 50 per cent. That is, just through these thoughts that initiate these feelings alone, we are changing our reality and opening our heart and, in effect, expanding our fi eld of awareness.
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— Dr Joe Dispenza
We can see how learning how to take a step back from our Mercury — our mind and the way we label and communicate with the world of matter — can’t help, but what can is changing the way we draw value (Venus) and move through our own existence (Mars). Therefore, unlocking our Mercury sign and learning to work with our mind isn’t key, but unlocking our Venus and Mars signs in the highest way.
Yoga Sutra 1.2 explains Yoga as the cessation of the fl uctuations of the mind. Put simply, it calms the mind chatter that draws our awareness away from our present-moment experience and that which keeps us in the stress response. So the very feeling and purpose of Mercury in Evolutionary Astrology is to honour the fact that we have a mind and that we think. Our mind is a powerful vessel not to be made the enemy. But through a lack of awareness and discipline, it can create a very limited and feardriven existence. Our energetic fi eld remains small and within form alone when we have a narrow, logic-driven focus on our incarnation. We can feel victim to our circumstances.
Discovering your natal Mercury sign
Within this experiential, we explore how to access your own natural Mercurial energy, the quality of your mind, in order to then move through the journal and meditation practices below. I truly encourage you to take your time and pause at this point in the course to take this exploration with a generosity of heart (towards yourself). You deserve to take as much time as needed to sit with your Mercury energy and then, through the meditation, go beyond it and fi nd a new embodied perspective.
To discover your natal Mercury sign, you’ll need to come back to your birth chart generated within the fi rst practical. You can then fi nd the Mercury sign glyph (above). It will fall underneath the sign your Mercury falls within. The three personal planets together function to create the personality and the personality creates personal reality. While you are there, you can also fi nd and explore your Venus and Mars signs, taking them through the prompts below. Eventually, the aim is to be able to drop personally on the level of the roles we think we have to play, therefore dropping into a deeper state of being — fi nding our true home within the Soul essence.
Integration activities
READING Once you’ve discovered your Mercury sign, move back to chapter fi ve, where the light and shadow qualities of your Mercury expression are explored. Remember that we are just talking about manifestations, the way something comes into physicality. Feel into these words on the level of vibration. How do they sit with you? Keep in mind, Mercury is how we communicate through our rational or logical mind, as well as how we take in information. It is how we express ourselves through our perceptions, through skill and speech. It is also how we establish connections with others through the need to relate and learn.
With the above in mind, move back to chapter one and the journey we took through the archetypes to feel into your Mercury sign on the deeper level and stage of consciousness it sits within.
Getty Images Photography: JOURNAL PROMPTS Grab your most treasured journal and allow your Soul to explore through the below prompts, with your Mercury sign energy in mind.
1. “I am the creator of my own existence and reality”. Free-journal using this statement as your prompt, allowing your mind to release and fl ow. Feel into anything that keeps you blocked from knowing this to be true, and be gentle with yourself. Let go of any conceptual thought of understanding your Mercury sign for now and allow the qualities to naturally surface through your free expression.
2. When stressed, the quality of my mind is …
3. When in a place of heart-mind coherence, the quality of my mind is …
BREATHWORK PRACTICE — BHRAMARI BREATH 1. Find yourself in a comfortable seat, in a place that makes you feel at home.
2. Begin to notice your natural breathing rhythm. Notice the quality of your breath, fl owing in and out of the nose. Stay with this motion of the breath for a few minutes, until you feel yourself going beyond the thinking mind, feeling into a deeper essence or quality of mind. Begin to pause for a couple of moments at the bottom and the top of the breath, once you feel an effortless rhythm begin step three.
3. Begin to make a gentle humming sound where you would normally exhale. So you will inhale and then hum on the exhale, feeling the vibration of the throat. Dissolve all of your awareness into the vibration, the feeling and the sound. 4. After about 10 rounds of this, we will bring the hands towards the face. The thumbs will cover the ears and the fi rst and second fi ngers will come to close the eyes. The remaining fi ngers will rest over the sinuses either side of the nose. Blocking the senses of sound and sight, we go within and practise the same. Feel yourself as vibration and allow the mind to dissolve into the feeling and sensation.
5. Afterwards, release the hands and come back to the natural breath. Stay here in contemplation, watching the thoughts without attachment, for as long as you need. 6. Free-journal on your experience. Keep this breathwork in your tool kit whenever you feel yourself going into the stress response and becoming incoherent or closed off in the heart. May you hum yourself back into your highest potential, feeling a new experience of time and space through the expansiveness of this moment.
7. For deeper integration, you may write down the mantra “I am the co-creator of my highest reality” and create some art or process around it that will keep affi rming this new mantra. The other part of the “co” is the universe, or the creator of all that is. Feel yourself as creator energy. What does it feel like? The key is through feelings of joy, ease, love, expansion and empathy, to start to create mind-body coherence.
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