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New York, Friday, May 6, 2011

Chelsea (877) 453-8265
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PlanetWaves

Planet Waves: Potential, not Prediction
Seeing and Being With What Is



When it came to astrology, I only knew enough to get myself in trouble. Like nodding knowingly when someone tells me they're a Virgo. But giving those knowing nods while not having a clue can be slightly dangerous territory. My backpedaling muscles were exercised more than once.

Motivated to learn more, I poked around, checking out different websites, even a few books. Mostly I went cross-eyed or fell asleep. Symbols and houses and planets and conjunct-this or retrograde-that -- it's another language, including its own alphabet. I figured I'd start with the basics, like a pre-school picture book version.

What I found was either wide and general or technical and specific. I found dull prose and floaty rhetoric. I wasn't interested in drinking the Kool-Aid of dogma. Overall, it was mostly boring as hell. Was astrology all wrapped up in itself or so dusty and ethereal it would be impossible to figure out?

Where was my Goldilocks astrology, not too much or too little, but just right?

Sure, I knew I was Aries. I'd read my horoscope in the newspaper. I knew those were Sun signs, based on date of birth. I also knew there were Moon signs and risings and ascendants and all that was based on the time and place of birth. But I didn't know what that all meant. I didn't know how to approach astrology in a way that jibed with my experience of the world.

Then, early in 2011, I saw all this flutter in my newsfeed about how the astrological signs aren't the same anymore due to magnetic shifts and planetary wobble. A fellow Aries, Rachel Maddow, even did a segment on it. Should I really start reading the Pisces horoscopes?

Someone turned me on to an article by Planet Waves that explained the difference between the tropical and sidereal zodiacs. It was all very digestible. Nourishing, even. I read, and I understood that I'm still Aries in Western astrology, but my Piscean side can be taken into account, too. Turns out I didn't need a picture book after all, but just clearly communicated information. My Goldilocks hunger to find more had me digging into more Planet Waves articles.

At last! Here is astrology that's both interesting and accessible. The news and what is happening in the world are embraced and explained.

From the blog page, I started listening backwards to the free podcast. My picture book understanding was starting to have some vocabulary words filled in. The fuzzy concepts were gaining outline and definition. There might be hope for me after all with this new language.

Listening to old podcasts, I heard Eric Francis describe what was coming, not in terms of predictions, but in terms of potential, what could be. He described what was going to be on the table, and suggested ways of seeing and being with what is.

Admittedly, it was eerie when I heard Eric talk about General Electric in early March 2011, illustrating links with science and religion as satirized in Kurt Vonnegut's book Cat's Cradle. Just days later, the earthquake, tsunami, and resulting nuclear disaster in Japan brought the world?s attention to nuclear power plants that were designed by... you guessed it. General Electric.

What gave me chills was not that Eric 'predicted' a GE connection. It was the overlap. The circles and connections that repeat along a spiral, tied together. Of course it's all connected. Tugging on a string in one place affects it all. What is woven together cannot be easily teased apart.

If this was what was offered for free, what was behind the subscription door for Planet Waves? I simply had to peek.

Slipping behind that veil drew excited gasps. All sorts of things are woven together. From world events to suggestions for gracefully navigating relationships with self and others, I learn something every time I check in. As I devour the subscription versions, my understanding widens. This river digs a canyon through me, wide and deep.

In Planet Waves I find a way of seeing, a lens, that looks at what is, compares it to similar patterns of what has been, and approaches it all with the intention of using the energy of a situation for the greatest good. Over and over I find myself nodding. Collective myth-making and informed sexuality and homeopathy and Jungian psychology and social observation and personal wholeness are served up, right alongside astrology, in a healthy feast.

Before I found Planet Waves, I'd already been meditating on a particular scene involving surf and sea and sand. I imagine myself trying to stay off the beach, to ride the waves of my life. Getting back up after stumbling, finding another wave, riding it, trusting myself to feel, balancing with a long spine and outstretched arms and strong legs, feeling the pulse of water under and around me. Doing it all Goldilocks-style, just right.

Seeing beyond myself, I have a stronger sense of the ways that the ripples I create with my own life join others' ripples, and together we create those very same waves.

Join us, as we ride.



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