I don’t know about your experience, but I find Scorpio season spiritually ass kicking. The underbelly is up for examination everywhere we look- whatever we have evaded, shoved aside or distracted ourselves from is now all around us and there’s nowhere to hide. From year end summaries and financials to account reconciliations, the leaves have dropped and there’s nothing but what’s left. Yeep.
As someone born in this season, this is a familiar place…and every year, I’m continuously humbled by the opportunity to reach into the recesses of my being and take an honest look at what needs to be sorted, what is out of alignment and where I could have done better. A previous version of myself would’ve gone into a shame spiral a la my 8 year old little girl and reacted with the very same strategies that I developed then- hot tears of guilt, defensiveness, overcompensation, covering up/justifying my behaviors- basically anything but sitting in the discomfort of the moment. I didn’t have any other tools and was simply trying to survive emotionally. And I can see with more clarity than ever, how I’ve brought this into my adult life- and is mirrored in the leaders I work with.
As a mother of an 8 year old, I am getting the chance to be with her and thereby myself in confronting moments like these and instead love the parts of me that I tried to cover up or discard. As she lets me hold her with deep, coregulating breaths, we simply acknowledge the suck and somehow it lightens. Without the need to edit or delete to quell my own triggers, I am learning to widen my tolerance for the wide spectrum of this wild human experience. Though I feel fairly adept at doing this in my professional life and am often called upon in moments of crisis, when it comes to my inner sanctum, it hits below the belt at inherited ancestral trauma. I know it’s not my responsibility to shoulder all of what came before me, and not even possible to clear it all out, but I do have a duty to do my part to mend fractured pieces and keep my heart open, even when it wants to close. My prayer is that perhaps a bit of the load is lightened for my girl, that she sees what it looks and feels like to embody the seasonality of life and muster the courage to shine the light where it needs it most.
The added bonus is that as I continue to endeavor into this journey, I feel more capable of walking alongside others, not because I read about it or have it nailed down, but because I practice it too. When leaders are willing to examine what is under the hood, they do everyone in their charge a favor by cleaning out the detritus that would have them reenact pains of the past and perpetuate things like extractionism, systemic oppression and racism. This inside out approach acknowledges our interconnectedness and the collective soup we are swimming in together.
So whether you are a leader of your household or a global exchange, as far as I can tell, the work always starts in the catacombs of our hearts and spirals out from there.
In the wise words of Lao Tsu from the Tao de Jing, number 54:
What is well planted cannot be uprooted.
What is well embraced cannot slip away.
Your descendants will carry on the ancestral sacrifice for generations without end.
Cultivate Virtue in your own person,
And it becomes a genuine part of you.
Cultivate it in the family,
And it will abide.
Cultivate it in the community,
And it will live and grow.
Cultivate it in the state,
And it will flourish abundantly.
Cultivate it in the world,
And it will become universal.
Hence, a person must be judged as person;
A family as family;
A community as community;
A state as state;
The world as world.
How do I know about the world?
By what is within me.
Photo Credit: Dmitry Ratushny