Your Inherited Potential: Understanding Archetypal Activation, Transformation, & Empowerment
Developing a clear connection to your soul’s evolutionary intentions, patterns, & desires through the Astrological natal chart can awaken personal power and a sense of feeling very grounded in your life path. Your birth chart is full of potent information about the evolutionary progressions of your soul desires. To deepen your overall sense of clarity and certainty along your life’s journey in relation to those evolving desires is to cultivate intimate relationships with key archetypes in your soul’s astrological context.
Archetypes are recurrent symbols or motifs in literature, art, and mythology. In Jungian psychology, archetypes are inherited potentials which are actualized when they enter consciousness as images, manifest in behavior on interaction with the outside world, or are consciously meditated on — or focused on with intention and attention. For Jung, “the archetype is the introspectively recognizable form of a priori psychic orderedness”.
By allowing a specific archetype — i.e. a planetary ally — to enter consciousness, it can be transformed from an autonomous and hidden form into a particular expression by an individual and culture, namely through stories, art, religions, myths, dreams and other forms of symbolic language and communication. These “primordial images” link us to our instinctual nature (through resonance). Evolutionary pressures actually have individual predestinations manifested in archetypes.
Jung states, “these images must be thought of as lacking in solid content, hence as unconscious. They only acquire solidity, influence, and eventual consciousness in the encounter with empirical facts.” Thus, the empirical facts — experience and observations — that you bring to your encounter with these unconscious potentials is what solidifies them in your consciousness, whereby you can build and color your own experience of life with individual intentionality and the surrounding universe or intent of the world.
Dreaming Your World Into Being
By reflecting on a planetary archetype, you are effectually exploring a highly developed element of the collective unconscious in a context relative to your soul’s evolutionary path because you are bringing your unique lens, perspective, and set of patterns that activate the archetype’s expression through your energetic system. The somatic responses, sensations, and felt resonant truths that arise in this experiential exploration hold symbolic keys that can validate past, present, and future cycles of learning, feeling, healing, growth, and spiritual development.
As you create meaning by witnessing your somatic responses, remember that conditions arising in your body reflect and validate microcosmic and macrocosmic patterns and cyclesthat intelligently inform or act as a barometer for your health or bioluminescence. Feedback from the body (biofeedback) ultimately reveals what is ready to be integrated, released, and loved so that greater spirals of inspiration, truth, and harmony can express.
Discovering what resonates well in the body is a way to validate and commune with aspects of your soul’s essence and the interconnected web surrounding you. To communicate, translate, and bridge these transpersonal elements to the relative world is what is meant by “dreaming your world into being”.
The Living Cosmos
Shamanic Astrology acknowledges that our planets have a living essence, and that this living spirit is something with which we can interact and commune with. Shamanic Astrology, perhaps the most ancient form of astrology, is closely connected to animism, which is a belief system in which plants, inanimate objects, and natural phenomena have a soul or all possess a distinct spiritual essence.
In the anthropology of religion, animism was a term created to describe the belief system of many indigenous people that animals, plants, rocks, rivers, weather systems, and even words have an aliveness to them and have agency — that there exists no hard and fast distinction between the spiritual and physical/material world, that soul or spirit or sentience exists not only in humans but all entities of the natural environment. In fact, every indigenous culture on Earth has had its own version.
Author and Astrologer, Donna Woodwell, notes, “to the ancients, things that moved had desires. They had Soul. And if it had Soul, it had the possibility of Intelligence — what we might call “consciousness.”In fact, the word Zodiac— the band of the heavens through which the Sun and all the planets move — was Zoidia (from the Greek ζῷον, zōion). As Hellenistic Astrologer Joseph Crane points out, Zoidia (pronounced Zoy-ja) is a complex term referring to a “living thing, also the seat of a god, or a picture or icon.” Zōionalso means “animal” — which shares a root with the word animism, that concept so essential to the shamanic worldview.” (Woodwell)
The animistic paradigm is at the heart of shamanism, which is essentially centered on co-creating with spirit. Shamanism celebrates that we are all aspects of an interconnected web–not just an intellectual construct–but rather a living, conscious cosmos, one that you experience all the way down to your bones and DNA. Thus, shamanic astrology takes the perspective that planetary archetypes are living entities that are interconnected, transpersonal parts of Self that we have a sacred relationship with, we can communicate with, and we can listen intuitively to gather wisdom.
A term that describes the type of unquestionable innate knowing[of your cosmic roots] that results from intuitive dialogue with these planets and cosmic forces (not necessarily with words) is Kosmognosis. As you relate, feel into, and engage with astrological archetypes with the wholeness of your self, you may begin to recognize the living gods among us that live within and without of our bodies. The expression, “As above — So below. As within — So without” is not an intellectual or spiritual abstraction, but rather a literal, kinesthetic, organic reality.
Talking to the Planets
The astrological tradition is an ancestor of shamanism; Shamanism is actually hard-wired into astrology itself; Astrology is a science that studies light and time, both intrinsic elements of nature. For this reason, Astrology is a study of nature itself, including all of its cyclical pulses, forces, and rhythms. Thus, Astrology and shamanism are intrinsically connected to one another.
Astrology is, in fact, a tool specifically designed to connect, cultivate, and commune with the living essences of the planets. Each planet has its own evolutionary desire that plays through the filter of our being. Getting to know the desire of a planet in its expression through you is getting to know how to co-create with spirit, the spirits of the earth itself— the rocks, trees, animals, and elements — and spirits of our native ancestors, dream keepers, shamans who’ve celebrated all aspects of our interconnected web of life.
By believing that we live in a “living cosmos”, you may also believe that just like Gaia— aliveness and consciousness that emanates from the Earth — all other planets have their own consciousness as well. By creating an intention to open to more interactions and spontaneous encounters with the planets, you can connect to the transcendent threads of Astrology’s design— not just a science and art, but a life-enriching tool for connecting to spirit.
Connecting to a Planetary Archetype
Connect to your planetary ally in a multi-dimensional way by experimenting with shamanic techniques and toolsthat induce altered states of consciousness that allow you to interact directly with the essence of the planet that lives within you. You can choose among a plethora of tools, ranging from active imagination and guided visualization to playing music and dancing.
Essentially, you can create an intention to connect to the essence of your planetary ally with some form of personal dreamwork— the process by which your unconscious mind is altered to induce images and emotions related to the intended subject (i.e. planetary archetype).
Each person has his or her own dream “language”in which symbols and archetypes are interpreted differently in their meaning. Finding your own is a creative personal experiment with various forms of dreamwork, such as hypnosis, guided visualization, drama, improv, writing, channeling, drumming, chanting, playing music, dancing, drawing, and/or keeping a dream journal so that themes can be observed as they develop.
Regardless of the technique or modality you choose, the result is some form of personal experience with the planet. An intentional process is conducted in order to promote insight, healing, and trust in your own inner wisdom — to use planetary allies/archetypes as weavers of the divine and terrestrial realms and as midwives to soul embodiment.
If you’re craving a deeper sense of spiritual and relational intimacy, personal power, soul-freedom, and connection to your intuition and inner wisdom, feel free to schedule a free consultation to explore your visions, dreams and desires.
