Soul Figures Method
Where we go wrong in how we approach “magic” (which is to say, life):
Synchronicity, that sly wink from the Universe, cannot be manufactured. Yes, you can pull your attention to something of interest and sync up your actions and thoughts and intentions upon that object of focus. You can start stirring your cauldron of meanings that you would like to weave through your life experience.
But the second you try to jump into the driver’s seat and try to determine or anticipate where, how, and when all of those elements are going to line up and know in advance when and how life is going to respond to you, your vision distorts. You start to insist on seeing patterns that are often not actually there, like forcing wet clay into a preformed mould when it clearly wants to take a different shape. And you miss the information that is actually being communicated to you, when certain events do rhyme with you – and what they’re actually saying. Your whole worldview starts to get rigid with expectation, grasping; seeking a validation of a foregone conclusion. When we hunt for the rhyme, as Matthew McConaughey says in his interview with Rick Rubin on the podcast Tetragrammaton, it actually pulls us out of life’s natural magic.
This wisdom runs counter to what most New Age folks will try to sell you out here in the self-help digital marketplace. But I, as a contrary type of New Age folk, think it’s important we wed our common sense with our spirituality.
And this position is simply based in observation, ample field data (personal experience), and common sense. Whenever I jump from being in the mystery to adopting a stance of certainty about how things should work, stuff generally stops working.
Of course we all want smooth pathways and soft, well-orchestrated landings. But what life delivers to us is often more in the spirit of Puck; the fool, the Kachina. This is partly because there is a divine, tricky, almost mean but generally well-intentioned humor to life, and humor’s sharpest weapon is surprise: you don’t laugh at things you knew were going to happen, but at what you didn’t expect. Whatever shocks or hits you upside the head of your adhered-to norms and frailties gets the bigger laugh. And I suspect life relentlessly teases us in just the same way because it doesn’t matter so much whether we figure it out or not; all that matters is showing up. And we need to be rattled out of our self-seriousness and our deeply etched patterns of control in order to do that. One of the main ways we try to stay in control is by making things extraordinarily complicated; trying to “figure it all out.”
In the recovery moment there is a saying: “Figuring things out is not a step.” And whenever we veer down that complicated, overwrought road, our load in fact gets heavier, and things generally do not get figured out.
a glimpse of the larger pattern at work
A longtime practitioner of embarking down weird detours and straying far afield from what I thought I was heading for, in spite of myself, back in undergrad I took a printmaking class. Our semester project was to make two copies of a book, two identical handmade printings of the same content. My project was an accordion book with an image of a wheel that I had carved out of a rubber print block; I stamped the image of the wheel across each of the pages so that it spun as they unfolded, and a line of text ran alongside them, weaving along the seam of each crease:
“a glimpse of the larger pattern at work.”
At the end of class we went around the room presenting our work. I said that my accordion book was a way of capturing an idea that can often feel complex, in the simplest way possible.
“The irony is that this is definitely not simple whatsoever,” my teacher frankly observed.
What made it so complicated, beyond all the folded edges and color-matched materials and hand-scrawled lettering, was the “I need to figure all this out” obsessionbehind it.I had imbued that fucking wheel with a pervasive demandthat my life reveal its larger pattern to me so that I might better control its unfolding. By the way, that fucking wheel is also tattooed on the inside of my wrist – my flesh is literally permanently inscribed with my demand that life be discernible, that I should, through my understanding of and ability to recognize the pattern, know my life’s events in advance or be able to make supreme sense of them once they’ve occurred; that I should be co-pilot, essentially, with God.
Naturally, practicing astrology can certainly inflate such predispositions – and many astrologers and astrology students are often guilty, I think, of taking on the role of co-pilot with God while that is definitely not a posted open position anywhere in the Universe. It is quite easy to get lost in the weeds of a certain framework and relate to it from the head only, rather than through an integrated awareness.
But oddly enough, for me personally I find that in any given astrology reading, since there is only so much time in a session, I can only ever lasso together a few core themes of the “larger pattern at work” in a chart, the ones that rhyme the loudest with each other. The rest is simply left for another time. Or just set aside altogether, to be known only to certain grinning fairies and nature sprites on the edge of cosmic consciousness. And I’m okay with that. There is enough meaning in just a few flakes chiseled out of the granite of a given astro-form for us humans; we don’t need to metabolize all of it in every moment. To try to do so is to play God and yank mercilessly on what is better left to the just-beyond. Better to let the client’s life experience, dreams, and personal myth-making unfold the rest, on its own time.
The most tempting thing for many of us is to figure things out from afar. To get the overall scope of what’s happening and why, and then somehow imagine ourselves at a more advantageous position once we get there—or, after things have happened, think we might find ourselves enjoying an additional comfort in trying to make meaning of what has just passed. But it’s usually that the opposite is actually true.
This principle was excellently documented in the short film, A Swim Lesson:
As swim instructor Bill Marsh’s endlessly patient and nurturing support of young children’s frightful first moments in the water illustrates, you just have to push yourself past the edge of the fear that sits on the precipice between wherever you are and what comes next. Then you’re swimming. And it’s in being able to meet the moment and push through the fear and hesitation that you come to know your own edges and get a sense of the ongoing process of how to keep moving forward. The present moment, the unknown moment, causes us to stretch, and though we often don’t imagine ourselves up for the task, but we make ourselves willing anyway.
That’s all you really need to know, and all life needs to know about you: that you met the moment and moved through it, that you’re willing.
That’s all you really need to know, and all life needs to know about you: that you met the moment and moved through it, that you’re willing. Not so much that you understand the why behind it, or that you can anticipate how future moments are going to go. Just that you met that one. And from that, you gained the confidence to meet the next one.
Sure, I will probably always continue to enjoy my tarot cards, my astrology, my alchemical practices of all kinds, because they do enhance my understanding of the contours of meaning in my life and give me an appreciation of how others swim along with the mystery too. And it is not merely a matter of appreciation; engaging with the archetypal does welcome nature and life to resonate with our actions, enhancing the song of our lived experience.
But poetry doesn’t explain; itsavors, feels, senses, responds.
Put your half of the verse out into life through thought and action in a statement of faith and trust that the Universe/Source/God will respond with the other half of that verse.
If you already knew how life’s verse in response was going to go, that would be so boring, wouldn’t it? And besides, life wouldn’t let you get away with it. The rhyming verse will always come with a twist, a variation we didn’t expect. It will often point us down a different path that turns us from the thing we thought we wanted towards the thing we actually need in order to get to where we might not have imagined we need to go in order to grow in a way that’s different from our preconceived notions.
When synchronicity knits an uncanny stitch that connects me from one moment to the next, all I need to do for my part is wink back at the Universe, put my head down, and continue doing my work—being willing to participate. And, trust that whomever or whatever orchestrated that synchronicity doesn’t need me as co-pilot. I’m just the player, the experiencer, the conduit for things I don’t necessarily need to understand in full—the voice who supplies the first half of the verse (which is often a question), and listens for when the second half comes back, and then continues with the next step in the dance.
All of this sounds good on paper but it can be harder to remember amidst the slog of day-to-day life. Check out our readings for a sidereal look at your current transits (in the actual sky) and ideas for practices on how to anchor into a balance between effort and surrender. We don’t have to know the entire pattern, but getting a glimpse can be a real assist.
XO,
Anadie
