It is nearly a year now since I received my initial diagnosis of Breast Cancer in the right breast. As one might expect it is a date that is etched firmly on my mind. Happily, I am through the worst, treatments have finished, the tumour has gone and I continue to stay well and accept the challenge of keeping well with all my heart as I am only too aware that there are those whose journey has a different result.
June 15th 2011; this was no ordinary date. I found myself sitting in a bare and comfortless room awaiting results of a biopsy. There is something psychologically manipulative about the rooms and their ambience relating to the stage of treatment one has reached, as your treatment intensifies and you have got your head around each stage of treatment, the quality of services and atmosphere seems to improve. Thankfully.
So, there was I, telling myself that there was nothing to worry about, yet all the while I had that sneaking suspicion that in fact I should be concerned, really concerned. In actual fact, the diagnosis on some level was not a total surprise; I had a feeling for a while that things were not right. My body already bore the affectations of a life well lived and was beginning to scream at me that all was far from well. I paid regular visits to the doctor for various tests that I insisted on having, which amounted to little more than a wild goose chase. The most helpful information I received at the time was that I had a vitamin D deficiency, which has been linked to Breast Cancer in some people. It has also transpired after talking to Oncology medics that it is not unusual for patients to have an insight into their cancer before the evidence emerges as a concrete fact.
June 15th 2011 is also significant as it was the time of the double lunar eclipse. I am certainly not an astrologer but even I felt that this diagnosis was doubly significant for me on a personal level because of this auspicious lunar movement.
In many respects that is all history now. However, the journey with cancer has been immensely powerful. It threw me smack bang into the middle of my own universe and all that I had been, was and could become. The scales dropped from my eyes and an intense healing began, a healing which was rooted deep in my psyche. I realised that I had become seperated, adrift from myself, what and who I represented and the integral divine essence that flows through each of us. The link to heaven and earth the same had become severed, the journey back to the beloved began in earnest.
It is not my aim to recount at this moment of the various layers that shifted and how the cancer shook my world in a way that was a terrible beauty all at once. Breast Cancer is not new. The picture is Rembrandt's Bethsheba and shows quite clearly her breast which appears to have all the markings of a cancer.
It bothers me enormously that Breast cancer is on the increase and one could summise that we are reaching epidemic proportions. My family and I were discussing another soul, a friend, who had just received a diagnosis quite recently. We were staggered to discover that between us we knew of 12 people in our collective address book who have or had been stricken with this dis-ease. That is a huge figure for just one bunch of people.
Nor is it my aim at this stage to discuss the implications of this disease on women and society, although I do feel that we are experiencing the incineration of the divine feminine and that Witch burnings still continue in a veiled and psychologically surreptitious fashion; this subject will no doubt arise at a later date, as it must.
Let's return to astrology. An astrologer friend of mine pointed out that not only was the date a lunar eclipse but also Chiron the wounded healer had shown up in my chart at the same time, this fact has fascinated me and my research into Chiron has amazed and comforted me. The time for karmic change was nigh!
Interestingly, Chiron will be about until 2018, my sense of it is that a massive karmic shift is happening, women are carrying this shift, the epidemic proportions that we have reached could well be a result of the presence of Chiron in the ephemeris tying into the shift in consciousness that we have attributed to 2012. This means that we must really look hard at how we nurture and are being nurtured and all that which this statement entails. Food, sex, work, relationships and self love all come under close scrutiny as well as repressed creativity and past hurts from significant people and life situations, including our relationship to the Great Spirit. The time for talking about the Great Spirit is over, NOW is the time us to experience the Great Spirit. If all of this be the case, then we are once more reminded that we are totally interconnected with each other and the planet we live on.
Chiron as a planet was discovered in 1977, orbiting between Uranus and Saturn. Chiron also seems to embody the principles of it's neighbours! Interestingly, at the time of it's discovery there was an emergence of alternative healing therapies. We were ready for the archetype of the inner healer to be absorbed into our consciousness.
In Greek mythology, Chiron was a Centaur. He was also a teacher, musician and holistic healer. He received a wound from a poisoned arrow, Hydra's blood and didn't die as a result of this wound, but could not fully recover and was destined to live in pain. Personal suffering and the awareness that can be derived from it becomes central to the theme of the myth and planet Chiron and the re-emergence of spirit in one's life. As the immortal son of Kronos, he teaches us to fulfil our potential, leading to holistic understanding.
Close to our 50th birthday we can expect the Chiron return effect. The transit crosses over his position in the natal chart, a time of karmic realisation surfaces from the deep and the only way to go is forward. I was 51 at the time of diagnosis. Not everyone is going to go through an illness to experience Chiron return, what ever shape or form it does take is appropriate to the individual and their karmic patterning. Either way it is a time of liberation of the unlived spirit through the knowledge that life is painful and we must strive to transcend. It is not our own suffering that we carry, but that of another and they carry ours. This is the interconnectedness at work, we are for each other. As we liberate ourself, we immediately liberate others, including Earth into the higher self.
It is my view that the repressed drive and creativity and the subjugation of the divine self resulting in a form of seperation play a part in the formation of a dis-ease. Once that is recognised and all that this notion entails means we can begin to clean up our act. The power of the Cancer journey and it really is a journey, is that it provides a platform to reach into our deepest and most hidden parts and heal all those hurts and anxieties that we have carried for far too long. I began to know love, true love at it's deepest level, it wasn't easy to get to that point, this love gave me the strength to examine my life and to ask life for life itself. Painfully sifting through all my 'stuff ' I realised what love is. For me love is knowledge, that knowledge we all have, to know without knowing, the action of gnosis in our .life, the gnostic self that we fail to recognise in the humdrum activities that we call our life. Love taught me compassion.
There is a sura in the Koran which tells us that 'The Lord sends sickness as a servant to bring us back to the Lord'. Our autonomy and independence through interdependence on each other and the Great Spirit is paramount to our well being and wholesomeness.
By searching for our own healing, we can learn how to heal others. We are the source of wisdom and healing for each other. It is through the expression of this wisdom that we also express the divine at work in both the esoteric and exoteric world.
I feel that life is a whole series of journeys. Each one a miracle in it's own right, each journey offers up a pearl from the bottom of our ocean, this pearl is the gift of experience, a validation to our footprints in the sand.....each pearl we receive is a celebration of our magnificence of being, the treasure within.
As Solomon said to Belqis; 'It is not the riches that you flaunt but the riches within that make you beautiful' .
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