Communicating about what hurts

It is a difficult journey to live a grounded happy and irritation free life when you have a childhood or a past that has conditioned you with a lot of hurt.  Last night just before going off to sleep and thinking about a blog I was writing yesterday on Saturn that I did not post yet, I was drawn to read some commentary on the Saturn Moon aspect in Bil Tierney’s book The Twelve Faces of Saturn.

The astrological synchronicity around this is that Saturn, planet of restrictions and boundaries, the earth centred planet that provides limitations and structures imposed that ground us on the earthly plain in ways we may find painful is currently slowing down to turn retrograde. This retrograde period is an annual phase in the yearly transit cycle of all planets that revolve around the Sun but in the case of the planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto it takes place every year at a certain time dependent upon the sign placement and it is a period that lasts for just under 5 months.

During this phase of the planet moving backwards over the degrees it has passed in the previous 9 months we get to look back and meet challenges or issues of growth, expansion and awareness that may have emerged slowly over the period that planet moved forward.

And if that planet (especially an outer planet) makes significant aspects to personal planets associated with our central being – the Sun (sense of self), Mercury (sense of communication), Venus (sense of relationships), and Mars (sense of self assertion and taking action in service of the true self) critical developments will play out that help us to come to a deeper understanding.  This process of consciousness building will assist us to grow if we can make deeper sense of the needed lessons, challenges and awarenesses.

My family was strongly Saturnian.  Both my parents had Sun Mercury Saturn conjunctions, Dad’s was in Virgo, Mum’s was in Scorpio.  My mother’s Saturn placements square many of my personal planets and my own Mars Saturn Moon in Aquarius.

The mother of the Moon Saturn child is not experienced as a nurturer.  There is a duty bound aspect around the home of the Saturn Moon child.  They learned early on that emotions would not be understood or responded to.  As a result they learn to distance themselves into the intellect (most especially with Moon in the air sign of Aquarius).  They come to have a habit of denying or minimising how they feel.  There is a discomfort with expressing animal emotions.

In contemplating this while writing I am reminded of how my mother could fly into rages when things didn’t go right.  (This is the Mars Moon part of my Saturn Mars Moon aspect).  During these rages she may be like a wild animal but prior to the outburst, it was a seething composed rage common to the Saturn in Scorpio profile of someone who blocks and buries deeper feelings accompanied with much nostril flaring.  This was the warning sign that would start to get our adrenal glands pumping.

In my mother’s case (and now knowing her own history with her own mother) I believe now the rage covered a lot of her own grief and denied pain at being unmothered herself, being forced to clean like a slave, being abused by the nun’s at school and being left alone for long periods with no comforts of siblings or family.  A very Saturnian legacy.

In addition while I was growing up both my parents worked and worked and worked. There was little time for play, certainly minimal time together doing things that were fun.  Chores had to be completed before we could relax and that relaxation was infrequent.  Often it comprised of trips the coast house where there was more work to be done or where we were taken on fishing expeditions by my father which I hated.

I did love the ocean though.  There were trips to the beach where I could surf on the waves with my zippy board and that is time of play that I do remember.  But it was painfully infrequent.

I think one of my Moon Saturn legacies that I have had to face and work with over the past few years is with this difficulty in relaxing.  I feel that I have to be busy or doing something to justify my existence.  I keep high standards of tidiness which really don’t suit the fact that naturally I am a looser person who likes to have things lying around, doesn’t need to have the dishes all washed up and put away with all clean surfaces everywhere.

I am noticing this week how much self judgement I have around this. I am learning to appreciate the diversity of my surroundings, not to beat myself up for having lots of things around : a jar of colouring pencils I am using at the moment, daily meditation books, a notebook in which I keep quotes that move me, a beautiful photo of my sister now dead taken on her wedding day in 1965, notelets, cushions, flowers.   I am learning to just celebrate the beauty of this cluttered surrounding as something that satisfies me and nurtures my soul.

My Mars Saturn Moon has in the past been so conditioned to be boxed up.  To clamp down, intellectualise, deny and indulge in attacks upon myself which mirror the parental voices telling me that I cant relax, that I am messy, careless, and a waste of space.

It has also been so hard on me about my very real and human emotions of anger a times.  I will start to feel anger over something someone did that hurts but then I find a hundred ways to justify or minimise and excuse why that happened.
And it has just occured to me while re-editing this post that perhaps witnessing my mother’s uncleanly expressed anger I came to fear anger as I child.

Growing up it was not enough just for me to allow the feeling of anger and give it a place, to realise that the feeling had information which could then be integrated in me and that the anger would pass in time.  I could not even begin to know the true roots of my anger until very recently, so buried was my anger under deep feelings of worthlessness and depression.

Since being diagnosed with breast cancer in January I have really allowed myself to experience and express my anger in my home and with several other safe people.  I have talked about it on my blog.  At times I have felt guilt surrounding the anger I have felt to my mother and my sister and yet I know that that anger I feel at not being nurtured at such a critical time is very real for me. It is not something that I need to bite down on and hold onto.  But it is something real that I need to acknowledge as part of the core cry of my soul and self providing me with useful information.

In reading Bil Tierney’s interpretation of Saturn Moon last night I was struck by the following words:

We need to honestly confront other’s with our grievances rather than start to build a wall of icy resentment.  Learning to vent feelings in open and direct ways, is always a challenge for Saturn/Moon people.  We need to feel confident that we will be heard and taken seriously.

I most certainly didn’t see this “open confrontation” in my home growing up. What I saw was my mother being possessed by a storm of anger.  My father avoiding and laughing it off.  Experiencing us all tiptoeing around while icy silence fell down across the house for a day or so, while Mum refused to speak to Dad and nothing was resolved.  Things then went back to normal, but it left a climate of anxiety and fear.

What I learned from both Sun Mercury Saturn parents was that feelings made no sense, they could not be expressed honestly but had to come out side ways or had to be laughed off or ignored.

It occurs to me that with Saturn now slowing down in trine to my North Node in Leo (which is all about leaving the intellectual prison of the South Node in  Aquarius where no primal feeling is engaged with and freeing the lion animal self to express its true roar) and in sextil to my Sun, Venus, Mercury and Jupiter in Aquarius square to Neptune I am now being given a precious opportunity for wisdom and understanding of past patterns around these Saturn Moon issues.

Hearing the negative voices is a reminder to me to wake up to where and when these voices and patterns of disparagement got laid down in me.  Voices that do not speak the truth but damage me in difficult ways.

Blogging gives me an opportunity to leave behind the repression and burying of that Saturn Moon and of the Saturn Mercury of both parents.  It gives the Lion part of me a voice, to say, this hurt and I would like it to be different now.  Today I would like a voice to say : This hurt me, so I no longer need to blame myself and can finally come to understand the truth of the painful Saturn legacy I have inherited and take some responsibility for changing it.