Acknowledging Darkness

I had a WordPress free morning today.  I struggled a lot yesterday and awareness came to me when realised a Mars square to the planet of the psychic Underworld Neptune was becoming exact here in Australia at around 5 pm.  I noticed the inner swirling and pressure began to abate then,  I got a text from a friend who had fallen down a flight of stairs and then logging on to WP about an hour ago came across several posts on suicide.  One blogger tried to take her life yesterday, another blogger was sharing her own thoughts on that subject, while others who followed the suicidal blogger were out there trying to support and get her help any way they could.  Thank God.  But what became clear to me as I read all of this was how interconnected we all were and how powerfully that Mars square to Neptune had manifested over the past week!

I am no stranger to suicide.  As some of my followers know my older sister tried to take her life in 1982, when she was 38 on the back of severe trauma and emotional abandonment.   My other sister tried to take her life in 2013 after being emotionally unrelated to in the depths of a major depressive episode with supposedly ‘manic’ elements.  I saw what led to both attempts and I myself have often felt like taking my own life, when the despair of living and compound losses seemed too great to bear.

Painful feelings we carry can either be turned within to suicidality or turned without to homicide.  We have just seen another mass shooting in America and to date I believe the figures for deaths from mass school shootings is now 150,000.   The perpetrator in this case took his own feelings of powerlessness (Neptune) and acted them out on others.   Some people take the feelings of complete hopelessness and powerlessness and act them out on themselves.

Feeling are problematic in our culture for a lot of reasons.   A lot of it goes back to how we have developed in the so called rational enlightenment : Descartes maximum “I think therefore I am” only tells half of the story and this from a man who undertook live vivisection on un-anesthetized animals and felt nothing as they screamed or contorted.   The image in the movie The Shape of Water where a primal sea creature is tortured with a cattle prod would be another powerful metaphor of how we treat all that is most tender and animal and vulnerable within us.   Deeper causes are complex but what we most need to do now is find solutions.  We must help young dispossessed people to deal with and relate to their feelings in healthier ways.   We need to help them to be connected.  There needs to be more awareness directed towards those who are isolated and so become prey to killing inner voices.   Lessons on expressing and valuing emotions should be part of every school curiculum before lessons on maths and science which are of little practical use.

There is so much more to say on this subject and due to my blog free morning where I chose to get out in the peace of nature with my dog and then interact with my sister who is also living alone now it is getting later and I need to limit my online time, but I will only say this.   If you are struggling with suicidal feelings or feeling helpless in the aftermath of these events please REACH OUT.  Speak to someone or call any of the crisis lines.  Here in Australia the Lifeline number is 131114.   I have called Lifeline so many times and the level of help and attunement has varied but being able to connect with another person is so vital if we are feeling so alone and in deep despair.   And please, please remember that you are a valuable human being no matter how you suffer.   You matter to the world, you really really do.