Just reading a fellow bloggers post on the roller coaster and how she felt full of joy right now I thought this. In a numbed out society are feelings of mania and depression just pathologised due to how emotionally feeling wounded we are? It is something that I have thought for some time. There is also anxiety we carry from childhood from stressed out parents who had all kinds of pressures on then that they played out and re-enacted. In my family it was my great great grandfather who carried the stress of the loss of his mum when young, then loss of a stable future in England so he migrated with his wife and three children to New Zealand and they lost one child shortly after arriving there. He eventually became an alcoholic, something I did not find out until I began to live my own recovery journey of sobriety in the early to late 1990s. Planetary aspects then triggered his chart as it resonated with my in the astrological family profile.
Mark Wolynn’s book on multigenerational trauma that I have shared about before here shows how stress, loss and abandoments as well as unresolved grief or family secrets are carrried by members down the generations. There is that aspect of our feeling life as well as the different highs and lows we go through. The roller coaster is also intensifed as we start to heal our trauma or become aware of it and is not just pathological but all part of healing.
Joy is like fire or air, it brings us to life with passion and zest. Sadness or depression can be like earth or water that buries us brings us low or dissolves us, but not always in a bad way but for an evolutionary process. I love the idea of these elemental sides of us astrology speaks of and so does alchemy. We should embrace our spirit in joy and our soul in depression, seeing both as all part of the profound and awesome mystery of being alive in a human body with a soul and spirit too.
Emerging From The Dark Night 