The Tea Bag Said It: Capricorn, Libra and Relationships Misunderstood
I’m writing about Pluto in Libra tonight, settled in for a cozy astro-inspired night at home. I remembered that a friend gave me a few tea bags of what is certainly the finest, most wonderful, greatest and otherwise superlativest tea ever created. It’s made by this company that has inspirational messages printed on the bag tags.
You know the one. They’re always pithy notes aimed at gently opening your eyes to a higher level of love and light. Or bringing you back to your already very elevated consciousness after a stressful commute full of screaming at all the ignorant people who shouldn’t be allowed to drive but inexplicably apparently are. Or reinforcing your entrenched self-definition as someone who trafficks in a Cali-style, new agey pithiness that your Midwestern relatives are continually stunned by, telling each other when you’re not around that you probably joined a cult.
I’m usually down with what the tea bags have to say to me. The messages tend support my chosen self-definition, and I even sometimes share with others what the tea bag told me if it was particularly poignant or Cali-licous.
The message tonight: Live for each other.
Can you blame me for running over to trusty Computor to get my reaction down on virtual paper?
I’ve been sitting here teasing out the blind spots and unchecked assumptions of Libra, and the criticism that Capricorn can offer if Libra will listen. Libra makes the other its business, and Capricorn makes building the structures needed to care for people en masse its business.
Each sign’s energy defines itself in terms of what it can do or how much can get done for the other, yet the criticism of Libra from Capricorn has to do with the reality of working hard toward something concrete, and not just remaining focused on a person and the (to-Capricorn) petty concerns of defining the self in terms of interpersonal human relationships.
But living for each other?
No, tea bag, no! Living for each other is how we malfunction. That’s how we get away from being able to offer each other our best, from being able truly to share life in the superlativest ways.
People, don’t listen to the tea bag. Don’t live for each other. Live for yourself. Get yourself to the point where being with others becomes a celebration, and honors your life and their lives and your choice to experience them with each other.
I can’t yet advocate never listening to any tea bag, but you need to root it out and slam the door in its face if it sneaks into your life. And let’s all just be a little critical when tea bags offer easy means to deludedly derail ourselves from our path of compassionate awareness, or whatever other Cali-licious path you might be on.
Tom is available for private intuitive astrology consultations. See his website for more info.
February 29, 2008 By Tom Jacobs
Last-minute thoughts before Pluto splits Sagittarius
1. Thirteen years might be a long time in human consciousness years, but might not be enough to rreeaallllyy intuit the truth. We’ve been trying on for size different versions of Truth, as well as different ways of arriving at it.
2. I’m pretty relieved now that I can stop trying to figure out what’s true. My job now is clearly to start building stuff - no more of this sitting around and checking in with my intuition, no more digging behind how things work. I mean, do you know how tiring all that fluffly perhaps-not-work is?
3. In honor of Pluto, I’m considering building a ladder down to hell.
Once I collected months’ worth of hair a roommate had brushed from her divinely adorable and wonderful cat and carefully rolled it together, a la dreds. I displayed this freak show entrant on the livingroom mantle, and when visitors asked what the disgusting snake-like lint thing was, I told them I was building a ladder to heaven from the cat’s hair, since she was so divinely adorable and wonderful, etc.
But now, it’s time to get serious. No more cat hair-as-joke lying in wait for unsuspecting visitors - no more frivolous games. Now is the time to earnestly build mental, physical and emotional structures to reflect what I learned from sitting around checking in with my intuition all those years (and preaching the truth left and right as I was deciding I was getting it). And one of the major things I learned during Pluto’s trek through Sagittarius is that doing spiritual work isn’t getting me anywhere if I’m not also doing soul work.
In depth psychologist and ecotherapist Bill Plotkin’s terminology, the former is ascension. While it has its place in our lives and journeys, integral to wholeness is also engaging in descension. I see we’re getting here and there better at ascension, for which we have some examples in our culture, but we don’t have acceptable, sanctioned models for descension, and so people don’t always know how to deal with that. I recommend Plotkin’s work to get a handle on this stuff - it’s conscious of how people and the world really are, and in it he suggests and explains numerous doorways to undertake the journey to gain consciousness of your most inner workings and, as I understand it, make friends with and reintegrate anything hiding down there that we’re afraid to look at. It’s a smorgasbord of shadow work.
Hence, a ladder down to hell.
Coincidence that I’m doing this waxing Pluto square thing?
Of course not. Why, I’m this week spending time with some monsters that’ve been under my psycho-emotio-spiritual bed. Probably I won’t report the encounters in detail, but suffice it to say that I’m learning just tons about stuff I think, feel and do that I’ve never been able to see before. And, of course, I’m happy to report that the reality is never as bad as you think - as bad as the fear of it. But something I got today when writing an e-mail to someone is this: One of the fears about coming to work with Pluto energy consciously at the waxing square is that in each of us, there’s a part that’s afraid to become the agent of change we so desperately want to become.*
*Pluto in evolutionary astrology, depending on whom you ask, represents the soul’s deepest desires/intentions or the soul’s deepest wounding. I work with it as representing both: To get to the desire and become that agent of change, we have to heal the layers of pain that inform our fear of living our lives in the ways we truly desire.
Tom is available for soul-centered consultations. See http://tdjacobs.com for more information.
January 25, 2008 By Tom Jacobs
Two or Three Thoughts on Libra + Transit Lab: Waxing Pluto Square
While Aries defines itself in terms of self, saying, “I am what I am because I am it,” Libra defines itself in terms of the other, saying, “I can tell what I am because I can tell what you are.”
This isn’t a terrible starting place, but it can’t be the only stop on the line. At some point, the Libran (whether it’s the Sun, Moon, Ascendant or some kind of planetary pileup there, or if there’s a very strong Venus/7th house signature) has to resort to understanding self first.
But the orientation to the other is a blind spot for Libra. The core aim of Libra, understanding it as a method, or a lens through which planets operate, is to create harmony and balance. Libra does not already understand how to do that. When people come in with heavy Venus/Libra/7th signatures in their charts, there’s an evolutionary intention to learn to relax, to slow down - to introduce moderation into their lives.
Last night I thought of the Pluto in Libra generation (1971-2 to 1984), specifically that they have the greatest soul wounding surrounding the aims and methods of Libra. There is a range of possibilities to each of the 12 energies of astrology, and yet people tend to focus more or less on specifics in their karmic journeys, as anyone’s conditioning necessarily limits the vast possible menu into a few subsections of it that can offer us appropriate playing fields on which to explore the core ideas of it.
The specific that came to me was in the prevalent Pluto in Libra fear of rejection, that can be based in a fear of abandonment. To be alone to these people is hard enough, but to be left by someone, a friend, lover or parent, is devastating.
What Libran Pluto people having this fear need to learn is that how people treat you has nothing to do with you.
Nothing.
It has everything to do with how they think of and feel about themselves.
This will make zero sense to most Pluto in Libra people who haven’t Plutoed themselves quite a lot somewhere along the way. And with Pluto entering Capricorn, the waxing Pluto squares for Libran Plutos are about to begin. Steven Forrest has said that this square is when the monsters that live under your bed come out and sit down with you at the dinner table. I have loved this image, and I find it very useful when working with clients.
When you’re sitting at the table with them, which is to say that what you hide is out in the open and needs to be faced directly and head-on, you see that they’re not as bad as you fear. That the fear of them is worse than their reality.
The next few years will see the older Libran Pluto people facing these monsters, and seeing how to navigate them. The basic message that Capricorn has to give Libra in its natural square is to stop looking around itself and to relationship for cues about how to be, and to get busy building stuctures to take care of the self. I expect that many people in this generation who haven’t learned to do so already will begin to take back what they put on other people (a Libran strategy to form relationships) and begin understanding the impact that kind of use of energy has on them and their lives (the Capricorn call to reality that feels like friction - the square - to Libra).
I’ll be writing on these and other themes about this business in the coming months. With my Pluto at 3 Libra, I’m one of those folks just beginning the square. And it natally squares my Jupiter at 6 Capricorn in the 3rd. How this has worked so far is that all the Pluto square stuff that wants to get thought ends up coming out in my writing and speaking.
Tom is available for spirit-guided karmic astrology consultations. Contact him via his website.
January 18, 2008 By Tom Jacobs