Mars Retrograde 2020

Journal Date: November 14, 2020

Mars finally stationed direct yesterday, after spending over two months retrograde.

“Mars is abrasive, courageous, alarming, bold, inciting, aggravating, confident, heated, and action-oriented. When retrograde, Mars makes us review our leadership style, our relationship to our agency, and our ability to carve our way into the world.

The weeks of Mars retrograde offered us lessons on how to turn towards our anger. Fuel for our engines when worked with consciously, rage is a righteous reaction to injustice–it’s just not a place where we can build a home. Tempers teach us what upsets us and why, when our boundaries have been crossed and how, what to demand and when.” –Chani Nicholas

All of this is true. I feel like I have learned more about these various Mars-related themes in the past two months than maybe ever before in my life up until now.

I spent almost all of the Mars retrograde period FURIOUS (and I’m actually not mad about that).

It was time for me to feel it. I was late to the game here. I had a lifetime’s worth of rage I was suppressing, and it was destroying me.

There were a million things that I should have been mad about, but couldn’t even see. I couldn’t allow myself to do so. I wasn’t “allowed” to be mad, ever.

I’m still not “allowed,” but fuck it, I’m going to go ahead and be mad, anyway.

My anger was the missing key. My rightful rage granted me access to everything else. It opened the doors to clear knowing in a way that nothing ever has before.

It’s been uncomfortable as hell, but still, I am grateful for it. I have seen more and grown more in the past two months that I would have imagined was possible for me.

Remembrance of Things Past

My first insight into my past lives happened several months ago, and I didn’t think much about it after that. 

It wasn’t until I went to my second session with Angelic that it came up again.

I’m not exactly sure how it came up in our conversation before the reiki healing, but I know I mentioned the short vision of the past life that I’d had, without giving very many details.

Just that I’d had it, and it had seemed like a difficult ending to that life, which seemed to confirm what she had told me before about having had “very trying past lives” where I was “persecuted for something I didn’t do.”

That was all I said, and she didn’t have much to add about it, and so we went ahead and started the session.

I’m pretty sure the part I’m about to describe began as Angelic was working on my 4th to my 3rd chakra.

Here is what I saw then: 

A cathedral at night appeared suddenly. I first saw it from above and kind of descended into it.

It was a cool night, and the inside of this cathedral was lit by hundreds of burning candles.

It was entirely empty, and it seemed to have been very late at night.

The scene then shifted, and I found myself outside, in a covered passageway running alongside one of the cathedral walls.

I then saw my past self, the one I had seen in my first past life vision.

I immediately ran toward her and embraced her. I threw my arms around her and held her so tightly. I was so happy and excited to see this woman I recognized as myself.

We separated, but I held my arm out to her, and then, arm in arm, just like old friends, we walked around the cathedral together, talking and quietly laughing and catching up.

This went on for several moments, then I started to wonder: who was it that had rushed up to meet this self?

I tried to imagine her. I wondered if it was the “me” that was laying there on that table in Angelic’s office, me dressed in an old gray sweater and black leggings, the “me” of today, Eleanor.

I tried to move my awareness out of the body I was inhabiting in this dream space. I tried putting myself in the place of “past me,” to observe from there this self that had just now rushed up to meet her with so much joy.

I took a step back then, and observed my Self.

I saw a brilliant white body of light, radiating outward, and having the outline of a human form. I saw this self as pure light, pure energy.

But when I decided to get closer and look directly at this self, this brilliant light became a perfect mirror, reflecting back to me my own image, whatever that happened to be at the time.


The scene shifted again. It was now the beginning of a very cool early morning, and I was in the graveyard outside the cathedral.

I came to my own grave. My past self had recently been buried here, and there were hundreds of white roses that had been piled upon my tomb earlier.

Then I found myself in this tomb, from within the vantage point of my buried past self.

There was a crack, a sliver of light coming through between the two heavy stones that had been laid over my grave.

I began to feel restless, and started shifting and moving around there in my grave.

Suddenly, I knew what I had to do. It was time for me to get up, and to leave my burial place behind.


I was concentrating on this when I heard a noise coming from right outside of Angelic’s office.

It was two older men who had started using one of the exercise machines placed right next to her door.

I started to get really upset. I was so mad. “Why won’t they just shut up?” I wondered.

I returned to my vision, and kept trying to focus on pushing aside the heavy tombstones and escaping my grave.

But the voices outside were too loud. They were too distracting.

“I can’t do it,” I thought. “They’re too loud, it’s their fault and I can’t so I won’t even try anymore.”

I started to get even more angry and upset.

“Here I am, trying to escape my grave, and these people are making it impossible for me. I’m doing my best to heal and I can’t because these people won’t let me!”

Then I had an insight: this was just like in my real life. 

People were always going to be in my way, telling me I couldn’t do this or I didn’t deserve that.

I had to be willing to stand up and rise, no matter what was going on outside of me. 

And so I made the decision: I was getting myself out of that grave, no matter what.

I turned my attention back to my inner vision. 

I focused on the heavy stones above my grave, and willed them to move apart enough that I could find my way out.

I was determined. This time, I wasn’t going to let anything stop me. 

The men outside kept talking. They kept on and on, but I just focused on my vision.

The voices outside were so loud then, they even appeared as characters in my vision (as angry townspeople yelling at the edge of the cemetary).

But I was already out. Nothing could stop me now.

Dressed in my burial gown of gold and white, I pulled myself completely out of that grave, and I started to run.

The sun was brilliant, blazing high above me. It shone for me, and it gave me strength. I felt this powerful, glowing warmth within and without. 

I picked up the pace, and I ran.

I ran and I ran, faster than I’d ever run before.

It was exhilarating. This freedom, this speed, this joy, as I ran, self-possessed and self-assured, encouraged by my brilliant, loving and powerful sun.

I ran. I came to a cliff’s edge and I jumped, leaping up, arms outstretched, to kiss the sun.

I became one with this power, before I turned and dove down, down into the sea below.


I started to swim slowly down, then more quickly.

Swiftly, I moved through the dark, quiet sea. 

As I swam, I picked up momentum, and quickly I made my way to the very bottom of the ocean.

I arrived at the very depths, and here, I found a great black boulder, and I swam near and pulled myself to rest on top of it.

Then suddenly, I was no longer at the bottom of the sea.

Instead, I saw myself, naked, covered only by my long black hair, sitting on this rock in outer space. 

I sat on this small black moon, a planet all to myself. 

An interstellar breeze caressed my skin and rustled my hair as I sat on my moon, contemplating the cosmos.

I was here for only a moment, not long at all, before I was overtaken by a new vision.

I was no longer on my moon. I was no longer anywhere, really.

All I knew was fire, all I could see where deep orange flames everywhere around me. 

I felt the anguish of burning, deep rage.

“NOOOOOOOOO!!”

I let out this primal animal scream inside my mind.

“No!” I repeated. “No! You don’t know me! Get away from me, get out! No!”

I wasn’t sure what was going on, or what this was about. 

But I knew that it was right for me to be here. 

I knew it was right for this to burn, so that one day it would turn to ashes, as it should.

So I let it burn.

My rage was all the fuel I ever needed, and I allowed it to be so.

I watched, in the flames, of the flames, on fire with this rage, consumed and willing to be here till eternity if need be.

Slowly, the flames died down, and then, a new vision quietly emerged.

Down at my feet, I felt the same vines of white roses as before appear, and begin to twine themselves over my body. The vine snaked itself around me, crawled around both of my ankles, white roses blooming, lovingly rooting me to the earth.

I felt a deep and pervading sense of calm. Maybe forgiveness, but even more than that, a sense of rightness, of being well with the world, of acceptance by the earth.

It told me, “It is okay. You don’t have to struggle anymore. You deserve to be here. Rest, you are at home.”

Descansos

Journal Date: Thursday, November 5, 2020

I just finished an exercise Estés suggested we do in this chapter on rage in Women who Run with the Wolves. It’s called “Descansos,” and here we are to mark all the little (and large) deaths of our lives.

Descansos are symbols that mark a death. Right there, right on that spot, someone’s journey in life halted unexpectedly. To make descansos means taking a look at your life and marking where the small deaths, las muertes chiquitas, and the big deaths, las muertes grandotas, have taken place.”

Estés encourages us to make our own descansos, to sit down and examine our lives, our losses, all the places which must be remembered and at the same time, put to rest.


I had a lot of crosses to mark.

My life has been filled with losses. One right after another, with little chance to recover in between.

At this point, I have between 25-30 crosses marked down to represent what I have lost.

Descansos

It’s a lot, but somehow it still doesn’t feel like enough.

I don’t even think my greatest losses are even on here.

My deepest pain comes from having missed something more intangible than a job or a boyfriend or anything I listed here before.

Maybe my greatest loss is actually me. My own self.

To have grown up never knowing (not to mention never liking) myself.

To never have felt at home. Not even in my own body. 

Especially not in my own body. This was a source of shame, and where I could locate all of my pain. Better just to not be here. To escape, by whatever means necessary.

And not just my body. I was estranged from all of me.

Always looking outside of myself for the “right” answer. 

The “right” way to look, think, feel, act, be.

I didn’t even know what I was looking for.

I just knew that I was doing it wrong.

I was just wrong, period.

I never belonged to myself. 

That’s the worst part.

I was in such a rush to give myself away. I would sell myself off to the lowest bidder. I was constantly in a rush to find the quickest way to betray myself next.

It’s very sad.

Looking back on all of this, I feel so tired. 

Exhausted. 

What was the meaning behind all of this?

It’s hard to understand.

But I’m starting to feel ready to grieve my losses. To grieve, and to let go.


“Remember in ‘The Crescent Moon Bear’ the woman said a prayer and laid the wandering orphaned dead to rest. That is what one does in descansos. Descansos is a conscious practice that takes pity on and gives honor to the orphaned dead of your psyche, laying them to rest at last.

“Be gentle with yourself and make the descansos, the resting places for the aspects of yourself that were on their way to somewhere, but never arrived. Descansos mark the death sites, the dark times, but they are also love notes to your suffering. They are transformative. There is a lot to be said for pinning things to the earth so they don’t follow us around. There is a lot to be said for laying them to rest.”