Losing all sense of time and space can be a welcome and necessary reprieve for the busy-ness of our material world. Staring at the ceiling for hours can be therapeutic for someone who needs to reflect, slow down and inwardly process, as can losing one’s self in the inner world of our emotions, fantasies, dreams. After a stressful experience, most of us need the healing power of Neptune’s sleep – we need to leave our earthbound consciousness behind for a while. We all need to dip into Neptune’s waters of “just being” from time to time, as a measure to the time we spend doing. We all need to dip into our Soul, if only to remind our Self that we are an Eternal Soul.
Yet as with all archetypes, Neptune can be as much friend as foe, and we humans have free will to do as we please with our Neptune. One person has a spiritual practice and it nourishes the rest of their life; another has a spiritual practice and it becomes a way of avoiding life. “Don’t bother me, I’m meditating!” screams the “evolved” Buddhist practitioner, to his family. One person calms the stress of their life with long walks in Nature, joking to friends, “I don’t know what I’d do without my walks. They help me to let go.” Another person goes to the bar after work to let off steam, saying similarly, “Cocktails help me let go of all the stress I have…”
There is a dark side to Neptune, and because it can be so damaging it is darker than noir fiction. Dark Neptune always strikes when you’re no longer paying attention, or you’re focused on the wrong thing. Laziness, unconsciousness, avoidance of reality, over-focusing on one (chaos-causing) area of life to the exclusion of your whole life, all create the perfect Neptunian cocktail for stealing your life away. Dark Neptune lulls us into an inner lassitude about the practical realities we’re neglecting: the fact that we “forgot” to pay the electric bill, again, or the fact that we missed another AA meeting. Maybe we “let go” of a partners’ verbal abuse over and over again because doing the work of relationship is new and scary. Under the spell of Dark Neptune we can develop a permanent sense of detachment from life -and the problem-solving that reality requires of us, to help us grow and evolve. Comfortably numb, we “forget” or passively neglect to fully inhabit our own lives. We become a ghost – no one is home inside.
The bright side of Neptune teaches principles of letting go, too, though quite differently. It expands our sense of consciousness, through the unifying power of unconditional love, and through experiences where our hands are so tied we can only help our self through embodying forgiveness, self-acceptance, faith. Neptune teaches the spiritual principles that are so hard to master, like “don’t sweat the small stuff” and “love knows no enemy.” Bright Neptune asks us to dig deep for the spiritual truths that resonate with our very core being and then to trust in those, to put our faith in what we can’t prove but we know to be true.
Neptune is moving retrograde at 5-6 Pisces on 6/7/13 at 1:26 AM PT. When a planet stations retrograde, it’s at its strongest. Wherever you are in your personal evolution, your relationship with Neptune will be under scrutiny, under a close microscope, right now. As a client said to me just this morning, through her tears, “Jessica, I think I’ve been asleep for years.” Yes. Neptune retrograde-station can bring us these potent moments of potent self-realisation and insight. It’s the perfect time for waking up.
Two paths, one planet. How well are you doing with Neptune in your life?
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