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There are moments of awakening, and they often happen in a form you do not expect or even want, but there they are, irrefutable in their magnitude. When Magnus, beloved pup of my heart, stopped eating, became depressed and lethargic last weekend, all of my nurturing attention was mobilized in only the way seeing one you love suffer, can. <\/span>From Saturday on, every day following\u00a0took on that hazy, otherworldly quality of being out of time. I started going into those dark places that we go to. You know the ones: the worry, projecting into the future, imagining the worst, imagining all possible scenarios, none of them true and all of them true at once. In other words, my mind had become a runaway train. Fear was the conductor and I was merely a passenger, holding on for dear life.<\/p>\n My own suffering was clearly looking\u00a0far worse than his at this point …and that\u2019s when Grace entered through the back door. I looked at Magnus, the epitome of surrender, of trust, faith, innocence and presence. My nervous system was wound tighter than a rubber band ball. He was everything I was not. I wasn\u2019t trusting, I wasn\u2019t in faith, and I certainly wasn\u2019t surrendering.<\/strong> The fierce mama instinct in me was ready for war. Though, truth be told, I wasn\u2019t exactly sure what war I was fighting but if there ever was a deserving moment of screaming like a banshee at an unjust God this was it. Suffering animals? Come on, God. This experiment is seriously flawed.<\/p>\n Mostly I wasn\u2019t being present, to either him or to myself, and that felt like a horrible negligence, a tribute unfitting to such a beautiful creature. Have you ever been so absorbed in your own process of negative emotions\u00a0that you couldn\u2019t truly be present with a loved one\u00a0during their last days and moments? I have. It\u2019s an awful feeling. \u00a0He was so bad off that I didn’t know what would happen next, but I did know I wanted to be present to him (How often do we do this to our self? How often do we become so consumed by our own personal brand of suffering that we neglect to love our innocent animal self when we are\u00a0suffering- when we need our love most?).<\/p>\n As I looked at my love muffin I\u00a0realized that the depth of my fear, worry and pain was in direct proportion to\u00a0my love for him. The only reason I was feeling so tortured was because I love him so much.\u00a0 That was the bottom line. I love this little guy so much and would give anything to make him happy, and\u00a0I was allowing fear to obscure this sweet truth and\u00a0contract me into pain instead of expand into more love. What if I chose love instead?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n That realization\u00a0stopped fear in its tracks. \u00a0Fear, worry, anxiety… It\u2019s all a\u00a0case of the emperor\u2019s new clothes. There is nothing original underneath our worries. It is manufactured, a made up illusion to try and\u00a0control the uncontrollable. Meanwhile, love is waiting for us to stop doing the crazy dance and listen to the music (it’s always a love song).<\/p>\n This Pisces New Moon Eclipse is a portal for\u00a0opening your heart as wide as an ocean.<\/strong>\u00a0 You don’t have to suffer. You can hold it all. You can accept that whatever happens you are here to love that. As we\u2019re pressed by change from all angles, awash in the unknowns and uncertainties of Pisces season, there is no better time to practice faith, surrender, trust and presence. When I looked into those sweet eyes and saw love waiting for me to answer it with same, I saw my attempts to control the universe was an illusion. The game of \u201cI\u2019ll feel good and fine when life shows up differently\u201d just doesn\u2019t work. It only creates struggle and disconnection. I choose love.<\/p>\n This eclipse set (located at 18’56 Pisces and in 2 weeks 3’17’ Libra) falls on my 6th\/12th axis- what April<\/a> calls\u00a0the axis of adaptation and retreat (click here\u00a0<\/a>to find out where YOU\u00a0are experiencing your eclipses). I\u00a0might ask April to change that\u00a0to\u00a0“the sh** hits the fan” axis; sick pet, being in process with a re-fi and\u00a0remodel, and\u00a0the environmental impact of the remodel on my health and work life… so much is in flux.\u00a0In other words, I have so many opportunities\u00a0to surrender to love. So many opportunities: to flip the switch, to stop resisting all the pain and inconvenience I want to keep at bay, to stop thinking “I can’t handle one more thing” and instead say “NO. I will not turn away from this moment.\u00a0I will open my heart wider, deeper. I will love this moment. Hard.”<\/p>\n Eclipses\u00a0bring change.\u00a0Pisces is a mutable sign, which means there’s a lot of adaptation to changing circumstances occurring now. The New Moon Eclipse is closely conjunct Chiron; we feel the pain of mortality, and are reminded of life\u2019s unfairness and injustices. A few degrees away, Saturn, planet of reality and limits, squares this New Moon, while Jupiter, planet of expansion and growth opposes it. It\u2019s a big, messy enchilada plate of opportunity for viewing life\u00a0from\u00a0a wider lens — a more spiritual one– and appreciating the little things (Jupiter in Virgo). Can you remember that you are not your name, role or identity but a soul on a journey? Remember\u00a0that life on Earth is a classroom, and while the agenda looks different, the lesson always loops back to learning\u00a0spiritual truths personal to you? \u00a0Can your fed-upness with your own suffering lead you to the choice to\u00a0surrender? Pisces\u00a0lends us\u00a0grace when we become\u00a0willing to transcend our circumstances and surrender\u00a0our illusions.<\/strong><\/p>\n Because there’s so much uncertainty in life. We never know how our actions will turn out; we can only work with the information we have at any given time, which is often incomplete.\u00a0For whatever our\u00a0question, the answer is, always: More Love.<\/strong>\u00a0Right now\u00a0I’m getting so so much from\u00a0Matt Kahn\u2019s book Whatever Arises, Love That<\/em>. As\u00a0spiritual truths must be worked into our system, kneaded like bread, to be owned, right now\u00a0my practice\u00a0is lately looking\u00a0something like this: What does this pain or ouch want? More love. Worry? More love. How will I get through this next hurdle? More love. How will we\u00a0pay down our\u00a0debt? More love. What does this\u00a0client need? More love. What\u2019s for breakfast? More love. What does 2+2 equal? More love. Try it. Even if you don\u2019t feel\u00a0the love, by\u00a0extending the invitation for love to enter, your\u00a0subconscious starts to resonate with your intention and a\u00a0new program will emerge\u00a0till, eventually, you bypass the love masquerading as fear part and go directly to the love. That\u2019s where freedom happens- this delicious unraveling of everything into an endless\u00a0pool\u00a0of love.<\/p>\n If you’ve been holding your breath this far, wondering, Well how is he??!, he was diagnosed with Addison’s disease which entails\u00a0a lifelong regime of hormones, and since we got him to the vet before he went into shock (as many dogs with this disease do), we\u00a0were lucky- it could have been so much worse. This week, Magnus broke\u00a0my heart open. While the human and animal have needed\u00a0practical\u00a0forms of\u00a0earthly love\u00a0(I’ve upped my self-care, the vets we’ve visited have been amazingly helpful!, and\u00a0we\u2019ve\u00a0been rocking the Crisis Cooler and Rescue Remedy Flower Essences…), during this eclipse, the spiritual expanded into love. Now, every time fear knocks, I surrender my illusion that life is supposed to be anything other than what it is. I humbly lay down resistance, accepting that whatever is happening is an opportunity for more\u00a0love. My\u00a0heart becomes\u00a0an ocean. I can hold it all.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n