Personal Transitions: Beyond the Comfortable Into the Real by Nobel Steve

Author:Nobel, Steve
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Findhorn Press
Published: 2018-10-14T00:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

The Timeless Way of Transition

6

The Ground Trembles

There is a candle in your heart, ready to be kindled.

There is a void in your soul, ready to be filled.

You feel it, don’t you?

— RUMI

Author and psychiatrist M. Scott Peck once wrote that life is difficult, and only when we embrace that fact can we ever seek to transcend it. Some people seek perfection in their lives, but perfection is a completed state, the very antithesis of growth, opening, learning, and awakening. Life is difficult and comes with challenge and tension. To avoid challenge does not mean we avoid tension. If we retreat from life and avoid desire or passion, this does not stop us from feeling tension. We feel tension when we are in a job that is dull or stressful, a relationship that is stuck or too demanding, or at a more material level, if we are not driving the right brand of car or living in the right location.

In everyday life, tension is generated when a need or want hits up against an external block or internal resistance. We want something and do not have it, or we do not want something and cannot get rid of it. This is what I call ‘surface tension.’ It is linked to the pleasure-pain principle: pleasure entices, and pain repels. Surface tension is how things move and get done in the world—basically, no tension equals no motivation, no momentum, no action. Without a degree of tension, there would be little incentive to shop, eat, wash the dishes, build, or make love. Of course, too much surface tension and we feel stressed, overwhelmed, and unable to meet all of life’s demands. Not enough surface tension, and we feel so chilled or relaxed that nothing happens at all.

Some surface tension is to be expected when living in the everyday world. This level of tension, when it is high, creates lots of change but never leads to a transition. The ego knows about change but does not know about transformation. A transition is initiated by a deeper level of force, which can generate what I call ‘soul tension.’ Soul tension is very different from our ego’s chasing, accumulating, and avoidance strategies. Lines of soul tension force can be seen in the hard aspects in the natal birth chart. Soul tension also starts to activate with the transits of certain celestial bodies. Chiron, Pluto, Saturn, and Uranus transits are all important ones. To understand current or pending soul tension in your chart, you need to consult an experienced astrologer.

Soul tension manifests when a calling to return to living an authentic life collides with ego defences and cultural-family rules or other social conventions. (I could spend a whole chapter trying to define an authentic life. The point is that if you do not know what it is, you are probably not living it.) Soul tension is a whole different dimension and much harder to deal with, since now it’s not about the car we want to drive, the promotion we deserve, or the person we want to date.

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