Do You Believe in Life After Love?
August Energetics: The Aquarius Full Moon, Lion's Gate 8/8 - it's the season for forgiveness and choosing to moving powerfully forward into your co-creative future
The Energetics of August: DO YOU BELIEVE IN LIFE AFTER LOVE?
Last night as I was walking around my neighborhood, Cher’s iconic song popped into my head. I laughed out loud to myself as it percolated in my brain, teasing me, inviting me to see a deeper insight.
Spirit, Angels, Guides, God, the divine within, myself, whoever it is, has such a good sense of humor, because this was the answer and the question to my year, to my life and of course, it was Cher.
I’ve been pulling cards recently that have pointed to the fact that I am my own block (which, I KNOOOOOOW, TRUST ME)
So, having my angels sing me some Cher was a nice lil reframe with - DO YOU BELIEVE - being the operative phrase here. I may be the block, but I can choose to have faith that I can work through it. I always have the CHOICE to move forward with faith, even when the past has left me hurt, disappointed, sad.
No matter what happens to us, no matter what knocks us down, we can always CHOOSE to heal, choose to believe in life after loss, after love has been broken.
As someone very much still putting the pieces together after getting blindsided by the end of my marriage last year, my life IS this question - can I open myself up again or do I want to keep my heart closed on the same loop?
And while you may not be experiencing the loss of a partnership, there are so many ways we have to birth and rebirth ourselves, navigating through disappointments, blocks, obstacles…living in America in 2022…
And as the full moon’s revelations have moved through me over the past week, I’ve realized my past miscalculations1, the flaws in my young thinking due to cultural pressures and norms, my own perfectionism and internalized narrative - and finally not from a place of self-shaming, but from a place of actual self-forgiveness, from a place where I can truly grieve for my youth that wasn’t picture perfect.
What’s up in the SKY?
Aquarius Full Moon - Forgiveness
With the full moon and the lion’s gate revealing a path forward - I see the beauty and power in the simplicity of Cher’s message, can you choose yourself? Can you keep going even when things get tough? We always have the choice.
I’m prone to ruminating (help me, I have gate 24, “The Return” activated on HIGH)
And what has been coming through to me is this - EVERYTHING IS LETTING GO.
“ENERGY WORK” boils down to an ability to constantly release attachments, to the past, to the future, to the material world, to your own expectations.
Energy work is an ability to travel lightly. Being present and fully in the now. When we are in the now, we detach from creating the same loops again and again.
I’m no stranger to hitting rock bottom.
The world of energetics is not all high vibes and crystals.
ENERGY WORK IS COMING TO TERMS WITH YOURSELF, because we can’t manifest, we can’t timeline jump, we can’t improve, or experience the highs without facing the duality of life. Shadow/light - you know the drill.
Prior to the Lion’s Gate opening on 8/8, I got massively smacked in the face with the fucking feeeeeeels. At first glance, I thought it was for my marriage. And while I sat with it, something deeper was revealed, something I’ve been dancing around this summer as I’ve been working through the To Be Magnetic Unblocking Challenge. I had to allow myself to grieve my teens + 20s. Something I’ve absolutely refused myself to do because “I can’t believe I’m still hung up on something that happened so long ago.”
BUT WE CANNOT HEAL BY FORCE. WE CANNOT HEAL THROUGH SHAMING OURSELVES. WE CAN ONLY HEAL THROUGH LOVE AND SELF-COMPASSION.
It doesn’t matter that intellectually I KNOW THIS (and literally wrote my graduate thesis on how literally nothing can happen if we do not feel safe in our bodies/environments) I have absolutely refused myself grace on the events of my teens into 20s and it’s finally time to sit with it, forgive myself AND forgive the people who caused and perpetuated harm intentional and not, because what I’ve realized, is a secondary gain of not facing and processing our trauma (whether big T trauma or little t trauma) is realizing that our growth and processing can make OTHER PEOPLE UNCOMFORTABLE. And unfortunately, I would rather be uncomfortable that upset other people, which is how I am here. Realizing that I needed to forgive events that happened long ago.
buuuut I’m a runner, folks, and I don’t mean it like I lace up my running shoes and do something healthy with my time like exercise. hah hah hahaaaaaaaaaaaa.. hahahahahahah. NOOO. IF FUCKING ONLY.
No, I am a runner like, I will do everything I can to run from myself, from my feelings, from my past until I am so physically exhausted I have to face myself (that and the universe WILL keep dumping you out at the same crossroads if you do not learn your lesson)
As someone who attempts to run and distract myself no matter the lengths, I also have a paralyzing perfectionist loop that runs, undercutting everything, HOW WILL I FEEL WHEN I LOOK BACK AT WHAT’S HAPPENING NOW?
The fundamental issue of course is - if I am so wrapped up in projecting out what might happen and guessing how I MIGHT feel, I can’t make the best decisions in the moment. I have lost touch with my magic and my intuition, ESPECIALLY AS A SPLENIC PROJECTOR.
And as I’ve come to realize this summer, I’ve been subconsciously funneling energy into protecting myself from processing old memories, therefore creating this distorted hall of mirrors, and layers upon layers of protection to protect myself from me and my own judgment - but the body, my dear sweet body, will always tell me the truth. because it’s really difficult to admit how much time and energy I’ve wasted spent keeping up the charade of a controlled image, trying to keep anything bad from happening, I’ve just kept myself in a loop from actually LIVING my life.
WHAT’S UR HOBBY? SELF-PUNISHMENT BY UPHOLDING PERFECTIONIST TENDENCIES, U?
My perfectionism is imagining all the mistakes I could possibly make and then being absolutely paralyzed with fear of making the wrong choice.
It’s giving invisible death spiral through being a shut-in, it’s giving screaming into the void via doom-scrolling.
It’s the flawed logic of the self-protective - if I hide myself, If I run from the truth of my feelings and emotions - if I put up enough armor, I can move through the world unscathed! HAHA JOKES ON YOU. I’M FINE, YOU DIDN’T HURT ME!
Except, when I’ve finally acknowledged the price I’ve paid - suppressing myself that deeply, to attempt to outsmart futher hurt - I forget the price paid is that I am sacrificing the pleasure of being seen, of being known. I’m denying myself the pleasure of truly EXPRESSING myself.
And while the amount of energy I funnel into this protection/paralyzing/pursuit of perfection is daunting - it’s a suppression self-fulfilling cycle, there’s always a breaking point for me. I can only be the dog in the burning room for so long before I have to admit that the room has burnt down.
There’s a lot of talk now about gaslighting - but what we don’t talk about is how it both possible and extremely harmful to gaslight yourself.
(CW: references through out the next few paragraphs to depression, s*xual assault, substance abuse, emotional abuse, and grooming)
When you go through a harmful experience, like being s*xually assaulted by someone you thought was your friend, our 2000s (and before) culture said, that’s on you. When these things happened to me, I was told explicitly AND implicitly to STFU and look at what I did that these things had happened to me. AND REMEMBER, worse things had happened to other people. Don’t be such a baby. You’re not special, you’re just stupid.
So when you find yourself being told nothing that bad happened to you, and you do your best to soldier on and you don’t allow yourself the space to grieve, you start a cycle of self-blaming that just leads nowhere all that great.
When we’re told (by ourselves or others) that other people had it a lot worse, so what’s YOUR PROBLEM, we do ourselves a massive disservice.
I’ve spent most of my time as an adult in semi-arrested development, trying to make sense of the string of bad luck that hit from 17-22, how the good church girl got bullied, ostracized, groomed, systematically broken down… I did mental gymnastics every day trying to prove to myself that I didn’t deserve that but coming up with answers that said, yes I must have done something to deserve this because it didn’t seem like anyone else was experiencing this, silencing myself, wading around in the gray space of being psychologically groomed and the slippery slope of what counts as abuse.
In the early 2000s, we didn’t have the messaging around power dynamics and hidden abuse that we do now. Girls/women who were sexually assaulted, girls who were groomed, they were considered broken, they were subtly and not subtly tossed out of communities. So if this happened to you- you had two choices- rock the boat and essentially label yourself other or silence yourself. I learned first hand that people, even the people who say they love you, they don’t actually want to deal with the consequences, they want you to deal with it by yourself, by sweeping it under the rug and keep going.
BUT YOU CANNOT DON DRAPER LOGIC YOUR BODY.
And while we still do this in 2022, while we continue to have a culture that implicitly says - DON’T YOU FUCKING DARE ROCK THIS BOAT, it felt much worse to me then. I had these experiences that were confusing, that broke my brain, and instead of receiving healing, instead of getting to process it properly, I received the message that I just needed to GET OVER IT. So, I filed myself under broken and went to work trying to hide my pain (extremely poorly) in plain sight.
Now I have to darkly laugh that of course my body “betrayed me”2 when I couldn’t hold the pain in any longer. First, by falling into “inexplicable” deep depressions, paralyzing anxiety attacks (leading me to bolt out of my college classes, attempting to choke down my tears until I could barricade myself in my room alone…), I didn’t know then how to connect the dots that my body was trying to get my attention, to process the experiences I had.
Instead, I felt so alone, so isolated in my pain that the world told me was my fault, that all I knew how to do was to pretend I was ok. It seemed like no one wanted to help me or validate my pain, so instead of validating myself (because I was 19/20 years old, I chose to drown out my entire being, silencing my mind with any substance I could get my hands on, making my cycle of feeling broken even more chaotic. If I wasn’t valuable to others, then I sure as hell wasn’t valuable to myself.
I went to work to gloss over what was happening to me by attempting to create a controlled image from the outside - finding “a normal” boyfriend, getting a “good” job. Moving to a new city where the past wouldn’t catch up with me… but the thing about trying to outrun yourself and your problems, is there you are. We’re constantly telling on ourselves subconsciously - until we can bring it to the surface and heal it with love.
And that’s what this supermoon is all about - forgiveness.
And with the time and space of being older and in a culture that is better at seeing how we’ve perpetuated pain and propped up abusers, I realized I had another opportunity to dig deeper into who I am, as painful as it is to see that I’ve been subconsciously in survival mode since 2004, unwilling to admit my hurt and pain, only cementing over it further and further, I ALSO recognize that only I can do the work to save myself through forgiveness, love, compassion, instead of perpetuating the cycle of abuse upon myself and continuing my suffering by shoving it down.
To save myself, I forgive myself. I don’t need to keep punishing myself for the past. My energy work is channeling all my energy into the present moment which means feeling though things that maybe don’t make sense, but if I’ve been locked up for so long, the only way out is through.
I can’t change if I’m simultaneously in the past and future.
We can only change when we pull all our energy into the present and let it flow naturally.
It is the most vulnerable position to be in. Being fully present. It is radical AF. It’s magical AF.
if you’ve read all the way to the end, holy shit, wow, thank you. I love you.
if you want to support my work - consider working with me one on one or hiring me to read human design for your family or office - my goal is for everyone to see that they are a unique gift with a unique purpose and that the world is a better place when you are operating with your energy.
to book send me an email - hello @ jenigage.com
My miscalculations were this -
#1 making comparisons. (This is something I still struggle with - but at the time of my young 20s, comparisons thrust me deeper into my struggles - comparing my experience to what I perceived other’s experiences were.)
#2 - thinking that because bad things happened to me, that I was broken, damaged, ruined FOREVER.
#3 - thinking the only way through these obstacles was denial or erasure of the past
If you haven’t read the body keeps the score - do this immediately. Our body is our wisdom and our truth teller. The more I understand myself, the more I realize our body is always communicating our truth and we are the only one who can answer our call. We can seek help, but no one else is going to do it for us. Listen to your body. You can save yourself.