This winter has felt a bit like I have been tucked in for a long winter’s night.  With Venus in Retrograde over the past two months, it has been a time for review of relationships of all sorts.  While the past week has found me hunkered down with a cold, generally speaking this time period has been about reviewing where I am at with several relationships.  I have been assessing what is working and what is not. This time period has definitely not been easy but it has been illuminating for sure.  It has shed light on relationships that I thought were not going to build but have immensely.  Other relationships are seemingly fading into the background becoming more a part of the past than the present as time moves forward.  This week is supposed to be about endings and when Venus comes out of hiding at the end of the week we move into new beginnings both internally and externally.  Hip Hip Hooray I say!   In our last chat Have the Time of Your Life: we talked about the real necessity to embrace the present moment and all it has to offer.  The above video was posted yesterday on Facebook by Jon Kabat Zinn and it brought me back to that same discussion as well as highlighting the work that Venus has us all doing.  When we are spending so much time contemplating the past, our mistakes or missed opportunities, the present and future are passing us by.  This is what drew me to be fascinated by positive psychology which is the science of positive emotions.  It is key to learn from our past but when we are IN the past rather than the present we lose out on building a healthier and happier self.  This is the light bulb that turned on for me yesterday when watching it.  I know, not exactly rocket science and not something I haven’t realized before, but it is a key concept to continue to return to over and over again until your heart can catch up with your head.  It is such an important balance, see saw perhaps, to learning from the past but growing from it at the same time.  The tendency of the mind is to take a bat and beat up the reflections that you have that you wish were different and romanticize those that you wish were still happening. Neither is really seeing things as they really are.  We all have parts of ourselves that are good and not so good.  I always try to remind myself that myself and others are doing the best we can in the moment with the skills that we possess at that time.

How do we use the past as a guide rather than a place to hang out and hide?  I know I am not always good at knowing a clear answer to this intellectually but my intuition surely knows what my brain can’t comprehend.  When I find myself ruminating over and over, again and again about something that is not happening presently, it is a sure sign that I am a) trying to control it and b) most likely I am being controlled BY it.  This has been my concern about the field that I have worked in.  In traditional talk therapy, we are trained that the past is the key to unlocking the present and future.  Therefore, we spend an awful lot of our time going over and over the details of the past.  We often go on an excavation searching for the emotions that are connected to these memories of the past (although our quest is working from the place of the mind which from my experience is often not where my emotions about past are held.)  I didn’t know this at the time, but getting into this field has reinforced the already strong muscle of rumination and analyzation from which I have needed to heal. My training began to make me feel like I was spending more time in my head than I was in the present moment with my client or even with myself.  Analyzation has it’s place but in my opinion, analyzation for it’s own sake keeps you trapped in the mind and stagnant. This brings me back to our last chat…..living life, having fun and embracing every opportunity for a life experiences. It is our life experiences that make life worth while.  I recently said in a post that in the end, love is all that matters.  This line triggered several readers as it seemed they may have been thinking more intellectually about what we need to survive here and now.  What I meant by this statement was that in the end all we have is love and the memories we have of the life experiences we allowed ourselves to live.  When we don’t take risks, we play life safe but at the same time those risks that we don’t take become our missed opportunities at living life.  I know when I spend too much time in the past, in my head, life is living me…I am not living life.

While being congested has not been fun, it has caused me to spend an awful lot of time resting.  As I begin to come out of the haze of marathon episodes of Will and Grace, a constant ingestion of fresh ginger tea, peppermint tea and homemade hot chocolate with almond milk and cinnamon (for the soul not the cold:), I am beginning to see the light at the end of the Venus tunnel.  I am preparing myself to take the next trapeze bar and move towards the life I want.  There are relationships in my life that are representative of who I used to be that need to go when the Universe is ready to offer up new ones that are representative of who I am today.  It feels good to be able to see this clearly but also work on cultivating patience as some of these relationships are currently still here for a reason.  What have you learned from the last two months?  Have you seen Venus’ hiding as an opportunity to go inward and look at what is working and what is not in your life?  How might you use the rest of this week to begin to make space for the new beginnings to come with the New Moon on Thursday/Friday?  How can you build towards choosing the happier you that you deserve to be?  For today I am going to keep it simple.  Go to the chiropractor for self care and hopefully have a release of sinus pressure, get some fresh air and probably have another hot chocolate because they are just so damn good!

Take care and be well:)
Cheers!