Solutions for Earth-Gone-Wrong

In my recent post Personality Flaws of the Four Elements I described ways the 4 Elements can go wrong, each according to its own nature.

How To Know If Earth Is Grounding You
When your life is carefully measured from achievement to achievement (or failure), it’s easy to forget how to have fun.  Earth is the poster child for “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”  Your Earth has gone wrong when:

•    You’re such a critical perfectionist that your partner calls you a nag.
•    You’re a cynic, only interested in the bottom line and closed to any ideas that don’t have already proven value.
•    You’ve been called “cold” or “calculating.”
•    You’re prone to overindulging in physical pleasures to compensate for how hard you work or how boring your job is.
•    You’ve learned to defer gratification in favor of long-term goals—learned it so well that you can’t let yourself off the hook during a vacation and you despair of enjoying retirement.

Solution One:  Balance Earth With The Other 3 Elements
If your Earth is distorted, the other elements can help restore balance.  When your routines and systems are so effective that even you are bored, it’s time to break up the Earth with a little Fire.  Be spontaneous, take risks, look dopey.  Fling yourself into something, instead of calculating all its details first.

Earth gets dull and blockish without the lightness of Air.  Air encourages brainstorming sessions and crazy ideas—some may sound just like empty theories, but others will, with the time and testing Earth provides, prove useful in the end.  But you have to open your ears and listen first.

Water fertilizes Earth in a wonderful way, bringing warmth, emotion, compassion and sensitivity Earth does not naturally possess.  Too many late nights at the office?  Balance them with cozy family time.  Gotten too controlled or controlling?  Nothing like a nice emotional outburst to break down the walls.  Oh, and don’t forget to be vulnerable.

Solution Two:  Emphasize Healthy Earth
Healthy Earth practices can eliminate the need for compensatory, negative Earth behaviors.  Here are some examples of “Earth-Fu:”

•    Pay close attention to your bodily needs and engage in rigorous physical self-care.
•    Feed yourself delicious, homemade, organic, healthy food on a regular basis.  It tastes best when you cooked it yourself.
•    Organize your home, your office and your projects in ways that allow you to streamline, be effective and stop worrying.  Work smarter, not harder.
•    Fall in love with this physical world:  get out in nature more, breathe clean air and surround yourself with trees.
•    Set achievable goals and be consistent about rewarding yourself (even if it’s just a mental pat on the back) when you succeed.  When you become preoccupied with your failures, wrench your attention away from them and instead put it on what you’ve done right.

The Four Elements are a fascinating part of human temperament.
Find out about yours in a reading with Jamie:
Contact Jamie to learn how.

Coming up next:  Does Air Have You Lost In A Cloud?

“Wake up!” says Uranus.  “Are you facing chaos? Lately I’ve turned your life upside down.  This year I’m making you an amazing offer:  to not only restore the order you used to experience, but to shift your life in a global way so that the problems you used to experience—the ones that led to this chaos—are not even relevant anymore.”

Today Is A Pivotal Day
When a planet turns retrograde it makes a pivot in the sky and also creates a metaphorically “pivotal” experience for human beings.  Today, that planet is Uranus.  It’s as if Uranus is telling us, “You can’t go on avoiding this change forever.  Today I’m delivering a wake-up call.”  If Uranus is touching a planet in your chart this year, this message is for you and it will have very specific meaning, depending on what planet that is.  That planet, and the part of you it represents, is in a massive uproar.  It’s time for a shift to a whole new level.  Today is the peak of Uranus’s wake-up call, but it could happen anytime within 5 days surrounding today.

Initiation Leading To An Inner Journey
Sometime between March and now, Uranus showed us an area of life in which we are due for a change.  What he delivered was an initiation and it was our first chance to catch a clue about paradigm shift to come.  That clue may have been obvious or it may have been subtle, but we’ve been shown an area of life in which something new and startling is possible.

The clue was delivered, but did we notice?  It’s human to go into denial.  As spring proceeded, we may have said to ourselves, “Maybe I don’t have to do anything about this.  Maybe it was just a one-time thing.  Maybe I can just move on.  Maybe I can get away without paying attention to this.”

Or maybe not.  Today Uranus turns up the volume and gives us a reminder.  “That big change you’re due for?” he says, “It’s crucial.  And I’m putting it right in your face until you do something about it.”  Today, Uranus’ retrograde journey begins and with it begins a period of soul-searching during which we must reflect upon and seek to understand the massive shift we feel coming.  Uranus will continue moving retrograde (i.e. backwards) until the day it turns direct, which is December 5, 2010.

Every Breakthrough Begins With A Breakdown
Uranus teaches us a fundamental truth:  a fresh, more inclusive order only comes after a chaotic mess.  A transit of Uranus is accompanied by a restlessness that causes you to want to dash it all to pieces.  You don’t actually have to destroy everything you’ve built in order to shift to the next level, but you may have to tolerate some uncomfortable mess as you search for the new frame to put it all into.

Uranus brings the “Eureka!” or the “Aha.”  From Uranus comes that moment of insight, that lightning-bolt-from-the-blue that disrupts your normal everyday assumptions and introduces an idea so new, so crazy, so startling that it just might work.  The best response to a Uranian insight is to open your mind up and engage in a search for a new frame, a new context, a new order in which all the old pieces make sense, and the new ones also fit.  Uranus turns your head around—that’s what he’s for.

Is This Story Your Story?
If this feels true for you, it may be that you are personally touched by this transit.  Uranus may be triggering a planet in your own chart, thus bringing these themes up for you.  This year Uranus is covering the space between 26 degrees of Pisces and 0 degrees of Aries.  If there is anything in your chart in 26, 27, 28 or 29 degrees of Pisces, Gemini, Virgo or Sagittarius, or additionally in 0 degrees of Aries, Cancer, Libra or Capricorn, you will feel this.  And knowing it can help a lot if you’ve been feeling surrounded by chaos and you don’t know why.  If Uranus has touched you this year, this could be the year when you finally liberate yourself from old, self-entrapping ways and instead bust out into a whole new way of being.

What Area Of Your Life Is Being Affected?
Good question.  It will have to do with the planet in your chart that’s being triggered by Uranus.  If Uranus is affecting your Venus, you may find yourself feeling restless and wanting more in your relationships.  You don’t have to destroy all your relationships to satisfy that restlessness, but you do need to shift them to a whole new level now.   If Uranus is affecting your Mercury, you’re getting more crazy, paradigm-shifting new ideas these days than you usually do—use this time of genius for your long-term benefit.  And if you are between 39 and 42 right now, this could be a year that calls forth your genius and the tremendous restlessness that goes with that, demanding that you live into your potential once and for all.

Uranus’ Gift
The promise of Uranian chaos is that it leads to a new order.  Uranus doesn’t really want to leave you in a chaotic mess for the rest of your life—and if he ever has, you’ve not responded to the situation with your true power.  The mess Uranus causes is only a temporary state—although a necessary one—on the way to something much bigger and better.  Sure the ride is messy, but what does that matter?  Isn’t being the most amazing you possible worth a little chaos?

Want to know more about how this Uranus transit affects you?
Contact Jamie at pandora@pandoraastrology.com
to schedule a reading.