Jyotisha Practice

Guilt and Grief

Male and Female psychic energies,affecting Male and Female bodies

Fra Angelico. Altarpiece of the Annunciation. c. 1430-1432.

Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain

www.etymonline.com:

• O.E.gylt "crime, sin, fault, fine," of unknown origin, though some suspect a connection to O.E.gieldan "to pay for, debt," but O.E.D. editors find this "inadmissible phonologically."...

• Guilty is from O.E.gyltig, fromgylt. c.1225, "hardship, suffering," from O.Fr. grief "wrong, grievance," fromgrever "afflict, burden, oppress," from L. gravare "to cause grief, make heavy," fromgravis "weighty" (seegrave (adj.)). Meaning "mental pain, sorrow" is from c.1300.

... is quintessentially female energy. Guilt is the emotional response to cyclical thinking. Guilt is a command To return, to revisit, to repair, to recycle.

• Female energies run in both male and female bodies.

• However, female bodies are happiest running about 70% or more female energy with 30% or less proportion of male energy.

• A female running toxic levels of male energy will feel stuck, unattractive, and vindictive.

...is quintessentially male energy. Grief is the emotional "trickle-down" effect of linear thinking. Grief is a command to stop, don't go anywhere, give up, forget.

• Male energies run in both male and female bodies.

• However, male bodies are happiest running about 80% or more male energy with 20% or less proportion of female.

• A male running toxic levels of female energy (guilt) will feel weak, angry, and manipulated.

Guilt is very easy to find in your psychic space. You can feel the "should" pressure all over your body. You know the joke about the four major guilt groups: mother, money, mate, and mouth.

• There are probably more "should's" attached to our relationships with food, parents, spouse, and finance than all other topics combined!

• But don't limit your search for "should's" to these core subjects.

• "Should" guilt shows up in many interesting places.

Grief is similarly easy to spot.You can feel the "can't" pressure all over your body. Just start thinking about your major frustrations, blocks on what you believe you can't do. That's grief.

• Grief means it's over, done, finito. No returning, no cycling back, no second chance. Like a sports game. The team won or lost, it's an absolute win or loss. If our team lost, that's final. We don't complain to the judge or congress or mom that it wasn't fair. It just is what it is, a win or a loss. There's no second chance. It's like the common western concept of death. Finished, ended, so second chances. This energy is terribly sad, but also comfortingly absolute.

"Should" energy.

Guilt is very easy to find in your psychic space. You can feel the "should" pressure all over your body. You know the joke about the four major guilt groups: mother, money, mate, and mouth.

• There are probably more "should's" attached to our relationships with food, parents, spouse, and finance than all other topics combined! But don't limit your search for "should's" to these core subjects. "Should" guilt shows up in many interesting places.

"Can't" energy.

Grief is similarly easy to spot. You can feel the "can't" pressure all over your body. Just start thinking about your major frustrations, blocks on what you believe you can't do. That's grief.

• Grief means it's over, done, finito. No returning, no cycling back, no second chance. Like a sports game. The team won or lost, it's an absolute win or loss. If our team lost, that's final. We don't complain to the judge or congress or mom that it wasn't fair. It just is what it is, a win or a loss. There's no second chance. It's like the common western concept of death. Finished, ended, so second chances. This energy is terribly sad, but also comfortingly absolute.

Guilt is passed from mother to daughter, down through the generations.

Of the "four major guilt groups" :) surely the main one is Mother.

The most intense Guilt is passed from mother to daughter.

Daughter soon has her own children and passes to them. is the energy that allows a mother to protect her children even when her children are not with her.

She trains them from infancy to think of her, think of how she would feel, think of her sadness, anger, or disappointment if her children took undue risks.

Thus her maturing children eat good breakfasts, wear their coats in winter, and finish their homework - even when she's not looking. They do this because they are thinking of her, thinking of what she wants from them.

Looking at the history of civilizations, there is no doubt that guilt is a good and useful energy for cultural survival The moral component of guilt

Women in grief

When emotionally healthy women feel too much "can't" pressure they have weeping breakdowns which allow them to purge the toxic amounts of grief in their space.

Men don't necessarily feel bad when they are running large amounts of grief. They may feel a little stuckin grief, but they also feel securein it. Men like linear process. "Can't energy" is nice for them because it sets a limit on how long any cycle can run. That makes the cycle more linear and more easy to think about and control.

Women and Cyclical Energy

For women, nothing is more satisfying than an eternally long unbroken repeating cycle. The cycle of the generations, the menstrual cycle, the cycle of the seasons: these comforting repetitive dances of the life force can bring deep cleansing awareness and happiness to the healthy woman.

Men manipulate women by injecting the men's excess grief, which is highly toxic to women, into the women's psychic space. Women are multi-taskers who need to keep moving. Too much "stop" or "can't" energy is very unpleasant in the female space. Women get horribly stuck when they are overloaded with the excess grief of the men around them - especially their fathers and husbands.

Woman Stuck in Grief

A common example is a woman serving as wife and homemaker who has gained weight and can't seem to lose it.

No matter what she tries, even if she can temporarily lose some of that stuck weight, it creeps back up on her body in no time at all.

She just "can't" unload the excess. Psychically, she is stuck in grief.

Male or males in her environment are throwing psychic monkey wrenches into her spinning feminine gears, in a attempt to slow her down and prevent her from taking over the universe.

• If she learns the big secret of getting un-stuck, releasing the grief, she will definitely lose excess weight. But to do this she will need to rearrange her energy relationship with the male(s) to prevent them from (unconsciously) trying to slow her down.

Psychically, women can do anything. They can (and really naturally must) do two or three things pretty much all the time to stay at a nice female buzz. Feed the baby, fix the printer, dinner cooking on the stove, laundry washing, on the phone, planning events, staying in touch with family - that's a happy buzz for most psychically healthy women.

• How could this marvelous being possibly get stuck in "can't" energy?

• How can such eternal creativity ever "stop"?

It goes "stop" when excess male energy- the calm, linear, single-process energy that male bodies know and love - jams up her space.

Letter to a female client struggling with emotional rejection from a guilt-ridden male:

[We had been looking at the Jyotisha dynamics of this man's Chandra (mother/emotions) characteristics. The male in question was enduring an excruciating sade saati, which for 2.3 years greatly emphasized the effect of mother-guilt in his life)

Q: It seems like Mr. X (a middle aged, top professional adult man) will never be able to make emotionally clear, independent decisions.

His mother has bound him tightly for his entire life.

He says that he loves me but he "shouldn't" be with me.

Who says?

Where is that 'should' coming from?

Why can't he make the free choice to have love?

He is miserable without me, and I know it. You should read his letters... his passion is intense.

The healer in me wants to break him loose of his bondage... why can't he break "free" to love me?

Go straight to La Mama.

You have given the answer to your own question. Of course he is enslaved to his mother.

Mama is not just the epicenter of moral choice. She is the set menu for all of his emotional options. If Mama had a behavior, a man will look for a mate who has that behavior. If Mama didn't do it, the man won't need it, want it, or recognize it emotionally. He simply won't pick up the signal, if he wasn't trained on that signal by his Mama.

Extremely rare that any man will change this basic give-and-take, push-and-pull dynamic set with Mama in uteroand continued according to HER emotional needs, throughout childhood. (and if he has an adopted mother, it is that much more complex emotionally because he has two or more sets of primitive recognition/response signals...)

If Mama is a guilt freak (and most Mamas are) then baby boy learns to keep her love and attention coming in on that vibe. Extremely rare to change that. It's very core and very comfortable, no matter how dysfunctional the results.

So... if you've got a mega guilt boy with a professionally educated mother, it is likely that this (40-yr-old) boy is profoundly attracted to your ethic of social obligation, family responsibility, commitment to get the job done right, personal integrity in group process, etc. These are highlights of moral character in public life but in private relationships the same sense of "responsibility" unless it is very consciously managed, translates into guilt.

Guilt is that terrible bondage feeling of "have to". 'Guilt' in English comes from O.E. gieldan"to pay for, debt." Ideally it is internalized in uteroas mama talks to her baby, saying 'when you come out I want you to do this and be like that" - already the sense of responsibility for following through on Mama's expectations, for keeping the love alive, is planted deep in the baby's cellular memory.

It's planted deep for the girl baby too, but she will get to dump off her excessive guilt onto her own children. The boy is just sort of stuck with it, and of course he gets toxic from too much demanding female energy in his space. IMO men REALLY need to learn to release this stuck female energy out of their space since it ends up poisoning their love relationships with women... but this is too rare ... and I digress.

In English the modal verbs of obligation = "must, have to" and the modal verbs of recommendation = "should, ought to" etc. An English-speaking woman who has a strong vocabulary of "must" and "should" (and their variants) is going to feel emotionally very comfortable and secure to a guilt-boy. He'll fall in love.

Guilt is the glue which holds most filial bonds and marriages together.

• There isn't a mother on earth who doesn't at least try to imbue her child with a sense of inescapable commitment and responsibility: first, to her personally; second, to the family; and third, at higher levels of evolution, to the tribe and the nation. Superior exemplars are Jewish women, who have by guilt maintained a marginal language and culture in high style for 5000 years. Ditto Chinese mothers: same style, same cultural continuity, same approximate timeline, same guilt methodology. Catholic guilt is nice but it's like Elmer's school glue compared with marine epoxy.

Unfortunately it isn't ridiculous that a man with a highly dignified Chandra would have married from responsibility rather than love. It's very sensible given how you describe his mother (and the Moon characteristics in his Jyotisha). I totally agree that if he stays in his current, loveless, guilt marriage, you wouldn't want him anyway. That choice would prove his psycho-emotional bondage to his mother is simply too tight to pry open. He's too damaged.

As usual, an attitude of duty and personal responsibility which works so well in professional life, is malfunctional in intimate relationships unless it's consciously managed. The Moon is so prominent, in this man's radix karma bhava - and in swashetra. His primary emotional validation = professional, not personal.

His mother wants it that way!

The sad fact is that no matter how admired the native may be in professional life, so long as their emotional guilt bondage is unconscious and reactive, they will live out their years as a slave to "must, should, and have to." The main profits of this behavior is money, title, and community respect. All worthy, but also, all temporal. All exterior to the soul. None "portable" across incarnations.

With guilt, there is no spiritual freedom. The lack of spiritual freedom is compensated often by material freedom to buy objects and experiences. (Granted by a society which greatly values the work duty.) But few people find lasting creative satisfaction in the act of buying or owning an inanimate object. Buying is a temporary rush of "permission". And many people do get addicted to "buying power" as a substitute for love. Unfortunately it's a dead end...

p>As a love interest of a guilt-ridden man, I would caution you to watch for psychic signs of The Healer Mother. The professionalized ones are nurses, teachers, and social workers. A needy, "selfless" mother will bind her children too tightly, in the attempt to externalize her self, to try to "see" and "manage" herself.

If the children have a healthy dose of human spirit, they will crave freedom and creativity - and they will rebel against control which exceeds the reasonable need for safety.

p>At the higher levels of moral and material development, where people are overall heavily ego-invested in wealth and position, adult boys and girls have to rebel covertly in order not to jeopardize their social standing. They find escape routes. They live through their children. They gamble. They drink. They have affairs.

They usually don't get divorced if there are small children involved, because guilt tends to quite over-rule the spiritual freedom instinct where parenting (Mama) is concerned. However the typical strong, highly placed Chandra, receiving drishti of Shani or other social constraining forces, will typically cause a "covert" style of rebellion. When the Moon is high and strong, the native undertakes a path toward authentic emotional interaction which also protects their public moral image. This almost always requires a public marriage to be maintained.

Oy.

Judging almost exclusively by the match of his Chandra characteristics to your Rahu/Ketu lagna, I'd say that this fellow is as much emotionally attracted to your master-trained sense of social and personal responsibility as he is to your female beauty, artistic gifts, poetic imagination etc. Despite incipient passions, he probably couldn't convert you into a sordid, underground amour. He probably couldn't even put you on the liberated pedestal of Other, the purely creative Muse. For good or evil, you're what the yuppie boys call 'Marriage Material' - a top-quality package with all the Right Stuff for the full upper middle class partnership. Just like Mama had with Daddy.

Oh, no.

Possible constructive action:

Emotionally, men follow women. They can't ask for directions :) but they do follow women's emotional lead. Perhaps there is some chance for the guilt-ridden male to escape his bondage if the female can properly direct him. She has to know what she is saying and doing in the relationship, and why.

• For 99% of women, manipulation through guilt is a knee-jerk historic response to insecurity and fear that we learn from our own mothers, and they from theirs. So we have plenty of work to do in escaping our own inchoate fears, let alone giving healthy directions to men.

• But it is possible to chip away at it - to break one little "have to" or "should" compulsion after the next. This guilt-breaking is a good habit and one which brings increasing satisfaction as life goes on.

Go to work on one's own guilt. Like attracts like. You have attracted this fellow through the magic of matching energy. If nothing else, the difficulties of this relationship create an opportunity to become conscious of and begin to release one's own bondage to mother-guilt. Looking back, you will be very glad you realized this opportunity to create a higher level of spiritual freedom for yourself.

~~ Ram Dass

"As long as you have certain desires about how it ought to be,

you can't see how it is. " Ram Dass

Regret and Sadness

~~ H.H. Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler, M.D., The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living.

"Howard Cutler:"Have there been situations in your life that you've regretted?"

Dalai Lama:"Oh, yes.

Now for instance there was one older monk who lived as a hermit. He used to come to see me to receive teachings, although I think he was actually more accomplished than I and came to me as a sort of formality.

• Anyway, he came to me one day and asked me about doing a certain high-level esoteric practice.

• I remarked in a casual way that this would be a difficult practice and perhaps would be better undertaken by someone who was younger, that traditionally it was a practice that should be started in one's mid-teens.

• I later found out that the monk had killed himself in order to be reborn in a younger body to more effectively undertake the practice..."

Surprised by this story, I remarked, "Oh, that's terrible! That must have been hard on you when you heard..."

The Dalai Lama nodded sadly. "How did you deal with that feeling of regret? How did you eventually get rid of it?"

The Dalai Lama silently considered for quite a while before replying, "I didn't get rid of it. It's still there. But even though that feeling of regret is still there, it isn't associated with a feeling of heaviness or a quality of pulling me back.

• It would not be helpful to anyone if I let that feeling of regret weigh me down, be simply a source of discouragement and depression with no purpose, or interfere with going on with my life to the best of my ability."

At that moment, in a very visceral way, I was struck once again by the very real possibility of a human being's fully facing life's tragedies and responding emotionally, even with deep regret, but without indulging in excessive guilt or self-contempt.

• The possibility of a human being's wholly accepting herself or himself, complete with limitations, foibles, and lapses of judgment.

• The possibility of recognizing a bad situation for what it isand responding emotionally, but without over-responding.

The Dalai Lama sincerely felt regret over the incident he described but carried his regret with dignity and grace.

And while carrying this regret, he has not allowed it to weigh him down, choosing instead to move ahead and focus on helping others to the best of his ability. "

translated by Coleman Barks

Unmarked Boxes

Don't grieve.

Anything you lose comes round in another form.

The child weaned from mother's milk now drinks wine and honey mixed.

God's joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box, from cell to cell.

As rainwater, down into flower bed.

As roses, up from ground.

Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish, now a cliff covered with vines, now a horse being saddled.

It hides within these, till one day it cracks them open.

Part of the self leaves the body when we sleep and changes shape.

You might say, "Last night I was a cypress tree, a small bed of tulips, a field of grapevines."

Then the phantasm goes away.

You're back in the room.

I don't want to make any one fearful.

Hear what's behind what I say.

Tatatumtum tatum tatadum.

There's the light gold of wheat in the sun and the gold of bread made from that wheat.

I have neither.

I'm only talking about them, as a town in the desert looks up at stars on a clear night.

updated:18 May 2012

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