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Disheartened by the Election? There's Reason to Hope...
This week, the people of the United States were given a choice. Supporters of Kamala saw an intelligent, competent woman offering a message of unity and progress. They valued her history as a daughter of immigrants, seeing her as a beacon of the kind of ideals America stands for, or as a steward for a more egalitarian and civil future. I imagine many also voted for Kamala, not as a positive choice, but as a rejection of the alternative. Kamala was good, because Trump was bad.
Many who voted for Trump, however, saw him as a fighter, or even a savior of sorts. His ruthlessness and willingness to fight offered them some hope of change. He made problems seem so easily-fixable. Even when his policy positions weren’t well explained or even thought-out, he expressed them with complete confidence. Others voted for him because they simply didn’t trust Kamala. Trump was good, because Kamala was bad.
This is a common challenge of dualistic systems. “Either-or” thinking creates division and makes it difficult to be in healthy relationship with others. Someone must win. Someone must lose. This week, Trump won, and Kamala lost. If you feel the people made the wrong choice, please read on...
The American Shadow
In many ways, Trump embodies so much of what lives in the American shadow. Might makes right, and winning is everything. The action hero pulls out a weapon and single-handedly vanquishes all the bad guys. Trump lies, manipulates and misleads in order to achieve his goals. He belittles and threatens those who disagree with him or stand in his way. He forcibly takes what he wants, even if others are hurt in the process.
Whether you voted for Trump or not, he provides a mirror for our own lower-self impulses. Many who agree with his goals remain willing to ignore the less palatable aspects of his persona. His agenda aligns with their own, and their lower-self desire to take what they want, whatever the cost to others, is activated and witnessed. Even those who didn’t vote for Trump must face the lower-self urges and impulses he stirs in them. We villainize and judge him. We hate him for his own expression of hatred and intolerance. We even not-so-secretly hope for his destruction.
Like Trump, our lower-selves want what we want, and we don’t really care who we have to hurt to get it. We don’t want to believe that’s true, which is why these darker, primal desires go into shadow. From there, they create all kinds of negative experiences in their search for the light. Trump embodies all of this shadow material. He stirs up echoes of the same darkness within each of us. In doing so, he forces us to look at it, bringing it out of shadow.
Also in the American shadow is a dark history of genocide, enslavement and persecution. This country exists only because of a willingness to forcibly remove or exterminate an entire existing nation of Native Peoples. It grew in wealth and influence because of a willingness to kidnap large groups of people from their homeland and enslave them. In our land of tolerance and equality, each new wave of immigrants was persecuted and “othered’ by the ones before. Women remained just as disenfranchised as they were before. Throughout our history, those seeking religious freedom have used their freedom to enforce their ideas and codes of conduct upon others. We’re still, in many ways, living in the gun-culture of the Wild West. We’re still willing to tear ourselves apart and destroy our brothers in a brutal Civil War.
The American story is rife with all kinds of evils, though the darker desires that spawn such behavior are oftentimes denied, rationalized or simply sent into shadow. We instead create a legend of brave explorers discovering a new world, forming a nation where all people are equal and entitled to justice and freedom. From shadow, however, our lower-self desires continue to create realities that simply don’t align with the story.
Trump, as a shadow mirror, brings all of this to the surface. We are him. He is us. In serving as the lightning rod for pitting us against ourselves, while fully embodying our collective shadow material, Trump is taking us into the heart of all of our most treasured illusions. Herein, lies the reason for hope. Bear with me, and I’ll try to explain.
Trickster Energy
Back in 2016, I wrote a post about Trump’s astrological chart. If you haven’t read The Soul Path of Donald Trump (and Why We Need Him), I highly encourage you to take a look at it. In short, Trump is uniquely capable of taking up, demonstrating and magnifying collective, shadow material. He’s the ultimate guide for a collective, shadow journey.
“Trickster” energy is strong with Trump, meaning he’s very rarely what he seems, even to himself. He has a unique capacity to hold conflicting streams of energy. He's an example of the extreme wounding that routinely happens in our culture. To the masses, he appears either a villain or a savior. Indeed, he is both. The path he urges us on is a dark, shadow journey. If it’s taken up fully and carried all the way through, however, there’s the potential for releasing bound energies and birthing something entirely new. Those who see him as a villain are focusing on the very real dangers. It’s true that things could get dark on the human stage. Those who see him as a savior are seeing only the promises and potentials. It’s true he will bring change. Either viewpoint, however, is only seeing half of the whole picture.
The Collective Shift
Not coincidentally, the Earth is in the midst of a massive energetic shift right now. In short, feminine energy is rising. This is a balancing action, as we’ve been collectively skewed toward masculine ways of living. As the alternating current to masculine energy (which holds the essence of order, structure and action), the feminine current is more aligned with chaos, stillness and the void. That’s not to say that feminine energy is chaotic and destructive without purpose. Rather, it’s a natural, healthy response to overgrowth and decay. Without it, things would grow unfettered, until life itself was strangled. There would be no room to breathe and no way to start fresh.
These changes are happening collectively, so the entire population of the planet is feeling this shift. In essence, our energetic systems are in a process of recalibrating to a higher frequency. This recalibration will help usher the world into a new way of living. As part of this shift, a new “level” of the heart chakra is becoming available to us, perhaps for the first time ever. This new level will allow us to be in relationship differently with each other and with the world. This also opens the doorway for a more unitive way of living, both with each other and with the Earth. But this massive shift isn’t going to happen overnight, and it’s probably not going to be easy.
Here in the United States, we’re playing out the drama of this massive shift for the entire world to see in big, Hollywood style. As we fight amongst ourselves, we’re demonstrating exactly what needs to be overcome to enter into an era of heart-centered relationship. Whether we see Trump as a villain or a savior, we’re engaging in separatist thinking. We’re seeing only half of the picture. We're trying to separate out half of the population. This is a masculine way of seeing and thinking that denies wholeness, darkness and death. If we are to step into feminine energy, we must open to change, to rest, to wholeness and a bit of chaos. We must be willing to embrace the things we don’t necessarily like, as valid expressions of divine energy. We must be willing to let go, to let things die. We must learn how to nurture ourselves and each other.
So How Do We Navigate This?
In my blog post The New Heart Potential, I’ve laid out very specific ways to work with these new energies. Working the shadow material that will inevitably be stirred for each of us is also an important aspect here. Boundaries, too. We all have more sovereign choice, both individually and collectively, to create what we want than we’ve been led to believe. (I’ll put links at the bottom of this page to articles about each of those topics.)
If we boil it all down, we need to learn how to embrace wholeness (the good and the bad) and step into a more unitive understanding of life. In a unitive framework, nothing is excluded. Rather, we look for the connections and the places of intersection and create something together that we couldn’t create alone. Any illusions you’re holding about separating out certain subsets of people, so that everything can get “back to normal” is just that – an illusion. We cannot go backward, though there’s a strong shadow desire on both sides right now to do just that. That’s just fear. Don’t let yourself be derailed by it.
You can start stepping into a more unitive understanding of life by choosing to view what’s happening right now as a collective effort. In many ways, we’re all playing a massive game. Trump is the trickster, but on some subconscious or superconscious level, we’re all in on the joke. On a soul level, there are no good guys and bad guys here, however it may seem. We’re actually all working toward the same massive goal, just from different angles. The only way out is through.
In our hearts, I believe we all know how chaotic and confusing things might need to get to breakdown the dysfunctional systems we’ve created. We’ve denied our feminine understanding of magic, endings, flow and emotions. We’ve denied our inherent need for soul-affirming connection, as well as our very natural desire to nurture and be nurtured. We’ve cut ourselves off from each other and ourselves so completely, we have no felt sense or memory of what wholeness is.
It may take a lot of feminine chaos to free us, but there’s wisdom in the movement of dark, feminine energy. It's exactly the kind of journey a trickster is perfectly suited to lead. Those who voted for Kamala may be holding the higher vision, but those who voted for Trump are holding open the doors for the way through. We all have a part to play.
If you connected with the unitive principles in Kamala’s messaging, then hold fast to those ideals and integrate them into your real life with the real people in your sphere. Don’t lose faith! Ground your vision. Do your personal shadow work. Practice healthy boundaries without judgement. Center in your inherent goodness, and look for the inherent goodness in others. Allow others to have their experiences. Likely, many will choose not to see this journey through, and that’s OK. The heart asks that we simply meet what is. Be present in this moment. Feel the difficult feelings. Take care of yourself, and be with Mother Nature as often as you can.
Those who’ve aligned more closely with the shadow material that Trump is demonstrating will have parallel but different journeys to take. There is a lot of energetic displacement at play here. The displaced pattern is a defense that forms in response to wounds of deep betrayal. Indeed, many feel betrayed by our systems, and their hearts are crying out against it, in wounded ways.
Displacement is a defense that creates a lot of tension, controlling behavior and aggression. In a lot of instances, the people who are behaving the worst are the ones who’ve been most wounded by our systems. I’ll be writing much more about this in the future, so be sure to subscribe if you haven’t already. How we meet the wounding in others will greatly determine the trajectory and length of this shadow journey.
It helps if you can remember that we’re all in this together. There may be places where it’s wise to take a stand, but remember that once you step into a fighting stance, you’re entrenching in separatist energies. That’s the old way, and we don’t need any more of it. If you must fight, do it with love. Extend a hand where you can. Offer a higher vision, and try to see the good in others. Hold a positive intention, practice unconditional love, align with your personal truth and let go.
We’ve stepped onto a collective journey that has the potential to birth a new way of living. Hold the higher vision. Don’t descend into the darkness. Find the new ways of relating. We are all explorers now, charting new paths to the new world.
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