My Cup Runneth Over

In an old martial arts parable, a young student seeks out a master to further his studies. The student, striving to make a good impression, talks about the lessons he has learned from various instructors as the master humbly pours him tea. While the student continues to elaborate on what he has learned, his cup fills up but the master keeps pouring and it starts spilling out on the table. The student jumps up and yells "the cup is already full master, it can't hold anymore!" And the master smiles, setting down the teapot.

I've been thinking of Pluto this week. After posting the previous entry it kept tugging at the back of my mind and I knew it had something more to say. So I let it percolate all week and today it finally spit it out; it thought I'd obliterated two subtle points in my broad-stroke overview.

The first point Pluto addressed congealed into this: our lives are always full. No matter what stage we are in, our cups are always full. To add or change anything in our lives, at any time, we have to let something go. Sometimes this happens purely circumstantially. When we move, for example, a number of things shake lose and allow for new possibilities. If we change jobs, take a trip, use our time in a different way with a new routine, we break up large or small pieces of our static identities and allow new energies to form new ways of feeling, experiencing and understanding. When this happens involuntarily, we often consider it a crisis.

In our ancestral blood-line, the Norse warned that for everything we ask for, and receive, there is an associated sacrifice. In the Havamal they wrote "Better ask for too little than offer too much." To be more that we are, in whatever dimension that is important to us, we will have to sacrifice the merely adequate and the comfortable for the extraordinary. I think this requires courage and a fortitude to move outside of our comfort zones, if we truly want change. But the kicker is, even if we don't want change, we are going to lose what we have so it may be a good thing to start learning to surf this wave rather than wait until it starts pounding our coastlines. It may be worth exploring how to make room for and re-engage with our dreams rather than trying to hold on to our status quo, and do so in whatever proportion we can manage. Because whether self directed, or by happenstance, things will change. Such is life.

The second point Pluto made was that at any point in our lives we are, and will always be, facing challenges. The challenges may vary with the circumstance and our understanding. But the place we think we are going ---that doesn't have our particular challenge du jour--- will have others. This doesn't have to be a bad thing either, unless we resist it and refuse to grow.

There are habitual ways that most us respond to these challenges: anger, anxiety, depression or denial. And in spite of the negativity associated with each label, each approach has a powerful resource embedded in its response ---if we learn to employ the energies rather than merely react in their habitual modalities or address only the symptoms. For those of you who would like to learn more about the power of Pluto in leveraging these patterns as resources rather than liabilities, I highly recommend this. Or, to explore some meditations on these responses and how they can be leveraged.

I think that's all Pluto wanted to say, it feels like my take on the topic is relatively complete. Now if I can just get Neptune to shut-up... I think there may be another planetary post in the works. Oh joy.