I swear that this is the last time I am going to refer to yet another moment as the beginning of 2019. We’ve had the Times Square New Year, then the Chinese Earth Pig New Year and now, the Astrological New Year. But it stops here. 2019 is happening. It’s official. It really can’t get any more started than this.
I could explain all about what all the positions of all the planets mean, but rather than that I want to tell you what you need to (finally and definitively) start this year right.
We are poised for expansion, and with that expansion comes the potential for abundance, and the thing that will stop that abundance from reaching us is..
Womp womp….us.
That is, unless we do what the luminaries are asking and tend to the bones of things. This moment is full of earth energy, and earth is slow, it is meticulous, and it builds things that are stable and secure and meant to last. Earth asks; yeah, but what is it made of? Can I trust it? When we try to expand without examining the structures that are in place, we try to build on shoddy ground, we depend on non-existent infrastructure and we try to fill vessels that are either already brimming over, or cracked and porous. And there is no support for growth or for receiving.
Just like your bones are the physical structure that holds up your body, there are bones in everything; bones in your relationship, bones in your business, bones in your creative life. And when we neglect these bones, everything that expands from their structure doesn’t hold up.
If there is an area in your life right now that you feel is anything but abundant, where things feel stuck, scarce, and unstable; look to the bones.
Sometimes we need to get creative to figure out what that means. My relationship has bones? What the hell? Yup, friendship. If you don’t have friendship, there is literally nothing holding your relationship up. When our romantic relationships aren’t working or don’t exist, we need to look at what kind of friends we are being. Are we rooting for our partner, do we really want to see them shine? Are we afraid that if they do it will take something away from us? Do we listen to what’s going on for them without automatically assessing what that means for us, and somehow taking it personally?
Friendship has bones too! The bones of my friendship is my relationship with myself. If I don’t dig myself, I am kidding myself if I think I can really enjoy anyone else. If I don’t give myself energy and support, I will only give energy and support to others in the hopes of getting something back. Because my vessel is empty, and I am unwilling to fill it myself.
Even our psyche has bones…it is built on beliefs. Everything that we do is an impulse which arises from a collision between what is happening and what I believe. We are made up of endless beliefs about what is good and what is bad, about how things should be. Some of these beliefs of ours need a chiropractor. Others were broken and allowed to heal crooked and twisted long ago, and we don’t even notice the limp they cause because it’s been there for so long.
To tend to your bones is to know them. Sometimes we don’t know ourselves as friends, we don’t know what kind of beliefs we are carrying around. We don’t understand the depth of our workings, and then we weirdly, but consistently, expect that we can receive with this vessel. Imagine trying to fill a tank when you don’t know its capacity, when you don’t know what kind of material it can hold, or even if it has a bottom – if you didn’t know whether all the precious whatever you were putting into it was just running back out and spilling all over the sidewalk. You wouldn’t just go for it, you might want to fill it, but you wouldn’t do it wholeheartedly, you would be wary, and cautious, and wondering if it were really working at all.
Knowing the bones of yourself is knowing your capacity; how deep you can go, how much you can hold. It is also about knowing what you need, what are the basics that need to be in place to make you healthy, to relax you, to make you feel like you have something to give?
We often we just push, because we were taught that infinite growth is the model we should strive toward. But the only thing that grows infinitely is cancer, every other part of life breathes. It expands on the inhale and contracts on the exhale. When we know the bones of ourselves – our why, where we really want to go, and we know what feeds us, AND we take the time to give ourselves that food, we can move forward nourished, recharged, and ready. Every human being is an infinitely complex equation and although there are so many threads that join our experiences together and unify us, there are so many particularities to each individual. Knowing your bones is not just about knowing how to exploit yourself, to squeeze every ounce of productivity from your pores, but rather, knowing your breath. No one inhales forever, the exhale is necessary – so, what gives you rest, what nourishes you, nurtures you, gives you pleasure and joy, and readies you for the next inhale to be spontaneous?
What needs to happen to prepare the field for the abundance you seek? It doesn’t matter if it’s financial abundance, abundance in your intimacy, in your creative life, what move can you make to ready the container to receive. We are in the midst of a cosmic impulse toward straightening the structures and tending to the bones. When you burst forth in all your glory what will it look like? And what minutia can you attend to in this moment to allow that blossoming to happen? Everyone wants to shine, not everyone wants to polish.
May abundance rain down relentlessly, and may we have our berms and rainwater harvesting systems working to such a degree that we don’t miss a drop!