How to trust your own heart
A dispatch from inside the descent
I have followed the path of other people’s certainty more times than I want to admit.
The reason it felt easy to do that was that I always had a name for it that sounded to me like a virtue. Adaptable. Flexible. Open-minded. I left school and followed an ex-partner to another country for a year to be on his timeline. I quit a job I really liked because someone I loved thought it was the right time. And somewhere in the middle of all of that following, I gave myself a lot of credit for being someone who could flow with things, who wasn’t rigid. Who was open, flex, and compassionate. Someone who didn’t need to control the direction.
What I was less willing to see was that in each of those pivotal life moments, I did know what direction I wanted to take. I knew not after I made the decision in a remorseful state, but right when I was agreeing to the choices. My heart had its own read on things the whole time, but it was quieter than the certainty coming at me from the outside, and I hadn’t yet learned to trust that quiet wisdom over a loud voice.
For years, through my 20s and early 30s, the stillness in me kept getting overridden by the momentum of someone else’s vision, and I kept calling that growth. I kept calling that love.
It took me a long time to understand that what I was doing was a kind of disappearing. What finally interrupted it wasn't a breakthrough moment or a conscious decision or the years of therapy where I talked in circles and told myself what I thought the therapist wanted to hear (haha). It was attuning to the seasons, and paying attention to what each season was asking of me.
The framework I have been building over the past several years, which I’m currently calling The Heart Is a Compass, has been giving me language for my patterns in a way that I find truly useful. It isn’t a way of understanding myself better in the abstract (like some chart readings can feel), but as a way of knowing what a particular season can help me learn about myself and my relationship with the world, right now.
We are currently in the window of time celebrating Beltane, the exact halfway threshold between the sprouting season and the gestating one. From Beltane to the Summer Solstice we are in the season of Earth, of full yin, the elemental signature of deep receptivity. It’s when the world (in the Northern Hemisphere, at least) tends to be in its most lush, receptive, and open state. In the life cycle of the year this is the moment of the blossom, the flower that has stopped pushing through the dark and is opening up into the light, twisting it’s stem to orient toward the sun.
The throat chakra governs this season, and the gate that opens at its threshold in Human Design is Gate 2: the Direction of the Self. The gift of this gate is orientation- the season of late spring reminding us that it’s a powerful time of year to come home to ourselves. The shadow of this collective moment is dislocation, which shows up as a feeling of not knowing which way to face, of being unmoored from your own center.
In the myth of Inanna’s descent, which I’ve been deeply initiated into this year, this cross quarter day of Beltane corresponds with the underworld gate where the goddess surrenders her lapis lazuli necklace, the beads at her throat. This necklace is a symbol for the pleasantries and niceties, the beautiful crafted speech that protects her before she has said anything real, anything from her heart’s desire.
She gives the necklace up at the gate and goes one level deeper into the underworld. What she finds without it, I believe, is the difference between saying what people want to hear and speaking from a place that can actually receive an honest response. The necklace is charming. The necklace is likeable. The necklace is also a filter between her voice and the world, and she has to take it off to find out what an unfiltered response feels like.
I think about all the times I adorned my voice with pleasantries or things that other people wanted to hear while my heart was saying something entirely different, and how long I called that being kind. One thing that keeps coming up this year in conversation is that there is a huge difference between being nice and truly, deeply being kind.
Chironic Activations
It’s within this season of blossoming that I find myself observing the collective wound of dislocation, along with the collective gift of orientation. This is the time of year when many people are launching beautiful, heartfelt offerings, blossoming into the public world with their own brand of genius that’s been incubating since last Halloween. It’s also the time of year when I witness people feeling like they’re on a treadmill and can never catch up- which turns into the embodied sense that they don’t even know if they’re running in the right direction.
The Scorpio full moon hit me pretty hard over the past few days, and I’m feeling all of this inside me. I’ve come down with a bronchial infection that is giving me some ptsd, as it’s harkenening me back to the endless coughing and shortness of breath that I felt after getting stuck in an asbestos-filled housefire in my late 20s. Scorpio is in my 4th house of home and security, so this lung thing hitting me out of the blue and it’s connected memories feel pretty on point. I also found it pretty funny that I lost my voice immediately after I published a podcast episode about the full moon, Beltane, and finding your voice. Touche, universe.
There are some other transits, too, that are hitting my chart in an even more profound way, that are giving me some clues to the wounds around connecting my heart to my voice.
My Chiron is in Gemini in Gate 20, the Gate of the Now. The big shocking sky-daddy Uranus just entered Uranus after 7 years in Taurus, and is lightint up this gate first. Uranus will be hanging out there for about a year, bringing electrical attention to a wound around being present with myself and speaking my truth.
The Gene Keys shadow of Gate 20 is superficiality and the gift is self-assurance. I have lived in that shadow in ways that are specific and recognizable to me now in a way they weren’t before. The ways I smooth things over, make myself easy, keep things light when something heavier and truer wants to come through.
This gate and this Chironic wound live in my 11th house, alongside my North Node, in the house of groups and community and belonging, and the particular ache of it is that I have always been good one on one or in small circles while hungering for the larger belonging the 11th house represents. People in my life have at times told me they wanted more from me, that I wasn’t going deep enough or showing enough of myself. I heard it and didn’t know what to do with that, because from the inside it really didn’t feel like withholding at all. I was asking questions, staying curious, being nice. It felt like offering what I had. But I think what they were sensing was the sparkly blue necklace on my throat, before I even knew I was safe enough to take it off.
My Midheaven, the place of public perception and career, falls in Thunder season, between the Spring Equinox and Beltane, In my Heart Compass framework, that season is associated with Innana’s surrender of the measuring rod, the tool for assessing progress and judging whether something is good enough or developed enough. In Mesopotamian art the measuring rod is depicted a little like a compass and square, a tool of precision. It’s the measuring mind that grabs hold of new growth and demands an answer before it has even found its direction .
My career, my visible work in the world, sits in the season that asks me to put that tool down and let what is sprouting grow without subjecting it to constant assessment. Chiron in the sky right now is conjunct my Midheaven in Aries, in the gate of Innovation, opening the wound right where this work is. And Uranus cracking open Gate 20, my natal Chiron gate, is simultaneously breaking through what has been softly managed by my measuring rod- and now that it is falling away, I can see how much my self judgement (of imposter syndrome, the shadow of this gate) prevented me from seeing the gift that shines from within it: making order out of chaos, facilitating the birth of new creations, and embracing the necessity of change to spark innovation.
From Wounded Soul to Alchemist
Over the course of the past few months, I have been meeting each week with thirteen people who have given themselves the audacity to call themselves magicians, trading readings and divinations in a container that asks us to show up as what we actually are. Chiron’s myth is that his wound never fully heals, but in the witnessing of it something becomes available to pass on to others. I am finding that to be true in ways that are still surprising to me.
What I appreciate most about this Heart Is a Compass framework that came to me in a dream earlier this year, especially in seasons like this one when the personal and the cosmological are piled on top of each other, is that it gives me something to orient by without pulling me all the way into self-analysis. Knowing that we are collectively at the threshold between the thunder season and the earth season, the 3rd eye and the throat. And that personally I am feeling activated to release the measuring rod and the necklace, gives me a place to put the experience that is larger than the experience itself. It returns me to my heart when my self perception threatens to become its own kind of strict and definite measuring rod.
What I keep learning, every time I come back around to these thresholds, is that passing through a gate once doesn’t mean you don’t pass through it again. The spiral always returns. Beltane comes every year, and Inanna descends more than once in a life. But each time around, you meet the same threshold with different eyes, different wounds, and different capacities. And what you surrendered before you will need to surrender again - but the next time it’s more willingly, with more honest grief and more accepting grace mixed together.
This time crossing into the blossoming season I am more aware of my own tendency to hide inside pleasantness than I have been before, and also more aware of the self-assurance that is quietly growing underneath it. It is still a wound. It still carries the specific ache of the 11th house, with a hunger for deeper belonging that never quite resolves. But I am learning to let my throat carry something honest and stay present for what comes back, so the wound doesn’t fester, it communicates.
People have called me both deep and fun my whole life, sometimes with a note of surprise in their voice, as if they expected to have to choose betwen the two. I remember the precursor to Facebook, Friendster, had a wall where people wrote testimonials about you (rather than notes to you). I was a freshman in college, and new classmates I had just met filled my wall with both of these words. I thought it was… weird. (I mean, the whole concept of having a personal testimonial wall was weird, and the reviews on my personhood felt stranger still)
But looking back, I do see I have walked that tightrope for a long time. I’m well versed with the depths of philosophical interconnections, and also always down to go out and laugh and bounce around on the dance floor. But this compass framework is pointing me toward something more integrated now, more toward self-assurance and presence, innovation and innocence. More toward a voice that is actually mine and not just the version of mine that is easiest to receive- through lightness or depth.
Inanna doesn’t narrate the underworld from the surface, from the world of the sky gods, although she does return there to bask in the sun eventually. For now, she speaks from the depths while she is still in them, because that is how the testimony really means something.
As for me, I am still in the descent. In the process of shedding “shoulds” and proving myself to the patriarchial overculture. In the process of seeing the parts of me that are revealed in this shedding as both/and -the complex, shadow and light beings that they are. I am learning not to fight it or rush it, but to meet it, and to witness it honestly.
This framework is the compass I am using as I walk down, and it’s a reminder that everything — even descent— has its own seasons.
I am not sitting in the static darkness waiting for the return of the light. I am letting my eyes adjust to see the beautiful nuances of color underground.
If you’re in your own descent, I’d love to share some tools that I’ve been working with to navigate more clearly in the darkness.
Your Heart is a Compass starts May 19th. It’s a place to locate your moment in the descent and shed the garments of the sky gods. To witness the dance of your shadow, and reveal a glimmer of love within the darkness that might lighten heart, just a little bit. There’s an option to add on a custom reading about your specific chart’s wisdom within this compass, too.
And if you’d like to see what my facilitation style is like before committing, I’m hosting a Beltane Ritual the evening of Tuesday, May 5th from 5-7 MST. We’ll be exploring the blossoming potential of the current moment with breath, sound, and art-making. Come honor the wheel of the year and the gorgeous flowers within your heart. (It’s free for paid subscribers with code EMBODY.)
Thanks for being here <3
Shedding shoulds 👐