will do tonight after the class, thank you Michelle!

Marija Bio for practice chart reading with Michelle

Info: June 30, 1973 1:45pm Dubrovnik, Croatia

My question, or rather, my core issue that I would love your help rising above, is the struggle with overwhelm and the endless tediousness of the 6^th house Chiron and Mars in Aries, and the utter sense of impotence and failure I have come to live as my dominant state.

I get the theory, that the opposition with Pluto is about learning to see it all from a higher perspective and bring the work into  spiritual context and meaning. And I do see the spirital context and meaning of it all. In detail. Yet, most of the time I feel that I am half choking, trying to keep my head above water in the endless chaos of tasks and projects that I create.

And, I do create them all, that much is clear to me. I have had the absolute freedom to create my life since always, so the burden of that freedom is what I feel I am choking under.

I have a terrible feeling that I somehow missed the boat and that I am just biding time with all my attempts at being useful and serving my community. People do mirror back love and appreciation regularly, yet it all feels like I am trying too hard, somehow not aligned or in the flow at all. Though, objectively, I do a lot of great things for so many people, and my studio is viable, I feel a deep and constant sense of impotence and failure that is hard to reconcile.

Ari gave me the homework of sorting out how Saturn and Capricorn are about guilt and shame.  I have a strong Saturn in Gemini, Capricorn NN in the 3^rd repeated theme, and, all my life I have been battling with all my Mars in Aries force and grit to overcome guilt and shame, and do great and worthy things in my community despite of it.

Perhaps you can help me clarify how to dissolve the sense of impotence and futility that I am left with at this point of that battle.  

BIO

My life feels like a fast river with many treacherous rocks, each rock another major textbook trauma. Yet, those are the most beautiful and vibrant rivers, there is nothing murky or muddy about them, they radiate life.

I feel a lot of shame telling the story of all the trauma, like something is so deeply wrong with me that I deserved it so. The placements in my 12^th house, as well as several past life hints indicate that this life might be a lesson in gratitude, humility and choosing life.  

It begun in Socialist Yugoslavia, during a time when things were optimistic and promising in Tito’s land. The socialist government had successfully pushed down any dissent, and instituted a “believer’s only system”. I grew up studying about the glory of the socialist cause, and the promise of the new future, while corruption, dissent and nationalism slowly rose to the surface from the shadows. This was the first  seeding of a cosmology of relativity, ultimate futility and illusion inherent in the duality we live in. The next 30 years and both countries that I lived in, USA and Croatia germinated those seeds into facing the ultimate lack of meaning that marks our times.

I was born into a working class family of first generation city dwellers that came from rural agricultural traditional families that had lived the ancient way of life on the land for millennia. Meaning that I was the first generation to be born into the new concept of nuclear family.

My parents were not equipped to handle this, and, they lived within a milieu of many other young families similar to them, with no elders around to guide them or help out. One manifestation of this was that it was considered normal during their time to leave children to care for other children and to go about their business of being the “adults”. This often meant hanging out with other wannabe-adults, smoking and drinking coffee, endlessly discussing and comparing their new lives. They all needed to feel a part of an extended network, and they were making it happen as most young people do, hanging around aimlessly with their cohort, processing their lives.

 I was the first of the children in my family, nuclear and extended, there was no one to leave me with, so they left me alone. My mother went back to work when I was one month old, and she would leave my in my crib for the few hours of her split shift. Dad would leave his shift and drop in to check on me for a few minutes when he could, and even that, only after a few months. While I was a newborn, mom said he was resentful of me taking his place as the center of attention. But then, when I started mirroring him back, he fell in love with me and that was my first feminine “victory”, using my cuteness and giving my total adoration and full attention to get my needs met.

My mother was really unhappy and resentful of her new life, I think. My dad worked super hard but he really was not mature enough to be a husband, provider or father. He needed to be supported, worshiped and adored, and my mother was not good at that. She had grown up the first of two daughters with 4 older brothers, in a very patriarchal and abusive family. Her childhood sounded quite terrifying and torturously hard.

She thought she had found her Sagittarian freedom whe she met my dad who was older than her, adoring and kind, but soon she was missing the strong patriarchal hand of her father who was a respected elder of his clan.

She lived in contempt of my father until her last breath. He responded in turn by finding other women to adore him, one of whom was my aunt (my mom’s brother’s wife). There was a public scandal when were were young, but it was all pushed under the carpet and they stayed together for another 40 years resenting each other and punishing each other in small contemptuous ways for the rest of their lives.

They had two more kids, my two brothers, who are 4 and 12 years younger than me. My mother was very abusive, of my father and of us. She belittled and humiliated him and she beat us daily, probably as a way of discharging her stress and trauma. She stopped hitting us when I realized I could hit her back, and started to hit her back hard. I was probably about 11 then. But she continued to verbally and emotionally terrorize everyone until she lost her speech due to brain cancer.

I became a mother to my brothers very early on. Mom and Dad started to leave my older brother in my care when I was 5 and a half, and my younger brother I took into my care as soon as he was past the newborn stage.

I have been working on overcoming that caretaking pattern for the last decade. I felt like I got over it pretty well, but then I got a little nephew that soon had me hooked into that overwhelming sense of responsibility and need to protect him and guide him to safety past the treacherous cliffs of our family patterns. His father, my younger brother, was the sweetest child, but now he subtly perpetuates the legacy of abuse as well.

My dad often played a victim. He was sweet, attentive and kind, but lacked boundaries and authority. He indiscriminately used us to meet his own need for love and attention. He disclosed way too much, shared everything that crossed his mind. He told misogynistic “guy jokes” when we were too young to understand what was funny about them. He was very forthcoming with his struggles and shortcomings, and frightened us with his anxiety and problems that were beyond us.  I recently learned the term for that is “covert or vulnerable narcissist”.

So I grew up perfectly equipped to play the complimentary co-dependent empath part. The next 30 years of my life I was driven by an irrational need to find a man who was not like my father and to prove (to I don’t know whom) that I can have a happy fulfilled life despite all the terrors of my early life.

I have only recently begun to grieve this illusion. I attracted narcissistic men all of my life, with short periodic breaks of playing the narcissistic role myself.

My most recent relationship with a covert narcissist was only a few years back. Pluto leaving Capricorn, and Saturn ending its cycle with the NN has really brought this dynamic to my consciousness and in the last few months. I have finally been able to gain the clarity to say ‘no’ before getting too far into the familiar ‘dance’.  With each ‘no’, I feel like I am seeing each of these men more and more clearly as mirrors of my own brokenness, and to say ‘no’ to with more sincere love and care for them as aspects of me.

***

So, the timeline of my adult life:

By the time I was in the last year of high school, the Socialist Yugoslavia was falling apart. Tito had died and we were at the brink of a collapse that ushered in a devastating 5 year war with Serbia.

I left Croatia in August of 1991 to go on a 6 month high school exchange program in the US as the imminent war was already starting to take shape from the chaos like some dark cloud rising on the horizon. What happened next was unfathomable. In the middle of Europe an ethnic cleansing went into a full rage, and people around me pretended not to see or understand. They talked political nonsense for years, as more and more people died. For me, the initial fight gave way to a deep loss of meaning, and faith in life.  

Yet, I was very fortunate. A secret hand had taken me out of that horror and placed me into a promissing new life in Seattle, WA. Despite the horror of what was happening back home, in the US I felt a new lease on life. The cultural shock was strong, but I felt seen, blessed, supported and held by life. It was terrifying, for sure, the doors behind me were suddenly closed with a slam, but I felt strong, miracles were a daily occurrence, and I felt loved by life.

My next 20 years were not easy, but grace was undeniable and I lived an extraordinary and blessed life. I put myself through college, and got a Masters Degree in Applied Behavioral Science. I was successful as a model, and I bought myself a house. I had many friends, traveled extensively, and lived a free and boundless life.

The struggles were subtle. Similar to my parents in their youth, I was in a completely uncharted life, with no elders, no guidance, or role models to which I could relate. It was hard for me to discern fantasy and projection from what would be a correct life for me.

Possibilities were endless, but I was having a hard time pinning something down. Relationships were just not working out, and I didn’t know how to turn my Master’s into an actual carrier that matched it. I simply didn’t understand the new life I found my self inside. Work always came to me easy, so I followed the path of least resistance in that realm.

In my early 30s, I found myself betrayed by yet another in that string of narcissistic men.  I met a vedic astrologer who predicted a new man who would be all I was hoping for. He gave me the exact timeline and details of what was to follow. So when it came to pass, I married him, thinking I was being guided by a higher power.

Unfortunately, if that was true, the higher power had intended to bring me to my demise. Perhaps to wake me up. Or, perhaps, predictive astrology is simply a misuse of that higher power and I should have never listened to that instead of my own gut.

In any case, I soon discovered that I had married a seriously disturbed man with strong psychopathic tendencies. My perfect fairytale life turned into a quagmire that lasted 5 years.

In those 5 years, I met a guru. I left my husband in July of 2010 and spent the next 5 years as part of an ashram community, once again living a grace-filled and blissful life. I thought I was saved by the same grace that pulled me out of the nightmare the last time.

It really felt like this was the beginning of my real life, which in my mind meant that I would meet my true partner there, and live happily ever after in my spiritual community, fulfilling the divine union projection I still strongly held on to. (Since then I have understood that this is exactly the basis of the co-dependent empath delusion trap that is so prevalent in our time).

After 5 years, that illusion faltered too, and I found myself in another nightmarish round. My parents both fell ill with cancer. After several cross-continental trips back and forth in a short span of time, I ended up in Croatia with a one-way ticket. I had to leave a year long project I was working on in Bolivia with an ashram teacher to go be with my mother in her last dying days.

It just so aligned that I had no home, job or place to come back to any more. The ashram community had dispersed by the orders of the Guru and we were to go find our own paths.

As I was flying over the Atlantic, I felt a terrifying feeling that I was never coming back. This was the third time I was returning to Croatia with a one-way ticket (once after I finished school in 2003 and once with my husband in 2009), and this time it was without the hopeful fantasy of happily-ever-after, but more with dread in my heart.

I felt there was something that same higher power was not going to let me escape from again.  My mother died after one week, and it was a sad and unsatisfying end. My dad followed after a year and a half. I felt no resolution or healing in their passing, they both seemed to meet their endings terrified, disappointed and powerless.

The three of us never spoke out loud that it was a relief to finally be done with that part, but we  don’t speak of them much. We became even closer as we closed ranks.  Our parents built a big house, an apartment for each of us, as had become customary in here in our world. I am infinitely grateful to them for my brothers and for this home. I know they meant well and did their best with what they got. I get I chose them and that it was no easy task for them either.

We now live in a little commune, each in our own space, but close to each other. We support each other and give each other space too. It works pretty well and our home feels peaceful and quite happy now. But the trauma is there, never really addressed out loud.

I have been here for 11 years now and it has become a grace-filled life again, in so many ways. I have my own home. I sold my house in Seattle and opened a holistic fitness studio. I do what I like and have a small following. I make a difference, the community has taken me back in and I play my part in bringing in the New Era. All of it is quite blessed. Except for the weight of the endless layers of trauma.

I have done an infinite amount of healings, therapy, bodywork, movement and process, I honestly don’t believe there is much that can be done by going further down that rabbit hole, though I try something new from time to time.  

My parents did make me a great looking body that had given me many advantages in this life, but I have also had a complex autoimmune disease that I became aware of in my 30s. That is getting more tedious as I age as well. I have been doing a lot of work to raise awareness around the root causes of these ever increasing autoimmune hormonal disorders. I share my learning in the holistic ways of dealing with it, but some days the work of getting through the days really just feeds the sense of impotence and futility.  

What keeps me going is the belief that I am here to serve a specific purpose exactly the way that I am broken, and that this is the work of our time. I have adopted the strategy “Stop trying to heal the illusion and get on with the service anyway.”

The need to love oneself has come to sound like an empty cliché to me, though I am open to being proven wrong and discovering that as a possibility on the other side of the Chiron return.

But, more and more, I hear Ari’s words that no one actually promised this would be pretty or that there is a happily-ever-after in this life. More and more I think that our script is exactly as it is so we can wake up to who we truly are through surrendering to exactly what is, without trying to fix it or make it better.  

Tho some part of me would still like to create a happily-ever-after, I accept in this life it may not come. I look for ways to contribute and finally grow up. It is a tedious path but there are some glorious moments of highlight.

The way I understand it, that Capricorn NN at this moment is about growing up emotionally, accepting responsibility and overcoming the Pluto shadow of impotence and victim consciousness through serving and getting over myself.

And, what I would like, is some genuine peace and joy in all that.

What gives me joy, sparks my passion and lifts me out of all that Saturnian tediousness is studying astrology, reading for others, writing columns in a local newspaper, and research of ancient history, mythology and ancient genetics.

Some 5-6 years ago I intentionally grounded myself here to work on that Capricorn NN, but I would like to come back to traveling at some point as a writer and researcher of the ancient rememberings that are rising to the collective surface. However, I am deathly afraid of losing my mind and getting lost, which cripples me to some extent. Home feels like some security and protection from getting sucked into a vague hollow emptiness beyond my control. (I think that might be my experience of that Pluto in the 12^th….  Oh, lord…!)

I have strong memories of some ancient time and place that drives me to remember, reason for which I don’t know. 20 years ago I started writing a book from that remembering but I feel the stuckness and impotence on that project especially, as if I don’t quite see the full picture yet. Pluto coming towards my 4^th house and Jupiter feels to me like a deeper dive into that.

Thank you for reading this long bio! I found it hard to shorten, and end ended up lengthening it more… I think I will just send it now! LOL…