Maybe It’s Not What You Think

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So I’m sitting out on my front porch staring at a big beautiful full moon on Friday the 13th. Far as I know, tonight is a full moon in Pisces. My astrological crew has informed me that this is a moon that will show us the differences between what we can and cannot control. It will push us into positions where we are forced to realize where we are powerless. My less astrological crew seems to think that Friday the 13th is a night to get weird and push some boundaries. After all, it doesn’t happen every month. My dad thinks it’s all bullshit.

The astrological calendar is an interesting little thing to me. I once attended an adult adventure camp (yes they have those) where one of the learning activities was a star gazing session with one of the leading astrologers in the country, a professor out of UPenn. As you might imagine, an adult adventure camp is filled with a ton of hippies, free spirits and unconventional thinkers. Most of them identify quite strongly with their astrological sign and birth chart. So as the talk started picking up steam, someone asked a question about their star sign and the professor pointed out that over the time frame that has passed since the astrological chart was first created, the world has had a certain amount of leap years that actually send most of us into the next star sign over from what we believe we are. The crowd went nuts.

Never try to tell an Aries that they’re really a Taurus. It doesn’t go over well.

But really the terms Aries and Taurus are just labels that we place on people that are born during certain days. We could just as well call them “Hunters” and “Bulls” and the attributes that we associate with those individuals would still be valid. Kind of like if the whole world got together and decided that from now on we would call the color blue yellow and the color yellow blue. The color doesn’t actually change, just the label. 

I’m inclined to find some truth in star signs. We as a species have collectively agreed that the moon, an orb circling our planet over two hundred thousand miles away, controls the tides of our oceans. So it stands to reason that stars that are exponentially further away from our planet can have an exponentially more subtle effect on something happening here. Something like emotions or personality traits. That’s at least one defense of the zodiac that I think holds weight.

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Part of learning about the zodiac is learning your sign so that you can discover your strengths, weaknesses and how you interact with other signs. I’m a Libra, and let me tell you, I’m very Libra… but most people I talk to about the zodiac think that they are very much their sign. But either way, let me tell you a little bit about my sign. Libra is the only sign that is represented by an inanimate object. The sign for Libra is scales and Libras are always looking for balance. In this search for balance, we can be seen as wishy-washy, and have a difficult time making decisions because we can see both sides of every situation. It’s interesting that Geminis have a similar issue but are seen as “two-faced” for what amounts to pretty much the same inability to commit to one path.

I was recently at a little gathering where it came to light that there were several Libras there and through the course of conversation it came out that we all get anxious at the grocery store. There are just too many choices to be made and it freaks us out. We don’t do well with Leos because while a Leo could never understand our indecisiveness, a Libra could never understand their confidence.

Two or three years ago I learned that the hard way.

So as a Libra, I do my best to leave myself open to several roads and possibilities. It’s one of the reasons that I am able to identify so closely with Zen and Taoism. Both of these philosophies de-stress the idea of being goal oriented or placed on this planet for a specific purpose. One of my favorite reappearing terms in Taoism is wu-wei. It is the idea that you should be like water. Water doesn’t decide it’s path, but instead it follows a natural course of movement. Should a rock get in the way of the flow, it simply bounces off and follows a new course of movement. It has no intention, it just continues to flow. Just like a Libra. 

But being a Libra can be difficult. It takes a good deal of commitment to be so non-committal. When I first got out of Physical Therapy school, I began working in a sports medicine clinic just outside of Phoenix. Towards the end of the first year, there was talk of an Orthopedic residency to become a specialist. It would have been a big move for my career at a relatively young age. I could see myself in the white coat at a hospital being the Physical Therapist that all the surgeons respected. I’d hear them tell patients about how long I had been there and how if they had to see a PT, I’m the only one that they would trust. But I also read a lot of Kerouac growing up.

I had romantic dreams of paying off my student loans and then ditching the job for a year or two on the road with nothing but a rucksack and a book of poetry that no one would read until long after I had died. If I took that road, it would be difficult to see a surgeon singing the praises of an unwashed hobo who shirked his great promise as a young and talented PT for a life of aimless rambling. So I didn’t do either one. I waited. And I waited. And then several things happened all at once that led me to quit my job, break my lease and move out to Los Angeles all in the span of two weeks. I hit a big boulder and went with the flow, which is really the only way to make a Libra come to any type of decision at all. It has to be forced on them.

And I was recently sharing some of these Libra-type happenings with a good friend of mine. I told her about my struggles with decision-making and commitments. I relayed my inability to interact and cooperate with some of the other signs, and I illustrated all the work that I was doing to improve these faults so that I could be a better person despite these downfalls. After listening for a while, she kind of rubbed her eyes the way people do when they have a headache (or hear something so stupid that they are afraid that one might be coming on) and then she floored me with a fairly simple question:

“Why do you feel like you have to fix everything?”

That’s the point of this article. Whether it’s through studying the zodiac or some other measure, self care and self study will always bring up your baggage.

Take yoga for example. When you go to your first class it really is a bit of a mess. You can’t follow the instructions, its difficult to touch your toes and it seems like everything the instructor says one minute is immediately contradicted the next. And as you become more consistent with the practice, you open doors to bigger challenges. So while a twisted crescent pose doesn’t bring about the same labored breathing that it once did, you can now add an arm bind that 3 months ago wasn’t in your wheelhouse. In other words, you do get better but the practice never really does. Because the practice is always the act of going deeper than you were the day before. The yogis you see on Instagram doing handstands where they scorpion their back to touch their toes to their forehead still find challenges in their own practice. The practice is never perfect, so nothing is ever really ‘fixed.’

And I think that’s another great take away from your mat to your life. As a Physical Therapist, a lot of patients ask me when they will be cured. As someone who instructs clients on meditation, people ask me when they will be better. And the answer to both of those is never. You’ll never be better because you’re not bad. You’re not good either by the way. You’re just you. And when you get into the thinking that you have to “fix” something during a new moon, or correct the negative attributes of your zodiac sign, you run the risk of stepping into a negative self image that you don’t like. But if you can’t see yourself and love yourself exactly as you are right now, then there won’t come a magical day when you will. 

So within the conventional goal-oriented thinking of the western world, maybe my dad is right. If you’re not going to fix anything, then maybe it is all just bullshit. But maybe that’s okay. After all, if you need a goal to make life worth living, then you’re going to have to go the route of a religion with an afterlife. I don’t think I need that. I think I’m fine with enjoying my daily spiritual work knowing that it will never be completed. But maybe I’m just leaving myself open to another possibility that might come along.

It would be pretty Libra of me.

That’s just something I’ve been sitting with…

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