Author Archives: Amanda Moreno

About Amanda Moreno

Amanda is an astrologer, soul worker and paradigm buster based in Seattle. Her adventures in these forms of ‘practical woo’ are geared towards helping people to heal themselves and the world. She can be found in the virtual world at www.aquarianspirals.com.

My Gypsy Soul

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Life has been so packed for the past however long it’s been. In the past few days, I’ve been able to unwind a bit, due mainly to forcing myself to take the entire four day Thanksgiving weekend off from all five (six?) of my jobs.

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OK, I was forcing myself at first, but then the sheer pleasure of not working sunk in.

And let me tell you, three and a half days without doing anything I’m obligated to do was so very much needed, even if I folded on that last day and did a bunch of work because a strange bout of inertia kept me away from anything else.

I’ve now entered what some friends and I are referring to as Self Care December (SCD). I hate December. It’s true.

Growing up, I was all about the carols and the tree and togetherness, but then shit got weird: family started disintegrating and death anniversaries became a reality and I realized that even though I’m perfectly fine with my oodles of outsider status the other 11 months of the year, it’s way too hard to be ‘different’ in December. I don’t like consumerism or plastic; Christianity makes me pretty uncomfortable; I don’t have a traditional romantic relationship; and the complex emotions that arise, coupled with some dear-hearted friends who really try to help, just make the experience kind of a mess.

Part of SCD is that I’m taking a lot of walks. I love walking. I love focusing on a given color, or my breathing. I love getting a feel for the city, or talking to the trees and bushes, even just in my mind.

In the past two days, I’ve wandered around walking a lot. A LOT. Someone mentions Christmas, I feel my anxiety start to rise — even though my life is pretty rad and amazing (which just compounds the anxiety) — and I just take off down the street.

As I’ve engaged this practice, I’ve felt a familiar longing creeping back into my soul. It’s hard to articulate, but it has to do with the urge to wander the world combined with the urge to establish home.

At this point in my life I can feel these different paths in front of me. I feel like I’m at a crossroads. The sacred sexuality route is calling, amplified by a sudden preponderance of opportunities to explore it at all levels. Do I want to explore it just for my own personal sake, or bring it into my work with clients? I don’t know. There’s the energy healing path. Mostly for my work with clients, but clearly it would be an experiential path as well. There’s the part of me that very much wants to follow the path that is partially laid out already, working with ancestral and earth-bound spirits, and incorporating that into my work. And there’s my commitment to furthering my understanding of astrology, particularly in the therapeutic context.

Clearly all of these things are connected. But there’s that whole ‘time’ thing to think about.

Days like today have made me feel homesick in a way. For the days in grad school when I got to wander and just do what my soul wanted me to. I would wake up, write, go on a walk, come home and make food, take a long walk to a coffee shop, write, ponder, drink coffee (or whiskey) and stare out the window, walk home, make food, write… That kind of behavior feels like home. And it feels like freedom.

Space and spaciousness are themes lately. Breathing into spaciousness. Imagining space around the parts of my body and my emotions that are constricted or anxious, breathing spaciousness into the bad emotions and breathing out to create space for the new. Finding the space to do the work. Finding a space to live. Finding a space to call home.

Then there’s that conflict that always arises. My soul longs for the space to do the work I love on a full time basis. Working with people. Striving for change. My soul also longs for the space to wander empty beaches and silent forests. But I have to pay rent. I have to pay rent in a city that is seeing rent increases more pronounced than anywhere else in the country — and the home I’m currently living in, while incredible, is temporary.

It makes me think of the Devil card in the tarot. It makes me think of my own general interpretation of the card, which emphasizes an understanding that we are here, in the material world, for a reason. That reason is not to shun the body and materiality, but rather to play here. To enjoy. To learn how to work with stone and steel and flesh and bone.

It is when those things, the money and the desire for tactile goods to create security and comfort, take precedence that we find ourselves chained. The gravity of the material is real — but there has to be space, too. Space for the mind and the heart and soul to merge and be explored. Finding the balance — honoring the structures while not making them the center and becoming chained to them — is an ongoing lesson.

So I wander through the city, now that I’ve been able to do something other than focus on work and family drama, now that I’ve started coming back into myself and the work — MY work — and it hits me: I want a home. I’m ready for a home — for MY home. But I also want to wander.

This dichotomy is so present in so many areas of my life — the tension in my life as a person practicing non-monogamy, for example. It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that I want primary bonds and long term intimacy and someone(s) who feels like home. But I also want freedom. I want the freedom to explore other people, other places, other things. And people keep telling me that the two things — home and freedom — can’t exist together. That I have to choose.

I’ll admit that I’m stubborn, and that when people tell me I can’t do something I’m prone to dig my heels in. But I don’t think I’m doing that now. I want home, and I want freedom. I want to do the work I’m meant to do and I want the money to be able to live where I want, and probably on my own. I want a home base and the ability to wander the globe. I want primary intimate and sexual bonds and I want the freedom to explore that with more than one person if needed. I want core commitment and family, too. I want the space to explore anything that’s going to help me help others. And I want the freedom to do it my way.

And so I leave you with a poem by Rilke, who really says everything I need to, much better than I ever have:

You see, I want a lot
Maybe I want it all:
the darkness of each endless fall,
the shimmering light of each ascent.

So many are alive who don’t seem to care.
Casual, easy, they move in the world
as though untouched.

But you take pleasure in the faces
Of those who know they thirst.
You cherish those who grip you for survival.

You are not dead yet, it’s not too late
to open your depths by plunging into them
and drink in the life
that reveals itself quietly there.

— From Book of Hours

Shifts in Consciousness & Holding Actions

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I attended my first political rally and march in the spring of 2003. I was 23 and the U.S. had just declared war on Iraq, and I was pissed. So I went, enjoyed a walk in the sunshine with several thousand others, and felt pretty uplifted. But I also felt entirely ineffective.

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I attended a few more rallies in the months to follow, and every time had the same reaction: that it was lovely to take a walk outside with friends, and that I was so glad people were passionate enough to shout through microphones about things that made sense, but that I felt like it wasn’t doing any good — that I wasn’t doing any good.

I realized then that I could have more of an impact in the world through interpersonal relationships. Through working on myself, through “being the change,” and then through aiming to be as authentic as possible in the hopes that anyone around me might change a little because of that, resulting in a ripple effect out into the world.

This insight was personal. It in no way meant that I thought rallies themselves to be ineffective, although I do bounce back and forth about that one to this day to some extent. It was that I didn’t feel it was the best use of my own time. In the past 11 years, this core understanding has blossomed within me, and I’ve realized that my work here during this time very much has to do with helping myself and others to shift their consciousness out of this paradigm and into the next (how was that for a summary?!).

Several years ago, I came across The Work That Reconnects and the three dimensions of the great turning. Lobbying and protesting are included, but so is working for shifts in consciousness. As I’ve mentioned in my column before, I love Joanna Macy’s work, and this simple breakdown allowed me to see that all of the components are necessary, all of the work is necessary.

I have to say, friends — at the risk of sounding like ‘one of those people’ who is always tossing around astrological transits as life changers — the Sun’s shift into Sagittarius was such a blessing. I feel lighter again. I feel playful. I feel like I have space to hopefully integrate after that gloriously horrendous eclipse season.

This exists in contrast, per usual, with the events in the world; and that contrast is increased by the Ferguson grand jury decision. As tends to happen with me any time there are mass protests or ‘civil unrest’, I tend to switch into this mode of ‘love and light will heal all.’ This mode isn’t evangelistic, I’m not preaching, it’s just a way of moving on the Earth, with a smile in my heart and the remembrance that I really do believe love is the only way through.

I’m all too aware of how my inner critic bristles when I make statements like that — an awareness of how it can sound: maybe delusional, maybe privileged, maybe a whole host of other things. And oh, how grateful I am for the people who do willingly take to the streets in attempt to express and make a statement and band together. I’m grateful for the people who are paying close attention and covering the story in as balanced a way as possible. Per the aforementioned dimensions, work of that kind buys time, saves some lives and ecosystems, species and cultures. But it is insufficient to bring a sustainable society about.

I was listening to NPR the other day, which I haven’t done in a very long time. They were interviewing a pastor from the Ferguson area. I can’t give you the details of the interview, because my brain started wandering away from his words in expectation that he would not address what I see as a core issue — that we need to love each other above and beyond anything else; that that is the shift that is really needed.

I tuned back into what he was saying, and there it was: he was talking about how his son would be staying with him through Thanksgiving, and about how his son had asked if he could go join the protests. The pastor expressed some conflict about it, but also wanted to let his son express his voice. But what it really came down to for him was the belief that we just need to love the **** out of each other through this. We need to greet this situation, and all situations with love — including the times when the injustice is too much, and we feel like the love is lost. Love ourselves and each other through that, too.

It made me smile. It also made me cringe a bit as I glanced over at my bag full of groceries and goodness that I’m so blessed to have, leading to the loop of “but what about people who are suffering so much that contemplating love is not even a thought that’s ever crossed their mind?” But that is a topic for another day.