Walking up the street to work this morning, exuding confidence. I can feel it. Some days the sharpness of my personal power startles me, especially when I’m harnessing it so effortlessly. Of course, it happens while I’m doing mundane things like walking up the street, and rarely in ritual or during other more mystical pursuits.
The theme of ‘coming into my power’ has been around for a spell. In many ways, it seems to be a lifelong process, but during this most recent burst I’ve felt more on the verge of unlocking something within me that will unleash the core of my own personal power. In many ways, I know that I’m afraid of it. My worldview would have me believe that that’s due to lots of karmic patterns, and luckily I do work fairly regularly that helps with addressing those patterns and hopefully healing fragments of myself that are bound up in power dynamics.
I associate this power within me with Scorpio, with the core of my emotional body (Moon in Scorpio), and with patterns of betrayal and obsession that seem to ribbon through every part of my being. When I first started really ‘learning’ about the Scorpio parts of me, it felt like I was headed into madness.
I remember the first autumn I spent with that energy, probably 2006 or 2007, wanting to lash out at (and fuck) everything and everyone. I wanted dark kohl liner around my eyes, clothing that accented hips and breasts, and felt like I was losing control in so many ways. And I wanted someone to fix it, I wanted to rage at someone and be lost in some passionate love affair where insanity played some central role and the love was bound by passion in its most destructive forms.
Luckily, the phase was short lived. And only really resulted in acute awareness and a whole slew of very pornographic photos that I took of myself. I’ve since entered more gingerly into the Scorpionic realms, unleashing my power more in a steady trickle. Probably more tentatively than is really necessary, but that’s the way I’m playing the game right now.
Part of me is longing for the unleashing, especially now that I’ve done so much work with creating containers for transformation — and ESPECIALLY now that I have absolutely no desire for destructive passion. Which means I have learned how to own my own ‘insanity’, and have gotten so much better at realizing when I’m projecting, especially in terms of my longing to control (hey, it’s a defense mechanism).
My longing now is for passion shared as a mature creative force. Sure, I still think passion can involve irrationality and getting ‘lost’, but I’ve let go of the part of me that romanticizes the destructive aspects. I want to be a powerful woman in powerful relationship with other people coming into their power. Mmmmm, power.
But it’s pretty amazing just to observe what that power feels like as I walk down the street. It’s femininity coming into form — and not pretty, harmonious, sweet femininity. It’s a raging, no-nonsense, unrepentant and utterly creative force that ‘I’ get to ‘control’. It’s woman-on-top, undulating and dominant energy.
In a lot of ways I totally get why society as a whole seems to fear that energy. Because unleashed…well, I mean that’s the power of Gaia. Of volcanoes and earthquakes and deluges that wipe everything out, leaving nothing but mud and rubble. It is chaos.
But it’s also life being pushed out through a tight little canal to witness the light and the breath of being. It’s creativity — in its nurturing and destructive forms. And so as I walk down the street, I breathe deeply into that sense of power and confidence. And I think about how much we need a world where everyone — women first and foremost but everyone — needs to learn how to channel and deal with and express feminine power. The more she gets repressed, the more violent, insidious and uncontrollable the inevitable outburst is.
With a Scorpio rising, I know the walk well. I am watching another dimension of that power, sitting in hospice with my Scorpio friend. She is fully empowered in her choice to surrender to a power much larger than her, and she relates tome how peaceful this surrender feels. There are butterflies everywhere in Phoenix, I love the symbolism, love the transformation, it brings me peace.
I’m also Scorpio rising and I get it too. Sounds like Kali. Awesome. So much more real, complex, layered, dynamic and yes, powerful, than the energies and manifestations to which Western society still tries largely to confine women. Thanks.
Thanks Amanda, my NN is conjunct Uranus in Scorpio and I’m attracted to that power and destructive passion, but am very controlled about it except at random moments that shock the people around me who are expecting my Virgo rising. It’s something I’m working with right now. Power is such a difficult concept to master in our society as, I feel, we are low on role models and guidance unless we actively go looking for them.
Hi Shelley – I have Uranus in Scorpio square my NN in Leo…so…yeah, power dynamics, especially where passion is involved, are always interesting. 🙂
Containers for transformation rather than pivoting?
I prefer Len’s ‘move with and yield to’ power to what you describe here Amanda. For me stepping into your own power is more like stepping onto a moving escalator or into all that movement and colour in India. A sort of immersion and natural movement.
Each to their own perhaps – introvert and extrovert?
The oracle said this to me but since the reference is scorpio perhaps it speaks to you too. Both views there anyway
Dec 25, 2007
SCORPIO – Monthly
YOU HAVE LONG felt different; what you must now do is act differently. I know — you are still mulling that one over. Sometimes you take so long to think about things that you make your friends over in Taurus seem like a kid on Red Bull and rollerblades in the mall. I will concede that at the moment (early in the year) you are still working out all the negotiable points with someone close to you, and they seem to have a viewpoint that’s difficult to pin down. You may be uncertain if someone close at hand is a friend or an enemy — of themselves. If you’ve gotten that far in your observation process, you’re living up to the psychological capabilities of your sign. That is precisely the issue: whether anyone who gets close to you is on their own side. The ones who are, you can work with; the ones who are not you must consider dangerous. Now, as you sort this out, you’re going to come across a diversity of ways that you are divided against yourself, and that is indeed a great time to pause. Pause, that is, and consider this. You have been dragged over hot coals the past decade of your life trying to establish your independence, your autonomy or perhaps just a healthy self-sufficiency. Exactly what you were recovering from I cannot be sure, but God did not make you a Scorpio for nothing. Usually someone as strong as yourself is that way for a reason, and the reason can be found in early childhood. But it will show up again and again in your life. You developed the idea that you have to be sufficiently powerful (in particular, financially and spiritually) to withstand the extreme swings of loyalty that you were exposed to. Now that you have grown up and accomplished that, you are being put back into the position to cultivate mutual trust, a sense of community and a new lesson, that of interdependence. But this will all go a lot smoother if you remind yourself every moment that you must be committed to your own cause, and use that as the criteria for who you involve yourself with.