By Amanda Moreno

I’ve spent the past six weeks more than 3,000 miles from home, staying with a teacher-friend on the Gulf Coast of Florida. Here I am, a week and a half after the fact, still trying to get some traction in integrating whatever happened — because it was a time of such incredible growth. And so once again it’s time to use my tools.

Photo by Eric Francis.

These days I’m thinking a lot about Jung’s theory of the transcendent function.

This theory basically says that when consciousness is engaged in tension — when it’s torn between seeming opposites — the transcendent function is what arises in an attempt to bridge the two.

It is the source of incredible creative energy — just as polarization is the source of incredible destruction. These days, I feel like I’m existing as a mess of seemingly irreconcilable opposites — and so I just keep reminding myself to hold the tension, and I try to do something constructive with the energy. Or I just cross my fingers and hope for the best.

My heart has longed for total immersion in ‘healing’ work for some time. My time in Florida was the closest I’ve come. But now that the thirst for immersion has been somewhat satisfied, my creative juices are flowing full-force whenever they want to.

There lies one source of tension, because when my body is sitting in an office (at a very worthy non-profit that serves my direct community, mind you), creative energy is pulsing through me. Although I’m grateful for that baseline paycheck, and can maintain a positive attitude at my job, I long for the freedom to focus on my passion, and to incorporate what I’ve just learned in work with clients.

So what DID I uncover?

I learned that after five years spent separating myself from my fixation on the myth of soul mate, I’m ready to revisit it and bring it into my professional work.

I realized that when someone told me that my genius lies in understanding the complexities of the human heart, they were onto something.

I discovered that I have so much to learn about karmic patterns of relationship dynamics, energetic boundaries and kink and everything sacredly sexual — and that I’m really frickin’ excited about all of it and want to explore it all NOW; but I also want to build containers of trust in which to do that work. Which takes time.

I learned that life is truly wrapped in synchronicities, some of which [re]-introduced me to Sophia, divine wisdom, and a new understanding of the myth of separation — just as the asteroid Sophia (which, natally, conjoins my Leo ascendant, squares my Scorpio Moon, and opposes my Aquarian Sun) was squaring my nodes: something unfinished is being revisited. I began working with asteroid chart delineation and found a whole maze of wonderful discovery that’s sent me plunging into the study of Gnosticism and lineages of hidden feminine wisdom.

I learned that the modality I’m being taught by my Floridian teacher, Deep Memory Process is the absolute perfect application of the combination of evolutionary astrology, depth psychology and shamanism. It’s a form of cathartic past life regression therapy and soul retrieval that is both transcendent and deep and is geared towards healing trauma in a way that gives me hope for the world. Understanding the depth of my commitment to this work brought me to tears one day — and, oh: the power of being connected to purpose.

I broke up with the tarot deck I’ve been using every single day for the past six years or so at the same time as I decided to go on a divination fast. Well, a tarot divination fast. The quest to trust my intuition has taken a new form, and not relying on the cards for personal insight is strange. And liberating.

I’ve also started coming to terms with the fact that while my soul is calling out for a simple, deep, long-term intimate connection with one other person, it is also voraciously questing for autonomy, freedom, exploration and variety. I don’t in any way find those seeming-opposites to be mutually exclusive, but they feel irreconcilable at times, especially because most people don’t have the framework to be constructive listeners when I need to talk about it. Or perhaps it just feels like a daunting task to find one partner, let alone several, who can understand and support those needs. And so I’m just holding that tension, hoping for the best.

New understandings about my needs in relationship are rocking the foundations of my beliefs about family and relationship and intimacy. Not because my thoughts have changed that much, per say, but because my emotional body has changed — my felt sense of knowing what I want.

Due to super-whammy Saturn transits, a deep restructuring of everything I am has uncovered a felt sense of my own vulnerability, rather than just the rational understanding that it must be there. Work with my inner child has uncovered a need for trust and intimacy alongside a deep-seated belief that there’s no way relationship won’t end in betrayal or sudden loss (thank you, Uranus in Scorpio square the nodes from the fourth house).

And yet… for the first time in my life I do have a sense that intimacy and depth can happen — that familial bonds can exist without traumatic endings. That hope feels like a sunlit, powdered quartz beach in Florida. With dolphins. It feels like my heart is thawing out. But it also feels scary.

As someone who prefers to engage non-monogamous relationships, I’m finding that I’m questioning my wants and needs. And because they seem to be flitting between polarities, I’m reminding myself that part of the work of handling paradox — of engaging the transcendent function — has to do with holding the tension without succumbing to the urge to cling to one side or the other; rather, waiting until a third option comes forward. Waiting until something new is created.

And right now, it just feels like so much is being created, which is exciting and yet horrifying. So I rely on some laughter and my shiny new motto, which is: we’ll just see what happens.