Article by Donna Woodwell

Eclipses are all about working with shadows. A solar eclipse is literally the Moon’s shadow falling on the surface of the Earth. Metaphorically speaking eclipses then are moments when we must face our individual and collective shadow, to allow us to find healing through a new level of understanding.

In this sense, Donald Trump was never the “enemy of progress. He was the right man, in the right place, at the right time. In this sense, Trump is a man destined from birth to hold the projection of the collective shadow of our nation. So that we can clean up our shit and move on to the next phase of our history.

He’s holding up a mirror to see what’s broken within ourselves and within our society. He’s a proverbial match that lights the bonfire, already stacked long before he arrived.

Now it’s our turn as a nation to ask the crucial questions: who are we as a nation, and what do we want to become?

Dualistic thinking is what creates The Shadow in the Jungian sense. We project our monsters onto the other, so we can avoid looking at the darkness within.
Eclipses are the cosmic reminders that opposites can be complementary poles which attract one another. The eternal dance of Yin giving way to Yang, to Yang giving way to Yin.

There are no winners and losers in the dance. Only endless change.

Original post can be found

medium.com/@DonnaPhilosophica/what-astrologers-see-in-an-eclipse-that-you-dont-57539ee9b290

From the wise mind of Matthieu Ricard, "We expend a lot of effort to improve the external conditions of our lives, but in the end it is always the mind that creates our experience of the world and translates this experience into either well-being or suffering.

If we transform our way of perceiving things, we transform the quality of our lives. It is this kind of transformation that is brought about by the form of mind training known as meditation.

What is meditation? Meditation is a practice that makes it possible to cultivate and develop certain basic positive human qualities in the same way as other forms of training make it possible to play a musical instrument or acquire any other skill.
Among several Asian words that translate as “meditation” in English are bhavana from Sanskrit, which means “to cultivate,” and its Tibetan equivalent, gom, meaning “to become familiar with.” Meditation helps us to familiarize ourselves with a clear and accurate way of seeing things and to cultivate wholesome qualities that remain dormant within us unless we make an effort to draw them out.

So let us begin by asking ourselves, “What do I really want out of life? Am I content to just keep improvising from day to day? Am I going to ignore the vague sense of discontent that I always feel deep down when, at the same time, I am longing for well-being and fulfillment?” We have become accustomed to thinking that our shortcomings are inevitable and that we have to put up with the setbacks they have brought us throughout our lives. We take the dysfunctional aspects of ourselves for granted, not realizing that it is possible to break out of the vicious cycle of exhausting behavior patterns.