An old friend, Janet, now located in South America, and I got together again over the phone for our weekly Sunday 8 AM (your time zone) LAF meditation. Recognizing that the entire world has been inundated with the F.E.A.R. (False Evidence Appearing Real) virus promoted by the so-called powers that be in order to drive all of humanity into a roboticized, technocratic, transhumanist, despotic, globalist Great Reset, aka New World Order, several of us had decided in August that rather than just batting fear away, we would take action.

We began on August 22, at 8:02 AM, the exact time of the Full Moon in the final degree of Leo. Leo rules the heart. The final degree of any sign symbolizes what must be learned before the next sign can be successfully embarked upon.

So, what must be learned? Coeur-age, that is, we must dare to open the heart, no matter what comes, and keep it open, so that the LOVE that fills and fuels the universe may pour through and alchemize the continuously invading F.E.A.R.

During our last LAF meditation, Janet found herself going back over fearful situations in her life, doing personal work to alchemize memories. This time, she said her LAF meditation was easy, natural, not personal.

And myself?

After seven Sundays, I’m proud? — no; embarrassed? not exactly; chagrined? closer — to announce that this morning, for the first time since we began, my own meditation was decidedly personal. Sure, I want to help “save the world” from the predations of the evil ones. But so what? First, I must learn how to save myself.

And to say that it took this long, seven Sunday meditations, for me to turn from thinking myself a sort of “universal helper” to recognizing that I’m a severely wounded being, just like everyone else, is, yes, a matter of chagrin. The ego is involved. I cannot but admit that.

Okay, what happened.

For about three months now, I have been in pretty much unwilling contact with a woman who comes from afar, is on the road, looking for a place to call home. As soon as I met her, I realized, on an unconscious level, that she felt like a “sucker,” that is, she sucks my energy. I tried to bat that recognition away, but it hasn’t worked.

Which makes this a perfect situation for me to learn about my own need to disentangle from the tendrils of others who, usually without realizing it, seek to manipulate me through calling upon my sympathy, my empathy.

Okay, she contacted me again by email mid-week, said she would be in town and wanted to do the next Sunday meditation with me, and to come share a meal. Though I noticed my stomach contracting in response, at first I provisionally agreed, but said that I had to think about it. After sitting for 24 hours with the stubbornly unchanging instinct that did NOT want to see or be with her again, and especially, that did NOT want to do this meditation in her presence, I emailed her again to say so, trying to be nice, but full of as much desperation myself as I detect in her that she NOT contact me.

A few hours later, I felt badly about the tone of my reply, and emailed her yet again, saying she could try me again in one month. That I might feel differently by that time.

It might help to know that this woman has her Sun and Moon closely conjunct in Taurus, and that they both nearly exactly conjunct my Moon in Taurus. That fixed, earthy Taurus Moon has long been the part of me that I’ve had to come to terms with, since my restless and aspiring Sagittarian Sun/Ascendant and Mars constantly seek to view this material world from high above. For me, what has helped to ground myself immensely are physical and emotional practices that work with the body, to bring my mind in attunement with that stubborn lunar part of me that seeks security, safety in the material world. Furthermore, during these last 18 years, I have managed to create a tiny little permacultural paradise around me that meets with my Sagittarian visions of what this world could look like if, together, we re-member how to connect more fully with (Taurus) nature: see greenacresvillage.org.

That this woman’s Sun/Moon link so closely to my Moon shows my emotional identification with both her nature and her desperation. I can’t seem to “shake” her. She keeps coming back.

On her part, over these past two years she has been undergoing an immensely powerful, once-in-a-lifetime Plutonian transit back and forth over her Capricorn Ascendant, and so, despite her desperation to find a place to call home (Sun/Moon in Taurus), she must ultimately consent to bottoming-out, dying to who she thinks she is (and that includes her resume, which is extraordinary), in order to be reborn.

Okay, so that’s the situation going into today’s meditation with Janet. I told Janet the story, and we processed for awhile, realizing that this woman — seeking relief, feeling abandoned, no friends, needing a place to call home, and, most of all, desperate — represents a vast segment of humanity today — refugees of various kinds who have been uprooted, due to various causes and conditions, usually originating in transnational predatory capitalism, with the entire situation worsened enormously by the ongoing Covid Con. Indeed, we might generalize further to say that most settled people today F.E.A.R this rootless state, and try desperately to both keep refugees away and make sure it’s not their fate.

So . . . Janet and I decided to once again to begin with a focus on feelings, on the fearful feelings that most of us try to either deny, or at least to hold inside or project onto others. Once again, as we did last week, we decided to let our emotional bodies move into full on howling, shrieking, however best the buried collective pain be allowed to express. And this time, we also encouraged bodily movement. For me it meant standing up and noticing myself going into full-on defensive mode, again and again, howling while thrusting away with my fists the woman whose desperately needy energy sucks at my soul.

I was trying, and failing, to “get rid of her.”

Then, during our meditation, I felt discouraged, noticing myself still wrestling with the energy of this woman, noticing that indeed, no matter what I do, I can’t seem to be rid of my identification with her plight.

About 15 minutes in, I began to notice a gradual shift. Hard to put it in words here; it felt like my “identification” was morphing into communion with the whole; that through my identification with her I could feel much more strongly the F.E.A.R. that grips the world, and that we need to fully face and embrace in order to alchemize it into LOVE.

Now I was feeling the F.E.A.R. of the whole world as channeled through her being into my heart, which then, I was able to keep open and allow the universal LOVE pouring through to both penetrate and alchemize.

Indeed, I realize now, were it not for this woman, I would have been able stay somewhat “above it all,” thinking, after all, I’ve conquered my F.E.A.R., so what’s wrong with any of you that you haven’t? Yet, my mind had captured me, leaving behind my body, which of course still, and always will, seek security.

So I thank this woman, for her service, in showing me just how much I still have to learn.