Mars Square Pluto, Helpers Needed

Transcript:

Hey everyone, this is Acyuta-bhava from Nightlight Astrology. Happy Monday, everybody. Today we are going to talk once more about this week's major astrological configuration, which is Mars is upcoming square to Pluto. This is going to happen on July 1; Mars and Aries will be squaring Pluto in Capricorn on July 1. This is a very explosive and dynamic transit that most people most astrologers will be feeling and talking about this week. We're going to start off this week by talking about the aspect one more time, this time providing you with some helpers, some helpful insights, and hopefully some helpful pieces of advice for how to either work with this energy or pacify it. Two basic responses we could try to flow with, harness, direct the energy, or we could try to sort of calm the effects having on us, maybe a little bit of both. So that's what we're going to talk about today, as well as exploring maybe a little bit of why this aspect is so difficult or some of the shadows that it tends to bring up in the collective and things like that.

Well, we are looking at Mars in Aries square to Pluto in Capricorn on July 1. I'm really excited to have Ashley. It's my wife and longtime partner in pairing herbalism and astrology together; we've been working plants and planets together for, gosh, 12 years now. So she's going to come on in a minute and help us talk about ways that we can use this energy and ways that we can pacify the energy with the teachings of a few specific plant teachers. So that's what we're gonna be looking at. I want to show you this on the Real-Time Clock first. So here is the aspect in question today. And it's a pretty big one. I gotta bring up my little epic pen here, which There we go. So let's take a look. Here you can see Mars in the sign of Aries. So here's Mars in Aries, squaring Pluto in Capricorn. And that is coming through on July 1, which is this Friday. You will be feeling the force of this transit all week. You will feel it over the weekend, probably through about next Monday or Tuesday. That's a good estimate. So you got about a full week of dealing with this energy. You have probably been feeling it already.

Certainly, it has been a part of some of the news cycle here in the United States with the overturning of Roe versus Wade and a lot of strong, strong feelings and reactions to that happening. That is also very much in line with Jupiter's entrance into Aries, where Jupiter in Aries is a planet that presides over law. Jupiter is related to the courts and justice and higher education and the legal system and the systems that govern and run society. When Jupiter is in Aries, there is often contention and fighting over laws and lawmaking. This is why earlier on, when we preview Jupiter in Aries I talked about, for example, the fact that Jupiter Aries, previous ingresses into Jupiter in Aries coincided with the renewed debate about gun violence and laws around gun control. A lot of other things too, but contention around laws, lawmaking, and so forth is sort of in the air right now with Jupiter's co-presence with Mars in Aries. And then you see Mars squaring Pluto. And you have, and there you have it; look back at last week's episode that I did on Mars square Pluto for more on that aspect. And just the I think I went through a list of like ten things, you know, ten convulsions that you can expect to see from that particular transit.

I want to say one thing before Ashley comes in to talk with us about some plant helpers that may help us use the energy or pacify it this week. Someone recently asked me, you know, do you have any sense of why we keep seeing so much, you know, like shootings? Someone asked me that. And they said, Do you think this has anything to do with Mars square to Pluto? And I was like, No, I mean, Mars is square to Pluto is happening right now. Some of the recent mass shootings in the United States have happened, I guess, since Mars entered Aries are right around that time, but I wouldn't necessarily peg it on any one aspect.

However, there are lots of moving, but it's because that's, that's a problem that has spanned decades now. Right? And it's growing and so forth. So I wouldn't want to try to just name like one, you know, transit that's like two weeks long and be like, Well, that's it, you know. But what I do when someone asks me a question like that, and there's a transit perfecting in the sky, sometimes my wheels will turn, and you know, certain insights will crop up. And so, I thought there was one that was worth sharing. Sometimes people say, you know, Yeah, is this like a Pluto thing? Or like, you know, what is it? One thing that Mars Pluto exposes is the shadow of the hero.

So let's just, broadly speaking, talk about the hero archetype. In movies, the hero archetype is the lone Knight or warrior; it doesn't matter if it's a man or woman or whatever. And against, you know, insurmountable odds on a solo quest, they battled darkness. And then they vanquish that darkness, and they stagger, you know, bloodied across the finish line, maybe having almost died. And then they, you know, they either die for the cause, or they stumble across the finish line, and maybe they've lost a limb, or they're just bloodied and battered. And, but it's this one person, you know, saving the day. That's one of the images of the hero that's really popular in movies in the sort of modern West. What is the shadow of that? If it had a shadow? What would it be? What, in other words, any archetype that possesses our psyche, to the point where we become conflated or identified with it, usually that means that there's, you know, some unconscious dimension whenever an archetype possesses us societally or personally or whatever. And I'm not the first person to say this. So I, you know, I looked at people like Jung and Hillman and some other great archetypal psychologists; Liz Greene has said things like this.

The shadow of the hero, for example, is, well, if you take those parts, right, the lone individual that rises up against insurmountable odds to save the day, what lives in the shadow of that is loneliness, the feeling of not belonging, of not being special, of being isolated and alone. And of the insurmountable odds being oppressive forces that feel like they are against you or they are unfair or contribute to your illness or harm mentally, emotionally or physically that are done to you, whether those exist in society or in the form of like, just not feeling like you fit in at school or whatever else. And the frustration, and, you know, even rage of feeling misunderstood, underappreciated, undervalued. And so, you know, you could say that some of those things live in our obsession with the hero. One of the things that Mars Pluto can do is to expose within the drive to be number one the deep feeling of alienation, inferiority, oppression, unfairness, and the anger or rage toward those things, which is, in some ways, exactly the profile that we hear about, Again and again, whenever some lone shooter crops up and rather than being the lone Knight that kills the dragon; ends up being the lone, you know mentally perhaps mentally ill individual feeling outcast, or alienated or different or disturbed, who is angry and takes it out, rather than taking it out on a dragon takes it out on someone who is, you know, looks looked at as innocent. So it's like all of those factors just from I'm just making a really vast oversimplification, right, just that as a way of trying to turn that archetype. So you can sort of see what's on the other side of it.

The reason I think it's important to look at that is that the shadow of the hero, in some ways, is the feeling of needing to be an individual, heroic, rising above the rest, you know, select and special and unique compared to the rest, standout individual, accomplishing things, no one else has victorious, special. And when that when we elevate that standard of what it means to be beautiful or valid or happy or, you know, loved.

The shadow of it is that many, many people end up taking on all of those feelings of ostracization and abandonment and not feeling special or, you know, like that. And then you know, what do we see? We see an endless amount of memes trying to pump people up. Well, you are special and like this. And in some ways, that whole thing is just evidence of the fact that we are sometimes possessed by the hero archetype and its shadow, the outcast loner who doesn't have a heroic role to play and who may become destructive toward themselves toward others who may feel left out who may take it out on others. It's a complicated thing. So I can't, you know, I'm just trying to give a simple summary of what might be on the other side of the hero obsession.

The reason I think it's important for today, and then I'm glad to have Ashley come on and talk about help, is because when we, when we live in the shadow of the hero, the feeling is always, it's up to me, there's something I have to do, no one else can do, I'm on my own, I've got this. I mean, everyone should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, take responsibility; it's all a heroic message. And we've lost touch with the fact that you know, it takes a village, you know, it, there's, you don't do things alone. In fact, that maybe the least, that maybe the shadow of the hero wisdom is the, you know, forgetting about tribe, forgetting about family, forgetting about community forgetting about relationship and cooperation. And so with an aspect in the air this week, that can be so much about individual will and responsibility and power and sovereignty and, you know, might make right and fight and all this, it can be so heroic. But we need helpers to like we're not, we're not designed to be, you know, trudging up these bloody hills with battle axes all the time, psychologically.

So today, I thought it would be really good to have Ashley come on, and talk about some plants, simple things in nature that you can do, that are a part of the natural wisdom of the earth that can help us not be alone in dealing with, you know, all the pressure that can come with this. These are plant helpers. We're going to talk about them today. And I'm gonna bring Ashley on right now. There you are. Hi. Thanks for being here.

Ashley
Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be back. And I love what you just said about this. This energy of the kind of the lone wolf versus the community. And I think that's going to tie in really nicely with the plant allies that I've put together because, you know, the plants, they don't work solo, you know, they work in a very profound way, like the ecology of plants and the way they communicate underground with one another and help each other, surmount all sorts of difficulties, I think can be a really great analogy for what we're kind of all collectively going through right now. So thank you for having me on to talk about our sacred plant helpers.

Acyuta-bhava
Yeah, yeah, we're going to talk about them in two ways. Today, we're going to talk about four. These are helpers for Mars Pluto this week, but you could use them anytime for any kind of energy, especially those that are intense that place the pressure on you of having to get things done or feeling like you're on that heroic, you know, individual quest, it's very Mars, Pluto, you know, again, like just to summarize, like, if everything is up to us individually to be great, or to manage or to deal or whatever. Is it any surprise that the shadow that keeps cropping up is, you know, individuals who are like anti-heroes, every day in the news, there's some lone individual cropping up and doing something crazy because they feel like they can't do it anymore. Right? That's kind of the sickness of the hero archetype. And I think that that you could; you could talk about that with many different planetary combinations. But that is, I think, one of the shadows of Mars/Pluto; you could look at it as Sun/Pluto dynamic as well. But anyway, I don't want to spend too much more on that. So we need help. We can't live life alone in a vacuum, heroically trudging on and doing it all ourselves. And I think the plants I've always appreciated about Ashley is that you know, in working together and being married and everything in dating, I guess, for 11 years now going on 12. You know, she's always looking for help from the plants when there's something. "Oh, I know what you plant can help with that." So I think that's good energy to bring in today. So there are two plants we're going to talk about that can help us use this energy, which means channel it in the right way, direct it when there is a pressure to get things done, or use the will of Mars with the sort of explosive dynamic of Pluto, and there's pressure, and you got to use it and not get overwhelmed by it, but you're in a pressure situation, you could use some help using the energy. Let's talk about these two plants. Ashley, tell us about your first one.

Ashley
So the first one is horsetail. Horsetail, this plant is really, really powerful as a conduit and for helping us maintain structure and boundaries. While we're getting a, you know, bleep ton of work done. You know, it, it's, you can see here in this picture, it's like these tubes and horsetail is made out of silica. So if you think about what else is made out of silica, it is our entire internet, right? Like, you know, all of the informational wires that carry electricity, that carry information through the internet, all of those fiber-optic wires contain silica. So it's a plant of conduction. And I remember when I was at study with Matthew wood at the green comfort School of herbal medicine in Virginia, there was a woman there who had worked very closely with this plant, and she said, you know, call on horsetail to bring in the light, you know, if you're feeling overwhelmed, or overcome by darkness, call in the plant that holds and carries and moves the light. And that's this plant. So, you know, I think the Mars and Aries and Pluto and Capricorn, those energies are really intense. And you know, Pluto energies can be kind of dark, too. So if we're feeling overwhelmed by the darkness, and you know, especially, you know, in the news, as a tutu was saying, some of the heaviness of the current Pollak political situations and the state of things that we can call upon this plant, and this plant has been around since before the dinosaurs, this is a prehistoric plant. You know, it's, it's, I forget how many millions of years old, but this plant actually grew up to be about 30 feet tall, you know, now, these days, we see a congruent grow up to maybe like four or five feet, but it used to be as tall as trees, you know, even before the time of the dinosaurs. And it was like, you know, this, again, this light bearer. So this plant, you can use it as it's best used as a tea, you can use it as a tincture, but I think it extracts the minerals come out better in water. So you can buy this from Mountain rose herbs or any of your organic suppliers; you do want to use organic because, like a lot of plants that are high in minerals, they can also pull up toxins out of the soil. So we don't want those. So if you can find an organic source, brew yourself a tea, and it will strengthen your hair, your nails, your teeth, and your bones; again, it has so much of this stabilizing silica in it that it will fortify all of this all of the crystalline structures of the body. And then those more, you know, we can say more subtle, crystalline structures that help us hold the light and keep our spirits light in our bodies as well.

Acyuta-bhava
Nice. Yeah. And just, you know, for people who are looking to find an easy place to purchase online, we don't get anything from Mountain Rose.

Ashley
No, I have no affiliation with any herb companies. That's just probably, I think, for people in the United States the easiest place to find it, but certainly, you know, ideally, you find your own local source. If you can find an organic grower or harvester in your region. That would be the ideal place to find it.

Acyuta-bhava
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So there's a second plant that could help us work with the energy. What does that one?

Ashley
Yeah, this one's a little this one works differently. So we talked about horsetail as really bringing in the light and helping carry the information through these times. Well, black cohosh is more a plant of the dark of the underworld. Another name for this plant is the black snakeroot. And if you look at its roots, I don't have a picture of this, but the roots of like these black snakes, you know, hence the name under the earth. And it's a plant that's ruled by Scorpio. So it has this sort of Mars Scorpio energy to it. But what it does is it helps us to unwind, the things that are dark and trapped. And, you know, kind of like, if we can't get to the source of our own pain and darkness and loneliness. Sometimes black cohosh can help get in there and actually go into that energy to help us sort through and figure out what we need to shed, what we need to build strength upon, and all of those sorts of things so that we can start to make light of the situation, so the roots are black and dark and tangled. But look at these flowers in this picture. There's they're upright, the arms are out. It's in this very kind of like, you know, receptive, I'm imagining as a bhakti yogi is like Lord Chaitanya has this very like, you know like, I'm hear I'm open to receiving, you know, even see images of Jesus you know standing like this as well.

Acyuta-bhava Dasa
So sort of looks like a shaman a little bit like with a with like a ritual.

Ashley
Yeah, totally. So you know it has that it's a very shamanic plant in that way, it really helps us to sort through these, these darker aspects of our psyche and also in our muscles. So it's really good; I like to use it also for whiplash and neck tension. So if you've been in a car accident, and you've had whiplash, or you just tend to carry tension in the neck, it can be really helpful at helping to relax and loosen that tension. It can also be helpful for tension in the lower back where you feel like maybe there's like a dragging heaviness in the low back. If, as a woman, you ever experience menstrual cramps that are heavy and dragging, it gets like this very sort of dark draggy energy. But what it does is it gets in there, and it lightens all of that up for you. So I do want to say that if you are taking birth control, or if you're on any hormonal modulators, or taking hormone replacement, you know, you want to consult with your doctor or your certified herbalist or registered herbalist before taking this plant because it does have a modulating effect on the hormones. If you're not taking anything, and you feel like things are good and steady, then I think I would recommend that you take a tincture of this, and you don't have to take a ton, then you can start off with three drops as a very kind of more gentle energetic dose and work up to a full dropper full to get a little bit more of that muscular tension, releasing energy.

Acyuta-bhava
Black cohosh, I think, you can probably find in your co-op, even.

Ashley
Oh yeah, yeah, this one's a bit easier to find on the market.

Acyuta-bhava
Yeah. Well, those are really good plant allies in terms of like, you know, if you're feeling the pressure, and you need to be moving things, and there's the question of how do I work with this energy, I think these are the two that, you know, when I was talking to Ashley, she really landed on, if we look at two plants that pacify this energy, you're like, I'm overwhelmed by it, I need to calm it down. I'm getting worked up, how can I, sort of, soothe and just turn the volume down. We have two plants that might help you with that too. What's the first one

Ashley
So the first one is peach leaf. And this is a plant medicine, you know, we all know peach. This is the leaf of the tree that bears the peach fruit. And I will say that peaches on their own as well, just as a fruit, can also have this pacifying energy to them. Peach leaf. This is a picture of a peach leaf, peach leaf and peach fruit are cooling. They contain these cyano glycosides, which slow down the Krebs cycle, which is a fancy way of saying it basically just works on slowing down your body's heat-producing function or catabolism, or your catabolic functioning. So if you're feeling hot, irritated, overwhelmed, overexcited over extended, then the peach leaf is just a superlative remedy for this. One tip that you can do to see if peach remedy is specifically indicated for you is to go have a peek in the mirror at your tongue. And if your tongue looks like one of these leaves here, it's a long-dated, it's a little flat, and it's really red in color. These are a little more on the orange side. But if your tongue is not pale but it's redder, that's a sign of heat. If you're showing signs of heat, then peach leaf or eating peaches or even using peach bark can be a really, really nice remedies, and these you can find in commerce, you know, you can make your own. You know, you can make your own peach leaf tincture, if that's something if you've made medicines before, but you can also find it you can also find this product you know in commerce, but I wanted to read it just a bit of what Matthew Wood talks about for this plant from his book The practice of traditional Western herbalism. So if you're interested in herbal energetics, this is a really wonderful book that I use in my herbal apprenticeship courses. So he talks about peach leaf being specifically good for the tissue state of excitation, which means heat redness and everything is moving faster. And you know, everything is in a more excited state than it needs to be. So this is a sedative herb. Peach is a superlative remedy for the irritative tissue state, especially for heat and irritation and for people with sensitive skin and tissues. It is also used for nervous agitation with gastric irritation and inflammation, the leaves, twigs, bark, and other opened kernels are used, but the seed is poisonous due to its high content of hydrocyanic acid. The classic indication of heat and irritation is a letter in an elongated pink, red tongue. And then, he goes on to tell more about the case histories. So this would Yeah, I think this one is a really nice one for it for this energy if you're really feeling irritated and overwhelmed by it.

Acyuta-bhava
Yeah, and it's Mars. Maybe one of the most primary actions of Mars is going to be heat, especially Mars and Aries, heat, inflammation, irritation, redness, fevers, skin, you know, like redness of skin or shingles often you're gonna get with like a Mars Pluto combination, things like that, too. That's a really good one. And is that best in tea?

Ashley
So you can use you can find tinctures; I think tincture works really nice for this already. Yeah, yeah, it takes I think I'd mentioned tincture, but you could make a tea you could do they make a twig tea, peach twig tea that you could do. And that would work really nicely. And then just buy some fresh peaches if you can, and let that medicine also be very cooling and helpful for your body.

Acyuta-bhava
Nice. Well, we have one more plant that might help you pacify some of the energy of the Mars Pluto square this week. What is that one?

Ashley
So that is Linden. So whereas I think the peach leaf works really well for that Mars heat, hot, irritated energy. The Linden is going to work a little bit more on the Pluto and Capricorn, a little bit more of that constrictive tightening. Yeah, kind of like just a little bit, kind of like the energy of things just feeling like things need to be perfect, but it's too hard to even begin getting there. So, Linden, it's also pacifying, it's also a sedative, but it really works a little bit more on the mind. So I really liked this plant. It's a tree, actually. But we use the leaves and the flowers that are pictured here. And it's for sedating hyperactivity of the mind, for hasty speech. So if you feel like you're your mouth is sort of getting ahead of you. Or maybe you've been saying you're a little too quick to speak. Or maybe you've been using sharp or harsh words with your family or friends or even in your own mind. Linden will really soften that voice. It'll soften that energy pacify it, and slow it down. It's also really good for when you feel like your mind is flitting from subject to subject and you're having a hard time focusing. It can help your mind to settle to relax and can help with heart palpitations as well. It has a heart-shaped leaf, which is an indication of a heart remedy. And so that one works, I think, ideally as a tea, and that one's very easy to find, try to find organic, and you can make it as a tea it blends well nicely with chamomile, as a relaxing, especially if you want it to give it to children. Linden is safe for kids; it's safe in pregnancy, so you can blend it with another safe, you know, pacifying herb like chamomile, and that would work really, really well together.

Acyuta-bhava Dasa
Yeah, you know, just to kind of put a bow around this, thank you so much. First, for you know, just bringing the plant wisdom because, you know, this is one of the more intense transits of the year. This Mars Pluto dynamics, especially because Jupiter's in Aries along with Mars, so it's got a little extra pop to it. We're coming to this in Anaretic Degrees. Those are the late degrees of Aries and Pluto's long journey through Capricorn. So there's the feeling of there being a lot of history behind what's happening right now. And, and so it's easy for there to be this, you know, this kind of volcanic dimension to the transit. I think, again, if I were to summarize why I thought well, what would be the use of having, you know, plant for plant teachers and because there's too much pressure with Mars and Pluto to go it alone, to try to do things alone. And, you know, with the pressure of being a hero, of pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps of doing everything solo, of overcoming all odds, of being victorious, being special, of being unique, and especially the pressure to figure everything out on your own. You know, we love a good hero story, and we are so quick, you know, we're so quick to forget that behind every personal accomplishment is usually an entire ecology of support. And usually, the support the most fundamental, valuable support boils down to love.

If you look, for example, I was watching the NBA Draft this past week, every other guy that got up there was sobbing and holding his mother here are like, you know, world-class athletes who spend their lives in the gym, you know, 4 am to 8 pm, every couple of hours working out again, working out again, feeling their bodies, they're going to these hyperbaric chambers. I mean, they just they're totally programmed to be good at like one particular thing. First of all, most of us are not like that, right. And yet, a lot of the times we end up looking toward those images, that's what I've got to do. I've got to start my morning at 4 am. I going to be running on that dark street, I got to be, you know, whatever. But the truth is that when that person gets to relish the accomplishment, what do they do? They hug their mom, you know, who you know. So it's like these transits, you know, when they come through, they can make you feel like the weight of the world is on your shoulders. And the thing is, you don't have to do it alone. And in fact, you suffer so much when you treat transits in life, and your birth chart like it's big heroic journey, and you have to take all these steps and evolve and get better at life. And not at all. It's like, what if the purpose of life was about relationships? What if it was about, you know, love and friendship. You can hear our daughter screaming.

Ashley
I just wanted to say to you know, on that note, you know, this is such a good time to rest, you know, and like, last night, I cuddled in bed with my girls and just snuggled them a little longer. And it's, you know, taking that time and I'm gonna go do this, I'm gonna go take care of her next, but just relishing these moments, and, you know, making sure that you're taking time to rest, and reset, because, without that, it's really hard to handle, you know, the uproars, because they're not going to stop.

Acyuta-bhava
For sure. Well, I can close this down if you want to go take care of her. Okay, I'll close this down. So, um, you know, as we are closing up here, I also want to let you guys know that Ashley and I are in the process right now of developing a new offering that will begin in January of 2023.

We don't have a title for the offering yet and an exact structure of how it works. We're in the very early phases, maybe in the next month, we hope to be, you know, sort of promoting it and offering another website, but the gist of it is going to be we're going to hold monthly, new and full moon gatherings for people who wants to join this group. And every month, we're going to be looking at the astrology of the month. But we're also going to be dieting or working with plants. You'll probably have a choice of different plants or two that you could work with each month, as a way of diving a little bit more deeply and experientially into astrology and trying to pair the plants with the transits as a way of deepening your spiritual life. And having a place in a community where we can talk and actually share our experiences with one another, you know, in a community setting. So that's a new offering that we have. We're in the early stages of developing it, and I will be announcing more about that offering, hopefully sometime in July, maybe August, but it'll start in January. We'll have a presale. So we'll have like a week or two where it's like, you know, there'll be a sale price, and there'll be a normal price. And maybe we'll even put it back on sale during the Kickstarter again, or something like that. But anyway, um, you know, it'll be we'll try to make it very accessible for people will have an option for people who are on you know, constrained or limited budget or something like that, too. So, you know, anyone should be able to join and work with some plants and talk about the astrology of each month in a more sort of guided intentional way.

And you know, we work with plants and planets all the time. It's just not something that I've deliberately tried to pair here on my YouTube channel outside of having Ashley on from time to time, but this is something that I really both of us have been really feeling called to do next year. Because it's been several years now that we've gotten backed up, because of the pandemic of bringing this offering together was actually in the works several years ago, I was promoting it during the Kickstarter, the pandemic happened, you know, there's we moved, childcare like, it was just, um, but thanks, thankfully now we're ready to do it. So we will be promoting that shortly. Anyway, that's what I've got for today. Many thanks to my lovely wife and partner, Ashley, for being here. I'd love to hear how you're working. If you decide to work with any of these plants, how do they help you this week? You should be able to pick most of them up pretty easily and just even just working with them a little bit. You'll probably feel some support. That's what we've got for today. Hope you guys are doing well; take it easy, bye.