When Life Feels Unfair: Reflections on the Solar Eclipse in Libra

Hey everyone, this is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology, and today, we are going to take a look at this weekend's upcoming eclipse in the sign of Libra. It is a solar eclipse that is happening on October 14, and so that gives us opportunity. That's this Saturday, it gives us an opportunity.

We've looked at the Libran Eclipse from a variety of different viewpoints, dating back to the summer when the nodes of the moon entered Libra and Aries. With just a couple of days left, I want to take two more looks at this upcoming eclipse, and today, we're going to look at it from the standpoint of disappointment and the feeling that things aren't fair.

Most of the time, when we think of the sign of Libra, we think about fairness, balance, eloquence, harmony, and justice. We don't always think about the fact that the sign of Libra is the sign of the scales can. It's a sign that points to karmic harvesting, and for many of us, we're going to have different moments throughout our lives where the outcome is not one that we would consider favorable, and we may even go so far as to feel picked on, or that life is unfair, that somehow we're not, we're getting the short end of the stick.

It's a very common experience. I think that we can all understand. We've probably all had it at one point or another. Some of us may feel that we've had it more than others. So, I want to talk about why this eclipse can bring up the feeling of life being unfair and how we can deal with it. What are some of the things that these ancient wisdom schools who practiced astrology, the hermeticists, the Platanus, the Stoics, the yogis, what did they say about the presence of karmic justice and the mystery of karma? And what to do when things feel unfair, because it's a real feeling, and I'm not going to promise you, we're not going to sit here today and say, Actually, everything's fair, and you just have to adjust your attitude. That will not be the approach we will take.

Although maybe sometimes that is the appropriate response. But that's not the only thing we're going to say today. So I don't want you guys to hear that, like, you're like I'm being set up for one of those, like, just accept it all, you know, and hopefully, we'll get a little bit more nuanced with what to do about the feeling of cosmic injustice, or the feeling that somehow what's happened, you know, to us or around us feels unfair.

So anyway, that is our agenda for today. Now, tomorrow, I want to also say that we will take another look at the eclipse through a totally different point of view, which has to do with when extremes are being tempered or when things are balancing out and we're reaping what we've been sown, and there's a feeling of things of a balance of being restored in our little universe and that's going to be a totally different take, and one that will be a little bit more uplifting than today's talk. So, just so you know, we will try to balance things out a little bit and truly brand fashion.

Anyway, before we get into it. Don't forget to like and subscribe; it really helps the channel to grow, as you guys know, and if you're new to the channel, I hope you're enjoying it and that you'll subscribe and become a regular around this place.

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All right, let's take a look at this eclipse, and I'm going to talk about cosmic disappointment and cosmic sense of injustice. This is not uncommon for an Eclipse in Libra. I remember the last time that we had eclipses in Libra; we were just looking back at some of those previous Libran eclipses, and I was thinking back about, you know, all that was happening and the feeling that sometimes you just feel like the universe is taking a dump on your head.

Like, this is unfair, and you would think that with Libran eclipses, everything should feel so fair and balanced. So why is it that sometimes, and I'm not talking about the psychological characteristics of people who have Sun or Moon in Libra, I'm talking about Libra as a sign that signifies the entrance of the sun into the underworld, which was associated with the judgment of the soul?

For example, one of the myths that is frequently associated with Libras, the Egyptian Hall of Mott, where the heart is weighed against, I think it's an ostrich feather, and the idea is that if your heart is metaphorically lighter than a feather, you pass through this kind of purgatory space and ascend to a better lifetime or a better world or something like that. I don't remember exactly how it went. But that's the idea.

The underworld is a space where, you know, most of the time when you hear stories about the underworld, it's like, you can't take anything with you down there, and you're sort of stripped naked, and you go, you go down naked as you came into this world naked, you go out of it in a sense.

So it's a place that's associated with death in the solar year, not just death, but the evaluation of the fruits and actions, activities of our lives, in internal evaluation more than external. There are many people who live lives where, you know, on the external side, it looks like he made a lot of mistakes. But on the internal side, there's been a huge amount of reform and healing and growth.

So we're not talking about when we talk about karma from the Libran point of view; we're talking about the evaluation of the soul, and this is an archetype. I'm not trying to suggest that you buy into some paradigm where you should be concerned about the judgment of your soul 24/7. What I'm talking about is that felt archetypal sense that there is something like a harvest and that there is something like cosmic or karmic balance, harmony, that actions are weighed, and that things are measured and that results are orchestrated in a mysterious way and that somehow the way that things are orchestrated represents a kind of universal balancing principle, the sign of the balance.

Now for, I think, for many of us, this is a really, this is like a hard pill to swallow, you know because they're the inequality that we deal with on the human level. I mean, let's just speak before we even get into some of the heaviest ways in which inequality plays out in our world through, you know, systematic oppression and the way that certain groups of people are treated by other groups of people and, and so forth, we get to an even more basic fact that people are not.

Although there's always been, in most religious traditions, a sense that on the level of the spirit or soul, we are all equal, we are all sparks of the Divine and, in that sense, were somehow the same were one, there's also been the very obvious way in which we are anything but the same from the principle of, you know, individuality and sort of the unique, creative snowflake theory, you know, we're each so unique, utterly unique at the same time, we're all fundamentally equal in divine dignity, and we look at it from that standpoint; it's actually sort of breathtaking and beautiful that there would be sameness and difference at once. But the problem that sameness and difference at once also create is this feeling of things at times being unequal, and that's like a shadow that we're always dealing with.

This is the way that ancient mystics thought about things. There were all sorts of opposites, and opposites didn't have just one way of relating to one another. There were fundamentally different ways that opposites had of relating to one another. Opposites had, as a paradigmatic way that opposites related, had its own opposite. Opposites could be fundamentally opposed to one another and incapable of moving toward or transforming or existing along a spectrum with one another. They were opposed as differences that absolutely could not be changed, light is not dark, dark is not light, and so forth. Evil is not good, and good is not evil, and so forth. You are not me, and I'm not you and like that.

Then, there's a way in which ancients thought that opposites could relate to one another along a spectrum. Masculine and feminine could exist along a spectrum, like dark, good, and evil. There's a fluidity in a way in which opposites can relate that are very fluid. So there's a there's a shadow that can come with everything. When we think about the idea of the universe being a perfectly balanced place, where some kind of cosmic harmony is the underlying principle of everything, it only makes sense that there would also be an experience of disunity, discordance, chaos, or inequality.

So this is somehow the way in which these ancient mystics viewed the universe that the universe is creative potency has to do with the fact that it is this interplay of opposites, which, at times, the existence of these opposites and the play of light and dark and equality and inequality is just brutally painful to experience and if you try to deny that you're just not being real, you know and at other times, the interplay of light and dark is the occasion for religious-like epiphany or religious experience or ecstasy.

It's like when you see it at play, and you somehow accept it all. That seems to be the common ground for mystical experience, and it's really hard to do. It's easy to talk about it; you know what I mean on a podcast, right? It's different when it's like your life, and we're born with a sense of inequality that is very basic and mundane.

For example, I remember as a kid, there were some kids who could just run faster than I could, you know, and it wasn't like they trained, you know, we're in the third grade. There are people who could just do the mile run quicker than I could, you know, there been people I remember in school, you know, who just got math better than me, but I was often one of the best readers. I don't know. There are people who have all sorts of skills and abilities that some people wish they had that don't come naturally well; they come naturally to other people who don't even care that they have them.

So, life is like this. There's we're not there's all of these different inequalities, or there's this way in which nothing is really the same. You know, James Hillman likes to say we're not walking around on ground that is perfectly flat and in nice geometric shapes. You know, the Earth is a very patchy place with a lot of uneven terrain and different kinds of textures and substances that we walk on and through that surround us, and the environment is not a place that is that moves around in, like, at least our experience is not that it is like some perfect geometric field. You know what I mean?

It is like walking through a beautiful art museum where everything is, you know, perfectly shaped, and even the strange arrangements feel somehow symmetrical and tidy. Life is not tidy like that.

I think when eclipses come through Libra, as I was reflecting back on previous cycles, one of the things that often happens is there's a deep feeling that comes over us; at times, there are opposite feelings we'll talk about, especially in tomorrow's talk. But one of the feelings that comes over us is like, this isn't fair. Something has happened that has tipped the scales, and maybe something that I was working toward or hoping for, or aiming or intending or wheeling myself toward. It just doesn't work. It doesn't. It doesn't I don't get what I thought I was going to get. The outcome is not the one I wanted, and more than that, the outcome might be a disaster. There could be a sense of the scales going boom in a really dramatic way. One that, to us, suddenly feels like we're being accosted or cosmically persecuted even. There's a deep sense with Libra. There can be that things are tragically unfair, you know.

So, there are other Libran experiences that are not the only Libran experience. Another very commonly bring experience is like reaping what you've sown. There's a like a Libra is so there are so many times with Libra energy, Libran transits where you go, I put in the work, and I got the metal, like, I exercised virtue and people liked me like that.

But there's this deeper level at which cosmic karmic cycles are at play extremes and opposites and patterns are being tempered, and we, it's too big, it's too much. It's too intricate. It's too mysterious for us to understand, and so it can feel really trite when people sort of look at these moments from afar, maybe, especially when we're not experiencing one, but someone around us is, and we say like, you know, don't you understand that the deeper, you know, like, just let go, man, just surrender, you know, and there's nothing more obnoxious than someone sitting on a high horse telling you to just accept a very deep feeling of unfairness that's permeating your life.

You know, it's, like, not very cool. There's part of me that's like, and you don't have to do anything with that feeling of unfairness. You don't have to do anything with it doesn't need to be solved or fixed, and there could be a very real sense in which something is unfair, and it doesn't; you don't have to force it to be more than that. You know, we're not, it's like, not everything needs to be a mural of hope that we, that we paint up on a rusty inside of a building. It's like, you don't have to do anything. It just feels unfair, and you can just be with it.

I think most of us want to understand what's happening; we want to understand why or, at the very least, we want to work through and come out of a place where we're feeling sort of tortured by experience, or we're feeling like somehow the scales have tipped dramatically. Like we don't want to stay in a place that feels stuck, or resentful, or bitter, or we don't want to stay feeling like we've been victimized, most of us don't, you know, and that doesn't mean that it's going to be easy to flip the scales or to understand why something is happening or to move through that state. I think most of us want to at some point; we're ready to at some point.

So, what are some of the things that ancient mystics who practiced astrology told us about what we ought to do when life feels unfair? And I think these are good ones. I wouldn't share them with you guys if I thought that they were trite BS. Do you know what I mean? So I can't say that I am in touch with these things. Especially not when I'm in a state of feeling like something's unfair, and believe me, as Mars has moved through Libra.

I've had some really deep moments of being like, this just feels unfair to me, and just stuff going on, and you know, in my own life, and I know that there are people out there who are dealing with things that feel unfair on a scale that I can't imagine? Right? So, just to, like, tip my cap to all of you who are going through stuff that, you know, maybe a lot of us listening to this can't imagine.

Number one is to start with the pain but stay honest and stay with the pain or the disappointment. There's a way in which so many different religious and spiritual traditions around the world have taught us that pain is the answer. It's not anywhere else. If we can just stay in this feeling. I am hurt; I'm disappointed. I'm frustrated, I feel sad, I feel angry. I feel like this isn't fair. Stay there. You don't have to stay there forever. But sometimes, that experience is what we need to have. Or maybe need is too strong a word; that experience can do more for us than we think.

Have you ever seen the way kids, you know, if you have kids, they process emotions just like this. My daughter, my five-year-old, and she gets angry. Instead of going up to and going, why are you angry, which often makes her more anxious or more angry, or trying to fix it or solve it? If I can kind of get down on her level, my wife Ashley is really good at this, and I just get down there, and I go, you're really upset right now. I can tell that you're really, really mad. You know, and, uh, just kind of trying to open up a space of, like, validating and just letting someone feel that. You know, it's usually really positive.

Yes, I'm really mad. You know, I feel like this is really unfair. I'm really sad. I'm disappointed. I wanted something. It didn't go my way. Or something happened, and I don't understand why this happened. It feels real; it feels like cruel and unusual punishment. Like, I just, like, don't get it. Stay with it. Don't go anywhere. Just let yourself feel that, and maybe there's some maybe if it's really really strong like maybe you need to go for a walk and feel it, you know, or move your energy so that it doesn't become like, I mean, I don't know sometimes for me anyway, I can get really angry when things feel unfair and then, you know, if I go for a walk and feel angry, it's a little bit better than just sitting and boiling until I lash out at my you know, Ashley or the kids or something and say something kind of, I don't know, just snappy or snippy or something. You get what I'm saying.

It's like, one of the things that you know, it's very common in the yogic traditions, and you see stoics saying similar things, you see Taoists saying similar things, many of those traditions, practice astrology, it looks a little different in the east and so forth. But one of the things that you see is like, all things have their season, all things have their place. That doesn't mean that it feels good that all things have their season or place; it doesn't mean that you should thus not have an experience of disappointment. But if we start from the premise that it's okay to feel really upset right now, to feel frustrated and disappointed.

In my experience, if there is something, if there's some gift or blessing, some understanding. Some of which may come sooner or later. It will often come because we've allowed for the experience to be what it is and not tried to move it into something else, and I bet you guys can relate. How many of us don't like it when we're upset and someone tells us what we ought to do to get out of being upset as opposed to just listening? Can we just hold space for ourselves to be like this feels unfair? This doesn't feel good. I'm disappointed with the outcome.

Number two is humble acceptance. Humble acceptance to me is not like again; it's not some trite, overly confident course in miracles certainty about the just sonus and just rightness of every last phenomenon. Just you don't just you don't just walk up. You can tell who's annoyed me in the past.

For me, humble acceptance is very similar to what we're saying about staying honest and staying with the pain or disappointment. It's like I'm not in control of this. I'm not in control of what just happened or how things turned out. I don't have to understand why. I don't have to understand it like cosmically, why this, this, this can happen. I don't have to understand why it happened to me. I don't have to understand what I did to make it happen or what I didn't do to make it happen or who's to blame or who's not to blame. There's no cosmic calculus that I have to figure out. I can just start with a, to me, humble acceptance is like, Well, shit, what am I going to do about that? Nothing.

I think acceptance is not a heroic act. I think it's a very common, quiet, simple act of saying okay. Okay, and I'm still probably going to feel upset and frustrated and angry in waves. That, and I know the waves as they roll through occasionally.

Number three is moderate and compassionate self-reflection. When I say moderate and compassionate, I don't mean because I just said you don't have to figure anything else out. You don't have to figure out why it happened or what you did to make it happen, or you don't have to look for the lesson. You could look for a lesson if you wanted to if it felt useful.

I think most of the time, we don't go looking for a lesson. I feel like when things like this occur, and there's a feeling like things didn't go the way I wanted them to go, I didn't get what I wanted. The outcome is not only not what I wanted, but it's something that feels kind of unfair, shitty to me. I feel picked on; I feel like a victim of forces or people or circumstances; feels pretty yucky. You know, you can take a moment if you want to moderately compassionately, gently, you can say, how did I participate in the creation of this result, and there doesn't need to be one answer, like, ah, there it is, I have cracked the code, and now with this newfound knowledge of my flaws, I shall move to level 11.

You know, I shall move, I shall ascend the ladder; it'll become an evolutionary level above what I was when I began and heard consciousness. So we don't have to go seeking the answer to why we created this or how we played a role.

Instead, we can think about our own actions, our own attitudes, our own dispositions, our own karmic history, so to speak, and we may find insight. But insight is not the same as an answer. The answer is not the same as certainty, which certainly tends to perpetuate self-righteousness, and that's not the center. I don't think that's our friend. So moderate compassionate self-reflection, where multiple possible insights into our own participatory role may emerge, maybe. Right, that kind of approach.

Number four, seeking justice with a firm but kind heart when unfair things happen; it is possible that someone is to blame someone has taken advantage of us, someone has harmed us, we've become a victim of a force that needs us to do or say something about it. That's appropriate. I mean, yeah, I'm all about compassion and forgiveness. But you know, if you have, I don't know, if someone's showing sexual harassment at work, you know, maybe you need to speak up or say something, go to HR or what, you know, whatever the right path is.

There are times when people need to be held accountable, and these kinds of eclipses can bring up the feeling of injustice, but also the need to speak truth to power or to say something or do something that can help. That is somehow corrective. Like we may become an instrument of cosmic justice, how do we do that without becoming inflated? By being part of that?

I think sometimes people, like, one of the things that I think we have to be really careful of is it's like, you know when someone does something, they may need to be sued, for example, but if they're like, in an accident, let's say someone's at fault, and they need to be sued, and that that's like, maybe that is the best thing that needs to happen.

How can we participate in that process without feeling you know, sort of like our ego is getting some kind of dark and empowerment by being the punitive hand of justice. Do you know what I mean? There's a compassionate, firm, but disentangled way in which we can seek justice, and I think that's probably always the best path. You seek justice, but you do so without vindictiveness or cruelty or identification with the power of justice itself like I am that power; that's the trap that we can fall into with eclipses like this because they will bring up injustice, and sometimes then we get identified with the power of that process which will become corrosive to our hearts and souls in time.

Number five would be to find creative opportunities. I was watching, I don't know, you know how they have all these shorts now that pop up on YouTube, and I watch a lot of sports podcasts, and that's kind of my one of my hobbies is I follow all the Minnesota sports teams, and this guy popped up, and he's famous, like motivational. I think he's like a former Navy SEAL or something. His name is literally Jocko. Okay. I just couldn't. I was like, wow, that's like, and he looks like kind of what you expect, like super meaty dude, and I'd never heard of this person before I saw this short, and then I watched a few more clips, and I'm like, Okay, this isn't really my jam.

But I was just curious because there was one clip that came up, and he was talking about, you know, in being in the military or something, and someone's like, we don't have this special kind of equipment. Like, it's a problem, and he goes good, and then like, you know, people would present him with these other problems, and here we go. Good.

Then he went on to articulate that where there's a problem, there's an opportunity for a creative solution, and I just liked how he was sort of like, defiantly, you know, optimistic about problems. That was the only piece of it that I really liked. Just because I find that I can be like that at times, and it's really helpful for me, or it has been at times, not all the time, but so it's like sometimes when these things come up, the best possible thing we can do is to tell you guys to get act like this Jocko guy feel so stupid. I'm sorry.

But yeah, like you could get a little Jocko with this navy seal, dude, and he you can you can be like, good. No, I don't mean quite like that. I mean, it's sort of similar. But I guess the idea is that you know, what comes to my mind is there was a show that I watched a long time ago called Lost.

Do you guys remember that show? It took place on an island, and they were all trying to figure out, like, where their plane crashed on the island, and then it was like a very weird magical island. They were all trying to figure out why they were there and get off it and so forth. Well, there was just one thing I will just never some of the characters were, like, named after philosophers, too, and I don't remember which ones were which. But there was a kind of an old man, and he had found something, and he was just sitting with it, and they were like, everyone was kind of troubled by what this object was.

Or like, maybe it was like a pot, and they were trying to get into it or something, and he was just sitting with it. He was like, Well, why are you sitting with it? And he goes, I like to sit with problems. Because if you sit with it long enough, you know, and just sit with it, then the answer appears, and I feel like that's what's so cool. I mean, honestly, I resonate with that. It's sort of similar to being like there's a problem. Oh, good. Interesting. Because when there are problems in like big moments in our lives that feel unjust, I consider to be problematic, you know, so they sit in front of you, and you go like, well, what am I going to do about this? And if you just sit with it, and you kind of look at it like, Oh, interesting, good.

You know that if you sit with a problem long enough for most of us, there's been you had experiences like this, suddenly the answer as to not only how to work through the problem but why it's there will just appear, and it's not the same as it is never to me. Sometimes, it will dovetail with, like, how did I participate in creating this, but that has such a moral connotation, and I'm not really talking about the problem having a moral core that we need to, like, unpack or pull out somehow. Rather, what I'm talking about is that when things come up like this, the initial like, Oh, I'm so frustrated. I don't like this. Yeah, but once you got to get past that, then the problem sits there, and you sit with it, and all of a sudden, the reason for this problem, as well as maybe the appropriate way of dealing with it, sort of rise to the surface, and I just feel like you're learning some kind of cosmic origami.

It's like you're this thing that can be moved around and reshaped creatively, and it can serve, it can serve as like a creative catalyst for something else if you stay patient and curious, and you sort of stay with the problem, but also have a little bit of ability to deep personalize it and I'm not suggesting this works all the time, or that there isn't like a stage in which you need to, like, have a personally painful, you know, relationship to what's happened. But then you can get to a space where you just depersonalized, and you sit with the problem like it's this weird Rubik's cube that's dropped out of the cosmos and into your lap, and then you go like, Huh? And then you're so good. Oh, and now let me sit and sit with it, and then suddenly, it's something it's like the riddle of the Sphinx, and I love that, like, I love being able to look at life events in different ways. First, personal, spiritual, and emotional processing of trauma of grief. You know, there are so many different ways of working with problems.

But then there's also this way where it's like a hermetic object that's been dropped into your life, and you have to keep turning it and looking at it, and the more you do, all of a sudden, you see that it is actually maybe there's a little like, inner sanctum that you move into, and then, you know, that's just filled with creative potential. Do you know what I mean? Does anyone, anyway?

The rest of the day, I'm going to be thinking about all my YouTube listeners, who will curiously go look at who is Jocko being like, oh, oh, Adam. Anyway, but he's not my jam. This was just one of those little shorts that popped up. But I liked that he was like, problem. Good. That's like, because sometimes that's how I get to, and I can appreciate that attitude, but not in the sense of, like, good, give me 3000 push-ups or something like that.

Anyway, I hope you guys are having a good one, and at least we ended on a slightly comical note, considering the difficulty of the topic for the day. We're going to revisit this again tomorrow from a slightly different perspective. I thought we'd end on a higher note. For Friday, dig into the muck and mire a little bit more today. So that's it. I hope you guys are having a good one. We'll see you again soon. Bye.