Being a native of Cleveland, the Cleveland kidnapping story has been of great interest to me. When stories like this are close to home, it has a greater sense of being real, a greater sense of “this could happen here.”

The astrologer in me notices that the escape of one of the girls (which led to the freedom of two others held captive) occurred during the Saturn in Scorpio transit when sexual issues, including rape, are surfacing more in the news.

The Scorpio part of the Saturn-in-Scorpio transit involves penetration, violation and obsession. Scorpio’s positive manifestation is to rise above obsession, or stuck and frozen feelings, into a pure, unblocked experience of emotions.

The kidnapper was the negative side of Scorpio and the girls, to survive, may need to manifest the positive side of Scorpio, the letting go. I’ve heard that in these types of situations, there is not only physical bondage, but emotional bondage.

Letting go is very easy to say and very difficult to do.

Thinking of letting go as part of surviving may be a better path to the process than through moral or religious reasons, which can cause us to fight against our own negative emotions.

The brothers, the daughter, the community

Watching the news stories that involve interviews with the community, the brothers of the kidnapper and the daughter of the kidnapper, I’m wondering how much each feels a sense of guilt about not having known what was occurring. The daughter, it appears, was best friends with one of the captives before her disappearance.

The stories sometimes describe subtle hints of evidence that no one at the time recognized and certainly couldn’t recognize without some hypothesis that their brother/father/neighbor was mentally ill.

Are they feeling guilt? Or having thoughts like “What if I had . . .?”

In “Working in the Swamplands of the Soul” Anne Ortelee writes about guilt as:

Guilt: Saturn. Guilt is responsibility. Part of developing as a human is accepting responsibility for the consequences of one’s choices. Saturn marks our conscious choices and critical turning points. Guilt can reflect a lack of permission to be oneself combined with the power of early authorities. However unconscious a person was when they made a choice that made another suffer, acknowledging it and admitting error is the beginning of wisdom and the path to release. Task: Dealing with guilt in a mature fashion involves recognition, recompense (where it is possible~ remember symbolic actions count) and release. It includes forgiving yourself, a critical and difficult step. Otherwise good energy is wasted on the past and blocks new options. Ask your client “Against what are you defending yourself?”

As Saturn transits Scorpio, will we be feeling collective guilt about sexual violation and emotional bondage?

While we’re learning lessons about Scorpio, his water-sign friends Pisces and Cancer will be coming to help in the form of Neptune in Pisces and Jupiter in Cancer (in June). Transiting planets in all three of the water signs creates what’s called a grand water trine.

Neptune and Jupiter like to create spiritually accepting and loving conditions. Neptune in Pisces and Jupiter in Cancer invite you in to dinner. They see you are tired and offer you a place to sleep for the night. They make you a cup of hot milk before bed. They understand whatever it is you’ve gone through without judgment. They listen.

If you need a comforting rest, this is good. If you what you really need is a fire under your ass to get motivated, then this comfort can be an indulgence.

Water is compassionate and sometimes so much so that it has no boundary between itself and others. If a person is well adjusted, this is a warm and loving situation. But if a person is hurt and unable to process the feelings, they might be hurting others, as psychologists say, to feel their own pain through the pain of others.

The grand water trine will include the comforting Neptune in Pisces and Jupiter in Cancer with the responsible Saturn in Scorpio. Saturn may be involved to remind us that we are responsible for our own feelings. If we’re feeling collective guilt about emotional, physical and psychic abuse, then maybe the Neptune and Jupiter placements will help us establish emotional links with family and community to prevent these types of abuses.

The power to feel

While Scorpio gets its share of negative press for its obsessive qualities, I personally feel Scorpio is about the power to feel.

Why power?

It’s power because we avoid bad feelings. Avoiding bad feelings is like the overuse of anti-bacterial soap and antibiotics to avoid illness. The medical field is suspecting that if we don’t encounter, process and build immunity to certain bacteria, we are then more prone to super bugs and drug-resistant strains of bacteria.

Likewise if we don’t build immunity to unpleasant feelings, we can’t handle situations where intense negative feelings exist, like during the death of a loved one, a natural disaster or any unpleasant situation.

I heard a saying once that the heart is a muscle and needs to be exercised. Likewise the emotions might be made weak if we feed them only good feelings, like having only sugar in the diet. Our emotions need sugar but also need fiber to clean out the pipes and allow feelings to flow out and not get caught thereby causing a leak of sewage into other areas of life.

This also relates to the Asian concept of qi and energy flow. When flow is constricted is when we have problems. Saturn in Scorpio says we are having collective constriction with regard to sexual and survival energies. Guilt may be the response to that restriction.

Writing about guilt on a beautiful day

Writing about guilt on this beautiful Mother’s Day brings up feelings of guilt – why write about ugly stuff on a beautiful day?

The answer to myself is that both the ugly situation and the beautiful day have arisen. One doesn’t cancel the other – they both exist. Like food eaten, both must be digested.