aquarian age – Feminism and Religion

Life last year continually pushed me to figure out how I should care for those close to me while also caring for myself. I have been pushed to see the difference between myself and other people: their choices and my own. This is perhaps, the most difficult challenge I faced in the first year of the Age of Aquarius… and life has been an unrelenting teacher.

Happy 2013! Or a statement more accurate to my feelings: Happy end of 2012! Last year around this time, I wrote a post entitled: Celebrating the Beginning of the Aquarian Age. The push to evolve was and is very exciting to me. This shifting astrological paradigm challenges us to break away from those habits and patterns that no longer serve us. But excited as I am, I have to admit that the first year of the Age of Aquarius really kicked my butt.

Did last year feel exceptionally difficult for anyone else out there? I really felt like I couldn’t catch a break for the entirety of 2012. This is not to say that my year was simply filled with loss and grief, though I am dealing with loss and a great deal of grief. But some really great things happened last year too, which I celebrated, but also found extremely difficult to manage. Many of my roles and relationships radically changed in ways that were more difficult than I expected or wanted. Riding the Aquarian tides, I felt tossed about and was often confused. I kept telling myself: just hang on. Just hang on, because you are not alone riding these cosmic waves. Hang on, because you will learn how to swim in these new waters.

Therefore, in honor of the New Year, I would like to take this opportunity to evaluate and strategize for my how.

I am not usually one for making new years’ resolutions. The cultural rhetoric surrounding resolutions either presupposes failure or relates success to the amount of money you spend to achieve a goal. Yet today I find myself considering how I approached last years’ challenges, successfully and unsuccessfully. I have concluded that I need to create more life giving patterns and habits in 2013. Many things I am doing now, my coping mechanisms and my defenses, can no longer meet my needs. So, I guess I am making resolutions. I, however, prefer to say that I am actively hope-ing to evolve my praxis of living. ;) Thus, I set the following intentions for 2013: Continue reading “Patterns for the New Year by Sara Frykenberg”

Looking back, it’s interesting to think of myself as a young woman learning in a time of transition from the Piscean Age to the Aquarian Age. According to Yogi Bhajan, the man known for brining Kundalini Yoga to the West, 11/11/91 marked the beginning of the last part of the Piscean age and on 11/11/11 the Age of Aquarius officially began. So, welcome all to the Age of Aquarius! This change of course, entails a significant paradigm shift that is supposed to affect our attitudes, consciousness and all of our relationships. The beginning of the Aquarian age, like the end of the Mayan calendar and other overlapping prophesies of change, tends to inspire our apocalyptic imagination. We may anticipate a breaking of our world. I tend to imagine the pressure of the Aquarian transition like an event horizon of a black hole: a movement through extreme gravity that feels crushing and inescapable. However, recently I’ve been struck by how the seeds of this new age, have been blossoming in my own experience and in the world around me.

According to my Kundalini teachers, the attitude of the Piscean age can be summed up as, “I believe.” The attitude of the Aquarian Age is, “I know.”

As a child I desperately wanted to believe enough. My evangelical Christian upbringing taught me that all I needed to do was believe that as God, Jesus Christ died for me and saved me from my sins. If I did this, then I could go to heaven with my family. Plus, Jesus would take me with him when he came back—that is, I wouldn’t have to go to hell or suffer the trials and tribulations of the apocalypse… this last part really stuck with me.

I thought I believed. I wanted to believe. I did “all the right things,” to somehow prove or provoke the kind of unquestioning belief I thought was necessary to be a “real” Christian. But, the fact of the matter was I doubted. As a little child (and I’ll admit, into my teens) I was sometimes struck with a sudden and horrifying fear that my family had been raptured and Jesus had left me behind. I would literally panic until I found someone; but I’d also hide this fear because I didn’t want anyone to think that I didn’t believe enough.

I now know this extreme fear of god and His (sic) wrath was a part of my abusive relationship to what I thought was god. I also know that our doubts can lead us towards renewed life. I know that it is not my beliefs that make me valuable: wholeness is inherent in our connection to “a larger creative existence.” We express this wholeness and our value, “with each committed action.”[i] Continue reading “CELEBRATING THE BEGINNING OF THE AQUARIAN AGE by Sara Frykenberg, Ph.D.”