The hidden enemy of false stories
Sirius, the very bright dog star, is now rising early in the morning before sunrise, radiant Venus is holding court in the evening sky after sunset, and the Sun has entered their ever-fiery home of Leo.
It’s a great time to consider how, where, and with who we shine brightest. Shining bright means expressing yourself freely and expansively, being seen and heard as your truest self, being accepted and supported by yourself and others. We of course, have to be the first person to accept and support ourselves, but who can you go to and really be yourself without dimming or shrinking? What activities or hobbies have you being entirely yourself? Leo season is a good time to lean into these people, groups, places, activities.
Leo can become about an ideal image, rigid expectations, the paragon, the perfect hero version to pedestal - resist this.
The sun just shines. Birds just wake up and start chirping. Think of the supportive attitude and stage we give children who are playing and practicing their own self expression. We don’t care if their macaroni art is “high quality”, we applaud the intention, effort, follow through, creativity, bravery, and the honesty of their expression. We celebrate their human-ness. How can we bring this kind of open and encouraging attitude to ourselves and others?
Another approach I have to helping people shine their brightest, is by exploring what can get in the way of that light, by examining their 12th house and any self-diminishing stories that live there.
A house in astrology symbolizes a set of life topics. The 2nd house symblolizes money, the 3rd house symbolizes siblings, etc. Without getting into everything the very rich and deep 12th house symbolizes, of all of the 12 houses, the 12th contains some of the most unfavorable, unfortunate things. For so many reasons that are beyond the scope of this piece, the 12th house is hidden things
Of the unfortunate and/or hidden 12th house things, one of them is hidden enemies which can show up in versions physical, abstract, real, or imagined. Overlapping like a Venn diagram with hidden enemies, the 12th house also symbolizes what drags one downward - people, places, things, ideas, habits, circumstances, jobs, long-standing issues, chronic health challenges, marginalization, disenfranchisement, exile - anything that can drag someone downward in life.
This is where Sharon Salzberg, Robert Thurman, and Anu Gupta enter the chat with an entire book, and workshop all about loving our enemies (of which I attended and read). They include in their analysis of possible enemies, hidden ones. While they do not use astrology, I do, and I couldn’t help but hold up the 12th house framing to their work on enemies when they started discussing hidden ones.
Getting more specific, there is a subtle subset of hidden enemies that are false and deleterious stories we have about ourselves.
“Self-limiting beliefs” would be a simpler way of invoking this part of the 12th house, also alluding to a place where Saturn, lord of limitation, finds their joy. But this is not how I arrived at this set of ideas, so I wanted to name my influences.
This is my focus today: Hidden enemies include the False Stories we carry about ourselves that drag us downward.
However, like wiping dust off a beautiful, radiant lamp, we can wipe away the accumulated stories that dim or obscure the shine. False stories from ourselves, others, jobs, experiences, successes, failures, expectations that we know are not true. False stories that were never true, or aren’t true now. Stories that leave us confused about or denying who we really are. Stories that leave us feeling not enough. That keep us from doing what we could do well or at all, keeping us from living as expansive a life as we can live.
It’s ok if you can’t identify where the story came from, the important thing is identifying the story, and identifying it as not you, and not true. This is a 12th house exercise; some of the self-undoing of the 12th is unlearning things about the self that aren’t true, and remembering who we really are.
The dust was never yours to begin with and you can wipe it away. If the dust comes back (as dust tends to do), you can clean off the light again, and remember who you are.
If you’re living in unsupportive circumstances and are still exposed to these false stories from others or the environment, or if the stories are very strong and loud, maybe you have to wipe away the dust multiple times a day. There is still a shining light there.
Regardless, keep remembering who you are over and over again.
Some examples of my own false stories that I’ve uprooted:
“I’m not funny” - for several reasons I won’t get into, I thought this for years, and stayed silent in conversations when a wild wit arose in me. Now I realize I’m very funny, and a lot of people are funny, and I have to actually try hard to not have too much fun everywhere.
“I’m not observant” - a favorite gaslighting an ex would drop on me when I was falling just short of the perfection they demanded. I believed I wasn’t observant for a while, even while I was continuously exceeding expectations as a pharmacist, where being observant was the entire job. Absurd!
“thin is beautiful” - yt supremacist, patriarchal propaganda for which I have to continuously be on the look out for signs of internalization/re-rooting.
Like peeling back the layers of an infinite onion, I wonder if I’ll forever continue to unearth these kind of stories, and if so, I look forward to extricating every single one.
If you’d like to explore your unique 12th house, or dust off your radiance, schedule a reading here on my website!