Full Moon Of Triangles, Trauma and Triumph

This full moon is a Super Moon meaning it’s close to Earth and it’s packing a lot into the celestial stew.  You may have already felt it this week with tension, blow ups and breakthroughs being a few of the hallmarks.

I study a lot of different sources for what I share with you and one phrase stood out to me in particular.  My vedic astrologer source called it the moon of ‘letting go’.  It resonated so I started digging from that point of view and here’s what I really want you to know.

We all begin life in a triangle with our two parents.  So our primary association with love and security begins with three participants.  Because we are so helpless as infants, our awareness of love is also linked to survival.  It’s a known fact that we die without care as infants.

As adults though, our primal brain is often still hardwired to feel like loss of love means life or death.  This is one reason why relationships, all relationships, have such tension and struggle at times.

Loving and being loved is the most soul satisfying place to be, yet it also includes being hurt and burdened by those we love.  It’s inescapable.  So we learn to minimize our risk as protection from devastating pain, but all too often that protection becomes the biggest obstacle to loving.

Having something or someone else to focus on gets us out of our hearts and into our heads to strategize survival.  The problem is overestimating the threat and underestimating ourselves in that scenario.

It doesn’t matter what the relationship is, friends, families, co-workers or our lovers, most people start and often stay in a place of having a third party buffer.  It’s most obvious in romantic relationships when there is a third party, but it doesn’t have to be a romantic rival.  That triangle can include family, a job, a hobby or even a pet used to deliberately put space between us, and those we love.

It’s risk management to have that buffer, whatever it may be.   It’s like an unconscious safety valve to help balance how vulnerable we feel.  I’ve talked to dozens of people in the last two weeks alone grappling with this very issue (I’ve had my own history with it) and witnessed two people I love play it out painfully this week.

I watched their fight start over nothing.  I do mean nothing, except the fear in each person along with the vulnerability of being so in love and feeling exposed or needy in those feelings. The first person wanted help but didn’t specify the type of help they wanted, so their partner offered one kind only to have the other person go explosive because it clearly wasn’t the assistance that meant something to them in their exposed moment of need because it wasn’t what had been offered to a former lover. Then they were off, both fighting old ghosts of a triangular nature and not really with each other, adding to the wounds.

That’s what happens when two vulnerable people are afraid they can’t trust the other person to be good to them in that raw space because your history reminds you of a painful pattern you learned instead of trusting.  It’s brain biology working to rescue you, but doing it in the most basic survival style possible.  It drags in something else to blame, excuse or minimize all of the emotion resting with one person.

As children it is our parents’ job to take care of us and our wound begins with where they fell short.  The challenge is when we expect parental level care and fear our wound story will repeat.  Instead of seeing each other as equals, including equally challenged in difficult moments, we have unrealistic expectations that lead to resentment when they aren’t met.  We aren’t meant to parents each other.  Instead we are meant to re-parent ourselves.

You can adapt if you wish, by gently moving yourself out of the place that feels helpless against those we care about or even strangers that roll across our day.  It takes letting go of so much defensiveness and replacing it with awareness and self-soothing when we get triggered.  I’ve got a handy little exercise that’s free, legal and portable to help called The Breath of Love.

Each time you do it, you rewire for a more frontal lobe choice, using the smart part of your brain to engage and work with what’s happening rather than the baby level brain stem initial response.  It shifts you out of trying to control the people or situation around you and moves you into both people working together to solve whatever comes up.  You are taking care of you – that way you don’t need others to and you are free to create from a less triggered or helpless feeling place.

This full moon, indeed all the way through the end of November has us learning how to let go of the perception that we can’t take care of ourselves because of old wounds or old traumas that go back to childhood.

Imagine that triangle began when you were a newborn, and so it’s tied into a feeling a of helplessness that was real then.  But it’s not true anymore… It really isn’t.

Not knowing this truth is why we can wind up in some staggering overreactions that simply add to the issues and our habits of defending ourselves when there is no attack or going on the offensive when there’s no real threat.  All in the name of protection.  We are never as weak as we were when that fear was wired into us as an infant.

Now at this full moon you can let go of the feeling of fear and need behind it as you start to realize that you aren’t the helpless baby anymore.  Yes things happen in life you don’t wish for, don’t even like, but when we stay stuck in reaction mode we limit our power to resolve any situation spending so much energy reacting instead of creating with what’s in front of us.  That is a triumph in hand available to you now.

When you replace your original programmed response and limited effectiveness with a more empowered one (Breath of Love is one option) you start to consciously rewire for better outcomes.

Then it’s a matter of conditioning.  Know your startle response when someone says or does something alarming and then retrain it over time.  Simply being aware of it is a start but won’t stop it from happening again.

Instead, you can catch yourself, do the Breath of Love to flip the fear switch off.  You know you are in that young place when you have statements like ‘you hurt me, how could you, if you loved me then you’d… .  When we blame our partner or ourselves, shaming or raging means we are in that tender place that feels like it’s life or death to be loved the way that makes us feel safe.

Realize that even ‘bad’ behavior on the part of our loved ones can bring us closer if we work together.  Because the majority of the time those we love aren’t out to hurt us.  They are simply going through their day, quite possibly protecting themselves from potential hurt.  What this ‘let go moon’ offers is a chance to realize we have more ability to impact and it feels threatening by the way we handle it when it happens.

Practice letting go of the need to control another’s actions and bring the focus back to what you can do to help bring you into greater alignment, no matter where it begins.  In fact, some of the greatest intimacy can be sharing the truth of those vulnerable moments and taking responsibility for shifting them together.  It starts with you!

Don’t worry if the other person doesn’t respond the ‘right’ way at first, it’s good practice to hold your position of internal strength and refuse to pick up the other end of the emotional tug of rope.  Let go of the struggle to be right in order to get it all right.  Don’t try to move the third party out, just focus on doing your work and the need for one starts to die off.

It’s NOT easy.  It does take practice.  It may be easier to start on the edges with people who aren’t as close to us to get our strength and mindset up to speed.  But imagine a life where you create more and more safety with those you love by observing where you get triggered, understanding that what you are feeling is most likely way out of proportion to the threat, and gently relate to yourself from this place.

I like to use the good old Breath of Love here for when your brain stem is running things and you want to get into the frontal lobe instead.  There are a lot of emotions swirling in this full moon celestial soup and it helps to have a simple pattern interruption.  Your breath is always and forever at your command – free, legal and portable.  You can do it anywhere and anytime.

So use it when you need it and be good to yourself this weekend as old patterns get kicked into being to show you how much more powerful you were than when you were born.  I’m toasting your triumph over that limited view of YOU!

Lisa Greenfield

TruthinHand.com

Post edited by Tamara Lynn Grace