Episode Details

Report card is here and I want to know if I’m failing, because we’re in very challenging times, and the only way I can see if I’m failing is because I am allowing the collective transpersonal energy to overcome the peace and the calm and the temper that I can have in time of responding—not reacting.

I actually have this thing throughout my life that when big bad things happen, I’m the coolest in the room; so if there’s ever the big bad thing, just call me—I’ll be there, just like observing. I have many six lines in my design, and I have the capacity to be very detached when a crisis happens. I am wired for unexpected turns, and I have the ability to both detach and discern what to nurture. I take the stance of observation first—witnessing, collecting, and feeling from a distance—so that when I do speak, I synthesize. My role is to see clearly, and only then, to speak from coherence.

I was talking to Mark Jones about it in my session today—maybe that was something that I developed after my father died, that I kind of closed the door to react in despair or panic. I’m also very calm in moments of crisis. Take 9/11—I had a temporary art studio, Tower 1, 92nd floor, WTC. I stayed up recording the thunderstorm Erin on the eve of the attacks, left at the last minute because I ran out of cigarettes (twist plot: my father died in a car crash because he also ran out of those). The morning after, witnessing the attacks from my Brooklyn Heights windows, I responded immediately, calling and organizing a meeting for the rest of the artists—I knew we needed to care for each other’s needs. This all happened within the first two hours. I don’t know where this wave of calm comes from… Read more about this event and see the film I made—link here.

But the question always is: am I here to perfect things, to make them perfect and to repair them? Or am I here to nurture—and who am I nurturing? Is it me, or the projection of what I think needs to be nurtured?

So we are in a room full of mirrors right now. The whole world. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Versailles, and they have this beautiful room that is just like mirror after mirror, so at the very end you don’t know where your reflection ends because you’re projecting—Doug Aitken’s mirrored architecture or Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Room, metaphors of both the dissolution and disillusion (the lack of illusion) of the self.

And that’s what happens a lot when you go onto social media, you go to a party, a big conference, you belong to a group, and if not in the right frequency, you end up reacting to all the shadows and all the images that are coming your way, and that you cannot probably process one by one like you do in Aikido.

When you do randori, you just have to wait—one after the other. You just have to do what you have to do so the other person rolls down on the floor.

And this Solstice—on June 20 - 21st—is quite charged. Not only for the collective, but for me at least. I’m going to have the conjunction of the Sun and Jupiter exactly on my nodal axis, right at the beginning of Cancer. And just a few days later, on June 25th at 6:31 a.m., we’ll have a new moon in Cancer perfecting this same aspect while it is being squared by Saturn and Neptune in Aries, the tolls of war might be echoing in the background…

The path of what was to come was awful. It was the enormous dying, a sea of blood. From it the new sun arose, awful and a reversal of that which we call day. ~ Carl Jung Liber Novus (full quote at the end of the article.)

The astrology is so remarkable because every time I look forward or backward, or even at the moment—like what’s going on—and I look at it in relationship to my chart, it really helps me to get deeper into my insights.

Do not be