Field awareness & creature consciousness: supporting our instincts
to reveal the next just-right step
Through the methods of experiential astrology we create processes and enactments that delight and develop divinatory modes of co-discovery, within ourselves and our relationships to the worlds in which we live. The divinatory mode is open and receptive, soft and spacious – a state that allows for a broad, extensive, multi-layered awareness that we call field awareness. This field is made of the many realms that we live within and are made of, both at the macro and micro level. Folds of space time frequencies, vibrations that oscillate concurrently through vast spatial and temporal dimensions.
Through astrological awareness, and more so through experiential astrology’s attentive focus, we can come to feel this sensual quality of the field, its generous couching of life’s intelligence, and how our mind-body-being is woven through the field’s currents and pulses.
While there may be as many ways of entering and tending relationship with the living sky and dreaming earth as there are people practicing such a custodial role, there is still a common thread — an implicit understanding and shared affirmation that we are held inside a wider, shared field. As we are thinking, we are being thought. As we are dreaming, we are being dreamt. As we are weaving, we are being woven. We live inside an intelligent tissue, with its own agency, memory, generative and potent pulse. It is from which everything emerges and back into which everything dissolves. Other eras have had differing names for this intelligent textured tissue — the world soul, mundus imaginalis, anima mundi, the Otherworld. As Toko-pa Turner writes in her book, The Dreaming Way:
“We have been taught to think of psyche as the inner life, as a subjective experience housed within the scaffolding of the human body. But psyche is more like a field that includes our own bodies and reaches everywhere into the animate world around us. Psyche is certainly within us, but we are also in psyche. It does not belong to us in the objectified sense, but extends into every aspect of the cosmos. Though being in a body allows us to access something akin to a node in its network, psyche is without any definite barriers. We cannot say where “our” psyche ends and another’s begins.”
This recognition and realisation of psyche doesn’t deny our individuality, our agency, or our need for boundaries and containment. In fact, the more we attend to what is happening within the limits and contours of our own situated, individual, embodied experience, the more space psyche has to replenish our lives meaningfully. When we are not given or told the ‘meaning’ of our lives, but rather show up to our own fleshly human existence — expanding our window of tolerance for its full texture of colors — the more relevant, alive and dynamic our meaning-making becomes. The more life-enhancing our encounters, within and without, become.
The more rooted to our lived experience and felt sense of the field we are,the less available we are to having meaning made or prescribed for us. Field awareness, mythic sensibility, play and symbolic vision all grow our immune response to separation and domination stories.
By rooting understanding in our direct, lived experience, we are humbled. We are brought low, ear pressed to the earth, again and again, to hear who is wanting to speak – what is wanting to be said – and how. Our sensorium can acclimate to this particular darkness, and make possible a never-before-seen revelation of the night’s familiar constellations.
Field-tending
Within our astrological, elemental journeys ‘Living the Signs of the Zodiac’, which have been ongoing for five years, we continue to feed the field – already alive, intelligent, and feeding us. As we continue to reciprocate, all the creatures and their modes of consciousness become ever-more alive and attentive, responsive and animated, sharpened in image and mutable in expression. Hence, within experiential astrology sessions we tend habitat safety, offering a haven for the many creatures – planets, aspects, zodiac, temples in the sky –and their dreamscapes, to come out of hiding and awaken through our soma. To creatively express. To be witnessed, felt and comprehended by the wider relational context of the group, engendering a potent and powerful quality of affirmation for our own bodies and the places of hurt and hiding therein, as well as the field at large.
This is an intentional practice of releasing notions around who one is supposed to be, and allowing one’s Sun to shine as a spontaneous, generous and precise response. What becomes visible can only be seen within the given moment, this place, under this sky, with these people. What is said can only be uttered, here and now, in this relational context. There are no on-high proclamations that can be dispensed and placed upon emergent life. There’s no Astrology Teacher who maintains a fixed grasp or claim to astrological intelligence. “Knowledge” becomes co-creative – an ever-fluid process and experiencing of the field as a living, generative, responsive envelope, rippling with life and wisdom.
To access this mode of mutual discovery and co-creation of knowledge, there is often a kind of grief. There is often a surrender of what we knew before, in order to awaken to the particularities of this moment. We must to be willing to molt calcified shells of interpretation – emptying ourselves of their associated powers – and to allow the inner beings to return to their essential nature, from which they may continually secrete new shells, grow new furs, feathers, fins, new costumes and adornments that shape consciousness in continual communication with surroundings.
Sky as benevolent witness
Every animal, creature, symbol, god wants us to re-pattern and re-constellate anew, allowing our soul body to become ever more enfleshed and realised at this time in its eternal journey. Creating space for the field of creaturely instincts and capacities cultivates a radical sense of empathy and generosity for ourselves, each other and the many vectors of force and flow we experience. We expand and strengthen our capacity to be with the field’s multiple folds, vectors, forces and flows rather than reduce our experiences to identify with, prioritize, authorize, just one.
What becomes fostered is a space for divination, revelation and fluid meaning-making where the one wearing the mantle of Astrologer is not charged with the power of delivering the revelatory insight; rather the symbol reveals itself through the attentive, attended field. This quality of revelation comes through astrologer and querent and their surrounding environment. It’s revealing itself through the “us/we” rather than just the “I” — allowing the creatures to come forward in response and follow their natural instincts under the benevolent witnessing of sky, and within a shared group field of acceptance; a gentle allowance for the next just right thing to happen.
Your Turn
~ Take a moment to gently notice your body — its position, contours and weight.
~ Let your attention drop to your belly, hips, the points of contact with your seat. Feel the embrace of gravity and the ground beneath you. Connect to the core of the Earth.
~ When you’re ready, invite your awareness to travel back up, to your sacrum, solar plexus, heart, top of your head. Play with feeling and connecting to this midline all at once.
~ Staying connected to your core, feel into your inner space. Notice the quality of intelligence that pervades your body. Follow your internal space to the space that exists right around your body.
~ Let your awareness continue to spread out laterally into your room, even beyond your room and what you can physically sense, as far out as possible while remaining connected to your core.
~ Notice the textures, sounds, colors, movements of this continuous field, within which you are one center.
~ Notice the surrounding silence and stillness.
~ When you’re ready turn your attention back to your body, your heart, your breath.
Take a moment to journal or otherwise creatively capture something of your experience. As always, feel free to hit reply and share with us how this email lands with you.
to the flickering fabulous field,
Nicole & Amanda