Inviting the Intention
At the Heart of Your Story to Dance

People come to workshops with varying levels of intention, and varying degrees of conscious awareness about what intention is actually at the heart of their driving engine. But everyone also comes to a workshop with a story, and what I have found – through years of working with people – is that if you can get to the part of the story that brings tears to the eyes, or a ferocity of spirit to the surface of a laid back personality, or that unexpected smile, or that liberating laugh at the absurdity of it all, or that sudden blink of recognition, or that long slow sigh of surrender, you can coax the intention at the heart of a life out to play. Usually, though not always, that intention is joined at the hip with a buried source of pain. Intentions arise out of core issues, and core issues fuel intentions with the power to drive a life uphill and down.

If you tell the story, the intention will emerge, and if you tell the story in a circle of avid listeners, who listen without judgment or superior knowledge, the intention will generate its own movement and change. Beyond anything that we might offer in any workshop, I’m convinced, this is what it takes to change a life.

Having said that, I personally have found a few tools to be helpful in leading those who are ready to the moment when the final chip may fall. As an astrologer of 40+ years, I have found no other modality as useful for creating a framework for the telling of a story. Although we are conditioned by the clock to believe that time moves in linear fashion, our soul stories actually move cyclically in ways that are uncannily reflected by planetary cycles. We circle around our issues – like red-tailed hawks around their prey – and astrology can help us understand more clearly what it is we are circling, and when what we are circling is likely to come into focus. This is important because our core issues and the intention to heal them to which they are bound can be as elusive as a mouse seeking to hide from the hawk that would eat it. If we wield it with sufficient skill and clear enough intention, astrology allows us to see through the subterfuge that hides our issues from us.

Forget telling the future. In my workshops, I track the soul through the past into the present, looking through an astrological lens. After a bit of circling, the issue ready to be shifted comes into view. If the chipper is ready, he or she may be guided instinctively to strike the chisel at the very point that the final chip may fall. It doesn’t always happen, but at the very least, the tools of astrology can tell us where our chipping is most likely to yield deep understanding.

What I have also learned in the course of my work with Yggdrasil, however, is that insight alone is not enough to shift a pattern. The mind – even an astute mind armed with intuitive skill and hard-won wisdom – is insufficient to strike the blow that will release the final chip. The mind must be met by the heart and be dipped in the alchemical bath of emotion. Its abstraction of ideas about the core issues it is attempting to see clearly must be met by mythopoetic images that capture it without the use of words. And above all else, whatever insights are released must be embodied through instinctual movement that sets actual change in motion. Change is movement, and without movement, change is just an idea waiting to happen. In order to make a space for change in your life, you have to invite the intention at the heart of your story to dance.