Anthony Rella, MA, LMHC

Author: Anthony Rella

  • Experiments in Social Media

    For a variety of reasons, I am going to experiment with moving my regular contemplations, newsletter information, short essays, and blogs over to Substack. Here is the link.

    My goal is to be less entangled with Meta products in general, which have felt like a marketing black hole for a number of years even before the overall quality of their sites declined significantly in the past few months. Substack offers an opportunity to provide the same writing I’ve always done with the opportunity for a motivated reader to offer financial support. I also appreciate the community of thoughtful people who aren’t afraid of a read longer than 250 characters.

    I am also aware of critiques of Substack in terms of their allowing extreme authors who promote hate speech to also share and participate in their community. To be honest, at this moment in history, I am not sure if there is any escape from that.

    Consider this a “soft launch” that I will experiment with for the months to come, and will likely not be updating this blog space until and unless it makes more sense to return. A part of me would like to be able to maintain all of these spaces but I am increasingly finding it overwhelming to tend and curate all the different social media spaces.

  • Set your house in order

    Set your house in order

    Mars in Cancer

    Are you powerless or are you focusing on things that your power cannot influence?

    Are you powerless or remembering moments as a child when you had no power?

    The roots of power begin at home. If you are feeling overwhelmed, try cleaning something . Make a meal. Have a conversation with a loved one about your feelings.

    Strengthen your base, then try doing harder things.

  • Encaged by others’ limitation.

    Encaged by others’ limitation.

    There was a time several years ago when my regular blog writing started to gain traction and my regular views began to really increase. Then Facebook did something different, acted different, updated the all-mighty algorithm, and I was back to very few clicks a day.

    Or perhaps it’s convenient to blame technology and it’s just my moment, barely achieved, had lost its draw?

    These are the kinds of questions I feel as the sun traverses Aquarius. This is a season where that potent joy of creation and feeling of purpose really feels hemmed in by the changing structures of the culture around us. Laws change, tastes change, technology disrupts old pathways, and here we are trying to shine our little lights while the walls move around us.

    It’s enough to get someone wanting to claim the power to be the changer, to make the rules and the laws and decide who gets attention. And the effort required takes us further from lives of play and connection into the heavy work of organizing and gaining power.

    But the light always shines from within wherever we are held, and these shifting walls may themselves let us shine the brighter.

  • Your limits can soothe you.

    Your limits can soothe you.

    Saturn is the ruler and embodiment of limitations, old age, infirmity, and all the things that most of us try not to think about when we are not forced to do so. And Saturn can teach us what truly matters. All the bluster of trying to prove ourselves or shore up our own ego gets stripped away when Saturn lays her leaden hand upon your crown.

    To feel limited is soothing when we accept it. When we feel overwhelmed with possibilities and responsibilities it starts to really fray the energy. We hold on to too much and accomplish little. But Saturn is here to remind us we will die, our powers are limited, and what matters are the children—the future world, the continuation of our species and people. Without children there will be no one to care or remember what you did anyway.

    This does not mean having children is everyone’s path. But if we can let our limitations weigh down our imagination, we can better focus on our piece of life. We’re not saviors nor pure victims. We’re people moving through life in a particular moment.

    Along with that, what we dream and imagine needs our steady commitment and discipline to make something the children will inherit when they are ready.

  • Fierce and fertile

    Fierce and fertile

    Today Venus appears to me as fierce and magnetic, all tattooed and ready to party and fight while nourishing new life. I am reminded of Aries’s great power to initiate, to use her profound vitality to get things going—a party, a bar brawl, a new project, and life itself. I am also reminded of Aries’s need for freedom and self-centeredness.

    As much as Venus can create and get going this season, she’s also not going to be one to stick around and nurture. It’s not that she’s incapable of love or does not care for the things she births. But her pride is her relief; to see her children able to make it on their own so she can move on to the next intrigue.

    Along with this, she may feel so inspired by ideas, so stirred by new conceptions, she struggles to focus on which would be most rewarding. In truth, it doesn’t matter what she chooses, but if she cannot choose and commit then nothing she carries forth will have much vitality. If she’s going to bear a literal or metaphorical child, she might take a break from the partying and fighting, which risks boredom.

    Today you might sense into where in your life this energy is kindling her flame. There is great potential to get something interesting going, and a risk that it could be a brief flame that burns bright and flickers out. At least it will be interesting.

  • Multiple filters allow for depth.

    Multiple filters allow for depth.

    Last week we reflected on how each story and perspective is a filter over perception, and like a colored filter on a lens, each filter reveals certain things and obscures certain things about what is. So to gain more depth of perspective, one needs to hold and perceive through multiple filters.

    This evokes the classic 3-D glasses with a red lens and a blue lens. When you watched an older 3-D movie without the screen, it looked a little blurred and you could see the different layers of color over each other in a flat, distracting way. With the glasses on, with one eye seeing more blue and the other more red, the perception of depth and three-dimensionality emerged. That is the benefit of having two eyes that face forward, to have depth perception.

    Every source of news, every call to action, every opinion editorial is a particular filter with its own agenda and position in the world. We might look at certain sources of news as propaganda for a particular state and be interested in foreign news sources, but they too may well be propaganda for their own states. That does not make any of these sources useless; it just requires a remembering that these are filters. A news source with allegiance to one state is going to soften the actions of its own state and highlight the failings and atrocities of adversarial states. Proceed with understanding.

    It feels important to take in at least a few different sources of information with different perspectives, to orient yourself in these times.

  • Reason and instinct gaze upon each other.

    Reason and instinct gaze upon each other.

    Today we might feel a cleavage between what seems like the smart move and what feels like the right move. Logic and instinct need not always be at odds, but these moments of opposition may make us feel stuck, agitated, indecisive. And it’s an opportunity for the sacred marriage to renew itself.

    The moon in fullness in Leo feels that need to be loud, to be seen, as a path to safety. Mercury in Aquarius might favor the path of conformity, to belong clearly and adhere to the community norms for the purpose and protection such adherence offers.

    Sitting with this, it feels like now is the time to clarify what side of the line you’re on, and part of me recoils from the thought. Such clarity can be as empowering as it could put us into danger. And there is something deep within that wonders if being true to one’s truth might be more important than the idea of safety.

    And the full moon reflects the light of the sun, which is so close to mercury right now. Perhaps that dramatic pronouncement is the instinctive expression of the sense of purpose and logic shining forth today.

  • Healing Loneliness with Myth

    Healing Loneliness with Myth

    Sophia and her son

    The Gnostic traditions offer a story about creation that differs from more widely told tales. It begins in what is called pleroma, which is the fullness of divinity, the totality of god. Before there was the created world, there was only fullness that radiated out like a star, and beyond it was void.

    There was also Sophia, who is the wisdom of god, who was overcome with curiosity about what lay in the void beyond fullness. So she moved away from the center toward the edges, where fullness grew thin. Finally stepping into the void, however, Sophia became confused and terrified. Suddenly she knew herself as an individual being, one with her own existence beyond fullness, an existence that she suddenly realized could be extinguished.

    The fear and confusion choked her like river water to a drowning person, and she forced it from her body. That fear and confusion became a child, serpentine and body and leonine of head, and Sophia felt clear enough to return quickly to the edge of fullness before it devoured her again. It was a relief to remember that she was of this totality, and nothing of her could be lost or annihilated.

    But the child of Sophia’s anguish remained in the void, bellowing and crying out in his anger, fear, and confusion. His face was turned only toward the overwhelming expanse of emptiness, the only world he’d ever seen or known, and he could not even dream it was possible to turn around and see the fullness from which he had come. “I am alone,” he shouted. “I am abandoned in this wasteland. I am a miserable child of none.”

    His cries pierced Sophia’s heart, and she knew his suffering was hers. In her rush to return to peace, she had abandoned him, and now he was too far to reach and she dare not risk leaving the fullness to rescue him. So she cried out, “You are not alone! Turn around and see me! I am your mother, who loves and weeps for you!”

    But the child only cried louder. “I am forsaken in this vast forsaken abyss! I am cursed to be awake in a world of nothing. I hate that I must know my own hell, this vacuous suffering, mocked by shadows.” Thrashing his serpentine body, he was too loud to hear his mother’s voice, and from his despair he vomited forth galaxies, planets, stars, and beings to populate them. “Now I will not be alone!” He cried. But as he had never known the fullness, he could not enspirit these beings, and they offered nothing to him, so he swallowed them with rage and vomited forth a new world.

    Sophia, boundless in her patience and love, watched his torment, worsened by his efforts to escape it, and continued to call out his name in the hopes he would hear. From her heart poured her love, and the spark of divinity that lived within the pleroma, and this streamed into the world created by her son to infuse all the beings that crawled and swam and flew and rested and remained still with a piece of the fullness. She prayed that with this touch of god these beings would know themselves and know their son as well. She prayed that one day enough of her love would pour forth that all of these beings could help her son turn toward the fullness and finally see her, in her boundless care and wisdom, and know they had never been alone.

    Our lonely struggle against belonging

    This story often comes to mind when I watch the misery of those who feel alone yet resist what belonging and connection is available to them. I get it, because I can observe this longing and resistance in my own heart. We can bemoan our state with a sharp, hot, aggrieved resentment toward those fortunate enough to have love and connection. But to surrender to it ourselves when those around us offer it may feel somehow humiliating and deeply threatening. To be truly known and loved after feeling starved for connection is overwhelming, and it’s common to want to push it away instinctively.

    It’s like we have a hurt muscle, and someone is approaching with the intent to massage it and give us relief, but we don’t quite trust them. We guard against the pain, grow tense, and flinch from the touch. To establish trust, the contact has to begin slowly but with confidence. We need to believe—to have evidence that sustains belief—that this person has an intention of care and will not hurt us more. As trust grows, muscles soften, and the masseuse can do deeper work so long as they show they’re noticing the sharp moments when it is too much. When we can tolerate the connection and care, the pain surrenders to healing.

    Of course, those of us on this earth lack Sophia’s boundless wisdom and patient love, only the cupful we can hold. Connecting is challenging and requires fortitude and patience, and if you’ve been too long in the void it’s hard to summon any of that with the faith that the pain is worth the attempt. The risk of loving is fraught with pointless arguments and hurt feelings. What’s worse, lonely people tend to find people who don’t really treat them with respect, so their fears are amplified.

    The metaphor of the masseuse does not encompass fully the difficulties of connection, because with a masseuse (or a therapist) there is an agreement in roles—one person is there to receive care, and the other is there to provide it. When it comes to love or friendship, you might have a sore muscle and the other person might reach for it and you have no idea what their intentions are or what they’ll do. Do they even know you have this pain? Are they reaching out in care or carelessness? Are they going to poke you because it’s funny to them? Are they going to lay their hand on your sore spot with this earnest desire to connect and leave you feeling like you have to endure the pain because you don’t want to hurt their feelings and lose the connection?

    In non-transactional relationships—the ones that we truly crave—we could be simultaneously the healing masseuse and the wounded patient, and many more things besides, and we might miss who is talking to whom. You might be asking for care from someone desperate for care. Or they might be asking you for care and you hear a demand for more painful wounding. The dynamics happen so quickly, so under the surface through tone and eye movements, we might not even realize what’s happening or why I’m flinching away from their connection. No wonder it feels easier, somehow, to bellow into the darkness and bemoan our misery, to create a pretend world we can dominate instead of risking connection.

    When we stay settled in pain, we risk becoming authoritarians. Our essential resentment of loneliness becomes an accusation against the world, a feeling that somehow we are entitled to dominate it because we are in so much pain. Authoritarian movements draw in lonely, embittered people who have no other belonging and gives them a mission for which their misery is fuel, and repays them with the satisfaction of vengeance against those they blame for their misery.

    And it is never enough, because their misery cannot be cured by another person’s suffering. Domination does not give us the connection we so desperately crave, the real balm to loneliness. It leaves us instead in a state of constant competition and insecurity, feeling powerful one moment and then protective of your position the next. Someone who is with you out of compulsion can never give the boundless love that Sophia offers freely in every moment.

    I write of Sophia as a metaphor, as an archetype, and as a real force that exists beyond time and space to which we could turn and connect at any time. The story that began this writing is not literally true, but I feel it tells a spiritual and psychological truth. Our lonely egos are the serpentine child suffering in loneliness and despair while the fullness of Self is always there, always ready to receive us, to reconnect us to the belonging we already have. All we need to do is to be willing to receive it, to imagine it is possible, and to ask for it. Whether you think the story is real or bullshit, whether gods exist or they’re all fabrications, all of those thoughts are okay and you could still connect to something that is love and wisdom which could help you brave the bumpy world of human relationships and material existence.

    If we have no human sources of connection, we could find it with our beloved pets, with the natural world, with spiritual practice. We could use imagination to connect with experiences that are hard to access otherwise.

    Practice

    I will close this by offering a practice that works with the story of this essay, so we can imagine together what it would be like to turn around and see Sophia there, divine mother, boundless of wisdom and patient love, her arms open and heart aflame in care for us. I want to repeat that you do not have to believe or disbelieve any particular thing to experience this. If you are skeptical, that is okay. If you don’t believe in myth or the gods, that is okay. If you are of a different tradition that doesn’t believe in Sophia, that could be fine, but if your tradition forbids you from engaging with any symbols or beings outside of itself, you could just substitute your own divine figure instead.

    Read the following completely, and then try it out: Close your eyes and imagine yourself in an empty world, feeling isolation and desolation. Ask to feel as much of your loneliness as you wish today, just enough to get the feeling of it but not so much it overwhelms you. If you feel too disconnected, ask to get closer. If you feel too overwhelmed, ask for more distance.

    Keep breathing and seeing how it feels in your body to be lonely. Stay with it for several breaths, or until you’ve reached the amount you can tolerate.

    Then imagine you hear a voice. It calls your name. It is calm and firm, with a resolute care. Notice how you feel toward the voice, and acknowledge all of those feelings. Notice there is no aggression in the voice, but it is insistent. It calls your name, and waits, and calls again.

    Imagine you can turn toward the source of the voice, and notice what happens in your body, your heart, your mind. There is a woman, bright in the darkness, calling to you. Love and care pour from her heart in a golden stream that flows toward you. You could let that stream pour into you, or over you, and drink in as much as you wish. See how long you can stay with this, receiving love and wisdom, and connection. Ask for whatever help you need to find this connection in your life. Thank the being and thank yourself.

  • Vicious claws become a loving grasp.

    Vicious claws become a loving grasp.

    The warrior energy of Mars wants to be strong, protective, and move confidently toward what is necessary and useful, but in the nurturing and punitive sign of Cancer he must move crabwise, side to side, with two harsh claws that will quickly register their displeasure with anything that seems threatening. In this sign, that warrior energy becomes highly reactive, easily spooked, dramatically boastful one day and then dramatically victimized the next.

    What is wanted is to connect this powerful energy to the heart, which can turn the claws into hands that could grasp, push away, hold tightly, or strike if needed. In this sign, we might forget we have hands that can do so many things based on what the situation is needed. We might feel we are in a state where we must claw at anything threatening or cling strongly to what we want to hold close—a clinging that might actually break or injure whatever it is we’re holding.

    If we can open the heart to what we are feeling, there is room to perceive and respond. Our feelings and the stories we tell about them are only one layer of reality, and may be quite different from what others are perceiving outside of us. In Cancer, feelings are sharp, urgent, and overwhelming, and the last thing we’d want is to slow down and spend time with them. But it is that practice—letting our hearts be the ocean in which our feelings are merely waves that peak, break, and recede—that lets our power truly flourish. Then that tight pincer grip may become a really firm, loving grasp. One can feel truly safe and loved in such a grasp, one that knows its power and chooses to express it in care.

    So this is a good season to notice those swelling waves and the drive to go on reckless attack, strategy be damned. See if you can breathe space for your feelings and perhaps try to simplify your response to two questions: What do I love right now? How could I protect it?

  • Step onstage and bloom.

    Step onstage and bloom.

    Today the moon has a brief confrontation with the collective underworld on its way to blooming in fullness with the reflected light of the sun. For those who follow the lunar cycles, this is a potent moment in which what has been growing in shadows is finally ready to come forward, and in Leo this coming forth is prone to come with a lot of drama and pomp.

    But today, it’s as though you’re the actress preparing to step on stage, and through the curtain your eye settles on the audience and suddenly you’re struck by something. Perhaps you see an ex in the audience, an old nemesis, or—perhaps worse?—no one you recognize at all. Total strangers, wanting to be entertained, ready to either celebrate or judge you based on what you do.

    Whatever you see, there’s a feeling inside that comes forth that needs to be acknowledged before you step on stage. Because what you perform will be for those people, and for the whole audience, and all the emotion coming up is fuel for your work—but the story must be set aside. You cannot control how you are received or judged, whether you gain satisfaction of some long-running vendetta or you are wholly ignored. All you can do is step onstage and bloom as best as you can.

    There are people who want you to succeed, if only because they want what you have to offer. Even if they don’t know you personally, or know what you offer, as soon as they connect they’ll recognize it and be glad for it. Writing this is of course much harder than believing, and believing much more tenuous than knowing, but perhaps as you prepare to step forth, you might imagine connecting to that possibility. That possibility that, whatever dark feelings arise toward the audience—which may be quite valid—there is also a sea of support in which those feelings swim.

    Then take a deep breath, and step onstage.