Life may be poking holes in your ego and slowing your stride. This is a time when the efforts to achieve that normally work fine are instead beset by unexpected problems and harsh feedback. Charisma falters in the face of public disgust and resentment. If you are willing to listen and take the loss, there is much to learn that will serve you in the future. But this will take longer than you like. It’s okay to take some weights off the rack and do lighter reps for a while.

The roots of the word “weird” lie in an old term akin to fate or destiny and evoked a certain sense of power to influence those large forces. Today it comes to me as Venus, the embodiment of desire, sits squarely in the sign of Aquarius, the weirdest one. Weird in the contemporary sense of strange, outside of convention, but perhaps also in its capability to alter destiny.

Aquarius is often associated with revolutionary change, or the impulse to move towards change in a future-oriented way. Capricorn is more conservative, wanting to preserve and maintain structures of governance, whereas Aquarius sees how those structures must adapt for future need.

What intrigues me is that Venus was recently moving through Capricorn, softening the political upheaval and normalizing the second act of the Age of Trump. But then, just as she was crossing terrains, the murder of a CEO has opened the way for Venus’s shine to glow upon an agent of antagonism toward the system as it is. Truly Venus blesses the just and unjust in her journey, and even compels us to rethink our ideas of justice.

This was a larger take than usual in my contemplations, but we can look at the weirdness in our lives for the past couple weeks. What excites you now that was unthinkable a month ago? Or what new threat arises that you’d dismissed before? No matter your feelings, these changes in thought have density that will affect your days to come. How can you adapt?

When we’re feeling idealistic or righteous, it’s easy to look at others’ behavior and see it as irrational, and therefore not worthy ofconsideration. The logical mind seems to think that the world should work according to its understanding of things. Life will give us so many opportunities to learn that our understandings are inaccurate. That reactions occur, even if they don’t make sense and we have to deal with them. That people have opinions and feelings that we consider immoral; nevertheless, that label doesn’t make them disappear.

When this happens, it’s a useful time to soften the judgment reflex, and shift modes towards seeking true understanding. Understanding doesn’t mean I have to agree with or like what’s happening. But it means a willingness to adjust my mental models that are inaccurate to let them take information that will hopefully calibrate them towards greater accuracy.

This is a season in which opening up some more information leads to beneficial outcomes. The powers of air give us space clarity and more freedom with what is.

For some folks, their higher brain functions that are very good at suppressing emotional responses and instincts, but the larger point stands. Those emotions and instincts are still there. They are simply buried, and what wisdom they have to offer is ignored or explodes in unhelpful ways.

Both the heart and the gut have their own little nervous systems that link to the more popular nervous system connected to the brain. Which is fascinating as certain esoteric teachings speak to centers of energy in the heart, head, and gut, and of course all three show up in our everyday expressions of knowing and action. There’s more to learn scientifically to expand upon what we sense intuitively.

Today Mercury reminds us that the heart communicates and receives communication, more literally than we might imagine. When the words sound pleasing but your heart feels tight and afraid, there is wisdom to heed. When your heart wants to connect, it may be joyful to let it lead while your head remains a wise counselor.

If you do not know the language of your heart, today is a great opportunity to begin to learn through paying attention to its sensations.

This past weekend I oddly experienced a couple situations in which my confidence was shaken and I was held up and called out as a bad example—or rather, an example of something unskillful. In a way I invited some of it but was surprised by the form it took and especially the visibility of it.

In many ways neither were fatal or that big of a deal. But I’ve always shied away from public criticism and failure and would usually do all I could to be flawless before putting myself out there. Turns out it’s embarrassing but it passes quickly.

After a couple days of tending my wounded pride I am seeing that these were held up not because I am uniquely bad and deserving of shame; rather because they were quite common problems, and my own thoughts and behaviors were useful illustrations so that others could learn with me. Others have the same struggles, and anyone piling on in judgment either was just expressing long held frustration or excited to look away from their own flaws.

We all practice together.

The full moon this weekend illuminated truths, and now there is a grounding support to take in those truths and feel what to do with them. In my upcoming book Slow Magic I speak of the full moon as being like a flower, the culmination of a cycle of growth that is beautiful and open to fertilization from outside of itself. It interacts with the world then closes again to become fruit, which is the waning phase.

So in this time we’ve both revealed truth and received important truth to blend into something new. Today is a great day to not act. To let things settle and feel how it sits in you. From here it will get clearer what wants to come to fruition from this moment.

There is a reciprocity between heart and mind. Those whom we respect and admire are of greater influence to our thinking than those we dislike. And our principles may evolve, creating more distance from who we once admired and drawing us to connect with others.

Lately I have been really noticing that there is a moral sense that it’s less important what is done and more to whom it is done. Every human and faction has undesirable elements that we’re more likely to excuse and overlook if we feel aligned with them, and the inverse is also true. I’m not saying this is the pinnacle of morality, only that it is a factor we may not be wholly admitting.

This brings up some confronting possibilities about the stances we take. But also there are factions within factions. I may get along better with an ideological opponent that shares some similar values than people I largely agree with but who have strategies Ito which I am averse.

Today Venus feels like she wants to show who she loves by taking a stance.

Some people believe in some kind of unitary self in which we have one perspective, one set of thoughts and desires, and that any kind of inner contradiction is a sign of moral weakness or mental illness.

This makes no sense if you truly observe yourself or others. If you only had one true thought then why do you have inner conflict. If you experience self-hatred, how could that be possible? A pencil only has one point and cannot write upon itself, but we can turn the gaze backward and judge and scrutinize every action—that is a part of us scrutinizing other parts of us.

Truly it is normal to have a multiplicity of thoughts and perspectives, a tangle of contradictory impulses and longings, and it is from the recognition and acceptance of that multiplicity that we come into a coherent inner consensus on who we are and what we stand for. Yet it is hard to appreciate this multiplicity, let alone allow it to make music rather than noise, when we’re fighting to make one part dominant and the other parts inferior or excluded.

This morning the image of a rattler comes to mind, a hollow gourd filled with beans that we can shake to make music. Meditation is like becoming that gourd, allowing our thoughts and feelings to separate out from each other without needing any of them to justify their existence. You might wish to try on this image as you go about your day, being a hollow gourd in which your many thoughts and feelings rattle around, keeping rhythm and becoming music.

Today we can see a moment of synthesis in what otherwise looks like a war. Perhaps this is the broader culture war or something more personal to you. This week our aggressive tendencies are rethinking issues of ego and self-expression while our harmonizing tendencies focus on the collective good, a notable contrast that could make us feel in a tug of war.

But today the intellect is seeing things in a different way, and for a moment could move past the extremism and scary facets of each side and see something earnest and beneficial to both. They are not truly in a war of dominance, they are exploring different facets of the same game, and if we didn’t feel the need to pick a side we could learn from each.

Perhaps you are surprised or intrigued by a current of similar feeling across vastly different apparent ideologies. This is a moment to be curious about it and see where else those polarities connect. Doing so is not the same as agreeing with everything that is said or done. It is about holding multiplicity so a true synthesis emerges.

No one loves feeling trapped. And there’s not much to love about it. But it has much to teach us. We can exhaust ourselves in the efforts to pretend we’re not trapped or escape the trap we’re in, only to find we carry the mechanisms of the trap inside.

Being humbled in defeat is a great gift. All the thrashing starts to settle when you finally experience what you most feared would happen. It turns out the trap was your unwillingness to experience pain, and that unwillingness made the pain into suffering.

This is a season when the ego’s efforts to hold onto its fantasy of self are thwarted. You thought you were beloved when you were despised. You thought you were impervious but you had weakness. It could all be okay, not in the sense that things will work out the way you think it should, but that you can be okay even when hardship comes. And that okayness is the true warrior’s heart, to set aside how you think life should go and instead meet life as it is with courage.