Occasionally when exploring a conflict with another person, I’ll try an exercise of imagining that I am the other person and going through the conflict from their perspective. I only do this after I’ve thoroughly explored my own thoughts and feelings about the issue and feel clear about what’s upsetting me. Then I can try imagining the other person’s thoughts and feelings from the view that they’re just like me, they’re trying to be loved and safe at the same time, and all of their actions are coming from that place.

This is not a substitute for talking to the other person, but it helps to slow things down. If I tend to think in terms of other people being evil, hostile, stupid, while I am always right, pure, goodhearted, then I will have a harder time repairing friendship with another person when there’s a problem. At the same time, if I only think about their wellbeing and don’t take the time to understand what bothers me about what is happening, then any repairs I make will quickly be undone when the same problems happen again.

The people in my cultural bubble have decidedly shifted toward the “you don’t owe anyone anything, feel empowered to cut them off if they’re not serving you” end of things, and that has its time and place. It’s good to know you can protect yourself, have standards, and choose the people you want to be around.

And it’s also true that eventually the people you are around will have differences, will have problems, will have fights. If we cut off every relationship with these problems then we will have few to tend. It’s also true that life forces us to have relationships with people we’d never choose—coworkers, neighbors, family, people in positions of authority over the things we need. We don’t have to invest the same level of care in those relationships, but we need to be able to deal with them and figure out how to work through problems when they come up. It’s worth looking at how to do both, to validate my truth and acknowledge another’s experience.

There is a quality of judgment that is simply necessary in separating out what is good for us from what is not, and bad for us might be good for someone else, so we do not need to judge for another. And there is a quality of judgment that really wants to judge for someone else, often with a measure of contempt, and that tends to be what we dislike the most.

“Judge for someone else” could mean that I am judging myself based on what I think someone else might think of me, or it could mean that I am judging someone else based on what I think they should be doing instead. Wherever it’s aimed, it’s usually unpleasant, conflict-inducing, and unwanted. And sometimes there is a wisdom that gets lost in the unpleasantness.

When I notice judgment in myself, if I have the time and energy, I ask the part of me that’s judging, “What are you concerned about?” This isn’t a trick question, it’s a genuine asking, and a willingness to acknowledge any answer. Turning away from the judgment toward the concern makes things softer. It invites the care that is beneath the harshness to come up, and it lets my judging parts express what’s really bothering it.

When the care comes up and the concern is clear, so much moves more easily. Perhaps once I’ve named it I realize it’s not that big a deal and move on with life. Or I can address the concern for myself and the judging part learns it can express itself with the harshness. Or I can decide if the other person would benefit from hearing my concern—best of all, I could ask them if they want to hear it.

In the face of looming responsibility, sometimes we might want to flail in helplessness and hope someone else will pick up the pieces. Other times we might shoulder all the burdens with sober intensity, pushing down the overwhelming feeling to muscle through. Either of these moves is disempowering in subtle ways, disowning either our own power or overvaluing our power to the disempowerment of others.

But if we set these moves at either end and look between them, there is the truth of participation and help. We have things that we can do, and we have resources to turn to for aid and support. The trick is becoming clear on what I can do, what I can learn, and when I am over my head and need support. Then the other trick is risking asking for help and becoming discerning about who can best help me. It is unfortunate that simply wanting or asking for help is not quite enough. We still have to participate in being helped—we have to communicate, we have to work together, we have to allow help to happen.

Yet the more I learn how to engage the help that’s available, the more I see how much needless suffering I’ve created by thinking I have to do it all myself. Without that suffering, I could do so much more.

What responsibilities feel just beyond your capacity right now? What would make them easier to bear?

Late last spring initiated a turn of the spiral for love and beauty, spurred by the unfolding potentials of technological change. What comes to mind is the innovations in medicine and surgical technique that allows those who wish to transition genders, sparking much handwringing and fear to protect “natural” definitions of gender. Which actually requires one to define those natural genders, which turns out to be so tricky that one might begin to wonder how natural they are, or why they require protection, or why a woman forged through her own will, desire, and medical support wouldn’t count.

On a personal level, we might consider ways we’ve come to reassess our own value, what and whom we value, and how we understand love and beauty since last May. Now is a time when those big shifts are bearing fruit and we can begin to see the new form things will take.

I made big changes in my own work and practice to allow myself more time and energy and now find myself in the question of: what to do with it? It’s a good problem to have, and I think it embodied this phase that will continue for several months. We’ll have to live with these changes for a while, but eventually we’ll be clear on what we like and what wants more change.

In what new ways are you experiencing and sharing love this year?

Communication is much harder than it seems it should be. We inhabit a shared reality but our experiences of it are so unique that we might as well be our own planets, sending signals through space hoping that some intelligent life will receive and interpret it successfully. We often have to communicate a lot more than we think we “should” because our understanding and thoughts and feelings are invisible from the outside. When I use a phrase that all my friends use and intuitively understand, it communicates a lot. When I say the same phrase to someone who’s never heard it before, it mystifies a lot. When I assume they should know this phrase that, after all, everyone I talk to already knows, then I see their misunderstanding as being willful or stupid.

So sometimes we have to say a lot to communicate a little. And sometimes the more we communicate, the more confused and muddled the message becomes. It’s taken me a long time to learn that sometimes I have to stop talking and let the other person chew on my words for a bit so that they either can come to clarity, or they can ask questions that will help me understand what they’re not getting.

These seem like opposites but they are compliments. I need to be willing to slow down and let them tell me about the confusion so I can better clarify what I meant.

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.