Post-Christian Fulfillment
What to do with your life now that you’re not saving souls from eternal destruction?
I’m celebrating the 30th anniversary of my 29th birthday this week.😍 It brings me into a reflective state of mind: how do I want to spend the precious time I have left this last third of my life? How does it tie into the purpose for which I came into this realm (which thankfully has nothing to do with saving anyone from anything)? And how exactly does one determine their personal purpose, if there is one?
Had you asked me a year ago, “Julie, what is your purpose in this life?” I would have readily replied: “Contributing to the love and liberty of all beings within my given sphere of influence.” Emphasis on liberty—liberating people from religious, educational, political, medical and any other kind of oppressive systems that operate through black magic, word magic, and mind control. Today, I still see it as part of my purpose. And what a fun one it is! It brings me great pleasure seeing lives come into newfound freedom from external control while cultivating deep, unwavering trust in themselves! This is also the foundation for self-love and the ability to accept love from others.
Contributing to the love and liberation of all beings sounds like a grand, perhaps egoic aspiration. But it comes at a great price. That price has been the experience of seeking my own love and liberation through much wounding, rejection, isolation, fear, bondage, struggle, repeated deaths, and all the other lovely descriptive words that go with a Phoenix-rising-from-the-ashes pathway. We can’t assist the transformation of anyone else until we have first experienced our own transformation. It’s an inside job that requires a lot of dying off of old programs, mental habits, formative paradigms, and disempowering beliefs that no longer serve you, while making room for the new. You can’t put new wine into old wineskins, a wise sage once said.
In essence, we free the world by freeing ourselves. We love the world by loving ourselves. We help the world overcome fear by overcoming our own fears. For many of us, these are not innate, easy conditions (e.g. being a free, fearless, or loving agent). They are hard-won, trailblazer and even sacrificial paths of growth. For example, I’ve spent the last nearly six decades learning how to love myself, how to courageously accept the love of others, and how to free myself from many, many oppressions and fears.
First, I had to become conscious of the programs my mind and emotional body are operating from. Then I had to face and challenge them. Then I had to (still am) integrate and heal them. It has been quite a long, slow, difficult journey. This is probably why we are given 70+ years here in earth realm. It takes time to do these life tasks.
New Avenues of Growth
I have learned so much about myself (or at least clarified) over the past year, primarily through my newfound interest in astrology. But I have also started down other new-to-me avenues of self-discovery, such as the gene keys and human design. Like Enneagram or the 16 personalities, these are alternate ways of obtaining self-insight and utilizing opportunity for growth. I won’t try to explain either of them as they are somewhat involved, but the links are provided for your own inquiry. You can also obtain your ”type” or profile for free at each link, for further self-study.
Astrology
Apparently, the main reason I am so self-inquisitive is not my fault. According to the cards I was dealt in my natal astrology chart, self-exploration, self-focus, and personal transformation are a huge part of why I’m here. So, deal with it. 😂😩🙄
This year my birthday falls on my second Saturn return, meaning that Saturn is in the same place in the sky (right now) that it was at my birth. Saturn makes a complete trip through the zodiac about every 29-30 years. This planet is said to have pronounced psychological effects on a person, especially during returns. Based on my experience with two Saturn returns now, I am a believer!
Saturn is considered a malefic (difficult influence), stern planet of restrictions, boundaries, discipline, responsibility, foundations, hard work, and is referred to by names such as: the policeman, the drill sergeant, the principal, the Lord of Karma (we reap what we sow), and the keeper of time. A first Saturn return at about age 29 is said to course-correct one’s life and can be traumatic if one is not following their path. The Saturn placement is not exactly purpose, it’s more like a life lesson.
During my first Saturn Return when I was 29, before I knew a stitch about astrology, my life and sense of home went through a ground zero event. My marriage went up in flames, I lost almost all of my friends, my church relationships, my reputation, and nearly my sanity. It was a time in my life when I was getting way off course in search of belonging and significance through futile means. You can read more about this season of my life in a previous blog.
What is my personal Saturn life lesson? My natal Saturn, merged with the energies of Chiron, the wounded healer, is located in my 4th house of home, ruled by the Crab of Cancer where ancestry, mother, emotions, the personal shadow, fears, and the unconscious reside. Saturn lessons often manifest as red flags through repeated intense emotional disruptions, blockages, and insecurities in relationships. So my Saturn lesson revolves around fear of abandonment in close intimate relationships. Once I am able to heal most of my wound (I don’t know if full healing is ever possible or should even the goal), I can then take my alchemized pain and turn it into a beacon of healing for others. This alchemy for me is showing up as:
Emotional self-regulation.
The courage to be vulnerable and not run away in partnerships.
And primarily cultivating belonging and a sense of home for myself and within myself.
Sound fun?
It turns out that my greatest fear in this life (I’ve been aware of this long before my astro chart told me so) is…love. LOVE! Sounds ludicrous to my objective mind. Everybody loves love! Everybody needs love! But when you don’t receive the required love and emotional safety as a child, you tend to fear giving or receiving the very love that you need as much as oxygen, in order to survive this realm. But love feels far too risky, too uncertain to open your heart to others or to trust. The distrust is not rational or mental, it’s all contained in the emotional and cellular body. In such a scenario (I suspect a large part of earth’s population has this struggle), everything in you wants to run from love, intimacy, and vulnerability. Yet you can’t thrive without it. What a conundrum!
To normies, giving and receiving love is as natural and effortless as breathing. To a wounded-child soul, no matter how old, giving and receiving genuine love feels like dying slowly. It’s like telling a crab to leave its impenetrable and safe yet tightly constricted shell in search of a new shell that will provide a better fit for the attainment of the comforts of home and safety. First, the crab must trust enough to expose herself to untold dangers and the perceived threats of death by leaving her shell in pursuit of a better suitable option. To quote astrologer Steven Forrest, “a crab’s endpoint is to see the hellish discord of life while, against all odds or common sense, to love, to trust, and to accept all that existence offers.”
This brings me to the purpose of the second Saturn Return, twenty-nine years later. Where I’m at this very moment. This is a check-in point for one’s appointed life lesson after being course corrected twenty-nine years earlier. It’s a time to reflect on how I have met the tasks and responsibilities that I now believe I set for my life from beyond the veil, before I came into this incarnation. It’s like being called back into the Principal’s office for a follow-up visit on what I am doing to fix the issues that were brought to my attention at the last summons.
To be honest, I’m still working out the searching for significance issue of my young adult self. I’m still learning to trust in matters of love and opening my heart to intimate loves. I haven’t arrived, but I have made exponential progress. I hope that’s enough for Mr. Saturn Taskmaster for now.
The takeaway for you is that, depending on where your Saturn occurs in your chart—and you don’t need astrology to tell you this—you have your own life lesson to work out. The Saturn lesson, they say, is not optional. If we don’t work on it in this lifetime, we will keep repeating the same lesson until we sufficiently overcome it.
Gene Keys:
I can’t exactly explain this extensive channeled set of wisdom by Richard Rudd called the Gene Keys yet because I’m early in learning. But it has something to do with activating our “junk DNA”—that 98% of DNA that doesn’t code proteins and which scientists have been pontificating on for decades—into its divine potential within us.
We each have a particular Gene Key profile that tells us: my life’s work/ what I’m here to do (difficult to distinguish from life purpose); my purpose (what deeply fulfills me); my evolution or life lesson; my radiance or what keeps me healthy; and several other categories.
My personal life’s work, according to my Gene Key #25, is to take myself from constriction in my inner prison or trauma (think of the crab staying in a shell that’s too confining due to anxiety or fear) into the acceptance of Universal Love. The great antidote to trauma is love. If I can learn how to accept and feel my deep, difficult emotions without being overwhelmed by them, notice at that moment that everything is still okay—I am still okay—then I can gradually move into trust. This is the path from fear to love that will help me regain awareness of my original state before I was bequeathed with a particular wound. It surely sounds easy enough on paper.
Though obscured by ancestral pain, Universal Love resides in all of our DNA. My life’s work is to allow this Love to flow through me in order to embrace and relieve the collective wound. I’m here to revive Love’s many facets of beauty, wildness, fun, and creativity by first bringing them back into my own experience. Gene key #25 is the passage from mortal life into Christ-consciousness, through heart opening and trust.
My purpose, or what fulfills me, is Gene key 52 (an anagram of 25 above). This key also deals with the stress or fear, and how to direct it into stillness. “Stillness,” according to Rudd, “is how the world will be transformed.” When in a state of fear, I am to slow down, breathe, ground myself, and restrain myself from the mental loop. As I ease back into Stillness, I will find my inner Being bulging with potential, potency, and life. In this place of Stillness is the Wellspring of Joy, the end of all seeking, where all things meet in ultimate significance and unity.
Think of it this way. When a crab has shed the old constricting shell, and is bare and exposed while making her way to the new shell, she protects herself from predators by holding very, very still. So then, it seems that my life’s work of overcoming fear, so that I can receive and give Universal Love, will be most easily obtained through the practice of stillness.
Human Design
I know the least about this avenue, but I was reading today and found some very interesting crossover. It’s like the human design people, got together with the gene key people, who got together with the astro people. In reality, the gene keys and the human design seem related because human design used the same two numbers, 25 and 52. So it might be based on the same foundational principles.
Good Old-Fashioned Way
When in doubt, or if you’re not drawn to any of the methods above, there are some sure-fire ways to know what you’re here to do or to transform. Ask these questions and they will provide a guidepost:
· What is my greatest emotional struggle?
· What is my greatest emotional sensitivity/trigger?
· What do I spend inordinate amounts of time trying to run away from, cover up, forget, push away, or numb myself from?
It’s important to distinguish emotional struggle and appointed work from, say, addictions. The addiction is the thing we use to cover up the struggle, which is usually tied to our emotional body. What causes the pain that I am now trying to cover up or numb out? What makes me want to run away from emotional relationships, especially with intimate partners?
The way I see it, our life lesson and our purpose are tied together somehow. The lesson is overcoming the shadow of that thing. In my case, the shadow being the paralyzing fear of loving and being loved and all the behaviors that go along with that fear. Understand that most of my life, this fear was unconscious. It was the triggers in relationships that led me to uncovering this fear. The purpose then, is shining the light side of that transformed struggle as a beacon of hope for others. Once I have dealt with this primal fear, I am able to take that alchemized beauty-from-ashes—as a wounded healer—to show the world that love is the victory of my life. What a gift it becomes!
What’s the Point?
Nobody (except a few saints among us) wants to face their greatest fear or their greatest shadow. It’s f&@#ing hard! It takes years to work through. As mentioned, facing your greatest fear or obstacle feels like dying.
What is your life lesson? What is your purpose? Do you know? Does learning, growing, and facing your challenges excite you? Scare you? Sending you screaming for the hills? Everyone is here for the challenge of the lesson and the bliss of the purpose. Chances are if you are paying attention, you already know what both of those are without the insight of external sources. I knew that I was scared of the vulnerability of love long before I ever looked at astrology, but it gave words and structure to the deep knowing I already embodied.
I encourage you that if you don’t know why you are here, find the paths of exploration that call to you. Everyone is here to do something iconically important. Understand that, by you transforming your pain, you are helping to transform the pain of your family, your ancestors, and even the collective. Healing is a resonance, like energetic waves that ride the ether to impact the field of consciousness far and wide.
You are here to overcome, to shed a skin, to light a lantern, to prepare for the new you and the ever-evolving future of humanity.
How do I want to spend the precious time I have left in this particular avatar as Julie Ferwerda? I want to spend it loving and being loved fearlessly and fiercely. In this way, I will emanate to the world a powerful healing presence through my daily life, my writing, my emotions, and through my Being. Authentic, Universal Love brings liberation to all souls. Sounds like heaven on earth.
Remember, we don’t change the world through campaigns and causes. We change the world by changing ourselves.