Sun in Gate 30: Clinging Fire (Feelings), Earth in Gate 29: Abysmal (Perseverance).
Today, the Sun enters into Gate 30: Clinging Fire (Feelings)
In the Emotional Center, Gate 30 has a lot to teach us about the nature of desire.
Gate 30 burns with feelings. This is a gate of emotional intensity, yearning and longing to share new experiences. This is the ability to recognize what we are feeling and what we hunger to feel, to patiently wait until we arrive at clarity around what it is that we truly desire.
Still, no matter how skilled we become at knowing what we want, life does not tend to bring us precisely what we ask it to. Ultimately, Gate 30 is here to teach us how to release expectations and surrender to what life brings.
“Freedom recognized as an illusion and limitation accepted as fate”
An immature Gate 30 can be an absolute mess emotionally, obsessively clinging to fantasies, wallowing in disappointment and refusing to accept reality for what it is. It has a hard time distinguishing fantasy from true desire. It may act impulsively and dive into experiences that bring a short-lived, empty high followed by a crash, instead of waiting and aligning its actions with its deeper desires.
A mature Gate 30 knows what it wants, it knows when to hold its desire, and also when it’s time to let go and move on. It knows how to hold itself through intense feelings and longings while maintaining its composure. It does not take unreciprocated desire personally. It trusts that when you receive a NO, it’s because the universe has something better and more aligned more in store for you and eventually you will look back and laugh at your younger self and what you thought you wanted.
The ability to accept reality is not typically an intrinsic trait- it’s something we learn (or not😜) as we mature through cycles of experience. When you are young or newly learning about the nature of desire, you might believe that you can manifest anything your mind wants. When life doesn’t conform to your expectations, you may just assume that this is because you’re still learning but with time you will be able to ensure that reality always matches your fantasies.
(Hopefully during this phase, you refrain from going deeply into debt by marketing yourself as a manifestation coach teaching others that they get to have everything they want 😝)
As you gain more life experience and witness the journeys of those around you, you begin to recognize the limitations of our ability to choose what we want and don’t want in life.
This isn’t logic, this isn’t about patterns- this is the fates. No matter how many of your dreams come true, you will never be immune to the possibility of the fates coming in and disrupting the logic of your life.
You can manifest your dream home in the Pacific Palisades and then it can burn down in a fire. You can plan the perfect vacation but you can’t control the weather.
You might miss your flight due to no fault of your own, and on the flight you take instead you end up meeting the love of your life. You swore you would never leave New York but now you’re so in love you’re moving to Portugal. None of this could have happened if your college sweetheart hadn’t broken up with you, an event you once thought you’d never recover from!
And then we have the Earth in Gate 29: The Abysmal (Perseverance)
“The deep within the deep. Persistence despite difficulties has its inevitable rewards”
Gate 29 is eager to say YES! Yes to life, yes to experience, yes I am all in and I will give this everything I’ve got. In the Sacral, this is the power to make a commitment and persevere through any difficulties/obstacles that arise, trusting the process and letting go of the need to know where it will take you.
The challenge is that Gate 29 can have a tendency to say yes too much.
Together, Gates 29 and 30 teach us about the relationship between desire and commitment. This is about getting clear on what you want and then giving it your all. In order to have what you desire, you need to be able to discern what’s worth committing to (and what isn’t).
Commitment can sometimes feel limiting, because a yes to one thing means we will be unavailable for other things. Difficulties might arise and you may find yourself wishing you hadn’t made a commitment, fantasizing about escaping the hard work in front of you in order to experience something else that feels newer and more exciting.
But alas, the refusal to make commitments is also limiting, because then we never go deep enough to satiate our true longings. If you aren’t truly committed to an experience, you won’t get much out of it.
What to do?
This week, the level of desire in the collective is amplified. These transits might bring heat, longings satiated, full body YES! And/or, they might bring dreams shattered and deep disappointment, too much (or not enough) saying yes, stuck in commitments that frustrate you.
If you are living correctly as yourself, you can trust that life will bring you the experiences that are meant for you, the experiences that will shape you into who you need to become in order to receive what your soul yearns for on the deepest level.
Here are some questions for contemplation:
What am I holding onto disappointment around? What expectations might be creating this disappointment?
What is the difference between fantasy and desire? How can I tell the difference in my own life?
What fantasies am I clinging to? What am I getting from doing this? Might this be having any undesirable effects?
What is my relationship to unreciprocated desire?
Do I learn towards overcommitting, or avoiding commitment?