D.K. Foundation

This is an abridged version of an article to be included in a publication, The Healing Zodiac,

Emotional Intelligence

You are in process of incarnation; you are following your chosen way. Is the house you are building yet lit? Is it a lighted house? Or is it a dark prison? If it is a lighted house, you will attract to its light and warmth all who are around you and the magnetic pull of your soul, whose nature is light and love, will save many. […] Some are lost in the illusion and know not what is reality and truth. Others walk free in the world of illusion for the purposes of saving and lifting their brothers, and if you cannot do this, you will have to learn so to walk.

Cancerian energy is the energy of emotional belonging and reflects the connection between mother and child. The mother is the vessel that carries the being from the world of spirit into the world of form; she is the symbol of continuity between past life and the present incarnation, and is represented in the birth chart by the Moon, Cancer’s ruler. It is through the umbilical connection that we first receive nourishment and Cancer rules matters pertaining to feeding, nurturing, the maternal feminine and the experience of home. Physiologically, Cancer rules the womb, the breasts, the oesophagus, stomach and alimentary canal, and the lower ribs. These, mostly, soft parts of the frontal body pertain to receptivity, nourishment and vulnerability. These qualities are also the gifts of the sign, though negatively can manifest as defensive touchiness, moodiness and impressionability.

Cancer is cardinal yin energy belonging to the watery triplicity. The power of yin is often underestimated, even denigrated, in our culture. Yin energy is passive, receptive, yielding and containing. The womb is the first ‘home’ we know. It is an intensive environment, a place of protection, nurturance and peace, that allows the foetus to develop and grow in optimal conditions. Peace and protection are preconditions for the work of development; if we cannot find them without, we must certainly cultivate them within, ‘for without peace can no work be’. Cancer and the fourth house describe the home in its mundane reality; the less obvious aspect of ‘home’ is that it is the space for inwardness, inner searching, psychological journeying and the cultivation of awareness. There is a correspondence between the home, the private space and the inner life. The fourth house of the birth chart signifies the place of contemplation and meditative work - working towards conscious self-development - as much as it signifies our dwelling places. The womb, the home and the inner life are all places of creativity and the development of potential, which can be given full self-conscious, outward expression in Leo and the fifth house. Physical or emotional problems pertaining to creativity and the development of potential are likely to be expressed through the womb. Commonly these manifest as fibroids, menstrual problems and conditions sufficiently uncomfortable as to be treated by surgical removal. What happens to unresolved issues pertaining to a body part when that body part is removed? Our drive to eradicate symptoms perpetuates illness, for it prevents us from having the dialogue the intelligent body is attempting. A symptom, rightly regarded, is the first sure step towards healing: ‘at one and the same time a signal and a vehicle of information.’ It shows us what needs healing and how; it is simply an attempt to come to consciousness. Unresolved issues deprived of their primary site of expression find another appropriate lodging in the body or are driven into the outer world of events and circumstances.

Having outgrown our umbilical connection to the mother, nourishment is sustained through the breast. The breasts describe the relationship to mothering, nurturing and giving to dependants. Louise Hay makes the remark that part of this mothering process is letting the thing that is nurtured grow up. To create a state of dependency in offspring, ‘smother-love’, is as pernicious as neglect.
A major issue of maternity is knowing when to give and when to let go. The womb must deliver the babe; the nursing infant must outgrow the breast; the childhood home must release the young adult into independence. Rejection of, or clinging to, the giving role of mother are conditions that, if held chronically, tend to manifest through the breasts. As the breasts are also the visible - and highly sexualised - expression of femininity, they will often express how a woman relates to her feminine sexuality (a matter which is conditioned through the experience of the female line of her family).

The vulnerability of Cancer can lead it to be excessively self-protective; it armours itself either by attempting to bind others to it in pseudo-umbilical connections of emotional co-dependency, or by fleshing itself out through over-eating, or by more subtle forms of psychological armouring that may manifest in the body as painful lumps in the breasts, amongst other things. Cancer can create guzzlers and gorgers. We drown our sorrows and we stuff our faces, feeding ourselves up against the emptiness inside. Similarly, nourishment can be refused or feeding patterns disrupted by a disrupted relationship with the feminine: we are mostly quite aware of the range of eating disorders increasingly being expressed by pubescent girls and boys, and adults alike. Such imbalances reflect feelings being choked back and suppressed, particularly the craving for love and an overwhelming sense of neediness. The relationship with the personal mother, or with the maternal feminine in general, needs to be interrogated when we encounter problems such as these. Often there is a lingering sense that the mother was in some way unreliable (either under-protective or over-protective), leaving the inner child with the desire to be held, nourished, nurtured and unconditionally loved (i.e. all-powerful and entirely irresponsible). Snarl-ups in Cancerian energy can tend to create such patterns of maternal/infant manipulation and control, which hold people in thrall to infant modes of relating in many aspects of their adult lives. The cost of this regressive mode to the development of consciousness hardly needs to be elaborated. In any case, the Moon’s ‘pull of the past’ is very familiar to very many of us: another aspect of our individual and cultural journey towards fully adult expressions of manhood and womanhood.

To nourish ourselves we have to swallow and Cancer rules the oesophagus and the stomach. The oesophagus does the swallowing and the stomach receives (or fails to receive) what is swallowed. What we can swallow is common parlance for what we can ‘allow’ in. Swallowing, allowing and receptivity are registered through the stomach and oesophagus. A healthy stomach can receive and assimilate a whole range of foods. The primary function of the stomach is the yin function of reception:

It takes in all the impressions that come from outside and receives whatever is to be digested. The ability to receive requires openness, passivity and willingness (in the sense of self-surrender). With these properties the stomach represents the feminine role. … The feminine principle expresses receptivity, self-surrender, susceptibility and the ability to receive and contain.

Problems with the stomach show that there is an inability to receive and assimilate what is going on in the experience of life. We use the expressions ‘I’ve got no stomach for it’, ‘I can’t swallow it’. Dethlefsen and Dahlke relate stomach problems principally to problems around the ability to feel and the realm of feelings (as distinct from emotions):

If we drive out of our consciousness the capacity to feel, this function descends to the bodily level, where it is the stomach that now has to take in and digest not merely the impress of our physical food, but our psychological feelings too.

Often, the psychological feelings we are less ready to express pertain to our aggressive drives, which become in the environment of the stomach literally corrosive. The over-production of acid, causing ulceration of the stomach lining, indicate that a person is engaged in digesting the stomach itself (‘It’s eating me up!’) rather than entering into conflict and dealing with the cause of the ‘acidity’. This line of thought encourages Dethlefsen and Dahlke to suggest that those who suffer with their stomachs are unwilling to express aggression outwardly and enter into open conflict.

The possibility of Cancer and the Moon energy in the birth chart is conscious sensitivity and conscious emotional intelligence; the self-awareness arising from such consciousness creates the willingness and openness to accommodate feelings, impressions and experiences and make these available to the purposeful vitality of the solar energy. The Moon often indicates a weak place in the body. It is where we are conditioned by the past and by habits that have created blocks in consciousness that then seek to come to our attention through physical manifestation. As the Moon is the fastest moving body in the solar system it is impacted upon, astrologically, by all other bodies: everything impresses the Moon. Its susceptibility to register impacts makes it capable of synthesising and relating the past to the present. However, identification with the Moon energy creates low vitality and, ultimately, frustration, because it is identification with a former mode of being (a memory) which is compromising and undermining the requirements of the present experience. If the experiences of that mode can be assimilated into the current mode (indicated by the Sun), then the Moon represents the possibility for rich understanding. It is all a matter of becoming conscious of our regressive modes and being willing to learn to re-route our energy into conscious, responsible, purposeful modes of activity. Dethlefsen and Dahlke sum this dynamic up in a characteristically uncompromising comment on sufferers of stomach problems (though let us not forget that we all have a Moon to work with in our birth charts!):

What stomach sufferers need to learn is to make themselves aware of their own feelings, to get to conscious grips with their conflicts and consciously to digest incoming impressions. Furthermore, ulcer patients need not only to become aware of, but actually admit to, their desire for infantile dependence and maternal security and their longing to be loved and cared for - even (indeed, especially) if these desire are well-hidden behind a façade of independence, competence and pride. In this, as ever, the stomach speaks the truth.

References
Bailey, Alice, Esoteric Astrology (London: Lucis Trust, 1951).
Dethlefsen, Thorwald and Rüdiger Dahlke, The Healing Power of Illness (1983; Shaftesbury: Element, 1990).
Hay, Louise L., You Can Heal Your Life (Carson, CA: Hay House, Inc., 1984).

©Kate Wickens 2001