By Deborah Koff-Chapin

The cosmic weather pressurizes in December with an unusual increase of septiles. A septile is a 72-degree angle between planets, which is one of the most significant but least understood planetary aspects. When two planets are briefly linked by a septile (and there are many such angles between planets  this December) pressure is applied to your chronic sore spots and unresolved issues.

The septile reminds me of the Zen student who asks the master the best way to seek enlightenment and the master dunks the student's head underwater, increasing pressure each time the student tries to breathe, until the student overcomes the master's enormous pressure, forces his head up and gasps for air. Point being that until you seek enlightenment the same way a drowning person seeks air you're not on track.

Sometimes we need added pressure to find out what we're made of. All too often the experience of life and love is relegated to the upper surface of the mind. The possibility of what you're really doing here is swatted back and forth in the mind like a ping pong ball rather than taken to heart and soul. But until you seek love, meaning and enlightenment the way you'd seek life itself if you were drowning, you're only flirting in an unconsummated affair with  existence. Your fuller passion eludes you and your deeper powers lay dormant.

When septiles intensify cosmic pressure we get a celestial summons hard to ignore. It's tempting in those moments to collapse under the weight of it all, to drown in fantasies of helplessness rather than dredge up the deeper force inside. It's easy to get hoodwinked by a false world culture that hasn't recognized its own demise and is busy running around the barnyard like a chicken with its head cut off. Old obsolete ideas about life and self and love and sex and meaning die hard and drag the world down suffering before giving up the ghost.

By Amo Rafael Minkkinen

But when challenges intensify, if you dig below the world illusion to tap the limitless love for existence packed into your core, that was the original force that drove your soul out of spirit into matter, you'll summon mainframe strength to break the hold of the partially-alive existence that has turned our world into a planet of zombies, and you'll light up inside as one of the bright ones learning to use the darkness of our time as a catalyst to ensoul the false world and restore wholeness.