Starstruck Journeys

We all lose our cool. Here are 10 easy moves to help you get through that moment when you feel yourself slipping.

The 10 Emotional Stop-Loss Moves It Took Me Thirty Years to Learn. Save This — You'll Want It Before You Fall They cure nothing and untangle nothing. They just put a stone under your foot in the moment you start to slide.

I thought this prayer was worth sharing with you today.

This prayer was written by Shantideva, a Buddhist monk of the Mahayana tradition who lived around 700 AD. He was a devoted practitioner who authored the Bodhicaryavatara or Bodhisattva Way of Life.

It is said that His Holiness the Dalai Lama considers this text to be THE source for developing altruism in your character and the "Spirit of Awakening." It is also said that His Holiness the Dalai Lama recites this prayer every morning as part of his waking rituals. So, if you give it a try, you're in good company!

Bodhisattva Prayer for Humanity

"May I be a guard for those who need protection

A guide for those on the path

A boat, a raft, a bridge for those who wish to cross the flood

May I be a lamp in the darkness

A resting place for the weary

A healing medicine for all who are sick

A vase of plenty, a tree of miracles

And for the boundless multitudes of living beings

May I bring sustenance and awakening

Enduring like the earth and sky

Until all beings are freed from sorrow

And all are awakened."

Now, take a deep breath and be still for a brief moment.

What did you feel when reading those words?

Study your birth chart. There's a map for this life in there.

This week unfolds in layers as we gain emotional balance through deeper understanding and through relational and personal accountability, all centered around identity release and practical grounded healing. The energy isn’t rushed. It simply asks us to pay attention, to participate and to grow.

Right now Venus is in a lovely discussion with Jupiter, making this one of the sweetest aspects of the season where love expands, creativity blossoms, generosity flows and beauty inspires. Say yes to celebration, connection and creating something meaningful.

Listen to what your body is telling you and engage in gentle exercise or nurturing self-care practices. Dreams may need some refinement and grounding before they can become reality. If the path isn’t perfectly clear yet, don’t mistake uncertainty for failure. Sometimes courage means taking the first step before seeing the entire staircase.

This week clears space, grounds our energy and helps us step more fully into the person we’re becoming. It’s intentional, layered and deeply supportive.

The philosopher Alan Watts spent much of his life exploring this uncomfortable truth:

Most people do not suffer because they fail to become successful. They suffer because they become successful at becoming someone they were never meant to be.

And perhaps the most frightening realization is this:

You can spend decades building a life that looks impressive…

while slowly abandoning the person you were born to become.

I love this by Danielle Wilkinson:

The Inner Critic is Not Your Guide
Naming the voice that isn’t yours — and learning to distinguish fear from wisdom

— ✦ —

There is a voice in your head that tries it’s hardest to keep you “safe.”

It told you not to speak up when speaking up felt dangerous. It told you to make yourself smaller when being seen felt like a threat. It told you to stay, to shrink, to wait, to doubt — and if you listen, you survive this moment.

The problem is that you are trying to build something new now. And that voice is still running the same program it always has, interpreting every risk as catastrophe, every bold move as recklessness, every claim of sovereignty as danger.

It sounds like wisdom. It has your voice and uses your words. It reminds you of your past failures with quick precision. But it is not your guide.

It is your inner critic. And most people would be surprised by how much of your business runs on this voice.

The inner critic is not the enemy. It is a protector whose job is outdated.

I'm sharing this on behalf of Rob Herring at Earth Conscious Life. It's important to stop this nonsense. No one owns the sky or space!

When They Try To Sell The Sun
This is one of those stories that really should have been left to science fiction…

A company just got the green light to bounce sunlight down from space. Not metaphorically. A startup called Reflect Orbital received federal approval to launch a satellite that unfurls a giant thin-film mirror in orbit and aims a beam of reflected sunlight at a chosen spot on the ground, for a few minutes at a time. Their pitch is that they can sell sunlight on demand, lighting up solar farms after dusk, stretching the growing season on shaded fields, even replacing streetlights.

What's Being Built
This is well past the ‘crazy idea’, or sketch-on-a-napkin phase. Regulators cleared the first satellite for launch THIS year, and the company wants tens of thousands more in orbit within a decade. Each mirror can light an area a few miles wide, then swivel to the next customer’s request. An early concept video pulled in hundreds of thousands of requests from people who wanted sunlight delivered to their exact spot on the map. Theoretically, it might at first sound like a good idea, somehow helpful to humanity: Light with no wires, beamed wherever it's wanted. Who could argue with more sun for crops that need it?

The trouble starts when you start asking the harder questions about how this tech could be abused, and what role the dark was naturally playing in the first place…and how that would be disrupted…

The Night Was Never Just Emptiness
A few weeks back we got into a Deep Dive on how darkness works like a nutrient, the cue your body waits for to make melatonin and run its overnight repairs. And those instructions from nature, and our circadian rhythm aren’t just limited to what happens within your home.

Four international societies of sleep and rhythm scientists have gone on record with regulators, calling a sky washed in reflected daylight a planetary-scale change to the night, one that could scramble the internal clocks that plants, animals, and all of us humans who depend on these cycles. Even short stretches of light disruption are already showing up in us as worse sleep, shakier mood, and measurable impact on metabolism.

So multiply those impacts by something exponentially more unnatural…

Ironically, the same seasonal light signals that tell a crop when to flower and grow fruit are the ones that a sky full of bright mirrors would likely confuse. This “tool” they are pitching as a way to help agriculture might destroy the very rhythms that productive farming leans on.

Nocturnal insects, migrating birds, and even the plankton that underpin entire ocean food webs all run on that same light-dark clock.

Once again, human ego and hubris seems to be running the show here, instead of humility and natural wisdom.

Who Gets To Decide?
This is where technology becomes about ethics. Who controls the power? The night sky is about as close to a universally shared aspect of Earth as we've got. No one owns it, which sadly somehow has come to mean that anyone with a rocket can start changing it, even when it affects it for everybody else. Reflect Orbital is just one company. SpaceX has talked about putting up to a million satellites in low orbit, some as floating data centers to run AI.

Some astronomers warn we could end up with a sky where satellites outnumber the visible stars, and that the mirrors may scatter light far wider than the tidy beam in the promo videos. Once tens of thousands are up there, there's no undo button.

So What Do We Do?
If you've ever felt torn about whether your own choices even matter against forces this size…that’s not uncommon. It's a fair thing to feel. In this case, the thing that some people think is the loudest, most expensive “fix” is actually the new problem that might end up doing the most harm. It is up to us to do our part to protect any small patch of dark sky. Continue growing (or supporting the growth of) food which is in line with the seasons.
Keeping your own nights dark enough to actually sleep and mentioning the importance of this to neighbors. That's the direction we want the future to head, and every choice pointed that way leads a world more informed and a sky more likely to be protected.

You can't personally ground a satellite. You can pay attention, tell the people who regulate this what you think, and keep advocating for natural solutions. This is important. For the kids who'll inherit whatever sky we leave them, it might be the different between a livable future or not.

Every year around this time, I heard about the Lion’s Gate Portal and how August 8 is the most powerful day of the year. I read that it was an ancient Egyptian celebration, but never fully understood what it meant or why it was so significant to some. I love ancient history, but I did not recall ever reading about the Lion’s Gate Portal.

And then, I read this little tidbit from Hathor Studios, which was in keeping with what I had learned about ancient Egypt:

“The Lion’s Gate as we know it today is actually a modern spiritual tradition, not an ancient Egyptian holiday. The ancient Egyptians weren’t waiting for 8/8. They were watching Sirius, the brightest star in our night sky, known to the Egyptians as Sopdet. Its first visible appearance before sunrise signalled the coming inundation of the Nile, the event that made civilization itself possible. Without those life-giving waters, there were no crops, no food, no Egypt.

Because this event slowly shifted over centuries, its modern appearance over Egypt now falls in early August around 7-8, depending on location and year.”

So, of course, it was a significant day for the Egyptians! But where did the Lion’s Gate come from?

This modern celebration blends several ideas: the Sun moving through Leo, the visibility of Sirius near sunrise, and the symbolism of the number 8. It reminds us of how our ancestors lived. They weren’t simply looking at stars. They were watching a relationship between the heavens and Earth. They understood that what happened above eventually revealed itself below.

So here we are on the day Sirius aligns with the sun, opening a portal of flow and abundance. The date and time might have changed over the centuries, but the meaning still seems to be there.

Tomorrow, August 6, Venus moves into Libra, its home sign, until September 10. We may see a greater emphasis on partnerships in our life, platonic or romantic.

We are all on a sacred journey of learning how to love ourselves. Venus’s purpose is to help us develop a conscious relationship with love, self-worth and beauty—one that can receive as freely as it gives, value ourselves as deeply as we value others, and find pleasure in life without guilt or shame.

It’s not about being popular, attractive or constantly in relationships. Rather, Venus is our capacity to love and be loved. It’s the part of us that says, “This is what I value, what I find beautiful, how I connect,” and then we spend a lifetime learning to embody that truth.

Psychologically, Venus’s purpose is to heal the wounded heart and the diminished sense of self-worth—the parts of us that learned to give too much and receive too little, to equate our value with our desirability or to believe that love must be earned through what we provide. When we work consciously with our Venus, we stop asking, “Am I lovable enough?” and start discovering “I am worthy of love simply because I exist.”

For Venus to grow into its authentic expression, it needs three core conditions:

1. Permission to receive—love, compliments, gifts, help and pleasure—without feeling the need to immediately reciprocate. A wounded Venus often gives endlessly and receives poorly, believing that love must be earned.

2. Permission to desire what we want, what we find beautiful, what brings us pleasure. Many of us were taught to suppress our desires in order to be perceived as “good” or “selfless” by others. Venus heals when we allow ourselves to want without shame.

3. Permission to value oneself. Venus is the planet of self-worth. A healthy Venus knows that our value is inherent, not dependent on relationship status, career success or external validation.

Just like Venus does not dim its light to make other stars comfortable, our inner Venus doesn’t need to shrink or perform to be worthy of love. Its purpose is integration. We can learn to hold both our desire for connection as well as our need for autonomy, our pleasure as well as our boundaries, and to express them as one coherent, loving self.

Venus needs beauty and pleasure in daily life, not as luxuries but as necessities. Art, music, nature, touch, good food and beautiful surroundings are oxygen for Venus. When these needs are met, Venus is generous, open and radiant. When they’re ignored, Venus becomes hollow, transactional or starved, always longing, waiting and never quite thriving.

Venus is not meant to be earned, performed or proven. It’s meant to be lived fully, generously and without apology.