Post date: Jun 10, 2010 1:0:21 PM
One thing that I know for sure is that there is a BIGGER picture and we only get to see a small piece of it. In simple terms, the PICTURE is much BIGGER than us!
Understand that! There is stuff going on that we don’t even know of.
There is no place for guilt in this BIGGER PICTURE! It’s so much more powerful than you or me, and yet we all feel guilty at times, sometimes hurling ourselves without hesitation onto the chopping block. Why does guilt find such an easy target in parents? Do we think that we are so powerful that we should be able to control such factors as: God/higher power, Karma, Astrology, or the lessons that need to be learned? Who are we to think that because we love our children that we should have the power to offset their life’s journey?
Any great teacher who is wise will tell you that they honestly don’t know. This experience that we call life is a great mystery and when people tell you, “God is everything” they are merely pointing to the mystery and conversely, when someone tells you that there is no God, they are pointing to the mystery as well. Nobody really knows. Even when we cross over we don’t know what the bigger picture is. We know that there IS a bigger picture because we have gone on, but exactly how it works remains a mystery.
That is why I feel that we must strive to let go of the guilt that many of us carry around about our children passing. Especially in cases of suicide or overdose the guilt can be enormous. Whatever the case may be however, it is important to acknowledge the bigger picture and to understand how much bigger it is than us.
I am going to share some information from Dan’s personal history because I think it will illustrate what I am talking about. Because of its personal nature, I sometimes question if it is appropriate to share and so I asked Dan, (in my thoughts of course) if it is okay with him that I share so much about his life. The answer I heard, almost immediately, was that I should definitely share anything that would be helpful to others; that it doesn’t matter that there were issues, only that we take the teaching.
I never took astrology seriously. It seemed like a fun game but I honestly didn’t believe in it. That was up until 2002 when I met up with Bob Cook, astrologer extraordinaire! For a mere $50.00, (now $60.00) I gave Bob the birth dates and times of myself, my husband, and our 3 children. He did his research and one month later I had a phone session with Bob and he recorded it for me as well.
Dan was 17 at the time and to be honest, he had been a challenge to us all of his life. He just wouldn’t tow the line. From early on he was a sweet, fun loving boy but we couldn’t get him to do anything! He got into drinking and drugging as a young teen and because we feared for his life, we put him into wilderness programs and emotional growth boarding schools, each time with new hope that he would come around. By the time he was 17 he was back home again, finishing high school and running his usual racquet.
In the 2002 reading Bob expressed much concern over Dan’s chart. He described Danny to a tee! He spoke of huge motivation problems and huge substance abuse issues. He described his lifestyle and all of his challenges one after the other and I was dumbfounded. All this from a date and a time? Pluto and Neptune and Uranus actually mean something?
Although I had consulted professionals, taken workshops and read extensively about ADHD, no matter what I had learned I still felt responsible for Danny’s problems. It was only after hearing Bob’s words that I was able to step back and think, “Then I had nothing to do with this!” It changed my perspective entirely and I thought, “What kind of an ego must I have to think that my loving Dan could overcome his entire chart?”
My perspective changed in another very significant way for now instead of seeing Danny as an errant child, I saw him as a hero who came into this life with all these cards to deal with! How differently I saw him now! All of a sudden I realized that kids who were “gifted” weren’t better, they were just luckier because they came in with a gift. Wasn’t my boy braver? The whole enchilada got turned upside down and that helped, however finding Danny dead in his bed in July of 2008 unearth every bad guilt feeling I may have managed to lasso into a corner.
Six weeks after Dan passed I was unpacking boxes in our new apartment. We had been in the process of relocating when Dan passed. I came across the CD from my second Bob Cook reading which took approximately 6 months before Danny passed. It was dated January 8, 2008. I instantly played it and again I was completely overwhelmed. I ended up typing it out because it was entirely too much and exemplified again how little of this I understood and how this really wasn't about me. I include it now for your review.
Astrological Reading with Robert Cook---January 8, 2008
Daniel Perl Migdol Born October 22, 1985
You’re concerned about Daniel. His moon is in Aquarius and he’s a Pisces rising. He has a very intense chart, this kid. He’s a Pluto kid, which means he comes from some challenging beginnings…a bit of an angry fellow and between Pluto which smolders and the Uranus up at the top, he’s a bit of a character, he’s got a complicated nature about him. I am concerned about a couple of things here because he’s born with so much Neptune, which is the substance abuse, and he has a lax attitude and that’s the Neptune. It’s nice later in life to make adjustments to make your life easier. Neptune has very little tolerance for dealing with discomforts so they always run to substances. They change how they feel but they don’t really change anything about their life. They move towards substances. They love to get high and their judgments tend to be terribly flawed. They just make bad decisions. And this Uranus up at the top makes him pretty much ungovernable because they have that attitude of “I’m going to do what I’m going to do” and that’s it. They don’t seem to have any remorse for anything they actually do, so there’s a problematic attitude. They meet up with a few low-lifes along the way, so he’s drawn to the underworld. It is very difficult to lead a legitimate life, if you will. Taking part in the world, that is very difficult to do and what I’m particularly concerned about over the next year is that Neptune is REALLY going to be coming to town. Neptune’s going to be sitting on top of his moon which for somebody else would be a very inspiring, creative beautiful moment. For him it could be a time of major substance abuse. He has to be careful of becoming undone or doing something really stupid, a bad experience, or doing something that just really shoots himself in the foot. It’s also possible because of the Neptune Moon, because the moon is like home, especially my family, especially my mother. She may be getting a little fed up with the whole thing and with the Neptune Moon, therefore he can end up feeling kicked out or cast adrift or cast out, because sometimes with Neptune Moon we lose our hope. We lose our roots. We lose our connection. A lot of people feel rootless with Neptune Moon. There may be some adjustment in the situation next year. He might just decide to take off and go who knows where. With Neptune Moon he could be a vagabond. It hasn’t even begun. It’s going to get very strong over the next year and you have to be very careful to stop him from coming apart. The best thing that could happen with the Neptune Moon would be that he meets some woman who helps put his life into order a little bit. It could be a good thing although I wouldn’t count on it. But that would be a nice thing. It can also be a time when he can make some really horrible decisions, and really really, it’s like come apart at the seams. And the other stuff is the twelfth house stuff where if you don’t get your stuff together there is the possibility of incarceration. Whether you just feel imprisoned in your life, or imprisoned in your home, or literally you are in prison, it’s like drifting, it’s like you’re just coming undone. He still has a ways to go, Sher. I still think the worst is probably still to come. This is a Neptune Moon aspect, which is a terrible aspect of self undoing. Total fragility. It can affect his health, terrible judgments…well, we’ll see. He’s like a cat with 9 lives, so he manages to survive this shit somehow, someway he does manage, but this is not an easy trip. That’s Daniel. Good luck.
I’ve included this so that you can see, as I did, that there are forces and purposes beyond our comprehension. To put ourselves on the chopping block in the midst of all of this is about the worst thing any of us can do and really who do we think we are anyway?
I hope that through reading these words, any of you who are coping with remorse will be able to lighten up and acknowledge that there really is a bigger picture in which each of us can only do what we can do.
If interested in a session Bob Cook’s number is: (631) 367-8021