KAJAMA.COM NEWSLETTER

January 15 through January 21, 2024

We may feel undirected under Monday's Pisces Moon, but the action speeds up on Tuesday and Wednesday as the Moon moves into sure-footed Aries. These are the days we will get the most done this week, and the theme to create movement involves asking for help. Brainstorming and researching are the keys to make the most of these two days. The Taurus Moon continues the action as it grounds and energizes us on Thursday and Friday, allowing us to make progress and see some tangible fruits of our labor. The highlights of the week happen on Saturday as the Sun and Pluto take up residence in electric Aquarius! For the next four weeks, innovation, inspiration and moving outside our comfort zones will be a theme. Though Pluto's influence may be more subtle at first, it ushers in a long-term cycle of karmic abundance, moving us to a higher level of existence until 2043. To quote an expert on the subject, "This sign strives to implement systems and structures that are more accessible, equal, and sustainable for all," says Houdeshell. With Pluto's intense presence in Aquarius, we can expect a push for total transformation—however messy that might be—in order to bring about that Aquarian ideal of equity.

365 Days of Crystal Feng Shui for Your Home, by Sandra Kynes

(Article originally published in The Llewellyn Journal.)

The laying on of crystals, or crystal therapy, is a powerful way to align and balance the energy of our bodies. Even simply wearing crystals can have an effect on us. Similarly, through the placement of crystals in our homes, we can attract prosperity, augment relationships, and initiate changes in our lives.

A number of years ago, I became interested in the Chinese practice of feng shui mainly because of its use of crystals. I had been following my intuition and placing crystals around my home for years, but the principles of feng shui provided a structure. It opened the door to a whole new way of approaching what I was doing. While a traditional feng shui practice can be complicated, even applying the basic concepts with crystals can bring results.

The most fundamental principle of feng shui—creating flow, harmony, and balance—is often illustrated with the yin/yang symbol. Although the white and black sections of the symbol are equal, they do not split the circle in half down the middle; instead, they flow into each other, creating balance and harmony.

Yin and yang can best be described as the harmonious dynamic of opposites. They are regarded as the binding forces that hold the universe together. However, because the forces of yin and yang are constantly changing, the universe is anything but static. As anyone who has done energy work on any level knows, it's an ongoing process. Using them throughout the year keeps both our homes and ourselves in balance. What's more, crystals are such powerful tools for energy work because they are formed by the dynamic forces for Mother Earth.

According to feng shui theory, negative energy is called sha, and it occurs where yin and yang are out of balance. Sha can occur in two extremes: fast moving (too yang) or stagnating and depleted (too yin). In the home, when energy is trapped in a corner of a room it stagnates and lacks life-giving vitality. Likewise, energy can be forced into a straight line, for example by a long hallway, where it can gain momentum and become uncomfortable or destructive. Chi is the positive, calm energy in between the two extremes of sha. To keep things in balance, positive energy needs to flow unimpeded through the home.

The art of feng shui is a balancing act between neutralizing negative energy and fostering positive energy. Creating energetic balance in our homes lays the foundation for tackling personal issues or cultivating a particular atmosphere. Just think about it: how can you plan a romantic evening if your home has an undercurrent of tension?

The Three A's of Working with Energy
Okay, now that we know energy needs to be in balance, where do we start? With the three As: awareness, adjustment, and activation. First, be aware and assess your surroundings. Take a few minutes to sit quietly in a room. If something doesn't feel right, look for a source of negative energy. Make an adjustment by placing a crystal or two where you feel it. Choose a crystal that will calm fast-moving energy or stimulate slow energy. If you're not sure, use a crystal that will balance energy.

It is often helpful to begin your assessment by looking outside your home. The artificial environments of towns and cities with busy roads can have a strong impact on the energy of our homes. Assess how energy flows toward your house or apartment building. If you live on a busy street, you may be bombarded with fast-moving energy that can drain positive energy from your home. If you live on a cul-de-sac, energy may be stagnating and creating a pool of negativity.

To deal with negative energy that is outside, place a crystal or two on a windowsill or near the wall in the direction of the problem. If you need to calm fast-moving or chaotic energy, place a piece of amethyst in the direct of the flow. This will both calm and balance the energy. Alternatively, use one piece each of white quartz and opal to do the job. To get energy moving, try clear quartz or peridot and obsidian. Table 1 below contains examples of crystals that can be used for this process. Some crystals have a two-fold function in either calming or stimulating and balancing energy.

Assess the Energy Inside Your Home
After looking outside, assess how energy enters and moves through your home. The front door is regarded as the main entry point for energy. Any blockage here will inhibit positive energy from entering and circulating freely to create a balanced environment. Blessings and abundance could get stuck on your doorstep instead of bringing them into your life. A crystal hung above the front door or placed near the door can help regulate the flow of energy.

Continue through your home. Look for areas where energy can get boxed in or where it may speed up. Place a crystal in the area where you want to change and balance the energy. Get creative; crystals can be placed just about anywhere.

As mentioned, after dispatching negativity and balancing energy you're ready to deal with personal issues or cultivate an aspect of your life. This also extends to the family. For example, the dining room and kitchen are places where families come together, not only for nourishment, but also for discussion and decision-making. Place several crystals, such as aventurine or charoite, around the room to foster a sense of family and community. Rhodochrosite, rose quartz, or tourmaline can be used in the dining room or kitchen to attract abundance to the family.

Sometimes we carry tension home with us from work and sometimes a conflict in the family can create unsettled energy. In addition, the energy of a room may just feel "off" without an apparent reason. Use calming crystals to change the quality of the energy. Blue lace agate, celestine, larimar, and selenite are particularly effective to restore harmony. Table 2 below provides an overview of crystals that can be used for specific purposes.

The time of year and weather can also effect the energy of our homes. During the excitement of the holiday season with an increase in family and friends visiting, we may need to tone down the energy to avoid an atmosphere of chaos. However, after the holidays, and especially in northern areas where it is cold and dark, we may want to ratchet-up the level of energy.

Before Using Crystals
While there are many ways to do a crystal cleansing, one of the easiest is to use your own energy. To do this, hold the crystal in both hands in front of your heart. Close your eyes and bring your awareness to the energy above your head. It may help to visualize it as a soft white, pink, or lavender glow. Feel it gently touch the crown of your head, and then move down activating your third-eye chakra, located between and slightly above the eyebrows. As this energy descends to the throat and chest, it activates the heart chakra.

From here, visualize the energy moving along your arms to your hands and into the stone. Visualize the light pulsing and glowing around the crystal. Now imagine it moving back up your arms, and then down your spine, legs, and into your feet. Become aware of the bottoms of your feet. Visualize the energy moving from your feet into the floor and eventually into the ground taking away old energy and any negativity with it. If you are not going to use the crystal immediately for energy work, wrap it in a cloth and put it away.

A cursory glance at Table 2 shows that crystals sometimes serve a number of functions. When you are ready to use a crystal for a specific function, use your energy to program it. Hold the crystal in front of your heart and think of your particular purpose for it. Visualize your energy moving from your heart, down your arms into the crystal to pattern it with your intention and willpower. Hold an image of this energy in your mind for a moment, and then place the crystal where its energy is needed.

After each use, cleanse the crystal to have it ready for the next purpose. Of course, if you're like me you probably enjoy having your crystals out where you can see and enjoy them. When you want to use a crystal that's on display for a specific purpose, go through the energy cleansing and programming, and then place it where it is needed.

The key to success with crystal therapy for the home is to start small. Don't try to take on the whole house at once. Start with any exterior source of negativity. After that, focus on the front door to make sure positive energy is coming in. Follow that by working individually with one room or one area within a room. Take your time to make adjustments and live with the results. Most importantly, let the crystals speak to you. Use your intuition to help you tap into the deeper power and wisdom of the mineral kingdom.

Article originally published in The Llewellyn Journal. Copyright Llewellyn Worldwide, 2018. All rights reserved.

I've been in a safe, secure marriage for ten years. I have two wonderful daughters, and my life is blessed with good health and a great family. Here's the problem: I have the most vivid, intense, passionate dreams. Often in these dreams, I'll reunite with ex-boyfriends, and when I wake up, I can't shake the feeling that I am deeply in love with them. It leaves me feeling like I took the wrong path in life. Sometimes I want to just dream my life away, and sometimes I'm actually afraid to fall asleep, because my dreams seem more real than my waking life, and I'm afraid sometimes that I may never wake up. It can take days for me to shake just one dream. Please help me. I feel like I'm losing touch with reality, and am afraid to talk to anyone about this because they might think I'm crazy.

- Dreamer

Dreamchaser:

I think you already know what is going on here, but you don't really want to face it. You said you were in a safe, secure marriage with two wonderful daughters, good health and a great family, but you did NOT mention that you were in love, felt loved, or were in any way satisfied.

I believe your gut told you when you were making this choice that you were choosing safety and security over being IN love. You were content with that choice when you made it because of what was going on in your life at the time.

Now, however, you are bored out of your mind. You are too honest and upright to go out and have affairs, however, so you dream. You dream of past boyfriends, of men you lust after that you would never dare proposition, and of men you have never and will never meet.

In those dreams you carry on in all kinds of ways. You do and say and think whatever you want. You are wanton and you are fulfilled. You are brazen and satisfied. When you wake up, it's very hard for you to leave behind the unbridled passion of your dreams for your "cookie cutter" existence.

As I often explain here, many people lead two very different lives. One is the life they lead while they are awake, and the other is the life they lead while they are sleeping and dreaming. I have actually heard of this "phenomenon" that you are experiencing many times. People who are bored, critically ill, shut in, etc., tend to live more in the astral world than they do in the physical world.

Now I must remind you that there are four equal dimensions of experience: spiritual, mental, emotional and physical. The physical is what people tend to view as either the only reality or at least the most important one. You lead different lives on all those levels. Your "safe and secure" life is just your experience on the physical plane.

Throughout the ages, many types of people have believed in the power of dreaming. Australian aborigines, for example, believed that in Dreamtime, beings with great powers would either arise from the ground, come down from the sky, or appear on the horizon and lend their powers to the dreamer.

I think you wake up with feelings of love that you bring back from your own personal Dreamtime. Since you can't love with abandon in your physical world, you do it in your dreams. Then you come back to the physical plane with a "love hangover." If you want greater fulfillment, I encourage you to explore what these dream experiences may reveal about your repressed needs.

I wish you fulfillment in every dimension.

*****

Astrea:

Though it seems you have a perfect life, something must be bothering you to cause you to want to stay in that dream world. Perhaps things are on SUCH an even keel in your waking life that your subconscious is looking for a way to keep you alert and entertained.

This sort of experience is not as unusual as you might think. After being happily married for as long as you have, many people end up not getting enough stimulation while they're awake - at least, not enough to be completely happy. You shouldn't be afraid of your dreams. Dreams are just dreams! Nothing is going to happen in your waking life that you don't want to happen. From what you wrote in your question, you seem in complete control of yourself.

What you are experiencing is a need to search within yourself for some new sense of purpose. Everything you're doing now, you can handle, but your mind yearns for more challenge. Just because it picked the old boyfriends doesn't mean that's what you're seeking. You ARE looking for something to shake up your life, something to excite you, something that YOU can be excited about doing.

What are your interests outside of taking care of yourself and your family? It's time to expand your world to include something for which you can feel real PASSION. If you like to volunteer, now would be a great time to be certified by the Red Cross or to join a group devoted to hurricane relief.

There are all kinds of activities that would be worthy of your time and energy, but you should try to find something that fulfills you in a DIFFERENT way than your family does. Once you become passionate about doing something outside of all that seems to be good and perfect but ORDINARY for you, those crazy dreams will stop.

Feeling that you are "losing touch with reality" is NOT a good thing, Kiddo. The good news is that you are not crazy - you are just bored. Many times deep desires and issues will manifest so clearly in our dreams that we KEEP the dream feeling going when we wake up. Everyone experiences this at times of stress, and if you're having dreams that seem so much more real to you than your waking life, it's time to examine what is stressing you beneath the perfect surface of your waking life, and then make some appropriate changes.

You have to be able to enjoy being awake just as much as you enjoy dreaming, one way or another. Find and make a passionate choice to do something very DIFFERENT from what you're used to doing. It will really clear your mind of all that foggy stuff!

Astrea:

Many times in life we hear, "You will always have what you NEED, but not necessarily what you WANT." Your spirit must have needed to experience the feeling of leaving your human body, and the suggestion in the next chapter of Sylvia Brown's book was all it took to get you there.

Even though you hadn't read it yet, your SOUL recognized the title of that chapter as something it had been seeking, and your soul, knowing that you had that reference to read after your experience, got with it and out you went!

While I don't usually recommend her books, Sylvia Brown has a wide reaching and powerful effect on lots of people. A Gemini like you would be able to relate easily to her writing and put it to good use. Synchronicity - you gotta love it!

I like your description of "getting caught." That's exactly what it feels like, isn't it? One minute you're free and hovering above the room, and the next minute, ZAP! back down into your corporeal form you go!

As a little kid, I loved that "feeling of return." With practice, most of the time we can control that event, but sometimes, when our physical ears hear a distracting noise or something else occurs to knock us back into reality, back we go. With practice you will be able to control your return better.

I find it interesting that you were visiting your mother-in-law and not someone in your own genetic family. Evidently, you and your husband got married for reasons that are even deeper than love. His family's interest in "psychic stuff" will nurture your children in such matters and help them to grow into their own abilities.

You'll never have to be concerned that when your daughter visits them, she'll be discouraged from exploring her own psychic life and power. My parents encouraged me to develop my psychic senses in a time when it wasn't nice to even discuss such things in public. Heck, it's STILL not considered a great topic at the dinner table in some families!

Your kids will get to talk about it ALL and ask questions and read and study. This is going to give them such an edge in life! Talk with your husband about how you want to present this to your kiddos, so that you are united in your approach and ready to tell them their experiences are all natural and okay.

A word or two of warning: Geminis often have difficulty staying grounded in REAL LIFE. Don't get so strung out on your ASTRAL life that you neglect what you're doing here on Earth.

You are at the beginning of a long journey to learn where your power really lies. Try to be patient with this process and take your time.