My Secret Spiritual Dance: "The Inner Guide Meditation" by Ed Steinbrecher

I'm slowly making my way through the history and Path my Spiritual Journey has taken. I'm still in my 20's and early 30's in the telling and I am now 50. Before I move forward any more, I wanted to share a few posts about some of the processes and Teachers I found who helped me define what I felt inside.

One of these Teachers was Ed Steinbrecher. You can find out more about him here. He combined astrology with the work of Carl Jung and developed a very interesting way of dealing with the archetypal energies we all have inside us.

His process in a nutshell:

First you get a horoscope done. This lets you know which energies you chose to incarnate with, and how they are in harmony or conflict. Then you meet your Inner Guide. This involves a series of seen/felt movments that you go through in active meditation (guided visual meditations). You see yourself walking into a cave. You look to the left and see a door. You go through the door into a new landscape. You look to the right and see an animal. This animal will take you to your guide.

Throughout the whole active imagination process, you stay inside your body...that is you see things as if you are in your body making the moves, not outside watching yourself do this. You feel/sense the earth below you, feel the air around you, watch and learn how to describe the scene you're in. Not all can visualize, but rather get a vague sense of where they are. It's all good.

Once you've figured out that this is your real guide (Ed talks at length about how to make sure it isn't a "false" guide). Then this guide calls in all the different archetypal energies as they live inside us. He uses the Tarot Major Arcana (trumps) as the symbolic embodiment of the energy of the different planets and signs in your chart. You can play with them in different ways...for instance, you can take the time to invite them in one by one to learn what their gifts are for you and how they can help you in your life.

You can also work with the relationships between the different planets to consciously mitigate their influences. For instance, if your chart showed that Uranus was in opposition to Neptune, your guide would call in the Tarot Trumps of The Hanged Man and The Fool. You talk to both of them, negotiate with them and get them to agree to work more in harmony so that your life gets better.

And if this doesn't sound complicated and weird enough, there are places in your chart where the planets kinda work together. So he then has you bring all these together, see them meld and come up with a new archetype to play with that is a combination of them, yet a separate one standing alone.

Astrology is an interesting thing to me. My brain does not work like an astrologer's. Truth is, I start to twitch whenever I read too much astrology because brain just can't go there. How do astrologers combine math, all that linear memorizing and then combining it with the intuitive apspects that are relationships and influences of the pieces and part of a chart, then putting them all together and have them make sense? Boggles my mind. And in the world of astrologers, Ed's mind was a truly unique one....to be able to combine and come up with all he did here is phenomenal to me.

Like many of the things I've exploreed, there were pieces and parts here that stayed with me and some that didn't work out so well for me because of who I am. Ultimately, like astrology, this system was too much for me to do very long. There were too many people to deal with inside me, they wanted too much from me to work with. I'm lazy and this was just too much work for me. But there were some really juicy things that influenced me profoundly.

The biggest thing was that I learned to embrace my shadow. When Ed introduced me to her, I was shocked. She had long painted nails. I had not had them since high school. She wore business suits and pantyhose, I didn't one suit or pair of hose. She smoked and spent most of her time in bars, I didn't. She was blond with straight hair, I am a curly dark haired woman. She was loud, talked to everyone, was pretty non-spiritual. Not me. Her name was Amanda. She wanted me to be more like her, to embrace her energy more.

So I started. It became a joke of sorts as my wardrobe changed. There were Pamm clothes, and increasingly more Amanda clothes. Over time I started dying my hair, wearing nail polish, bought some suits (and wore them), bought heels. Soon I embraced her more and more until the clothes in my closet, and my internal reality which they were a reflection of, became "Pammanda."

I learned from Ed that I had two out of three aspects he calls "Alien Energy Constructs." These are really difficult to explain so I won't even try. What mattered for me is that it helped me to explain and give me ease around who I am and what I went through in high school. The reason they are called "Alien" is that's the way we feel about ourselves. We understand that we see differently, feel and experience life differently, know we are odd. Generally these are supposedly activated in the teen years and if we don't find guides and mentors we can go bezerk and shut lots of ourselves down because the psyche is scared, often taking years to heal. Major phew when I learned about them. Then to have him tell me I had two of the suckers...can't begin to tell you how much healing that brought. Just the knowing was huge.

Ed has passed. His work is being carried on by his nephew Stephen Connor. I found current Yahoo discussion group of pracitioners here .