Let’s Get Personal: A Nodal Integration Journey

After reading my first article on the nodal axis (https://moonx.app/share/7CgAqrWEUQi1FKRX9), I bet you are wondering how our seemingly abstract purpose plays out in the messy and unpredictable everyday world.

Well, you’re in luck, as I’ve written this article to help us understand just that!

✨✍️ This article is part of our new MoonX Creators Program. Want to join and become an author? Learn more at https://moonxcreators.tilda.ws/

My spiritual journey started in earnest at age eighteen when I first learned about meditation and mindfulness. I had a deep and inexplicable draw to run off to monasteries in India and Japan. I dreamt of meditating all day and eating simple meals of rice and pickled veggies. But when I actually visited those countries in my mid-twenties, I didn’t feel a pull. The monasteries had taken on a ceremonial role and the ashrams felt dull and lifeless.

I was nearly kicked out of my first ten-day Vipassana meditation retreat for talking and writing. “It says here you’re a teacher,” the head instructor chastised me, “So I don’t understand why you have so much trouble following directions.” “Because I hate you,” I wanted to reply. I was projecting all my unresolved issues with authority, freedom, and men on this poor, unsuspecting guy. And boy, did I have issues! I came to see that a large part of my spiritual seeking was fueled by a desire to bypass my pain.

Every time I’ve tried to escape and run off to some third-world country as a solo seeker, my path has been blocked either financially or circumstantially. My temperament in this lifetime is extremely fiery and expressive; I’m simply not built for a monastic life. And that’s not by accident. Our souls choose the conditioning and personality we need to fulfill our life purpose. With my South Node in Sagittarius, I’ve already had a lot of past lives in deep contemplation and on solo spiritual searches. My North Node in Gemini reminds me that it’s time to come off the mountaintop and share my wisdom with others. My in-built love and knack for language, self-expression, teaching, and writing (all Gemini North Node gifts) are hard pulls to resist. They ensure that I will share my light with the world through words. My name, Seda, actually means echo in Turkish, and a mushroom once told me that that wasn’t an accident either. Although I was extremely shy as a child and teenager and never thought I would have a public career, I served as a substitute school teacher for twelve years. Learning the North Node in Gemini skills of relating to others in a practical, adaptive, and concrete way has been an ongoing challenge. How do I channel my lofty spiritual ideals and aspirations into serving the needs of my students in the moment? How do I distill all my years of emotional processing, therapy, inquiry, and contemplative practice into a simple word or gesture to take care of the learner in front of me? Does my student really need to hear about our infinite loving nature when he just wants to solve a math problem or help tying his shoelaces? How do I take deep metaphysical truths (South Node in Sagittarius) I’ve explored as a solo journeyer, seeker, warrior, and explorer and make them palatable for others as a counselor, writer, and speaker (North Node in Gemini)? In this lifetime, I’ve struggled to fight my inner ‘freedom tapes’ to run off on some solo journey in order to deeply connect with others. I’ve had to heal my persecution complex in order to trust that I can be safe when sharing my Truth. After spending so many lives in quiet and solo contemplation, I’ve had to consciously remember to breathe and speak without bombarding others. I’ve learned to embrace relationships as part and parcel of my spiritual growth (North Node in Gemini), instead of some painful and necessary evil. Our areas of greatest challenge are our sadhana; they are our spiritual path. It’s not up in some mountain top, but here, in our very own lives that we learn to spread our wings and fly. Everything is here to wake us up. When I first look at a natal chart, I don’t know exactly how someone with the North Node in Gemini will express their purpose. While the general direction is outlined, the details of exactly how it will play out are not. The soul has to act in the moment, using the available opportunities and resources to fulfill its mission. It may have planned to write a book but discovered that its message is better communicated through an online course or offering counseling sessions. It may have created agreements to meet certain people at specific times, but have to improvise if those plans fall through. We can trust our True Self to guide us to our purpose through intuitive knowing, a gut sense, inspiration, urges to act, drives to take a particular action, and messages and opportunities presented by life and others. Everyone feels their life purpose because they are drawn to it by longing. Not the flighty desires of the ego for glory nor riches, but the deeper longing we each have to express the fullest version of ourselves. This might feel like the natural curiosity of a child who prefers reading to toys or who dreams of one day coding a computer. It might look like a love of creating beautiful artisanal crafts or building with one’s hands. These deeper drives pull us out of ourselves and close to their chest. They meet us where we meet them: in our hearts. We are drawn to the activities, skills, people, and places that are necessary to fulfill our purpose and away from those that don’t. There are many ways in which our purpose can be played out, and the soul is happy to be flexible. As a result, nearly everyone fulfills their life task in some way. However, certain ways of fulfilling it will be more meaningful and rewarding than others. The more tuned in to our intuition we are, the more likely we are to fulfill our purpose in the most fulfilling way. By offering you these insights and examples, my hope is that you can trust more in the intuitive guidance you are continuously receiving. Everyone’s life purpose unfolds in its own time. Most life purposes take nearly a lifetime to acquire the skills necessary to be carried out. As a result, most aren’t fulfilled until later in life. And yet, we often have a sense of our purpose decades earlier. The sense of it is what drives us to fulfill it. But this same sense can cause us to feel impatient and frustrated. The study of astrological transits can give us a sense of the timing of the unfolding of our lessons, experience, and life purpose. This can help us to counteract the impatience of the ego and any frustrating stories of failure it likes to create. The pace of life moves much more slowly than our egos would like. The ego can’t see the vast cosmic tapestry of interbeing on which our purpose depends. It doesn’t appreciate the importance of timing and readiness, but instead demands instant gratification. Our soul, on the other hand, designs life strategically to gather all the wisdom and skills we need to be of maximum benefit to ourselves and others. With all this talk of purpose, you might think it has to be something majestic like curing a disease or becoming a renowned spiritual master. But our purpose is often more humble: to learn patience, relate more lovingly, raise conscious children, eradicate a social injustice, heal others, write, teach, or create art. It doesn’t have to be grand or impact millions to be deeply fulfilling. Since all of our lifetimes are about learning how to love, every experience can be used to further this core goal. We learn to love by loving, being loved, doing what we love, and even by having love withheld and thereby developing compassion. No experience is ever wasted. All life purposes involve service of some kind since it’s difficult to share our gifts and learning without uplifting others. Our current culture blindly misleads us by giving the impression that we have to stand out to be fulfilled. The truth is much kinder than that. Expressing our fullest potential is all that is being asked of us. As Jesus said about evoking your inner truth: “If you bring forth what is within you, what is with you will save you and if you do not bring forth what is within you, it will destroy you.” Not to scare you or anything, but destruction isn’t always literal. An unfulfilled life, full of lost potential, is a sad one indeed. If, for instance, you have the North Node in Cancer, you don’t know that being vulnerable and revealing your feelings and fears is going to work out for you. You simply weren’t used to being vulnerable in your past lives. As a matter of fact, you may feel as though you’re going to die if you actually do reveal your true emotions. Everything in you may tell you to resist. Yet your soul is being called to do it anyway. And the more you reveal and share, the less fear you will feel. Facing our fears really is the only way to overcome them. Integrating our Nodes is a lifelong journey. To paraphrase the great Dr. Martin Luther King: The arc of our lives is long, but it bends towards love. You are going against deeply ingrained conditioning from many lifetimes. Be gentle with yourself. Take consistent action and walk patiently towards that cosmic door. One day, after many persistent knocks, it will open. As explained in my previous article, the goal of each of the Nodal Axis is balance. We are not meant to develop our individuality at the expense of relationships or our self-worth at the expense of supporting the talents of others, intuition at the expense of logical thinking, or being at the expense of doing, but to integrate these seeming polarities. While our journeys, themes, and dominant challenges are highly individualistic, our lessons are universal.

The Aries ♈️ - ♎️ Libra axis symbolizes self-identity vs relating to others, yet the way we treat ourselves is ultimately how we treat others. The Taurus ♉️ - ♏️ Scorpio axis symbolizes investing energy in one’s own talents and self-worth while supporting the talents and worth of others, yet we can only truly support others from a place of self-sufficiency and self-worth. The Gemini ♊️ - ♐️ Sagittarius axis symbolizes using our logical mind to learn and communicate while staying in touch with our intuition and deeper knowing, yet logic and intuition are not contradictory forces but complementary ways of navigating skillfully in the world. The Cancer ♋️ - ♑️ Capricorn axis symbolizes nurturing ourselves and others while honoring our personal goals and need for self-sufficiency, yet pursuing our personal goals is not fulfilling if it doesn't allow us to also give and receive love. The Leo ♌️ - ♒️ Aquarius axis symbolizes expressing our individuality and creativity while contributing to humanitarian and group goals, yet the only way to contribute to collective welfare is to allow our most authentic and liberated selves to be expressed. The Virgo ♍️ - ♓️ Pisces axis symbolizes the effective ordering of our daily lives while developing our spiritual awareness, yet form and essence, the manifest and unmanifest, emptiness and embodiment, and service and surrender are not two different energies, but expressions of the same whole. As we reconcile these six grand dichotomies in our lives, we come to rest more fully in the truth of what we are and the essence at the core of all our earthly lessons - the primordial ground of love at the core of our spiritual heart (Note: I’ve created a meditation to help you connect with the spiritual heart, available now on MoonX). Isn’t it interesting that the word earth contains the word heart and the word evolve contains the word love? We live in a mysterious world, full of ineffable beauty. It is more mysterious than we can ever know. Our vulnerability to experience it fully, to truly show up in the here and now as best as we can, is all that is being asked of us. And anytime we reach out for greater understanding, we will be rewarded.