The Self and The Other

Why We Need To Give A F*ck About Relationships

Hello lovelies,

I’m just going to own it straight out of the gate – I’ve totally been embodying the Libra stereotype with this one, see-sawing between topics and struggling to choose where to begin. It’s not that I haven’t known what to say – it’s been that there is absolutely too much to say. If you watched the weekly reading ‘Connecting to Thrive Through the Challenges’ then you know I threw out a ton of random themes and topics, and yes, at this point I have written about all of them. But none of it seemed right – not as the first post of the season. We will absolutely get to those other topics, especially as I have already written about most of them.

I realised something as I was talking about the recognition of worth or how relationships are the core of human experience and showing how relationships – rather than cementing duality – offer a path to non-duality. Relationships may be everything, but that balancing act which is the forte of Libra is a difficult one, and so I realised that before talking about what relationships are, how we can relate better, and the other themes, I need to cover one thing – why should we even bother? Why do we need to care about how we relate? Well, the simple answer is, because we do it all the time anyway, so what we’re really talking about is bringing an awareness to the fact that we do this. But before that, let’s talk about what we mean by relationships.

I know a lot of the tarot community has a reputation of being all about love and romantic relationships. I mean, even broken-hearted old me started off by doing love readings. I’ve been doing this a long time. (A quick sidenote: the video side of Aquarian Insight is actually a Libra – on my Mum’s birthday, 14 October 2016, I posted my first set of collective reading videos.) But even when I used to do a lot of love readings for clients, I realised that it wasn’t about the relationship – it was more about being happy, and thinking that a certain kind of relationship with a specific type of person would lead to happiness.

But here’s the thing – it’s never just about that ‘one person’ or the ‘perfect partnership.’ Whether we’re conscious of it or not, we’re relating all the time. From the moment we wake up and decide how we feel about the day ahead, to how we engage with our work, our food, and even our own thoughts. As human beings, we cannot but relate – and look out for my post ‘Life is Relationships: Not ‘me vs we’ but ‘without we there is no me’ which will go up next after this one. Relationships are the fabric of our reality and we form a relationship with everything and everyone we encounter.

I know this is not the commonly accepted definition of relationship, but I think when working with Aries and Libra energy – the self and the other – it is fair to have this broader, more encompassing viewpoint. Especially on the heels of a full moon lunar eclipse in Pisces, the sign of ‘we are all one’.

If we look to the scales associated with Libra, we often see relationships as what is weighed – basically what is placed on either side of the scales. But Libra is the scales, not what is placed to weigh. Libra is the balance – the way to relate. It is a process of communicating and interacting with the other – be that people, situations, or things. It is the bridge between the self and the other.

If we don’t have the awareness of this balancing act, we can define ourselves by the other, or place our worth in the other, or even shun and hide from the other, trying to find safety in a false notion of self. I think having an awareness within ourselves of the role that we play in how we relate, through the themes and archetypes of Venusian Libra, actually empowers the more Mars-ruled Aries side of us to act. But this lack of awareness doesn’t just impact us on a personal level – it ripples out into how we relate to the world around us.

But again, why bother? There are countless reasons I can give – and indeed, that I have given over the years – speaking of personal empowerment, fulfilment, purpose, and meaning. But these reasons, focused as they are on the individual, can reinforce the self side of the scales. So let’s zoom out for a moment and consider what’s happening in the world right now, because these broader dynamics highlight why our awareness of relationships is more crucial than ever.

Months ago, I talked about the eleven crazy weeks that would be Pluto visiting Capricorn for one last time. We are in the midst of that as I write this. There is chaos and madness in the world right now. Even while I was on vacation in a peaceful fishing town in southern Portugal, I saw graffiti stating ‘tourism = terrorism’, I noted the prices in the supermarket. Nowhere and no-one is immune to the changes happening in the world.

Yet, we don’t all deal with things in the same way. We don’t all relate to the other in the same manner. The graffiti I saw in Portugal echoed the ‘us and them’ sentiment we’ve been seeing play out in my own country. The sense of community I felt there was like a balm to my soul – not just through osmosis, but because of how I engaged with each person I met and observed how they interacted with one another. It’s a reminder that we each have the power to shape our environment and, by extension, each other.

In the UK, there’s been a lot of talk – well, to be frank, a lot of anger and frustration – around what this new government has done and hasn’t done. I had three separate conversations about the same policy change – cutting the winter fuel allowance for pensioners. The first person I spoke to felt completely disconnected from the country, saying they no longer felt ‘British’ because the government wasn’t fulfilling its relationship to the people. Viewing it through the Libra lens, I could see that this person’s strong reaction came from feeling let down by a relationship they believed no longer existed – even as the very intensity of their emotions proved the opposite. The awareness of that relationship was missing, and so there was no empowered response to what they were experiencing. Mars without awareness.

The other two conversations were entirely different in tone. Their focus was on what they could do – how they could support others in their community. One mentioned knitting blankets and scarves to help people keep warm, and the other spoke about local churches and town halls being opened up to offer hot drinks and a warm place to gather. While these aren’t long-term solutions, they show that by engaging consciously with our relationships, even imperfect action can create ripples of care and support. We put the well-being of humans first. Once we have that, we can start to evaluate if the other relationships we have – even those with our systems and governments – are still serving us.

We each have the power to affect one another. Our relationships aren’t passive; they’re active exchanges that shape our perception of reality and our responses to it. That’s why we need to give a f*ck about relationships – because whether it’s between people, governments, or communities, the quality of our relationships defines the quality of our lives and experiences.

So, when I talk about giving a f*ck, what I actually mean is being aware of the role we play in every dynamic, because those relationships exist whether we recognise them or not. We’ll be looking more at how they form the very fabric of our existence. I once saw a meme in the context of behavioural patterns that said ‘we can only divorce something once we marry it’. While I have a slightly different take on this – which you’ll see in my next post – I definitely resonate with the need to recognise and take ownership of relationships.

There’s a lot happening out in the world and in our personal lives that can feel overwhelming, as if it’s happening to us. But if we can see it as a relationship – sometimes healthy, sometimes not, but a relationship nonetheless, where we too have a role to play – then we can change the dynamics of that relationship. And those changes can have a greater impact on the collective as a whole.