You’d have to be almost living under a rock not to be aware of the once-in-400-years event taking place right now around the world as we experience a total lunar eclipse on the solstice. Not surprisingly, there is a lot of collective energy surrounding this event that is available to you now.

Old patterns have come out to play this past week, and it’s not uncommon to have had the sense of being hit over the head with a hammer, one that perhaps you thought you had dispensed with long ago. Even people accustomed to self-work and introspection can find themselves faced with long-familiar sensations dredged up from the buried past.

If this is you, remember that the energy is fleeting, at least in the grand scheme of things, and that you are in control of how you feel. In other words, what you are experiencing will change into something else (the Law of Impermanence), and regardless of what you are feeling, you can determine where that takes you. Perhaps, more than any other “lesson” available to you now, this concept is the most profound and life-changing.

Let’s examine this further. It is true that there are energies and influences “out there,” floating around in the ethers, that are likely to affect you. Understanding that your interaction with the universe, i.e. you vs. not-you, is a give-and-take or at least a two-way street is helpful. You are not subject to the whims of the universe; you are a contributing part OF the universe and therefore can determine how that interaction takes place. But this may require a paradigm shift of sorts, especially if you’re accustomed to allowing yourself to feel disempowered or disconnected from your own process.

You decide how you feel.

Getting there isn’t always easy. When you’re sensitive to energies around you, whether they are from people, people’s emotions, your community, or the world, it can be difficult to discern what is you and what is not-you, especially since on some level there is always the understanding of our constant underlying connection and oneness. The intensity and retro nature of this week’s Solstice Full Moon Eclipse is a prime example. You are likely feeling the effects of this through being presented with patterns, dynamics and feelings that are either exquisitely familiar (and perhaps in a not-so-good way) or that you thought were long put away.

Welcome to the opportunity that you give yourself to finally release these patterns.

Self work is not a linear process. When you think you are finished with something, it nearly always comes up again in some other way. This isn’t a test but an opportunity to see a familiar thing differently. Imagine peeling an apple, beginning from the stem end, in one long spiral that reaches around and around the globular shape of the apple. Stretched out, the peel is long, reaching perhaps the distance from one outstretched hand to another if held taut. Looped loosely in a pile, the apple peel’s edges touch other edges, giving birth to new interactions. What was once part of one side of the apple now can touch an area that had been around the other side of the apple, two parts that never would have met except through the wholeness of the apple itself. Self work is like the spiral peel of the apple. What was once now comes around again, but in different form. It looks and feels the same but you can choose to view it differently.

Now is the time we ease more firmly into our true heartspace, whether for ourselves or for humanity or for all awareness. This Solstice Full Moon Lunar Eclipse holds a container for an energetic shift, if we should so choose to walk through that doorway. The slow shift into heart-centered awareness takes place regardless of how we approach our spiral apple peels individually, but understand that conscious awareness of movement nearly always feels better than a stab in the dark.

You choose what to do with the energies available to you this week. Do you look backward and heal old wounds? Do you look forward into the brightness of what you create? Do you expand laterally into the Now of your every breath? All choices are valid, and all lead to growth. All choices help support the overall tapestry of creation that unfolds in every moment.

What will you choose? Whatever you choose to do with what is available to you in THIS moment, choose with your whole heart and your whole being. Choose what supports you most in this moment. And then step through that doorway into your What Comes Next.