The Need to Be Seen

Attachment and the Need to be Seen

My favorite definition of secure attachment comes from Marian Dunlea, the creator of BodyDreaming. To Marian, secure attachment means “knowing you exist in the mind of the other.”

It really is that simple. And it really is that essential. Secure attachment is the foundation from which we feel the safety and trust to risk moving out into the world. (Kind of gives you a whole new way to consider the archetype of Leo, which so often gets shamed for representing this most fundamental of needs.)

No matter our past patterns, there are ways to experience secure attachment now. Thanks to neural plasticity and the living nature of the human psyche, our bodies and psyches both—as two sides of the same coin—can weave experiences of trusting life.

Astrology and the Experience of Knowing You Exist in the Mind of the Other

To me, there is something about the language of astrology, about symbols as ancient as human consciousness itself, and stories that emerged from the depths of the human psyche. This language has the capacity to hold us, to awaken experiences of being seen.

You see, the language of astrology is not fixed, is not linear, and is *not* literal. It is cyclic and steeped in symbol, myth, and imagery. Nothing in it is static. Everything element of it is in motion within a cycle, and everything is relational.

Just as ancient neolithic sights create a sense of sacred location, of place, through inter-visibility between sacred sites, so the language of astrology depicts the qualities of a moment in time, where a sense of sacred location can be experienced through the inter-visibility of planets, stars, sky, and earthly seasons.

We might say that the syntax of this cyclic language is itself the archetypal feminine, looking down from her black dome, Nyx, the ancient “waters above.”

Jung was convinced that, with the collapse of collective myths the world over, the human psyche did not lose its need for myth. Rather, psyche needs to discover and live its own personal myth. You have Your Very Own Myth too… and it was alive in the sky over the place and time of your birth.

To interact soulfully with astrology is one way to experience our lives as existing in the mind of the anima Mundi, the soul of the world, the consciousness that pervades the matter of the Cosmos and the Psyche. When you experience resonance between the tuning fork of your body and the music of the spheres, you sense that the Earth herself and even the cosmos sees you; that it wove for you a myth in the heavens that can open you the archetypal forces unfolding through your life: Your Very Own Myth.

And through our own earthen star myth, we can experience something of secure attachment, of knowing we exist in the mind of the other: the mind and soul of the cosmos. Not by believing something. By experiencing it directly.