Virgo's 2nd Decan Influence: "Devotion" (Sep 2nd - Sep 12th)

Virgo's Second Decan Influence (Sept. 2nd to Sept. 11th) is "Devotion", a noun meaning "dedication", "loyalty" or "faithfulness."

Typically our concept of devotion suggests a loyal attachment to people, places, and things, bringing up loving feelings for family, stirring up pride for a job or craft, and revealing admiration towards our higher power. Our devotion to these things implies we harbor no intentions of abandoning or betraying them.

We are attracted to situations that make us feel good - people, like our children or our grandparents, places like a park or a pub, and things like a particular brand of tools or clothing. But being devoted to situations like these only makes us feel good temporarily. Situations change - people, places, and things change - mismatching the object we are devoted to with the thing that exists in its place now.

Through a deeper, functional understanding of devotion, we learn how we can use just such a loyal attachment in a way where it becomes a tool for empowering us to create changes to our circumstances. More than just the soaring admiration we envision upon hearing the word, "devotion" is a key that unlocks - or rather helps create - the path to wisdom: the inevitable result of continuous experience overtime.

By devoting ourselves to a sustainable focus, our devotions can serve a greater purpose than temporary highs of loving admiration followed by dry apathy when our devotion has run its course, or crushing heartbreak when our devotion is severed unexpectedly.

"Life, which perishes in a moment, has at its essence exhaustion and want of development. Therefore, remain modest in the midst of it all." - Elegant Sayings, pg. 8

We all know the crash that comes from a misplaced devotion - the debilitating exhaustion of our loyal offerings being wasted. But choosing a stable, more time-resistant devotion can actually help relieve this exhaustion by properly channeling these energies, our emotional investments, into a sustainable process that efficiently uses the energies of our exhaustion and desire for change, fueling a process that changes our reality the way WE choose, and giving them the proper time to do so. Without an understanding of this process, we can find ourselves instead being stuck in an energy-sucking black hole of endless exhaustion.

Step 1: Desire Change

By misplacing our devotions a few times, we begin to realize that it's not comfortable to feel so exhausted all the time. We may come to believe our resulting exhaustion means that devotion itself is a harmful, useless, wasteful or foolish use of our energy. But exhaustion does have a useful and proper place in the process of creation. Over time, exhaustion creates a desire for change. This relation between exhaustion and desire for change is intrinsic to the very essence of life itself. Like a seed shedding its sheath, a snake shedding its skin, and a crab shedding its shell in search of a bigger one, when we shed what no longer fits us, we leave behind inefficient and exhaustive uses of our energy, and we progress.

Step 2: Define a Focus

So we desire change. Great - now what? If we desire change, but have no formulated idea as to what, do we desire something unattainable? Do we desire something that doesn't even exist? Why does our desire for nothing exhaust us so greatly? Left undefined, this wanting and desiring for something different has no way to escape us, no grounded outlet to channel this exhaustion away from us, and so it will continually roll over on itself while sapping us of the energy and attention it needs from us to remain.

By defining our devotions based on timeless concepts like truth, virtue, or wisdom, we create a foundation by which certain habits and patterns can be set into motion, like planets orbiting the Sun. The stronger our foundation, the longer this cycle can endure; planets do not revolve around a newly forming protostar, but around an actual and clearly defined one. So too do our devotions need a solid, stable core to direct our desires, and in turn our actions, in a centrifugal sort of way that makes them effective, self-sustaining, and personally empowering.

Step 3: Devote to Focus

Now that we've arranged our exhaustion and desire for change around our defined focus, it's time to set a goal for change. By setting a goal, we commit our actions to the process of efficiently using our exhaustion, and we gain momentum. This commitment is a result of our devotion, and this momentum is our escape from exhaustion. We revolve our exhaustions and actions around our focus, setting goals with our devoted focus in mind, directing our energy into actions that make progress towards our defined goal, and in turn end up back where we began, feeling spent again. As we experience what it is actually like to do this, we personally gain the knowledge of this experience. And if we gain knowledge through experience, then devoting ourselves to a focus over time creates a connected series of continually strung experiences, a series of events we have personally experienced to be true, resulting in a wisdom about that experience we come to know directly for ourselves. The more timeless our focus is, the more stable our foundation is. The more stable our foundation is, the longer this process of continually strung experiences can continue, and the longer we can devote our attention to it. The longer we devote our attention to any one thing, the greater the number of continually strung experience we have, and so the greater the wisdom we earn for ourselves.

Without devotion, we might as well start over brand-new everyday. If we're not willing to do that, why not sharpen our awareness of what the opposite might be, and what elements the mastery of this process might both require and produce.

We are led by our emotions through the uplifting feelings of love, pride, and admiration to devotions we are initially happy and excited to commit to, but to have long-lasting devotion we must have something long-lasting to attach it to. The longer our focus lasts, the longer we can devote our attention to it, and the more wisdom we can derive from it. By devoting ourselves to timeless ideas instead of temporary circumstances, we can create a process with a solid foundation with which to build our lives upon - a process that empowers us to have a hand in defining and creating what we'd rather have in our lives. Without this process, this structure, our emotions rule our energies like waves in the ocean, and our feelings are at the mercy of the tides. But with an understanding of the bigger picture, this process shows us how our devotions can use our emotions to earn us wisdom. The wisdom we earn on our own is knowledge we can trust to guide us truthfully forever...and it is only through devotion that our emotions can earn us wisdom.

**For an instructional article on the process of setting goals effectively, visit here:http://leetea.hubpages.com/hub/Goal-Setting-Manifesting-What-I-Want-into-What-I-Have