You may wonder what a recitation of the authors personal woes and a particularly smelly process has to do with being sane, spiritual and having a life of your own. I shall endeavour to elucidate their connection by delving into the arcane realm of astrology's Twelfth House and the more pragmatic domain of agriculture. Since most of us are more familiar with food production than astrology, I shall begin with the latter.

It is generally agreed that proper nutrition is necessary for life and all creatures have specific nutritional requirements. Most primates would not thrive on a diet of hay and grass, while sheep, cattle and goats seem to relish it. Likewise, foods suitable to adult creatures are rarely appropriate to infants of the same species. Human beings have a predilection for making moral judgements on nearly every aspect of life. This is why we stigmatize certain foods as bad or junk, while advocating others good or healthy. Bad foods are often addictive and possess little nutritional value. I think coffee, chocolate, white sugar and saturated fat products belong in this category. Good foods are what we often have trouble getting our children to consume. These include broccoli, spinach, tofu and the like.

Then we have the debate between proponents of organic or natural food and those who simply want to spend less money on vegetables. I am torn between buying calcium in a bottle, eating large amounts of canned sardines or ignoring warnings about the dangers of dairy products. Half of my friends claim they are lactose intolerant and numerous others suffer from idiosyncratic food allergies. This has made it rather difficult to host a moderate dinner party and has turned the once pleasurable phenomenon of sharing food with friends and family into the equivalent of a major medical procedure.

So intense have issues of healthy food versus non-organic, irradiated, or genetically altered unhealthy food become during the last quarter of the twentieth century that the subject of nutrition has been raised to the level of a religion. Exponents of macrobiotic, fruitarian diets and devotees of the "whats good for you" and whats bad gang, fight for our attention. I recall a youthful vegetarian passionately inquiring, "do you want your stomach to be a graveyard for butchered animals?" He even labeled my banana bread as "non-organic" because I used eggs in it.

Another would be Guru of "natural foods" solemnly informed me the reason why I enjoyed or even desired certain foods was because they were toxic. He offered to test my state of "auto-toxicity" by testing my muscle strength after he named the food I admitted enjoying. A lovely vegan (vegans do not eat anything derived from an animal) said learning to get over the notion that food was supposed to bring pleasure or satisfy her taste buds was a very difficult process, but "she was glad she accomplished it." Perhaps, food should be judged on How politically correct and nutritional it is, rather than what it tastes like.

However, no matter how much I would like to take on food cults and the digestion fixated proponents of these emerging religions, my objective here, is to examine the metaphor of consumption. Briefly, no matter how nutritional a food is, it eventually turns into a waste product. This product can be transformed into an essential growth substance. My purpose is to examine how one can turn "shit" into fertilizer.

Consider the connection between all forms of consumption. In the case of agriculture, the soil is prepared, the seeds are planted, fertilizer is applied and eventually the plant is harvested, purchased, eaten and digested. This process generates physical energy, collects fat cells, and produces an odorous waste product. Similarly, the soil of our minds and hearts are cultivated, seeds of affection, of anxiety, belief and information are planted. Eventually these produce a set of expectations and standards. We rely upon this set of preferences and assumptions to judge our contemporaries, our society, and ourselves.

Too often we depend upon an underdeveloped and inadequate set of standards to evaluate our lives or others. For example, if a pickpocket looked at a saint, he might only see the size and location of his pockets. Then there are those who believe where there's smoke there must be fire and bad things don't happen to good people. The assumption that personal and social problems are evidence of wrongdoing only serves to compound such problems. I believe everything we take in, be it spiritual, intellectual, emotional or material eventually produces a waste product. Shit is an element of the natural cycle of life and bears a distinct relationship to the process of consumption as well as elimination.

Nasty things are part of life and no matter how carefully we arrange our affairs, every so often shit happens. Furthermore, I believe most of us prefer to avoid the self-indulgent perspective of victim consciousness and be sane, spiritual and cultivate a life of our own. If you agree with me, you need to realize that pain, frustration and suffering is a natural consequence of participating in life. This doesn't mean one has to like it! However, condemning or criticizing an unpleasant situation doesn't rectify it and quite often impairs our ability to cope with it. No matter how wholesome our diets are, or how carefully we avoid the unpleasant things of life we still need to deal with our waste products.

We can try to eliminate our shit, pretend it doesnt exist, flush it down the toilet, bury it in the back yard, or deposit it in the compost bin. We can conceal its odorous nature, through the careful application of perfumes and air fresheners. Some of us try to put it to work by making crude bombs, generating methane gas or enhancing the productive potential of soil. It is also possible to become psychically constipated and improve ones anal retentiveness. The proverbial stiff upper lip and strong, silent type seem to favor this approach, especially when it comes to emotional waste products. We can also pump ourselves full of intellectual laxatives and end up with a kind of verbal diarrhea typical of therapy addicts and the "Ain't it awful" crowd. Some of us even store up our grievances and use them to justify or explain our lack of progress. (The author quite often subscribes to this method.)

Each of these methods has its merits, in most cases its simply a question of where to put our waste products, when to keep them to ourselves, who to share them with, and how much to share. However, before you develop your "shit altering" mechanisms, you need to accept crap, garbage and rotten, dirty messes as a natural consequence of living! Once you achieve this type of awareness, you can move on to the process of acceptance, detachment, transformation and rebirth.

This brings me to the mysterious realm of the Twelfth House and its role in astrological interpretation. Many peoples understanding of astrology is limited to their Sun sign. If you were born on March 15Th, your Sun is in Pisces and your temperament could be described as emotionally sensitive and empathic. However, in addition to the 12 signs of the zodiac, there are 12 houses. While signs describe various kinds of temperaments and personal traits, each House represents a type of experience.

A House poses a challenge, which assists the astrological quest for personal growth and individuation. The Twelfth House is the final area of experience; it symbolizes all social limitations, the consequences of success and failure, collective misfortune and their effects. The accumulated residue of negative and positive experiences collects in the Twelfth House and can produce quite a stink if one doesnt deal with it. By coming to terms with the contents of our Twelfth house, we learn to accept what can't be altered about our lives, our history and the world. We make peace with ourselves, transcend the results of social and personal conflicts and achieve rebirth.

Any person who seeks a spiritual awakening, or goes into therapy is traversing the realm of the Twelfth House. The key to this area of experience is accepting responsibility while eliminating shame and guilt. The acquisition of compassion and awareness of the underlying unity of all living creatures is equally important. This is not an easy journey. There are no road maps and no guarantees except those of pain, fear and confusion. However, if you want to turn the waste products of your life into an enriched substance for personal growth here are a few techniques.

(I am going to assume that you have acknowledged the natural, non-demonic, non-conspiratorial existence of suffering. If you are looking for someone or something to blame for your sorrows, you need to consult another guru. I am also assuming that you believe enough in your own strength, not to wait for a fairy godmother to make everything all better for you. This is a difficult task but a necessary one.)

The first technique is: surrender to your feelings of pain and hurt. Let your howling infant and weeping child loose. This stage involves weeping, howling, beating your pillows or vigorously hurling yourself on the mattress. I prefer pillow beating and mattress hurling over wall punching, but if you are into breaking bricks, feel free. If you are going to reach the stage of acceptance, you need to Own your Pain and that means feeling all of it. Don't worry, no one ever died from crying too hard and if your friends and family have trouble with your "excessive emotionality" simply remember it is your life not theirs!

Once you run out of tears or feel emotionally exhausted, you might be ready for the next step, detachment. This technique entails focusing on something other than your pain. It doesn't mean to pretend the problem is solved, has gone away or doesn't exist. Denial of pain and suffering is a retreat from sanity and it doesn't do much for your spirituality either! This technique helps you create a space between yourself and your issues. I find physical activity such as taking a long walk, scrubbing the floor, washing the car, moving your living room furniture around, and doing your ironing creates such a space. If you are of the couch potato affiliation you might try watching something relatively mindless on the tube. I personally prefer karate type action films; however, my mother has reported positive results from Hollywood Sitcoms. This technique involves our inner child or adolescent. This is why you need to avoid any activity that involves abstraction and logical processing; while reactivating your sense of personal power and choice.

The third technique in this process is examination. It utilizes the relatively adult process of defining, expressing and sharing the pain. You might choose to write out the issues, draw pictures of them or share them within a non-judgmental context. Such an environment should involve a supportive friend or family member, a psychologist, therapy group or crisis line counselor. It is important to feel comfortable with such a person or group. It is crucial to share your feelings with those who do not try to solve the problem or play the rescue game. You need to be as honest and forthright as possible and abandon all ideas of saving face.

However, do not attempt to hasten this process or any of these techniques! All too often we avoid or deny pain by pretending our adult self has regained control, it no longer hurts, or we discovered some magic solution to the problem. Human beings are masters of self-deception, fully capable of convincing themselves of the following myth.

"I am the master of my own fate! I am the conquering hero who has banished the dragons of fear and anxiety. Nothing can hurt me! Nothing has ever really hurt me! If something or someone tries to breach the impregnable walls of my self control, they will be frozen out by the icy wind of my utter Coolness!"

The illusion that ones rational, objective, adult Self is in control is a myth formulated and promoted by an adolescent fear of loosing face. For all its bravado and seeming individuality, the adolescent self is profoundly dependent on the admiration, respect and acceptance of others. This may be why so many of us prefer to deny the real face of suffering than do something about it and why we cling to our pain rather than change our ways.

This brings me to the problematic nature of suffering and ultimate solutions. Many people believe for every experience of pain, personal crisis, or problem there is a perfect solution. Such people regard a problem as questions in a mathematics quiz. Such a perspective encourages the fallacy that all one needs to do with an issue is find an appropriate technique, apply it and then the problem will go away. This is true as long as our issues have a mathematical nature. Unfortunately, most problems are circular. They keep coming back again and again and the best we can do is reduce the stress they create or come up with a new issue to trouble us.

A wise person once told me that God tests us in our area of weakness until we turn that weakness into strength. This may be so, but I tend to believe that problems exist to remind us we are still alive and life wasn't designed to produce a maximum of comfort.