Find Harmony Within Dissonance

This is part of a series exploring the seven lower Sephirot (spheres) of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. These spheres are the seven core emotions that drive human interaction.

This week we are exploring the sephirah of Tiferet. Tiferet integrates the realms of Chesed, love and expansion, with Gevurah, which creates space through restriction and restraint, to create something that transcends the sum of its parts.

disruption abounds
as Sun conjuncts Uranus
let go or be dragged

when disruption comes
seek out hidden harmony
within dissonance

I love it when my esoteric practices some together in divine synchronicity.

Today brings a significant astrology transit that offers the perfect place to practice the specific trait of today’s sephirotic pairing.

Upheaval and Discord

Today Uranus, the planet of upheaval, innovation, and change, the planet of breakthroughs and breakdowns, comes into a conjunction with the Sun. Uranus is a slow-moving planet, so we’e been building to this moment for a while. And yet it still feels disruptive.

The seeds of revolution, currently planted in the fertile earth of Taurus, are sprouting, causing earthquakes and reverberations that are designed to shake us out of our comfortable routines. Uranus is an ungrounding and destabilizing force.

This is even more pronounced in Taurus, a sign known for savoring life’s comforts and its stubborn resistance to change.

I am feeling this transit acutely, as it is also playing out in my personal chart: my natal sun is in Taurus, currently conjunct Uranus.

In the song of life, this conjunction feels like a dissonant chord: jarring, disruptive, unpleasant. It feels like everything is going wrong and getting uprooted. In my personal chart, astrologers say that Uranus conjunct your natal sun is like an ego death. It certainly fees like it.

In a beautiful omen to synchronicity, this is the day in the Omer dedicated to Hod of Tiferet.

Finding Harmony in Dissonance

Tiferet is about finding harmony within a situation; combining love and restraint in way that transcends each component to create something new. Hod speaks to gratitude, surrender, and order.

In contrast to Netzach of Tiferet, which is about recognizing and finding obstacles to achieving harmony, Hod of Tiferet encourages us to see the harmony that already exists in the situation.

Not every “problem” is a problem that needs to be fixed.

This can be a difficult lesson to absorb if you’re conditioned to always seek out and solve the problems, or if you believe you must constantly push to reach a higher plane.

Rabbi Gavriel Goldfeder explains that

Hod of Tiferet calls upon us to relax, to be touched and nourished by the already-present richness of the situiation.

A musical composition contains dissonant chords. Sometimes a composer will resolve a chord and bring the dissonance into harmony. And sometimes the dissonance is the point. The dissonance is the harmony; the harmony is within the dissonance.

Seeing the harmony that is already there helps me to see more places where things are in harmony.

I find astrology to be helpful in this task; understanding the transits and how they can affect my life helps me put the dissonance within a larger context; I can see that there is harmony here, and that I am a note in that harmonic chord.

Practicing Hod of Tiferet invites me to surrender and allow the song to play out on its own timing.