October brings with it the energy of listening.  People are beginning not only to hear themselves but also to hear one another.  This is a change over previously, and in some ways signifies a burgeoning sense of connection to one another that hadn’t existed before.  You may find this manifesting most especially in your personal relationships, wherein you find a new awareness of what others are saying, beyond your previous perceptions of this.  There is the energy, then, of invitation to a new level of awareness among and between you.  This is the corollary to last month’s energy of introspection coupled with chagrin at global change.

So what does this mean, “listening”?  How is this different from how you perceived yourself and others in the past?

For one thing, your own sense of self-awareness has deepened.  Not just for a few of you, although your paths do not always coincide or move along at the same rate as one another, but on a collective level this is something you are choosing at this time.  Understand that the repercussions of such enhanced self-awareness, when taken on such a large level, are far-reaching.  Change does not always feel “good” at first, but there is most assuredly a feeling of movement.  Some of you like this feeling very much and some feel frightened by it.  Some people feel more in control when there is heightened self-awareness, encouraging others to also reach greater self-awareness, and others feel trapped by what they perceive is the darkness within.  Everyone of course manifests this change in different ways, each person bearing his own unique way of perceiving.

Coming back to our theme of “listening,” then, this is what we see:  because there is this deepened self-awareness, there is then a turning-away from the need for introspection, to some extent.  Not fully, of course, because this path is one many of you follow much of the time, but for now, this month, there is a movement toward finding out what this means.  You are looking to use the skills you have developed and identified during last month’s deepening, and you can mainly do so through interaction with others.  So this month becomes a gathering-in, a focus outward from yourself, to feel the pulse of what else is going on around you.  You then find yourselves more fully and in a more defined manner within that larger context of understanding what is around you.

You are listening, then, this month for changes in the pulse, the heartbeat, surrounding you.  By doing so you find your own sense of inner aliveness heightening.

This IS a time of change, yes, and it is also a time for deepening your understanding and awareness of that change and how you are affected by it, even as it swirls seemingly in chaos around you.  The inner core of that chaos, you yourself and the inner core of you that is the You That Is at its deepest level, is still there, still strong, and still present even though things swirl around you.

--Polaris, channeled by Karen Murphy October 6, 2008