Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun. Because of the orange-red colour of its surface, it is known as the Red Planet. Ancient peoples associated this reddish hue with blood or fire, and therefore with violence, battle, and war. As a result, the Romans named the planet after Mars, their God of War.

Mars is a rocky planet with a surface similar to that of Earth’s deserts. However, Mars retains some water, both in the ground and in small amounts in its atmosphere, where it forms cirrus clouds, fog, frost, extensive polar regions of permafrost, and ice caps, though it has no bodies of liquid water on its surface. Owing to its geological history, the possibility of past or present life on Mars remains an active area of scientific research, with some potential traces requiring further study.

The Taoist View
In Taoist, or Chinese, astrology, the planets are seen as the purest symbols of personality, as well as of human emotional and social behaviour. The planetary realm is understood as the realm of the soul.

Mars represents the desire for independence. It symbolises the development of the conscious ego, in contrast to cultures where the group functions as a single unit and is considered more important than the individual.

Masculine and Future-Oriented
Mars is the planet that rules the element of Fire. It relates to the tongue, speech, and the physical heart. Mars energy is masculine and future-oriented.

When our Mars energy is too strong in relation to the other elements that make up our being, it can lead to aggression and excessive talkativeness. If the element of Fire is too weak, the heart’s function becomes withdrawn and the person feels weak.

Your Connection with Source
The element of Fire is not a physical fire; it is an inner energy, or chi. It represents the incarnating spark, the light that allows the soul to express itself through the heart. Fire houses your spirit, your consciousness, and your connection with Source.

The heart is the organ that has a direct connection with Source. It holds your soul’s desire, like a quiet inner voice that gently guides you on where to go. It is what drives you, inspires you, and calls you forward.

Fire is the most relational of the five elements. It governs love, communication, expression, empathy, and our ability to give and receive warmth.

Survival Mode
Life presents us with challenges that can hurt us in many different ways, and as a result we often close off our hearts and slip into survival mode. A guarded heart can then lead to a way of being in which we lose the ability to connect freely with others, to love ourselves, and to receive warmth.

Isolating the heart from the love within and around us may feel like a successful strategy for avoiding the pain of past trauma and protecting ourselves from future hurt. In truth, however, it is an act of self-abandonment. We leave the heart alone to carry its burden of devastation.

The difficulty with any pain we bury within ourselves is that it does not dissolve on its own.

There is only One Way Through
There is only one way through such pain. To find inner peace and become whole again, we need to embrace and love all the parts of ourselves that have been abandoned or forgotten. To do this, we must reconnect with our guarded heart and gently ask what it needs.

The heart’s answer will be very simple: ‘Love.’

The heart is the organ of love, and all it truly wishes to do is allow love to flow freely from its supreme connection with Source into your life and the world around you.

Setting you Free
This is where the essence vibration of the planet Mars comes in. As the ruler of the element of Fire, Mars is here to help you connect with the deepest layers of your heart and to support you in freeing it from any unresolved burdens.

Slowly and gently, the Fire of Mars will ‘burn’ its way towards your heart’s ‘locker’, where your deepest pain has been locked away. It may have been stored there at a very young age, and you may have long since forgotten it was there.

Six Healing Phases
During the intake of the essence vibration of Mars, you may surrender to its loving fire as it gently guides you through the following – sometimes simultaneous – healing phases:

1. Reconnection with your heart’s ability to experience love
2. Reconnection with the pain that once struck your heart so deeply that you did not know how to process it, and therefore buried it within
3. Reconciliation with the life challenge that caused you to guard your heart
4. Reconnection with your heart’s resilience and its ability to open up again
5. Re-ignition of your heart fire, now free from blockage
6. Reconnection with the love within you and all around you

Heart-opening Process
This heart-opening process is highly transformative:

• Reconnecting with your heart’s ability to experience love strengthens the will to make the very best of your life.
• Re-igniting your unblocked heart fire helps you to surrender once more to your life mission.
• Reconciling with the challenge that led you to guard your heart provides inner sovereignty in a world full of choices and distractions.

The Mantra for Each Intake
When using the essence vibration of Mars, please place both hands on your heart and speak the following mantra with each intake:

‘I invite planet Mars to sustain my love for life’.

With all my love,
Harriët