Like many of us who have walked a path of inner healing, I have used a 12-step program. I meditate and practice several healing art forms to calm and center me.

I enjoy regular yoga, journaling, long walks and bodywork to release my monkey-mind and moments of anger, frustration and worry. As Thich Nhat Hanh teaches, I practice being peace.

But in spite of all the vigilance, like a psychic boomerang, certain old ghosts come back to haunt me. For a long time I’d think: What am I doing wrong? Why can’t I let go and let God? Why am I still attached to this old pattern or person?

Since the dwarf-planet Pluto slipped into the sign of Capricorn, my opinion on my letting-go limitations has shifted.

Pluto was the god of the Underworld, so to an astrologer he symbolizes death, birth, resurrection, surrender and transformation.

With all these impressive key words, his would be the realm of 12-step programs, addictions and letting go. Because Pluto has been in the sign of Capricorn since 2008 (yes! the financial earthquake), we are in a period where we need to make transformation more concrete.

Capricorn is about the tangible, it strives to do what it must to achieve the goal. So if we are concretizing the concept of letting go; it is time to recycle.

Energy cannot be created or destroyed.

As a result, when we let go of an addiction, person, belief system or situation, we must transform our relationship with it. Otherwise, we let it go and it hangs out in the ether, waiting to become something else.

When I let go of my ex-husband, the person disappeared from my life. But something remained; a phantom piece of my psyche which I religiously scrubbed until every fragment seemed to evaporate as though it never existed.

Yet years later, he pops up – in dreams or in found objects. I realize I cannot exorcise such a formative part of my life and I no longer want to. What I have to do is recycle it.

I have no idea who he is as a person anymore, but I do know he is still part of my cellular structure. Since all people in our lives teach us about parts of ourselves, to simply let go without transforming a relationship, may always leave us wanting.

This is not something I can do or wish to do with this actual human being, but I can certainly recycle what he represents in my psyche.

Instead of tossing out that plastic bottle of grief, addiction, limitation in your brain: consider transmuting it.

When I threw out the negative, I also discarded the positive.

Since I’ve been recycling my psyche, I feel less fractured. I realize this is a radical concept for many people, but for me it has made the difference between dismembering a part of who I am as opposed to performing reconstruction.

In recycling the psyche, I now look for ways to change that lead into gold.