Sagittarius is the sign of overarching perspective, of the big picture, and Gemini is the sign of information, data, questions and more questions. We may want more information, to have our questions answered, and maybe we even think if we had all the right answers and puzzle pieces in place, the answers would save us. But Neptune, square this “searching for answers” axis, doesn’t work that way.  At this full moon, there is no one right answer because what’s required in order for our confusing situation to shift is not a solution or answer per se but an expansion of consciousness. This doesn’t arrive via email, Amazon.com or another person; you can’t clear things up with a big relationship talk, at least not right now. Instead, it’s a sloooow inward process of surrendering and opening. We may want to make a move but feel immobilized, paralyzed, uncertain about the future. At this moment, that’s exactly as it should be. Sometimes the only answer we can trust for sure is, “I don’t know where to go, what to do.”

This week, I’ve had poison oak spring up out of the blue, and then a parasite infection may be resurfacing. Neptune rules my Sixth House of Health – my Achilles heel. I wish there was one right answer for my ailing health, like taking an aspirin for a headache; experience has told me there is not. It’s more like searching for a needle in a haystack, and this act of seeking has impelled my life’s journey. Sagittarius rules the Journeyor and Seeker in all of us, the Gypsy and Philosopher, the hungry, searching part of us who is a stranger in a strange land, searching for an overarching meaning to life’s mystery and its endless questions, searching for home.

Neptune shares Sagittarius’ divine restlessness which comes in the form of a longing, a craving and hunger for something we want and don’t have.  What are you most longing for?  Are you sure? Murky Neptune can cause us to think we want something really badly, when what we actually need is something else. Eclipses are designed for cleaning up, letting go, in an area of life, and this full moon lunar eclipse asks us to slow down, to create the time and space for awareness and realization to occur. Hold the space for new consciousness to enter the natal houses in which Neptune and this eclipse axis falls, and for confusion to exit. This week don’t try to solve the world’s problems, or even your own. And don’t get distracted by your, or someone else’s, crazy. That’s Neptune, too.  Nurture your Spirit. Trust. Know that the puzzle pieces will fall into place. Know that when the world becomes too confusing, flummoxing, bewildering, nonsensical, hard to pin down, the voice we can always trust is the small still one inside.

Here’s a list of ways to look at and work with Neptune, excerpted from Tracy Marks’ book The Astrology of Self-Discovery.

-Neptune may blind us to our real feelings and needs and keep us engaged in internal dramas which seem to lead nowhere and which have little relevance to our actual circumstances.

-We may be struggling with the wrong problems or asking the wrong questions.

-We may not be ready to make a change because pieces are still missing in our development, which will be provided in the future. We may not have become yet who we need to become in order to move further in one particular realm of our lives.

-We may not see clearly because seeing it can be painful…It (seeing clearly) might mean facing the internal emptiness, or lack of love in our marriage. It might destroy our dreams and illusions.

-Neptune rarely helps us cope with external reality and concrete issues; it is more concerned with awakening our inner self and our sources of inspiration. One of the more positive benefits of confusion is that it may motivate us to contact the center of our being and to discover the capabilities or our intuition and inner guidance.

image source: http://mickiekent.blogspot.com

I know money talk is a cultural taboo, it touches a lot of trigger buttons, but since this eclipse falls right on the cusp of my taboo-ey Eighth House – of “other people’s values and money”-I’m going to talk about it. Since other people’s values, therefore their money, make up the small nut of income I pull in, I need to say that I am so grateful there are people out there, people like you, who value my work enough to pay for it. You are blessed aberrations, freaks even, and I love you for it. Gratitude is always my first prayer.  But trust you me when I tell you I am only being realistic in saying that my services aren’t monetarily valued (rewarded) in the world in the way other things are. When people are ‘amazed’ that I earn some kind of living doing what I do – a small and unrealistic figure compared to what it costs to live in the world today – frankly, so am I. Our culture so clearly values certain things above others: technology over preventative and holistic medicine, pharmacology over cognitive psychologists, almost everything else over astrology, materialism over spirituality… I saw this on my recent trip to Thailand, where shopping malls haven’t yet displaced the temples. It showed in the peaceful, kind faces of Thais. Cultures erect enormous temples to what they honor; today the highest building in any American city is often a bank.

Value is subjective; it is always question of perceived worth. Maybe there’s no price higher than the price of freedom, but for some people, staying in a job or relationship out of security is far costlier. Unfortunately, more often than not, we are scared into staying stuck and playing it safe, by the people and institutions around us. Our personal values are shaped by our cultural, social values and programming far more than we probably realize, and so the temples the collective has chosen to erect (to beauty, materialism, power, technology, youth) will always subtly and overtly erode our self-worth and confidence, our understanding of our true worth and value as a person, deeply limiting who we think we are capable of  being, what we’re capable of doing in the world. There are plenty of people who will tell you otherwise, but finding spiritual-material congruence – aligning with the values, gifts, talents and abilities your authentic self has to offer the world and offering them -will financially, spiritually, materially support you. The greater the difference between what you versus the collective values, the costlier it is to wrangle, but worth is worth wrangling for.

Taurus New Moon slows us down, asks us to honor simplicity in our lives, the pleasures of creature comforts, to resourcefully add value to our life, take a chance on appreciating our worth; Taurus New Moon Solar Eclipse pushes the boundaries of our comfort zones. We may feel insecure, question the value of our worth, talents and abilities. Insecurity, low self confidence, are signs it’s time to become spiritually congruent with our true values, to shake up our thinking about money, security and worth.

There are questions we might ask right now, to intentionally stir the pot a little. Am I paying too much for my money? Am I honouring my true values and gifts in my life by acting on them, or am I playing it safe at a cost? What and who do I build a temple to in your life? Do they/it deserve it? What defines my worth? What limits it? Of course the worthiest worth is the worth we give our self. Every time we value our self, we gain. Every time we measure our worth by what other people or society values and rewards, we lose. This is the easy math of Taurus, the simple knowing of what feels good and right to the animal inside.

If new moons herald endings and new beginnings, solar eclipses are super new moon doorways, heralding far bigger endings and beginnings. As we revisit what’s keeping us from tapping those peaceful, easy feelings of pleasure, the abundance and self-worthiness we most want in an area of life, we can flip the switch, seize the opportunity to advance 10 steps forward in that same area.  Since the days following a new moon are potent for intentions, make the commitment to value and increase your personal worth over the next few days. If you’re on the ledge of truly valuing your self – of taking a leap on your gifts, taking that risk, making that decision that will pay dividends in self-worth – as the old saying goes, “It’s time to put your money where your mouth is.”

John and I quickly decided we couldn’t live without each other; time was made irrelevant by the fact that we had found our other half. There is no more glorious feeling than finally finding the one you love. Cue: angel wings and the horns of heaven. So why then was the first year of our relationship so fraught with dramatic fights, fears and cry-fests (mostly mine)? During that first year of commitment we seemed to bring out one another’s worst fears. He: that no woman would want to commit to a man who already had three children. He had proof of this, as a staggeringly high number of single women refused to give him, a single father, a chance. He also had other, more personal fears I won’t name here, irrational fears whose origins still bewilder me today.  As for me, I ping-ponged back and forth between caretaking his fears and verily actualizing my worst nightmare. Every fight was another opportunity for him to abandon me, for me to abandon me. Every fight inspired an ancient anxiety in me, the feeling I needed to flee, to save myself from being hurt. I was so deeply afraid that every argument meant our relationship was over, and so defiant in my self-protective instinct to save myself before it happened, this virtually guaranteed a fight would end up leading to that deep dark place in myself. My yo-yo behaviour could cause me to walk away, or plea in tears for his understanding. Sometimes I would go cold as ice while internally hugging my fragile Self  (held together by band-aids, paper clips, chewing gum at this point) so tightly that I would come close to hyperventilation –a nod to the way I used to hold my breath as a child when my parents would fight. Where was the self-aware, courageous, open-hearted person he fell in love with? I was becoming a hot mess.

It was horrible and glorious at once, to be so in so much love and so much hurt. Both of us knew we were one another’s soul mates, so why was this happening?  It was as if… our magnificent joining brought out our very best and our very worst. It was as if… we finally found the lock to the key that neither of us could unlock alone. When love really opens us up, everything opens up. The blood, the guts and the wounding.  There was no more hiding the fact that our damaged souls could not hide behind a love so deep, that somewhere deep inside we felt deeply unworthy, unlovable, abandoned, and that all the crimes visited on our hearts by those we had loved would be revisited by the person whom we now loved  - and more than we ever thought possible.

This is the point in the story where it could have gone either way. Looking back, I see that we were going through a powerful and painful process of trust earning. By showing one another our respective wounds, we were asking each other, albeit unconsciously: Will you betray me? Will you go away, too? Are you sure?   If we had remained unconscious to those questions, if we had allowed them to secretly lurk behind every fight, our relationship would have spiraled out of control. But what happened was: neither of us left because neither of us wanted that, truly. And over time we caught onto our selves, to what was happening.We realized that if we didn’t talk about and include our deepest wounds in our newfound love, we would destroy it.  Then we both began to trust that the other person wasn’t going to leave, and the relationship could survive our deepest demons.

Because our heart is so open to the people we love, they can hurt us. It’s the price of admission. We each have an animal in us that is pissed about being hurt before, and so the stakes are so very high in intimacy. We’ve each been taken before by the people we trusted, trespassed, lied to, made a fool of, had our heart broken. Yet if these, our worst fears – of betrayal and abandonment, of being victimized or out of control of our lives- remain unconscious, they will control our lives, and loves. We could mistake our breakout moment -the one where we find the courage and love in our heart to fully face our self, our unattractive parts and our deepest fears – as a disaster, instead of a victory.  Worse, we could mistake our True Love for our Worst Fear Come True.

The Scorpio Full Moon sheds light on the honest, bloody, ooey-gooey guts of things. The Truth is, we cannot be wholly loved without being whole, and we cannot be whole without being fully seen by the Other. Our icky, wounded parts and all. Whether we’ve been struggling with hidden patterns in intimacy, or we feel blocked from moving forward in our lives, eclipse energy is giving us an opportunity to re-set the system, to course-correct the broken record we keep re-playing in our lives, relationships.

During that first year, we learned to restrain our selves from compulsively pushing our relationship to the edge. It’s one thing to see how the train goes off the rails, but it’s another to pause during those high-emotional-stakes-moments and refuse to engage the story. Truth-telling and soul excavation without kindness can destroy. Scorpio needs calming Taurus as a balance; it takes guts to be gentle and kind. It takes wisdom to back away from the hairy edge of a too intense conversation and get an ice cream instead.

We survived each other and lived to tell the tale. Now on the other side I can confidently say that being seen wholly by the one we most love, sticking together through hell and high water, has big healing power. It unleashes a river of healing and forgiveness we cannot access alone. It is the ultimate compassion. At this full moon eclipse, look into the mirror of your Beloved, or the moon herself. It takes courage to face your deepest fears, your disowned self-parts, to take a deep look at the truth and to finally… breathe.

image source: Pinterest 

As I get older the love truisms develop in subtlety, complexity. For instance, the idea that before you can be a “We” there must be an “I” – a Self.  This is very different from loving your self, recognizing your strengths and weaknesses, becoming a confident person with goals and vision for her life. What I’m talking about is being deeply and utterly Self- centered and being okay with that. I mean really being okay with it. In a way that (most) men are born and raised knowing but (many) women aren’t. After all, if we were lucky enough to have escaped being mistaken for a parent’s appendage in childhood, society will socialize us out of putting our Self first.

He may not appreciate me telling you this, but marriage to my partner has taught me oodles about the importance of becoming more Self-centered. After all, I married a Leo. My Leo is awesome at putting himself first. He is most excellent at taking care of his own needs, whether at the dinner table talking about his day, or having a “John Night” every Wednesday night, he will make sure his social and physical needs are met. At one point in our marriage, the point right before I realized I was putting he and his Lion’s Pride’s needs before my own, I became deeply unhappy. Angry. I would voice my anger, despair, yet nothing would change. The more I insisted on my unhappiness, the more it reinforced his own insistence that he was perfectly happy. He couldn’t understand my frustration, he said. Why would he? I was meeting his needs; he was meeting his needs. For him, everything was working out brilliantly. As for me, I didn’t know how to put myself first.  I literally wasn’t brought up that way. I was brought up to compromise myself, sacrifice my own needs for others. It took lots of cognitive therapy and re-training. I am still training myself to be a Self.

I remember when I realized the problems in my marriage didn’t stem from his selfishness but from my lack of Self: that was a moment I started viewing my partner as a teacher. At my a-ha moment, “John is great at being selfish, at doing exactly what I need to learn to do,” John ceased to be my enemy- the person who always got what he wanted, and John became my model teacher, the person who always got what he wanted. I realized I coveted the way he always got what he wanted, from me, from life. I admired his easygoing assumption that other people wanted to make him happy, and that when they didn’t value him he could let them know. Of course living with your “teacher”, the person who is helping you learn one of your biggest life lessons, is a double-edged sword. He is sooo good at consistently reinforcing the fact that I need to meet his needs and put them first, I have to stay on my toes. It’s not his fault, really. He is a man, and he is a Leo. I am sure he is learning what he needs to learn from me, too.  Back and forth in our relationship, over and over, in different permutations and forms, in multiple ways I get to experience firsthand that: You should and can have your needs, wants and desires met, but not at the expense of another. Not at the expense of my Self.

Here’s the thing: I am still married to the man I love. Even though I think we experienced a big crisis (of course it was small to him, because you see, nothing bothered him, being as madly in love with me as the day we first met), I did a lot of personal work, and in the end I became stronger because I began honouring my Self like I’d never done before.  Even though I blamed him at first, the healing process required very little from him  (though he was amazingly good at taking instruction and being open to doing what it took to make me happy) because it was mostly about me and my relationship to my Self. Couples counseling? Moot, if you don’t have a Self. Marriage takes two people, each with a whole Self. The idea of fixing another person never appealed to me, anyhow. Maybe we can each do much more for our ailing partnerships by working on our own wounds and core issues.

Aries is the archetype of selfhood, and ruling planet Mars. Mars and Aries gives us both the anger at being trespassed, and the courage, to claim a Self. We each have needs, wants, thoughts and desires that deserve honoring, no matter how inconvenient this is to others, and whether they like what we say, feel, want – or not.  This bold Aries New Moon is conjunct Venus and Mars, highlighting our relations with others, with women, self-worth and value. Even next to sweet Venus, Aries does not wait for or have patience for the meek; with Mars you are either the courageous hunter or the prey. Only the strong survive.

We rarely think of a relationship as a battleground for Self-hood, but for many women living in patriarchal society, even if we do not consciously recognise it, it’s what marriage becomes. Through love and adversity, my marriage has made me stronger. It has also forever shaped the way I see gender. I have learned that when I Self-diminish, put my Self down, refrain from using my authentic voice, from asking for what I want, desire and need, it is not because I want to, but because as a woman I am taught, reinforced by culture, and sometimes my partner, to do this. Aries season is full of new ground to break and battles to fight, but as this lunation falls in my Seventh House I am celebrating freedom found in my biggest Aries victory to date: having a substantial Self.

Or worse. In the past, the hardest thing for me to do was slow down (Aries Moon). An Aries Moon born, I’ve been weaned on the mother’s milk of non-stop action. In the face of impossibility and adversity, I just keep moving forward. I’ve pondered the idea that my soul is basically okay with adversity, and that I may even need it.  Yet I also have the shadow of this moon sign whose comfort zone is being uncomfortable. High-stress emergency mode feels somewhat comfortable. Case in point: last year at this time, I just wasn’t dealing well with stress and like most people who don’t want to deal with their stress, I thought I was doing a great job. I actually believed: surviving house remodels, teenagers, career transitions, working forty hour weeks by pushing through it, meant I was handling my stress. My attitude of negativity and misery should have been a dead giveaway but it wasn’t.

It took a major crisis to put my priorities and values back in order again. I got adrenal fatigue…and a great naturopath and a therapist. These people have changed my life. I was so used to being the one who people come to, but I learned even the astrologer needs an astrologer, and a coach needs a coach. Frankly, alone, I didn’t know how to do anything more than the same old pattern I had been doing. There are certain things we cannot find in our self without deeply interfacing with others. One person holds the lock and the other, the key. With the help of others, I was handed resources and perspectives that I did not have in myself, what a gift! I could not have done this alone. By surrendering my problems to others and trusting them, my life changed absolutely.

This Libra Full Moon is no typical Libra moon; Uranus joins the Sun in Aries as the Libra Moon opposes. Like springtime, Uranus is the Great Awakener.  If you’re in a crisis, crisis is a sign you need to take an innovative new approach to the same old problem, find new resources. Aries says, “Do Something” and Libra Moon replies, “Don’t do it alone. Others can help you.” Pluto is nearby, having just squared off with Mars, so there is an element of working with our own power/powerlessness and self-protection. We need to remember that we are always in charge of our attitude, habits, choices, decisions, even if that’s the only power we have.

We may also come up against our own stubborn denial. When asked why people don’t heal, intuitive physician Carolyn Myss said: Procrastination. She says (and I believe this) everyone knows deep down what they need to do next. Problems happen when they don’t do it. Procrastination is the enemy of healing. It is also the enemy of personal growth, which is also probably not a coincidence.  We are stubborn creatures and change is scary. But what if Mother Nature said to Spring, “Grow new buds all over these trees? Nah, that would take wayyy to much energy. I think I’ll sit this season out.” Yet we say this to our self.

This lunation may be difficult, but because I don’t believe in monsters, I don’t believe it’s the “Monster Moon”. I think it’s more like the Dragon Mama Moon — fierce, loving, with an instinct for truth and protection. Sit with your self at this full moon, listen to the small still voice within. You already know what you need to do next.  You already know what you need to do, change, eliminate in order to more deeply live in accord with your own True Nature. With Uranus involved, we need to break from an attitude, habit, way of being — which may be a socially acceptable norm, but it is not what our True Self needs. Reach out to others, they are allies; we need other people’s perspectives right now. If you’re facing something difficult, breathe in your dragon mama self: your ferocity, gentleness, kindness toward all of life. If threatened, she can certainly breathe fire, but deep down the dragon is a gentle, vulnerable creature who needs the help of a noble princess as much as the princess needs her.

So it goes with life. We parse it out into good and bad experiences. We anticipate our future in the language of either/or. It’s easy for any of us to slip into duality, believing one experience is good and the other bad. We prefer bodily pleasure over suffering, ease over effort, wealth over poverty…and yet when you pause to think about it, so do children. We are here to spiritually grow and mature. There are no shortcuts for that. Apparently.

Pisces is the sign of the Fishes. The Fishes move in two directions at once, forward and back, asking that we transcend our dualistic ways of thinking and instead remember the sea from which we are all born. You can’t do the former without the latter, actually. It is impossible to know you are an eternal soul in a temporary body, and at the same time still believe that your deadline at work, your success or failure at being who you are is such a big deal.  Once you spend some time knowing you are more than this body and life, the solidity of your good/bad perceptions and stories about your body and life aren’t so solid. Try it and see.

Pisces is the sign of enlightenment. If we could learn to continually transcend our circumstances and raise our consciousness to higher levels, we would be. Pisces is also the sign of self-undoing, rules all forms escapism –from drinking to martyrdom to being addicted to sugar or negative thinking.  We all have plenty of reasons to want to escape our suffering. Pain is hard. Pain is the visitor no one wants to visit. Yet what is surprising about the experience of suffering, for me at least, is that in being totally present to it (even if it changes your life entirely), it changes into something manageable. If you meet your visitor with presence, they’re not good/bad anymore. When you mindfully refrain from the sugar or negative thinking binge true sanity is shockingly nearby.

I doubt enlightenment is possible for me in this lifetime, but I am a big believer in moments of enlightenment, the kind we experience spontaneously while looking at a sunset, the birds, or the starry night sky. In those moments, connecting with the Universe within, we just know what we are truly capable of.  Pisces is The Knower in each of us. The Knower knows that we are magnificent and powerful, even when our circumstances don’t reflect this. The Knower just knows life is a classroom, the test was rigged from the beginning, and finds the gentle humor to laugh at the absurdity of the monstrous task we’ve created for our selves.

At this Pisces New Moon take a moment to get off the clock, step outside the duality of your mind and into nature, the soul of creativity, your stillness, and make contact with the unlimited timeless being that is You. Know you are powerful and magical. Know you are doing something so incredibly amazing and difficult that even the angels are in awe of you: You are here on Earth.