Who in the hell d’you think you are? A super star? Well, right you are. – John Lennon

This weekend, I took a walk down the block to visit a new friend. She served me tea, peppered me with questions about myself and soon enough out tumbled my reindition of “How I Met My Husband”, which quickly led to other topics like: manifestation, healing from past relationships, spirituality and more. A half hour into the conversation, she sat back and looked at me for a moment,  genuflecting,  ‘I don’t meet many people like you –you’re different. You know who you are. Your self-trust and self-knowing guides all your decisions and choices. I don’t have that sense of myself, and many other people I know don’t, either. We all want it – this makes you unique.’  The unexpected praise went straight to my heart  and along with shyness & a few other emotions, I mostly felt  truth.  Sometimes friends can see us better than we can see our self…  Basking in the afterglow, I thought of Leo & the Star.

We all have something unique to our nature, something that makes us stand out from the crowd, a gift that we can offer humanity. But to develop something to the point we can give it away takes encouragement, and in my experience our Star power can be covered over by the sludge of conditioning, negative programming and wounding. That’s when we have to consciously & intentionally remember who we truly are. Leo has a strategy for self-remembrance, involving recognition, praise, affection & fun. Imagine your self as a shy, timid child (not hard for me to imagine, I was one!) and how a few positive strokes from a teacher or parent would buoy your spirits and make you positively giddy with positive self-regard. How easy it is for a child, egged on by praise, affection and encouragement, to let loose, get stupid & just be their self.  This is confidence, born of trust that the world is loving and good, and so are we.  As adults, we’re never too old to be that kind of childlike. Confidence in our own nature is a clear, shining facet of the Leo/Aquarius axis – and the Star.

The Star card is one of my favorite cards in the Tarot. It’s the card of talent and recognition, of the performer and the artist and humanitarian. It’s often depicted as a beautiful woman pouring stars from the heavens down to humanity. According to Angeles Arrien this is a card of self-sufficiency, of  “looking within and trusting what is there.” This makes sense, for to shine for humanity we need to not only trust the world is a basically good and safe place to come out and play, but also trust our self to be our self. It sounds easy but ofen it’s not, and it doesn’t feel natural. Our Star power can be projected onto groups of friends who really aren’t our friends, depended upon from lovers, depleted by negative self-talk, held in abeyance by cultural and family conditioning.  But this golden-ness is natural, of nature, in the deepest sense of the word.

I’ve seen this over and over again: friends play a role in this Leo Full Moon. It’s downright magical how often I’ve  experienced and witnessed the  ability of others to recognize our gifts ignite a Divine Spark that sends golden ripples of creative  juice into the Universe. Ponder this: there are people whose face would light up like a sunrise at the chance to spend a day just with you. I know that there are people in your life who are continually recieving the brilliance that you possess and reflect it back to you all the time. If you’re experiencing a flagging sense of self-trust & confidence, trust those people to help you remember who you are.  ‘On days like this,’ Lioness Tori Amos sings, ‘You know who your friends are.’

Leo Full Moon is a time for reconciling where we feel like an estranged alien far away from our home planet with our need to shine as a creative force, grounded in our own true nature.  It’s another chance to: trust that we are, as each of us is, perfect -and with positive encouragement, praise, and a few loving strokes from others or from ourself, can experience the brilliance we are. So as you stand under the light of the Leo Full Moon, pull on the resilient, hardy nature of your true  Star self.  Looking up at that fiery Leo Full Moon all un-self-conscious and aglow, it’s not a stretch to imagine your self as a luminous, shimminering being of light. It’s not that hard to trust  that what you have inside is exactly what you need.

Well we all shine on
Like the moon and the stars and the sun
Well we all shine on
Ev’ryone come on