This morning I sat down with my Virgo Sun journal, and made a list. I wanted to measure the difference between where I am now, and where I was six months ago. Six months ago I was in a radically different space. I was feeling disempowered, defeated, sick, chronically tired. Everything I’d try to do or change didn’t take. I was utterly alone, scared and in the dark. I’d work on one health issue and another would come up; my relationship, once a source of joy, no longer was. Home & family –that place of respite for a Cancer born– was a source of conflict, too.  This continued for far too long… until it didn’t.

I can pinpoint the exact moment that it all began to change, that my “light” which had grown so dim, began to flicker a little brighter. I had flown down to LA to meet a client in person, and I booked a reading for myself with my favorite psychic (my only psychic), Dolores. Dolores is an Italian grandmother with a truth-teller no-nonsense spirit that truly catches you off guard. She must’ve once been a smoker, as her voice is as thick as gravel. She led me to her office, took my rings (she reads jewelry) and disappeared. A few minutes later she delivered the diagnosis, voice gravelly and deep: “I hate to give bad news, honey, but nothing in your life is good right now.” My heart sank, but in a grounding way. Nothing feels so good as the truth.

Over the next hour she proceeded to make confusing and clear pronouncements. There are times when a person says something so true that you feel you might weep. “You’re killing your self, sweetie. If you keep this up for a few more months you won’t be good for anyone. I’m talking terminal disease. I need you to really hear this.” I began to weep. I was so starved for the truth. People around me, friends and family, had less of a clue as to why I was unhappy than I did. It was as if we were all in the fishbowl together, none of us able to see that the water we were swimming in was toxic, no one truly able to see the other. Dolores bluntly asked why I was doing this to myself. I babbled on about the pressures of step-parenting (a demanding part of my marriage I hadn’t planned on), the confusion about why astrology, the passion of my life, had dimmed, and how I couldn’t envision my own future. But even my own explanations sounded hollow. That was the problem, they always did. I was in the dark about my Self and I knew it. She did, too. She softened, now shifting between Truth Teller and Spiritual Advisor. “Quit your job as an assistant, it is killing you.” “You need to go back to astrology. Believe it or not, honey, counseling others gives you energy. It’s not the thing that’s killing you.” And “A year from now you’re going to look back at this time period like it was a bad dream. You’ll see you were the one who made your self sick, tired, half-dead. You did this to yourself.”

An hour later, I walked away wrecked, demolished, torn-down…and authentically hopeful for the first time in many months.

Then the pivotal moments began to accrue. It was as though I’d been broken open, and in being broken open –as so many people will say – grace entered. I still didn’t know how I was killing myself, but it seemed quitting my job was a good place to start, err, stop, so I did that. That same week, my high school girlfriends came for a weekend visit. In one moment of miserable complaining, my girl, Claire, who I now call the Truth Teller, turned to me and said, “Stop saying you’re a bad stepmother. From everything you tell me about the girls, you’re a great stepmother. You just need to give some attention to you.” That next week, I decided I needed more truth tellers in my life. So I said my intention, looked online through my HMO company and actually found a therapist named Truth Sayer (no joke). The epiphanies continued… from the way I had “forgotten” to honor and value my self in my marriage and home, to the trauma of growing up in a family where there were only two roles for me to choose from: caretaker or invisibility. I had alternated between both, and I was doing this in my marriage today. I had never learned self-care, and I was learning today, but I was learning the hard, difficult, painful way.

Readers of this blog have heard me lament the Pluto-Uranus square. This had been transiting half of my chart for years; now it reached my North Node in my Third House. Long ago, I had signed up for an author marketing group and emails with the subject heading “Want to Be a Coach?” kept appearing in various forms.  I intuitively knew this was meant for me, though couldn’t exactly see how. Then, while looking one day for answers for Claire’s Hashimoto’s disease, I stumbled upon the website of a woman who graduated from the holistic health school. She was like a health renegade– telling the truth. I researched the program and eventually decided to attend. In that, I started to understand this is the gift I’d been longing to receive. It’s not just a nutrition school; it’s a school of Truth-tellers, wake-up callers, people whose stated mission is to empower health and happiness. To give this to my broken Self was a grace. Disempowerment shifted into Mission.

This morning’s list of Now versus Then included the above, and more. What a difference 6 months makes. I am so grateful I faithfully pulled through this part of the journey. Gratitude is the predominant feeling overtaking me at this Pisces Full Moon.

Pisces is the sign of craziness and consciousness, and people tend to get both drunk/ loopy, and a little more enlightened around this moon. It’s needed. We need to let off steam, to deeply allow our self to release and recharge. This is also a moon of fruition and culminations and endings — for we’ve reached the fullest point in the last sign of the zodiac. What or who are you saying goodbye to? Friday’s Pisces Full Moon is the counterpart to the Pisces New Moon back in March, so it may be useful to note what’s changed between Now and Then. Pisces is the sign of the Visionary, and visiting psychics, soothsayers, astrologers, and listening to our dreams all help us get clearer. It’s a lovely, friendly blue moon (the second full moon of one calendar month) and though it’s not visibly blue, there are helpful and clarifying angels nearby: truth-telling Pluto and Mars. Some gifts, by design, can be received only once in a blue moon. Today, I’m counting my blessings.

image source: myrevelment.com