Full Moon in Pisces
Tending Your Inner Garden: Free Offering
Astrology reveals the psyche as a kind of inner garden, with the birth chart as a deeply accurate garden guide for tapping into our inner resilience, abundance and joy. And it is so helpful to have a guide because ...
We are always planting seeds and it's often hard to keep track of them.
We are always setting intentions and empowering them with our actions. Each intention, or seed, holds the code of a unique vision. As we are humans in the process of awakening, what is encoded is partly conscious, and partly unconscious. If this seed vision is mostly a reflection of our conditioning, it will contribute to more of the same. If it is a reflection of our truth, it will revolutionize the world.
Either way, tending our inner garden with more awareness helps harvest the information we need to remember and empower ourselves as creative beings.
How can we bring more awareness to the seeds we plant?
How do we cultivate their growth?
How do we recognize re-growths of old patterns? How do we pull them up from their roots?
How do we cultivate an inner garden that is resilient and in harmony with our inner and outer Nature?
Astrology reveals that each seed vision engages specific aspects of our psyche (signified by the planets), pushes us to different edges of our soul growth and authentic embodiment (reflected by the astrological sign), and unfolds on a particular stage of life (house in our birth chart). This information empowers our agency.
Furthermore, since we are always planting seeds with different life spans, cycles and patterns that overlap and interact in all different ways, it's pretty tricky to tease out and track our co-creations in process. As a result, life most often feels like it is happening to us and it is naturally difficult to recognize our part in creating a pattern or dynamic. It's naturally difficult to grasp the extent of our creative agency.
But by working with our birth charts, we have a guide to actually track the unfurling growth of the seeds we plant, or the intentions we set. We move at the pace of our inner Nature and in time with our internal seasons. We can recognize our conditioning coming up, forgive it, re-route and make more authentic choices. We can convert life experiences into lessons and wisdom. We can compost our mistakes into fertilizer for future growth. We can unveil what our role has been in creating this thing we are experiencing in our life. Sometimes we see there is nothing we could have, or can do, differently but uplift our response-ability. And that is empowering to know. And sometimes, we see and better understand the role that we did actually play in co-creating a unhealthy pattern, and we can choose again.
We grow to know ourselves better as truly creative beings and recognize our places of agency.
The Offering
Every day for five years, I wrote down how the current astrology was landing on my chart and then reflected upon what I was growing through. It ended up being one of the greatest gifts to myself: a fluid container for self inquiry, self validation, and self love. On top of that, it gave me an intuitive and embodied understanding of each astrological archetype. While it was still necessary for me to read books and listen to classes, one real reason I began to trust myself and my work with astrology was this direct, felt experience.
Because this practice was so life-affirming and so supportive, it became one of my dreams to hold this space for others who want to work with astrology for themselves, or just want to grow a stronger connection to themselves and their inner guidance.
We have so many reasons to direct our attention and energy outward. The intention for all of my offerings is to bring balance with an energetic anchor inward, a place-holder for your connection to Self, symbolic vision, inner guidance, and capacity to transmute life experiences into wisdom and compassion.
My focus is on reflection questions because the questions we choose to ask - the way we phrase them, our motivations for asking, and our openness to the answers and the forms in which they arrive - are powerful containers for, and organizing forces of, our direct experience. Astrology helps draw out, articulate, and really refine the questions that weave a chrysalis for our transformation, as we become a more authentic embodiment of the seed vision that exists at the center of our hearts.
For a limited time, you can send me your birth information (privacy protected) and receive a FREE set of journalling prompts around how the current astrology is activating your personal birth chart. And please pass along this offering with anyone you know may benefit from it. (I'll be responding on a first come, first serve basis, so sign up soon!) If you enjoy this process and want to continue it over time (because that's where the deep awe and wonder of truly seeing yourself happens), or if you want to dive deeper, be one of my first supporters on Patreon! Or get on the waiting list for the Living Moons monthly mentorship.
Full Moon in Pisces
We enter this Full Moon in Pisces on September 1st, with an opposition between Venus and Pluto that was exact on August 30th, and leave it with a Venus opposition to Saturn on the 2nd. So let's take a look at Venus ... and hang in there. A lot of what you will first read about Venus' significations may be exactly what is feeling obscured, dull, in pain, or put under pressure from the Lord of the Underworld (Pluto) and our Inner Critic (Saturn). This is to validate the experience, if it is what's happening for you, and provide some guidance for the passage. With respect to our soul growth, Venus is the planet or aspect of our psyche that is responsible for:
our capacity to receive the pleasure and warmth of the Sun, the pleasure and warmth of being and becoming Who We Truly Are, harmonizing our self-expression within our ever-changing relationships and environments;
the flowering of the authentic seed vision that exists at our core; opening up to allow cross-pollination with others' seed visions to co-create a Future Vision;
magnetizing what we hold dear and deeply value to us through aligning our thoughts and actions with our core values;
calming down, resting, relaxing into our true Selves, worth & abundance;
developing and nourishing a network of connections, both human and non-human, that restore our sense of balance and soothe our sensitivities;
feeling warmth, compassion, affection, and empathy for another;
creating, embodying, and feeling Beauty and sensual experiences.
Venus rules over the themes of: Our values Relationship to Money Creative energy Erotic energy Relationships Romance Artwork Beauty Physical appearance Adornment, clothing, makeup, etc Sensuality Pleasure Play Rest, leisure, relaxation
Venusian patterns that stem from a somato-emotional matrix of fear or lack-based beliefs, can look like:
suppressing the power of our own truth and erotic energy to be unthreatening;
people-pleasing or conflict-avoidance at the expense of experiencing the pleasure our own self-worth;
comparison and contortion of one’s beauty to a false or external standard;
aiming for negative peace, creation of “sameness” or universal likability;
indulgence in material experiences to distract from feeling clean pain;
buying into a static, external standard of material security at the expense of discovering the innate abundance, creativity, and resilience of ourselves, our relationships, and our communities.
None of these patterns are bad or wrong.
They are an inherent part of the human experience. They are part of what happens as a result of our spirits incarnating in the middle of a family, ancestral and cultural story. They are part of what happens as a result of carrying a piece of the collective pain body.
These current oppositions to Saturn and Pluto reflect that our inner Venus -- the part of us that can experience Love, Beauty & Balance -- is seeing, perceiving and experiencing through the filter of our pain body. This is described by Eckhart Tolle as:
"a semiautonomous energy-form that lives within most human beings, an entity made up of emotion. It has its own primitive intelligence, not unlike a cunning animal, and its intelligence is directed primarily at survival. Like all life-forms, it periodically needs to feed — to take in new energy — and the food it requires to replenish itself consists of energy that is compatible with its own, which is to say, energy that vibrates at a similar frequency. Any emotionally painful experience can be used as food by the pain-body. That’s why it thrives on negative thinking as well as drama in relationship. The pain-body is an addiction to unhappiness.”
Before going further, it is an understatement to say that there is a lot in the world, in reality, in the present moment, to grieve. And it is natural for this deep grief to spill out. To touch every part of ourselves and every area of life.
The Sun (our daytime consciousness) is now in Virgo, an energy of metabolizing, digesting, purifying. As we yield to this grief, may we bring the light of our awareness with us as much as we can, to notice when we've moved beyond feeling our grief in our hearts and when it is now generating thoughts about the past, thoughts about the future, and thoughts about the unfolding of Venusian themes that are beyond the present moment.
This is where we abandon, or are alienated, from our true Self. Instead of, or maybe in addition to, feeling and metabolizing our grief, part of this grief is also feeding and keeping alive the pain body that rides along with us.
This pain body is recognized by others' pain bodies, and it can be part of what unconsciously draws people together. When the pain body gets hungry, it comes up to the surface. This undigested emotional energy quickly impacts our thinking. It leads to distorted storytelling about ourselves and others, which re-generates more emotional pain and can spark dramas and patterns that provide food for our pain body ... Until it settles, we come out of it and then, maybe, realize a pattern just repeated.
The medicine of this Full Moon in on the Pisces-Virgo polarity is to transmute the pain body that was revealed and inflamed under the Venus-Pluto opposition, through forgiveness and humility.
Pisces: Mutable (transmuting) Water (the emotional body)
Virgo: Mutable (transforming) Earth (the physical body)
The soul's growth edge that Pisces brings us up to is unconditional self-love in the face of radical vulnerability to experiencing clean pain, spills out into compassion for others. The path involves accepting and forgiving ourselves in the present moment, even with this pain body. (And that paradoxically includes even the grief of feeling like we can't fully accept ourselves.)
The soul's growth edge that Virgo brings us up to (and supports the Piscean possibility) is humility and detachment. We know we should do better, but also, we are human. When you hold yourself hostage to perfection, you empower your ego as this false self concept that you could possibly not cause harm, or act from unconscious pattern, conditioning, habit ... as if you’re not human and perfection was possible and you Should have done better.
Forgiveness of the pain body does not empower the pain body. It empowers you as the Authority within, as the only one who can truly forgive yourself.
Love and Light is not about turning only towards Light and Love. Love and Light includes turning towards and leaning into clean pain, with as much Presence as we can. And with this work, we naturally build trust in ourselves and trust in our pleasure as a guide, knowing that the ways in which we seek and experience pleasure is less driven unconsciously by our pain body ...
We can deepen our trust in instinctively and spontaneously turning toward the pleasure and warmth of the Sun, the pleasure and warmth of being and becoming Who We Truly Are.
Which brings us to power of
VENUS.
Full Moon Blessings,
Nicole
