Full Moon In Scorpio

Full Moon in Scorpio,

a contemplation on the fixed and mutable ways of being. collage & acrylic

This Full Moon is illuminating and unpacking an opposition between Uranus in Taurus and Juno Retrograde in Scorpio (see the chart below). These two have been dancing around an opposition with each other for the last several months. First I’ll portray the opposition briefly from Juno’s perspective, and then from Uranus’.

In Scorpio, Juno has been keeping us in the fire of deep emotional honesty, alchemy, release and transformation through the efforts of upholding our relational commitments and ideals of community.

And Uranus has been challenging this process, showing us where the fault lines are in our relational status quo, where we tend to swing out of our window of tolerance, shut down or act out, and experience a rupture in the relational field.

But also we can have a different perspectival understanding of Juno and Uranus. We might be feeling that —

In Taurus, Uranus has been slowly excavating soul desires and facilitating a breakthrough of life force energy as more creatures inside of us find ways to come out and play through non-normative relational structures.

And Juno in Scorpio has been challenging this process, confronting us with how we’ve been meeting our urges to dominate and be in control —as well as to be dominated or controlled — in ways that are not intentional or consensual and that feel at odds with the potential of Uranus’ journey through Taurus for emergence, softening, re-wilding notions of commitment, community and (co)creative empowerment (emphasis on re-wilding community & creative empowerment, with Mars in Leo recently leaving his opposition to Pluto in Aquarius).

This isn’t really an either/or situation where either Juno or Uranus is the bad guy. Where either Juno is trying to support us through this relational transformation, achievement of intimacy and preservation of community but Uranus keeps disrupting her process — or Uranus is offering this breakthrough moment or revolutionary season, but Juno keeps trying to be in control of how it goes and ends up pushing it away.

The interesting possibility that I see coming up around this Full Moon/Juno-Uranus opposition, is reflected by the exact square between Mercury in Taurus and Pluto in Aquarius, as well as Jupiter in Gemini squaring Saturn-Ceres-North Node in Pisces.

The Mercurial energy involved in these squares suggests that creative evolution may come through allowing ourselves to be in the dialectic between Juno in Scorpio and Uranus in Taurus. To let ourselves sometimes perceive from the place of Scorpio, to experience our own deepest hunger and cravings to feel met, to feel felt, to feel emotional intimacy, interpenetration, merging — no matter the risk or how much it might hurt, as long as its real. And then also, to sometimes perceive from the place of Taurus, allowing ourselves to recognize and feel our need for material pleasure, security, safety, softness, slowness, simplicity, solidity, space and what supports emotional digestion. The more we allow ourselves to know and experience ourselves from both ends of this spectrum, the more our relationships can be taken off the pedestal of some idealized notion or shape of Love that we think works for us but that makes it very difficult for anyone to authentically fit into, and are returned to a complicated human expression of Love that is actually able to walk in the world, be shared, received and be a force of transformation.

The tricky thing is that, when we inhabit one side of the spectrum, the other side that lives inside of us will go dark to our own daytime perception — i.e. we can’t see it in ourselves … though we definitely can see it in the person in front of (and separate from) us! And then we try to work out our relationship with that side of the polarity (e.g. Taurus vs. Scorpio) through inducing them into holding that space for us. But if we cognitively know that there’s this other side of the polarity in us too (whether we have natal planets there or not!), we can intentionally get curious and play around with relating to it inside of ourselves too and not just work it out through the other person. This makes more space for them to wiggle out of an identification or shape that feels limiting, and a relational pattern that feels vexing.

And as a kind of related tangent — I’d like to return to Juno now to note something that I found really intriguing from Diana Harper’s talk on this asteroid goddess, which feels like a potential point of contemplation for this Full Moon (especially with Jupiter in Gemini). Juno is the goddess associated with fidelity and, in her research, Diana received this definition from one of her clients who is involved with audio processing. In this context, fidelity describes: “how something has held up to its original quality over time and through processing.” So, we could consider Juno as a goddess who wants us to make the choices and keep the oaths and commitments that are true to the creative life of our Soul, or our essential nature.

Then I also looked up the meaning of fidelity (admittedly very briefly) and found this:

“Fidelity is a reference to the use of film sound. Faithful to the source from which the audience logically conceives it. Notice, we said it’s faithful to the source that the audience conceives?

Thus, fidelity doesn’t mean that a sound has to come from the original source that produced it. But it must appear to come from the source the audience would expect.

… Let’s say you’ve got a very large dog on the screen, barking. Perhaps it’s a bull mastiff, or some other very large animal. But the audio you play, of the dog barking, is a chihuahua – a very high pitched, small dog, kind of barking sound.

The audience is NOT going to believe that this sound is true or faithful to the source, they will not believe that this large dog has this high pitched squeaking sort of small dog bark.

Therefore, if the viewer does not take the sound to come from the dog, then you have not achieved fidelity.”

This is interesting since Mars is in Leo and Jupiter is in Gemini. There is a potential for a mind-body split (Gemini) where we are expressing, speaking or performing something for the sake of making our audience (Leo) happy or making our audience believe something that is split off or different from our own interior, emotional, felt experience or sense of self. (I’m noticing how the bird in my painting for this Full Moon is half-hidden.).

Additionally, there is a potential for us to be really compelling (Moon and Juno in Scorpio) in that performance (Mars in Leo). Our words may say one thing, while our body feels another thing or multiplicity of other things (Jupiter in Gemini) — but we devote ourselves to the performance, holding our bodies and speaking in a way that’s really convincing and compelling. The sound we make appears to be “faithful to the source” — to some internal source of Truth, coherence, identity or value — but, really, it’s a partial truth.

This sounds manipulative and it can be.

But it isn’t always.

It can be a trauma-response.

But it isn’t always.

This is something we all engage in. When we inhabit, embody and express one perspective, we naturally self-organize so that some other perspectives/parts are backgrounded within the interiority of our emotional world. We can contribute a “truth” of ours in a conversation, and hide, conceal or veil other truths. The other person might align with what we’ve shared — or they might double for (but not identically mirror or twin with) another perspective that lives within us that’s been backgrounded. This “split” in us isn’t necessarily manipulative, duplicitous, dishonest or trauma-based. It’s a facet of our universal intelligence. In the myth of Castor and Pollux, Pollux gave half of his immortality to his beloved twin, agreeing to alternate days between Mount Olympus and Hades. In Gemini, we know we can be honest while sharing a half-truth. We know “authenticity” is a wild notion. We know we can’t have all of our universal nature “forward” and in the light. Some aspects of us will be “back” and in the shadow of other parts. It’s part of what makes us beautiful as humans.

We do get into trouble when we forget or kid or trick or deceive ourselves into thinking that one of our “truths” is our Truth — when we identify and only know ourselves through one perspective or one way of self-organizing — when the self-organization becomes fixed, such that one perspective is always foregrounded and given power while the other perspectives are backgrounded, dis-enfranchised, projected upon and induced in others.

Because, no matter where our planets are, we have all the whole Sky within us, we have both sides of each polarity available for activation, experience and embodiment.

How we acknowledge, hold space for, play out and communicate from our inner multiplicity and our many complicated and contradicting truths, is one way we evolve through relationship and experience intimacy.

But, if that is truly going to “play out”, it involves letting go of control (or tending healthy habitats and intentional agreements that help the parts of us that really like to be in control/be controlled, satisfy that hunger in a playful way); getting curious; taking responsibility for ourselves; and learning from the consequences of how we wield the power of our attention, attitude and words (Mercury-square-Pluto) in response to our endlessly mutable, uncontrollable, slippery, shape-shifting capacities (Saturn-Ceres-North Node in Pisces).

In the end… we can’t do it alone. When I talk about coming into embodied relationship with both sides of an archetypal polarity within ourselves — I’m not coming from the belief that we could do the work all inside of ourselves and then show up clear, contained and … not-messy. The South Node in Virgo and this Full Moon in Scorpio is helping us release residues of that notion of purity. We’re messy. And yet still, we’re lovable. Our transformation is ongoing and is prompted, nourished and sustained through the vulnerability of relating to others.

But remember —

while transformation is messy, it can be gentle. It can be subtle. It can be slow. It can be like a labyrinth. It can be like an art project. It can be like singing together. Whatever helps you play and be surprised.

Be gentle with yourself and the wild creatures in you that are still learning/remembering how to trust.

Book a reading today.

to the pleasure of being you in relationship,

Nicole