Full Moon In Virgo

We have a Full Moon in Virgo at 12:17 AM Pacific, on Friday the 18th. 

This Full Moon illuminates Virgo’s questions that range from —

What would be most helpful in this moment? How am I best positioned to serve? What skills can I share?

To …

How can I make this better? What am I doing wrong or not well enough? (How is this my fault and how can I fix it?)

For the latter half of this spectrum of questioning, the Sun offers a Piscean balm to the parts of us that are in such states of anxiety, striving or comparison. 

Pisces is the lens of the Mystic through which forgiveness can come online.  Not in the form of an “I forgive you” that carries the smell of something being granted from the victim to perpetrator, but as a release of a pattern unfolding through authentic self-compassion.

Compassion for the parts of yourself that have suffered alone with what they’ve learned, inherited, or experienced.

And compassion for the rest of your system — how it learned to organize around these silent burdens.  How they began to react to each other, making alliances and divisions, enemies and love affairs.  How they began to make judgments and assumptions about each other’s problems, without knowing how to ask what was going on for them. 

As we sit with our inner world of parts and truly feel for their experiences, there is a change of ages, a transition of power that is the mythical backdrop of the Virgo-Pisces polarity.

There is a re-organization. 

And, with that, comes a kind of chaos … and an evolutionary juncture.

Because as self-compassion naturally reorganizes our system, it gets soupy and we open ourselves again to feeling the overwhelm that drove our system into self-protection in the first place.

—

Pisces senses and speaks the language of energy. As children, even in the most “holistic” childhood environments, it’s rare to find parents that could offer the tools, wisdom and support to navigate the world with our Piscean sensitivities. We were likely reacted to, labeled, projected upon, and maybe punished for the ways we innocently acted out invisible patterns from our energetically sensitive Piscean parts. We were misunderstood for the forms we played, when our true nature was formless.

Unlike Cancer and Scorpio, Pisces has no protective shell.  So, in the face of what may have felt like being a helpless puppet in a maelstrom of energies, the younger Piscean parts of us found protection in water itself. In emotions. And in the emotion of shame.

They found protection in Virgo.

Now, to be really clear, Virgo is not intrinsically shaming.

Virgo sees what is needed, and serves.

And when our younger Piscean parts experienced overwhelm, our younger Virgoan parts stepped forward and, for the sake of the system and to protect our sensitivities, they assumed the roles of Inner Critic and Perfectionist. They used shame to contract our feelers and keep us energetically small, and more fixed and predictable, protecting us from our own wild Piscean fluidity and energetic shapeshifting according to what’s always here but invisible, as we learned to navigate a world organized by a materialistic and single-story paradigm.

So now I wonder:

What if it’s possible to neutralize the word “shame”, and allow it be seen as a seatbelt that we were given at a time when we lacked a better safety mechanism? 

What if “shame” was the wisdom and love of our own system helping to keep the parts of us that were highly sensitive, attuned and immediately playful with energies, out of sight and buffered from the pain of misunderstandings and misperceptions?

What if it allowed us to continue living our life on land — i.e. going to school, getting a job, buying groceries — without being completely overwhelmed by all the energy dynamics that our Piscean parts opened us up to receiving?

—

Shame — the “seatbelt” — is definitely not the whole picture or experience of Pisces.

The parts that were protected by shame, that learned to “play dead” in a way, had access to a realm of spirit that wasn’t any less real, or expansive. They had access to creativity, imagination, the capacity to dream, and to surrender.

My sense is that, if given an alternative, support and new skills, the inner Critic/Perfectionist can be uplifted into the detail-oriented Analyst that may be just what these slippery Piscean fish need to find their legs on land, share their visions and gifts of subtle sensitivities, and experience a new life cycle, within one lifetime. Like spring peepers.

So, under this Full Moon —

I forgive and thank my Inner Critic for keeping the most highly sensitive parts of myself, safely contracted.

I forgive and thank my inner Perfectionist for giving me an ideal to strive for, that kept me going on land, however impossible it was to meet.

I now tune into my highly sensitive inner children through their own languages of poetry, art, breathwork and grief. Of dance, song, and dreamwork. Of subtle sensations. I notice their connection to bodies of water. Their immediate response to the Ocean. And to Rain.

And I’m focusing on cultivating the skills and toolkit that support them in participating in the world again. These “tools” include astrology and human design, nervous system regulation, flower essences … and maybe more than anything, curiosity.

Tell me —

what’s been supporting you in giving your sensitivities more space in your body and awareness?

what supports you through overwhelm as you start to receive more information, to keep allowing expansion and maturity in the face of misunderstandings?

what skills help your inner Poet participate in the world in a way that feels authentic to you?