We have a full Moon, a SuperMoon in Virgo at 0 degrees, on 19th February 2019 at 3.54 pm GMT. A Supermoon is when the Moon is large in the sky as it’s the closest it’s going to get to the earth, this year. The Sun has just left Aquarius and entered Pisces.
Pisces is a sensitive, intuitive energy that in its understanding of Oneness expresses compassion and loving kindness for everyone and everything. Sensitive Pisces is not always easy though and can be drawn to martyr or suffering scenarios. It can go to extremes of surrender in order to escape life’s hard knocks, drowning its sorrows in the nearest rose-coloured glass.
Pisces is ruled by Neptune, and as a dream-like energy, it can be challenging to integrate. Yet the sublimity of the creative visions it can bring to life, when effectively channeled are literally out of this world. With the Sun making it’s annual conjunction to Neptune also journeying through Pisces, this month, it increases the spacey, creative, imaginative feel.
Incidentally, for those born 14-19 degrees into the sign can expect to feel that stronger. For all of us it’s not going to straight forward to get things done, and getting things done will happen easier from a place of non-doing! Lots of potential for creativity and soulful questing, though, over this Pisces season.
In what astrologically is certainly a transition year, it’s quite apt and useful that we have just had an end of the 12-year lunar zodiac cycle with the ingress into the Chinese Year of the Earth Pig. The Earth Pig offers up an opportunity to get stable, in both an internal and external reality sense, in our minds, emotions and souls.
The Earth Pig supports a degree of going inside, amidst a lot of external strife and change. Unless we can hold a feeling of internal stability within, the challenging changes coming as we make our transitions, might put us into a mini crisis. Stability, though, does not arise from being simply centred in our bodies, doing our meditation, yoga or qi gong daily. It arises equally from awareness of ourselves, and others, and an honest enquiry into the nature of who we are.
With Uranus about to re-enter Taurus in March after 7 year’s sojourn in Aries, the ground below is literally going to start shifting exponentially. We can expect a continuation of ecological, environmental and climate disruption, but it’s our internal world and sense of identity which is actually going to receive some tectonic shifts. This is what is coming. The question is, how can we best support ourselves while in this space of change?
While the events in the world seem beyond our personal scope of control, what we can have power over is how our internal world handles the external world’s stimuli. This is what we can do with the craziness we increasingly perceive outside of us (and often inside us as our processes and internal material arises for awareness and healing), instead of doing what we usually do which is numb ourselves out, escape from it or complain about it.
You could say that learning how to work with the process of sensing internal stability amidst all the change, is part of where we are going through collectively. As with all movement, whether it be our bodies, our minds, the ground beneath us, knowing who we are and who we are not, is integral.
The shift from free floating, not knowing whether we are coming or going, who we are, what we want, what the actual reality is or truth, are we crazy, are they crazy or are we both crazy (which was so present last year) is beginning to shift in that we can now have a focus for uncovering these things with time and patience, to give us some sense of stability – that might have landed only in the last few days. But it’s a very long term process.
It might now seem that the goal or vision is further in the distance, but there’s more of a reality time check on things. And at least there is a vision now, there is a sense of where we are heading – afforded to us by Jupiter in Sagittarius representing long term goals.
I’m still trying to land and orientate since my work trip away to Hawaii and my longer term visions being stirred up – it’s taken longer than expected. But then we always want to get clear and move on to the next thing as quickly as possible. We must take time to integrate more deeply at this time. It’s an important missing link – this anchoring, slowing down, and being internal.
This week we have a powerful meeting of Venus and Pluto and a run up of energies to this might be supportive. We’ve just had a pretty sobering meet up over the weekend between Venus and Saturn in Capricorn. If you had a planet or angle around 16 degrees of Aries, Libra, Cancer or Capricorn, you would have been strongly affected, but to some degree everyone will feel this.
Did you notice your dreams on Monday night? The first of three mystical, magical or simply confusing meet-ups between Mercury (how we think) and Neptune (dreams and illusions) happened that night. Perhaps you had a clear dream that you need to take some note it. I dreamt about a shooting star. This Mercury-Neptune pattern will repeat on 24th March and 2nd April, so let’s see how those visions initiated now are revised – and revised again – on those dates.
A harmonising aspect between Mercury and Saturn around the same time, infused a dream with reality. This is also the first of three meet ups; the second and third happen on 20th March and 7th April. So again these few last days are important to return to in March and April. Wednesday morning is as busy as it gets with the Virgo Moon in contact with six other planets – give yourself a reality check if you need it.
On Thursday the Moon enters Libra – might be a time for pleasing others more than ourselves, diplomacy and harmony. It is smooth running for the next few days, but note that the Libra Moon, is laced with powerful emotional content that may need our attention. As on Friday heady Mercury in spacey/intuitive Pisces makes its first of three squares to an expansive Jupiter in Sagittarius.
Then on Friday evening, we have the meeting of Venus with Pluto in Capricorn; the suggestion is power plays in matters of women, money, aesthetics and values. The Moon also squares Saturn that evening, expect intensity and then a dip in mood.
On Saturday the Moon enters Scorpio, an investigative, intimate position for the Moon and given that Mercury sextiles Pluto, shortly after, the need for depth, substance and potentially even control continues through into Sunday.
Chiron is pulling focus when exact on 19th February he moves signs into Aries. This isn’t a casual event, he will be there for some time, until 2027. Chiron spends more time in Aries than any other sign. And so this is a long term transit with a strong impact on all of us, since where Aries is in our charts is the area of life where we find ourselves. The theme of Chiron in Aries is self-actualisation, identity crisis, dealing with the self-denial and uncovering new concepts of self and taking direct action as a result.
Chiron in Pisces, where it has been since 2010, suggests feeling and healing the pain of despair at being separated from the Divine – hence the explosion in mind, body, spirit medicine. With Chiron in Aries the challenge is to heal the ‘wounded warrior’ (a warrior is what Aries needs to be), through acts of courage and taking risks.
With disruptive Uranus in Aries since 2011, this arguably broke down our sense of self, or rather brought it to such a crisis point that we can see it in pure daylight (he is about to move on too in March). Now with the cosmic baton passed to Chiron the wounded healer, we can begin to heal this hidden fragmentation rising into our awareness.
With Chiron, the important bit is to rise to the challenge, after all, we need to go into action. There’s a focus on healing distorted masculine values and leadership – all associated with Aries. You could say the me generation that we had in the 70s is back. More people will be looking for ways to heal a wounded sense of self.
So Chiron raises awareness wherever he goes. Carl Jung defined self-actualisation as “the tendency [of a person] to actualise itself as fully as possible is the basic drive.” Carl Rogers described it as “the curative force in psychotherapy – man’s tendency to actualise himself, to become his potentialities … to express and activate all the capacities of the organism.”
It’s sojourn through Aries seems well timed to address many issues involving self, self-concept and the notion of identity (something that is critical at this time in our individual lives, and the life of our culture). At the moment, collectively we are obsessed with identity. Identity is a social construct, created through social learning. We are born with self. Then we have an identity and believe in it. It’s what we identify with and it makes us forget our real self and become a part of a tribal identity. We are now stepping into self-actualisation – getting underneath our identity.
Chiron offers us an opportunity to repair some of the most disruptive effects that happened during Uranus’s sojourn in Aries. Uranus in Aries brought us ‘me-me-me’ – the distorted version of me or identity; the selfies, artificial intelligence and the trapped version – tribal mentality. But what does it mean to know yourself in a world that feels on the surface like it’s falling apart? In other words, who are we, anyway? What is this ‘self’ that we have forsaken?
Our healing quest is to get in touch with the true self that lies beneath all the distortions. In order to make contact with this, it’s necessary to get in touch with all that we are not, and then set it aside or cast it off. Most people are heavily invested in not-self – we struggle with making simple choices that work for us. Being in relationship with people who do not support us is a clear sign of an investment in not-self.
People like to talk about being honest, yet in order to be honest, we must confront all the ways in which we are being dishonest. Honesty requires a true appraisal of our relationships, and shaking them up. Were we to suddenly become transparent and honest about everything in your life, we would be taking a big risk. We would risk actually expressing ourself, our values and needs honestly.
Chiron in Aries is going to demand this from us. This begins with awareness, of our ourselves and our interactions with others. We will be uncovering all the ways in which our awareness has been suppressed, all the ways we’ve compromised and held ourself back. This can lead to a crisis of identity.
We are being invited to be one of the intrepid few who enters the process boldly, engaging fully with what it means to be a true spiritual warrior. We will need to set aside our list of things to do and embark on this next stage of our healing journey without any agenda other than to be aware of what is so; so to fully awaken ourselves. It’s about getting in touch with our true Divine purpose, rather than getting pulled into life purpose, or worse, our ego agendas and mentality.
Awareness of what is, is a real facing of internal and external reality. There’s little space for compromise. How we appear to be living and how we actually desire to live are often two different things, and we need to begin with an analysis of ‘what is’ first so we can engage with how we want this next leg of our lives to look. It’s difficult to escape this, it’s best to just get with the momentum of change and healing.
There’s a need to grow, and that entails an entirely new foundation of self for making decisions and taking action. Chiron never allows us to dump the past, the underlying ground must be examined and understood.
Prevailing societal conditions are not supportive of this – digital technology, artificial intelligence and the tribal mentality drive us in the opposite direction. To express ourself as a unique individual with our own views, intentions and desires isn’t easy. Being yourself requires transcending lower vibrational behaviour and base needs, and participating in a process of the most profound transformation.
Doing so will challenge people in your life – it pushes buttons, triggers them. Yet it’ll be no fun to fight this process. That is not real awareness; it’s resistance and sabotage for its own sake. What might you lose? All that is not truly a reflection of your deepest Divine nature.
Someone going through a real growth process cannot offer security and stability to those around; it will challenges others to find it within themselves. By engaging with Chiron, you will be challenging the people around you, not because you want to, but because that is what’s bound to happen when you reject what is not true for you. It will likely involve a questioning of our intimate relationships.
The process of self-actualisation has a wide social impact and it can feel isolating, even painful. But keeping your eye on the larger vision and goal, supports you to know there is a place you are going, while knowing where you need to be is where you currently are. Remember what we become arises from our beingness. Keep your focus on yourself this year, your own necessities of growth, your own inner awareness, it will set you up for the next 7 years of transformation.
