We have a New Moon in Virgo on 30th August 2019 at 10.37 am GMT. This is a friendly New Moon, and should feel supportive, especially since over the next few days there are lots of solar storms hitting the earth causing more sensitive people to release a lot more at this time.
So these in combination suggest it’s a time of upshift. With all the planets focused in an earth element, that’s five inner planets in mutable Virgo – Moon, Sun, Mercury, Venus and Mars – we can expect to make some tangible progress, particularly if we apply ourselves to chopping wood and carrying water.
The inner planets in Virgo are forming a grand trine with Saturn and Pluto in earthy Capricorn and Uranus in Taurus. This is a concentrated triangular aspect pattern of earth energy, very practical, grounded and efficient encouraging flow, movement and fluidity. Grand trines are known to be fortunate and benevolent in astrology.
Virgo highlights humility and service and the need for detail and precision. It is very different to August’s Leo energy – it’s the opposite to getting an applause or standing out. Humility is Virgo’s special quality.
The more negative side of Virgo is that it has an attachment to perfection and can be critical – both of self and others. So the goal, for the next few weeks, is to open your heart and learn about the critic and judge inside. The goal is to be excellent in all you do, not perfection incarnate.
Our inner critic most obviously communicates through our thinking, our auditory channel. Some of us have mild inner critics, others have strong and intense critics. They can be self-judgmental, deriding, chastising and even derogative – directed inwards or outwards, and often both.
The strength of our inner critic directly relates to how much we need to pick up more discernment in our lives, and the amalgamation of our soul’s journey. We evolve our inner critic into a more discerning, discriminating force and ally when we cultivate more self-love and compassion, and when we listen and pick up the lesson it is trying to teach us.
Working with our inner critic is at the heart of creating a healthy relationship with ourself and others. Knowing how it speaks to you, its tone, what it says, what it needs, what it is trying to achieve and how it wants to evolve, often what new role it might like in your life, is pivotal for it to change it’s approach to you. You can see it as a figure or part that you can directly work with.
Some people have loud inner critics that resemble parental or teacher figures in their life, others have silent ones where they don’t even hear the words, they just notice they feel bad.
To find out what type yours is you can check out your natal chart – the position and condition of your Mercury – the ruler of Virgo and communication and thinking – can tell you a lot about how your inner critic works.
Mine is a largely a silent one, I rarely consciously hear it speak, it’s hard to catch it, it’s hidden, tucked behind my ascendant, equivalent to Pisces, so it operates behind the scenes. It’s invisible to me but it’s placement means I am very open to the cosmos and field consciousness. I can channel and play out others thoughts very easily, and so I need a lot of awareness to notice what is and is not me. In my case it’s good to remind myself that what I’m thinking or feeling is “not just mine”.
Other people have their Mercury in the first house, so communication would be very natural and easy for them, they would be identified as a communicator by their peers. Perhaps you have it in the seventh house, where communication becomes very important in relationships, you would need a mercurial partner. It’s good to know the challenges of your Mercury, some houses and conditions make it an easier that others.
Mercury in a difficult aspect to Neptune can bring a lot of confusion. With Pluto it can bring destructive yet powerful words and thoughts. Uranus can be feel very erratic where words are blurted out yet it is also connected to the higher mind so can be very incisive. There’s a lot to discover about yourself through how you think and how thoughts move through you.
Look to the sign, house and aspects to your Mercury to get an idea about how your inner critic works and how might be best to work with it. You could also check out the Virgo-Pisces axis in your chart, for example, a South Node in Pisces or Virgo can also indicate a journey to manage the inner critic.
If you have planets and tense aspects to them (squares, oppositions, semi-sextiles or inconjuncts) then you might have to learn to embrace and harness the power of your inner critic in a way that serves you and everyone around you.
Inner critics are not bad, they are usually very critical and judgmental of our inner critic, but usually there’s a strong gift that needs to help to emerge, and the critic’s tone and approach is the only way it has to get our attention. Once we start paying more attention to it, it can become a strong ally, and work at the level of editor, helping sift through our experience, and giving us clarity and boundaries.
It’s good to be a witness to our inner critic, this is the way we can support the process and unfold it’s teaching. Generally, they are fed up of playing out the role they are cast into, they want to evolve, like all aspects of us.
In many ways though, the power of our inner critic comes down to leverage of our mind and the power we give over to our thoughts. There are ego agendas, belief systems, fears, unconscious deep programmes and many other aspects of ourselves that set up how much sway our minds have over our experience. It is important to also honour these lower aspects of consciousness as they have served a purpose on our path as growth.
But putting energy work aside (which releases the energetic holding of these programmes in our energy bodies), if we can recognise more of our mind’s experience through a shift in awareness, then more beauty and simplicity becomes available to us on a moment to moment basis. This is the Virgo path.
This is about living more from where we are and deepening our honouring of life as a process through a moment to moment awareness. To live more from who we are means we become less of something in particular – like the no-self of Buddhism. It becomes less about going out and finding ourselves for what we are trying to find is always there with us, we just do not see it or rather we are not sensing and experiencing ourselves fully or deeply enough
Our commitment to our electronic devices and our input into the matrix and field of electricity, which we are all constantly plugged into, is a massive impediment to living from this more connected, grounded, sensing ourselves place. This is why going away and having breaks from the world of ‘yang’ electricity and phones is so important – it unplugs you from the matrix and mass consciousness, helps you find yourself again.
But our minds and thinking can be constantly nagging and grasping at things. We are constantly interpreting, giving meaning and feeding the thinking process which actually takes us into a place of separation and duality.
What we find though, when we become more aware of our minds and thoughts, is a very fluid experience of ourselves and reality. It moves through, in us and around us, rather than ‘we’ being confined to somewhere in particular. Through our noticing of the small details, we have access to a far greater and more expansive sense of self, or no-self, and all it takes is a recognition that we just need a shift of perception and perspective.
When we actually use the power of our discernment, which is our Virgo eyes and body sensing, we look more closely and experience things differently. We experience what is actually going on, rather than what our mind interprets is going on. This is taking a more phenomenological approach – the study of consciousness through direct experience is a quicker approach to awakening. If we notice the stream activity in our consciousness and experience then we are transported into a very present, being-led place.
Thoughts, sensations, images, sounds, movement, tastes, smells are all by and large ignored in our normal experience of ourselves as we just usually go down the interpretation route. We can have all manner of interpretations and meaning-making of our experience without having just experienced the problem in a sensory grounded way.
Having said all that, my personal means of gaining awareness is through me speaking it. I cannot just sense inside and get somewhere easily, it needs to be voiced, and this is often the case for people. We need to bring our experience out into the world, and create a feedback loop with our environment.
Our experience is always changing for our nature is change. Thoughts are like sensations we just done realise it. So it’s important to challenge the basic experiencing of ourselves, as it allows us to step into different perspectives. Asking ourselves who is doing the thinking helps us step outside of identifications. This more interactive approach with our experience can support our becoming.
Our thoughts drift, come and go, and in our minds and we never arrive at an origin or conclusion as different sensations trigger new thoughts. More is revealed when we pay attention, and it’s interesting to see what we choose to follow from the milieu of possibilities. Again, who is doing the choosing?
If we enter into the non-verbal, sensory-grounded world, we discover that there’s a dreaming process behind our thoughts and words. Non-verbal signals arise in the field of the unexpected and unintended, they come through in ways that don’t go along with our expected ideas. It’s present in what is almost happening, but not quite yet, since it exists in our subtle awareness, at the edge of our experience. When we embody more of our subtle awareness we are in a more awake place, since we are connecting to pre-experience realm, prior to full manifestation.
Why is this important? Well, existing in that place means we come into a more 4th dimensional reality, more subjective experiencing, where our truth is our reality, there is no ‘one’ reality – like a table is a table, it becomes what we perceive it to be from the higher or deeper realm of our soul’s dreaming imagination. We step out of the 3D matrix.
So while we might have our own ideas about an experience we are having, when we follow the body and our subtle awareness, we can experience a very different reality, which takes us beyond labels, stories and narratives.
This is a process of opening, revealing and unfolding, which diminishes our identifications and clarifies our emotional life. When we combine this level of awareness and enquiry with the energy work required to clear out the programmes and interferences preventing our Divinity shining, we can be catapulted forward on our path of awakening. Both need to happen in unison, among other important aspects.
As we encode higher levels of light into our energetic fields, we become more conscious and the interface with life and reality can effect us in different ways. Equally as we ascend in frequency and consciousness, the descension of light can be destabilising and create uncomfortable reactions at many levels and that can take time to process and integrate. The more we work with the body, the easier the integration.
Not getting stuck or attached into thoughts, patterns and recycling the same path, and instead working with whatever life throws at us, not as darkness, fear or shadow to reject or fear, but as a reality to embrace. This is the same as loving what is and living in the moment, experiencing life through all our senses and channels. Our bodies and subtle awareness needs to be awake to fully embrace the path of awakening.
Virgo is about discernment and saying no, yet appreciating all the parts. Like the original meaning, Virgin, Virgo represents the woman whole unto herself. The Virgin understands that by being in her wholeness she is able to discern clearly and choose more wisely, separating wheat from chaff.
This is where the devotion and service come in. As we reside in our beingness, our wholeness, we are aware that we are all the parts, and that they just fluidly change and move and flow into one another. This is what it means to embody our sacred duty to be in service to the whole of creation.
So this is a working, productive New Moon, if you want to pick up some of the above. It’s a time for paying attention, training your consciousness to express what is marginalised, what’s not seen or recognised in respect and honouring of the whole. It’s an efficient, organising energy. It’s not a time to let things go by. It’s a time to be on it.
Feng Shui your house, put up those pictures you’ve been meaning to put up, get your work files organised, whatever it is do something that organises the energy in your life. This is also a time to clean up your body, doing a detox, taking care of your diet and exercise is all supported during Virgo time. Be efficient and take care of what needs taking care of – devotion and sacred service to that marginalised or left on the sidelines.
