I’ve been pondering how people change. And whether we should even focus on change. Sometimes total acceptance and gratitude for every moment are really the answers.

Yet most of us are not completely in acceptance. We have issues and challenges we’d like to change, transform, or address in some way. We work on these ‘problems’, talk about them, process and perhaps debate whether they’re even changeable. The issues might be quite personal, like wanting to change jobs, lose or gain weight, find a relationship, have more money, eat more healthily. We might want to transform the glaring issues we see in our community or in another part of the world. We donate money; we volunteer.

What I notice is that most people circle around issues for quite a long time before they change. Most of us don’t change much at all in key areas or we change quite slowly. We end a relationship because we don’t feel it’s the right one only to pick another person, soon finding ourself in a similar relationship dilemma. We go on and off diets for various reasons. We donate money to a cause and then feel frustrated and dejected about its potential to really help. Intention becomes action and then fades to inaction.

And then it changes. Something happens and we snap. The friend we’ve been thinking about letting go of disappoints us just one time too many. We see a photo and are shocked at how we actually look. We see a community problem that hasn’t been fixed for years but we snap into an awareness that it really can be transformed.

One woman described her relationship snap. She had put up with several long relationships with men who weren’t really committed or present. Leaving the last one after several years of therapy and workshops, she was dating and feeling discouraged about ever finding a life mate. Then a man she was interested in called at the last minute to finalize details of a previously planned date, having left her wondering for days whether it was on or off. That was her snap moment. She told him she wasn’t interested in the date or in seeing him at all. That moment crystallized her sense of self worth to know she deserved and wanted a mate who would be reliable and committed. Weeks later that mate showed up and they are still married many years later.

We have a new Moon in Aquarius today. Aquarius is the sign of snap! Fast, unpredictable, lightning bolt change is possible when we tune into Aquarius. New Moons represent new starts. Aquarius is about authentic freedom and the ability to evolve rapidly.

What would you like to change? It may be that you’d like to not actually change anything, that your evolutionary goal would be to accept what you have and snap into gratitude and faith. That’s fine too. But if there’s something you’ve been thinking about changing, this Moon might provide a bit of an extra push.

Truthfully though, the potential to snap out of what we don’t want and snap into what we do want is always within us.

Life is always about cycles, and we feel them whether they are named as planetary movement or are simply our inner urgings to move forward or to slow down and ponder. The idea of long, slow, lazy days of summer are perhaps related to the heat, but I’ll bet there’s a few farmers who aren’t finding it a slow and lazy time at all. For them it’s a careful tending of the plants sown in the initiating months. This August looks like an interesting blend of a slowing down, playful healing and a review of bigger plans.

Right now the transformational planets are retrograde as they always are in the summer months. If we’re inclined to transformation we gestate in this cycle. Now Mercury joins them, retrograde beginning August 2nd and direct again on August 26th. Giving a few days on either side for the slowing down/stationing effect, that means virtually all of August asks us to review our lives, get things done in a different way, think about projects, and perhaps be patient in our plans. We know that Mercury retrogrades can be times for equipment failure, errors in documents and quick decisions that turn out to be in error down the line (usually about three weeks down the line!). But let’s look at the whole planetary picture to understand a bit more about August’s inner question.

The Mercury retrograde begins in the sign of Virgo, indicating we might be looking at a problem to be solved that requires skill (the debt ceiling debate might be just one such issue, but we all have something personal we’re pondering over the past couple of weeks that will be reviewed). Over the month it will return to the sign of Leo, drawing in energies of creativity, a bit more fire and a perhaps a sense of entitlement. (If you know where these signs are in your chart you’ll know where your personal place of review is). There are also strong energies of spirituality, compassion and perhaps confusion that will be in the mix of this month’s inner question, and our current deep processes of transformation and the healing of karma continue whether we co-create with them consciously or not. My sense is that during the month there will be breakthroughs in thought and resolution of inner challenges, but that putting plans into action might not occur until mid September through November.

All in all, August is a great time to take a restful vacation, perhaps close to home, or with patience and a smile if you’re relying on planes, trains and automobiles. You might do a mid-year review (by the pool?) to look at what you’ve set out to accomplish, fine tuning and adjusting your path, based on new information and creative, compassion infused ways of looking at your self and your life. It’s a great time to play with the children and friends in your life and remind yourself that the overwhelming issues facing our planet require us to have a balance between work and play. The news is filled with scary events and prospects. It can be very helpful whenever we are exposed to these stories to imagine a beautiful spirit-infused outcome and beam this thought back to the cosmos, rather than give in to the black and white pictures of conflict and negativity that are beamed at us.

This is a marathon we’re in; not a sprint. We might as well enjoy each moment and not be too concerned with the details of what the finish looks like. We can’t probably even imagine it (it’s that good)!