Category: Blog

Snap out of It! Aquarius New Moon

Monday, 23 January 2012 01:31 0 Comments

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.

Astrology Highlights for January & February 2012

Thursday, 12 January 2012 18:47 1 Comment

We began the year with an opposition between Jupiter and Saturn that will last until mid February. Saturn represents the structure, stability and groundedness in our lives, what we’re working diligently on to create in the material world. It also may signal a time to look at where we feel blocked and challenged by the various brick walls of reality, sometimes leading to a feeling of discouragement or depression. Jupiter represents hope and optimism, an inner sense we can expand and accomplish anything in alignment with our beliefs. So this tension between the possibilities of who we are and the apparent limitations of the world sets the entry level stage of 2012. On January 1st significant planets are talking to Saturn (connected by aspect: Pluto & Sun by quintile, a creative vibration between the structuring principle and transformation and identity, Neptune by trine (flow between structure and higher love), Uranus by quincunx (hard to find a connection between the structure and the need for freedom and enlightenment), and of course that opposition to Jupiter.

Meanwhile Pluto is in Capricorn, continuing our ongoing saga of transformation of all structures. You might see how the opposition of Saturn to Jupiter is related. We have to transform the parts of our lives, and our world, that are no longer sufficient to hold a container for our expanded beliefs. As Neptune enters the sign of Pisces on February 3rd to stay until around 2026, we will be infused with a greater level of heart and spirit than we can probably imagine, although if we were paying attention last year between April and August we had a taste of this genuinely compassionate, intuitive, spirit infused field of consciousness that holds a good part of the key to our world’s transition. On the shadow side, we must be mindful of addictive and mind numbing activities. We are called to surrender to that we cannot control, each of us a conduit for unconditional love and compassion.

I’ve been feeling an interesting window of time between the full Moon we just had on January 8th and the new Moon on January 22nd. It feels like we’re still working with the energies to release old patterns during this time, and not ready for a real new year’s start until the new moon in Aquarius on Sunday the 22nd of January. This is a great time to get your life in order and slowly put your new year’s plans into effect. Yet, right with that new moon, Mars will go retrograde on January 23rd at 23 degrees of Virgo. The action planet in the sign of diligent work indicates there’s still more to review. Between this retrograde of initiating force and a Saturn retrograde beginning February 7th, we may feel like our plans are not generating the results we’re hoping for. The answer is to be patient, do the work, be conscientious about the details, and take the long term view during this period of time that lasts until April 13 (Mars direct) and June 24 (Saturn direct). It’s not that nothing happens in a retrograde period, it’s that there’s a great deal of internal work to do and the energies we are cultivating now will often pay off later.

The natural rhythm of things:
START ON NEW MOONS / COMPLETE ON FULL MOONS
January Full Moon: January 8 @ 11:30 pm PST: 19 degrees Cancer
January New Moon: January 22 @ 11:40 pm: 3 degrees Aquarius
February Full Moon: February 7 @ 1:54 pm PST: 19 degrees Leo
February New Moon: February 21 @ 2:34 pm PST: 3 degrees Pisces

Mercury Retrogrades – the year of the Action/Emotional (Fire & Water Sign) review
March 11 to April 4 – 7 degrees Aries back to 24 Pisces
July 14 to August 7 – 13 degrees Leo back to 2 degrees Leo
November 6 to November 25 – 5 degrees Sagittarius back to 19 degrees Scorpio

Honoring your Own Turning Points

Sunday, 08 January 2012 18:12 0 Comments

I have to admit, I really didn’t resonate with New Year’s Day this year. I wasn’t ready to release the old and bring in the new. I was steeped in an internal philosophical battle between the part of me that wants to simply live in each now moment, and the part that wants to organize and plan for the future. The pain in my back for the first few days of the year engaged my concentration, and my desire to focus on diet and health was met with powerful resistance. Ever notice when you decide to change something your internal parts that don’t want to change become very very strong?!

So I decided today, January 8th would be my New Year’s Day. Seemed like that would give me enough time to get into the year and be ready. And yet as we arrive at this day I am noticing it is the day of the Full Moon, exact at 11:30 pm tonight, Pacific time. The Sun is in Capricorn, the Moon in Cancer. We are all triggered internally to find balance between structure, success and our goals, with our needs for love, nurturing and family (family includes friends and beloved pets too!). And, a Full Moon always has a quality of completion, of letting go. Intuitively, today is a great day to ponder the past month and what it has brought to us, and perhaps to consider the whole year of 2011: where we’ve felt success and accomplished our aims as well as where we’ve felt blocked. We might also look at where have our emotional needs been true, clear and met with healthy care and love, and where have we depleted ourselves in our mission to feel secure and loved. The chart for this Full Moon also inspires us to balance between caution and conservatism and a desire to expand our selves and our life, as well as an ability to think deeply about the transformational process we all find ourselves in.

The New Moon on January 22nd will in fact truly be the beginning of the new year energetically. At 3 degrees of Aquarius and forming a tense yet creative alignment with the forces of constructive conservatism and expansive optimism, after January 22nd will really be the time to initiate significant change, internally or externally, if that’s what we’re called to do. The first three weeks of the year give us much time to analyze, transform and slowly initiate the changes, letting go of old patterns and understanding ourselves and our shadow material more deeply.

We are meandering into 2012, unlike the obvious shift at the turn of the year that we feel in some years. I am honoring my internal call, and accepting the energies of each day as I perceive them, creating my own turning points and rhythm.

Happy New Year!

Monday, 02 January 2012 08:20 0 Comments

We like to wish each other happiness. Happy New Year, Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays. This is lovely, we generally would prefer happiness over unhappiness and we wish the best for others. But over the past few days I was pondering what it is we really want, or are likely to get, and perhaps it’s more complex than happy.

And since the Universe likes nothing more than a teaching story, I was given my personal version of Happy New Year today.

My lovely plan for a happy day was to wake up slowly, go to a special yoga workshop, work on a blog, finish cleaning my closet, journal and go for a walk or work out later in the day. In honor of the perennial New Year’s ‘and I’ll be more healthy this year’ kind of thought process I decided to cook a simple fish and salad dinner, but in honor of “it’s still a holiday” I wanted to also bake a cake, something I rarely do.

I did wake up slowly. That was kind of happy. And the yoga workshop was fabulous … and with an unanticipated result. The body ‘intention’ I set at the beginning of class was to release any old emotional energy I’m holding in the lower pelvic region, and about an hour into the class my back seized up with that lovely psoas muscle that goes from the back kind of around the inside of the pelvis and down to the inner thigh. Leading to a lot of crying (definite emotional release) not to mention barely being able to walk, stand, lie down comfortably or sit for the rest of the day. My plans mostly dissolved and released, along with emotion that felt old and deep, just like the muscle.

After hot baths, endless stretching and lots of massage I was able to hobble around to cook the tilapia and bake the cake. The accomplishment of two pans of cake in the oven was quickly diminished when I realized I’d carefully measured out two teaspoons of potato starch into the batter, not the baking powder I thought I’d used (Bob’s Red Mill … if you know the brand you know all those little bags look alike). So now my cake didn’t have leavening in it. I was beginning to see a theme. Happiness, Plans & Reality.

We metaphysical folks can be a little superstitious. Everything can be a sign from the Universe, especially when our day is not going as planned. I asked myself should I not do so much yoga? The inner voice said no, yoga is great, this is the release of old emotional energy I asked for. Should I not bake cake? Well probably, but I already knew that it’s not my superfood.

To me, the truth is when we imagine a good day, a happy holiday, a good life, a fabulous year, it’s not necessarily smooth sailing. There are steps to climb, ravines to cross, nasty people in traffic to consider in a new and different way. Wanting to release emotional energy isn’t always a quick breath and stretch leading to unbridled happiness. Sometimes release really hurts. And maybe we actually don’t want a consistently happy mellow existence every hour of every day. That might be boring and not very growthful. The bottom line is we don’t always see in advance exactly how our wishes and dreams will play out, or what needs to happen first, second and third before what we think we want occurs. Flexibility and surrender are often crucial ingredients in happiness.

We want to be able to meet each moment with an alive sense of who we really are, with skills and talents to handle what comes up, hopefully thriving. We want to feel deeply, both highs and lows, and not get caught or stuck in attachment. We need to be able to accept difficulties, intuitively aware of an approach or tactic to meet the challenge, cognitively clear and grounded, willing to soften and accept assistance and guidance when needed, willing to release and surrender, or to go to Plan B.

For me, my day revolved around the release of the emotional and physically connected energy and other wishes had to be postponed. On some level this must be my highest wish because that’s the way it happened. And it turns out cake not exactly leavened with potato flour isn’t all that bad!

I wish you a magnificent year, filled with life, love and authenticity.

Reviewing the Review

Sunday, 18 December 2011 22:46 1 Comment

We’ve had a few days since the Mercury retrograde moved forward — or actually our perspective has moved forward. Retrogrades are symbolic time cycles where we perceive a planet moving backward from our earthly perspective. With Mercury, we think about issues we’ve already covered so that we can deepen our personal perspective and move forward with greater clarity. This often involves fixing things that need to be fixed, like your computer hard drive which obviously needed more clarity itself!

I was pretty smug as I approached the end of this three week retrograde. Nothing had broken, no obvious errors. I’d made as many travel plans and other commitments as I could for 2012 the week before, careful to be sure that anything during the retrograde was double checked and had an escape clause. I had managed to submit my Canadian passport for renewal just a few days before the retrograde, knowing I was taking a risk with its Fedex arrival in Gatineau on the actual retrograde station day, November 23rd. Yet, I was delighted to receive the passport without a hitch a week later. Whew!

With the retrograde in the sign of Sagittarius, there was a noticeable focus on people’s grand plans, travel ideas, educational goals and philosophical leanings in session after session during the three weeks. Some people experienced major equipment and auto breakdowns, but in general a Sag retrograde won’t indicate as much of that as when it’s in Virgo or Aquarius or in your 2nd, 3rd or 6th houses in your personal chart.

As the Retrograde period came to its end and began to station forward around the 12th and 13th of December, just last week, that’s when its mischief came to light. For me I discovered I had written my rent check with the wrong checkbook and my rent had bounced twice in an unused old New Mexico account. I’d forgotten to pay a couple of bills and hadn’t checked some other numbers that came back to haunt me. The day of the 13th was filled with stories of last minute changes and confusing problems for many. For me, the big picture review of Sagittarius seemed to have a corresponding deleterious effect on the opposite sign of Gemini, the indicator of details, the ADD sign of the zodiac.

Why am I still talking about a Mercury retrograde that is technically over? Because it’s not over until it reaches the ‘Shadow Point’ — the degree at which it initially went retrograde. We’re still in the integration phase and it’s useful to continue pondering and rethinking our values and beliefs and how we’d like to integrate them as we move forward. Mercury will be back to that point on January 1st, an auspicious new start day for us energetically — and — Jupiter, the ruling planet of Sagittarius moves direct from its long retrograde on December 25th, so it will be just picking up steam around the 1st. Energetically I continually read December to be a great downtime period as we get ready for the dynamic potential of 2012. And, since most of us don’t take enough downtime periods without help, colds, flu and other viruses have been mowing us down into downtime these past few weeks, haven’t they?!

2012 is almost upon us. Being ready spiritually, mentally, emotionally and physically will be at the heart of our lives during the next year. No time to waste — let’s approach it with joy and a deeply centered spiritual awareness!

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