The Balance of Heaven—Libra Full Moon—April 6th.
Your pain, your sorrow, your doubts, your longings, your fearful thoughts: they are not mistakes, and they are not asking to be ‘healed.’ They are asking to be held. Here, now, lightly, in the loving, healing arms of present awareness—Jeff Foster.
The Sumerians called the constellation of Libra Zib-ba An-na, “the balance of heaven.”
The Egyptians weighed the souls of the dead against the Feather of Truth in golden scales of balance.
At this time of pause and reflection celebrated with ritual and reverence in so many tradtions, we are called to hold ourselves tenderly at this point of stillness.
Tonight’s full moon makes an exact opposition to the Sun, Jupiter, and Chiron, the wounded healer, all warmed by the fire of Aries highlighting the ways we wound and heal in all our relationships, inviting us to bring harmony, beauty and balance in our own lives. As we cradle our pain and our sorrow, our doubts and our longings, may we also tend to our tired bodies while the full moon silvers the world with her light tonight.
The full moon holds the tension of opposites between two hot-headed Aries new moons (March 21st and April 19th). Alluring Venus in sensual Taurus disposits this full moon heightening her charm and her grace, a celestial reminder that we need more beauty, more sensual pleasure, more harmony and ease in our lives. Mercury joined Venus in Taurus on April 3rd and begins to lose pace as he slides into shadow on April 7th, the day after the full moon. We enter a Mercury Retrograde cycle in a fixed element of earth from April 21st-May 14th, which accents practical concerns like finances, property, working conditions, and importantly the most valuable rescource, our body and its needs. For those who have angles or planets at fixed degrees (5-15°) Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, or Aquarius, this will be an opportune time to attend to the most fundamental details of life. Jupiter will amplify themes of abundance or lack (finances, love and loneliness) when it enters Taurus in May and also accents that 15° point, turning Retrograde at 15° Taurus on September 4th and moving direct again at 5° Taurus on New Year’s Eve.
As we contemplate the worth and the meaning of the associations that support or challenge us, this lunation illuminates the patterns in our relationships, and the part we play in braiding the ties that bind.
For some, this will be the moment in time when we harvest all the thoughts and emotions that have brought us to a place of ending. This will be a time of departure from a relationship that for far too long has provided scant nourishment. Within every human heart is a longing to be cherished and to be seen. Psychologist Sue Johnson writes, “this drive to emotionally attach—to find someone to whom we can turn and say ‘Hold me tight’—is wired into our genes and our bodies. It is as basic to life, health, and happiness as the drives for food, shelter, or sex. We need emotional attachments with a few irreplaceable others to be physically and mentally healthy—to survive.”
We expect so much from our partners, in love, and as we continue to live with the existential anxiety of the climate crisis, those relationships that have sustained us—friendships old and new, the intricacies and vagaries of family relationships, the encounters with our virtual tribe or colleagues at the office—we absorb and embody experiences that take us down the twists and turns, repeats and spirals, back to ancient themes.
Spanish philosopher, Ortega y Gasset wrote that “no land in human topography is less explored than love.” It is the exploration of love’s landscape that is essential to the soul’s holy longing, and we must be brave wayfarers. Although all planetary archetypes portray our human experience of relationship—attachment, separation, autonomy, and dependence. The Venusian art of relating and healing the heart’s contraction has evolved from Agony Aunt columns and our urge to pathologize, improve or fix, into the collective experience of relationship therapy. The “telly-therapy” of Esther Perel and Orna Guralnik offers voyeuristic participation in couples therapy, revealing the archetype of Venus in all her guises, and inviting personal identification with couples who are living in the trauma world of fear, disconnection, and shame.
“Intimacy is a difficult art,” Virginia Woolf once said. Intimacy is a difficult art in a world where technology replaces the warmth of human encounter. Voyeuristic TV series like Married at First Sight portray a lonely absence of intimacy, a hungry urgency to find shelter for the soul. In a culture so focused on measurables and certainties, we may find the candlelit depth and substance of intimacy a difficult art. The Sun, the symbol of our creative self-expression, is said to be in its fall in Libra implying that a perpetual state of balance is impossible to achieve, as we continually re-create ourselves amidst the complexities of our relationships and metastasise the events that are unfolding in the world right now.
Balance is as capricious as the patterns of neuronal firing in our brains, as fleeting as our emotionally charged perceptions of the world around us. It will be the small gestures of love and kindness, the careful harnessing of our untamed thoughts, the brave reimagining of how this world could be that keep us open-hearted, willing to be held and to hold.
Please get in touch if you would like a private astrology consultation or to join me and spiritual guide and teacher, Eileen Heneghan on Saturday June 24th in Celebration of the Midsummer Solstice: ingrid@trueheartwork.com
It arrives suddenly, unannounced, concealed in a swirl of dry wind that scatters a shroud of ash over life as we knew it. It blinds us in the glare of a nuclear sky. Out of the blue, news that buckles our knees, shatters our world into shiny, sharp shards that embed themselves in our heart. At that moment, we know. Our life will never be the same again.
The Sun conjoins Chiron on Wednesday, a suggestion that the road ahead may not be easy. That stiff upper lips and stoicism was not what M Scott Peck had in mind when he said, “Life is difficult.” We may feel flawed; our flame of creativity and passion may be extinguished by worry or sorrow. We may not feel like Xena the Warrior. Chiron pierces through our illusions, our judgements, and in our pain, we may be emboldened by our courage, our inexhaustible vitality.
It takes great courage to submit to the call to visit those secret vulnerable places in our heart, to weep away the pretenses, to risk tenderness.