Astrology of 7/5-7/11: Full Moon in Capricorn & Watering the Desert

We had an intense last week with Mars opposite Pluto building and going exact; with Chiron stationing retrograde in Pisces. This week we build to a Full Moon in Capricorn which joins up with Pluto and opposes Mars, with the Mars-Pluto opposition still in orb. This makes many of last week’s themes ongoing, with further emotional integration now. There can be recognition of inner spaces that feel dry (Full Moon in Capricorn) and developments along how these spaces are irrigated. The Sun in Cancer is active this week – still shining lots of light on our emotional bodies; and forming aspects to Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto. The emotionality is high while at the same time so are the walls and dams that keep it all at bay – unless – we start to see a way to better integrate these forces. We see a restructuring of how the vital waters of our lives are channeled.

Before we get into our week, I’m excited to announce that I’ve teamed up with my friend and colleague Ichrak Dahou of Atlas Astrology to share a wealth of information with you on what you can expect from the Eclipses of August of 2017, including the lunar eclipse in Aquarius on the 7th and the solar eclipse in Leo on the 21st. Sign up for our mailing list to receive communications about what eclipses are, why they matter, and what’s special and relevant about this upcoming eclipse season. Later this month, we invite you to attend a webinar on the August eclipses with us to resource yourself with information on what to expect and how you might make the most of these transits. Get tickets here!

Here’s our week:

July 5

Mercury enters Leo: 5:20 PM PDT

(Mercury will stay in Leo until July 25th. It will later retrograde in the sign of Virgo and trail back into the late degrees of Leo at the end of August.)

• This introduces some fire to our sky where the personal inner planets have been earth, water and air dominated as of late. This can be a quality of emerging enthusiasm, creativity, and vision.
• Mercury in Leo loves the exchange of recognition, validation, complimenting, courtship, romance.

Sun in Cancer trine Neptune in Pisces: 5:47 PM PDT and Sun in Cancer square Jupiter in Libra: 7:44 PM PDT

(Image: http://chechula.tumblr.com)

This has the Sun in Cancer highlight the Neptune-Jupiter inconjunct that has been a backdrop for some time. Reminds me of a John Welwood (a psychotherapist who writes about love) title “Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationship” – that there is a difference between the perfect energy of divine love and the ups and downs of human relationship. Yet at times, the two actually align into focus, in the same way that sometimes we align directly with our Higher Selves or Spirit and feel supercharged. When the Sun in Cancer highlights this dynamic, we may also be considering the love present within ourselves and our relationships and the ways that we access divine contentment versus the ways we experience earthly contentment. There is often a friction/discomfort within the inconjunct aspect which signals the need to make an adjustment, relating to some of these possibilities:

• feeling disappointed by the disparity between ideals and lived reality
• being haunted by nostalgic memories of paradise (either by direct experience OR by the imagination of it such as a culture as a whole idealizing historic time periods)
• feeling longing or sadness evoked by the pendulum of life (the good times come and go)
• a goldilocks // princess and the pea dynamic playing out somewhere… the extra-attuned sensitivity to something not being quite perfect when perfection can be imagined, but is not the current direct experience. The reversal of this can be when the imperfection in itself becomes perfect as it grains and highlights a particularity worth paying attention to and refining.

Positively, when the adjustment needed is made; often through humility, deep reservoirs of abundance and gratitude fill into the tiniest of details of our lives.

Within this backdrop storyline, the Sun in Cancer harmonizes with Neptune (divine realm, unconditional love, non-discriminatory) and forms friction with Jupiter in Libra (relational, direct experience with relationship, the expansion and discovery of human relationship).

• Great emotionality; feeling happy and alive one moment and sad/depressed the next; easily affected
• Being held (or wanting to be held) in dreaminess; fantasy life in real life; being soothed by fantasy/imagination
• Parties, barbecues, etc. are generally a landscape that catch this transit. Leisure is a way to catch the dream energy.
• Confusion or negative dissolution appears as issues between people become about right and wrong; it’s more about empathizing with how someone else is feeling.
• Disappointment and sadness is easily dramatized at this time; and in its dramatization we may be inspired to find mental, philosophical or emotional adjustments that allow the disappointment to pass (or risk going further into the crab’s shell).
• The type of magic that happens in interior (and/or enclosed) spaces; the connections and expansive experiences related to knowing people and being part of tribe.
• A tension between keeping harmony by being social or engaging in conflict where it exists versus retreating and gaining recharge/spiritual clarity in a given situation. Think about facilitating this level of space and be present with the ways in which Jupiter exaggeratedly seems to be poking Cancer’s soft spots; making our defenses higher or retreat more likely. This also means that trying to have a frank or direct conversation with someone might not go over in some scenarios, or that it may be directly vitalizing in other scenarios (depending on the relational philosophies of those involved and how comfortable/opportunistic one is about meeting conflict).
• Finding philosophical peace with the way things are; the inherent perfection of what is, realizing how something that seems not optimal or not ideal is actually a gift/blessing; finding the grace/forgiveness in what is deemed imperfect to the point that things begin to shift and transform. If we go about our lives trying to correct something from an inherent place of lack, we will always be digging at the bottom of a dried-out well. If however, we shift our lens and see how we have exactly what we need, we start to naturally see improvements upon the things we were upset about.
• A small change (tangibly or in perception) creates a sweeping result; some little area in our life needs attention that once tuned into, radiates contentment, alignment, integration.

July 7

Mercury in Leo sextile Venus in Gemini: 6:19 AM PDT

(Image: Hiroko Shiina)

• Playfulness dispels some of the more serious/heavy themes of the week and is supported here.
• A greater cognitive realization of where one is holding pride; and the simultaneous inner-negotiation around that (trying to see other angles of the situation). Pride can also be used as a tool for emerging from circumstances that one doesn’t resonate with… (“I’m worth more than this.”) Pride consolidates the ego. In other cases, the loosening of pride (where there has been too much) frees up consciousness to actually enjoy itself more, to feel connection.

July 8

Full Moon in Capricorn: 9:07 PM PDT

The Moon will be in a balsamic conjunction to Pluto (completing a cycle with Pluto), and Mars is still in orb of being opposite Pluto and now our Moon as well.

• The death of an emotional ego structure; feeling that death occur. This can be very sobering, maturing, grief-related or enjoyable.
• The emotional maturity of realizing that one will be affected by the structure of one’s life and so using an engineering quality to construct a livable life… the emotional intelligence involved in cultivating a pleasing home environment, of having a positive relationship with one’s work/job, etc… the responsibility involved in constructing a life that is emotionally rewarding & the grit that is required when one is starting from a depressive place.
• An illumination of the dryness of an inner emotional landscape when one is /going without/ – in the desert emotionally/relationally and still trudging onward. Simply that this space is out and visible means it can begin to be integrated or met more deeply; watered.
• Working with finding the way to balance the emotional agitation that comes from feeling alone or not taken care of/loved and seeing where this has been a result of being invulnerable or jaded; loosening of related structures.
• The self-destruction of fixating on what is negative in one’s experience (even when one is on a track of becoming more self-aware etc.); needing to balance it with a fair acknowledgement of either how far one has come (in one’s Capricorn climb), how good one does have it. Within Capricorn we can be so forward thinking and always seeking new peaks/heights that we forget to either enjoy the way up or take account of where we’ve travelled, to the point of being very cynical. It can be especially rewarding at this time to take compassionate account of how far we’ve come.
• The realization that constructive efforts can be yielded by really listening to one’s emotional reality. Systems of waterways and pipes can be created to irrigate and water our lives. Inevitably, the structures we live by and the emotional experience that fills them will be in a relationship and these structures can be designed.

July 9

Sun in Cancer opposite Pluto in Capricorn: 9:31 PM PDT

• A lot of projections arise from this, especially in terms of how people are taking care of each other or feeling not taken care of, and where we locate the responsibility.
• Situations which are supposed to be fun can have a deep, thrumming angst in the background: the juxtaposition of light, breezy summer fun and dark feelings because the light imagery pokes at something systemically or historically repressed / turned to the shadows. Alternately, a dropping in may occur, where one becomes so focused upon and merged with the experience of emotion, of reality, that there is no longer so deep a chasm between the psyche and the lived experience. This experience can be really environment-dependent; like some environments evoking this dissonance while others evoke dropping in. Alternately, if one goes the vibrational route and drops in regardless of what the circumstances are, the circumstances may also re-align.
• The recognition that some things are too heavy to be held by certain others; the experience of judging whether there is enough of that kind of trust to go deep with others or whether to keep it light; the desire for heavier things to be held and nurtured. In the case of there not being “holding” (Cancer), Capricorn is well-aware of how to go without or how to be totally self-reliant and have a grip on things in the midst of emotional desert. However, for this kind of ongoing karma to shift (of having to be invulnerable because no one understands or is empathetic enough to “hold”), it might be important to face one’s vulnerability head on and form some bridges to fertilize these empty interior spaces where things have stopped growing. This can definitely mean engaging other people (receiving care from others; especially if one’s self-care is highly developed as the result of not trusting other people). Likewise, if people you care about open up to you at this time consider it a compliment! It likely is an act of trust. Honor and respect will go a long way, whether it is holding space for your loved ones or being honest about your boundaries.
• Personal evolution that occurs because an emotion has been supported to reach a state of fullness – “the intensity of an emotion is the funeral pyre of that emotion” is a quote I heard once and I can’t discern the author. When attempting to look it up though, I found this article called “The Alchemy of Anger” instead that’s really interesting.

So, what you may see this week is a dynamic of confronting the inner-desert; and seeing, directing rain to these landscapes. Sometimes this may be very easy; other times we may be dealing with ongoing defenses. Take meditation on the structures in your life and the ways they can genuinely support you. One thing that studying astrology has taught me is that emotions (Moon/Cancer) and infrastructure (Saturn/Capricorn) are in direct relationship (Cancer and Capricorn are complimentary polarities). It’s important to keep these lines of communication open and to have something like irrigation canals, pipes carrying water – rather than to have pipes without water; or water spilling out all over the place with nowhere to go. Depression as an experience often points to times where we are getting ready to make a structural life change; we can’t simply go through the motions so dryly anymore; we’re thirsty. So keep it wet this week! 🙂 Thank you for meditating on the planets with me. I love to hear how you are doing so drop a line in the comments!

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~Sabrina Monarch

Sabrina Monarch is a soul-centered Evolutionary Astrologer who publishes weekly astrological forecasts. She has been collecting astrological experience for over a decade. She also enjoys kundalini and ashtanga yoga, hiking and creative writing.