This week, the urge to immerse ourselves in fantasy may rival an urge to edit, fix, or refine reality. One miracle we can pay attention to is the possibility to be disillusioned of our problems – to see something we have located as “wrong” soften and become more acceptable to us. A very vigilant part of ourselves will resist this because we believe we need to make things wrong, and separate ourselves from the wrongness, in order to fix it and do something about it. It puts as at war. But sometimes a deeper, more skillful understanding of how to navigate the impasse only comes from forgiving it first and relieving it of its “wrongness” status.
How do we get into this place of sublime forgiveness that dissolves problems? Peak spiritual experience is one! Or, perhaps more accessibly, the steady cultivation of spiritual practices. (I’d argue peak spiritual experience can be found intentionally, with practice of learning how to contact those states.)
If you want to dissolve the duality between problems and acceptance, try being more honest with yourself about how you are feeling even if it feels ugly or wrong to you, and assert that you love and forgive yourself for feeling that way. Over time, this trains us to stop making problems out of problems, and to just let things be. Consider acceptance and forgiveness NOT as a form of enabling the “wrongness” to continue, but rather as a key that allows a situation to transform.
Welcome back! Or in case this is your first time here, I’m Sabrina Monarch and I’m a soul-centered astrologer. I love providing perspectives on the opportunities of transits and putting into words what the vibe feels like at this moment in time, to support you on your path & open a dialogue between us and the cosmos. If you would like to receive these weekly forecasts to your inbox and be notified of upcoming educational opportunities, sign up for my mailing list here.
Here’s our week after a few announcements:
Astrology Reading Bookings FULL: I am booked out for a little bit, but still taking new clients for ongoing mentorship/coaching (6 month – 1 year commitment).. If you’re interested in working with me in that capacity, send me an email at sabrina@monarchastrology.com. And make sure you’re on my mailing list if you’d like to be informed of when my books open again!
NEXT EVOLUTIONARY ASTROLOGY INTENSIVE
We’ve just begun the current intensive, but I’m going to announce the dates for the upcoming one sooner than I normally do, so you have time to plan. I’m also going to make the next one friendlier to European time zones. Stay tuned, and make sure you’re on my mailing list to be informed. View the course page here for more information on this amazing learning opportunity.
August 27, 2020
Venus in 19 Cancer trine Neptune retrograde in 19 Pisces: 2:13 PM PDT
(Image: unknown)
“Once you start having a good experience, a natural tendency is to want to keep hold of it. But if you do this, you’re no longer flowing with the experience and are instead standing apart from it trying to freeze and possess it. Then there is no more good experience. It is like listening to music. If you hear a great riff and try to replay it in your mind while the song continues, the enjoyment goes out of the music. Therefore, the art is to like the good experience without wanting it.
Liking involves enjoying, appreciating, and relishing. By wanting, I mean drivenness, insistence, compulsion, pressure, grasping after, getting attached to, craving, and clinging. In your subcortex and brain stem, connected but separate circuits handle liking and wanting. This means you can like something without wanting it, such as enjoying the taste of ice cream while still turning down a second serving after a big meal. People can also want something without liking it, such as the ones I’ve seen mechanically pulling the slot machine handle over and over in a casino, hardly seeming to care if it pays off.”
Rick Hanson from Hardwiring Happiness
- Our sensibilities and desires for sublime experience are highlighted, with Venus contacting dreamy Neptune. Beautiful moments will dissolve (as any moments dissolve) and we might like to let them dissolve without trying to grasp onto what cannot be grasped. It is not that we can’t experience those same feelings again, but these feelings arise from moments where we feel particularly connected. It’s not the moment itself necessarily, but the feeling of connection the moment triggers, that is the sublime.
- Venus-Neptune contacts can relate to chasing ghosts (I mean metaphorically) – and perhaps all the more when we have Venus in a nostalgic sign like Cancer. Reminiscing can have an enchanted quality and might be a source of creativity or insight. Yet, sense into when reminiscing becomes haunting and overindulgent or creates feelings of lack around the present moment. That might be a signal that it is time to re-enchant the present moment and get back into connection with the ongoing flow of reality (rather than some place in the past).
August 29, 2020
Mercury in 17 Virgo trine Jupiter retrograde in 17 Capricorn: 6:28 AM PDT
(Image: Frida Kahlo)
- A tendency to go into a shame spiral when we perceive ourselves having made some error/misstep is a possibility with this transit. (Or externally, to feel persecutory of others for the mistakes we perceive them to be making.)
- The magic with this transit is learning how to break the shame spiral or tap into insight that makes the shame spiral irrelevant.
- Self-improvement, self-refinement, and being safe do not require self-abuse. It may help to reflect on our bigger picture rationale for why we aspire to be “good”. Are we seeking to earn something we don’t inherently have? Or are we acting in accordance with who we truly are (already)?
- If we feel we’ve made a mistake, we might benefit from a bigger context or even story that can hold our experience in a more forgiving light. What do we make of trial and error? How do we learn from mistakes and have resiliency of spirit? The story of famous/successful inventors with many failed inventions along their string of failed attempts and victories comes to mind.
August 30, 2020
Venus in 22 Cancer opposite Pluto retrograde in 22 Capricorn: 6:31 AM PDT
(Image: Alla Mingalëva)
The quote about liking vs. wanting above in the Venus-Neptune section also applies here 😉
- Venus-Pluto contacts bring power exchange to the forefront. At lower octaves, this can be unconscious or manipulative power games within relationship. But at higher levels, the Venus-Pluto reality is about the metamorphoses that can occur when people with different gifts come together – how do we share and exchange what we uniquely have more of? The themes of power and powerlessness tend to come up (at any octave!) in the sense that people get positioned as “the best [x person] that [y person] will ever have” or “the only [x person] that can provide this highly desired experience for [y person]”. When the stakes become this high, and the threat of loss too terrible, it becomes increasingly difficult to relate, and we become more susceptible to possessive behaviors (enacting or receiving).
- In the signs of Cancer and Capricorn here, the themes the are up may relate to negotiations around emotional labor, safety, and emotional security within the connection.
- Though the themes of Venus-Pluto mentioned here relate to inner-development that is ongoing (empowerment, unhooking from toxic dynamics, becoming self-aware of how we leak our power and our energy, etc.) one thing to stay mindful of this week is if we find ourselves in a position where we feel that another person is making us feel a certain way and we are feeling a charge. This can be any kind of feeling, pleasurable or painful. Take this as an invitation to slow down and come back to yourself and question why you give this person that level of power. It’s one thing to notice how you feel around people or how you feel in situations, and use that as navigational information. It’s another thing to really believe that the feelings are sourced from the other people and that they made you feel those things.
- When we take more accountability for how we are feeling (rather than place the accountability on the other person), we can still make choices from there or have discussions with the other person. We will just be approaching that conversation from a more responsible place. There is a kind of magic of two people discussing the subtle dynamics or conflicts within their connection, being able to NOT make each other wrong and NOT coerce the other into anything, but then to find new ways to relate that feel mutually enhancing for both parties.
- When we do truly love someone AND we feel some level of psychological intensity about what they mean to us or what the connection means (such that we may feel a lot of difficult emotions arising), this can be an alchemical container for transformation.
Mercury in 19 Virgo opposite Neptune retrograde in 19 Pisces: 11:44 AM PDT
(Image: unknown)
- Two extremes may need the other – if we have been excessively surrendered and trusting of the flow for something to happen and we have no logical strategy, we might need to think about that or collect some information that would help us organize our plans. Conversely, if we overly rely on our logical minds, there may be some unyielding issues that cannot be resolved with logic but instead, surrender and inspiration.
September 1, 2020
Mercury in 22 Virgo trine Pluto retrograde in 22 Capricorn: 3:42 AM PDT
(Images: unknown)
- The mind’s capacity to collect evidence for whatever it is focused upon is truly powerful. By default, the mind will find evidence for its unconscious beliefs and assumptions (or historic, conditioned ones). Then, the evidence we find often confirms our biases. Many of these mental-perceptual loops even become addictive, regardless of whether they enhance our lives or not. Try intentionally scanning reality for something desired – like inspiration or awe. If it’s challenging to do, another way to look at this is that you are training your mind to transcend its habits. Every time you successfully re-route your consciousness to a desired focus, you’ve built a pathway you can come back to.
Full Moon in 10 Pisces: 10:22 PM PDT
(Image: Amelie, 2001)
The last New Moon in late Leo made an inconjunct aspect to Jupiter, Pluto, and Saturn in Capricorn, and I’d written about tapping into fire and even emotions like pride to lift one’s out of denser emotions like shame, or grief when you feel ready to pull yourself up. I said that pride could be a gateway emotion before more ‘enlightened’ frequencies emerge like forgiveness. And a Pisces Full Moon delivers such an opportunity.
- Sometimes part of what keeps us out of sublime experiencing is that we are focused on what is wrong – what is wrong with ourselves, with others, and with reality. We have a hard time seeing this data and NOT reacting to it and making it a problem. Or we believe that judging it is going to enable us to make the situation right.
- There is a stage in many people’s spiritual processes where they utilize forgiveness and acceptance in a way that results in them tolerating and rationalizing something dysfunctional in their lives. While the other extreme is to be so vigilant that nothing escapes scrutiny.
- Would it be possible that some of your “problems” go away when you neutralize your perception of these “problems” enough to forgive them and not make them such? If they are little pieces of your life that are out of alignment and requiring thoughtful action on your part, is it still possible that forgiving them allows them to be more malleable and adjustable, more easily addressed?
- As the Moon grows full in Pisces, our fantasy life grows and our imagination ripens. We can take little details and make a big, cinematic story over them, which means we might also choose what we are wanting to run away with, what we are wanting to enhance, versus where we are wanting to check our premises first.
- The Moon will be conjunct Ceres and Neptune during this lunation, signifying there may be a release of grief. There is also an opportunity here to clear some emotionally charged perceptions of the grief itself that have created further emotional dissolution. By this I mean, are there hints to your grief story of having been exiled from paradise? Or that you manifested it, or earned it? That you’ll never recover? That this is the worst thing that ever happened? That it was your fault? It can take time to really pull free from these heavier grief-anchors but one thing that may start to help (if you like) is to make a list of all the positive collateral of what still grieves you – what came into your life as a result of the difficult experience, even if it’s a little indirect through a chain of cause and effect. Examples: people you wouldn’t have met but did, fun experiences you had a result of meeting those people, a meaningful mentor or guide that entered your life in the aftermath, a deepened sense of compassion.
- One of Pisces’ inclinations is to make everything magical, if even only through our perception. It is not just our room, but our palace. Not a house, but a castle. We may do things on a practical level to enhance this fantasy perception, such as create more mood in a space, or enter a conversation expecting to be fascinated and finding those threads as a result. As Roald Dahl once said, “And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.”
Thank you for meditating on the planets with me this week! If you would like further guidance, I have been increasingly focused on longer-term 1:1 work with my students and clients, in the form of mentorship – helping people form a depth relationship to their natal chart and personal transits over time, to develop themselves, to heal, and to reach their goals, all through the soul-making lens of evolutionary astrology. If you’re interested in working together in that capacity, I am currently accepting new clients. Send me an email at sabrina@monarchastrology.com to start a conversation and set up a free consultation call.
Find me on Instagram @sabrinamonarch and Twitter @Sabrina_monarch, get on my mailing list to stay apprised of all upcoming offerings and events, and I’ll see you next week!
With love,
Sabrina Monarch
(Top Image: Yume [Dreams] 1990 Akira Kurosawa)
No Comments