This New Moon in the first degree of Aquarius (today January 21 at 3:53 PM EST) aligns just one day after Aquarius Season began, and coincides with the conjunctions of Venus & Saturn in Aquarius and Juno & Jupiter in Aries. This lunation sextiles the Jupiter-Juno conjunction.
Juno and Jupiter (Hera and Zeus) are archetypal lovers, and Venus and Saturn coming together can also reflect commitment, aesthetic integrity, the desire to build something beautiful.
Thinking about these three conjunctions together (the new moon, Juno-Jupiter, and Venus-Saturn) I’m inspired to think about intentional creativity and the type of beauty or enjoyment in life that is created on purpose and doesn’t necessarily just happen on accident.
The tantra of the fixed signs
One of my ongoing meditations on the fixed signs (Taurus, Leo, Scorpio & Aquarius) is the tantric nature of them.
Taurus gives us the body’s sensations and our capacity to receive and enjoy sensation.
Scorpio of course, gives us intimacy and deep connection.
Leo is pure play and creativity and Aquarius is the architecture of our consciousness.
The fixed signs hold many riches, as well as many places of stagnancy.
When I think of the tantra of Aquarius, I think of the capacity that we build to direct our thoughts and neural pathways, how we get to choose to entertain or ride certain trains of thought or tune into certain radio stations of consciousness.
What stands before that choice (of the types of consciousness we engage) is the habitual tracks of our neural pathways, our conditioning and various educations, our unconsciousness, and so on. Trauma and trauma responses/triggers can also be moments that we feel involuntarily ‘taken out’ of choice or agency, at however much an extent.
So while we might think of eating chocolate with a blindfold and slowly taking in the flavor as a kind of tantric activity for the senses (maybe more Taurean), Aquarius has its tantra too, like the thought experiments we take on of deciding what kind of frequency we want to tap into, or what train of thought we want to develop.
Deciding where to send the energy
When we receive a rush of spiritual or erotic energy, or otherwise high frequency energy (through pleasure, fun, awakening, etc) it floods through our consciousness and the various energetic highways that compose us.
Aquarian activities or practices might be anything that activates greater sensation in the nervous system. Even if you simply tapped your entire body with your hands and then sat still after, you’d likely feel the echo of your body buzzing with sensation. That *energy* can go to places or it can dissipate.
Saturn, the traditional ruler of Aquarius, relates to irrigation systems – pipes that carry and direct water. Uranus, the modern ruler of Aquarius, relates to the Akasha – a place of infinite possibility and unique timelines in the Universe! So whether we are moving the water through pipes or surfing a timeline, Aquarius is the magic of intentional energy and energetic integrity.
At a level of unconsciousness or lack of intention, energy will likely go where the channels are already erected, due to habit. This is part of the make-up of being triggered – a stimuli occurs, and our consciousness maps the energy to a particular trauma and set of trauma responses.
Considering that tantra or working with energy in general are PRACTICES, we don’t become excellent overnight at directing or channeling energy. It’s something we work at over time.
Aquarius gifts us the intelligence of seeing things from a more removed perspective, like when we study our nature through astrology – the more we are able to witness our thoughts and our patterns, we gain agency in moments of those things arising to choose how we want to relate (do we get on the train, do we facilitate a process, do we just witness, etc.?).
We might consider the play that we have available to us in the form of choosing where to send the energy that we have and the energy that we cultivate.
Sending energy to places can look like:
- choosing more elevated or expansive thoughts because you can and you want to experiment with your consciousness
- sending colorful light or envisioned energy to different centers of your body
- permissioning yourself to cultivate certain emotional states on purpose even though there are competing drives (like letting yourself enjoy a legitimately beautiful or expansive moment instead of feeling guilty about what you ‘should’ be doing or feeling guilty that your family or ancestors didn’t have the same access to these feelings, for example)
- and so much more
An energetic law of the obstacle… and you can be intimate with the obstacle
(Image: AVATAR: The Last Airbender)
In the episode of AVATAR: the last Airbender where the Guru is teaching Aang about the chakra system (19th episode of Book Two: Earth), the Guru shows Aang that the chakra system is like seven pools of water that energy is meant to flow through, but sometimes debris or blocks get stuck in between the pools and obstruct the flow of energy. (Such that the pools become still water and the waterfalls cease to move energy between the pools)
In this visual, we can see that energy flow is related to freedom or obstruction of energy.
So either, when we free the obstacle — energy flows,
Or when energy flows, it touches and confronts the obstacle.
This is simply a law.
Yet, we can still find ourselves confused or mystified at why being in love or having intense feelings for another person triggers so much deep material, or why our capacity to have fun and our trauma are connected! As though we should just feel all that energy and have absolutely nothing in the way of it, or that what is in the way of it is sooo terrible and wrong about us.
These obstructions of energy simply happen – in nature, too.
These obstructions personally can have us feeling disconnected from our full potential or can create suffering.
If we want to experience greater freedom (a major Aquarian theme) in our lives, we end up having to learn how we want to relate to the obstructions and obstacles that we have inside of ourselves.
A word of advice: receiving floods of high energy shows us where we have obstacles and obstructions, but we might take care not to use the energy to feed the obstacle’s continued existence instead of seeing the bigger picture. This is like when our spiritual awakening feeds our trauma stories or personality/ego to a degree that we use all that energy to prop up false parts of ourselves and turn our pain into who we think we are.
Two basic methods for working with obstacles
One is to bypass the obstacle, which although “bypass” has a lot of negative connotations lately in relationship to spiritual bypassing, bypassing is not necessarily always bad or irresponsible. It depends on the situation. There may be certain moments where our will to cultivate a certain energy may override our compulsion to be hijacked by something else. For example, you might be having a really beautiful day and a little annoying or irritating situation comes up that normally would really derail you, but you choose to not entertain the drama of it and continue to enjoy your day. That is both bypassing an obstacle & making a conscious choice.
The other is to be intimate or curious with the obstacle, to let it have a process, to let it be felt. This is crucial especially in places we feel an immense amount of resistance, and where trying to simply “get over it” is not working out. Often obstacles are simply emotions that have not been fully felt.
Lately one of my favorite ways of working with obstacles inside of myself is to get theatrical and creative with them. I was having a conversation with my friend Katy the other day (who was earlier on Magic of the Spheres podcast episode #185 about creativity called Courting the Muses & Creative Embodiment) and in the conversation we had just recently it emerged that I was having a hard time accepting my own moodiness or disenchanted side, and I was really trying to feed the part of me that is enchanted and in love with life.
Katy suggested I try to give space and embodiment to my moody and disenchanted alter-ego, instead of trying to suppress it. I got excited about this and when we got off the phone, I went full on into my Russian accent, slavic alterego (my ancestry, too) and started complaining about every grotesque thing I could observe in my apartment, like crumbs on the floor I hadn’t cleaned up, and eventually was laughing and feeling my bitterness lifting.
This draws in the other fixed signs:
Leo: play, theater and drama
Scorpio: intimacy, and connecting to “taboo” parts of us or parts of us we find ugly or edgy, alchemy
Taurus: moving through layers of stuck energy in the body by just letting it exist and accepting it
Aquarius: the insight or genius (here, lended to me by my friend Katy) that innovates how to work with the energy in a novel or authentic way
A final note…
While these practices may, in longer-term efforts, change our actual lives – upgrade our finances, change our baseline mood or sense of inner-security, and so on… like, in other words, we can literally work with energy to change our lives or solve our problems…
The practice of working with energy and the tantra of Aquarius (as I’m calling it here) is not necessarily about a permanent arrival but it’s how we play with the currents of energy that move through our lives, ongoingly.
We are conditioned to see our lives as a series of timed milestones or arrival points, but another way we could look at it is that life is a pulsing wave of energies, constantly, and we’re just dancing in it and learning how to co-exist and collaborate and play and work and be with it all.
As per Aquarian magic of seeing things from entirely new perspectives or having a paradigm breakthrough, there is literally SO MUCH MORE than what we currently experience (based on the limitations of our various energetic highways in how they have been cultivated to this point) that we could experience, if we are willing to be alchemists or scientists or experimenters and players.
Practice this right now
Locate one place that has been touched by reading this (and you are feeling energy in some way) and follow the thread of it creatively in a way that you have access to right now. See if you can discover something novel instead of imposing a preconceived plan onto how the energy wants to flow.
Or if you want the anchor of an intention when playing with energy (like your intention is to feel or embody more joyfulness) I still would invite you to surprise yourself as novelty has a magical way of disrupting the habitual egoic body and allowing for something else.
And perhaps for the New Moon, I invite you to reflect on new ways you can play with and create energetic flow in your life. Aquarius is architecture and it’s not set in stone either – it can be reinvented.
Astrology can be an erotic/tantric practice also
Astrology is a major lens for deepening interiority and our connection to the cosmos at the same time. I’ve been sharing lately that the Evolutionary Astrology programs I teach offer my students more than they can imagine when they sign up — because the planets and archetypes are teachers, and what I’m sharing and transmitting is a much deeper way to relate to them yourself, to have your own connection to them — and once you establish that connection and relationship, the planets will guide you in the ways that is for your own path.
Join me in the upcoming Dragon of the Moon: an Evolutionary Astrology Initiation to study soul-centered astrology in a stellar community. I am in conversation with my students during the months we study together as I believe astrology is best taught with conversation & I’m happy to offer my support, insights and adjustments along the way.
Learn more about the course, read student testimonials, and apply here.
With love,
Sabrina Monarch
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