Fasten your seat belts and tie down your grounding cords: One of the most intense phases of our lives is here. For many of us, it’s the most intense yet — and, brace yourselves, that’s not backing down anytime soon.
Don’t freak; keep breathing (and reading). You’ve been preparing for this. Whether you knew it or not, you’ve been staking out a place of power, support and refuge. Plant your feet firmly onto that turf you’ve been tending, cleaning up and cultivating for the past year. It’s your platform for the dynamic, exciting and, let’s be honest, challenging pressure that’s both bearing down on and rising up in us.
Signs become unmistakable this week of just how many areas of life are heating up at once. Relationships, finances and values are up for reconsideration, with Venus retrograding in the communication and gadget loving sign of Gemini (May 15-June 27). This review isn’t a good-time free-for all, with flings for old-times’ sake; it resounds with issues of permanence and commitment, because Venus does her about-face just a smidgen shy of an exact link to structure-loving Saturn.
All manner of communication and transportation issues are hitting a power-up, too, from Sunday’s Gemini solar eclipse — from the nature, quality and content of our thoughts and information flow, to the tools we use to receive and transmit and get around this planet, to our dealings with neighbors and outsiders, to the educational and belief systems we create from all that data. (Read more in my mooncast, which will be posted on my site by Saturday.)
As if those influences wouldn’t be intense enough by themselves, a cosmic doorman is pointing and pointing into an opening for making peace with long-standing issues of separation, wounds, sacrifice and self-sabotage. (This one’s with us all month, the gift of a helpful link between Pluto the transformer and Chiron, who challenges us to turn wounds into badges of our humanity and settle into the physicality of existence. ) But wait! There’s still more, lots more, the biggest source of intensity of all, and the one that will be with us for years: the epidemic of chicken-or-egg situations involving previously secure structures collapsing because of strikes by, or triggering responses from, revolutionary, individualist, impassioned-to-angry impulses. (Noticed any in, say, the national news lately?) Personally and collectively we’re feeling tension escalating and accelerating as the two cosmic change agents, Uranus (sudden and unpredictable) and Pluto (deep-rooted and unavoidable), move into position for a fight that’ll go seven rounds from next month into 2015.
So: intensity every which way you look, and the heat’s not going down. What’s the takeaway?
For starters, forget about pulling the covers over your head and hiding. That tactic won’t work. Besides, incentive abounds to dive in and actively grapple with all of this. And the payoff will propel you into living honestly and boldly.
Notice who and what pops up now, as well as who and what depart. With Venus retrograde, people and themes from the past will resurface — maybe to reconsider, maybe to resolve, maybe to remind you of how much you’ve grown or where you would benefit to revamp your thinking. Doors will slam shut, too, some breathtakingly and unexpectedly. Do not grab the ankles of anyone walking away. It’s futile. Major comings and goings are part of the eclipse process. You can’t stop anyone, and if someone did happen to turn around, you would not really want them at this point.
Notice your thinking, too. That goes for your habitual patterns (calling yourself stupid if you forget something) as well as statements of what you believe to be true. The Gemini/Sagittarius eclipse cycle is bringing mental filters up for cleaning out. You can reboot your attitude about pretty much anything if you apply yourself now. I have two resources to help you pull this off. My article “Know Your Mind: The Potential of May’s Gemini Solar Eclipse” has tips for working with the eclipses, and my 2-mp3 set on the eclipses discusses how they affect each sign (and gives strategies, too).
When the pressure really bears down on you, work with it. What are you fighting? What are you resisting? How are you making situations harder for yourself or rewounding yourself? The potential is great to dump decades of relationship, financial and self-worth baggage, clear outdated programming from your thinking and data flow and let yourself off the hook as you have never before. You’re human. That’s not only okay, it is also the truth.
Whoa, right? Wow, right? This is an enormous opportunity. Forgive yourself for what you perceive as shortcomings. Purge the resentment and the chains of living by other people’s standards. Embrace who you really are. Plat your feet firmly on that patch of ground you’ve been cultivating. Keep your knees loose and hang on tight. The adventure of a lifetime is underway.
My six-minute podcast offers another take on this week’s events. If you like it, please give it five stars on iTunes! (Don’t want to use iTunes? Visit my Podcast/Video page.)
Want to understand how all this is affecting you? Book a reading with me!
Astro-Insight 