Spooky: 2012 Taurus Full Moon

October 29, 2012
12:50 PM PDT/ 3:50 PM EDT / 7:50 PM GMT
6 Taurus 48 / 6 Scorpio 48

Full moons invite emotions to emerge from hidden places and come out and play. What’s surfacing now promises to be uncommonly fierce and revealing, and not merely because this year’s Taurus Full Moon falls during Halloween week.

We’re in the first days of an immersion that will play out over three years, as Saturn, proponent of commitment, responsible behavior and the status quo, makes his way through the dark and sometimes frightening waters of Scorpio. What’s now coming to consciousness — or, minimally, gaining expression — is the first wave of how we feel about issues of money, resources, ownership, sharing, trust, sex and control, which find their astrological home on the Taurus/Scorpio axis. They’re highly charged, all of them, setting off irrational and clutching impulses, primal terrors and, at the other extreme, a heightened experience of life (and union) with more focus, profundity and intensity than ever before.

The stakes are high. Ramifications are stark and real. From one perspective, ancient monsters and tactics are lumbering out of the grave and grabbing at power and renewed life. They are particularly visible on a collective level, where battle lines have been drawn on taxes, government spending, and women’s bodies (issues of which neatly encompass both sex and control).

Fear is, alas, rampant. It does not have to taint or control you, though. Keep these tips handy:

Tip #1: The bogeyman is a manifestation of fear.

Tip #2: The bogeyman has only the power you grant him.

Tip #3: The bogeyman is the most frightened of all.

Got it? Good. Acknowledge the terror under the masks you encounter and you will (a) diffuse their power and (b) possibly even view them with compassion.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s look at other potentials of this Moon. Taurus deals very much with the here and now, the tangible, the bankable. The role of possessions is under scrutiny. What do you own? What do you share, and what do you expect/get in return? Are you happy with the return or glum? (Image for contemplation, from “It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown:” trick-or-treaters examining their loot house after house and Charlie Brown inevitably announcing…”I got a rock.”)

Attachment is a theme, too. What — flip the first question — possesses you? (Image for contemplation: Gollum, in Lord of the Ring, clutching the ring and muttering, “My precious.”)

Whatever your answers — whatever is stirring for and in you now — a few characteristics are certain. It (whatever it is) feels solid and real and unavoidable. It is not trivial or passing. It involves letting something go (perhaps in yourself, perhaps in a situation), possibly merely letting go and giving yourself over to an intense experience or development. What remains will not allow (or inspire) getting out of easily, and will touch and reshape you at the depth of your being.

The weighty, somber air comes from Saturn, still close to the Sun after last week’s meeting and requiring us to take our end of each equation seriously indeed. The sense of monumental goings-on is also gaining fuel from transforming, regenerative, death-defying and intensifying Pluto, who is in easy communication with both ends of the Full Moon. (Pluto and Saturn are in cahoots, too; since each is in the other’s home sign, each is resonating with the other.)

What we want, we want deeply, drawn by a gravitational pull that reduces logic to irrelevance. What we are releasing, we are releasing for good. As for all points in between, we are being shown the costs and benefits.

Do not fear this.

This formula can simplify, strengthen and amplify. It can yield huge upticks in self-esteem, self-worth and resources both personal and joint.

This will involve some shifting. Venus, ruler of the Moon as well as of all that we hold dear, is contacting Uranus (the agent of volatile change) in a way that challenges where and how we set values, as well as specific connections and in relationship dynamics as a whole. Venus is also contacting Pluto (the agent of unavoidable change) in a way that demands action. Attitudes and situations are turning without warning, with lightning speed and with a force that will penetrate the core of your being.

Don’t squander this amazing potential on trivialities. Set your intentions boldly. Walk straight into the storm; dive into the water and open your eyes. Wave at the monsters and creepy-crawlies that pass by you, even if they challenge or push buttons. (Inspirational image: “Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?” — Indiana Jones, on entering a chamber in Raiders of the Lost Ark.)

The issues, and to some extent the situations and people, that crest now will be ongoing themes for the next few years. We’re in the first wave of not merely Saturn’s three-year tour of Scorpio, but also the next eclipse cycle, which will take place in the signs of Taurus and Scorpio. We’re already feeling rumblings of the first shot, November’s New Moon solar eclipse in Scorpio. The coming cycle will reboot and reset our experience of money, intimacy, sharing, power/control and life itself. This week’s Full Moon is the lead-in. Pay attention.

© Kathy Biehl 2012. (Image © Kathy Biehl 2011.) All Rights Reserved. You may forward this article as long as the copyright notice is intact. No part may be used or reprinted without my prior written permission. Karma, ya know.

Going Deep: Forecast for Oct. 22-28, 2012

Be on the lookout for specters, ghouls and trick-or-treating. It will feel like Halloween before the calendar says it’s time. Spooky vibes are coming ahead of schedule. We are in for another important and potentially intense week.

The main venue for the week is Scorpio, where nothing is trivial and much is deeply felt, craved and possessed. The focusing and transforming potentials of this sign will be permeating our experience of life, and especially of relationships, for the next three years or so, as Saturn makes his way through Scorpio. This week brings a baptism in those potentials. We’re not merely sticking our toes in the water; our entire beings are going in, deep.

When the Sun enters Scorpio on Monday, the annual phase begins of the veil between the worlds growing thin, of nature hastening its descent toward winter, and of heightened awareness of the passing of time, and of decline, decay and death. We begin instinctively to prepare for a time of going inside. This week, we feel this with an uncommon solemnity.

For the first time since 1983, the Sun is melding with Saturn in Scorpio, on Friday. This meeting is orienting us to the next three years. It is imprinting on our psyches the potentials and challenges to come. It is immersing us in the seriousness of our end of the relationship spectrum — specifically the part where we invest our time, money, energy or emotions with someone else’s.

Whatever — and whoever — is with us at this point, we are going to explore extremely deeply and tenaciously. The breakdowns and break-ups that happened so quickly before aren’t the order of life now. The situations that made it past the recent gauntlet of upheaval are with us for a good while. There are no do-overs for the actions and choices that we make this week and for the next few; what we do now has staying power, because Saturn is covering territory that he will not revisit.

Don’t take that as reason to freak out. Instead, treat it as reason to take everything seriously, especially yourself. Always start with yourself.

This is a time to be profoundly honest with yourself. Admit to yourself what you want out of your various relationships and arrangements, and what you are willing to invest of yourself in return. Admit to yourself the truth of what you are really putting in and getting out. How much deeper could you go? Likely, lots. Acknowledge the desires and terrors that are stirring within you and, yes, this includes skeletons in the closet and all manner of compulsions and monsters that are not generally fit for polite public discussion. Take them seriously.

This is a time to be profoundly honest in your words and actions as well. Speak up, bravely. Show yourself where it matters, and bridges to intimacy and union will take shape. Small talk and trivial interactions can wait for the holiday season. Right now, a few honest words speak volumes and deepen connections.

Communication does resound with special importance just now. Mercury, ruler of our information and transportation vehicles, is crossing the North Node of destiny on Thursday, as the Sun is making his approach to Saturn. Watch for messages that reveal undercurrents, truths and lies, that lock in connections, that set out a course from which you will not deviate.

The collective conversation will be similarly revealing, possibly discouragingly so. I’ve been saying all year that fear is so rampant that it is becoming an entity with physical form, much as Voldemort evolved into more and more distinct shape during the Harry Potter books. Thursday may be the shining moment of this new entity of fear. you do not have to accept it. You do not have to allow it to govern your life.

Now, there are several approaches you can take to this Scorpionic immersion. You can succumb to the darkness and allow fears, paranoia and the boogie men under the bed to run rampant and steer your thinking, emotions and actions. (That phenomenon is inescapable in political discourse and social media feeds.) You can put on your X-ray goggles and investigate the darkness with a researcher’s fervor. You can dive in and explore depths of emotion, desire, intimacy and union — an approach that has the potential to heighten your sense of being alive and, if the circumstances and company are right, obliterate the boundaries between individuals and worlds.

The skies offer support for not succumbing to fear. Enthusiasm and gumption and impulses to go for it (whatever “it” may be) are getting a huge boost from Mars, ruler of our drive and action, and beneficent Jupiter, who increases anything he touches. This puts rocket fuel and incentive at our disposal for jumping into those Scorpionic waters and going deep.

There’s another incentive to connect. A counterbalance to the Scorpionic weightiness is on the way. Venus, ruler of our hearts and relationships, is entering her Libra home on Sunday, and good vibes are sure to follow. Until the week before Thanksgiving, she’s encouraging beauty, grace and harmony in words, appearances, gestures, activities, interactions and environments. Her presence in this mode will soften the edge of the exploring and communicating to come. The contents may be fierce and raw, but they’ll be in a pretty package.

More’s in my extended weekly forecast, which includes day to day analyses. For another take on this week’s events, listen to my quickie podcast. Please give it five stars on iTunes! You can also get my podcast as an app for Android and Kindle Fire at Amazon and as an app for your iPhone, iPad or iPod! Apple product info under this week’s podcast.

I have now been making this weekly forecast freely available for four and a half years. Please support it by booking a reading or making a donation via PayPal to kbiehlATempowermentunlimited.net. Thank you! And thank you to those who have donated — I truly appreciate your gesture.

© Kathy Biehl 2012. All Rights Reserved. You may forward this article as long as the copyright notice is intact. No part may be used or reprinted without my prior written permission. Karma, ya know.

Get On Board: Forecast for October 15-20, 2012

Implementation is the theme of the week. The imperative to change is pushing situations and people into motion, at the same time that a new phase is launching in how we treat each other.

New details or wrinkles might introduce themselves into situations, but much of what unfolds now has already been taking shape to some extent. We’re picking up puzzle pieces that are already on the table and moving them around, instead of going to the shelf and taking down a box with an entirely different picture — or a different type of activity box altogether.

Although who knows? There’s enough of a Uranian element this week that anything’s possible. Somebody could upend the table and precipitate a flurry of trying new combinations for all those puzzle pieces.

Mars, the planet that rules our action, is teaming with unpredictable Uranus (one of the two hosts, as you’ll recall, of the ongoing cavalcade of change we’re living for the next few years). They’re firing up motivation to get moving on the shifts and cracks and outright changes that have been erupting inside and out.

Progression won’t be neat and tidy, though. This interaction is volatile to the max. Unpremeditated action will be epidemic. A lot of wild hares are going to be running loose. People will be leaping into spur-of-the-moment adventures, both philosophical and physical.

Even when you do end up taking an action you’ve contemplated, the timing, and probably the manner, will fly out of you. If you thought about it too much right now, you might screw it up. Or chicken out. Raw, fierce action will do what you want, without your mind interfering.

You’re unlikely to worry about this. We’re all getting used to expressing our personal truth and wielding our personal power. Both are moving noticeably into a new level of comfort now. That comes from the conversation Mars is having now with the other change cavalcade host, Pluto.

Like Mars, Pluto rules our actions, too, but from a different perspective. Two actually. One is deeper and less conscious — the cravings and compulsions and programming that lurk in the basement of our psyches and deep with our very cells. The other is far greater than our mortal will can engineer or control — a universal force that trumps all human tinkering; fate, if you will. Our mortal will, our mortal actions are now aligning with those two higher perspective. All are working in coordination, in a way they haven’t previously.

See if you aren’t impulsively, boldly, daringly chipping out of patterns and situations this week, almost as if your very life depends on it. In a sense, it does. Your very thriving does.

Amid this activity comes Monday’s Libra New Moon, which simultaneously puts a bow on the relationship lab of the past two and a half years and also launches the intensive in intimacy and sharing that will dominate the next three. Both courses are courtesy of that old teacher Saturn, enforcer of rules, responsibilities and commitments, who has just left the relationship and reciprocity playground of Libra for the frisson of shared resources and ego-dissolving union in the waters of Scorpio.

Notice your interactions. Notice the difference in the air — and the difference in you. Communication’s favored now, thanks to cooperation between Venus and the cosmic messenger Mercury. Doorways are open. You’ve just got to leap through them. More in my mooncast.

I have now been making this weekly forecast freely available for four and a half years. Please support it by booking a reading or making a donation via PayPal to kbiehlATempowermentunlimited.net. Thank you! And thank you to those who have donated — I truly appreciate your gesture.

© Kathy Biehl 2012. All Rights Reserved. You may forward this article as long as the copyright notice is intact. No part may be used or reprinted without my prior written permission. Karma, ya know.

Libra New Moon of October 15, 2012

This month’s Libra New Moon is the first new moon of the fall season, and the first in the new mode of relating we’ll be in for the next three years.

Relationship dynamics and rule books are integral to the sign of Libra, in terms of both our actual outer dealings and our inner wiring for them. We’ve been exploring all of them — and taking all of them far more seriously — for the past two-plus years, as taskmaster Saturn traveled through Libra. Relationships have come, gone, sunk down roots, collapsed and re-formed. They’ve pushed us into awareness of give-and-take, reciprocity and fundamental fairness. They’ve prompted us to rethink and renegotiate what we want, what we are willing to give, what we are willing to accept and, just as importantly, what we are not.

Now Saturn has left Libra and moved his lessons in responsibility and commitment to the intense, untamed waters of Scorpio, where we will explore sharing, trust and intimacy — and all the sublingual appetites and terrors they stir. This New Moon comes on the heels of that shift, and it officially launches the new relationship paradigm we have been approaching.

We’ll be more keenly aware of what we’re putting in — and, more importantly, what we’re getting out of — every agreement, arrangement, connection and relationship. No more automatically putting the other person first, or putting ourselves at a disadvantage, or taking action unbidden on the assumption that’s what the other person wants or needs.

Some of you have already been experiencing this. The impulse is becoming greater, more natural and more widespread now.

The Moon’s ruler, Venus, is on board with this reckoning. She is facilitating cooperation and deep, meaningful, truthful communication, via an opportunity aspect to Mercury in Scorpio that’s about as tight as it can be. This is priming us to open up and connect in ways and at depths we may not have dared before.

Her consort Mars, ruler of our drive and representative of the masculine end of the relationship axis, is part of this equation, too. He and Venus are not in close contact, but he is pushing through change on her behalf. He is an easy flow to awakening, liberating Uranus in Aries, a combo that is lighting a fire in everyone and everything. Not only are both action planets, in fire signs, but Uranus is in Mars’ sign (i.e. under his command, as if anything could “command” Uranus), and their link is tight to the max. All of which means this double team is igniting excitement, enthusiasm and openness to impulse, radical, sudden change.

All these aspects are setting the tone for Saturn’s entire journey through Scorpio over the next three years. A new relationship paradigm. Deep, soul-baring communication. Lust for radical change. Remaining independent and true to ourselves as we sink ourselves more deeply than ever into union. (How’s that for a paradox?) Let the games begin!

© Kathy Biehl 2012. All Rights Reserved. You may forward this article as long as the copyright notice is intact. No part may be used or reprinted without my prior written permission. Karma, ya know.

Blinded By the Light: Forecast for Oct. 8-14, 2012

Form meets formlessness this week. Theoretically that’s a paradox, but we’re about to see how those seeming incompatibles can and will converge. Each of us is due for contact with a consciousness greater than the parameters of a mortal mind, and the impact will permeate life here on the ground.

A new phase of life is clearly here. With Saturn now in the sign of Scorpio, we’re embarking on a several-year journey into the depths of our beings and connections with each other. As we explore the myriad ways we invest with and in others (time, money, emotion, energy), the road will pass through dark, scary, profound and steamy territory. That’s later. For now, the path is heading into mystery…and maybe even magic.

This is where form meeting formlessness comes in. This week, and effectively for the month, structure-loving Saturn is in direct and easy communication with mystical, otherworldly, anything but physical Neptune. Saturn likes rules, order and all things tangible; Neptune is in the clouds (or generating them), if not far off in the cosmos, where divine guidance, spiritual love, artistry, illusion, escapism, deceit, delusion and insanity coexist in one unbroken continuum. This week, they’re collaborating.

Aim for the higher end of that spectrum. It will certainly be pouring down onto terra firma. The trine, which is exact on the 10th, is a conduit for compassion, grace and telepathy flooding our closest connections. We could spy God in a beloved’s eyes, or in a brilliant sky; this link is an opening for insight and epiphanies to rush in that elevate physical existence to a holy experience. The artistic productivity that comes from this will be mind-boggling.

Resolving old business will also be in the air. We were on the brink of this aspect earlier this year. This link started to come together after the holidays but did not quite lock into place. As that happens does now, developments that did not quite take shape in January will firm up.

There is a possible downside, of course. With the enforcer of the status quo in cahoots with the cosmic fog machine, there’s no telling how far the the power structure will go to harness spin and puffery and outright lies. They will not be harmless puffs of smoke, unfortunately, but incantations, if you will, with real ramifications and real consequences.

Back to you: Invoke the magic. Set aside time for contemplation, meditation, cloud- and star-gazing, reverie and generally lolling about. Thursday and Saturday are optimal for this, because the Moon will be void of course for the entirety of both days and forward pushes aren’t going to amount to anything, anyway. (More about what that means here).

Ask to be led to courses of action that are most beneficial to you. Ask for the higher perspective on situations in your life. Pay attention to your dreams; ask for answers to come in them, too. (Be sure to specify that (a) they use imagery you understand and (b) you remember them.) Ask to approach others with compassion and forgiveness.

Include yourself in that request. Mars is approaching an action-demanding encounter with Chiron, the wounded healer that challenges us to master the physicality of existence. That contact will be exact on Monday, but we’re feeling it all week. You’re here; you’re human; get over it; okay?

For another take on this week’s events, listen to my quickie podcast. Please give it five stars on iTunes! NEW: You can now get my podcast as an app for Android and Kindle Fire at Amazon and as an app for your iPhone, iPad or iPod! Apple product info under this week’s podcast.

I have now been making this weekly forecast freely available for four and a half years. Please support it by booking a reading or making a donation via PayPal to kbiehlATempowermentunlimited.net. Thank you! And thank you to those who have donated — I truly appreciate your gesture.

© Kathy Biehl 2012. All Rights Reserved. You may forward this article as long as the copyright notice is intact. No part may be used or reprinted without my prior written permission. Karma, ya know.