🌙  Happy New Moon in Virgo + Solar Eclipse! 🌙

New Moon: Thursday 1st September at 7.03pm (AEST)
How did you go, journeying though this last lunar cycle? 
Any recurring themes? 
Any parallels between your experiences on opposite sides of the circle?
What was/is calling for your attention?  

Eclipse Season
Lots going on this month with the two eclipses – a Solar eclipse now at the New Moon, and a Lunar eclipse at the Full Moon on the 17th September (they always come in pairs).

Solar eclipses occur when the Moon passes between the Sun and the Earth, and Lunar eclipses occur when the Earth passes between the Sun and the Moon.

From the Lunar Solar Journal introduction:
“From a psychological perspective, when the light of the mind and consciousness (Sun) or the instinctive wisdom of the body and emotions (Moon) is blocked, something else that is normally held under restraint emerges unimpeded.  Consider the analogy of robbers who prefer to do their work at night under the cover of darkness.  Eclipses can allow us to access that which has been concealed or repressed – what Jung referred to as the shadow.  This encounter with the hidden and rejected contents of the unconscious as it refer to either the solar mind or the lunar emotions can bring a person to integrate the unknown with the known, the dark with the light, the past with the future.”
~ From Demetra George’s Astrology and the Authentic Self.

I translate this for myself to mean that the eclipses function as a portal to aspects of my subconsciousness that are ripe to be brought to the light, and lovingly questioned as to how they serve me…

What’s been bubbling for you over the last few weeks?  What messages is your soul communicating?  What arenas of life are you wanting to clear/declutter/clarify? 
The invitation is to pay attention to these threads over the next two weeks, and see how they evolve, see what becomes possible.

New Moon in Virgo
The New Moon occurs at 9° Virgo.  Virgo has a natural understanding of how the world works.  People for whom the Virgo archetype runs strong work to analyse a system and understand how it operates in the most efficient and optimal way.  They want to use their vision to help the system or group do what it’s meant to do, and do it well.

When they see things that are broken or out of order, it’s upsetting, because it’s a violation of the natural order and they want to fix it.  And this can lead to the Virgoan propensity to be judgmental, critical, or nit-picky, or so focussed on the small things that they lose sight of the big picture, but these behaviours are motivated by a benefic intention for things to work so they can be useful and functional, and fundamentally, Flowing!

Virgo has a deep desire to be useful, to be in service, bringing about the whole vision by attending to the small, necessary details. Virgo is also connected to purity and healing (food, personal hygiene, pure thoughts, the health of the body).

Have any of these themes been arising lately?  What are you working towards, with small yet faithful steps?  Where, if anywhere, have you lost sight of your vision?
(And where is Virgo on your birth chart?  This will indicate what arenas of life may be activated by this New Moon.)

Full Moon in Pisces
The Full Moon on the 17th September occurs at 24° Pisces, the sign opposite Virgo, and as always with astrology and its sacred geometry, the opposites inform each other, just as the Sun illuminates the Moon when they are opposite each other.

Pisces here adds vision, intuition, trust and watery flow to Virgo’s deep desire for healing and smooth, stress-free living.  Pisces knows that our individual wellness and peace is connected to everyone else’s, and the Earth’s as well, and that without compassion, we are stymied in our efforts to change.

A lived example
I was talking recently with dear friends about an awful, awful situation of school boys uploading explicit images of underage female peers to a porn ring.

So hard to be with a situation so clearly ‘broken’ and not know how to ‘fix’ it.  A situation that felt devastatingly unsurprising.  I felt waves of judgement and anger towards the perpetrators, for living this Way, for perpetuating this brokenness, for operating so far from basic human relational decency.  How is it that their social compass is so outrageously skewed?

My Virgo self is often demoralised by the scope of the healing so clearly required, saddened by the negative impact on the lives of so many.

This morning, walking at dawn, I felt an inner sunrise of compassion – ahhh, I am sorry for these boys/kids, sorry to be part of a general culture that leaves SO little room for them to feel, to cry, to be vulnerable or unsure, to feel deep longing and know how to be with that… It seems clear to me that to be able to operate with such predatory intent, these boys must have numbed out to their heart a long time ago, way before any sexual interest, and that is so, so sad…

So I pray for healing, with heart and soul!  In feeling all these things, I am encouraged to do my own work of living from the heart more and more each day.  I truly believe – in big, dreamy Piscean fashion – that this is the antidote to violent and heartless living, the pathway to real healing, and that love sustains any small steps I take towards a vision of a healed relationship between men and women.

And as with any complex problem, a genuine solution can only be found by combining both right and left brains, intuition and reason, mind and body, the dream and the embodiment of it…  Pisces and Virgo…