Venus retrograde Tag
May 19, 2020 In Astrology, General By Ingrid Hoffman
New World in the Morning—Sun in Gemini May 20th—June 21st
An agitation of conflicting communication about COVID-19 eddies and twirls across our screens. "There shall in that time be rumours of things going astray, erm, and there shall be a great confusion as to where things really are," says the Boring Prophet in Monty Python's Life of Brian.
We become deafened to our own thoughts amidst the torrent of talk. Vacillating opinions deplete our analytic stamina.
The Sun moves into Gemini this week. The Gemini archetype lives within us all in our restless minds. Venus is Retrograde and conjoins the Gemini Sun (opposing Sagittarius Moon and South Node) of America's maverick President. Venus will conjoin Boris Johnson's Gemini Sun/Venus on August 5th. As governments and epidemiologists grapple with too many variables, the immune response to COVID-19 is still not fully understood, and there is still no definitive data on post-infection immunity. Gemini rules the nervous system and the lungs.
Robert Skidelsky, in an article entitled the Unspoken Reason for Lockdowns writes, "What "flattening the curve" really means is spacing out the number of expected deaths over a period long enough for medical facilities to cope and a vaccine to kick in."
As we venture into this liminal space, the road maps offered by our leaders are ambiguous. The familiar landmarks have gone. We're speculating about fragmenting globalisation. Supply chains are sagging. Prices are higher. Cities are empty. Our ancient human instinct to gather, to touch, to hold and to kiss has lost its innocence. We're hunkering down. We're distancing. We're separating.
The story of Gemini's mythic twins is a story of loss and longing. Of trickery and lies. This is a story of two handsome twin brothers separated by death.
In alchemy, the process of separation isolates and defines. As we try to separate apparent truth from fiction, as we try to define our post-COVID-19 roles as colleagues, parents and partners, we may look back at what has grown from these slow days of waiting. As we knitted and baked, as we cleaned, and home-schooled our children, as we spent hours connecting on social media, as we danced around the sofa, as we anxiously watched our income dwindle, as we strained to support those we love from a distance, some of us flourished as we strengthened our bonds with those people who matter in our lives, contained in a circle of belonging. Yet for many, this has been a time to rely on the kindness of those strangers who brought food and essentials, who offered the comfort of connection during the long lonely days.
COVID-19 has brought seismic change and lingering disruption and uncertainty to our lives. For those who have not sheltered in the safety of secure and loving relationships, those who have endured the trauma of watching a loved one die, those who will not be able to pay their mortgage, or endured domestic violence, the three Ds—Divorce, Death and Destitution—are the only certainties.
Under a cloud of obfuscation, a sequence of planets—Jupiter, Pluto, and Saturn—move Retrograde, reflective perhaps of a shift in our collective perspective. The planets mirror the grim modus operandi of change and shrinking economies as they regress through the heavens.
Venus (those things and people we cherish and value) is the puella in Gemini. She has vanished from the sky, her carefree spirit subdued as she moves through the dark, in Retrograde from May 13th to June 25th (Retrograde at 22° Gemini and direct at 5° degrees of Gemini.) During a Venus Retrograde cycle we may revisit those things we valued and lost, seek out second chances, repair and heal those relationships that have become entangled in assumptions or frozen silences. Venus Retrograde periods are cosmic magnifying glasses, amplifying our inherent values and intimate desires.
Venus squares dreamy Neptune, raising our hopes high in love but also in escapism, delusion, illusion, and fantasy. She may be the victim, the rescuer. The glimmering Venus/Neptune square (May 3rd, May 20th, July 27th, and December 30th) adds a tincture of loss and longing, a heady cocktail of truth and lies, or a restless yearning for something or someone who is unattainable.
Intoxicating Neptune is notorious for delusion and disappointment. As the music dies and the fairy dust dissolves, we fall out of love with our soul mate, or realise that our dreams have been blown off course. This will be the initiation of devastating disappointment, the searing pain of grief and unspeakable loss, or the peak experience of shedding our illusion, adjusting our vision, seeing through the mirage.
Venus Retrograde may amplify the sense of awakening from our cruise on autopilot, as we exhume our buried desires and atrophied longings and embrace each moment with renewed intensity. As we prepare to emerge into this new world, there's no going back. The way is forward. Something greater than us is governing our lives and we must walk in this direction.
Chogyam Trungpa taught the practice of the awakened heart—"the genuine heart of sadness", which he said was natural to us all when we allow ourselves to receive the full experience of life with open hearts. It is in this "genuine heart of sadness" that we discover our repressed grief, our forgotten anger, our thin shard of shame, our intoxicating joy and our boundless capacity to Love.
On June 3rd, Venus aligns with the Sun, a mythic mating, a Venus "new moon", a union that is an alembic for our inner values. This Venus Retrograde transit may expose our deeply buried desires, our failure to ask for what we need. Venus Retrograde may dredge up discord that signals just how far we have drifted off course from what we value. Upheavals in our relationships may intensify as lock-down thaws. Mars moved into Pisces (May 13th) as Venus changed direction. Mars will conjoin with Neptune on June 12th adding to our discontent, or augmenting our compassion and ability to forgive.
Mercury is moving through Gemini, and will unite with Venus on Friday, May 22nd (square Neptune), an invitation to be discerning about the information we ingest or pass along with an unthinking swipe. This is a time of flux, an invitation to grieve what is lost, to bring Neptunian qualities of compassion, communion, and imagination into the world we are returning to. Systemic family therapist Richard Schwartz writes, "it's possible that this massive shock to our planetary and national systems will wake up enough leaders that we can get off the suicide train we've been on and create a slower, fairer, greener one for ourselves. I believe a lot of that depends on how each of us responds to this crisis."
The New Gemini Moon on May 23rd may draw us back to our natural rhythm. To the moment of now. Jeff Foster, author of Falling in Love with Where you Are distils the essence of this month's lunation: "This moment is not life waiting to happen, goals waiting to be achieved, words waiting to be spoken, connections waiting to be made, regrets waiting to evaporate, aliveness waiting to be felt, enlightenment waiting to be gained. No. Nothing is waiting. This is it. This moment is life."
As we reflect on the sacrifices we have made and the enormous challenges we now face, poet Rainer Maria Rilke reminds us, "let me not squander the hour of my pain."
Please get in touch if you would like a private astrology reading: ingrid@trueheartwork.com
New World in the Morning. Songwriter: Roger Whittaker.
April 20, 2020 In Astrology, Relationships, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman
Sacred Cow—Sun in Taurus—April 20th—May 20th
Today, the Sun moves into the fertile sign of Taurus. The air smells sweet and wildlife is beginning to return to silent cities.
Venus-ruled Taurus brings us back to the earth, to the potency of the virile bull and the gentle passive cow. During this time of enforced curfew and cocooning, we may have glimpsed some of the virtues of Taurus—patience, acceptance of those things we can no longer control, those things we can no longer change.
This week's Taurus New Moon (April 23rd) is a harbinger of slow and painful progress and economic recession. She unites with unpredictable Uranus and makes a frustrating square to responsible Saturn in Aquarius, symbolising the tension that further restrictions and limitations will bring as a second wave of this crowned virus exposes the hubris of our leaders, honours the courage of front line workers, reshapes our lives.
Outside our windows, Venus glitters against marmalade sunset while Jupiter, Saturn and Mars rise over the horizon at dawn.
As the Sun moves through Taurus, the energy of four Retrograde planets will be emphasised. Pluto goes Retrograde on April 25th (24º Capricorn), Saturn on May 11th (1º Aquarius), Jupiter on May 14th (27º Capricorn.) Venus is moving through Gemini now and will turn Retrograde on May 13th at 21º Gemini and go direct on June 24th at 5º Gemini, a notional period of 40 days and 40 nights. Transiting Venus apparently moves backwards in her dance across the skies once every nineteen months. These important Venus Retrograde periods distil the essence of what it is that we hold very dear to our hearts.
The ancients tracked the passage of Venus in a perfect pentagram across the skies, ascribing her disappearance in the skies to her descent into the Underworld. Innana (Venus) is stripped of all her valued regalia and exquisite clothing and enters the Underworld vulnerable and exposed. In modern times, the Underworld is a symbol of our own unconscious where we may encounter a truth that reverberates viscerally. The trial of these 40 days and 40 nights are a cosmic reminder for us to dissolve, discard out-worn values and beliefs. To re-organise, re-examine, re-prioritise those things we value around a more truthful, authentic place that rests at the hearth of our heart.
As Venus turns Retrograde in Gemini we may be facing unemployment, or the unexpected gift of emerging from our chrysalis, starting over, lighter, more appreciative of the little things that bring texture and quality to our lives. We may have reached a relationship crossroad where we wonder, as author, Elizabeth Gilbert once did, "do we want our belly pressed against this person's belly forever—or not?" We may be relishing our solitude, if we're home alone. We may be dating at a distance, enjoying a slower, more sensual rhythm, a new way of being. We may be falling back into love. Grateful, blessed, to be with the one we're with.
An invisible virus is still among us, and those leaders who become complacent or who try to hurry back to the way things were, may encounter setbacks or a resurgence in the pandemic as Mars moves into nebulous Pisces on May 13th, moving impatiently into the heat of Aries on June 28th, to rendezvous with Chiron, emphasising our pain, our grief, our woundedness.
"You cannot rip away caterpillarness. The whole trip occurs in an unfolding process of which we have no control," Ram Dass once said.
In myth, Venus was also a goddess of war. The pre-Colombian Mayans believed that when kingdoms were unstable, and regimes might topple, her emergence signified an auspicious time to begin a war. Venus Retrograde in Gemini may bring to a climax a festering conflict in our relationship, or the return of a mangy old grievance. As our politicians use military-style language, and direct their impotence towards another country or each other, we may resolve to act in ways that don't ignite conflict, or deplete our own immune systems.
As th is pandemic becomes endemic, we speculate about what life might be like after COVID-19. The astrology speaks of years, not weeks or months, of metamorphosis, the kind of heat and stress that changes limestone into marble, that transforms golden calves into sacred cows.
The combustible 2020 Pluto/Jupiter/Saturn conjunction square Eris (goddess of discord, strife, and consequence) is the capstone for the end of an epoch. Pluto and Jupiter united on April 4th and will meet again on June 30th (both Retrograde) and finally on November 12th, just after the US presidential election.
Unprecedented change, disruption, and upheaval will be the hallmark of the waning square of the Saturn/Uranus cycle as it builds between 2020 and 2023. There will be three exact, uncomfortable Saturn/Uranus squares from February to December 2021, and a close encounter in October 2022, but this energy can be felt already, as the old order breaks down.
Saturn/Uranus alignments coincide with periods of civil unrest, economic collapse, revolution, radicalisation, and the collapse of systems that no longer serve their purpose. If we look back in history, the Saturn/Uranus square of 1928/1933 heralded the Wall Street Crash, the Great Depression, and the establishment of The Third Reich. It is likely that there will be record levels of unemployment that will again precede enormous social change. Like the interwoven spirals and coils of Celtic knot-work, the astrology of our times is threaded with the amalgam of the past.
This is a long-term encounter with destiny that will highlight the jagged edges in our relationships, crack open fault lines in our societies. As we steady ourselves for more sacrifices, as we anticipate more uncertainty, Teresa of Ávila who lived during a Saturn/Pluto conjunction in Capricorn at the time of the Spanish Inquisition, reminds us to have courage for whatever comes in life—everything lies in that.
I post astrology updates regularly on Facebook, and offer personal astrology consultations, so do please connect with me, I'd love to hear from you ingrid@trueheartwork.com
October 18, 2018 In Astrology, Relationship By Ingrid Hoffman
Back to Black—Sun in Scorpio—24th October—23rd November.
As brittle leaves blanket the black earth in copper and gold there is something poignantly reassuring in the contracting light of autumn. Yet as Nature responds to the ancient rhythm of life and death, some of us may sense a seam of blackness in a world advancing through a dark night of the soul. As the inevitable juddering, shuddering climax of climate change, habitat loss, micro-plastics and global warming is shrugged off by plutocrats and self-serving politicians, as thousands starve in Yemen, and "rogue killers" prowl through the Saudi Consulate, torture and gruesome death is the price paid for speaking out.
Fair is foul and foul is fair. This is the month of Halloween and the ancient festival of Samhain. A liminal time, halfway between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice. A time to cull. A time when the veil between the worlds shimmers, gossamer thin, in the cooling air. Juxtaposed with rows of golden pumpkins, the rich aroma of roasting chestnuts, a ghastly parade of ghoulish costumes send a frisson of recognition that winter is coming. On October 24th the Sun dips into the deep waters of Scorpio. That night a Full Taurus Moon illuminates the fallow fields. The very first aspect the Sun makes is an opposition to disruptive, radical Uranus and a square to the Nodes, a foreshadow of unexpected, fated, events. Scorpio is an archetype associated with depth of feeling, with intensity, and let's say it out loud: with death.
Pluto and Mars are invoked when we talk about the Scorpion. We talk glibly of transformation, and yet, Pluto, and the essence of Scorpio, coils around that over-used cliché. For those of us who have witnessed the dying process of a beloved pet or a loved one, for those of us who have pared down to the bone after the dismemberment of a divorce, or the devastation of illness, know the pain of those irrevocable endings, those radical severances that bring us to our knees. Death and loss of all that we hold dear, distills what we value to quintessential heart-bonds, makes us count our blessings. We're humbled, overwhelmed by the beauty of the little things. We're brought to tears by an act of kindness, a soft word of sympathy. When we enter the realm of Scorpio, snakes shed their skins and feathered phoenixes emerge from the flames. We draw deep on our human capacity for resilience and survival. We experience forces greater than ourselves which render us powerless, broken, yet also capable of acts of heroism and love, as told by Heather Morris in The Tattooist of Auschwitz.
Venus Rx, Mercury and Jupiter are the Sun's travelling companions this month. Jupiter's passage through Scorpio—October 11, 2017—November 8, 2018 has been the Pandora's Jar from which all kinds of "great and unexpected troubles" have oozed—Jupiter magnifies and amplifies, and in Scorpio, this has been the sexual harassment and assault has exposed the sepsis in our society that has festered in silence, for years. The renewal and trans-formative power of human sexuality, as well as the distorted perversions and abuse of sexuality are Scorpionic themes, trivilaised on TV in the titillating Bisexual and the toe-curlingly awful Wanderlust. Venus has vanished from the sky. She's dressed in black, withdrawn, reflective. These forty days and forty nights, we may encounter those things that arouse a visceral response. We may recoil from encounters or sensory experiences that sting or poison us. Venus is the arbiter of our values, the tempera on our creative canvas. She's our detector, altering us to those circumstances, relationships, or more literally, to a sense that our tastes have changed. We not longer crave a certain food, love a certain style of fashion. The art or music that evoked a strong reaction now seems banal. The person we thought we liked or loved with such fervor fails to engage our interest as Venus stirs within us an internal transfiguration.
Scorpio, in its true essence, asks us to dive deep into rivers dark and dredge up what lies beneath: sexual diversity and preference, obsession and compulsion, deep vulnerability and soul naked intimacy. We experience the sublime and the profane, the Life-Death-Rebirth cycle of relationship, the intensity of being here, now.
This month the Sun, Mercury, Jupiter and Venus Retrograde in Scorpio amplify the sense of awakening from our cruise on autopilot, as we re-examine our values and embracing each moment with renewed intensity. As we prepare for the coming of winter.
Jeff Foster, author of Falling in Love with Where you Are distills the essence of this archetype: "This moment is not life waiting to happen, goals waiting to be achieved, words waiting to be spoken, connections waiting to be made, regrets waiting to evaporate, aliveness waiting to be felt, enlightenment waiting to be gained. No. Nothing is waiting. This is it. This moment is life."
For astrology readings and more information about forthcoming workshops in the UK, please email me directly: ingrid@trueheartwork.com
September 30, 2018 In Astrology, Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman
The One I Love—Venus Retrograde—October 5th—November 16th.
Sometimes it's only when we lose what has been comfortingly familiar, tenderly consistent, that we discover what we truly value.
Venus goes Retrograde on October 5th. As she moves apparently backwards in the skies through the deeply sensitive sign of Scorpio, she quickens our hearts and demands only the most honest and loyal bonds of attachment. Venus symbolises our inner values, and in Scorpio, superficiality and masks just won't do. We may have reached a crossroad where we wonder, as author, Elizabeth Gilbert once did, "do we want our belly pressed against this person's belly forever—or not?" Whether we choose to go or to stay, to keep or to give away, Venus Retrograde periods distill the essence of what it is that we hold very dear to our hearts.
The ancients tracked the passage of Venus in a perfect pentagram across the skies, ascribing her disappearance in the skies to her descent into the Underworld. The pre-Colombian Mayans believed that kingdoms were unstable, regimes might topple, and so her emergence signified an auspicious time to begin a war. Retrograde cycles emphasise those areas in our lives where we unconsciously lead with our wound. Where we move through life like a somnambulist, unable to truly value what we have until it's too late. Where we make Shadow choices drawn from unexamined cultural programming or adaptations to past trauma. In therapy, we may learn skills that help us leave behind the legacy of our old conditioning, surpass our constricted hurt lives, all by ourselves. And yet it is in relationship that we encounter our Shadow and our Light.
In myth, Innana (Venus) is stripped of all her valued regalia and exquisite clothing. She enters the Underworld vulnerable and exposed. In modern times, the Underworld is a symbol of our own unconscious where we may encounter a truth that reverberates viscerally. The trial of these 40 days and 40 nights are a cosmic reminder for us to dissolve, discard, out-worn values and beliefs. To re-organise, re-examine, re-prioritise those things we value around a more truthful, authentic place that rests in the hearth of our heart.
In astrology, Venus is about relationship. As she travels through uncompromising Scorpio, she encounters her vulnerability in intense emotional encounter.
"It's a tough, anti-relational world out there. Relationships between men and women have never been more difficult," therapist Terry Real believes. "Close to half of couples getting married will divorce. And there are far too many couples who suffer in relationships that lack the passion and closeness we all deserve."
The Archetype of Venus transcends gender and sexual preference. These 40 days and 40 nights bring an opportunity to transform vicious cycles into charmed circles as Venus magnifies and amplifies our most private and intimate relationships.
Blood-soaked centuries of patriarchal conditioning have programmed men and silenced women.
Writes Robert Bly, "many men numb themselves so they're not expressive. If you're too expressive in IBM, you get fired".
Terry Real believes, "men are just doing what they have been programmed to do—work hard, try to be more involved in the family, try to be responsible and responsive—and feel that they will never get it right."
Venus in her retrograde cycle invites us to slow down—our speech, our movements, our breath, the beat of our heart.
To be present with ourselves, with our lover, in a way that engages all the cells in our body and makes our heart expand like a Super Nova…
In A Plea to Women, John Wineland imagines that what all men want is—Less. "Our nervous systems can't handle more. We love range. Especially in bed. We want the Divine Mother, the cock-worshipping whore. Find ways to playfully and lovingly bring that to us. Try to separate the tools that you use to succeed in business from the tools that you use in our relationship. We want more of your vulnerability, more of your fear, more of your pain, we don't want to be told what book to read, what seminar to go to what therapist to see, we want to be told how painful it is for you when we don't show up for you… we want you to find something in us every day that you trust implicitly…. because the thing we want the most is to feel that you trust us and that you would let us lead you anywhere and find some way to continually surrender."
Transiting Venus moves apparently backwards in her dance across the skies once every nineteen months. Now, she's pinned like a diamond on the coral swathe of the evening sky. Venus passed her superior conjunction with the Sun on January 9th, a mythic mating, a Venus "new Moon", and since then, she has been moving further and further away from the glare of the Sun. She reached her greatest brilliancy on September 21st, reclining low on the western horizon. During the last week of September, she appeared as a large, elegant crescent, surrendering to the embrace of the darkness of each night, a fragile, vulnerable, a faded version of her former splendour. At Christmas time, she emerges from the Underworld, The Star of Bethlehem, the Angel of the Dawn, gifting us with a new revelation of our heart's desire.
Philosopher, Lao Tzu once said, "being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage."
Venus in Scorpio demands that we love deeply and bravely. And when she emerges once more as the glittering Angel of the Morning, may she find us awake to new possibilities, fully aware of what we truly value, and extravagantly generous in our loving.
I post regular astrology updates on FaceBook:
https://www.facebook.com/ingrid.hoffman.75
Please contact me directly for private readings in London and for more information about forthcoming UK workshops—ingrid@trueheartwork.com
September 16, 2018 In Astrology, General, Relationship By Ingrid Hoffman
In the Balance—Sun in Libra—September 23rd—October 23rd.
In tough times, everyone has to take their share of the pain—Theresa May, Libran.
The souls of the dead were weighed against the Feather of Truth by the ancient Egyptians, and this month, for many of us, there will be a sense of arriving at a crossroads of a situation that requires sound judgement and careful consideration.
The Sun enters Libra on September 23rd, and as it moves over the equator, day and night are equal. This is the midpoint of the zodiacal round, representing the seasonal shift of the Autumn and Spring Equinox.
For so many of us, balance is something we may wistfully talk about when the rhythm of our days begins to gyrate, scattering the weight of unattended tasks and responsibilities like a mantle over our minds. Balance is something we strive for when world weariness infuses the marrow of our bones. Yet, balance is as capricious as the patterns of neuronal firing in our brains, as fleeting as our emotionally-charged perceptions of the world around us.
The Sun, the symbol of our creative self-expression, is said to be in its fall, or debilitated in Libra. A perpetual state of balance is impossible to achieve, as we continually re-create ourselves amidst the complexities of our relationships.
In the Tarot, Libra is Justice XI reflecting the advancement of culture, away from the "primitive" instinctual life. Libra and Aries mark the Equinoxes and where Aries is the beginning, Libra is midway, a crossroads where the old converges with the new. Where reason, justice, and law must be carefully weighed in the balance. As the Sun moves through the sign of Libra this month, we may be standing at a personal crossroad of choice, where our decision must be carefully weighed.
The month of October may bring us all closer to a more tangible rendition of this sole inanimate sign. Venus rules Libra, and she goes Retrograde on October 7th, moving apparently backwards, through the deeply sensitive sign of Scorpio, quickening our hearts as she demands only the most honest and loyal bonds of attachment to those things we hold dear to our hearts. Venus symbolises our inner values, and in Scorpio, superficiality and masks just won't do. She moves into a second square to Mars on October 11th. Mercury moves into Scorpio on October 11th when there is a repetition of a theme of choice, or an issue around a relationship or something we deeply value that might have begun in the week of September 11th.
The essence of Libra is paradox and as Richard Tarnas, author of Cosmos and Psyche, writes, "Our time is pervaded by a great paradox. On the one hand, we see signs of an unprecedented level of engaged global awareness, moral sensitivity to the human and non-human community, psychological self-awareness, and spiritually informed philosophical pluralism. On the other hand, we confront the most critical, and in some respects catastrophic, state of the Earth in human history. Both these conditions have emerged directly from the modern age, whose light and shadow consequences now affect every part of the planet."
Margaret Thatcher and the last woman standing, Theresa May, both represent different aspect of this complex cardinal sign, yet share one of the most underestimated of all the Libran traits: intractability. Perhaps, they believed themselves to be agents of change and justice. The astrology documents the events that have unfolded for the often-inscrutable Mrs May since the start of the election campaign on June 8th 2017. We have no accurate birth time for Mrs May, but the positions of the Sun and most especially Mars in her birth chart reveal the stressors and coping strategies deployed during this turbulent time in British politics. From May to August 2017 Neptune conjoined Mrs May's Mars, suggesting that striking out in self-interest would be undermined in a swirling sea of confusion, delusion, and discouragement. Neptune Mars contacts bring a sense of idealisation that clouds our willingness to accept "reality". The essence of this transit is about surrendering our ego to a greater cause. Mars represents our will, and Neptune undermines and dissolves, making it difficult to succeed. She is quoted as saying, "I've been clear that Brexit means Brexit." And as Neptune conjoins her Mars at the end of October for the last time, stationing direct on November 26th and remaining there till late December, whatever clarity Mrs May was referring to may emerge like a chimera to haunt her and the Conservative Party in November/December.
Saturn has been in square to Theresa May's Libran Sun—March, May and early December 2018. A time of critical development where she will be challenged, perhaps her ambitions thwarted. Saturn square her Sun represents a period of trial, of low vitality. Projects she began seven years ago are now facing a crisis, and she will need all her Libran diplomacy and hopefully the ability to compromise to try to save what she believes is worth saving. Jupiter squares her beleaguered Mars in early January 2019 against the backdrop of Pluto's transit through Capricorn. In the words of William Butler Yeats, "things fall apart, centre cannot hold."
Pluto opposes the UK Moon (representing the people) in the last of five oppositions in early December, signifying irrevocable destruction, and eventually a rebirth, and we will all feel the pain. Pluto opposed the British Sun in the 1920s (1922/23) and conjoined the nation's Moon between 1930/31, at the time of the Great Depression. During the Thatcher years (1975/76) Pluto squared the nation's Sun and in 1979 and 1980 at a time of unemployment and austerity and the miners' strike, Pluto squared the nation's Moon.
Pluto conjoined the Sun of the UK chart in 2013, squaring the Nodal axis, which gives a "fated feel" to the unfolding drama. From March 25th 2019, Saturn opposes the nation's Moon and on April 14th 2019, Neptune squares Mercury, with Uranus square Jupiter (June-April 2019) signifying the disruption and upheaval that has accompanied what will be a hard (Saturn) Brexit.
Many Librans are prone to agonising procrastination and inertia in their quest for balance, peace, justice and harmony. In the need to please, to be gracious and charming, they offer concessions, subjugate their own needs, and stumble into the shadowy realm of obsequiousness and repressed resentment.
Compromise or polarisation. Judgement or discretion. Quiet desperation or the grace to remember that this is precisely what we have come here to do. In the scales of Libra we hold the tension of opposites. Light and shadow. The paradox of our humanness in the eye of the storm. Perhaps, as Carl Jung believed, if we hold the tension between two opposing forces, a third way emerges, uniting, transfiguring, transcending the two, giving birth to something new.
For astrology readings on Skype or Whatsapp and for more information about workshops please connect with me: ingrid@trueheartwork.com
I post regular astrology updates on FaceBook: https://www.facebook.com/ingrid.hoffman.75
March 22, 2017 In Astrology, Relationships, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman
In myth, Venus retrograde periods are cosmic magnifying glasses, amplifying our inherent values and intimate desires. We may be blindsided by the behaviour of our lover, pressed down by the weight of the frustrations, the drama of it all. We may have reached a crossroad where we wonder, as author, Elizabeth Gilbert once did, "do we want our belly pressed against this person's belly forever—or not?"
In myth, Innana (Venus) is stripped of all her valued regalia and exquisite clothing. She enters the Underworld vulnerable and exposed. In modern times, the Underworld is a symbol of our own unconscious where we may encounter a truth that reverberates viscerally. The trial of these 40 days and 40 nights are a cosmic reminder for us to dissolve, discard, out-worn values and beliefs. To re-organise, re-examine, re-prioritise those things we value around a more truthful, authentic place that nestles at the hearth of our heart.
In astrology, Venus is about relationship. Retrograde cycles emphasise those areas in our lives where we unconsciously lead with our wound. Where we move through life like a somnambulist. Where we make Shadow choices that we draw from compulsive, unexamined cultural programming or adaptations to past trauma.
Psychology uses the language of self-empowerment, internalisation. In therapy, we may learn skills that help us leave behind the legacy of our old conditioning, surpass our constricted hurt lives, all by ourselves. And yet it is in relationship that we encounter our Shadow and our Light.
These 40 days and 40 nights bring an opportunity to transform vicious cycles into charmed circles. The Archetype of Venus transcends gender and sexual preference. What your partner wants might not fit neatly into a heart-shaped cookie-cutter. As Venus magnifies and amplifies our most private and intimate relationships, do we dare ask ourselves, what do men want? Pretty much the same as woman—with all the subtle water—coloured nuances and dappled light. To to be fully seen. To be heard and validated. To be loved. Just as they are.
Venus in her retrograde cycle invites us to slow down—our speech, our movements, our breath, the beat of our heart. To be present with ourselves, with our man, in a way that engages all the cells in our body and makes our heart expand like a Super Nova…
Now as Venus withdraws from the light of the Sun, she's "in the dark". A fragile, vulnerable, a faded version of her former splendour. Venus has the same eight phases as the Moon. As she aligns with the Sun, a mythic mating, a Venus new "moon", an alchemical union with our soul-self. She reveals herself, resplendent and radiant once more, as Venus the morning star (March 24th,) offering clear vision, new revelation of our heart's desire .
Two archetypal energy forces are activated in ourselves and globally as Venus moves between fiery Aries and watery Pisces these 40 days and 40 nights. In Aries, Venus hunts Mars. She's the warrior, the activist, the persecutor, the feisty rebel. In relationship, tone down the volume. "Try to separate the tools that you use to succeed in business from the tools that you use in our relationship."
In dreamy Pisces, she's exulted, raised on high in love but also in escapism, delusion, illusion and fantasy. She may be the victim, the rescuer. She may search for the Mystical Lover in the vain hope of redemption. Use this symbolism to appraise your own relational style. "We want to be told how painful it is for you when we don't show up for you…"
When Venus appears again as the Angel of the Dawn, dare to love generously, deeply, expansively, creatively. Bring forth the Divine Spark within you and blaze brightly out into the world.
R.E.M.—The One I Love