Tag: taurus

astrology, moon, new moon, virgo

New Moon in Virgo – A Time to be in our Physical Bodies

Karena

We are exactly experiencing our New Moon in Virgo as I write this; both the Sun and the Moon are at 14 degrees of Virgo. Virgo New Moons are excellent times to evaluate what is working for us and what is not, and to remove all of the cruft.

This year, our Virgo New Moon is particularly potent as the Sun and Moon are exactly trining Uranus in Taurus as the New Moon conjunction occurs. Uranus in Taurus often brings disruptions to our basic living needs…. food, shelter, money, and other material goods.

With Uranus in Taurus trining the Virgo New Moon, there are many positive ways this could manifest!

With so much outside of our control in 2020 and 2021, this might be an opportunity to take control of some of the small things we can control! Take your car in for an overdue oil change, organize that closet that you just haven’t had the motivation to get to, start a practice of doing food planning or preparation on your days off of work so that you have homemade food at the ready when you need it, spend some time on personal grooming (styling your hair, plucking eyebrows, or those other things we all did frequently before covid kept us home so much!).

The common theme here is positively disrupting and “cleaning up” (literally or figuratively) some of our Taurus-based areas of life. Particularly with everything we all have been dealing with over the past 18+ months with covid, it can sometimes feel hard to muster motivation for simple, easy, benign things like tidying our house, brushing our hair, and prepping food for meals. It can feel easier to “lose ourselves” in an imaginary world brought to us by our favorite author or our favorite Netflix show than to put any thought or energy into our physical world. But it is important to remember that we are actually physical beings in a physical world. Although it might be easy during these times to pretend that we don’t have hair to brush, the very act of being present in our bodies and doing something physical and down-to-earth can actually feel like a healing ritual, particularly during the Virgo Full Moon!

A wonderful way to start is to really ground yourself in your body. Sit in a comfortable place with as few distractions as possible, and take a few minutes to really check in with your body. Take a few deep breaths in an out, allowing each inhale and exhale to be 3-4 seconds in length. Gently clear out any chattering thoughts in your mind, and just allow yourself these few minutes to really focus on your body and your breath. As you breathe in and out, you are likely to become more aware of the rhythm of your heart beating. This is your own personal rhythm…. be attuned to it and notice it!

Whether you allow yourself time for cleaning your closet, alphabetizing your spice rack, or taking a few minutes just to breathe deeply into your body, allow yourself to find something physical and material that you may have been neglecting to take care of during this Virgo Full Moon, and put some energy into that area!

Photo by Todd Rhines on Unsplash

lunation, moon

New Moon in Taurus

Karena

So much of the energy of 2020 has been heavily dominated by Capricorn and Aquarius – strongly Saturn-ruled signs. That has led to a heaviness, a darkness, and a sense of time dragging on and on while we hope, perhaps in vain, for better days to come soon.  But let’s take a step back from all of our intense Capricorn/Aquarius energy, and look at the New Moon cycles of 2020, since we are hitting our fourth New Moon of 2020 today.

Christmas Day, 12/25/19, heralded the beginning of an eclipse season with a foreboding eclipse at 4 degrees of Capricorn, the sign in which Pluto, Saturn, Jupiter, and the South Node were all clustered.  Five days later on 12/31/19, China alerted the World Health Organization of the virus that would come to be known as covid-19.  Eclipse seasons often kick off a series of related events that continue throughout the next six months, and in this case the series of events it kicked off was both epic and tragic.

Our first full lunation cycle of 2020 was off to a rough start with a New Moon at 4 degrees of Aquarius on 1/24.  On 1/23, one day earlier, China began lockdowns – the first of what would become many caused by the pandemic.

Our second New Moon of 2020 occurred on Feb 23rd at 4 degrees of Pisces.  This corresponded with Italy’s lockdown and the realization that not only had this spread well beyond China, but we also had a global pandemic on our hands and would need to take serious measures.

Our third New Moon of 2020 occurred at the 4th degree of Aries on March 24.  This was the Monday, interestingly, in which many states issued a “stay at home” order .  And we definitely saw the Aries New Moon bring the proactive energy of the warrior to the strange mix of world events.  It ushered in a cycle of people aggressively headed to the stores in droves and emptying shelves of rice, beans, hand sanitizer, and pretty much all forms of cleaning products.  The Aries warrior energy was also evident in very literal fights over toilet paper and other perceived necessities.

This energy all leads us to our fourth New Moon of 2020: A New Moon at 3 degrees of Taurus.  Maybe I am naive or superstitious (or maybe both?), but I am hopeful for this New Moon cycle.  There is a certain heaviness associated with Taurus, but it is not the oppressive heaviness of Saturn; it correlates much more readily to the heaviness of lethargy.  And that may actually be where many of us are mentally and physically at this point.  No motivation to get off the couch, because, really, where are we going to go?  Many people I know (myself included) who were voraciously reading all news and statistics related to coronavirus in the earlier days of 2020 are now suffering from serious coronavirus news fatigue, and a bit of whiplash trying to follow the latest thoughts on how contagious it is, how deadly it is, how soon it actually started spreading, etc.  Rather than the more hectic, panicked pace we were all keeping earlier this year, now many of us are making friends with the four walls of our houses, working on home projects, and planting gardens (This is causing a huge shortage of seeds!  It’s hard to imagine a more Taurean response!)

The April New Moon is also the first New Moon of this cycle not happening in the 4th degree of a sign, but rather in the 3rd degree.  In China, the number 4 is considered an unlucky number since it is pronounced nearly the same as their word for ‘death’.  Not particularly auspicious during a global pandemic!  Three is generally viewed as a much “luckier” number.  Again, I acknowledge that I am very possibly a superstitious person, but the third degree definitely seems “luckier” than the 4th, and we need all the luck we can get in 2020!

So what could all of this mean for the April Taurus New Moon?  For some (especially those on the front lines fighting the virus!), it has to continue to mean a highly concentrated and highly exhausting effort to treat people with the virus.  For those of us who have the option of taking a deep breath, though, now may be the time to do so.

As the moon slips from the last degrees of Aries into the 3rd degree of Taurus that the sun occupies, maybe a lethargic darkness will quietly settle over the world.  Maybe this next lunar cycle will give all of us the desire to look inward rather than outward.  Maybe we will focus less on scrolling through endless news feeds and browsing graphs of statistics and will instead focus on the more earthy, grounded experiences right in front of us.  Maybe we will improve our homes, our gardens.  Maybe we will improve our family relationships over shared homemade dinner.  Maybe this will give us the opportunity and desire to connect with the earth in a very real way (in a way we may not have connected with her in months, or even years!).  New Moons are generally viewed as excellent times to set new intentions; times to evaluate the past monthly cycle and prepare for a new cycle ahead.  Maybe it is time for many of us to do exactly that, focusing on what we can control rather than what we cannot control.  We cannot control the health or the economies of the world, but we can control the state of our own minds, and maybe this Taurus New Moon is a call to do exactly that.  We can ground ourselves in the sturdy energy of this most fixed sign, and find peace in focusing on the earth, our families, our gardens, homemade dinners with all of our comfort foods.  While coronavirus will be a reality for all of us across the world for the foreseeable future, maybe this lunation cycle can be a call to take a deep, full inhale, and a long, slow exhale and allow ourselves to come down from our adreneline rush.