angstoic.com Astrologer, Ang Stoic
Ahh… remember the old Chinese curse:
愿你生活在有趣的时代
(may you live in interesting times) ?
It appears to have gone viral…
With the social-minded Aquarius Sun rising before Mercury and Venus, scouted by the cruel Saturn/Pluto in a South Node-end locomotive, lead by an out-of-bounds Mars, we strap in for another super anxious week. This anxiety is especially intensified as the bombastic, attention-demanding Leo Full Moon holds an entire bucket of planets to ransom.
- Mercury and Venus will change signs this week, so expect to see a significant shift in the way we attach feelings to circulating thoughts and ideas.
- Mercury throws it wide open when he enters dreamy Pisces (Mon), where he will retrograde, eventually returning to Aquarius (4-16 Mar). This means we are in are now officially in his retrograde shadow, having much to think and rethink, visit and revisit till we come to some assessment about what is real and what was, after all, an imaginement of our own inner fignation.
- The Aquarian Sun still leads with his fixed ideologies and outlook for the future but with all the malefics (♂, ♄, ♇) rising well before the dawn, our days are generally tinged with a touch of the nasties before we even rise out of bed.
- After an intensely sobering finale in Pisces (♀ ∗ ♄/ ♇) Venus enters Aries, where her love-at-first-sight force of attraction magnetises us into all kinds of sympaticos and woundmates (♀ ☌ Ch).
- Meanwhile, the Uranus/Neptune semisquare stays supertight for another couple of months (closest on Feb26). The mental dissolution, disengagement and soul-fracture reaches epidemic proportions, particularly if we are not aware of our vulnerability to become infected by the anxieties and diseases of others,
- and as the separating Saturn/Pluto conj. starts to unravel our sense reality, it tries hard to introduce disturbing measures to prevent the whole damned ‘reality thing’ from crumbling apart.
Whilst we do not wish for our societies to completely crumble, we are also becoming aware that the foundations upon which they rest (democracy, socialism, oligarchy, etc) have reached a point where they are unable to transition the lifestyles that sustain humanity into a new level of balance, peace and harmony.
Economically, this is going to be a difficult time ahead as every critical challenge to our ecosystem causes significant disruption to the economic order. Pluto’s square to Eris this year means that we are teetering on the brink of complete wipeouts of certain classes of species, as well as habitats and natural weather patterns. Unenlightened humans are messing with it. Ecological and environmental crises demand that we make serious adjustments to the way we manage our earth’s resources. Extreme lifestyle changes are necessary, not just on a personal but at the cultural, socio-economic and political level to avert certain disasters.
To the average ‘citizen’ the necessary changes are not only unfathomable, but they seem almost impossible. The Aquarian Sun alerts us that unless we change our ‘group ideologies’, we have no chance of making any progress. Uranus, the progressive ruler of Aquarius is at his lowest functioning modality in fixed/earth Taurus. A stubbornness to shift generates an obstinate conservatism, one that grounds us to tradition and regressive measures in order to attain independence. Sadly, many would rather keep things as they are and ‘hope for the best’.
This comes down to our nature of attachment, patterns we develop as children which impact us in powerful ways throughout our lives. Understanding our attachments to certain things, people and principles in our lives goes back to values instilled in us by our parents and other influential figures in our community. Better acknowledgement of these values can offer us incredible insight into why we live our lives today the way we do, and particularly, how we operate in our relationships, not just to one another but towards the greater society.
This is a very complex process and may take years, especially if people are not willing to seriously look at how these old patterns and dynamics from our past are affecting the present. If we endured insecure (avoidant, ambivalent, or disorganised) attachment patterns, we are most prone to becoming inextricably inclined to re-experiencing insecurities in our adult relationships, not just with our partners and our own children but in the greater socio-political sense.
Poor, or unhealthy attachment models leave us feeling insecure and insensitive to ourselves, from which point we choose to enter poor partnerships and other key figures in our lives – people who basically ‘help’ us to recreate relationship dynamics from our past. We choose those people and ‘things’ that will ultimately assist us to distort our sense of security, or who we otherwise provoke to recreate for us the familiar emotional or cultural climate in which we grew up. We do this because we fear the unknown. We are afraid to try something that ultimately liberates us from toxic or unhealthy patterns because we are conditioned (familiarised, or programmed) to choose the ‘devil we know’.
The current crises, now infectiously spreading beyond the individual into the greater social radius of influence place all societies into a state of widespread uncertainty and insecurity. With Uranus semisquare to Neptune, it is the most sensitive, vulnerable, emotionally unsteady and infirm who feel most exposed. As the epidemic spreads, the powers of control as seen by the current Saturn/Pluto conjunction become more intent on forcibly maintaining the current structure and status quo. Of course, no structure is permanent, and the more force we apply to hold it, the greater the pressure upon it to either transform or detonate and disintegrate into dust.
A feeling of widespread fear develops as these powers (parents, authorities, governing bodies) display increasingly extreme, but also incongruous responses to our own progressive needs, further aggravating our anxious attachment patterns. As a state of emergency develops, those in control impose more even desperate measures in their attempt to effectively respond to our needs whilst also preserving their own power structures.
The Aquarian Sun brings conscious awareness that things must change, but as the Leo Moon reaches its full synodic culmination (Sunday), the contrast between what we must consciously decide is countered with or against unconsciously aggressive attachment needs. We will see this in our most significant relationships, expressing our distress most vigorously as if desperately clinging to our most securing attachment to be heard – like infants screaming and wailing to garner our parent’s attention. Preoccupation with our attachments leaves us feeling empty, anxious, insecure, distrusting, and reactive, both in our relationships with others and towards the whole of society.
Stress and separation anxiety (stemming from various levels of past losses) becomes more and more activated now, and as we will see throughout this next year, the world’s ‘old order of things’ and the securing ‘contracts’ which kept some semblance of organisation and permanence continue to either transmute or crumble and fall away.
We are about to see many more changes. It is best we assess the level of fear (negative charge) we place on things and how much we base our identity around them. We need to know within ourselves how much we are willing to be pressured, and how much pressure we are willing to apply outwards in order to ‘keep things as they are’.
There is a significant difference between earned secure adult attachment styles and those formed out of now outdated childhood patterns and defunct cultural neuroses. Being able to accurately reflect upon our past experiences – seeing how well we have worked to let go of those – has the power to impact the present and future tremendously.
The Saturn/Pluto is here to test how well we can rebuild our lives should those things we value become no longer sustainable, expired, absent or simply turn to dust.
To those willing to do the work, it is possible to develop earned secure attachments by creating a healthier, more coherent narrative about what is present in our lives. As this Full Moon culminates, we must seek to make sense of and feel the full pain of our past and find strength and courage to break free from recurring habits of strained attachment.
Also, it pays to choose to be with others who show a degree of maturity in their attachment patterns. This includes finding partners, friends, associates and community leaders who demonstrate a high degree of calm, composed and consistent sense of responsibility to current needs. While the Full Moon brings highest awareness to our basic needs, it is also a time to decide whether we stay together by agreeing to work together or is can be a time of upheaval and separation from those people and things that are not coherent in our current life narrative.
Examine the degree of anxiety, uncertainty, possessiveness or jealousy in your attachments. Choose those who provide easiness, calmness and stability. If you detach yourself, then know that you are seeking to work towards forming healthier attachments. The Venus/Chiron conjunction will highlight where the past wounds of attachment lie, push them into the foreground of your relationships so that they may be addressed.
This may also be a time to seek healing or counselling therapy. We cannot always rely on a partner or loved one to meet our needs or help us heal from the past. While we must work within ourselves to develop inner security, build stronger, healthier relationships, sometimes we must reach out and seek professional help.
The world at large is undergoing tremendous turbulence, mostly stemming from a deterioration of trust in things that once provided some degree of security. In the scarcity or absence of these securing attachments, we must turn to developing inner security as a process that will provide greater freedom to become our true authentic selves. Only this ‘inner trust’ will allow us to experience our lives and relationships to the fullest.
Cosmic tribe subscribers, please look out for our Newsletter, Thursday, with links to your Special Empowering Messages for this Full Moon. Also, here is the link to last Thursday’s Cosmic Bus Live Webinar, discussing this lunation in full: Cosmic Bus Lunation Report – Full Moon in Leo (live on 31 January 2020)
Blessings to you all, and have an amazing week xx