ARIES NEW MOON ECLIPSE HOROSCOPES
The Aries New Moon Eclipse is almost here...
Officially Monday, April 8th at 11:20am Pacific • 19º Aries
We are in the eclipse-portal ∞ a carousel of endings, beginnings and shifting priorities. Certain realizations may be presenting themselves dramatically, breaking your usual patterns. On the Aries/Libra axis, you may be ready to stop taking cues from other people's standards, no longer interested in waiting for permission to get excited about who you are and what you're called to set into motion. This may demand that you shed a people-pleasing habit, risk not "being liked" or set an important self-affirming boundary. You get to lay down the law for yourself, and inspire others to do the same...
Mercury went retrograde April 1st, and so a re-assessment of something from the past may help you make these decisions. Mercury retrograde is also a good time to slow down and consider the inner origins of your motives. In Aries, we are learning dynamics about self-and-other in a way that may encourage us to take ownership over our part in the story, to resolve conflict from the inside out. It's easier to leap out of ourselves to quick fix with an external state-change, but external state-changes often do not last.
With Mars getting wrung out by Saturn in Pisces, in order to drink the joy and nectar of your truth, you may need to stomp out distractions and endure the pressure of what's most sustainable for you long-term. Take the days surrounding this new moon to patiently press out any pretense and get real about what you want. Mercury will be retrograde until April 25th and out of its shadow May 13th, and so consider this eclipse an important part of a fermentation process. Trust that even the smallest insights will not be wasted, but will mature over time, aged, bottled, poured into a reality that honors the ever-evolving spark of who you are.
The days following the intensities of this eclipse, invite some exciting alignments that are likely to offer some cohesion. Mark your calendar for the April 11th Mercury Cazimi and Jupiter/Uranus combo on April 20th. More on this soon...
Sacrifice demands decisiveness, so that its forces can be applied with potency. As Dion Fortune says: “[A person] may sacrifice their emotions to their career..or sacrifice their career to their emotions. If the cut is clean, and there is no repining, an immense amount of psychic energy is released in the chosen channel. But if the lesser desire is merely inhibited and denied expression and not really laid upon the altar of sacrifice as a deliberate free-will offering, the unfortunate victim has made the worst of both worlds.” Do your best to be deliberate about what it is you're wanting, and even more deliberate about what it is not.
It isn't really possible to understand one's life purpose if we consider it apart from its community and social fabric. Career is more than a calling, it is a cosmic swirling of relationships. Many influences go into its making, and in turn, it contributes to the scheme of that entirety. This may be an important time for you to slow down and bear in mind this interrelationship, to not see your success as a mere exercise of goal setting, validation or status - but a blood-pact of group-potentiality, in the same way a sculptor feels the clay pushing back and co-shaping, the palm and earth are from the same place.
Anytime our individuality thrusts itself forward, a relationship takes the back-pressure. Like a track runner's starting block, offering a secure base for the stress of the charge forward. Sometimes interlocking stress adds up to stability, like tempering metal until it hardens. At first, it may seem like running away, without being tethered by anything or anyone is the most free. But when we slow down and cultivate safe, clear emotional bonds, a powerful substance is formed, a firm foundation for autonomy to fling out from. Be sure that whoever you choose to be held by, matches the freedom in your heart. Not everyone can handle your kick-back.
Where does waiting start to waste time? Ask a shotgun wedding…or a person turning left at a traffic light. Western clock time is not the only time we exist in. There’s also time that respects the moment, a relational quality, a story time that takes the time that it needs to tell. There is also the time in your head and the delicacy of translating it to others, a back and forth hallucination of words and feelings, we patiently wait to comprehend each other. Wasted time is also a material - trust that whenever something has outlived its usefulness, a path opens and you make a left turn.
Some deny that we consciously experience our birth, that we have no memory of it - despite the extreme stress of the event. We have forgotten somewhere that we smashed ourselves through a portal - lungs fighting for life, head collapsing like an accordion to survive. In birth is death a precarious threshold of almost breathing and not breathing, until the bellow of your accordion head opens and the universe pushes down on the group of notes your soul needs to play - at first it sounds like a baby crying. But then a rhythm gushes out of you, a re-living of this birth event in other symbolic events, as an artist squeezes paint out of a tube.
Many magical formulas are hidden in words. A combination of letters, like numbers on a padlock. Abracadabra creates itself into being as hearing a knock on the door creates a person entering. Highly influential acting teacher, Uta Hagen took away her 'tricks', imposed no line readings, no gestures, no positions, no outer directions as the material from which to construct the mask of a character. “I was not allowed to begin with, or concern myself at any time with, a preconceived form. I was assured that a form would result from the work we were doing.” Trust the magical formula that is hidden in your natural wisdom - as you speak, a form enters.
Although I’d love to pinch my friends' cheeks and smother them in hope and encouragement, to be the one that stimulates and also steadies them. When unbalanced, generosity can be draining. Sometimes the most helpful thing is to take a step back, watch the group hit walls without you - as they pull away you catch a sling shot, a rubber band snapping back into yourself, like a big inhale. Do not make decisions off of other people's blocks. Go somewhere quiet and absorb your own energy so that you can re-emerge and re-divide yourself generously.
We all express different kinds of power under different circumstances. When someone proclaims they are enlightened - we ask, enlightened everywhere ? A singer may be an open channel when it comes to writing music - but lost in the sauce when they do taxes. It's very rare that a person is walking on water, across every part of the pond. Despite your vast experiences, there may be something you realize you need to slow down and learn (or re-learn) to fill out your potency. If that's not the case, then consider this: there are some delusions that we will never overcome, some territories of life that we do not have the time to be an ascendant master of - let this relax your shoulders.
A snake unlocks its jaw and swallows a rabbit hole. Can you imagine, that level of all consuming intimacy, to be swallowed whole ? There is a hunger in you, to pass into uncanny levels of passion with others…beyond the facade of sharp teeth, small talk...past the emotional body and inside the inner sanctum. There is an art to this, of moving through the belly of a snake without getting lost in the dark. Find methods of merging that amplify your individual edges. Seek out honest collaborations that shed the skin of false selves and push you to emerge with colors deepened, scales polished.
Divest in unnecessary trappings of how magic works. It requires no temple, no special robe or tool of any kind. It can be performed using only your hands, your body and your mind. It can happen anywhere anytime and once you learn it, no one can prevent you from using it. When your own body is the magical material - an empty hand is enough. You could be confined in a prison cell or even chained to a wall - and still be powerful, because you need nothing but your breath, clear insight and the furnace of your belly to work out this life.
No matter our origin story and how many broken pieces are yet to be understood - things can be a mess and still, life keeps happening - its processes are a deep and irrepressible force. You can fail and life keeps happening. You can win and life keeps happening - rhythm, not stability is the nature of things - and whatever has been interrupted, whatever extreme you have arrived at is only one side of a pendulum swing…running its course for now. Trust that you will swing back to center, that you do not need to take any one phase seriously, it is the apocalypse and also the new era, a rhythm will always keep happening.
Anthropologist Felicitas Goodman, discovered that the body postures in statues created by horticulture societies in Crete are not simply aesthetic, but keys to certain types of religious trance experience. That is, each posture was different from the other and by maintaining one of them for 15 minutes, combined with drumming, an effective formula for a vivid journeying/trance experience would ensue. Remember this dear friend, when you are feeling confined by a decision, it is not simply arbitrary - you are having a posture experience - an initiation, a truth unveiled only through your willingness to sit still in one place.