Loving Ourselves Back to Life
By
Sarah Varcas
By
Sarah Varcas
This new moon in Pisces is gentle as a feather and soft as a summer breeze. Like a flower, she opens the heart to suffering, applying nectar to heal division and unite us with those people we would otherwise avoid. This moon reminds us that anyone’s life can change in the blink of an eye: the mighty fall, the rich lose everything, the healthy become sick and our greatest loves can be lost to us. How we respond to the calamities of life dictates our current character and future choices. It can be all too easy to judge another on who they are today without knowing the journey that brought them here: the aching disappointments, devastating losses and bitter regrets. We all have a back story – a path which has led us to now. No one is immune to the vagaries of life. It is this truth which connects us all.
The remedy is love
With four planets currently in the sign of the fishes – the Moon and Sun, Venus and Neptune – emotional boundaries can be especially porous now. Feelings rippling though the collective may find their home in our heart, and anyone could be carrying another’s emotional load along with their own. But wherever emotion originates, the remedy is love, love, love by the bucket load, starting with ourselves and radiating to all. It can be tough to open the heart in a harsh world, and our world is frequently harsh. But it is also beautiful and radiant, with people seeking to do the right thing alongside those helping only themselves. We may fear that loving too much can make us vulnerable: that we may be taken advantage of or end up sacrificing our own needs. But Venus and Neptune assure us love is not weakness but strength, not surrender but an all-encompassing embrace. It diminishes no-one and makes all things new. In love, both the lover and the loved are reborn.
So if you’re beset with emotion at this moon, it’s okay. Wounds are being healed, emotions re-balanced. In Pisces the moon is compassionate and kind. She seeks a return to the One from which all things arise. The realm of emotion becomes a hazy mix of yours and mine, feelings picked up from the ether and atmospheres born of the past, energetically present within and without. The harshness of separation – born an individual in a world that further divides – is anathema to this Moon. She knows you as me, now as then, the past as the present. It doesn’t matter who felt this way originally, the intention is simply to heal, whatever and wherever the pain.
It’s not about us
To personalise our feelings right now misses the point. We don’t have to justify why we feel the way we do, we simply have to feel: to let emotion arise unfettered, perhaps for the very first time. Fear of powerful emotion can perpetuate a fractured psyche that struggles for ground when the going gets tough. If we cannot embrace the misery of life, we cannot entertain its joy. If we avoid grief, we cannot know love, and if we deny anger, we will struggle to know fully the passionate pursuit of a better world. No matter our relationship with our feelings up to now, this moon awakens us to the healing power of gentle acceptance applied to whatever arises – ourselves, each other, this broken and beautiful world.
It’s not easy to set the mind aside when feelings are rife. Thought is triggered by emotion: memories, justifications, that inner voice that tells us to pull ourselves together or reminds us how hopeless life is! None of this matters now. Let the mind do what it does. We don’t have to listen or respond. Our task is simply to welcome emotion no matter how bewildering it may be. Healing is afoot and all can receive it. We simply need to be present with what is, allowing feelings to arise, be felt and released, be they yours, mine or simply floating in the ether for millennia. All emotion is energy and all energy is divine, seeking its way back to Source.
Accept, embrace, love
This gentle moon repairs broken hearts and fractured souls. She mends rifts, heals wounds and reintegrates all that’s divided. She knows separation as a mirage that dissolves in the light of truth and asks us to be gently bold and courageously compassionate in the coming days. To love where we thought we could not and connect where we seek to avoid. For unconditional love is always her first option – towards others and ourselves. If we are filled with anger, or lost in grief and despair, we may feel wholly unequal to the task. But this simply means we must begin with ourselves, accepting all that we are – every thought, feeling, behaviour, memory and emotion. Embracing it all. Owning it all. As we love ourselves back to life.
Sarah Varcas