The Full Moon in Taurus Total Lunar Eclipse takes place at 3:01am PST, and we find ourselves at the apex of this wildly transformative eclipse season. We are in such a profound, deep dive of change, transformation, and healing. The polarity is Scorpio/Taurus, where the Sun in Scorpio allows our conscious awareness to be graceful with the coming darkness, and the metaphorical death that we must all learn how to move through. Every in-breath is a birth, and we die every time we exhale. We wake in the morning, being born again through the miracle that is the brain firing into consciousness, and when we lay ourselves down at night, we welcome the sweet death of sleep. Scorpio and Taurus know this; they invented it. And the beautiful promise is that if we embrace death (Scorpio), we can have more love (Taurus).
So, what is dying off right now? Well, just about everything if you look at who is hanging out in Scorpio during this Full Moon. Sun, Venus, Mercury, and the South Node, which translates to baggage from the past (South Node), how we give and receive love (Venus), our ability to communicate with depth and gravitas (Mercury), and our conscious awareness of all that is changing at a deep level in a way that we can immediately integrate into our sense of self (Sun). In the Taurus mansion we find the Moon, Uranus, and the North Node in very tight Conjunction. The Moon carries the mechanics of a Full Moon, as she is the arbiter of our unconscious, the luminary that helps us navigate that land of mystery, and Taurus is where the change is taking place. The Moon is in very tight Conjunction with Uranus and the North Node. The NN means we get to move powerfully forward toward our dharma as we drop the weight of old wounds, and Uranus puts an enormous flash of lighting such that truly major change can happen, seemingly out of nowhere.
I have never known another astrologer who puts as much emphasis on the Inconjunct, the minor 150-degree known as the Great Eliminator, as I do. Perhaps because I am also a psychologist and my life’s work includes helping people dive into wounded spaces and heal, something we do mostly in small incremental steps. Of course, sometimes growth happens in big, numinous, and enormous moments of consciousness jumping up to another level. But most of the time, we heal a bit, grow on the inside, and are able to make new choices from healed spaces a little at a time. This is the power of the 150-degree angle, which is like an exit off the freeway of your old, unconscious patterns, and into new territory, a bit more with each new, higher choice you can make. This eclipse has both. For some, this eclipse may generate things like dark nights of the soul, kundalini awakenings, and enormous radical and revolutionary change, mostly courtesy of Uranus. But the two Inconjuncts that are on the side of this lunation are offering the real change that is possible right now.
Chiron is holding the Great Eliminator angle with the South Node of the Moon in a five-pass release transit that started in late August and completes itself at the end of December. The South Node is our karmic past, where all the baggage and patterns and wounded consciousness are held at bay until we are ready to let some of that shit go. The South Node is also where all the action of this eclipse is, as the Sun and the South Node are Conjunct, creating the eclipse in the first place. Chiron holding the Great Eliminator angle for so long is a powerful healing tool, helping us dig in and let some wounds go. This is partly why this lunar cycle, and the past few months, have been emotionally painful, for you can not heal a wound unless you first allow it to be triggered, and then breathe new love into those stuck places, and help the body release things it has been holding onto, some of them for decades.
When we can turn those deeper healings into new behaviors, then we are cooking with gas. All behavior is a dictate of Mars, the planet through whom we choose and decide. He is retrograde right now, and standing stock still at 25-degrees of Gemini where has been for over a week. From this place, he is holding the Great Eliminator angle with Pluto, the Lord of the Underworld, who holds our shadow in his basement. This eclipse season is ruled by Pluto, and as a result, this is truly a moment of radical change. Mars touching Pluto in this way is going to allow us to, over the next three to five months, dig deep and find all sorts of new behaviors that align with this greater inner healing. It may be months before we begin to see the true results of some of what we are processing down below the surface of our unconscious at this time. Trust me, the emotional and psychic healings that we are moving through now will turn into new behaviors between now and the next eclipse in April 2023. But there will be more work to do after this lunation falls into our rear-view mirror. Mars moving backward for two more months will help.
Remember the structure of every Full Moon is gratitude and release. The Full Moon is like the moment of harvest, where we take the wheat berry, but leave the chaff to decompose and fertilize the next crop. In consciousness, this turns into gratitude for the yummy stuff we have already created, especially in love, comfort, and security, as Taurus invented these things. Then comes the release, where the chaff is left behind because it no longer serves us. This is akin to the old, wounded patterns we are now ready to be free of. When we do this well, we serve the next harvest by dropping old patterns that have held us back. Scorpio energy is what turns this into such a deep, death/rebirth potential, and the exact proximity of Uranus makes the whole thing like lightning in a bottle. You may feel like part of you is dying, and that is accurate. Remember the cycles; without death there can be no rebirth, and we are in a complex moment of simultaneous dying to self, while something new is being born. It is being born out of love. Trust that, and have at it.
