Recently, I uncovered that Nr. 6 is an ideal number for your home, as it is represented by the planet Venus, the ruler of the finer things in life, beauty and love. This was brought to my awareness only when I moved into my new flat, two weeks ago and felt curious about the apartment’s numbers which added up to a 6. Since then I find myself reflecting on 6, 66 and 666 as numbers which in the collective unconscious are usually associated with the Devil, fornication, bad luck and unfortunate events, and yet occult teachers who dabble in numerology tell us that 6 is a number deeply connected to Venusian energy.

How did we get it twisted for so many years ? Well apparently, Christianity had something to do with it, and the bad rap that this number got went hand in hand with most things that suppress the Divine feminine and have distorted how we understand femininity in two unimaginative and extreme polarities: either the Maddona or the Whore, the weeping mother or sex-starved, fallen woman. Due to my sociological education and training as a feminist thinker, I am highly critical of the religious background I was born into, one that seems to continue to infiltrate common sense thinking and propagate the same tired clichés regarding what it means to be a woman (the man’s so called subordinate, a mere ‘rib’) & a man (i.e. built in the image of God).

Fortunately, some aspects of reality are far removed from popular thinking beliefs, as both men and women live their lives at varying degress of strength and capabilities and vulnerabilities, but these beliefs continue to hold water, and for some unreflective and unaware people, they continue to represent ‘the natural truth’. Life would be easier if there would be one obsolete truth that we could all follow, but things don’t function so neatly in practice.

So, to counteract the trend of distorting femininity, I keep reflecting on Venus and the meaning of 666, and I find that this number represents nothing to fear and everything to consider. Since I moved into my 6-themed new home, I spontaneously created a shrine to Venus in my bathroom one night when I was feeling depleted of energy. I drank some Weissbeer and took a bubble bath. Slowly, I regained my energy, and got into a routine of self-care: eating well and drinking water, doing morning yoga, putting on make-up and feeling inspired to write and share ideas.

At the moment, I feel a very strong Venusian presence in my life, and I am not entirely sure if this came with the place or if I am entering a period of my life where with age came the wisdom to simply accept my femininity, to be kinder to myself as a woman and accept that taking care of myself does not mean that I am subordinate to men, just that society chooses to see me this way (and well to see women, in general). I like to live in this discrepancy between what I think and feel about my gender and what society tells me I should feel and think. I am aware that it would be easier to blindly give in and conform to social norms and traditions, but the cost is to live within a sado-masochistic relationship with myself, one in which I hate myself for the things I want, for the skills I have and the personality I choose to express. So I’ve decided to let go of pain in my life, to slowly shed learned helplessness and compulsory modesty since I’ve no longer been able to lie to myself like I used to.

In astrology the suppression of the feminine is tied in with Venus-Pluto aspects. Venus represents our way of loving someone, how we earn money, how we value ourselves. The astrological sign in which our Venus falls and the house into which it is placed, determines our relational worth. A Venus in Scorpio or Venus conjunct Pluto would show an individual who represents soft power under external duress, a person who constantly transforms their value and loving patterns. So thinking of the symbolic dance between Venus (the bright) and Pluto (the dark) inspired me to write this post.

To offer some guidance, if you have strong Venus-Pluto links in your chart, the combinations, can be the following:

• a square: this represents explosive sexual tension, the kind that builds up in time and one day finds an unexpected outlet, also the person is perceived as sexual and lusty and attracts a lot of unsolicited sexual attention from others, heated arguments, power struggles)
• an opposition: an aspect of imbalance and excess, either too much sex or too little, too much money or none at all, a lot of personal worth or feeling dejected by others, a game of hiding the true Self or coming out with an uproar, keeping secrets or engaging in overt healing, one is empowered through beauty and a personal sense of style or feels awkward and disempowered.
• a trine or a sextile: these are harmonious aspects, they bring a lot of dignified sexual partners, tantric sex, being a really good secret keeper and confidant; if money is earned through sex there is a sense of quality and respect about it, of luxury and it is kept hush-hush; natives with such placements are also excellent artists.
• a conjunction: which works the same way as having Venus in Scorpio, since Pluto rules Scorpio – and makes the person a center for power and sexuality, for secrecy and smouldering good looks; this aspect imbues the native with strong intuition and keen analytical insights, as well. In my interpretation of this natal aspect, Venus-Pluto conjunctions are creators of sexual and healing karma, rather than karma receivers, which means they have a lot of power to change people’s lives as long as they become aware of their intense magnetism and use it for good and healing (otherwise it backfires on them and involves them into Ego-scenarios were they believe people ‘hate them for being beautiful’)

One way to deal with this energy is to accept your vulnerability rather than act from a place of constant defense and embodying aggressive, macho power. This means that one could encounter violence in life and respond with soft power, by drawing from the power inherent in the feminine archetype. Examples can be found in the amazing book of Leymah Gbowee, inspired by the events of the civil war in Libya, which details how groups of unarmed, vulnerable women of all ages, together with their children, used their vulnerability to counteract toxic, militant masculinities through comming together to pray and help each other. In one episode even, when threatened with sexual aggression from military men, Leymah described how she managed to disempower men by getting completely naked and oferring herself up, treating the sexual exchange not with fear but almost as a business exchange. When faced with this dignified surrender, men lost the capacity to draw pleasure from domination – which unconsciously lies at the root of sado-masochistic sex, the kind of sex that is used to control women’s bodies and is considered manly and normal in some cultures – and in some cases, men gave up using sexuality as a way to punish their victims. By meeting this soft power, they felt momentarily emasculated and lost the incentive to gain power through exploiting others’ weaknesses. This experience reveals the dynamics of gender intimidation and offers a soft strategy of overcoming Venusian power challenges.

The problem is not that women are the weaker sex, but that they are taught repeatedly to think they are weak, so that men psychologically can feel they are stronger by dominating them (this is what psychologists have coined as the ‘learned helplessness’ complex or in more popular terms, being a damsel in distress that needs a hero). This power dynamic brings nothing but tension between genders, and while it might lead to sex and procreation, it does not lead to fulfilling and respectful relationships where both partners can grow, because there is an imbalance of power which constantly has to be measured against human worth and dignity (which continues to be problematically gendered in society). Releasing this tension means that women need to let go of ‘learned helplessness’ and the pervasive idea that they are weak and frail and thereby ‘feminine’ and men need to let go of ‘machismo’, and the idea that they are real men if they drink hard, fuck hard and work hard. No. We can all drink, work and have sex, we can all build muscles and have feelings, we all eat and argue and cry and create. We can all be moral, peaceful and loving. Both men and women have estrogen and testosterone in their bodies, and just the simple fact that we have it in different quantities shouldn’t be the defining pillar of how we structure our social relationships. Well the upcoming 22-years long transit of Pluto in Aquarius is going to bring this point home to most of us, as we will see the collective transformation of the social fabric.

Indeed, some do some of these things better than others, but gender does not have anything to do with it as much as we traditionally thought – it is just the ideas that we attach to gender and we believe to be ‘a natural & inalienable truth’ because thinking along such stiff lines gives most people a sense of comfort; these ingrained beliefs about femininity end up perpetuating a string of boring, unimaginative comments on women’s plight. And this is where Pluto comes in: to disrupt what is stagnant in our psyches, to transform what is suffocating and does not help us all grow on a soul level. Even if Pluto has been demoted from the rank of a ‘planet’, it continues to pack an energetic punch and because Pluto transits are so long (it takes the planet aprox 248 years to complete its movement around the Sun and through the 12 zodiac constellations!) this transform happens slowly and in bursts which are usually triggered by the aspects Pluto is making to other luminaries (the most infamous ‘detonator’ being Pluto squaring Uranus which represents a period of intense, extreme, often violent, rapid social growth)

Individuals with strong Venus-Pluto aspects often exert a fascinating power of seduction over both genders, and project outwardly an unforgetable androgynous look. Some examples include Kurt Cobain (Pluto in the first house, Venus conjunct Sun & opposite Pluto) or Wynona Ryder (Sun conjunct Venus in the sign ruled by Pluto, Scorpio):

So how is the number 6 then integrated with Venus-Pluto aspects? To sum up my initial analysis, I would say that individuals who have a Venus-Pluto imprint in their chart could live out their soft power by experiencing moments of disempowerment in their personal connections which shame them and urge them to rise into their own self-control and empowered thinking. These tough lessons happen through the intermediaries of money, sex and personal agreements, and through how their body, style and beauty is perceived. With such an astrological signature, they also have to negotiate their trust limit and adapt it in order to build strong bonds of intimacy with others. So, if Venus-Pluto people go through a life-long process of bringing to their conscious awareness more and more of their self-worth in the world, this can increase their distorted self-image which usually stems from toxic relationships from their childhood or inter-relational trauma (usually of a sexual kind) experienced in the process of growing up. The Devil then becomes Venus again, as strife and anger is symbolically converted into peace and harmony in their personal relationships. So in a way you could see this symbolic process of the Venus-Pluto person as a reclaiming of the original meaning of the number 6’s energy. I think the number 6 can also be reshaped and rescued into our collective awareness, since it carries Venusian energy and Pluto can purge its bad reputation throughout time and helps us collectively reappreciate the number 6. The 6 can be transformed, or rather returned back to its original, pre-Christian meaning, from the number of the Devil to the number of Venus and Love.

Numerology is useful and wonderful, because it does exactly this, it rescues the numbers 6, 66 and 666 from a dogmatic meaning to one purely focused on the vibration of the symbol. By stripping away the religiously uptight and judgmental understanding of Venus – seen as something ‘amoral’ because of her association with pleasure and prosperity – and by celebrating her as the Goddess of Love, Beauty and Pleasure once more, we could collectively learn to heal one aspect of the Divine Feminine and perhaps begin to value soft power again, to prize intuition together with courage, and strength together with vulnerability. That is my hope.

With universal love,

Lexi ❤

Have you ever wondered if your Mercury placement can affect the quality of your self-talk? It took me some courage to finally write about the act of talking to myself, mostly because this is one of the first symptoms of an aggravated mental health condition. Then I started searching the web with ‘Dr. Google’ (obviously, the normal thing to do when you consider ‘accurate’ self-diagnosis) and I found some resources which brought me a sense of solace:

• http://theconversation.com/is-talking-to-yourself-a-sign-of-mental-illness-an-expert-delivers-her-verdict-77058

• https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-minute-therapist/201712/do-you-talk-yourself

And especially this podcast which was informative and sweet (and I agree with the speaker that our inner narratives can often feel like court hearings, depending on how we use the inner critic):

• https://podtail.com/podcast/help-me-be-me/ep-121-inner-dialogues-when-others-trigger-us-we-g/

I enjoy the fact that the first article mentions the work of Jean Piaget, who was one of the first psychologists who described the mental stages of development for children. Piaget found that there were largely 4 of them: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal abstract (or formal operational). In his view, there is a link between the development of our mind from childhood onwards, and moments of intense emotional upheaval. Terapeutic stories depict how in moments of intense emotional upheaval and trauma, adults could regress to a younger version of their Selves, a less sophisticated one, a version of their Self usually experienced during childhood. Or in Piaget’s terms, when we grow up we develop naturally from stage 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 so we could operate at the level of abstract thinking (even if many psychologists following from Piaget onwards, debunked this neat linear development of the mind). However, in situations where we experience trauma – with its strong emotional content – some of us could overload the cognitive system and momentarily inhibit our capacity to think at a formal level. Thereby, a life event could get an adult to move back from stage 4 thinking (formal operational) to stage 3 thinking (concrete operational), and that’s when internal talking could become externalized self-talk or thinking out loud.

At the same time, and at the level of language, adults also revert from what the sociologist Margaret Archer called ‘our inner conversation’ into its predecessor: the explorative loud-talk of children. Little known, is that this regression is helping the wounded Adult Self to heal from the shock of the present situation, by temporarily escaping into the past. The real problems appear if the adult escapes completely into the past or in a world of illusions and is incapable of reverting back to mature forms of relating, or to act on the principle of reality. Part of the process of healing from trauma is getting an individual to reach that stage of formal mental development (and there are many others such as Erik Erikson’s emotional stages of development etc.)

I think there is something profoundly beautiful about how we return to our inner child, when as adults we experience trauma. Of course, I am not supporting traumatic events, nor do I say that there must be the condition of trauma in order to access your inner child – you can easily do so by playing with other children, by enjoying yourself and having fun in the present. It is just that during situations of trauma, one facet of our inner child usually pops up – the wounded aspect. What I find beautiful is that the Self seeks solace in a previous version of ourselves, one that was more open, and more vulnerable to the social world. Psychologically, the mind attempts to learn again and heal, and this is a unique function that demonstrates the plasticity of our brain, and the hunger to learn and to improve. As the old saying goes, sometimes you need to go two step-backwards in order to move forwards in life.

In such circumstances, talking to oneself becomes like the Freudian ‘talking cure’, just that instead of lying on a couch talking to a paid professional, you carry these conversations with yourself as you go about your day. Sometimes these self-talks can produce some funny and quite embarrassing situations, such as when someone else notices how passionately you might reprimand or guide yourself in the supermarket or on the street. This happens to myself relatively often, since my Moon sign is in Sagittarius and I get some of my best ideas when I move, when I walk and roam around the city streets.

One way in which I managed to escape embarrassment, was by recording my thoughts into my phone with the audio recorder function; in this way, talking to myself looks like I am keeping an audio diary or talking to someone on the phone and it appears less crazy (or so I hope 🙂 I also speak quite silently when talking to myself, almost as if I am praying, which again lessens the mad aspect of this peculiar behavior.

One one hand, talking to ourselves shows once again how social we are as human beings – even by ourselves we long to connect to something, to discuss, to relate to someone – just that in moments of deep solitude this relating means we only can socialize with our-Selves. For some of us, being alone means being yourself, and being protected from judgement, harm and criticism, while being near someone who doesn’t understand or accept our self-talk could feel like one version of a personal hell.

Solitude can be a fortress into which we retreat to ‘lick’ our social and emotional wounds (and sometimes even actual, physical wounds); we share this behavior with animals, and how they act after a fight. Solitude can then be a way of coping with running away from toxicity and a way of coping with life’s struggles. The downside to such an approach is that, if it is prolonged, it can end up alienating us from others and ultimately, from ourselves. This is why solitude has to be temporary (and regression as well) so that the link to reality is somehow maintained. So that we may find our way back to the present moment, if we lingered a while in the past.

In astrology when we think about the mind, we would usually think of Mercury, the planet associated with communication, speed and fast processing. While, Neptune would be the planet associated with healing, the past and any form of emotionally-rooted communicative problem. Neptune rules the sign of Pisces, while Mercury rules the signs of Gemini and Virgo. The Piscean world of escape, fantasies and dreams can heal. But if you spend too much time alone in a Neptunian haze, you might not be able to find your way back to reality, or the secure, stable ground of Virgo-logic. I understand the energy of Pisces to exist on a continuum with that of Virgo – in spite of the fact that these are two very different astrological signs, and are placed opposite from each other on the astrological wheel. Piscean dreams need Virgo practicality, and Virgo’s extreme sense of reality needs encouragement from the fantasies and rosy-eyed scenarios that Pisces usually spin out of thin air —> Sidenote: I made a series of videos about the dual qualities of both of these signs on my Youtube channel, for those interested in knowing more:

Neptune is about the splendors of liminal experiences, of in-between states of mind & being; it is about learning to love uncertainty and the unknown in life. The center of all creativity is this foggy territory of doubt. In connecting astrology to psychology, I would argue that Neptune governs over post-trauma recovery. Regression as well is a very Piscean strategy of coping with the harshness of the social environment. And Virgo, as its opposite sign and a sign that is ruled by Mercury (the God of communication), influences how we process self-talk as a protective psychological device (or what Freud would call a ‘defense’, and said in more common terms ‘building walls around you’).

But I want to switch now from the depths of this discussion to each astrological signs’ communication style, based on their Mercury placements. After all, the way we think and speak affects how others relate to us, and in learning about your Mercury placement, there might be further healing clues for how to handle post-trauma energy.

Since I am writing this article during the weekend of the Full Snow Moon in Leo and right before the first retrograde of 2020 (which takes places across the sign of Pisces starting from Feburary 17th for 3 weeks), let me briefly break down what each Mercury sign is about:

Mercury in Pisces (or Mercury conjunct Neptune) gives the native limitless creativity. Your strongest point is your capacity to imagine and quickly download ideas from the ether. You also make many associations between elements which people overlook. Your weakest point is the tendency to repeat yourself, gloss over details and speak with doubt and lack of authority.

Mercury in Aries (or Mercury conjunct Mars) gives the native a quick, sharp mind. Your strongest point is your capacity to be direct, funny and concise with your speech. Your weakest point is that you come across as curt and impatient, and a bit of a bully in how you give indications.

Mercury in Taurus (or Mercury conjunct Venus) gives the native instant authority. When you speak, people listen, and what you say tends to stick around for a while, so choose your words carefully. Your strongest point is your capacity to clearly state what you think and to perseveringly back it up. Your weakest point is that your communication tends to be one-way or inflexibile, and you find it hard to explore alternatives (the ‘horse blinkers’ effect).

Mercury in Gemini (domicile placement) gives the native a brilliant mind for communication! You are excellent with verbal, written, audio-visual or online transmissions and you have a knack for flexibly moving between all these different mediums with ease, speed and grace. Your strongest point is being a PR powerhouse since you understand speech and thinking in many different ways and you are very adaptable. Your weakest point is your tendency to distort the truth and reality to the such an extreme that these disintegrate into nothingness and you could be pessimistic about outcomes.

Mercury in Cancer (or Mercury conjunct the Moon) gives the native a depth to their speech that is incomparable. You can soothe people emotionally through how you speak. Your strongest points are emotional healing and poetic tendencies, you are also a very good storyteller. Your weakest point is that your mind and speech are driven by emotions, so you can also be mean and emotionally explosive when angry. Nonetheless, you make a great storyteller.

Mercury in Leo (or Mercury conjunct the Sun) gives the native a mind that is focused on having the best and being the best. You speak of your work, your life and yourself in a positive light and are able to encourage others and coach them into action. Your weakest point is that if someone does not give you attention or disrespects you, you cut off communication with them immediately and burn all bridges. Give people second chances and ample opportunity to discuss things with you, since no one is perfect.

Mercury in Virgo gives the native a well-balanced mind, but often a nervous one as well. You are more connected to your senses than any other astrological sign, so you could be clair-sentient or clair-audient, for example. The downside is that this mental sensitivity needs a lot of care, so that you don’t veer into pettiness and small-minded thinking. You speak by crossing your T’s and dotting your I’s, and you are excellent at details. You process new information slowly and only in an organized way, so give yourself time to get accustomed to new facts.

Mercury in Libra (or Mercury conjunct Venus) coats their speech in beauty. You have the mind of an artist, and when you speak you are fair and detached, but can also think of funny things to say to lighten up the mood around you. Your weakest point is that what you say today might not hold tomorrow, as you tend to speak to please others and hold ideas that are approved by many. However, you have phenomenal abstract-thinking skills and can be a good strategist.

Mercury in Scorpio (or Mercury conjunct Pluto) does not waste words or thoughts. This is the mind of an ultra-sharp thinker, who understands what lies beneath people’s words and their actions. You can get gloomy & silent, but you always match verbal speech to non-verbal elements in how you understand someone, and you keep a mental score if a person is telling you the truth or not. This is why you’re not so good at written communication, texts, DMs, emails (on a daily basis), but you could shine at short directives or sexting, for example. Deep & solitary analysis is your thing and you can unearth information that changes the way people think about a situation.

Mercury in Sagittarius (or Mercury conjunct Jupiter) gives the native a sense of expansion in their thinking. They are as limitless as a Mercury in Pisces, but they speak from a more logical framework. You are often mystical in how you speak, since you are capable of grasping the big picture and connect this easily to ordinary thinking. You are in touch with the higher realms and think like an abstract painter. You love to discuss philosophical interpretations of life and to explore truth and meaning, but you are also impractical and you tend to not stick to what you promise. Tone down the fibbing in order to get others to trust you more.

Mercury in Capricorn (or Mercury conjunct Saturn) is the structured thinker who enjoys mental effort. You are serious in how you express yourself, and use caution in your speech. Sometimes you speak deliberately, slowly and perhaps even monotonously. You might have speech impediments which stem from childhood, but you usually overcame these with effort and patience. Your thoughts and words produce karma, so you learn to discern how you use them. People seek you for advice the older you get.

Mercury in Aquarius (or Mercury conjunct Uranus) is highly inventive. You use words in new and sparkling ways, creating funny and unexpected reactions in people. There is a shock-quality to how you think and how you express yourself. Sometimes you drop eff-bombs in the middle of a high-brow conversation, or you chit-chat superficially, and then expurgate a really deep truth. ‘Expurgating’ is certainly a word you would use, as well as many tongue-twisters and other witty technical devices. The downside is that you are often misunderstood by others who feel that they are being talked down to or that you are just too weird.

In relation to each of these Mercury placements in your birth chart, Neptune (being currently in its own sign of Pisces, until 2026) communicates in either: a) trine (flowing, easy aspect of support), b) conjunction (it infuses your Mercury in Pisces with its energy), c) sextile (friendly aspect, with some benefits), d) square (tense aspect, frustrating) or e) opposition (with many highs and lows). For example, my natal Mercury is in Pisces and it is in a friendly aspect to my natal Neptune in Capricorn, which adds some structure and pragmatism to my dreamy mental energy. So make sure to check where your Mercury is placed (the sign as well as the house, since the house colors it differently; check also if your Mercury is retrograde, since this adds an extra layer of depth to your mind and communication). If you struggle to understand your natal Mercury or Neptune placements, feel free to get in touch with me for a birth-chart reading by sending me an email at macht.alexandra.georgiana.pfa@gmail.com

With universal love,

Lexi ❤

To be honest, I don’t think I know what self love means. I try and learn about it each day and practice what I hope is self-love. But like a fish struggling to stay on land without breathing, sometimes the meaning of self-love escapes through my fingers and suffers a quick death.

I come from a culture that values modesty in women and pretty much oppresses them, not as harshly as in other cultures, but there are social norms that distort femininity all while socially blaming women for not being patriarchally desirable enough (femininity in this context is seen as just being hot, while anything else associated with it such as grace, wisdom, tenderness and nurturing is usually parodied).

I am trying to find out how to be confident without being arrogant, which is a tricky line to cross mostly because I lacked a personal model of female empowerment while I grew up – except those fashioned by the media and they were usually unidimensional. There were occasional exceptions, like Xena the Princess Warrior 🙂

I think self-love can be tough love sometimes, which is not a very popular opinion. To me, tough love means being honest in your self-reflection, and having patience with yourself and admitting when you realized you made a mistake (not by rationalizing or explaining your mistake, but by accepting the truth: ‘You made a mistake, and I love you anyway’). And I think this also could be followed by ‘Let’s see how we can repair the situation/relationship’. So I guess self-love is about formulating accepting thoughts about your individuality and letting them transform into daily, compassionate actions.

What puts the ‘tough’ in tough love is the fact that from my experience at least, self-love requires effort and work. To practice it, you often have to make difficult decisions. Such as leaving a well-paid, prestigious job because your boss is controlling and toxically obsessed with your every move, or leaving an even better paying job because the city where they sent you for research proved to be dangerous and isolating, or leaving a marriage because he couldn’t stop cheating on you etc. Imagine pushing the person you love away, because he couldn’t understand that you loved him no matter what. It’s taken me a long time to accept these facts of life, and not to feel ashamed for who I am, for whom I loved, and for the difficult decisions I took. Sometimes shit just happens and you simply have to get up off the ground and dust your knees (even if you repeatedly fall).

If you are not openly vulnerable about such aspects people assume you’re OK and that you are strong no matter what. Even as time passes, they might also think that you might be cold, arrogant or that you lack a heart – but that’s not the case, again that is an illusion. Usually, emotional detachment is a result of PTSD, a self-protection strategy that psychologically tends to appear after dealing with diverse social relationships that just kept breaking down. Relational failures can cripple us mentally and emotionally, because one of our core needs according to Abraham Maslow is the need to connect, to socialize, and to share ourselves.

From my experience, people will naturally be more attracted to you once you start to show yourself some love & appreciation. When you understand that you don’t need to be in an unhealthy competition with someone, or that you should bend over backwards to please someone whose always morose, or that you are worth more than that awful job or relationship, or that sometimes you just outgrow certain relationships and places. Not everyone will simply feel inspired by your strength and provide only admiration. Oftentimes, envy sneaks its ugly head into your life. What takes you painstaking time to practice each day, could appear easy from the outside looking in, as if you received a natural gift. For those who do not comprehend the pains and pleasures of self-discipline, self-worth appears as a magical gift, one that someone has been unfairly blessed with; here’s the catch – it is not. Self-love comes about with equal doses of strength and emotional work, much like most real things which are worth something in life.

So there is an amount of self-protection involved once this self-love is awakened. This is because accepting yourself as imperfect or better said as ‘perfectible’, and letting go of that defensive mask we are usually trained to put on in social circumstances, will make others angry. Self-love might not bring you the desired result immediately and even worse, it will trigger toxicity around you; the key is to persist in it (‘You do you’). I noticed that being honest and vulnerable infuriates people who do not have the courage or simply do not want to see themselves as worthy of love, or as good, kind and willing to change, as people who might work on themselves. In this context, when you have to deal with a toxic person (be it a parent, lover or a friend), practicing self-love is easier said than done, as often intrusive and self-harming thoughts show up to self-sabotage you. Following heart-break, your mind can become a bully, blaming you for every decision taken, that is if you repress your pain instead of releasing it.

In tense emotional situations, especially subconscious ones, your inner critic can all of a sudden veer from giving you the usual, daily instructions, to shouting at you angrily much like a drill sergeant. When your inner critic becomes an abusive asshole, this means you have internalized the toxicity in your environment and are self-sabotaging your self-love process. As you are pushing your inner peace and stillness to the side, you begin mirroring the voice of an abusive parent or lover; ruminations over negative memories can appear, instead of a healthy focus on the present situation or sheer excitement for the future.

The good aspect in all of this is that the past is behind you, the past is done and closed – no matter what we do, we just can’t go back there, except in our minds – and learning to control our mind in such situations is half the battle won (or so it felt from my own experience). We only have the present, and the excitement of planning for the future (which granted, can often feel overwhelming). So knowing this means that the only ‘enemy’ in the present moment is your mind. Self-love is then quieting your mind, talking kindly and gently with yourself exactly in those moments when, in the past, there was external shouting. I guess the trick is to deceive the expectation, which is created from a negative memory. For example, when I was little and tired, my mother used to stress me even more by shouting at me for making mistakes when I was doing my homework. She couldn’t empathize with me as child, that I needed some rest, that I had to take a break and distract myself with something fun for a while. This was my karma to bear as my mother has a natal Saturn in Pisces and I was born to her as a Sun in Pisces child. But we are meant to also overcome our karma and not just hopelessly give in to it. With self-awareness and year of astrological study, I finally understood our difficult mother-daughter, Saturnian dynamics.

Fun was definitely not the word I would ever use to describe our mother-daughter relationship. And when I was young I didn’t have the awareness to challenge her attitude. I grew in time to the realization that it was also not my responsibility to challenge her. I was 7 and she was supposed to be the adult, the more emotionally mature person. This didn’t happen. And I learned to accept that my mother is simply limited in her emotions, due to a mixture of her own childhood trauma, societal pressures on motherhood and her own personal choice of not seeking help and healing. I do not even criticize her anymore since that activity would only make me angrier. I’m learning to accept now. Her behavior and my own. Because I’m learning to love myself and choose my battles. I seek inner peace so I am forgiving her by understanding her and setting my own boundaries in how I relate to her. I notice what it is that I can control (and I know that I certainly can’t control her, nor would I want to), so I move on without hesitation to do just that. I’m present-focused rather than past-obsessed.

Now, I can give to myself the nurturing I should have received in such moments. For example, when I feel tired, now I rest. And I learned to talk to myself differently: From ‘Go, go go! WTF is wrong with you to be so slow!?’ to ‘Alright my love, stop. You are simply tired. Leave whatever you can’t accomplish today for tomorrow. There is time. Now rest’. Repeating this internal dialogue every time I feel tired, is very healing. Now, I have a new relationship with myself, based on acceptance of my flaws, and love for the fact that I am imperfect yet valuable, worthy of rest and aware that I do my best work actually when I break large tasks into smaller, daily ones and when I respect my sleeping schedule.

Social and cultural norms also gender self-love, to some extent. I noticed that self-love is about not being stuck in over-giving as a woman (and I speak from a perspective in which I identify with my biological sex). As a woman then, you have to receive as well – you are not a machine that loves automatically and produces all the time, no matter how much the patriarchal economic systems love this cheap arrangement. Being willing to let go and trust is often a frightening experience, when you are aware that societal structures in many different regions do not prize, nor do they support vulnerability (and some even actively attack it).

In the eyes of many, what counts instead are displays of power and stoicism, of winning and coming out on top. Bearing this in mind, as a woman then, self-love is simply listening to yourself and understanding your personal power after many tests of powerlessness or of being compared to ideals of power modelled after men. It is also the quiet knowledge that soft power and being soft and vulnerable does add value to life, as a more gentler way of existing in the world, and dare I say even a more eco-friendly one. Imagine if we swap all the guns in the world for home-made pillows or self-care sets, or if we rest more instead of taking pride in how we fight through life and over-work ourselves.

It might seem like a banal example, but imagine the difference such simple and small changes would make, both to ourselves and to our natural environment, which at the moment is increasingly asking us for nurturing attention.

With universal love,

Lexi ❤

I write for a living and sometimes, I get tired. I look at the blank page and don’t know what to tackle next. It seems so pristine and not really in need of my Ego-driven desire to record my thoughts on it. Whenever I face this ‘blank paper wall’, I remember the blunt advice of my professor of critical psychology ‘Go deeper into the unconscious, Alexandra’. I’m not quite sure what he meant by that – I probably should’ve insisted more in class for clear answers. So I devised my own strategies, aware of the fact that therapeutically I need to nurture my inner child when I feel blocked or slow down rather that pressure her; so each time I get frustrated with my work, I play. Several bouts of burn-outs throughout my career brought this point out very clearly: don’t take yourself so seriously or you’ll collapse under the pressure of wanting to control uncertainty; perfection, if it exits, is elusive.

What play means in this context, is that I visit the local academic library to switch up my writing routine. I go to the shelf of a completely different discipline than the one I am active in, and I select books with titles that draw me in. Then I open a book at a random page and place my finger on whichever page I feel guided to. I proceed to read and jot down the sentence that first appears under my finger. It won’t make sense initially why I would copy a sentence about car transistors or remote villages in the Pacific, but I trust my intuition and wait for the big picture that is created once I finish the exercise – it is also fun to discover other writer’ work in this spontaneous way, and writers whose work I wouldn’t normally read.

So, I repeat this process with as many books as I want until I get tired. I then put together all these disparate sentences together in a Word document and read this whole new, randomly-pieced story to gain funny and creative insights. It works e.ve.ry.ti.me! I have fun, it breaks my routine and reminds me why I enjoy reading and writing in the first place: because it’s creative!

To exemplify, below is the story I created today by randomly picking up books with titles I liked from the Philosophy, Arts and Biographies sections of my current university:

• “Doctors also developed idiosyncratic relationships with machines and to technology generally
• It’s the improvisation. With improvisation the great jazz musicians were just sort of …in the moment. They had no idea where they were necessarily going next, sonically.
• It was in the loss of the Manufacturers and Liberal Arts Building, however, that Bancroft found both his “historical mythology” and its political theme
• From this time on the true George Platt Lynes took form. As his finances prospered, so did his debts.
• Imagine being forced from your home by government authorities and incarcerated in the stall of a prize racehorse, simply because of your racial heritage.
• In passages that bear direct consequences for his students, Karpov championed an art that involved a “spatial extension” to entangle the participant, breaking with conventional painting, to an art more actively involved in ritual, magic, and life itself.
• The transition from Piper to the Mythic Being is marked visually. As the artist’s identity dematerializes, he gets darker. In that way, Mythic Being overtakes Piper’s identity.
• The effort to make art revert back into “life”, or to turn every aspect of life into “art”, simply emphasizes the vast gulf that exists between what has conceptual significance for a handful of people and remains business as usual for everyone else.
• For the month that my daughter lay in isolation at UC Medical Center, struggling to stay alive after a bone marrow transplant, I sat with my husband either praying or drawing. When she had recovered enough I asked her to write her feelings into some of the drawings.
• Disproportionately influential to the actual numbers who took acid and wore what could loosely be described as ‘psychedelic’ fashion, whether the decadent proto-hippie bohemian version of London, or the experimental glitter and glitz of the New York underground as typified by Andy Warhol and his entourage, the psychedelic and hippie style of dress ran parallel to the preoccupations of the mainstream sixties’ fashion industry based on the ‘Swinging London’ Mod look.
• It is inconceivable to him that these close ties between art and society might in themselves constitute the equivalent of Western “aesthetics”, albeit in terms different from those in the West.
• Vermilion’s ingredients were sometimes buried in dung-heaps to make golden pigments. So vermillion again bears comparison to the ‘vilest and meanest’, the ‘common’, ‘despised’ and ‘rejected’ Philosophers’ Stone – both we’re ‘amongst the refuse’.
• It seems altogether likely that Cosimo wanted the three paintings, not so much because of his interest in the history of the city as because of the contribution they could make to what we might today call the “Medici image”, the reputation he was creating for his family, partly by means of architecture and works of art.
• The journalist seems to have conflated de Loutherbourg’s faith healing and Hebraic interests; the former did keep him from his painting for a time, but the latter he incorporated into his art.
• Soon Carr’s search took her increasingly into the forest.
• To Albert Wolff, Manet had turned his young sitter into a ‘monster of a human nature’.
• Family, probably the one of Jan Gerritsz – health and hygienic conditions in the 17th century are disastrous.
• This Stone is of a great value if he be the great and fayre, and is equal for his bignes to anye Stone (Diamond and Rubye excepted) but is not so much harder then pearle, and Easley wearers rough/ ther is also another transparent Stone which we call Geratsolis which hath no cullors but a kynde of shining, and if the Sune or summer bright days light we are under it or within it.
• “A seemly obscurantism” is Lowe-Porter’s translation of “eine ehrbare Verfinsterung” (literally, ‘a respectable obscuring’), which is also the title of this whole section, though she prefers ‘Drawing the veil’.
• As far as business is concerned, there are booms and recessions; prosperity rarely lasts indefinitely. That is the nature of human society; that is the way of the world.
• The victory should be treated as a funeral
• An initiation ceremony into the Yoruba religion that I had begun during my fieldwork
• To put it in a nutshell, heart-to-heart communication (xin yin xin) has long been an additional method by which spirit mediums can communicate with the divine in Wannian. It has been employed when spirit mediums are otherwise unable to interpret divine messages or need the deity’s immediate help. In the urban context, by contrast, heart to heart telepathy has gradually replaced vision interpretation as the primary way to communicate with deities.
• First, it sees itself and then grows – only to destroy itself in harmony with the seasons and the cycles of time. But, just as with nature, the very fact that it destroys itself means there will never be a time when it is not about to return to bring a new sense of life back again.
• Not to allow that the boundaries between the different parts of the whole are crossed, is a way to keep the cosmic balance and a task for the goddess Dike to supervise. Not only men, but also heavenly bodies have their dikes, which can be seen again as a balanced distribution of parts within a whole. For instance, in Heraclitus’ B94 the sun must limit itself to shining during the day, respecting the dike of the night
• With Lu’s view of communication, bureaucratic paperwork took on a new significance. Paper work sometimes exasperated him.
• I will make a road in the wilderness, rivers in the dessert – Isaiah
• It is curious how in Guy Debord a lucid awareness of the insufficiency of private life was accompanied by a more or less conscious conviction that there was, in his own existence or in that of his friends, something unique and exemplary, which demanded to be recorded and communicated
• I have noted that Suarez conceives of the voluntary as something essentially willed and subject to the will, whether reflexively in elicited acts, or as the object of a distinct act of will in imperated acts
• What is the preeminence that each horizon claims for itself? We may first point out something it is not. My horizon includes, or contains, the totality I call ‘the world’; or as we have often put it, the totality I call the “world” is internal to THIS, to my horizon. Your horizon includes the totality you call “the world” (…) we do not share the same horizon, but we share the same world.”

On a final note, if you are like me and hate re-reading your work (but nonetheless you have to read it for proof-reading reasons) I can suggest another trick offered to me by a friend: transform the font of your writing in Comic Sans (or some other equally silly font like Magneto or Showcard Gothic). I guarantee this will bring a smile to your face, as you see your ‘very important’ thoughts in an ‘equally important’ font. And you will laugh, laughter being the medicine of our souls and a relaxing way to unclench our busy (academic) minds. I hope these small exercises help you unleash those mythical creative juices.

With universal love (& banter),

Lexi ❤

I’m in a period of stasis. I reached a point where I somehow produce wealth and yet I am not working on the thing for which I have been employed. I am reading a translated version of the words of Lao Tzu and wondering what is happening energetically with me. Last week I quit my job but my boss avoids talking to me and I have to wait 2 weeks before I can leave the country were I was initially sent to do research. In the absence of any advice or support from my mentor, what I do is focus on myself, on my health, my sleep and work, on managing my inner uncertainty. An overwhelming feeling of ‘living in the moment’, followed by a larger ‘this was meant to be’, washes over me at variable moments throughout the day, like the cool waves of the sea. I live in a state of ‘calm turbulence’, I think this is how I would describe this period of my life. I’m in some sort of spiritual transition.

A dear friend from Bangalore, whom I never met in person yet I feel a connection to, shared a book with me about Tantra and absolute love, over the holidays. I finally managed to read it and it felt like I had a tiny awakening. I also noticed in the postscriptum that the French author who wrote it, Daniel Odier was also working as an academic when he read the work of Lao Tzu and decided to leave his job and move to France to teach tantra.

I am wondering if it is actually true, that once you begin your spiritual journey, all your material needs are being met in almost magical ways. Of course, you don’t get an Ali Baba cave of riches all of a sudden at your doorstep, but you get just enough to keep you nurtured and healthy. You get what you need, as you relinquish what you want…or thought you wanted.

I try to live still anchored in the present, but when I spend most of my days alone, with no clear goal to fulfill and inevitably waiting to leave a place that feels alien to me, I keep wondering if I am going through a spiritual awakening or if I am merely losing my mind? In the absence of an answer, I rest. And as I rest, the answers come to me.

For two years now I’ve been in the process of commiting my time and energy to a lot of work, seeing it through and then merely leaving it behind me, while neglecting my personal relationships on this path for success. I thought that once I will become ‘established’, the right and supportive relationships will follow. I was wrong.

I quit a prestigious teaching job in the UK and a researcher position that had me travel between Sweden and the US. During these job transitions, I returned home to Bucharest and got floods of awareness that helped me grow by leaps and bounds. I am maturing at such speed and yet I also have the feeling that I might be self-sabotaging my chances of success in life. Where does the truth lie? Am I following my intuition or am I simply not comfortable with positions of power? Am I escaping the constraints of rational-bureaucratic work in favor of the spiritual path, or am I lazy and afraid of commitment?

From the outside looking in, my decisions surely must look bonkers. But from the inside-out I keep feeling that this is not the kind of work I felt I could do in this world when I initially began studying humanistic sciences. The younger version of me wanted to help people, to work in their service, while figuring out who I am. But the work I ended up doing alienated me from the very things I initially set out to achieve. The paradox is that working as a socio-psychologist keeps pushing me in isolation from the social. Unsurprisingly, I ended up supporting academic egos and projecting a false sense of self, repressing who I truly am.

In this soul-searching context, when I read this line from Lao Tzu, I felt woken up:

‘proud of wealth and renown

you bring your own ruin.

just do what you do, and then leave:

such is the way of Heaven’

So is leaving this job, my way of following the Way (Tao)? Of being immersed in this beautiful philosophy of just being or is this a sign that I am shooting myself in the leg, metaphorically speaking? I could analyze the situation to death, but I prefer to let it be as I continue to exist temporarily in this state of nothingness, wondering how to fill my time while I wait for my flight back to Europe. It’s like waiting for Godot, but the international version. Helpfully, Lao Tzu has an answer for this dilemma as well :

‘presence gives things their value,
but absence makes them work’

So by letting go of this job, I might increase my self-worth, huh? In addition, and contravening the protestant work ethic that dominates so much of Western economic thinking, Lao Tzu writes:

‘When you never strive, you never go wrong’

&

‘things rare and expensive make people lose their way’

This feels true to my experience so far; all this movement between jobs and countries made me realize how futile the quest for material success is and how easily I can live without a lot of material things. Minimalism is somehow spiritually supportive, so I’m starting to understand the stoics and the ascetics. I’m also learning the rhythm and value of things, people and places because I am engaged in a state of constant comparison. The more I compare things to each other however, the more I realize how similar they all are.

So am I becoming more aware of when to act and when not to act, while making a lot of blunders on the way? I am reminded of the principles of karma and dharma. Karma as action and its consequences and dharma as doctrine but also the principle of receptivity. As I write about stasis for my book and learn about Kashmir Shaivism and the philosophy of nonduality, I try to think of how action and inaction are blended in reality in how individuals perceive and experience them. I also try to reconcile this awareness of my personal power, my growing inner world and being emotionally open and vulnerable, by stimulating and healing my heart chakra to accept life and intimacy, after loss and trauma.

On this path, I feel I am embodying both sides of the Divine Feminine archetype described in Odier’s book: one being Kali, the terrifying and destructive feminine force, and the other Devi, the balanced and harmonious feminine energy (two slightly more imaginative interpretations of the Western clichés of the Madonna and the Whore) :

With all these mysteries in mind, I feel that I am at the beginning of an interesting string of life events.

With universal love,

Lexi ❤

In the aftermath of the first full moon eclipse of this brave new decade, a full Moon in sensitive Cancer, I sit on a couch in America and pet my flat-mate’s fluffy cat while watching a video of a woman watering the burnt paws of a kangaroo in Australia. I cry because this cat is not mine and I will soon need to leave it as I depart from this place, and I cry without even realizing I am crying. But the mess on my chin and dribble on my T-shirt reminds me of this unavoidable fact: I have feelings. No matter how much my work – which is rational and emotionally suppressed by its nature – reminds me that feelings are useless in neoliberal capitalism, I still have them. No matter how much social media promotes a certain kind of affectionate display, one which is superficial and overly saccharine and positive, I continue to feel. Often, I experience an overwhelm of emotions considered by many to be socially-taboo: sadness and anger.

My default is that I usually avoid watching clips with babies and animals as these get me in my feelings every time. But this time, I couldn’t look away. To distract myself from apprehensive news about the tense political situation in Iran, I look at Australia’s wild landscape and how it is set aflame for months now. It seems that everywhere you look as this year began, there is this mass fear and emotional outpouring. I’m also amazed that it still takes us so much to realize that what happens locally, affects us globally.

Our world weather is rapidly changing and mostly due to the indifference with which we treat our artificial creations (cars, packaging, highways etc.). We could choose to let nature be but instead we persist in manipulating it, and in the current patriarchal ruling system we also continue to rapidly destroy it. Nature is not a threat to us; it nurtures us and keeps us alive. However, in the Anthropocene we seem bent not only on using and exploiting Nature, but also in neglectfully ruining it. And why? Nature supports us, it is part of us; we are as natural to this world, as it is to us. Maybe we hurt it because on some collective, unconscious level we became addicted to harming ourselves. Or maybe living in comfort, gives a certain meaningless to life, and we then start to randomly destroy just for fun.

We are connected whether we like it or not. Its instincts are our instincts and no matter how rational and spiritual we are, we are also part animal. We exist in this World to experience it fully, and hopefully to exit it, in a much better state then it was when we were born into it. A kangaroo’s destroyed habitat today, will become the polluted and ashy rain sweeping over Pacific Islanders, New Zealanders and American West Coast cities, tomorrow.

The transit of the North Node in Cancer conjunct this Full Moon in Cancer is about precisely those things: holding on, the wild environment, the Mother Archetype and the vulnerability and fragility that exists within us and beyond us. It is about treating the global as if it were our family, and realising that when we fail locally to protect those that need love and attention and care, we also affect the global chain of events.

Another channel that gravitated towards me seamlessly in this period is Invisible People. I watched videos of homeless people from all over the world, struggling to survive and truly living out the spiritul credo to ‘live in the moment’ but marred by a hungry hope for a safer future. The ways in which these brave people cope and how they struggle to remain optimistic and continue to move on in spite of hardships is such a wake up call to our shared humanity:

I cry with them and I cry for them, both out of fear that I might end up in their place since life is so uncertain, but also because they remind me that I have a heart and that I would love to do meaningful work, to help people like them that experience desperation, to offer them hope and shelter. I realise as well that someone else is crying with me, and that is my inner child, who suffered neglect and abandonement in my earlier journey.

It took me a while to realize that tears are ok. That they are a release, a healthy reaction of our bodies to emotional overwhelm, a pressure valve that opens with heart-break, so that we can let the energy flow through us more freely. Feelings exists within us to alert us to how we give and receive respect and understanding. Feelings help us make memories, they work with thoughts to help us become more aware of ourselves and our humanity; they poi t towards how our personal and physical boundaries are being trespassed or reinforced. Because of emotions, we maintain a set of values that help us relate to each other, and can also protect us from each other and from complete obliteration. A sarcastic and rational world that just aims to be madly optimistic and cool on a daily basis, is a world that eventually will eat itself up. Much like a nihilistic world, devoid of meaning, pleasure or joy, can darken the horizon of our shared futures.

Feelings and tears also come and go much like the cycles of the moon. Farmers in the past used to run agriculture based on the moon and women used to keep an eye out for pregnancies and periods according to its monthly movements. The moon controls the tides of the sea much like the Sun warms our Earth and helps crops grow – our Earth is linked to us and to the planets of the solar system.

But the continuous influence of the patriarchy (Rule of the Father) and our collective obsession with the masculinist principles of strength, force, individualism, rational calculation and physical prowess is telling us otherwise. We see it with Trump. We see it with Boris Johnson. We saw it with every dictator that made a mark in history. In spite of progress in education, we can’t seem to shake off these masculinist principles which when taken to an extreme as they are now, they affect not only our everyday gender relations but are deeply embedded within our economy, politics, education and medical and legal systems across the world. We forget that these values are created as they seem to form a natural and immovable law, but they are not natural, they are socially constructed, and they are becoming antiquted and harmful to our very existence on this planet.

The divisions we understand to exist between us as self-standing human beings, the natural environment of this planet and our wider solar system, are illusions created by the divisions of our limited minds (of which we use only 5%). These divisions are the product of fear and control. And we have so much of this fear and control running amok in our collective unconscious at the moment with the South Node – the karmic place of letting go – conjunct Pluto, Saturn and Jupiter in the sign of fear, karma, limits, effort and emotional stoicim, Capricorn. And yet this Full Moon reminds us that we have hearts, and that we need to be aware of them, to get into our feelings, and let emotions overcome us, in order to solve the current political and environmental problems. To better situate the planetary energies that are bringing these issues into our collective awareness, I use the visual world of Tarot:

Light and dark, nurturing and stoicism, the man-made rule of the father and the instinctive and maternal pulsations of Nature. These comingle of course, as the patriarchy offers stable structures that nurture us and Nature is at times maternal, but can be equally brutal. On some level controlling nature ensures our survival. But can we establish a relationship of growing care for the world we live in, rather than one of domination and usage? This would require us to adopt a more spiritual approach to the world, to be more careful and patient and resilient, to restrict giving in to our base desires at the click of a button and to control our impulses. Who knows perhaps that might be a new form of stoicism, one born out of care and respect, rather than a need to be tough and ‘manly’ for power’s sake. We might surprise ourselves, as we also conserve the riches and beauty of this planet.

In light of these emotional waves we are riding, of the generalized fear and limitations we are encountering, there is the Wolf Spirit guiding us all through this cold Full Moon, since the first lunar cycle of the year is also called the Wolf Moon. Somehow the beautiful energy that emanates from a pack of White wolves and the way they communicate with each other through their whole bodies, unique by themselves yet part of a tightly knit group, is comforting and inspiring, and I feel intuitively that I should share it with you:

With universal love (and a heavy yet opened heart),

Lexi ❤

In the traditional and widely-known Rider-Waite Tarot deck, The Empress and the High Priestess cards are two of the main feminine energies of the Major Arcana. The archetype of the Empress easily creates stability. She is a reliable presence, nourishing the Earth and those around her with her body, her mind and her heart. She brings peace through joy, and she radiates inner and outer beauty. The energy of this card is better depicted by the following songs and singers:

The entry into the video swings the camera over an old man who recites the words ‘Love and forgive yourself’, which is the quintessential credo of the Empress who is the mistress of self-love from which her abundance flows forth. The song if also infectious in the most positive way possible, making you want to tap your feet and dance – another element, of this energy is the joy that it creates in your body. And the body is the key word here. The Empress is represented astrologically by the sign of Taurus (Earth, ruled by Venus) and by Leo (Fire, ruled by the Sun), two signs that usually live their lives focused on their embodiment, on their health, wealth and prosperity (whether these are financial or artistic).

They also naturally attract other people and chances their way, as they tend to be quite immovable (fixed elements). They are stubborn but loving, especially to those that earned their trust, and they make other people move towards them rather than the opposite. And paradoxically, sometimes they attract others by running away from them, like in this brilliant song by the wonderful Leo Sun, British singer Kate Bush:

As a person who often runs away from what’s good for her, I can completely relate (although I’m blessed with a Jupiter and Aries, who is unforgiving if I ever completely ‘chicken out’ of a situation). But again the passion in the music, the force of the drums and of her voice, the sheer joy that it emanates, are again all characteristics of Empress energy. It’s not so much about the music nor the lyrics but about the presence and about how these women embody their gifts. The energy creates almost a sense of wanting to follow them, play with them, kneel in front of them, as they won’t take any bullshit or suffer fools, but they light you up from within and inspire you. For example, one woman I adore is Gemini Sun, Annie Lennox. Her sense of creating a dramatic atmosphere merely through presence is unparalleled:

Of course the boa feathers and colorful make-up also add to the ‘visual drama’ but her voice moves you, that’s the main thing that transports your spirit, or at least mine. So again, the body, embodiment, the music, the abundant generosity of spirit, all of these reside in the flamingly beautiful Empress.

The High Priestess, on the other hand is a slightly different energy. It is still the archetype of an empowered woman, but one who relies on soft & unspoken power, as she rides on ebbs and flow of activity. Where the Empress untangles life’s mysteries and makes them into flesh, the Priestess weaves them into mystery and lifts them up to the skies once again. Our Priestess is detached, scholarly, unique and reticent to delve too much into life’s pleasures (she embodies a bit of a stoic energy). She is more focused on rest, reverie and interpretation than on fertility, wealth and creation. Where the Empress creates tangible value, the Priestess creates intangible wealth.

For a flavor, the energy emitted by this card and in general by this archetype is similar to the songs and singers below. I discovered Daughter’s music just this year and during my Hermit-like phase, and was struck by the vulnerability & wisdom portrayed by the singer Elena Tonra, a Capricorn Sun:

Elena Tonra is English and I’ve lived in the UK for more than 8 years, but only engaged with Daughter’s music while soul-searching back home in Bucharest. Just a reminder how everything is subtly connected and divine timing or soul time arranges these daily bits of ‘everything’ into a cohesive and rhythmic whole, much like the Priestess operates in a stealth and yet precise manner. She is the artisan of the unseen and the custodian of the ineffable.

If the Empress matches Leo and Taurus energies, then the High Priestess matches Pisces (Neptune ruled) and Libra (Venus ruled) energies. Both signs are analytical, and can be sociable but also socially-removed, two signs that intellectualize their strong feelings and turn them into wisdom, into something…well, poetic, something that heals and enriches the lives of those around them. Both signs are also inwardly glowing, can be nocturnal and introverted and are usually empathetic. They tend to mask their abundant intelligence because they are aware that people don’t need more Ego in their relationships, as much as they need to be seen and understood at a Soul level. These two signs are Water and Air, together forming rain or sparkling water, and what can be more nourishing to both ourselves and the Earth than water infused with oxygen. Pardon the needless metaphors 🙂

The lady with her head in the clouds, oblivious to how her presence impacts her environment and other people in subtle and unconscious ways, that’s our Priestess.

A final word on Strength

The way I understand Strength (this difficult and yet so, so beautiful card) is that it combines the energy of both the Empress and the Priestess. The blending helps the person who draws this card to tap into both energies at once. To succeed in face of life’s challenges we need both material and spiritual resources. Strength is usually associated with Leo energy, with the vitality we gain after a battle, with taming the wild part of our nature through loving kindness. This energy is dual, touching upon the physical and the metaphysical, because to tame the Lion you need both a brave heart and strong arms 🙂 Virginia Woolf wrote almost a century ago:

‘A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’.

Symbolically-speaking, you need both peace and material security to create, to be yourself, to feel free and to stand strong. Or better yet, you must stand strong to achieve these things. And sometimes this energy appears exactly when life events lend you a tough hand and you feel powerless. Often we experience a deep sense of vulnerability as preparation for the re-awakening of own Power, possibly done this time in a more deeper, more profound manner, digging down deep in that part of ourselves, where we meet the fabric of the Universe.

As an example of how I see this energy embodied, take Alice Smith, a Sagittarius Sun who carries this energy majestically. He work is a unique blend of High Priestess magic and the Empress’ regal command of voice, together forming true emotional Strength in action:

With universal love,

Lexi ❤

As I experience in this period the North Node in Cancer transiting my natal Lilith in Cancer in the 9th house (aka the Nurturing Nomad role meeting the Wild Feminine Archetype), I find myself to be even more protective of my independence than I usually am, and I continue to spend most of my life interacting with powerful women (I am one of those anomalies, having had only female bosses for the last 10 years of my professional life – there was an occasional male boss once, but that exception only lasted a month). This strange path might be created by the fact that since 2008 a year which coincided with my leaving the ‘family nest’ and travelling on my own to seek love, happiness and fulfillment in international locations, the planet Pluto in the traditional sign of Capricorn has been opposing my natal Lilith in Cancer in the 9th house – this energy has been so far about transforming my local environment, about diving deeply into the occult to heal my maternal wounding and it has also been about power and vulnerability in my intimate connections with men.

So this post is about personal transformation and how the Lilith Archetype, of the fiercely independent but also maligned and hated woman, the Venus Obscura of the zodiac, the dark and perilous side of Aphrodite, has been influencing me. It is my hope that if I share of my personal reflections on such transits I can show you some examples of what to expect, just in case you are about to have Pluto in Aquarius opposing your natal Lilith in Leo for the next, roughly 22 years. The inner Lilith energy was activated in my life back in 2008 as Pluto started opposing it, and as such it has been unconsciously working in the background of my life, stirring up some dark energies. Part of this energy was materialized in how my mind has been changed and reshaped (Pluto was in my 3rd house all this time) and how it has been created some interesting, cinematic obsessions. After all, what we are culturally interested in could mirror back at us hard to accept parts of our own Psyche, or better known as ‘Shadow’ aspects of the Self.

In the following, I want to write about Meg Ryan, Mireille Enos and Amy Adams and three characters they created for the cinema, and who keep haunting me (while I am also starting to believe they are unconsciously starting to affect my life choices). The characters I want to focus on are: Frannie Avery, Sarah Linden and Camille Preaker.

These are all American movies with American actresses, and complicated, dark and unsettling narratives, that combine loss with healing and sensuality with death (it’s October, close to Halloween as I write this and I’m currently living in the Deep American South, so the mood is pitch perfect). Another character I could add to the list is Stella Gibson from The Fall (2013) played by the enthralling Gillian Anderson (but I hated how that series ended, so I am going to exclude it from this analysis).

I’ll try to unpick what unites and divides these characters and why I am strangely fascinated by them. Usually, when we think of cinematic anti-heroes we instantly picture fallen and muscled men who are fighting for their souls, for example Batman (emphasis on the ‘man‘) who was also deemed the ‘Dark Knight’, or Constantine (an oddly loveable, if self-destructive detective). However, for women the situation seems to enact puzzling cricket-inspiring moments: ‘Who are those anti-heroines?’

I would suggest that a female anti-hero or anti-heroine to be more precise, is the leading character in a story, a person who walks the thin line between the classical Madonna-Whore or Virgin-Vixen female stereotypes, but transcends them and drastically improves them through complex and soulful performances, that combine both light and dark aspects of the Human psyche. Therefore, the three characters that I fell in love with are a teacher, a detective and a journalist, women with seemingly ordinary jobs who are looking for their own peace of mind in highly misogynistic environments (and interestingly, in the case of Camille, this misogyny comes from her close female relatives).

But rather then fear their constricting reality and submit to it so as to make peace with everyone, our three anti-heroines actively participate in it, they challenge it, they take it on and sometimes use it to fulfill their selfish needs. They transform whatever they can get in the relationships, from within, with guts, determination and a lot of painful soul-searching. These are not exemplary portrayals of ‘good femininity’; these women make mistakes on the way and are portrayed as imperfect creatures. These are stories about women who don’t speak much, who observe, who are intelligent and confident, even as they deal with their fair share of inner demons. These women don’t over-apologize for their existence, or gush at pictures of children, they are not easy to live with or to understand. For example, Frannie is naive, romantic and has weak personal boundaries and poor taste in men; Camille self-harms and is a functional alcoholic who suppresses a lot of her rage at the sexual abuse she suffered in her youth; while Sarah obsessively works to the point of neglecting both her physical needs and those of her teenage son. All three of them are also very beautiful, not only physically but also emotionally -precisely because of these vulnerabilities – and they are also creepily good at their jobs. Work for them becomes the only place where they find safety and some sort of material anchor in the midst of the spiritual battles they are immersed in. And ironically, it is through work and not through their families that they also meet the men they fall in love with and the people who ultimately nurture them into healing.

They are also driven to pursue the mysteries in their lives until the end, whatever it takes. All three of them are surrounded by men who they do not know if they can trust and yet fall in love with, they witness how death and despair seeps into the cracks of everyday life, and how their past life-choices leave them at the mercy of their own present needs. Yet when confronted with difficult life decisions, they remain vulnerable and deeply understanding human beings. To an extent, they succed in their narratives not by fighting but by letting go, by forgiving, by deciding to care and to love themselves. These are three wounded women who are learning how to take care of their needs in the midst of life’s chaos. Camille’s boss tells her jokingly at the end of her maternal ordeal that she’d won the ‘fucked-up family Olympics’ and yet she chooses to lean towards kindness and acceptance rather than towards bitterness and revenge. Personal resistance in all three cases, becomes a measure of their worth, but ultimately it is kindness and courage which redeems them.

This forms part of my enduring fascination of watching their stories unfold. Here, I am reminded of Eva Green’s acting tour-de-force, her character of Vanessa Ives in Penny Dreadful (2014), whose story unravels with a similar intensity and painful vulnerability, and it also quite difficult to watch at times (although her story deals more with the supernatural, and again I am excluding it here due to the heartbreakingly disappointing ending). To my mind, and for what it’s worth, Eva Green embodies the Lilith archetype so well, that now I tend to visualize her rather than some statue from Mesopotamia, whenever I hear the word ‘Lilith’.

Returning to the three characters that made ‘my list’ 🙂 and whose stories I was happy to see end in life-affirming ways – rather than in patriarchal fiascos – it is interesting to note their birth-chart placements and to compare them:

• Mireille Enos is A Virgo Sun, Aries Moon and Leo Ascendant.

• Meg Ryan is a Scorpio Sun, Aries Moon and Capricorn Ascendant.

• Amy Adams is a Leo Sun, Virgo Moon and Gemini Ascendant.

It’s a bit magical to see the Leo-Aries-Virgo connections across all of their charts! Leo and Aries are masculine signs, connected to the fire of the holy spirit and divine inspiration. Aries is cardinal fire energy (self-starting), while Leo is fixed fire energy (attracting). Virgo is the sign of the Maiden who reaps the crops during harvest time (Autumn) and she is considered the purest energy in a native’s chart, representing mutable Earth, in terms of order, cleanliness and health. So there are themes here of blending masculinity with femininity (strength and vulnerability) and of literally being ‘a brave feminine light in the dark’, illuminating the wisdom of self-care and purification through work. Work has so many different meanings to people. Both Virgo (as the Archetype of the Cosmic Maiden) and Lilith (as Adam’s first wife, who refused to submit to him) are two frequent cultural representations of post-modern feminism and are enmeshed in the ‘woman who works/refuses to serve’ archetype.

Of course, I am not arguing that the lives of the actresses mirror the stories of their characters, but what is interesting to observe is that each of their birth-chart energies drew them towards these particular stories, and they took on the tasks of bringing to life these fascinating women; there are invisibly-threated, spiritual connections between these actresses’ personal astrology and the characters that they created, and again reaffirm my conviction that there are no coincidences in life, just simply synchronicities 😉

For me as the viewer, these astrological aspects are also highly significant. I have an Aries North Node conjunct Jupiter in Aries, a Midheaven in Leo and a Sun in Pisces in the 5th house. Even though my life is not at all as dramatic as that of these characters, I share some personal similarities with their stories: I taught gender classes and I write for a living just like Frannie; I now work with legal actors and observe criminal cases, just like Sarah; I have past trauma and a complicated intimate history with the women in my life, just like Camille. Also, like all three of them I find it hard to trust men and have been told I am soft-spoken yet determined (Libra Ascendant and Sagittarius Moon conjunct Saturn).

Perhaps, why I am drawn to in these stories is because on some level they mirror some of the themes of my own life. Upon reflection, some of these are: the difficulty of living independently as a determined woman in a patriarchal world; working through trust issues in intimate connections; having an intense relationship with your mother and sister; learning how to practice self-nurturing; using work as an escape from feeling too much; and dealing with shadows from the past which are at the root of self-sabotaging behaviors in the present. Perhaps these are were the connections between my own path and that of the women in these stories lie: in the familiarity of our life stories. Each unique, distinct stories of random courage, of loss and healing, threaded together by the act of making your way through life, guided mostly by the flashlight of intuition and self-belief, illuminating the surrounding darkness. A darkness that is both within and without…and yes, having to rely mostly on the kindness of strangers to pierce through it, in the absence of familial support.

However, the stories show that once that inner darkness is seen, loved and accepted, it ripples out into the wounded environment which also becomes suddenly replete with love. For example, Camille allows her boss’ loving family to take care of her and to ‘re-mother’ her (in the book) or she decides to take care of her younger sister (in the film), although with a much creepier conclusion. After much soul-searching, Sarah admits that she loves her long-suffering ‘work husband’ detective Holder, and lastly Frannie saves her own life and returns home to fall into the arms of the hand-cuffed detective Malloy.

Of course, life is less spectacular and at times more silently bewildering than the blood-spluttered challenges that these women had to overcome. In our daily lives, we are given more time for spiritual development and growth then in the span of a film/TV series.

And as for the women in these stories, it has been revealed to me that a heart that was once broken can be healed again with courage; that at the end of each individual dark-night-of-the-soul, once all the addictions are shed and self-love is discovered, these women (and myself) are able to follow our hearts again. Whether it leads to romantic love is generally uncertain, but it certainly leads to a form of love. One replete with ease and a sense of peace, where once there was only emptiness and a premonition of incoming darkness. Being a brave woman is literally being a light in the dark in the social world.

Undoubtedly, these are stories about three successful Pluto transits sitting in relation to any of these characters’ Lilith, much like the transit I have also been experiencing in these last 14 years. And if I began the transit by renouncing my familial ties to seek pleasure, job ambitions and personal self-satisfaction, I now end this transit back in my family home, renewing my commitment to my family and experiencing reconciliation, repair and heart-mending. When your personal Lilith is activated in your chart by an outer planet (like Neptune, Uranus, Pluto or Saturn) you could be asked to go through some years of dark willfulness, sexual intensity, deviance from your soul’s light and of having to feel shunned, unfairly punished and judged, and made to sleep in the ruins of who you once though you were, much like Lilith was summoned to sleep in the ruins of cities, in the aftermath of bloodshed. However, it strikes me now that maybe this post was an essay about making peace and finally integrating the ‘demonic’ side of the Psyche, and learning to love and accept the unlovable and the unacceptable within. This is the spiritual teaching of Lilith and to some extent it speaks to what Leonard Cohen meant when he sang in Anthem:

“There’s a crack in everything/ That’s how the light gets in”.

With universal love,

Lexi ❤

Some astrologers traditionally understand the two signs of Scorpio and Sagittarius as distinct and separate, and this makes sense if you consider that there are two different constellations in the night-sky after which they are named. However, in between Scorpio and Sagittarius lies the mysterious constellation of Ophiuchus, considered by alternative astrological thinkers to be the secret 13th zodiac sign. In this article, I’d like to propose that rather than seeing Scorpio and Sagittarius energy as bridged by a mysterious 13th sign, I would consider them to be the same energetic imprints of a similar energy; or to put it differently, I see Scorpio and Sagittarius as light/dark progressions of each other. From my experience, they are mirrors or complementary forms of energy, which is outwardly expressed in unique and original ways. This is why some Scorpios behave like bold fire signs, have hot tempers in spite of being water signs, and like to thrive on risk and chance, while some Sagittarians have a dark, Machiavellian way of relating to others, or can sometimes go to fanatic extremes in their love life, work projects or political and religious beliefs. These two distinct signs are potentially two sides of the same mythological beast. In this piece I’ll analyze how Sagittarius energy and Scorpio energies are intertwined and reflect on the the light and dark aspects of the human Ego and the astrological archetypes which govern them.

Sagittarius energy is wild and unencumbered. It is meant to roam freely and not suffer from any limitations. It is almost as if the light of the soul needs to expand and grow after it emerges from the darkness and the depths of Scorpio season, a time during which human energy is trapped underground and often repressed, as we transition from Autumn to Winter. For Sagittarius, or the astrological Centaur, being in state of emotional chaos, sometimes awakens the stability within. The constant need to move and to discover fuels a creative fire that maintains sexual energy, a thirst for adventure and a feeling of being alive and constantly growing. Sagittarians are also highly competitive. For them, winning is the act of managing to overcome whatever challenges appear on their journey of discovering the meaning of life,. Sagittarian energy is not about living without challenges and limitations but it is about keeping the inner fire of the soul intact, undiminished, flickering towards the heaven as each obstacle is surmounted with intelligence, humor and honesty. Losing for them, is spiritually crushing because it waters down their spiritual fire (and to a large extent their belief that they are somewhat invincible, as they feel protected by God). Although, it can helpfully ground the ashes reducing their energy back to the deep waters of Scorpio, much air is needed to start a watered down Sagittarius back up again. In a metaphorical nutshell, Sagittarius energy is elemental 🙂 as it works to connect all of the 4 elements: fire, earth, air and water. But the transition from Scorpio season to Sagittarius season is alchemical, since water and fire magic when brought together are considered to create pure, spiritual gold.

The opposite sign to Sagittarius is Gemini, their Shadow aspect, representing the cool air of intellect. Geminis are ‘mutable storms’ of ideas, that often makes natives born under Mercurian energy, literally sparkle. Gemini is the opposite of Sagittarius, the open-minded yet fickle thinker, a jack-of-all-trades that shifts in the same day from consenting opinion, to dissent, to a range of arguments that they invalidate by dinner time, then awake the next day and perform this role again, for each person that they meet in completely new and refreshing ways. In terms of knowledge production and acquisition, which both astrological sings are naturally talented at, Gemini moves whereas Sagittarius conserves. Sagittarius searches for ‘the Truth’, while Gemini is aware that there are many truths, according to mood and circumstances, or what you might have eaten last night. But there is also a deeply spiritual level, where Gemini is equated with the Lovers and Divine Union, while Sagittarius represents the Holy Warrior, the image of the announcing angel of Temperance or of Archangel Michael who commands the heavenly fleet of angels that sent Lucifer crashing down to Hell.

I digress. Let’s come back to the dual flame idea I am trying to flesh out in this article. Sagittarius comes after Scorpio, at the end of November, and marks the purification of intensity. As they go about experiencing life, Scorpios can produce a lot of energetic ‘filth’ (through revenge, cruelty, and an eye-for-an-eye mindset). However, when the energy shifts and the Sagittarian constellation is illuminated by the Sun, there is an upsurge of light that cleanses the energetic debris acquired in the previous season, and this transitional purification serve to distil or preserve only the best of Scorpionic experiences – true intimacy, depth of intuition, a keen researching spirit, and stealth determination. Symbolically, the secrets that caused pain during Scorpio season appear to the surface in Sagittarius season, are cleansed, illuminated and transformed into wisdom. A judging process takes place (this is why Sagittarians rule morality and acquire many spiritual positions of authority in society). This processual parsing of what is true from what is delusion (and Scorpios just as much as Pisces, suffer often from delusions, since they are highly emotional signs), is necessary in the turning of the zodiac’s astrological wheel, as it brings us from the dark depths of unconscious behaviours (Pluto’s domain, the natural ruler of Scorpio) into the clear light of reason and common-sense (Jupiter’s domain, the natural ruler of Sagittarius).

After this assessment is complete, levity kicks in: and humour can be used in Sagittarius season to learn from a past, painful situation which happened in Scorpio season. Thereby a brighter perspective on life appears, upon which new spiritual foundations can be built, of the kind which proclaim that “I have been through a dark night of the soul and lived to tell the tale, that might heal and inspire others”; it is for this reason that Sagittarius-influenced people make such good teachers. And if you think about the next level, this astrological progression makes sense since after Sagittarius comes the Master Builder, Capricorn, who requires strong foundations to raise its proverbial ‘fortress’ of material achievements.

Nature’s cycle of death-rebirth governs the months of November and December. During this period the earthly ego (obsession, sex and the body) and cosmological transcendence (research, spiritual knowledge, overcoming) are important themes which are activated in our collective unconscious. If you live in the Northern hemisphere, this is when the darkness is at its most heaviest on Earth, as the planet completes its movement of revolution around the Sun; on top of this, December also brings with it the Winter Solstice, a powerful energetic portal. Before there were technological and scientifically developments, this season usually inspired artists and craftsmen to intense representations of the battle between light and dark, and the creation of archdemons and archangels. For example, in the traditional Ryder-Waite tarot deck, the Death card which represents Scorpio energy and the Temperance card which represents Sagittarius energy are excellent depictions of these light and dark themes.

But instead of thinking of these two energies as opposites, I want to challenge this perception and argue that they are merely continuations of each other. Energetic forces of equal intensity, exemplifying the journey and exploration that each of us has to undergo in their lifetimes versus the stillness and concentration required of impending life changes (getting pregnant, giving birth, marrying, divorcing, getting a job, training for a career, moving places, dying and witnessing death, making love, losing love etc.). All these actions transform us, we usually are never the same version of ourselves we used to be before such a significant life-event, if not all of them. These moments include our deepest sense of Self and our Egos coming in contact with higher forces which remain mysterious to the human mind (for example, we still don’t know what exactly happens to the human soul after the body dies, we’ve also yet to precisely uncover where we exactly come from and towards what are we collectively heading)

The Transformed & Spiritual Self

Now, the German spiritual teacher Eckhardt Tolle believes that it’s always wonderful when things go wrong throughout the day. This is because when challenges arise, the triggers push us back into presence, so from our Ego we are sent to experience the presence of our soulfulness, through the things which make us feel uncomfortable. To my mind this is the perfect description of what the Saturn in Capricorn sextile Jupiter in Scorpio transit has been about in this last year (2017). These two energies do not offer obvious, flashy and directly positive gifts, but ones that require effort (the effort of being present) and patient to access your innermost self (Scorpio), to unlock the seat of all power and creativity (where we reach ourselves as parts of the divine) so that you may transform the ego’s manifestation from karma (or past life debt) into dharma (or present gifts), or little morsels of enlightenment. In this process we discover our Sagittarius meaning: that maybe life is being just for the sake of being.

People who thought Jupiter’s transit through Scorpio in 2017 did not deliver anything good (and I include myself among the plaintiffs) where operating from the Ego at the level of form. However, at the level of spirit, tiny wonders were happening: a paradigm shifting emotional release, reassessing our relationship with anger, activating the divine masculine, and divine feminine energy, noticing karma and how we produce it and how it works through us in other people’s lives, as well as integrating the lessons from 2011 until now (as the moment when we collectively started to transform due to the intense planetary activity, supercharged eclipses and multiple retrogrades in an almost-decade long period of Saturnian and Plutonian influences).

Below, is a piece I wrote when Jupiter (the protective energy of the Divine) was in the sign of the heart and inner strength (Leo) and it was transiting my 10th house (the area of the public). It was a transit that inspired me to write content on this website and I am sharing below an excerpt from my personal archive because I think it illustrates well what I mean by the Scorpio-Sagittarius dual flame, and how what deeply connects these two astrological signs to such an extent that they seem twins, is their capacity to passionately feel their existence and to raise to the level of a work of art, thereby inspiring us to do the same. Re-reading my initial post some 3 years later, I noticed while under the mentoring influence of Tolle that the first words I used to begin it are ‘We suffer’. I was at the time deeply immersed in a karmic relationship with a rich and arrogant man. After the relationship dissolved (in a typical Plutonic fashion, completely out of the blue and painfully), that life-event made me realize that inner growth is needed, and I was pushed into a solitary path of precious self-development path. For years now, I’ve been honing my spiritual awakening into something I can manage, and I try to find ways to share with others the insights I am currently gaining an almost High-Priestess-like periods of private seclusion. I too have a strong Scorpio in my 1st house and a Sagittarian stellium in my 2nd house and feel ‘pushed’ daily into an alchemical process of having to understand and work with my passionate inner nature:

• Within the sheltering warmth of everyday spiritual acts, your ego is flexible and malleable and this is how you learn that there is pleasure in feelings which are different than happiness (if, as me, you are exhausted by ‘happiness speeches’ & toxic positivity): the wistfulness of melancholia, the passion of longing, the energy of anger, the frenetic burst of joy, are all experiences meant to be felt and lived out. These feelings are all within you, given as a gift. Accepting them fuels you to create. And creating, whether it is a project, a child, an event, a cake, an object, a relationship, a dream, or a character, is the meaning we seek to commit to in this life. If praying is seen as a dialogue between something powerful and someone powerless who needs help, rather than an antiquated religious custom which loses meaning in the era of information, then it can be regained for our benefit. Even more outrageously, I’m proposing that God or what I prefer to call the ‘cosmo-spiritual connection’ we share with the Universe, might not be sought outside of us, but within – something Rainer Maria Rilke was keenly aware of when he wrote: “Take your practiced powers and stretch them out until they span the chasm between two contradictions…For the god wants to know himself in you.”[1] If courage has been seen to prevail at times even in face of consistent adversity and trust is the building block of many of our relationships, institutions and businesses (albeit not in all, in its purest form), ultimately the final characteristic which we can actively cultivate, because of its preciousness and apparent scarcity at the time in this world, is kindness. Happiness and success are praiseworthy goals but to my mind the most important value in life is kindness. Nothing reaches the soul like kindness. The gentle rule of oxytocin over adrenalin shots, dopamine kicks and serotonin fireworks to the system[4]; the thing that truly makes us smile in the face of adversity and guides our daily acts towards caring. The silent peace-maker in a troubled world. As David W. Orr aptly explains: “The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.”[5] What I would add here is that we shouldn’t want to put too much thought into our displays of kindness for fear of falling back into an over-thinking cycle. Ideally kindness should be an impulse, and as long as we can offer it spontaneously, it is a gift (both for ourselves and for our recipients). However, engaging with this impulse proves trickier in practice then it is in thought, but it is worth practicing. If only to aim for a kind of spiritual nourishment detached from dogma, that keeps on giving and rarely disappoints. So lean towards kindness whenever you can and remember to start by being kind to yourself before others (just like operating an Oxygen mask in the event of an emergency plan landing). The dual energy of Scorpio (healing) and Sagittarius (belief), remind us of this precious gift.

With universal love,

Lexi ❤

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[1] From “Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke”, translated by Stephen Mitchell, 1995, Modern Library.

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReRcHdeUG9Y.

[5] From “Earth in Mind: on Education, Environment and The Human Prospect”, 2004, Island Press.

The New Moon is the best time of the month for new beginnings. Each month we are given a fresh spiritual reset, an opportunity to set new goals and to see them grow. A new moon usually takes places in the same sign as the solar sign of that month: so let’s say we are in April and we know that April is traditionally the month ruled by the Aries’ solar energy (as many Aries are born under this sign, in the last week of March and first three weeks of April). This means that the new moon we would normally experience in April is a New Moon in Aries. The process is then a creatively potent one, as the month’s Solar energy merges with the growing energy of the Moon and becomes a cosmic dance of fertility. From this lunar & solar monthly ‘coupling’, fresh energy pours into the collective and blesses our personal lives. This cosmic fertilization process ends up influencing our moods, emotions, ideas and creations in our world, here on Earth, because believe it or not we are influenced by what happens in the cosmos, and you can clearly see this with the changing weather we would normally experience here on Earth, around each monthly lunation or during eclipse season: things can go haywire, weather-wise around a Full Moon!

Full Moons work inversely, since they take place when the Sun and the Moon are in opposite signs of the zodiac. So if we have a New Moon in Aries conjunct the Sun in Aries, we would also have a Full Moon in Libra (the opposite zodiac sign on the astrological wheel from Aries) in the same month. For example, we have an upcoming New Moon in Pisces at 15’46” degrees on the 6th of March 2019. This New Moon will conjunct the Sun – the period from the end of February until the middle of March is known as Pisces season because the Sun travels through the constellation of the Fish. Whatever we seed now, whatever intentions we put into place now – either with our mental scoresheet or a practical ‘to do list’ – we can then expect some material manifestations on the 14th of September 2019 when there is the Full Moon in Pisces at 21’04” degrees taking place during the season of Virgo, so the opposite sign to Pisces on the astrological wheel. This means that even if we have a Full Moon in Virgo in the same month as a New Moon in Pisces, the growth of your intentions/spells/desires takes about 6 months’ time as the New Moon in Pisces undergoes a number of lunar cycles until it ripens into the Full Moon in Pisces, in the season of Virgo in September. This is how astrological signs are paired as ‘opposites’ on the zodiac wheel and also according to lunar cycles.

Please don’t worry if you miss the new moon or full moon energy in a given month, since each month we have fresh new-moon and a full-moon points. Nature and the cosmos are giving us plenty of fresh starts and times to reap our rewards. Other times, we also experience eclipses, which are super-charged Full and New Moon points that invite fated events to take place and Divine intervention to work its magic, as our human willpower is momentarily subdued. If you have trouble knowing what to manifest during a given moon cycle or if you struggle with decision-making, then simply allow eclipse season to make the necessary life-changes for you (but mentally prepare for the chaos or ensuing drama as well 🙂

Right before a new moon, a dark moon phase occurs, also known as the ‘balsamic’ moon. This is because the moon seems to disappear completely from the sky, robbing us of its energetic imprint (those moonbeams can be ‘nightly gold’ for our energetic bodies, charging us here on Earth like tiny batteries, much like the Sun does each day). Around a balsamic moon, we usually tend to feel very sleepy (especially if you are an empath, introvert or light-worker) and we can experience a decrease in energy and vitality. This is normal and should be respected as part of the cycle of energy, since it is generally harder to be active during a low-energy period. But we need the rest and you should plan ahead and figure out that it will take longer to get out of bed the two days when the light of the Moon replenishes itself. Following this phase, we fully enter the New Moon energy. So new moons are moments when we might feel like a great brown bear waking up from its winter slumber: groggy, moody and in need of copious amounts of caffeine (I know I do at least), especially with the new moons which occur during the Winter months. This is why you shouldn’t’ schedule strenuous activities around such a time but plan to indulge in them as the Moon is Waxing or close to Full (of course, if your life permits the luxury of planning).

This week’s New Moon is extra special since we have the planet of unpredictability, Uranus changing signs from Aries (rules by Ares/Mars, the God of War) to Taurus (the celestial bull, symbol of abundance and fertility and ruled by beautiful Venus/Aphrodite). Not only that, but we have Mercury beginning its first retrograde motion of this year (i.e. Mercury retrogrades happen three times per year). This aspect is making all our logical, verbal and written communication go a bit hay-wire & loopy, as it conjuncts the planet Neptune (the planet of confusion, escapism and creativity). However, if you lean into your intuition and just go with the flow during this period, the time is magical for manifesting big dreams! At the moment at which I am writing this, it is Spring and therefore what we spiritually ‘plant’ now (to be read as what we ‘aim for’ and ‘set out’ to achieve) we can reap as rewards during the harvest months, or in the Autumn-Winter period.

New Moons are good times for cleansing and cleaning, for sorting out the old from the new, so this would be an ideal time for cleaning out your wardrobe, sorting out your closet or kitchen cupboards, washing your crystals and reorganizing your tarot and oracle decks, throwing old things away or donating what can be reused, and mopping the floors of your house with essential oils. If you read tarot, this is an ideal time for sage-ing your body and house, and for salting the frames of your doors and windows for renewed protection. You could also get some Reiki sessions to rebalance your energetic body. It’s also an excellent period for sleeping and resting more to recharge, and for tacking long hot baths with crystals and other pampering beautiful things.

Full Moons are times of taking stock, or celebrating an achievement or seeing things for what they really are. They are times of great clarity and vision and they are also good for chord-cutting rituals, for removing old energy and what no longer serves you. Each New Moon your prepare to build and to take in and each Full Moon your prepare to close up and release. New Moons begin things while Full Moons bring relationships and situations to a firm conclusion.

So for a New Moon ritual prepare yourself to receive the new, to bring in fresh new things into your life that support your changing desires. I find New Moons have more significance than Full ones, although the latter are revered because when you practice spells under the power of the full lunar energy, these work much quicker. So people who enjoy love spells, money spells or banishing rituals also adore Full Moons, while others who thrive on intentions and manifestation, like myself, tend to enjoy the New Moon energy more.

One practical thing you can do to align yourself with lunar energy and bring some candle magic into your life, is to understand the color-code of each candle and its specific, protective deity. If a New or a Full Moon fall on a Monday, light a silver candle to invoke the power of the Moon. If they fall on a Tuesday, light a red or orange candle to invoke the power of Mars, if Wednesday then light a green candle to invoke the fresh energy of Mercury; if it’s Thursday then light a yellow candle for Jupiter; on Friday, light a pink or white candle for Venus; on Saturday, light a black or grey candle for Saturn; finally on Sunday, light a golden candle for the Sun.

As co-creators, we can merge our human minds with the intentions of the Divine, so new Moons are perfect for this dual communication between our daily reality and the unseen world of Spirit. The best way to receive inspiration is to write a list of intentions (sentences that help you figure out what you would like to materialize). Keep in mind that intentions should be written in the present tense, as if they already happened, and you could add the powerful word ‘now’ to finish the sentence, in order for them to ‘work’ and to activate them by anchoring them in the present. For example: I receive my heart’s desire now / I attract wealth now / I am in love with life now, etc.

Below is a list of other things that New and Full Moons are good for:

• Letting go of an addiction. You can do as little as saying ‘I’ll start doing this thing less from today’ and then see how the energy builds up gradually to support you. But you have to keep this goal in mind, and not to deceive yourself in the process. This intention will create circumstances that will hinder you from falling back on that addiction, so be mindful of what you wish for and commit to it to see results. You might encounter external obstacles when you are tempted to revert to your old bad habits, and remember that challenges can actually be blessings in disguise for your manifestation. For example, I promised myself to cut out processed foods and when I went to get a doughnut at Krispy Kreme in a moment of weakness, my card wasn’t working and the server was really rude for no reason; after my momentary anger subsided I realized that it was a challenge to stick to my intention and what I consciously committed to a couple of days before). In this way you are manifesting your heart’s desire, within the limitations of the material world.

• Getting on with projects you’ve been putting off. For example, I’m struggling with writing my second book, so I’m now rearranging my notes, re-reading my old draft and setting the intention to commit more fully to writing a little bit each day. Find out what you prefer, as forcing yourself to do what other people do, will only backfire. I usually, write in the evenings when I feel inspired and there is more quiet and still energy around me and I can hear myself think. This goes against a lot of the popular advice on writing routines which urge you to rise early in the morning & engage in writing sprees, but I adapt the activity to suit my own personality and not the other way around.

• Align your chakras and do chakra meditations to raise your spiritual and bodily vibrations. For this step, there are loads of videos on YouTube that are helpful. As some suggestions for beginners, I like Meditative Mind , Calm Whale & Taos Wind Spirit Music on YouTube. The best part, is that you can listen to these clips while you do other things; I like to do transcriptions while I’m realigning my chakras, as listening to something calms the impatience I feel when I must work on a repetitive and dull task.

• Starting up a long-term endeavor such as a new job, saving up for a large purchase, beginning new contractual agreements etc. It’s best to launch things when the sliver of the moon appears on the sky (so usually one day after the New Moon, when you can actually see the Moon reappearing on the sky). Be careful thought because from my experience the energy can also work viceversa. For example, I started a relationship on a New Moon without consciously realizing that I was working with this energy and now I find it hard to let go of that person even if I am logically aware that we are not good for each other & are better off living our lives apart 🙂

• Write down intentions. For example, you want to have more money in your life, so you can write ‘I have all the money I need and can purchase everything I want’. It’s always good to think relationally when you make wishes – for example ‘I have all the money I need to buy a house so I can start my family’ or ‘I have money to pay rent so that I can rest and relax and work better for others’. The intent has to be positive, it has to come from your heart, from a place of love and peace. The same for if you want to attract love, I advise you begin with self-love affirmations first and then include your ideal partner – ‘I have so much love in my heart for myself and for others around me, and I am attracting the love of my life’ or something similar. It should always begin from you and your heart chakra/energy center and then spill out beautifully into the world, for others. Remember, we are all connected, whether we like it or not. Make sure to write the sentence down at least 10 times on a white sheet of paper, and as you do focus on already imagining how your life will look like if your wish is granted. In this way you are giving your subconscious specific tasks to work on while you sleep and you’ll notice your behaviour will slowly change in your daily activities, to help you attract what you have intended.

Because the new moon this month is conjunct the planet of unpredictability (Uranus), factor in some surprises. You could write down as well an anti-routine (which means something you are not so comfortable with) or something new and off-the-beaten track that you’d like to add to your life. For example, I’d like to open myself up for more fun and adventures – I’m usually quite careful, I love solitude and am fairly common-sensical, but I want to do more spontaneous things together with other people this Spring. So that could be one thing. Another would be to read things you wouldn’t usually read, try out new foods, go and try new sports or new beauty rituals, change your perfume or clothing style, plan to redecorate a corner of your house that needs more love and attention, or even plan to carry your passport with you at all times for a spontaneous get-away. Add some ‘electricity’ to your life, and open up to the unexpected of your own volition. It’s better if the choice is yours, rather then allowing the universe to completely take over, as it might re-arrange some aspect of your life you aren’t prepared for.

New Moons are also great for creating a mood-board (whether online or with papier mache). Mood-boards are usually collages made out of random and colourful pictures depicting how you would like your future to be, and what you would like to change in your life. Or if you don’t have time for that, simply place a picture of your desire somewhere where you can see it daily. If you want a new car, print a picture of your desired car and place it on your table so that everyday when you have breakfast or when you sip your coffee you can see it and remind your subconscious mind that this is what you are working towards. However, don’t expect things to appear over-night, the cycle begins with each new moon and completes in 6 months’ time with the corresponding full moon, so breathe in and maintain patience (its slowly coming for you, in beautifully unseen and surreptitious ways).

** Happy Moon-manifesting **

With universal love,

Lexi ❤