It’s fascinating to sit with the emotional landscape of people eight hours a day and track trends and themes. Depending on the week, it could be the subconscious theme of powerlessness and parental domination when Trump was elected, or it could be an eclipse and everyone’s core wounds are erupting like volcanoes on the Big Island of Hawaii.
Eclipse season is now upon us, and while there are many specific nuances an astrologer could speak to, my rudimentary description is it is a time of potential change, endings, and rebirth. Whatever core material needs addressing is being unearthed and brought to the surface for you to acknowledge, feel and act upon.
Things are boiling and coming to a head for many of my clients currently, and it sometimes helps to know you are not alone in the intensity of what you are feeling. The cosmos offers a bigger perspective to view looming decisions and hard feelings through. It is not that people aren’t always moving through life transitions and having hard conversations, but planetary influences and forces may amplify our experience.
This particular lunar eclipse this Friday, May 5th is accompanied by Mercury in retrograde and a full moon. Mercury in retrograde (April 21st-May 14th) is known as a good time to readdress incomplete conversations. It is a great time to review things and understand what isn’t working.
Remember full moons are a good time to reflect and let go. What phase is completed? What have you outgrown or are you ready to say goodbye to? This may then mean there is a new phase you are ready to embrace and put effort towards. We have seasons to focus on different goals or intentions, just as we have seasons to grow different kinds of plants and veggies.
I wouldn’t consider planting cucumbers in the winter, yet we commonly push and try to date when it may be the season for career change instead. I reflected today, I may want to get chickens, but do I have that extra energy to add even one more task into my daily life, or do I need to be conservative as I work on developing my online courses?
What do you need to release this eclipse season?
It may not be your relationship itself, but it may be the habitual pattern of relating you are caught in, a habitual response, or tolerating a certain treatment. It may not be that it’s time to quit your job, but reevaluate your relationship to money, whether it’s a rejection or fear of not having enough. What mental contracts did you write with yourself in the past about your value systems, your safety, and who you would like to be like or be different than?
Sometimes for survival, we intelligently react out of fear, need to take action, and flee a home that is unsafe in search of refuge. If you grew up in domestic violence, your nervous system may communicate out of habit that your safety is threatened. When in actuality your girlfriend not calling you back does not pose an imminent threat, it’s actually a trauma response sounding off like a faulty smoke detector.
If it feels like you are on a precipice and overwhelmed by urgency, feeling you need to make a decision, see if it is possible to regulate your calm and nervous system. If from a place of perspective, you still want to take this action then do it.
It is best to make choices from a grounded place especially during eclipse season. There may be heartbreak and loss, but often you will feel something open inside your torso. This choice is coming from a deep internal knowing that love may not be enough and letting go is right at this time.
I’ve sat with clients for over 20 years, and the most productive couples sessions occur when both people are willing to step out of blaming the other and be present with their emotional experience.
I will take each person through a process of examining a recent hurtful moment: the thoughts that accompanied their reaction, how these thoughts produce sensations, and how these show up in their body, and then have them inquire when else they have felt this way. What time in their lives, how old were they, who was it with, and what did they need or want back then that they didn’t get?
It is rarely only about the person sitting on the couch next to them. The past is usually amplifying the present upset they are feeling.
I see this dynamic domino effect a lot: One person feels rejected, unwanted, unseen, or not heard and may withdraw and go into their habit of being self-reliant. In response to this withdrawal, their partner may then fear they can’t trust they will stick around, so they pull back as well, and then more distance, assumptions, and hurt feelings ensue.
When both parties are able to take turns accessing, narrating, and feeling the sensations of this original wound and then empathically witnessing their partner’s vulnerability, things feel so much less personal and accusatory.
I am particularly moved, humbled, and feeling the tenderness of what it takes to be human and navigate relationships especially during eclipse season. It brings up the image of a beekeeper who loves honey but is also allergic to bees and risks anaphylaxis daily. When in love, when it is working there is an incredible sweetness. You invest your heart in someone and hope for comfort, safety, and mutual pleasure, yet there is no assurance you will receive that in return or for how long.
The stars have to align along with mutual interests and relationship desires, workable attachment styles, physical chemistry, spiritual and intellectual compatibility, and more. My hope is that we can all reframe any pivots or endings as evolutionary gains instead of failures. We are all doing our best, while there are sociopathic exceptions, most often people are not intentionally hurting one another.
They are just humans with limited capacity and growing edges. The best we can do is to be accountable for our impact and intentionally turn towards the parts of us we are less inclined to see and accept. When we can accept all parts of ourselves then we are more likely to turn kindness toward others.
