Today is the New Moon (Solar) Eclipse in Virgo, the match to the Lunar Eclipse (Lunar) eclipse in Pisces two weeks ago on the 7th. This pair of eclipses has been very intense for me. I have a ton to do, yet I’ve been dealing with disrupted sleep, digestive upset, and an absolute inability to focus. The irony is that I know exactly WHY this is happening (2/8 house eclipses, shadow work, seasonal changes) but knowing why doesn’t keep it from happening.
Now, there are two ways to deal with a situation like this. First, we POWER THROUGH! that’s the road where we medicate the symptoms, ignore the messages, and keep moving forward. Second, we hang back. This is the path where we allow ourselves to experience what we’re experiencing, treat ourselves with kindness, and acknowledge that we aren’t just productivity machines 24/7.
Here’s the part where I’m supposed to pick one of these approaches and sell it to you. So either “you are the captain of your ship, you got this! grab those bootstraps and pull like hell!” or “you are not a machine! you need self-care and to love yourself and to shuck aside the expectations of society.”
The thing is that both these messages are true and you need to have the discernment to know which of them you need at any given time. That kind of nuanced and thoughtful approach doesn’t make for good quotes and clickbait, which is why I think it’s not common. But I think it’s more helpful and accurate. There are times when I need to be proactive and power through and times when I need to hang back and nurture myself. (Inside of you are two wolves and all that).
I find that my personal approach is much more the bootstrap method than the self care method. Which is why the voice of my need for nurturing and care is so strident and disruptive (stop ignoring me or I’ll make you ill!). You might be the opposite, in which case the voice yelling at you to get your shit together and go for it! is the loud annoying one (make choices or I’ll make them for you and THEY WILL SUCK).
By deciding that one of these approaches is the only correct one, you disempower the other and it comes back in shadow form and fucks shit up.
The past two weeks I’ve been taking the approach of simply trying to feel what I feel. I’m not leaping in to aggressively fix things or trying to bully myself into feeling better. Instead I’ve been trying to make choices for myself that acknowledge both my desire to be productive and my need to be nurtured (it’s interesting that “self-medication” has a negative connotation associated with addiction and yet, it can mean “have some vitamins and go to yoga”).
I’m sharing this because I feel an obligation to be honest about the things that challenge me. I’ve talked about this before, but when you are in the personal growth / helping / fixing field, there’s huge pressure to always appear perfect and like nothing ever goes wrong. Yes, using project planning and magic together has improved my life immeasurably and given me a ton of great benefits. And if my entire life was a dumpster fire you would be right to question that. But that doesn’t mean I don’t ever have tough times or challenges. In fact, the test of any system or method or approach is not how it functions when things are going well, but how it functions when things are going badly. My approach has been nicely battle tested over the years, but that doesn’t mean nothing ever goes badly.
Eclipses are always a window of time that challenges us with hiding and revealing. This is what’s being revealed to me.
