Taurus Full Blood Moon Lunar Eclipse

At 4 o’clock this morning the alarm started buzzing. Why so early, you ask? I wanted to see the lunar eclipse, so outside in my slippers and bathrobe I went. I stayed out there for all of 5 minutes because, quite frankly, it was cold, but not before capturing a terrible picture on my iPhone. This specific type of lunar eclipse hasn’t happened since February 18, 1440 around the time the Incas were building Machu Picchu. It won’t happen again until February 8, 2669 according to NASA. And we had a doozy coming at us November 19 at 4:03 am (EST), this one having 97% total coverage. Quite the extraordinary event!

This particular eclipse also happens to coincide with the Full Beaver Moon, called that because it signals that it’s trapping season for their pelt. Think warmth and water resistance. This is when the beavers begin sheltering, for they have amassed a sufficient storage of food for the upcoming winter.

The corresponding new moon was May 11, which was all about releasing the past. I pulled Algiz, the rune of protection, and Death reversed, the tarot card of inner purging. Personal transformation requires us to embrace change rather than resist it. Taurus hates change, but Scorpio assists us in grounding this energy into tangible form, something that will take some of that red hot energy away from the stubborn bull in all of us.

A Total Eclipse of the Heart

Eclipses reveal shadows and symbolize sweeping change, which can stir up fear within the body. Last night’s eclipse marks the beginning of a two-year cycle winding down sometime in October 2023. The last big eclipse season that we had was in July of 2020, when the protests were in full activation. That was a huge Jesus flipping the table moment for our society as a whole, but there is also seismic change that happens within the individual self. I know I did.

I was heavy into therapy at the time, doing both solo and group sessions on a weekly basis. It was around this time I began to deal with some underlying traumas from my childhood, things that I hid away in my metaphorical closet. Skeletons, or more like ghosts from my past that could never pass on to the next realm. Sometimes things happen when you are little that your child brain can’t handle. You can’t quite understand what happened, much less explain it to someone else. So you stay quiet, and it becomes a rock in your heart. Eventually that rock gets kicked over, and begins to break you from the inside out. You can either choose to deal with those emotions, or let them engulf you completely.

I have spent much of my life in a trance, sleepwalking through the days. The world holds so much pain that it has to hide the magic, make it go away, make it wrong, make it evil. We are shaped and molded to disbelieve, even though the evidence lies right in front of us. It almost seems as though we are encouraging people to participate in fake fairy tales. It makes the real ones seem less believable. They try to cover up the truth. It keeps them feeling powerful, and the rest feeling weak. They don’t want us to know that we are enough. That’s why it’s so hard for us (me) to internalize our own basic goodness.

Death to the Ego

I ran through life checking all the boxes of what I ‘should’ be doing in order to be a ‘good’ person. I never thought about whether or not I wanted to do all of those things. Truthfully I hated school. All of it. Even college. I didn’t want to be there. I was bullied and harassed by my so-called friends. I was sexually assaulted more times than I care to count. In those moments of my childhood, I froze developmentally speaking. That is what trauma does to the body. The brain will protect you initially, but the body will hold onto it. It remembers, even when you don’t.

A girl exclaimed to her mother one day
She no longer wanted to wear a dress.
Why would she do that you ask?
It made her harder to access.

It must be a phase.

Shame can be a brutal master, if you allow that emotion to take control of the wheel of your life. I did for a very long time, some due to societal conditioning and some due to generational trauma, the mother wound it is sometimes called. Women are taught to be like maidens, whose job it is to protect the masculine, when actually we need to be more like crones and embrace the feminine intuition. We need to get untamed, as Glennon Doyle says. The only way to do that is with information. And this was about the time I exclaimed to my religious therapist that I bought my first Bible, The Vagina Bible by Dr. Jen Gunter. Knowledge is power, as they say.

Mantra: I embrace change in all its forms.

We are all tasked with coming to terms with our light and shadow sides, maturing through experience as we do so. They must first be given conscious consideration. And that in and of itself can be a true heartbreaker. Balance that out with understanding that you are not a problem to be solved. I know how that sounds, but two things can be true at the same time. It’s understanding the fact that there was nothing wrong with you to begin with, and it’s your responsibility to fix yourself. And by ‘fix yourself,’ I mean find yourself, the person you were born being. As much as they try to make us forget, we are human beings in fact.

We all have the same basic needs, to be seen and to be loved. Without these two things, especially in our developmental years, we get a sort of severed belonging. We conform and perform to meet the standard, to keep up with the Jones. I did this, and then I really started not to like myself. When we don’t like ourselves we react out of an insecurity in our nervous system, which leads to chronic worry (anxiety). We put up walls and weapons because we mistrust ourselves. We feel separate, like we have no sense of belonging.

We resist our sense of goodness more than we hide our sense of badness. It’s easier to live in a familiar flawed sense of self, than it is to consider our profound capacity to love.

Tara Brach

You can’t always think through your problems; intuition happens in your body. I had a hard time learning how to sit with myself and my emotions. Therapy gave me a safe place to practice and the tools I needed in order to keep it all going, although I still fall down quite a bit. Most days I ask myself once simple question: What are the words that I need to hear today? And then I tell them to myself. That was a huge lesson for me, learning how to stop breaking my own heart, to stop looking outward for something that is already inside myself.

Mad love, Jenna