July 2013: Time to Grow Up & Move On!
by
Sarah Varcas
This month we are challenged to resolve early life issues in order to embrace our present and redesign our future to new specifications. The planetary focus is not on specific spectres from our childhood that haunt us per se, but upon the unconscious responses and reactions we learned at a young age, which continue to operate even now. These thoughts, feelings and behaviours are usually so close to us we don’t even recognise them for what they are. ‘I’m just that way’ we think. ‘I always have been’. And thus we don’t bother to wonder why we’re just that way and whether it really is ‘just who we are’, or in fact a layer grown many years ago to manage our experience of the world around us.
Of course, these layers served a purpose, and an important one. They helped us make sense of the world and cope with it at a deeply vulnerable time in our lives. But we’re not little children anymore and we don’t need to continue like we are! Which is a key message from the cosmos in the first two weeks of July: It’s time to grow up and gather all that we are, all of our energy, emotions, thoughts, behaviours, hopes and dreams, right here into the present. Once we’ve done that we will have before us a whole host of tools with which to build a positive and fulfilling future.
Between 1st and 13th July Mars completes its journey through Gemini. Oddly for Mars, he’s rather lagging behind everyone else at the moment, a bit like the last runner in a race steaming towards the finish line while everyone else is beyond it, enjoying a cool drink and a foot massage. He’ll get there come mid-month, but in the meantime he continues to remind us that just because we’ve always thought a certain thing at a particular time in the same old way doesn’t mean we can’t just let those thoughts go and do it differently next time. Actually, perhaps he’s more the sweeper car in a marathon, gathering up those who couldn’t quite make it to the finish line, ensuring they get to where they need to be regardless. Either way, he’s giving us one last chance to get to grips with some habitual thoughts and show them once and for all who’s boss!
Throughout this time we have further cosmic support that conspires to reveal exactly where in our lives we respond to pressure with unconscious reactivity, based upon decisions and opinions about the world developed in our early years. Whenever we find an automatic reaction arising within us we can now stop for a moment and ask ourselves, ‘What am I really reacting to?’, ‘What interpretation of the current situation is causing that reaction?’, ‘Where do these feelings really come from and what do they tell me?’. In asking these and other questions, we can begin to recognise just where we’re still running old tapes from days gone by that really need to be dumped once and for all!
Of course, doing so can be easier said than done. Old habits die hard, and there can be a powerful sense of security in the familiarity of being a certain way, even if that certain way actually causes us more problems than anything else! Which is why we’re particularly blessed that these issues arise now when we have a Grand Trine in Water formed by Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune suspended in space above us. This is a significator of deep emotional healing and spiritual ‘at-one-ment’, at its most powerful the week beginning 15th July. Whatever the first two weeks of July bring to our attention, we can call upon these universal healing forces to assist us in transforming its energy into something life-affirming, positive and creative. We CAN change, and we will, if we embrace the possibility and offer up ourselves and our lives to the divine forces which know far better than we do what is needed and when.
Throughout this month we also encounter the energy of the on-going Uranus square to Pluto which has signalled so much disruption and change in peoples’ lives in the past year. The focus now is particularly upon Uranus and its exhortation that we release ourselves from anything and everything that we have allowed to limit us previously. It’s a tall order, I know, and one that may be hard to comply with in its entirety, but every effort we make to do just that this month will be met with cosmic applause and encouragement to ‘now take the next step too’. There is little time for complacency in this regard. Let go of one thing? Right then, on to the next! There are no days off when we’re under this kind of pressure, but it’s the pressure not of a tyrannical master who demands beyond anything we can give, but that of a caring and confident coach who knows what we’re capable of and is determined to bring it out in us, come hell or high water!
The presence of the Grand Trine in Water, despite its healing potential, is also a double edged sword this month, because it can make us too complacent. We may know what we need to do but can’t find the energy to do it. We know that running over those old memories is not helping us move forward but we’ll do it just one more time anyway…. Or we know that feeding our sense of powerlessness is getting us nowhere but we’ll run through all our grievances against other people again, just to make sure we haven’t left anyone out! The fact is, we can’t afford to do this anymore, not if we really and truly want to change and grow. Our thoughts, our feelings, our behaviours, they have power now, like never before. Just as the healing energies all around us have power like never before too. But in order to call upon that power for our own healing we have to exercise the self-discipline necessary to decide we’re not going to walk the same old path in the same old rut. We’re going to stand up, take charge and claim the healing as our own, inviting it into every nook and cranny of our lives. If we want to heal we must be prepared to do so whatever it takes and however far out of our comfort zone we have to step in the process.
Between the 24th and 29th July we see the Grand Trine transformed into a Kite by Venus in Virgo, providing a wonderful opportunity for us to ground the changes of this month into the world of form. Here’s an opportunity to decide just how we need to be and act differently, and then do it. We don’t have to make a huge song and dance of it (that’s most certainly not Venus in Virgo’s way!), but quietly and gently we can begin to react differently, to speak new truths, to express who we are now, not who we were ‘back then’. These are nascent stirrings of a new life. They may feel delicate and vulnerable, but the more we nurture and nourish them the stronger they’ll grow and the quicker they’ll become just as familiar as the old ways were, except these ones will be aligned with the present, with who we are now, not who we once were before we knew any better!
As the month comes to an end we may find ourselves somewhat overwhelmed with potential as scales begin to fall from our eyes and the future is revealed in a fresh new light. There is a feeling here of stepping out of a cave into daylight, blinking and disoriented. It’s best we take a moment to let our eyes adjust and our internal compass find our own personal north once more. Then once we do that we can begin to stride forward with greater confidence and sense of purpose, looking back upon a month during which much has arisen and been cleared, making space for daylight to enter once again.
Enjoy your month, and thank you for taking the time out to read my thoughts about it!
Sarah Varcas
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