This New Moon in Aries marks a courageous new beginning, a leap into a new self. But before the beginning, is the ending; the release. With Saturn and Pluto conjunct the South Node, is there some ancient hang up that’s been residing in your bones, that is ready to be deposited into the earth? Are you carrying the baggage of your ancestors, bags and bags of shame and sadness? Oh, but there are treasures in there too, hiding under the pain.
While Mercury is moving forward again (as of March 28th), it is still in its retrograde “shadow”, meaning it is retracing the ground it backtracked through in March. So, we are coming to understand and then act on what the waters of Pisces revealed. It takes great courage to SEE what has been dredged up from the depths of the sea—to see ourselves clearly, to face our sea-monsters and accept our treasure.
As Aries classically is the God of war and is traditionally understood as masculine, and we also have Pluto, God of the underworld surfacing the South Node unbalanced energies of Capricorn, which often is understood to represent Patriarchy, there is a potent opportunity at this time to heal the masculine parts of ourselves, to transform masculinity. (I want to note that even though I occasionally employ the polarity of masculine and feminine, I believe there are many gender expressions, and gender expression itself is non-binary.)
There has been much talk of the divine feminine in recent years, and that is an important conversation, and it’s essential that the feminine energy be given voice, and be allowed to grieve and rage and express itself and share the torment it has been subject to, as well as the gifts it offers.
But it needs to be said too, that in order for the divine feminine to come into its full expression, we also need to transmute masculinity. The imbalance of patriarchal power for the past several millennia has been the dominance of the masculine over the feminine, an imbalance that has harmed all of us.
But it’s a sick and misunderstood expression of masculinity that dominates the feminine. So in order to right the balance, we must attend to masculinity as well. We must heal the sick parts of our masculinity, so that it too can come into its higher expression in which it reveres and supports and honours the feminine.
One way to transmute the masculine warrior energy of Aries, is to employ that fierceness and courage to heal. With Mars, the ruler of Aries, sextile Chiron, the wounded healer, there is great potential now for stepping into the aspect of ourselves that is healer. And with Pluto and Saturn conjunct the South Node, surely our shadows will come into the light.
Aries offers the gift of courage. With this gift, we may look at what the waters of Pisces have washed up onto our shores—our addictions, our pains, our sadness, our grief. Other signs may run at the site of grief, but Aries can sit with it, with the understanding that even the most difficult or ugly or painful parts of ourselves, are simply seeking love and understanding. They just want to be seen, and felt. They want presence, the way a child does.
So when your grief washes up, what do you do? Do you run away? Do you throw it back into the sea? Do you bury it—or your head—in the sand? That’s ok too, because few of us have been taught how to heal. So forgive yourself for that too.
But this Aries New Moon offers us a new beginning in self-healing, and self-trust; trust in the ancient knowing residing deep within our bones, in the ability to heal that we developed life-times ago, that over millennia of abuse, was buried in the sand, but now is being revealed.
So the offering is: when your grief or pain or disconnection or anything else reveals itself to you, sit with it. It’s natural to want to turn away from pain. It’s natural to want to find a way to make it go away. But that attitude robs the pain of the respect it deserves. Treat your pain as a child who wishes to be held and loved and seen.
For those of us newer to the healing way, it may sound strange, it may seem counterintuitive to love our pain. But try it: treat it as an experiment. When we accept and hold and love ALL the parts of ourselves, all the feelings and emotions and voices that arise, we allow them to teach us, we empower them to transform into blessings, and free the energy to be used for something other than the holding of pain.
As we know, energy cannot be created or destroyed. So when we work with the shadow, we enable the energy that has been stuck in loops of sadness and grief etc that we weren’t able to witness, to be transformed, and then that energy that had been trapped is released for our use.
The warrior spirit is needed for this: to simply sit with the turmoil and pain. To sit with demons and monsters. To hold steady, to stay present, to witness, to see truth. This is how we transform Aries energy from the fighter into the lover, from the one who harms to the one who heals. The one who fights for truth and love.
Aries, as the first sign of the zodiac, represents the rush of energy that is spring; the flowers bursting through the soil, and the buds springing forth from the trees. And that surge of energy is available to us now if we understand the secret ways of the warrior-healer.
Ok, winter is officially over, but as this is the first New Moon of the astrological year, now is the time to truly release what the winter showed as dead, and to step into the new year, into the new self, into the new life.