BOOK EXCERPT:
REMEMBERING & EMBODIMENT PHASE
Heroine’s Journey: The Queen of Heaven and Earth strengthens Her material presence and explores Her growing influence on the world.
IN THE SKY…
Duration: 5½ months (163 days)
Venus: Evening Star. Moves 194° forward.
Venus-Sun separation: Increases from 15° to maximum separation (~46-47°) after the Sun.
Venus-Sun aspect (in order): semi-sextile (30°), undecile (32°), decile (36°), novile (40°), semi-square (45°).(1)
The Remembering and Embodiment Phase is the period of Venus’ 5-6 month ascent from low over the western horizon to high and bright at sunset. Through this phase, Venus’ brightness, altitude and duration of visibility increase. Her speed gradually decelerates, as she moves closer to Earth, ending this phase at her greatest distance from the Sun. Each month of your long phase sees a meeting of Venus and a Crescent Moon (first sliver) that occurs slightly higher in the sky and later in the evening than the previous month. Both are growing at the time of their meetings, Venus in brightness and the Moon in body. We can see this as the “maiden” Moon pulling Venus to new heights with her youthful enthusiasm.1 Or we can understand Venus as representing our heart energy and the larger lunar crescent as standing for nurturance or protection. These are just two ways to imagine the Venus Moon dance here. Your Phase, in fact, distinguishes between each specific Venus-Moon meeting (see below).
There are two important sky events or factors involving Venus and the Sun in your Phase, each with its own interpretive meanings for you. There are also important conditions involving Venus and the Moon, described below.
- Venus increasing in evening brightness gives you confidence, optimism or naiveté that your efforts will have positive impact, yet can also evoke in you issues of lethargy or superiority.
- Venus moving away from the setting Sun strengthens your integration of personal desires with group need, yet can also surface issues of resentment and inadequacy.
If you were born close to one of these events, its qualities are more strongly a part of your Feminine Self. Further, if you were born at the very start of your Phase, qualities of the ReBirth Phase may also apply to you; if born at the very end of your Phase, those of the Wholeness Phase may apply.
Through your Phase, each Venus-Moon meeting changes in visual appearance, zodiacal sign and sky position. Spending time with them each month can be a meaningful and reconnecting experience for you. You’ll be participating in your own Feminine celestial story!(2)
PHASE MEANINGS
Collective Theme: Exploring our re-made feminine intention; maturing our feminine destiny.
Personal Dharma: Integrating personal transformations in tangible ways which engender or catalyze shared actions toward an improved society.
The amount of Venus light you were born under determines where in your Phase you began your life. Earlier in the Phase means less light, later means more light. Naturally both situations have their opportunities and challenges. If you were born in the first half of the Phase – the first two-and-a-half to three months – you are more likely to feel isolated, unseen, blocked or inadequate about specific parts of yourself. These same aspects you later discover are the key to fulfilling your Feminine Dharma. This is because you started out with less of an individuated feminine identity, less Venus light. Your development relies on shoring up your authentic inner feminine identity, inside of you. If you were instead born into the latter half, you have a stronger stance in your Feminine Self yet don’t know how to express her in the best way. You’ll be challenged by not knowing how to effectively channel your inner energy for the best result.
Your femininity is compelled to demonstrate herself. This is key to your dharmic attainment. You’ll find just what those ways are from Venus in your personal birth chart. But your feminine higher calling, your Feminine Dharma, requires constant social reflection from lots of interaction with friends, lovers, community members, antagonists, mentors, and even your bosses who control your salary. Everyone who means something to you. And through your life of social involvements, all these people will constantly reflect for you what’s working, what’s not, who you are now and who you need to stop acting like. In other words, you need to be honed and refined by the cultural reality of your times so that you become a person whose Feminine Self functions not in a vacuum of personal ideals, but in an enriched and informed social reality. I call this your social context and it is crucial for you in particular. It’s the omnidirectional screen on which you project your unique Feminine Self and her creative gifts. It gives you instant feedback on how far your light is shining. A healthy context doesn’t mean everyone likes you. It means an enriched, diverse populace of people coming in and out of your life and heart. And it means continually improving the quality of your presence and friendship with them.
During the first part of your life, you’re more of a satellite revolving around your particular issues. With time, you identify and work through some of them, coming to understand yourself better. You see how not addressing them has influenced your past choices and who you are today. Healing and transformation follow this, which leads to authentic wisdom. As your wisdom grows you begin to sense where your presence is needed by others, sometimes in the most surprising ways. If you choose to be available to help or guide others when asked to, you will find you need to modify yourself in some way to better serve others. This is not disingenuousness, it’s being flexible and prioritizing others over yourself. But if this fork in your road gives rise to confusion, fear, hurt, anger or pain, this becomes your next wave of growth toward fulfillment of your Feminine Dharma. You see, dealing with these ‘negative’ emotions are the bread-and-butter of your unfolding Feminine Self. As your Remembering and Embodiment Venus teaches us, true remembering pushes us through our false behaviors and negativity and into who we actually are. Avoidance is never a final answer, only a temporary Hold button. Each month’s increasing light of Venus shining to Earth signifies the increasing demand on us to be who we truly are, not just for ourselves but because the world needs that much from us now.
As its name suggests, your Phase works through two intertwined processes…
REMEMBERING means increasing your ability to understand yourself, your life and your choices, and identifying what works, who’s worthy of your time and how you’ll proceed. In this respect, your Phase is a lifelong dharmic workout to reconnect to your Feminine Self in ever-unfolding ways. If you aren’t fully devoted to remembering, or putting back together, who you can be, you force yourself into an over-reliance on your superficial self. For Venus, remembering is much more than re-assembling memories and re-connecting with left-behind parts. It’s taking responsibility for everything you are and can It’s remembering that you’re alive, that your life is precious, even amidst your limiting concepts and fearful shut-downs. Your Venus Phase states that this type of remembering is your spiritual discipline in order to be in the world in a better way. It means staying here, in your body, with others, on the planet, no matter what comes. To truly remember yourself in this way can be the most ecstatic experience of your life because you simultaneously transcend your fear and dive into your love at the same time.
Embodying means allowing life to unfold and accepting yourself right where you are. It asks that you immerse yourself in a desired quality, such as compassion, gratitude, intimacy, flow or devotion, and live it in your outer life. It also requires meeting all resistance to your immersion with equal fullness. It’s re-discovering that facet actually living inside of us, perhaps even physiologically (i.e., localizing pathological sadness to the kidneys or rage to the liver). Any residual resistance from the remembering process will arise as you go deeper in transforming negativity. This type of embodying requires a constant focus on taking into yourself that which you want to transform. Naturally, it’s an intimate thing to in-body something, especially if it’s frightening. But your increasing embodiment of who you are is the quality-control measure of your dharma. The more you inhabit the fullness of your experiences, the better an agent you become for higher expressions of feminine qualities/principles. Your embodied choice to act compassionately becomes compassion’s opportunity to move further into creation through you.
Together, Remembering and Embodying are an extraordinary team for going deeper in your body, back into your past or into your hidden gifts. It’s a wonderful litmus test of your wisdom. Each Remembering of your potential will dehydrate you if you don’t actualize it in your life beyond the conceptual level. And each Embodiment will stagnate if you avoid the inner work necessary to remember yourself. Seen in this light, they are two sides of the same coin, utterly dependent on one another to produce legitimate healing and growth of your Feminine Self. Your complete participation and full awareness is required.
VENUS & THE MOON
During your Phase, the Moon orbits around the Earth about six times, bringing her to a new meeting with Venus each month. A combination of factors, including the Earth-Venus and Earth-Moon distances, and their orbital relationships, produces an amazing phenomenon — every Venus- Moon meeting during your Phase occurs while the Moon is in her Crescent Phase. The Moon’s Crescent Phase is the first visible sliver that appears after the New (Dark) Moon which starts that cycle. The shared symbolism here is hard to ignore. Just as Venus is gaining in height, brightness and duration each night during your Phase, so does the Moon promise growth as a Crescent shape ‘scoops’, ‘holds’ or ‘absorbs’ light and energy. Fellow astrologer Michelle Gould writes:
“At the crescent phase, the moon’s light is slowly building, and new life must be nurtured and strengthened. You are called to move into the future while fighting the pull of the past. As you redefine yourself and renounce old roles and expectations, you may encounter opposition – from your environment, from others, from within yourself – to the person you are becoming.”(3)
This combined image – a Crescent Moon and a bright single star – is one of the most ancient and enduring celestial images in human memory. Most of the world’s religions and traditions incorporate it into their primary symbology, including Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, Judaism, Christianity and many others.
The Venus-Moon meeting closest to your birth represents the central theme of your feminine transformation.4 In addition, there are a number of other factors involved with accurately interpreting the Venus-Moon relationship within your Venus Phase.
There is a remarkable diversity in the monthly visual meetings of Venus and the Moon. On their own, each body possesses a wide range of appearances – based on brightness, viewing angle, and other astronomical factors. Their monthly meetings, in turn, are an ever-revealing – at times unpredictable – treat. This is partly due to the fact that their meetings – like any which involve the Moon – are brief encounters given the Moon’s fast speed through the zodiac. These are elegantly nuanced sky events, requiring a subtlety of perception on our parts.
Here are some of the considerations:
- The closer you were born to a Venus-Moon conjunction, the more precisely will its descriptions match you. Likewise, the further away from the conjunction, the more you will be a blend of qualities of the conjunction before and directly after your birth.
- When Venus and the Moon are visually close to one another, their strong alchemy makes you more attuned to the emotional reality of your environment and gives you greater intuitive access to your cultural, historic or even lineage memory.
- When Venus and the Moon are visually apart from one another, their weaker combined effect allows you to develop each one independently, to “see” each facet of your Feminine Self with greater clarity.
In the following two, short delineations, Venus represents you in your Feminine Dharma and the Moon represents the inherited or ancestral wisdom you carry. Prior to each meeting, the Moon met with the Sun as a New (Dark) Moon, became infused with that cycle’s new intention, then carried that information into her next meeting, as a first Crescent, with Venus. Thus, each evening sky conjunction infuses a brightening Venus and your Feminine Dharma with the growing energy of the lunar cycle as well.
- If Venus is direct and higher than the Moon, you can be an inspiration or a welcome presence for others, yet periodically lose connection to yourself.
- If Venus is direct and lower than the Moon, you may keep your feelings under the radar of others or work behind the scenes. You may wish to be recognized for what you’ve done, yet remain feeling unacknowledged or passed over.
