Coming Home To our Emotional Intelligence
Pisces Full Moon + Mercury Retrograde | Saturday 8.10.22 | 4:59am CST
Saturday’s full moon in Pisces serves odyssey energy. This is the feeling of indefinitely long soul searching journeys out at sea. The feeling of homesickness pulses from beneath the surface and we are called to honor our love and faithfulness to the things we’ve lost, or that call to us through the mists of time. There is a yearning that invites us to learn ourselves anew and refresh the way we look through the lens of our imaginations.
Six hours before this full moon, Mercury begins its retrograde (rx) phase, which lasts until oct 2. This indicates a katabasis —which is the Greek word for the mythical descent to the underworld. Mercury transfigures from communicator/messenger who makes things more comprehensible, to the psychopomp who guides us into and through the shadowy murk of hell, much of which is designed to exceed our intellect. Where communications have been smooth, we can expect the ghosts of the past to begin interrupting the present, and because Mercury stationed rx in Libra, we can expect it to get personal. Look to your interactions with your closest allies, friends, lovers, and enemies to find out where you need to pay attention to the past.
A Pisces full moon conjunct Neptune is a pro at projections, so stay aware of this and remember to find multiple outlets for exploring these ghosts and echoes of the past. Both Libra and Pisces thrive through creative acts and imaginative, aesthetic expressions. And everyone thrives when we are conscious of how we project our pasts onto one another. Remember that as much as you may see your past walking around you in the form of your loved and loathed ones, each one of these beings is a full self, also processing their full past. Honor folks in their own odysseys while you honor yourself in yours. Our relationships will be asking for attention and processing; just be sure to give yourself some space to play and laugh and create when those tasks feels crunchy.
The chart of this moon does point to a yearning to remake the self. Mercury stationed rx in close opposition to the currently rx Jupiter in Aries. This is a call to explore entirely different possibilities of who we imagine ourselves to be and how we craft the stories of who we are. How do we expand toward or contract away from one another through the stories we tell? How can we refine those narratives to honor all of the voices that make the story what it is? Remember that movies with flat villains are boring. Flesh out the stories of all the characters who participated in shaping who you are. Through Libra and Pisces we can find avenues of transformative justice, where everyone is given space to transform their behaviors as well as the systems that shaped them.
The feeling of Pisces is distinctly vast. Though it is Virgo season and both Libra and Virgo appreciate containable and manageable units of experience, Pisces humbles us here and brings in servings of emotions that may flood us at times. Often Virgo wants to get control or feel that the path forward is distinct and predictable, but Pisces is an ocean, and it simply cannot offer predictability.
It then becomes helpful to imagine how Pisces can invite Virgo toward compromise. Explore questions like: what are the realistic steps you can take to get closer to mystery with less overwhelm? What are some practices you can use to get back to a sense of agency in your body when you do become flooded with emotion? How can you create space to metabolize the full range of your emotions?
Ultimately Pisces plunges us into experiences that we have been lulled into forgetting, or that we have buried and dis-membered by forgetting willfully (whether that has occurred through our own choices or the choices of our ancestors). Pisces invites us to re-member. To achieve wholeness by placing back together what has been fragmented, whether the process is painful or pleasant. What Pisces does at its very best is hold space for the emergence of new shapes and beings when what was once discarded is re-integrated.
The Pisces myth follows the story of the innocent Aphrodite and Eros escaping from the destructive monster Typhon. It carries elements of madness, chaos, destruction, escapism, and salvation. We have a vast and shapeshifting narrative arc to explore under this full moon right within our very lives. Staying present with this rather than tuning out or numbing will transform our capacities to connect with ourselves and those around us —human and nonhuman beings alike. By staying connected and present for the full transformative cycle of our inner waters, we come home to the rhythm of our emotional intelligence and learn how to live with our waters rather than keep them at bay.