Tonight's Full Moon And Lunar Eclipse Will Give You The Strength To Let Go

It'll be redder than you expect it to be, and darker. It will feel a little too close, too intimate, too all-knowing, uncomfortable—but, maybe you're into that. By that, I mean discomfort, that tense place between what's familiar and what the future has got to offer: a hesitancy to settle, an inability to leave. You've felt it coming for a long while now, this revelatory light, this Big Moon Energy. Like a juggernaut of self-revelation, of the things you knew you knew but acted like you didn't. It's rolled right into your eye-line and, now, there's nowhere else to look.

This Leo Lunar Eclipse, this blood moon, is a leonine thing, by which I mean there's deep feline energy—the hunt, the ego, and one's pride (pride as in integrity, pride as in family). And, I am behooved in the spirit of referential logic, and with the knowledge that eclipses are not singular events, to offer you this Fleetwood lyric: Dreams unwind, love's a state of mind. Love's a state of mind, reader, and, like most things, what we love changes as much as we are changed by what we love. You might think this is about romance or something else you've been taught is worth obsessing over. And, it might be, if that's all you think you've got to sort out but I think you're wrong. I think that what's at stake here is buried deep at the core of each and every one of us.

The asteroid Ceres features big in this lunar eclipse, as she has generally done in the past few months. This is the goddess who gave us winter, who took all harvest, all new life from this Earth because she mourned the rape and abduction of her daughter. There are many of us who have, one way or another, inherited a grief like that. Those who know what it is like to bear the weight of darkness. But, grief need not be your albatross, reader. Grief has the gift of sight inside of it, of understanding life's precarity, its sacred joy. In small, mundane ways, and in large ones too, this eclipse cycle has been bent on teaching us to recognize how we regard the things and people we value. If you have felt yourself running late and missing opportunities, running your mouth and having it backfire, running out of time to do right by those you care for (including children), running out of patience with people who are more often sorry than they are safe—these are keys, these are moments that want to teach you about transformation.

It's officially Aquarius season but the full moon is in Leo and the chart for this lunar eclipse puts the north node within Cancer and the MC too. Don't be surprised if all the compartments you've created, for all the feelings you don't know how to feel, break open. Don't be surprised if what you find inside is a story much simpler than the one you've been telling yourself, the one that fueled your ego or championed your extraordinary chaos. Here, the answer is the one you've been avoiding all along: In order to get to the next level and out of the maze, you've got to surrender to what you feel—lie down in it—know it and call it by its real name.

It might overwhelm you if you haven't been in training this whole time, it might make you feel like you're just not strong enough to hold together both your everyday life, and this, too. Okay, then don't hold it all, let go. Imagine the thing that hounds you, imagine a bright red coal shining in your chest that you grip in a tight fist even though it burns. Imagine unfurling one finger, imagine unfurling another. A question of self-assessment and self-forgiveness, an echoing of Eclipse cycles, this lunar eclipse wants us to be aware of all the earthly matter we've positioned between us and the light we need to shine. What wound do you tear open again and again to have control over the pain you feel? What values have you taken on as your own while distancing yourself from what feeds your spirit? What empowering boundaries did you forgo making out of fear of abandonment? When have you let your ego masquerade as your sorrow? If you have chosen a weaker version of yourself to believe in, if you have convinced yourself that you can't survive your own self, If you ache to love more, to be strong in your resistance, to protect this (supposedly wild and precious) life, reader, you've got to change your mind.