Welcome to eclipse season friends! This journal shares a transcript of the third episode in our Lunar Series. In preparation for our first eclipse of 2024, we'll explore the significance of eclipses, their disruptive nature, and how they can propel us onto unexpected paths.

Listen to the full episode.

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of The Designed Life Podcast. I want to start this month by asking you about your relationship with conflict. That question might sound loaded right off the bat, but I'm asking because many of us have an aversion to conflict or a kind of disorganized relationship with what conflict means, what it represents, and how to work with it when it arises. We're not really taught how to work with our emotions in a way that is productive, especially our most difficult emotions like anger, jealousy, guilt, or shame. These emotions usually come with or are surrounding feelings of conflict or experiences of conflict. So, I want you to start this month by exploring what conflict means to you and what your relationship to conflict has looked like in the past. Also, consider how you might be interested in seeing it evolve and change for yourself and your relationships.

We have some lunations this month that can cause a little bit of disruption or discord. In those experiences, I don't necessarily think our true selves are being shown, but I do think that it shows where we are most supported in ourselves, and those moments illuminate where we feel most abandoned, either by ourselves or by others. It's important to recognize those parts of ourselves because when we are in conflict, those are heightened experiences that test our inner reserves. So, how can we spend more time with those parts of ourselves that might need more support? Or might need us to really show up so that when we do experience conflicts, as we always will or experience difficult emotions or difficult experiences, or you know, things that cause friction, we feel more resourced. We feel like we've got our backs a little bit more, and we feel like we have more tools in our toolbox to be able to move forward with those uncomfortable situations with a little more grace and like we're holding ourselves; we're a little more self-possessed.

Now, let's get into the lunations of this month and what this all means for the coming weeks and why I'm specifically talking about conflict right off the bat and how it's probably not going to be as bad as it might potentially sound.

So, the first lunation of the month is a new moon in Pisces on March 10th. It's at 20° of Pisces, so if you have any planets that are at 20° of Pisces, Cancer, Scorpio, or the other mutable signs such as Gemini, Sagittarius, and Virgo, you might be feeling this new moon more. But, you know, we talked about Pisces Energy a little bit last month when I was discussing the full moon in Virgo. Pisces Energy, as an archetype, is, you know, it's the last sign of the Zodiac. It's the most connecting of the signs. It really wants us to feel the dissolving of our ego. It's the part of ourselves that feels really connected to the larger picture, the larger experience as a whole. It's the part of ourselves that is deeply connected to empathy and the experience of other people or other things and what other people might be feeling, being able to walk in another person's shoes, for example. It's also the part of ourselves that is really imaginative and kind of visionary.

The challenging part about Pisces that we might sometimes experience in ourselves is when we feel, you know, a little impractical or elusive, or we might want to, you know, run away from situations or run away from difficult, challenging moments. It's an energy that can sometimes easily be confused, symbolized by the two fishes spinning in a circle. So sometimes it can feel like we're going in circles trying to understand or get to the bottom or the truth of something. And we can lose ourselves really easily in this energy. But now a new moon in Pisces is really kind of beautiful because it allows us to tap into these parts of ourselves where we can be really imaginative and we can see outside of ourselves to a bigger vision of what's possible. And we can start to envision how we can be more connected to, you know, the larger purpose, the larger experience that we're perhaps seeking in this lifetime. Now the thing about this particular new moon is that it is sextile Uranus and Taurus.

So there's something also about wanting to be a little disruptive or to really think outside the box, to really have big ideas of what is possible. So what I would love for you to do with this new moon is to perhaps set down some ideas or some intentions, or even do some art, do a little drawing, do a little painting, do a little creating, do a little collage. You know, whatever feels good, that feels a little bit free form. You can, you know, free write about where you envision your life moving. What would be the biggest, most grand version of your experience in a felt sense? So if you're imagining your life right now and how your life feels right now, how would you most want it to feel on a regular basis? I'm not talking about concrete like I'm going to write a book in 10 years or something. I want you to think about what is the felt experience that you want to have on a daily basis. Do you want to feel energized and enlivened and motivated? Do you want to feel peaceful and useful and connected? What is the kind of undercurrent vibration that you want to have on a regular basis, and then from there, maybe if there are practical steps that you can implement now, go ahead and write those down.

But you know this day, this new moon is a really great day to daydream and to get a little loose with reality. Maybe just let yourself stare at the sky and the clouds, or the ceiling, or you know, get lost in a great fiction book or mystery and just allow yourself to kind of let go of the material world and see where it is that you go with your imagination. And that felt experience that you can bring back to making your daily life feel really, really good. You know our lives can get really swept away on a day-to-day basis with the things that we have to do and all the tasks we have and people to take care of, and it can be really easy just to get lost in the movement of our day today. But if every once in a while, we just take a few minutes to or even a few hours, you know, whatever time you have, to explore what feels really, really nourishing and feels really good and feels really healing, we can more easily access that felt experience on a regular basis because we know what it feels like.

This part of your chart has been getting a lot of attention because Saturn is now in Pisces and will be for the next couple of years. And Neptune has also been here. So this is already being activated, and you might already be exploring, you know, what does your experience of letting go of your identity or your ego actually look like and also what do fluid boundaries mean? You know, what does it mean to feel outside of our own bodies and also let go of predisposed ideas of what we need to be doing or what we should be doing, and invite more fluidity into our lives. So how have you been already accessing more of that free-flowing kind of felt experience, and how can you invite more of that ease, that natural organic movement of energy into your life on a more regular basis?

After you've kind of come down from whatever lucid trip that this new moon might be taking us on, I don't think it's going to be that crazy, but I do really invite you to kind of tap into your imagination that day and then once you step out of that deep visualization meditation or whatever it is and you come back to reality, settle the ideas down on paper. Get them down concretely because there's this really great Mercury sextile Pluto arrangement. So if you can write down and get clear or even verbalize—Mercury is all about communication—the feelings and what it is that you want to tap into more regularly. It'll feel really empowering and it'll grow. It'll grow really naturally with the energy of the new moon. Again, it'll be on March 10th, 20° of Pisces. A very nice, beautiful new moon to work with. Nice dreamy energy.

Now, after that new moon, we have our first eclipse of the year. And since this is our first eclipse of the year, and this is the first time I'm talking about eclipses, I want to give a little preface for what eclipses mean. So every time we enter into Eclipse season - you might hear people talking about Eclipse season a lot - it just means that there are two eclipses that have been within a two-week time span. There are always two eclipses that happen at once as a full moon eclipse and then a new moon eclipse. And they usually happen in opposing signs because they're connected to the lunar nodes, which are mathematical points in the sky. And the energy that eclipses bring, again if you think back to the origins of humanity, and if there was an eclipse in the sky that we could actually visualize or see, it would be our main source of light. Either the sun or the moon being darkened momentarily, and that would be terrifying, right? It might seem like a really, really scary moment because our sources of light are everything. They're what give us life. They're what propel us into our natural cycles, and we need the light in order to live. So if that light is temporarily darkened, it might feel like there's a blotting out of our life force energy.  

Now, not to say that that's going to be everyone's experience every time that there's an eclipse, but there is something about changing direction or shifting our life force energy. Eclipses are disruptive by nature, and they're surprising by nature and maybe even a little bit shocking or uncomfortable by nature. And so, when we enter into an eclipse season, it's important to recognize that these are going to be shifting times. It might not affect everyone directly in a really disruptive way, but collectively we're all going to be experiencing some sort of shift in energy, so I don't recommend working with Eclipse Energy in the way that we would traditionally work with a new and full moon, but I would recommend being very mindful and observant during times of eclipses because. It's almost like we're. We're throwing everything up in the air and then just seeing where it falls again. It's kind of a roll of the dice. There are things that we can potentially predict or themes that we can recognize will likely show up for all of us, depending on where the Eclipse lands in your chart and what archetypal energy or hat sign it's connected to, but for the most part it's disruptive. And the disruptive experiences that we're going to have will put us onto a new path or course that we likely did not anticipate or experience.  

So this first eclipse of the year is in Libra. It's at 5° of Libra and it happens on March 24th. The full moon lunar eclipse at the South Node. Let's talk about each of those things. So first, we just talked about eclipses and what they mean: big disruptions, big changes, big shifts, perhaps eclipsing out of energy. It's a South Node eclipse. So again, the eclipses always happen at the North and South nodes. So what does that mean? The South node is usually connected to some sort of release or letting go or temporarily putting something to the side. The nodes used to be historically considered the tail and the head of a dragon, and the South node is the tail of the dragon. So it's everything that we're letting go of and shedding, whereas the North node is everything that we're reaching for and we're hungry for and devouring and incorporating. So this particular eclipse has something to do with shedding and releasing and making space for some kind of new energy to enter into your life. And it's in the sign of Libra.  

We've already had an eclipse in the sign of Libra on October 14th of 2023, so you can think back to anything that came up around that time in your life. Any particular release, any particular shifting of energy, and that's likely going to be connected to this eclipse. When we're talking about Libra, we're talking about our relationships. We're talking about how we bond and connect with others. It's our social urge and energy. It's ruled by the planet Venus, so it's also about our values, our ethics, what we find to be beautiful, what we magnetize and attract into our lives. So it inherently doesn't matter where this eclipse falls in your chart, there's going to be some sort of reorganizing around relationships and connection. Likely something about how you potentially compromise yourself for the sake of keeping peace with others. It might also bring up experiences or your relationship to conflict. Which is again, why I brought that up at the beginning of the podcast. And also how you balance your needs and values and relationships while also taking care of other people's needs and values. You know, there's something here about how we need to show up to keep peace and to advocate for peace and to fight for peace, but also how we may over compromise. And so I want you to just observe around this eclipse, how and where you give away your power? And how and when you give away your perspective or your needs or your sense of self to maintain some sort of harmony and balance, and alternatively where you might not be compromising enough. In order to create some sort of compromise in your relationships, what discord or what conversations are you having around your relationships? What's your experience around your relationships around this time of the month and how is it that you're expressing yourself? And also how you might also make space for others exploring that harmony and that balance. Additionally, there might be experiences of how you relate to disharmony and discomfort, and things that you don't value that might be kind of brought up to the surface and brought to a space where you have to look at it and have to see it so that you can understand your relationship to it.

Either way, I say take your time around this day, around March 24th. Pay attention to what's coming up in your relationships. Allow yourself to observe, just with a little bit of a keen eye, a little bit of mindfulness rather than, you know, making decisions, being reactive to whatever the experience is. This is the beginning of the eclipse season. So we'll have two more weeks of being in this energy before we hit the Eclipse in Aries on April 8th. Just pay attention, allow yourself to kind of be with whatever comes up. I highly recommend journaling, putting things down on paper, allowing yourself to process, and then when you really feel like you've reached an equilibrium, you can address whatever conflicts or whatever disharmony is starting to show up in your relationships.

This is also a really good time to again explore your relationship to conflict. What does it feel like to be in conflict? How does your body react? Whenever we're talking about the moon here, which that's all we're talking about on this podcast and these lunation episodes, we're talking about the body; we're talking about our somatic experience. So what does conflict feel like in your body? What does conflict with yourself feel like? What does conflict with others feel like? How do you physically react and respond, and how have you managed conflict in yourself and with others in the past in a way that you really love and you really value, and you're like that's how I want to show up when I'm in conflict, that is the person I want to be? And if there is room for improvement, maybe do a little research on nonviolent communication or conflict resolution, listen to some podcasts, pick up some tools. It's a really fantastic time to explore how conflict resolution, how resolving conflict can be strengthened in yourself and in your relationships. Again, not to say that conflicts are necessarily going to arise, but because we're talking about Libra and we're talking about relationships and we're talking about release or making space and relationships, and we're talking about disruptive energy, it's possible that this could all happen. And so I want you to be prepared, whether it be around this particular eclipse or just in the future in general. We are social species. We have to interact with one another, and because we have to interact with one another, we are going to be confronted with conflicts at some point in our relationships. So what does that mean for you? What does that look like for you, and how can you learn more about conflict and discomfort in relationships and being vulnerable in relationships so that you can show up in those moments? Again, being really well-resourced and really taken care of?

So this month is very much about boundaries and dissolving boundaries, setting boundaries, communicating boundaries. You know, it's about our needs and ideals and our visions and what we really value and what we really want to connect to. Pisces is very unifying, and Libra is all about connection. So there is something about how we connect to one another, how we connect to our larger ideals, and how we can infuse those things together to create, to create harmony, to create ease, to create healing, and to create more space for empathy with one another.

Even though it might be a month that is, you know, a little dissolving and perhaps a little disruptive, it's also a really, really great opportunity to explore how to create connection where there's been disruption, how to heal when there's been separation or, you know, potential harm, and how to move forward with more compassion, with more clarity, with more fluid boundaries and the ability to connect and be, you know, empowered in that connection.

So I am wishing you all a very, very beautiful month. Please let me know how your experiences go with the eclipse and with that New Moon, that really fun Pisces Moon. Maybe not fun, but dreamy, imaginative new moon in Pisces. Again, we have all the resources to figure out where these particular lunations fall for you and on your chart on the website. You can go to thelifedesign.co and check out resources underneath the astrology tab. There's everything there for you to figure out what area of life Pisces rules for you, what area of life Libra rules for you, and where these lunations are likely going to be activating your life.  

Additionally, I didn't mention this with the Libra Eclipse, but if you have any other planets at 5° of an air sign, so in Gemini or Aquarius, you might really be feeling this. Additionally, if you have any other planets at 5° of a cardinal sign, so Cancer, Capricorn, and Aries, you might really be feeling this particular eclipse, so again let us know how these lunations land for you and if these questions, these resources have been helpful. You can always reach out to us. We'd love to hear from you. Otherwise, we'll catch you back here next month where I will be talking about the solar North node, new moon eclipse in Aries and the full moon in Scorpio. Until then, have a beautiful month. Sending you lots of really good vibes for these lunations and catch you in the next one.