New Moon

This week marks both the beginning of a 3 week Mercury Retrograde in Pisces, and Wednesday’s New Moon at 15 Pisces, conjunct Neptune, the ruler of Pisces—doubly emphasizing the theme of the mystic poet, dreaming monk, psychic channel, and ecstatic dancer. This cycle invites you to express divinely inspired creativity as well as to explore your ability to give and receive compassion and unconditional love. Synchroncities should increase, tarot cards should unveil the mysteries, mythical, archetypal, and transpersonal studies will connect the soul to the core patterns of the collective unconscious.

Mercury Retrograde begins on the last degree of the zodiac, 29 Pisces Tuesday, and he turns direct on March 28th at 16 Pisces. With Mercury conjunct worldbridging shaman and wounded healer Chiron, this cycle asks us to consider the thresholds in our lives we are currently crossing. Like the end of any season, a season of our lives may be torn open now, a wound may have ruptured, to birth a new desire and find our original voice—our own unique path of repair.

March represents old man Winter, whose thin belly masks a hidden pregnancy, fertile with Persephone’s promise of floral return in Spring. Changes are fermenting. Some part of us is thinning, shedding, making space for a mysterious fruit to ripen. Piscean Mercury conjunct Chiron asks us to journal, to memoir, to collect the medicinal insight of the last few months, and even the whole last astrological year. We can also Vision Board the Spring Season or the remainder of the year and use principles of the Law of Attraction to magnetize an emergent reality we desire.

We all need to give ourselves what Julia Cameron describers in her book, The Right to Write. We need the time to go within and excavate, In your journal, ask:
At which threshold am I now standing? At this time in my life, what am I leaving and Where am I about to enter?
What is preventing me from crossing my next threshold? What gift or blessing would help carry me across this threshold? Ask your dreams and the Spirit -world for they will reveal the treasure you seek.

With Pisces/Neptune we have to watch the tendency to be distracted by fantasy, to swirl about aimlessly, to give in to apathy and nebulous confusion. We have to raise awareness regarding these shadows as well as excessive escapism or oversaturation in media.

Yet the right media in the right proportion can elevate our consciousness so has there been spiritual film, fiction, or poetry calling your soul?

One of the best ways of ritualizing this New Moon and Mercury Retrograde is to commit strongly to your meditation practice, since Vesta, archetype of devotion to the sacred, is also conjunct Neptune and the New Moon.

Consider
1. Imagine the body as completely hollow, a totally empty space, the void, able to receive all. Breathe deeply into this shunyata / void and experience the fullness within the emptiness

2. In Japanese Shintoism, all of nature is imbued with Kami – indwelling spirits. Recognize that Shiva – the Awareness in you – is the same Awareness in every being you perceive. Move through your day acknowledging the pulse of consciousness, the Kami, and divine spark in every thing, even those things, people, events your ego may find repulsive. Look with equanimity, with no preference, with acceptance and embrace of all as the same vibrating Awareness.

3. Deity Yoga – Envision a deity or Ascended Master that you connect with at this time. Picture every element of them as clearly as possible in your mind and begin to breathe with their body. If you know the mantra for the deity, then repeat this mantra and allow yourself to completely dissolve in the deity.

Meditation music for your journeys:
my albums –Samavesa, Sustain, and Islands, in Digital Mist

Talks by Zen Master DT Suzuki

Inspirations form Mythologists and Poets:
The works of Michael Meade; John O Donohue, David Whyte

“May the one you long for long for you. May your dreams gradually reveal the destination of your desire. May a secret Providence guide your thought and nurture your feeling. May your mind inhabit your life with the sureness with which your body inhabits the world. May your heart never be haunted by ghoststructures of old damage. May you come to accept your longing as divine urgency. May you know the urgency with which God longs for you.”

O’Donohue, John. To Bless the Space Between Us