Eclipses: Moving Beyond the Four Walls of the Known

(c)2009 by guest blogger, Jessica Shepherd of Moonkissd

Donna says:  I discovered this article, like so many other guest posts, by following a link in my blog stats.  I was quite moved at how beautifully poetic and profound it was.  It’s perhaps the best explanation of how eclipses affect us I’ve ever read–without being limited to any one specific eclipse.  Big thanks to Jessica for allowing me to reprint it here.  Here’s what she has to say:

I am not going to give you a destination. I can only give you a direction – awake, throbbing with life, unknown, always surprising, unpredictable. -Bagwan Shree Rajneesh

Eclipses make waves. Some are big waves like the sea at high tide; others are more like small ripples. In breaking waves, eclipse season can deliver difficult news, like the announcement of death or illness, or wondrous, a birth or true love. The ripples are quieter, but carrying no less impact, for if our life resembles a placid lake, emotional ripples can jar something loose within, deeply inside.

We may become unmoored by what we discover there. Whether we’re receiving messages from our unconscious, or a literal birth or death in our life, all eclipses beckon toward a distant and unknowable future.

 The degree to which we feel an eclipse varies person by person, but during eclipse season about this we can be certain: we’re tossed about on a sea of change and the messages we receive during this time will change our consciousness.

The shared commonality of all eclipse seasons is their soul-stretching nature -how they ask us to make room for something radically new and different in an area of life. Eclipses ask us to trust what presents, be it a loss, a gain, or a hard truth.

Predictively, eclipses also tend to be on-time presenting opportunities to move from zero to 60 mph in five seconds flat. It’s as if the chess Master moved a piece, check mate, and we suddenly find we’ve been picked up and moved two hundred feet ahead of where we were. The rapid quick fire nature of eclipses challenge us to keep pace with the growth that’s been laid out for us to take on next.

If you’re nodding your head to the above, your next question might be, how will this eclipse season affect me, and for how long? To understand the answer to that question, we have to go a little deeper into the houses of the birth chart. So let’s imagine.

We each have twelve houses in our birth chart and a pair of eclipses will neatly fall into two of those. Let’s back up a second. The birth chart’s houses actually look more like ‘rooms’ neatly representing each part of our life, so maybe it’s easier to picture your birth chart as a mansion with twelve rooms, each containing a sign (or more), and each connected to a sister room across the hall – which will also happen to be the opposite sign.

An eclipse set happens in pairs. That is, a solar and lunar eclipse, will span two rooms (technically, houses) of your birth chart for duration of two weeks on either side of the lunar and solar eclipse for a grand total of four to six weeks, or so. I say ‘or so’ because these flash in the pan eclipse effects will reverberate for up to the next 18 months. Like a loud and uninvited relative descending on your space, the eclipses visit for a brief time – those four to six weeks – yet they will leave a lasting impression.

Here’s another analogy for understanding eclipse season. Let’s say you haven’t really been paying attention to these particular room(s) in your house. Maybe due to no fault of your own, you’ve been letting clothes pile up in the corner, throwing spare furniture that you didn’t know what to do with in this room, and the sister room directly across this one is taking the overflow.

As you’ve been busy doing other things, you’ve forgotten about these two rooms. Now these rooms require your immediate attention. Eclipses do cosmic clean-up duty and may exist to literally help you clean house. As those flickering lights of the eclipses turn off and turn on, the shadows loom larger, and everything your room contains pops out in high relief. What will you see there?

This runs the gamut, and depends on the houses, the signs, or even the planet the eclipse touches off. Here’s a sampling of what you might discover: forgotten dreams, abandoned shadow pieces of your self, a need for awareness, a need for healing, a need for an attitudinal shift. It may start as something like this: a spare tire around your belly, a desire to go back to school, someone you forgot to be, a death to mourn, a birth to celebrate, a romantic interest, a partner’s identity crisis (which rolls over into your marriage).

This brings up the point that since both houses of the birth chart will be eclipsed, there’s a sort of rollover effect. What happens in one also affects the other. Knowing the signs, houses and planets which the eclipses aspect in your chart de-mystify eclipse season, but beyond that eclipses still remain an enigma – unpredictable.

Unpredictable & Shocking

Eclipses carry the signature of Uranus – shocking, surprising and unexpected. They’re a wild card in the horoscope, a predictive astrologers enigma and maybe a psychological astrologers dream. Eclipses are unpredictable.  Use adjectives like wild, exciting, dramatic, unknowable and of course, emotional and you’ve captured the bewildering feeling of an eclipse.

Talk like this to someone who is already feeling uncertain or anxious and you’ve probably triggered a host of insecurity and fears, too. Fear of the unknown is very real around eclipse season. There are a lot of unknowns in the air, and that’s a lot to sit with. Yet sit with it we must. We can do other things, too. We can orient our self toward the positive opportunity to grow. By free-associating the possibilities that could happen with the houses and planets aspected we can expand beyond our same old four walls.

We can voluntarily become ready to willingly give up, toss out, or clean up a certain way of being that is no longer serving our growth. If we’re honest, we might sense that we need to stretch our wings in a new direction in a area of our life. By feeling the live wire energy of eclipses we can allow the live wire energy of eclipses to mobilize us. We may even do something out of character and radical. This may be a good thing. It’s certainly a good thing to notice, but do we need to act on that idea to move to Panama today? Maybe we do.

Read about the eclipses by house and sign.

People, things, ideas pop up on our radar and these may very well be exactly what they promise. Yet we must always remember the ‘unpredictable’ part of eclipses. For some of us, it’s a great idea to follow that wild hair impulse, and for others of us we can lose traction with reality.

Especially regarding new ventures – like marriage, business contracts, moving house etc. – my rule of thumb is: if an opportunity presents itself during eclipse season, sit with it. Don’t be so quick to act. I’ve found that the way I best flow with eclipse season is to receive, sit with what the season brings. Even though eclipses can move you light years ahead in a heartbeat, eclipses are of the Moon. Lunar intuition precedes action. Another lunar lesson: nothing can happen out there without being fully alive in-here, first. The outer exists as a mirror of the inner.

History, Repeating

Finally, during eclipse season we may find our self in crisis in direction or plagued by unknowns and unknowables. The unknown is only scary because it hasn’t happened yet – or has it?

 Eclipses repeat every 9 1/2 and 19 years so if we’re looking for clues about what’s happening today, and how to ‘get it right’ this time, we can go back in time and root out similar themes in the story. This story has probably occurred in a different variation 9 1/2 or 19 years before.

The story isn’t exactly the same, but the themes repeat. Eclipse cycles repeat the same journey, so we can reach a new level of growth and mastery over an area or issue in our life. They also offer a chance for healing – if we’re ready for a new level of empowered expression, eclipses offer that too. If the walls have started to close in on us, that’s a sign that we’re ready for change. Eclipses bring those ‘ripe’ issues we’re ready to finally deal with out of the closet and into the light of day.

Here are some eclipse survival notes I’ve compiled over the years. 

As mysterious as eclipse season can be we don’t need to be fearful of change. We also don’t need to be in the dark about how to respond. We have the light of consciousness on our side so that we stray neither too far North or too far South.

Eclipses may challenge us to hold center and release what’s no longer true for us for the exciting unknowable future. The changes emotionally stretch us but I’ve noticed that if you look for the opportunity to grow and heal and be present during this time, the Universe will respond in kind. We can always choose to stay in balance with our soul’s wish to experience exactly this.

What Jessica says about herself: I am a counselor, astrologer, and teacher living in Fairfax, CA who has studied astrology since 1992. My heartfelt astrological intention for each astrological or counseling session is to name and expand the creative potential and possibility inherent to each unique person and each unique moment. I believe astrology can help you create a truly magical life and that’s why I wrote A Love Alchemist’s Notebook: Magical Secrets for Drawing Your True Love Into Your Life. My other publications include: Sex & Soul Mates columnist for Constellation Magazine, Venus & Beyond: Love On the Outer Planets blog at astrology.com, Saptarishi’s Astrology, Sasstrology.com and more writing right here. moonkissd@moonkissd.com