"Disease is inertia. Healing is movement. If you put the body in motion, you will change."—Gabrielle Roth
How often have you tried to think your way into a new state of being or belief, or tried to think yourself into feeling healed? Thoughts are amazing tools for many things in life: planning, research, analysis. But often, when it comes to fully shifting our experience of ourselves, they are only part of the process—and sometimes not even the place to start.
For example, years ago I was really struggling with hearing any kind of career calling; I was at a job that used my talents only marginally, though its grassroots focus aligned with my values. I remember speaking to an older, wiser friend about how I had no idea what I was meant to do, no idea what would be ‘perfect’. I was afraid of getting just stuck again.
This loop of ‘I don’t know’ felt like a permanent glitch in my psyche. My friend said to me, “You can’t think yourself into knowing what will fit; you have to actually try things. They don’t have to be forever; you can always look for something else. But until you actually try the jobs that interest you, you can never know if they’re right or not.”
To heal my career-calling inertia, my stalled creativity, my fear of ‘getting stuck for the rest of my life’, I had to move out of the realm of thought. Because my thoughts about how stuck I felt were not helping me. My imagination was not even helping much, since any fantasy jobs came with a sense of being too far from my reality, and were therefore too ‘risky’. I had to move into the realm of ‘applied science’, or actually, tangibly trying things, to heal my perception of stuckness, and to heal my beliefs about creativity’s place in my life.
Admittedly, ‘healing’ can be a vague term. Same with ‘creativity’, though you may actually think of it too narrowly: as a rare gift that applies to ‘everyone else’, but not you.
Yet healing and creativity—perhaps even teaching yourself to heal your relationship to your creativity, or healing your relationship to your mind through creative means—look like themes of this weekend’s Virgo New Moon and partial solar eclipse. This New Moon occurs Sunday, Sept. 13 at 2:41 am EDT, when the Sun and Moon conjoin in the same degree of late Virgo.
Unfortunately, this partial solar eclipse will only be visible from the southern portion of Africa, the Indian Ocean and Antarctica. Eclipses generally happen in pairs, however, (sometimes we get three) and the corresponding total lunar eclipse on Sept. 27 will be visible from North and South America, skies permitting.
What opens up Sunday is a two-week period in which time can seem to condense, in terms of how you may be able to move some part of your life forward. The weeks between eclipses often have a sense of being removed from the normal rhythm of life. It’s a good time to consciously set new, desired patterns, and to slide into any unusual opportunities that emerge.
Astrologically, some eclipses carry a signature of releasing something that has run its course or that holds you back; others indicate a chance to move toward what could be described as your true purpose in life. You can see how those two concepts work in tandem: often we must let go of the old to make room for the new.
Yet they don’t always happen in that order—kind of like how you might not realize it’s time to list an old chair on Craigslist until after you’ve gotten your new couch. Suddenly the living room is cramped, and it occurs to you nobody really liked sitting in that old chair, anyway.
Virgo is an earth sign ruled by Mercury. The Sun and Moon conjoined there relate to harmony between your conscious and unconscious expressions of what goes on in your mind, through physical or tangible means. That is, it’s an image of actually doing something with your awareness in the 3D world. Even if the actions are small, they serve the larger purpose of subverting inertia. Small movements still count as change.
Opposite the Sun and Moon is Chiron in Pisces. Chiron emphasizes the themes of healing, teaching and service already present in the New Moon and eclipse, bringing them into clearer focus. It does so from the realm of imagination and desire: wanting to heal and to move forward is the first step; it just can’t be the last one.
Several minor planets that align with the New Moon and Chiron amplify the message: do not let yourself get tricked into thinking you can never ‘fix’ yourself if you feel broken. That sense of stuckness is ‘just’ in your head, and other astrological factors suggest it may be easier to move forward mentally if you put yourself physically, energetically in motion first.
Sometimes, to step out of the chaos of Monkey Mind, we just need some outside help—a teacher, a mentor, a wise friend. Sometimes we need to buy the couch first, then ditch the chair. Sometimes we need to move the body first for healing to occur, and let the mind follow.
