Everything In You That You Don't Need, You Can Let Go Of

Full moon at 4° of Leo

What I imagine my inner fire looks like when speaking

Thursday at 9:53am PST, the waxing moon peaks in fullness at 4° of Leo, fixed fire sign of the glorious flowering Self. Leo is ruled by the Sun, so it’s the most Sun sign of the sun signs. It’s season is the height of summer. It needs to laugh and sweat and shine and radiate. It is wildly free and endlessly creative and wants nothing more than to enjoy life and and stay loose and express its heart to the world. It appears to be one of the strongest signs; it’s associated with the Strength card in Tarot, and the majesty of the lion and big cat energy. But Leo’s strength comes from a full heart connected to its joy and pouring out love, so it also might be the most vulnerable sign. When we love that hard we open ourselves up, we are exposed to the experience of being seen and known and understood, and also misunderstood and rejected and hurt. Oh Leo. The older-kid-but-still-a-kid in us: enthusiastic to an uncool level, trying out freedom and self-esteem, singing its heart out, showing the world what it’s got, just trying to get a little praise for its praise. This world can be hard to be shiny in. The willingness of that kid to fail and keep going is kind of everything.

Leo stands opposite Aquarius on the Zodiac wheel, the hot embodied fire to its cool, heady, air-y imagination; the near sun to its distant starlight. There is so much emphasis right now on Aquarius, with Pluto and the Sun having just entered together and dramatically last weekend, another initiation drawing in an Aquarian age. Aquarius is group intelligence and group expression. It’s fixed air, so its energies are expanding inward on the mental plane, connecting us with the collective conscious, opening us to the unseen dream, helping us to imagine what it would take to create a more healed, more sane, more intentionally interconnected world. The Leo full moon is a temporary spotlight on the shadow or opposite of all that—on the individual, embodied self and its unbridled expression. It wants us to remember that healthy collectivity can be and must be balanced with healthy individuality. As we aim to be in right relationship with the group or collective, we need to be securely connected with our selves, with our own bodies and hearts and souls. We need to know our own preferences and style and be willing to be different, to value our differences. We need to recognize our personal strengths and develop our gifts enough to give them away, confident in their worth. Embodied agency is how we show up in a good way to relationships, to the group.

As I’m writing this, it occurs to me that Leo is the great shame healer. It teaches us to own the whole of who we are, the bad with the good, to see it all through the eyes of Love. It teaches us to straighten our spines and send some fire up them and fight back against a world that wants us to be different or somehow less. It teaches us how to love this specific life in this specific body, how to have some pride, how to risk being too much in order to be true. In doing all that, Leo restores us, and restores our personal power, over and over.

So here we are, at some kind of Leo peak, which could be a peak of the healing of our agency and personal power. A current of manifestation is coming to fruition that started back in August (The Fire Under Our Tongues), during that intense (!) Venus retrograde in Leo. Back then we were under a lot of astrological pressure to be a little more uncompromised in our self-expression, to heal from whatever was holding us back so we could enter the world more honestly and fully. This is a good time to review how far you’ve come and celebrate that. The Sabian symbol Leo 4° is something like “a formally dressed elderly man with trophies from a hunting expedition,” which is an image of conquering or besting one’s animal nature, having proved oneself over time, and being proud of achievements. So think of this as a moment to increase your faith in yourself and your courage by recounting and valuing your breakthroughs and achievements, especially in terms of getting freer and becoming more yourself. Celebrate your tangible progress individuating by looking backward. Remember what you were so afraid of six months ago, a year ago—what were your growth edges back then? How small and doable do they seem now?

All signs point to this being a very fiery year, in both creative and destructive ways. In two weeks the Chinese Year of the Wood Dragon begins, which could herald a lot of vitality and creativity. It’s also a big election year for those of us in the US, which—remember 2020? 2016? Yeah. So lots of fires in the collective that can’t be controlled, lots of anger and rage being incited and then manipulated, extreme difficulties forging and maintaining peace. It’s also a year when all the Mercury retrogrades will occur in fire signs—Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius—offering a deep review and healing of our relationship with our own personal fire. So we are just clocking all that on this first full moon of 2024. Whether we burn brightly or burnout this year is at least partially in our own hands. We are each responsible for learning to ignite and feed our own fire; to guard our energy and build our capacity; to somehow sustain the process of blossoming so that we can be what we are here to be, make what we are here to make, and give what we are here to give. Everything in you that you don’t need, you can let go of. That’s something Ram Dass says, and makes sound so effortless. Ask this full moon in Leo to help you get clear on what that is—what’s in you that you don’t need, that isn’t really you anymore—and then to slowly, steadily, joyfully, burn it away.

Ritual & Writing Prompts

(Disclaimer: Prompts are suggestions, not instructions. Play with what inspires you, ignore what’s doesn’t. Adapt in any way you see fit.)