How We Heal

Full moon at 4° of Scorpio

Tuesday at 4:48pm PT, the moon peaks in fullness at 4° of Scorpio, our dark queen of strong feelings. A Scorpio full moon is a lot. The moon is in her fall here, and gets easily overwhelmed, as Scorpio’s intensity fundamentally opposes the moon’s nature and her call for gentle, incremental change. It’s especially(!) a lot to have a Scorpio full moon be the kicker to a very intense eclipse season/Mercury retrograde double feature, that culminated (but is still happening/reverberating?) in a total solar eclipse in Aries at the exact degree of Chiron, activating our deepest, most enduring wounds. Aries and Scorpio share a ruler—Mars, planet of primal lifeforce and action and fighting. Mars continues to be in Pisces on this full moon, receiving spiritual warriorship lessons, where the only action it’s freely allowed to take is surrender. More and more I’m seeing this spring’s opening astrology as a particularly profound healing of Mars, necessary to initiate this year of fiery transformation. We’ve been confronted with some painful truths about our defenses. Some of the ways we have protected ourselves from getting hurt have ultimately hurt us and others, and we are being asked to take responsibility for all the ways we’ve been contributing to our own suffering by deepening into our old patterns of protection and defensive disconnection.

If you feel like you’ve been in a six-week long healing ceremony, I hear you, and that’s exactly what’s been going on. You have every right to be exhausted, to be turning down all advice that is not from the Nap Ministry. I have been receiving some crazy lessons in how to protect myself and the people and world I love more fiercely while also keeping my heart wide open, and I am good for now, I would like some time to integrate. I am over here trying to conjure a bed of moss to sleep and snack on for the rest of Taurus season. But our practice is to be in the river of what’s happening now, to accept it and breathe into it instead of resisting. Right now, where we are it is this gorgeous, terrifying, holy blessing of a Scorpio full moon. The only option is, as I’ve said, to actively surrender, to go even deeper, and it really is ok; this full moon has something important for us, that’s going to tie all this healing together.

Full moons are times of creative tension between opposing energies or archetypes, between the Zodiac sign the Sun is in—and our expanding consciousness, divine mind and Soul calling—and where the Moon is, and our sensing, feeling, physical bodies and our subconscious intelligence. The Sun has just entered Taurus, sign of fixed earth, stabilizing connecting roots, pleasurable nourishment, and generative creativity. The Moon is opposite all that in Scorpio, sign of fixed water, destabilizing emotional currents, the sacred work of feeling and tending grief and suffering, and the fierce bonds forged through facing death and our radical vulnerability. This opposition might reflect a way we feel split right now: a part of us is longing for the calm, solid ground of Taurus, which is technically right here beneath our feet; we want to focus on beauty and feeling good, on gathering resources and creating. Another part of us is underwater, being drawn further down into our Scorpion depths, into our painful history and present, personal, ancestral, and collective, and all there is to feel about it. As with all full moons, the invitation is to hold the tension between these two sides, and avoid any tendencies to simplify things or dismiss the inconvenient shadow side. Over time, we learn what we can about how we might integrate polarities, to experience more of our wholeness.

The wisdom of the Taurus/Scorpio pair of archetypes is reflected in Peter Levine’s favorite analogy for trauma and healing.¹ Peter Levine created Somatic Experiencing, a modality for healing the traumatized nervous system, and he is one of my most cherished teachers. Peter talks about the stream of life, and draw it as a kind of river: the stream is our ordinary experience of life, and our natural free-flowing lifeforce. Trauma—both event trauma, as is pictured here with some shocking lightning bolts, and the trauma of cumulative stress and overwhelm—is like a breach in the shore of that life stream, a rupture in its containing boundary, and that rupture creates an opening and starts to pull our lifeforce out of the stream, into this swirling eddy we call the Trauma Vortex.

We’ve all been there. A lot of our energy gets bound up in the Trauma Vortex, and until that breach is healed or repaired and that energy reintegrated, a large part of us is just circling in our trauma and pain and fear, constantly being triggered, re-living it, reinforcing it, unable to get back to the free-flowing stream. Peter teaches that to begin the process of healing, we first need to create a Counter Vortex. Others have called it a Healing Vortex, Resilience Vortex, or Stability Vortex. It’s a vortex of countervailing energy that pulls us back into the stream of life. If the Trauma Vortex is made up of stress cues and triggers for memories of getting hurt, the Counter Vortex is made up of safety cues, resources, sparks of calm joy, tiny moments awe.

Trauma Vortexes are very strong—we are fundamentally designed for survival, so we default to noticing danger and stress. And once we are in the Vortex, our mind and its defenses can’t stop thinking about it, and the more we think about it, the more doom we generate. The nervous system doesn’t really distinguish between an inner imagined event and an outer one really happening, so we are essentially retraumatizing ourselves. But our body and psyche also have many tricks for getting us through, many sophisticated ways of taking care of us, including splitting off our traumatic experiences from consciousness—dampening them temporarily or dissociating them entirely. Sometimes we don’t even know there is a Trauma Vortex there, we only know we don’t feel that stream of life fully. And, of course, sometimes all we know is the Trauma Vortex; we can’t seem to get a break; we’d pay good money to dissociate for longer stretches of time, and we do. One way to understand how nervous system healing works is that we slowly but surely attend to building up that Counter Vortex; we focus on growing it and stabilizing it, and our ability to feel safe and present and resource, until it can hold its own. This can take time. But then, with support, we start revisiting the trauma, driving back into the Trauma Vortex intentionally, being with it in titrated doses. There is no real healing until we can do this. Essentially we pendulate, or move back and forth between the two Vortexes, which allows a slow steady drawing down of the survival charge. We spiral towards the center of the vortex, until it’s possible to pour some love on that initial rupture.

Imagine the Taurus part of you is the part of you that knows how to build up that Counter Vortex. It does it by connecting you with the stability of the Earth and your life in the physical present, and particularly by getting you to savor simple sensual pleasures—it is ruled by Venus after all. Its very nature is resourcing and growing resilience, and it calls you into building and nurturing steady, loving connections and ever more supportive conditions. It wants you to be safe and resourced enough to experience lightness of being. The Scorpio part of you is the part of you that intuitively knows how to navigate and heal a Trauma Vortex. It teaches you to restore safety by fiercely protecting what is vulnerable. It teaches you how to be a bitch, how to armor up, how to set and enforce a boundary—it’s ruled by Mars and is not fucking around. And, when the time comes, it also knows how to soften that same armor; how to create and enter secret, sacred space; how to relax those defenses, allow your raw self to be exposed, and your feelings to flow. It knows that our most frightening feelings, our overpowering grief and sorrow, in the right dose, in the right empathetic conditions, are the agent of healing.

How hard these last six weeks have been for you likely has something to do with the strength of your Trauma Vortex and Counter Vortex, how intimate you are with your Scorpion wisdom and Taurus wisdom both. I want to say that some of us are carrying a lot more trauma than others, with far fewer resources, and if that’s you, if you inherited a crazy high difficulty level, I see you. I want to remind all of us that neither the project of building up a Counter Vortex, nor the project of navigating the Trauma Vortex are about personal strength. A truly strong Counter Vortex is not personal but communal, and healing work is communal work. My dream is that over time, we are all cooking up big, beautiful Counter Vortexes together, full of love and safety and soup and housing and poetry and joy, and that they resonate with all the other communal Counter Vortexes out there, that they form some kind of quantum mycelial network of healing energy. We focus on this not to avoid the Scorpion work of being with the pain and suffering of the world; it’s what actually enables us to do it without drowning, or pulling others down with us. It’s how we learn to do it joyfully even. The Sabian symbol for 4° of Scorpio is “a massive rocky shoreline resists the pounding of the sea.” That’s us—we are that rocky shoreline; we are the steady shore. As James Burgess writes, “Though slow to form, as is land itself, the ways of a community become firmly entrenched and together create a bastion against the storms and tides of evolutionary change.”

So there is some big communal healing medicine in this full moon. If you have been hitting some hard limits around what you can carry alone, it’s time to give a lot of compassion to that part of yourself, the part that thinks it needs to do it alone. You came by that belief honestly, but that’s the part that most needs to heal now. If you’ve been needing to lean on others more in the past six weeks, and you’ve been doing it, I’m so proud of you. We will only get through what’s coming by deepening our interconnections, nourishing our interpersonal ecosystems so that we have the capacity to transform and heal our physical ecosystems. And let’s not forget our transpersonal connections. The only people I know who have been riding out these eclipses gracefully don’t just have close loving relationships with other people and animals, but also strong spiritual practices that keep them connected with higher, loving forces and their guidance. Six months ago, back on the new moon in Scorpio (The Darkest Hour), I wrote this:

If you have been experiencing something beyond sorrow, something more like hopelessness and despair; if all your activism and effort to disrupt systems of oppression and save the world has left you angry and heartbroken, your ideals and certainties shattered; if all of your personal healing has led to having the space in you to feel the trauma of the whole world, and you feel overwhelmed by the task at hand; that makes sense. We’ve all been dosed with darkness, and it’s been a hard time to be a human being, but you got here by giving a shit, so you can trust this challenge. I don’t know what will happen next, but I know these are the conditions that drive spiritual awakening. In our darkest hour, when all of our egoic striving, and performative goodness, and attempts to control the chaos of world, when all of that fails, something else can happen. We are cracked open, finally vulnerable, and something holy speaks to us.

I hope you’ve had just such a spiritual awakening. I hope something holy is speaking to you. I hope you are receiving active support from ancestors and trees and planets and whales. I hope your weeks are full of winks and synchronicities. These are wild times for the awake and openhearted. As we move through this latest peak of healing energy, and land (finally) out of this time of intensity, please honor what is vulnerable and still in process. Treat yourself and others sacredly, and with extraordinary tenderness. Treat your body with kindness. Whatever the last six months have brought you, whatever emotional and spiritual awakenings you have received even just in these last six weeks, this full moon is a moment to really feel it, honor it, and then, in the way of water, let it go.

Ritual & Creative Prompts

(Disclaimer: Prompts are not instructions! They are made-up limitations and suggestions that provide seeds and inspiration. Use what sounds good to you, adapt in any way you see fit.)