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November 11, 2023 In Astrology, Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

Blessings and Bombs—New Moon in Scorpio—November 13th.

Children of chance, we have made ourselves into what we are — creatures who can see a universe of beauty in the feather of a bird and can turn a blind eye to each other’s suffering, creatures capable of the Benedictus and the bomb. Creatures who hope—Pattiann Rogers.

Darkness comes early now.

As we descend into “fall”, Nature responds to the ancient rhythm of life and death. Shoals of fluttering leaves twist and turn like golden minnows and delicate spiderwebs spangled with diamonds of dew shimmer in the hedgerows. The brilliant greens of summer have turned to marmalade and plum revealing the bare bones of the branches.

As the light slips softly off the hillsides, a new moon in Scorpio nestles beneath the dark hem of the night. New moons are generative times. Seeding moments when we plant wishes in the darkness and wait patiently, expectantly for them to grow. In our own birth chart, it’s the moon that conveys our private longings, our place of comfort and belonging, our habits and emotional topography.

In ancient astrology, Scorpio was The Serpent that shed its skin, healed and renewed itself, the mythical Phoenix that soared from flames and ashes.

In modern times, Scorpio is associated with the far-sighted eagle that soars high above the mayhem.

Even if we avoid “the news”, we may sense a seam of blackness in a world advancing through a dark night of the soul. Set-backs and existential challenges pervade our consciousness. Bombs and bullets continue to kill and maim in war-ravaged Gaza and Ukraine. In myriad forsaken places, cities are razed, lives destroyed. Iceland declares a state of emergency as tremors split the earth and the country prepares for a volcanic eruption in the coming days. As things fall apart, divisions widen. Polarised and impassioned opinions cleave friends and family as we reduce anxiety by focusing on something, or someone other there to fear or blame.

In our own lives, the primal energy of Scorpio may come in the form of that wrecking ball that smashes through the illusions, a truth that breaks the shackles that have bound us for so many years. It may come in a heroic apology, a severance that sets us free from a relationship that has outlived its purpose, a revelation of a truth.

Mars strides into battle at the midpoint of this new moon. This lunation (20° Scorpio) reflects the volatility, the anger, and the rage we may feel in the world around us. It’s an edgy, unpredictable astrological signature that accentuates a combative and explosive opposition to Uranus (21° Taurus), reflecting a reactive, heated rush of energy that may spill over into our lives, manifest as an accident, an earthquake, volcanic eruption, and accelerate the brutality of war.

“Anger is a tool for change when it challenges us to become more of an expert on the self and less of an expert on other,” writes psychologist, Harriet Lerner. Yet seeds of compassion and forgiveness germinate at this new moon time as we tune into Scorpio’s power to heal a relationship rupture or make a heroic heartfelt apology for something we wish we could have done differently.

“It’s a profound challenge to sit on the hot seat and listen with an open heart to the hurt and anger of the wounded persons who wants us to be sorry—especially when that persons is accusing us and not accurately as we see it—of causing their pain,” Harriet Lerner in her book, Why Won’t You Apologise?

The Sabian Symbol for this hard-hitting lunation offers a subtle, intuitive glimpse into the shadows and the hidden light of this new moon: Obeying his conscience, a soldier resists orders.

Jeff Foster asks that we “kneel before the power in your anger; honour its fiery creativity. From this place of deep acceptance, you do not become weak and passive. Quite the opposite. You simply enter the world from a place of non-violence, and therefore immense creative power, and you are open to the possibility of deep listening, honest dialogue, and unexpected change. In suffering, you become small. In love, anything is possible.”

As we prepare for the coming of winter, this dark moon carries a message of hope and regeneration through its association with the snake that sheds its skin, the mythical phoenix that rises from dust and ashes, and the all-seeing eagle that soars above the beauty and the suffering. It invites us all to enter this new day with a blessing or a prayer for healing, and the wisdom to obey our conscience.

Please get in touch if you would like a private astrology session: ingrid@trueheartwork.com

October 25, 2023 In Astrology, Relationships, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

The Light Within—Partial Lunar Eclipse in Taurus—October 28th.

So comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their ending—J.R.R. Tolkien.

As mist curls in spectral plumes across swathes of rust-coloured forest, the plaintive roar of a rutting deer echoes across the valley.

In the north, Scorpio season draws us into rot and decay. This is the realm of dragons and serpents, scorpions that sting, endings that ambush, darkness that seeps from night to day.

October is the month of mulching and composting, of endings and letting go. The ancient festival of Samhain, at the midpoint between the equinox and the winter solstice, marks the death of summer and the impending darkness of winter. October is the month of the dead, monetised at Halloween when the dread of darkness is brightened with a parody of plastic costumes and grotesque face masks destined for land fill. At this time of the earth’s shedding, many of us sit with uncertainty, painfully aware that climate change and the unspeakable brutality of war continues to deliver death and devastation to millions consumed in the conflagration. As news of more suffering washes over our safe, comfortable lives, we may feel scooped out. An unhealable grief sits wetly in the chambers of our still beating heart.

“Life changes fast. Life changes in an instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it, ends,” wrote Joan Didion when her husband of 39 years died of a heart attack while she was mixing the salad.

On October 28^th, a Scorpio Sun and Taurus Moon hold a séance in an autumnal sky. At Full Moon times, the lunar cycle completes. An eclipse is a super-charged full moon, so we may quite literally be at a time of ending as we draw deep and find the courage to let go and face in the growing darkness, whatever losses we inflict or must endure.

This eclipsed full moon marks the culmination of an 18-month cycle of eclipses in the signs of Scorpio and Taurus, that brought up issues relating to security and rescources and the existential crisis of climate change. Not everyone will resonate with the same intensity as an eclipse brushes over their birth chart. Eclipses are feral, unpredictable things, yet for us all, the symbolism of this lunar eclipse calls us to slow down, feel our feet on the earth and connect with our heart so that we can send love and healing energy out into the world, wrap love around war-ravaged places.

Taurus is associated with material things, property, those things we value and deem to be beautiful, and sensual pleasure. Taurus is a dependable earth sign. Although “being grounded” can seem like one of those self-help amorphisms, grounding, rooting, being in the power of now, affirms the richness of our ordinary lives. Scorpio involves a confrontation with destruction and darkness, and like the mythical phoenix rising from the ashes, we gain insight, healing, and renewal when we drink Scorpio’s strong medicine.“Light thinks it travels faster than anything, but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it” writes Terry Pratchett, in Reaper Man. Death, darkness, trans-formation may be unfolding themes in our lives this month and in our collective future.

At this in-between time of transition, we may feel suspended between life’s crevices and cracks of a choice about a relationship, career or a place of belonging. Eclipse moments bring us to the heart of the matter. Tonight, we may be drawn to what we cherish and hold close to our hearts.

October’s eclipsed moon (5° Taurus) conjoins Jupiter Retrograde as she opposes a coven of planets in Scorpio: Sun, Mercury, and Mars.

Jupiter expands the bitter and the sweet. And Scorpio’s uncompromising intensity takes us deep below the surface, if we are willing to go there.

The symbolism of this lunar eclipse may play out in world events, as Mars and Mercury meet in Scorpio one day after the lunar eclipse, a caustic combination in the fixed sign of Scorpio, amplified by Jupiter Retrograde in the fixed sign of Taurus and the Taurus lunar eclipse. This could be enormously challenging for hostage negotiations as Mars, the war-god, viciously slices through communication (Mercury). Poet, Andrea Gibson, speaks to hunting out the fear, which might mean facing a painful truth and harnessing rampant reactivity or finally daring to open to that difficult conversation.

On November 4^th, Saturn (boundaries, structure, self-discipline) turns direct at 0° Pisces, the last sign of the zodiac. Saturn presses slowly forward, suffusing our experiences with necessary endings, the dissolution of outworn structures. Saturn moves through the liminal realm of Pisces from March 7^th, 2023, to February 2026. The archetype of Saturn carries ponderous associations with fate and consequence as the western civilization turns to rubble, and unfettered growth and expansion are bounded by the inconvenient truth of climate crisis and mass migration. “Everything you love, you will eventually lose. But in the end, love will return in a different form,” writes Susan Cain in her new book, Bittersweet: how longing and sorrow make us whole. In a world where enforced smiles and white-knuckled positivity clenches against the wild winds of adversity, she reminds us that “light and dark, birth and death—bitter and sweet—are forever paired.”

Nature contracts, exposing an uncompromising knot-work of bare branches and stubble fields. The primordial pulse of the year stirs deep in our blood and bones and tonight, as we sense a slow, steady certainty moving through our body. This lunation carries the seed for repair, for release and renewal, if we trust the instruction of our hearts and acknowlege that death, like birth, is both an ending and a beginning. As we pause awhile, in this world of dying things, may those dead places in ourselves open to Love in new and deeper ways. And as the moon’s light grows dark tonight, Tolkien reminds us of the light within: May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out.

Please get in touch if you would like a private astrology reading: ingrid@trueheartwork.com

October 12, 2023 In Astrology, Relationships, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

Shadow Season—New Moon Solar Eclipse—October 14th

The beauty of darkness is how it lets you see. Adrienne Rich.

We’ve entered eclipse season, the season of shadow. As the days grow shorter a small flock of wild geese have returned to the estuary near my home. Spider webs glitter with dew in the misty mornings and scarlet hawthorn berries hang in bright bundles from bare branches.

As the shadows lenghten, the light of the sun will be darkened by the moon. This is the first eclipse of the autumn and falls at 21° Libra.

Eclipses arrive in pairs, and more rarely, in threes, and there is an eclipse every six months when a new or full moon conjoins the moon’s nodes. Symbolically, eclipses amplify the intensity of power struggles, life-changing choices, triangular dramas, those pivotal moments that change our destiny. A new moon eclipse in Libra carries the symbolism of the scales of balance as we weigh up moral and ethical choices pertaining to our relationships.

Mars the war-god entered the shadowy realms of Scorpio on October 12^th, charging this new moon eclipse with passion and intensity. The luminaries oppose both Eris, Greek Goddess of discord and strife, and Chiron the wounded healer, associated with profound pain and woundedness. The eclipse also makes an unyielding square to Pluto.

Now as the dark shadow of war stains the Middle East, eclipsing the devastating conflict in Ukraine and the myriad conflicts that fester in forgotten countries, we glimpse the gateway to hell.

As a tornado of destruction rips through the land, Pluto turned direct this week (October 10^th at 27° Capricorn) bringing into our consciousness the insanity of war. Pluto (collective and generational survival angst) moves Retrograde every year for five or six months, dredging up the darker elements of life: issues of power and powerlessness, death, survival and fate, prompting us to look at the shadow we cast across other people’s lives, so often quite unconsciously, by our thoughts and our behaviour.

The attack by Hamas on Israel has been described by some as a “Pearl Harbour moment”, “an opening of the gates of hell”. The event chart for the flare-up of the conflict is remarkable. It contains numerous painful and explosive conjunctions that reflect the enormous scale of the pain and wounding on both sides as this relationship breakdown will displace, wound, kill, and polarise so many people. As the Biblical “eye for an eye” commandment, is reactivated, measure for measure, the trauma of this war will reverate for generations to come. Historian and author, Yuval Noah Harari writes, “the current conflict is likely to put the last nail in the coffin of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.”

The essence of Libra is paradox. Richard Tarnas, author of Cosmos and Psyche, writes, “Our time is pervaded by a great paradox. On the one hand, we see signs of an unprecedented level of engaged global awareness, moral sensitivity to the human and non-human community, psychological self-awareness, and spiritually informed philosophical pluralism. On the other hand, we confront the most critical, and in some respects catastrophic, state of the Earth in human history. Both these conditions have emerged directly from the modern age, whose light and shadow consequences now affect every part of the planet.”

In the scales of Libra, we hold the tension of opposites. Light and shadow. The paradox of our humanness in the eye of the storm. Compromise or polarisation. Judgement or discretion. Quiet desperation or the grace to remember that this is precisely what we have come here to do. Perhaps, as Carl Jung believed, if we hold the tension between two opposing forces, a third way emerges, uniting, transfiguring, transcending the two, giving birth to something new.

For those with planets or angles at 21° Libra this new moon solar eclipse offers a powerful boost of energy and an opportunity to reflect on the changes that have prompted us to learn and grow since the spring eclipses (solar eclipse in Aries on April 19^th and lunar eclipse in Scorpio on May 5^th.)

For us all, this is a time to rebalance and reflect on how, in the words of author Stephen Richards, “our level of love or our level of fear determines the state of our reality.”

Our evolutionary challenge this month is inner serenity and a selective, deliberate focus on those things that are right in the world and in our relationships. Life coach and author, Shannon Kaiser offers a reminder to return to a prayer or a mantra when we feel frazzled or fearful, exiled from unshakable inner peace. “The outside world is going to keep being chaotic. When we’re looking out there, it will pull our energy. It will keep us stuck in fear. It will keep us in exhaustion… when we use a mantra such as “can choose peace instead of this… this anchors us back in the moment, to the light within you.”

The essence of Libra brings harmony to polarities, offers a possibility to let go of the melodrama, to transcend the personal, and touch the heart of another with hope.

“I know that hope is the hardest love to carry,” writes Jane Hirshfield in her exquisite poem, Hope and Love.

This from poet and mystic, John O’Donohue: May all that is unforgiven in you be released. May your fears yield their deepest tranquillities. May all that is unlived in you blossom into a future graced with love.

Please contact me directly for private astrology readings and for more information about forthcoming webinars—ingrid@trueheartwork.com

September 20, 2023 In Astrology, Relationship, Relationships By Ingrid Hoffman

Transitions—Full Aries Moon — September 29th.

We can’t make another person change his or her steps to an old dance, but if we change our own steps, the dance no longer can continue in the same predictable pattern. Harriet Lerner.

This is the month of changing seasons.

Bracken, the colour of butterscotch, swathes the hillsides. Diaphanous sea mists settle softly over lilac heather. As our wise bodies respond to the waning light, we may feel the need for more rest, more time alone, a yearning to revisit what has lain neglected in the extroverted brightness of summer. Change, like all initiations rearranges our feelings, evokes a profound stirring of the soul. Psychologist Harriet Lerner writes, “all of us have deeply ambivalent feelings about change. The will to change and the desire to maintain sameness coexist for good reason. Both are essential to our emotional well-being and equally deserve our attention and respect.”

At this turning point in the year, we might find value in turning over the material of our lives as we approach the autumn Equinox, remembering the way we were at the spring Equinox when the round of the year began a-new and the Sun moved into Aries.

Mercury turned direct just after the new moon in Virgo on September 14^th and now we navigate the territory of transition. Virgo is a mutable sign, symbolised by the wheat-bearing Virgin. As we reflect on what we have harvested this year, what we would like to keep and what we need to discard.

The Sun enters Libra on September 23^rd. As it moves over the equator, day and night are equal. This is the midpoint of the zodiacal round, representing the seasonal shift that accompanies endings, and beginnings. In the metaphorical language of astrology, the Libran part of our own birth chart will be illuminated for the next month as we practice and perfect the art of relating to others in an uncertain world, practicing new dance steps, small, manageable moves.

The souls of the dead were weighed against the Feather of Truth by the ancient Egyptians, and this month, for many of us, there will be a sense of arriving at a crossroads of a situation that requires sound judgement and careful consideration. For so many of us, balance is something we may wistfully talk about when the rhythm of our days begins to gyrate, scattering the weight of worry like a mantle over our minds. Libra is symbolised by a pair of balancing scales. Libra is an air sign, and the element of air may make us feel unsettled, unsheltered, and ungrounded. At this time of the Equinox, as the seasons shift, we may feel we need more rest, foods that support our digestion. In Ayurveda, autumn is the vata season, a time to enjoy grounding, warming soups or hearty casseroles.

As a slow soft light settles over the meadows, the moon is ripening as she circles the heavens. The full moon this month (6° Aries on September 29^th) sweeps across the birth charts of those of us with personal planets and points between 2-10° Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn, symbolically illuminating what is ripe and ready to be gathered into our consciousness; how we seek closeness or distance in the intricate dance of relationship, knowing who we can count on when the going gets tough. This full moon speaks to what author and psychologist, Harriet Lerner describes so succinctly as “that delicate balance between separateness and connectedness…as we confront the challenge of sustaining both without losing either.”

One day after the full moon, Mercury moves out of shadow and will cross the threshold into Libra on October 5^th.

Mars has been in opposition to Chiron since mid-September and this painful energy will become more intense around the equinox, (September 23^rd – 24^th) so this lunation may offer an opportunity to heal and repair a rift, rebalance a relationship that has become lopsided in terms of power and mutual respect.

The Venus Retrograde cycle which began on July 23^rd at 28° Leo echoes an earlier station-retrograde cycle 8 years ago when Venus transited this sector of the horoscope. Venus retrograde cycles are important, as they don’t happen frequently. These symbolic forty days and forty nights are times for quiet introspection, honest and serious appraisal of who and what we value, what feels authentic and real right now.

Now, as Venus accelerates through Leo, she reveals what was stirred up in June as she squared Jupiter for the first time (June 11^th) and then Uranus (July 2^nd) with three more squares culminating with the final Venus/Uranus square on September 29^th, that may reveal the gap between our inner values and what the tribal mind deems as respectful and relational.

If you have personal planets or Angles between 10° and 25° Taurus, Leo, Scorpio or Aquarius, this Venus/Uranus/Jupiter sequence of squares carries a super-charged energy around those things you value: literally money or possessions, property, as well as those you hold dear to your heart.

Venus is now accelerating direct in Leo and she makes a final volatile square to unpredictable Uranus on September 29^th, which might add sizzle and excitement, but may also bring a sudden realisation that more spaciousness, more independence, more fun is needed in a relationship.

This week’s Russell Brand exposé reveals a culture still marinating in toxic masculinity as feminine Venus blazes through Leo, shining her numinous radiance on the dark underbelly of exploitation and misogyny. Carl Jung is often quoted as saying, “until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” The Nodes of Fate and Pluto have been respectively square and opposing the Venus/Saturn square Chiron in the birth chart of Russell Brand, who has been accused of rape, sexual predation, and emotional abuse. Astrologer Liz Greene describes contacts between Venus and Saturn as “one of the most painful contacts to deal with… more than any other aspect, Venus-Saturn appears to strike at a person’s happiness…a nagging discontent and the feeling that one will never be able to be happy or take pleasure in life.” As Youtube suspends Russell Brand’s revenues, promoters pull his appearances and his publisher pauses all future book projects, the second of three Pluto oppositions to Brand’s Venus/Saturn/Chiron closes in on the full moon, and the noxious fall-out will linger all through next year and the next.

“It is the area of relationships that human beings are the most vulnerable, and consequently it is here they can make the greatest steps in growth and self-understanding,” writes Liz Greene. This is the month of changing seasons, of incremental or more noticable changes in our own lives.

We hold the tension of opposites with Aries (self) and Libra (other) in all our relationships. In those precious bonds of love and loyalty that bind. In those untethered casual encounters that so easily tilt and topple. Aries is the beginning, Pisces the end. Libra is midway, a crossroads where the old converges with the new, where the winds of change blow across our lives, exposing the roots, bringing us closer to ourselves, and to others.

“The strongest relationships are between two people who can live without each other but don’t want to.” Harriet Lerner.

To book an astrology consultation, please get in touch: ingrid@trueheartwork.com

August 29, 2023 In Astrology, Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

Once in a Blue Moon—Supermoon in Pisces— August 31st.

Heaven and earth, the Celtic saying goes, are only three feet apart, but in thin places that distance is even shorter. They are places that make us feel something larger than ourselves, as though we are held in a place between worlds, beyond experience―Kerri ní Dochartaigh.

Two full moons sit uncomfortably side by side, unnaturally confined in the man-drawn calendar month of August. This Pisces “supermoon” is the second “supermoon” in August, and in contrast to the previous big bold fiery supermoon in Leo, tonight’s moist full moon in Pisces skims across the heavens, silvering the earth’s thin places with her otherworldly light.

This anomalous 13^th moon is peculiar in her not-blueness. She travels through the last world-weary sign of the zodiac, signifying completion, release. This is a dreamy moon, a moon that may arouse our intuition, or remind us that, in the words of John O’Donohue, “we have fallen out of rhythm with the secret signature and light of our own nature.” The moon moves from a conjunction with authorative Saturn (tradition, rules, boundaries, limitations) as we reflect on the month now almost gone, the choices we’ve made, the decisions taken, the twists of fate that have brought us to this precious moment of now.

Four planets are in transition, changing direction between August 23^rd and September 4^th accompanying anticipated endings, threshold crossings and opportunities to choose again. What now needs to be lovingly repaired in our relationships, our communities, painfully polarised because we simply don’t and won’t pause long enough to listen and hear one another?

Pisces contains the symbolism of purifying, cleansing water, and Jupiter, the moon’s dispositor is one of the few planets that is still moving direct, prompting deep healing if we are willing to carefully examine our own biases and entrenched narratives.

Writes Kerri ní Dochartaigh “We have lost, broken, murdered, burned, stolen, hidden and undone—all in the false name of tradition. Lives, places, and stories have been ripped out by their roots because ‘that’s how it has always been’. I wonder, I wonder so very much these days, what wealth of imagery and meaning was lost when we became so focused on our differences here, that we buried the things that had once tied us together, the things that might still know a way through, for us all”.

Venus (those things and people we cherish and value) has been moving Retrograde in Leo since July 23^rd, drawing old lovers, friends not forgotten but perhaps neglected, from past to present.

During a Venus Retrograde cycle, we may revisit those things we valued and lost, seek out second chances, repair and heal those relationships that have become entangled in assumptions or frozen silences. Venus Retrograde periods are cosmic magnifying glasses, amplifying our inherent values.

Venus and Uranus turn in the night skies as one month ends and another begins. These celestial events carry a charge of energy. They are heavenly pivot points that are worth noticing as they brush across angles or planets in our own birth charts.

Uranus turned Retrograde on August 29^th (23° Taurus) and Venus moves direct on September 4^th (12° Leo) which will bring deeper insight, additional focus to Venusian themes if you have planets between 12-28 Leo, or 19-23 Taurus as capricious Uranus brings unforeseen opportunities to find a way through an impasse, break through a stalemate.

Now as Venus prepares to turn direct, it might be helpful to look back to July 23^rd when she moved Retrograde and reflect on the light of our own nature as circumstances and encounters have challenged and grown us.

The Sun entered Virgo on August 23^rd and made an opposition to Saturn as Spain’s football federation chief Luis Rubiables planted an unwanted kiss on the mouth of Jenni Hermoso during the World Cup Ceremony, igniting a conflagration of condemnation by politicians, and defiance from those who choose to ignore the toxic masculinity that pervades our culture.

Venus pivots, making her final square to disruptor Uranus on August 29^th, then the last square to Jupiter on September 17^th as gender issues challenge our default gaze; as our often messy, imperfect relationships offer opportunites to heal and to forgive.

Chogyam Trungpa teaches the practice of the awakened heart, “the genuine heart of sadness”, which he said is natural to us all when we allow ourselves to receive the full experience of life with open hearts. It is in this “genuine heart of sadness” that we discover our repressed grief, our forgotten anger, our thin shard of shame, our boundless capacity to Love.

Elusive Mercury switched direction on August 23^rd, turning Retrograde at 22° Virgo; direct once more on September 15^th (8° Virgo) out of shadow (the degree at which Mercury originally turned Retrograde) on September 30^th. A Retrograde Mercury asks us to be patient and tenacious in the face of delays or obstacles, amidst the ceaseless, clamorous chatter or the polarity of choice that skewers us in indecision.

We are collectively in the alchemical stage of solution. Jung describes this process as “the selfish hardness of the heart is dissolved: the heart turns to water. The ascent to the higher stages can then begin.”

As we make fluid our rigid routines, dissolve our hardened habits, cleanse the debris of emotional blockages, we draw moisture into our parched lives, may we flow outwards again. May we make our world beautiful.

To book a personal astrology session, please get in touch: ingrid@trueheartwork.com