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Love and War—Gemini Full Moon—December 8th.

Light and shadow are opposite sides of the same coin. We can illuminate our paths or darken our way.

It is a matter of choice—Maya Angelou.

Mars, the ancient war-god, escorts the Moon across brow of the heavens tonight, a celestial reminder of those choices that take us down dark and lonely pathsor paths that sparkle with possibilities. As we prepare for the holidays, this last lunation of the calendar year, arrives in convivial Gemini, a mutable air sign associated with communication, connections, and with the choice we make every time we say something that may land like an arrow in the heart of another.

This full moon marks the climax of the Mars Retrograde cycle. When Mars meets the Moon, our battle for security and safety is not yet over. We may still be grappling with impossible choices, still embroiled in misunderstandings that erode our trust, still aching from a betrayal that armours the ache in our heart. We may have slipped into the habit of expecting a catastrophe, we may find it safer not to hope or dream. We may be wintering, even though the sun is shining.

As the Sun opposes the Moon and Mars tonight, a restless and confusing T-square with Neptune offers a choice, aided by a sextile with practical Saturn. Raising our glasses to the year almost gone, may we listen deeply to what is said around the dinner table, sensing a heart ache or a longing that may be concealed in an emotionally charged silence, and make our choice. We can’t avoid winter’s darkness, yet the Sun’s passage through hope-filled Sagittarius is a reminder that we may have become too rigid in our opinions, too wrapped up in anticipatory anxiety to dare to trust and hope. Says grief mentor, Julia Samuel, “hope is a feeling, but it’s also a plan.” We are living in anxiety-inducing times. Amidst the rubble of war, families are fractured, lovers separated by choice or by necessity; millions are exiled from their homelands. Mothers, fathers, teachers, store owners, are now simply refugees.

Through Gemini we encounter the power of two and the archetype of the sibling, the power of the pair to shelter one another during the fallow times when we are frozen and disheartened. The choice to make a new plan.

The numinous image of the Twins is mirrored by the Lovers card in Tarot, depicting the awakening of a partnership of equality. Also, the strands of individuality, separation, and loss that are woven into love knots. In the round of the Zodiac, this is the first meeting with the Other, the Twin Soul.

Like so many stories steeped in patriarchy and dominion, that form the bedrock of our civilization, the enduring stories of twins, siblings and soulmates are threaded with the pathos of loss and separation, woven with duality and ambiguity. Beneath the popular astrological descriptions of the breeziness of Gemini, the fun-loving and fickle eternal child, lies a story of loss and longing, a life-long search for something or someone from which we feel separated. A story that’s so often punctuated with long stretches of aloneness. A story that stumbles into the sinkhole misunderstanding. A story that ends with nothing more left to say.

Sibling stories underline Rome’s foundation myth and draw us into the story arcs of fiction and movies like Shakespeare’s Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Ian McEwan’s Atonement, SK Tremayne’s chilling story about the death of a twin, The Ice Twins, and the marvellous Harry Potter books. Gemini is also the sibling we love or loathe, the bonds of blood that bind or divide. The Swimmers (Netflix 2022) is a Gemini story that marries the light and the darkness of two young sisters, Sara and Yusra, who escape the trauma of the war in Syria in a leaking boat, hoping to be reunited with their family. Theirs is a story of sexual assault by a trafficker, soulless immigration queues, barren refugee detention centres, and the triumph of being selected to compete in the Rio Olympics of 2016.

Twins in myth and fairy tale, are similar at first glance, then reveal themselves to be fundamentally different. The story of Castor and Pollux, and their beautiful twin sisters, Helen and Clytemnestra is a brutal story of theft and revenge, kidnapping, murder, and loss. Maya Angelou once said, “I don’t believe an accident of birth makes people sisters or brothers. It makes them siblings, gives them mutuality of parentage. Sisterhood and brotherhood is a condition people have to work at.”

This month, Mercury-ruled Gemini appears as the winged messenger, delivering choices which are seldom packaged in black and white, choices that arrive on the restless wind and arc through the air like the ideas that tumble through our minds. It is in the light and the dark of our relationships that we encounter our human complexity and discover the light and the dark within us.

May the winged sandals of Mercury carry us towards those extra-ordinary encounters that bring everything into focus. May the mythic Twins preside over those soulful tugs of choice, careful planning, that herald radical change in the way we live and the way we love.

 If you would like to book a personal astrology session for 2023, please get in touch: ingrid@trueheartwork.com

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Happy Days—Sagittarius New Moon—November 23rd, 2022.

“We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again—Katherine May.

A weakened sun lies lethargically on the horizon. Here in the north, the sky story speaks of a season of falling leaves. As winter winds blow this year to a close, glittering party clothes beckon from shop windows; bright lights distract us from the darkness for a while.

This week, the UK government announced a recession as postal and rail strikes reveal the bare bones of collective frustration and discontent.  Authoritative Saturn is still square unpredictable Uranus in earthy Taurus (banks, money, climate crisis).  Strikes and civil unrest in many countries depict the existential angst and a general dis-trust of authority.  “The present convergence of crisesin money, energy, education, health, water, soil, climate, politics, environment and moreis a birth crisis, expelling us from the old-world order into a new,” writes Charles Eisenstein, author of The Coronation.

For so many, this has been a challenging month. The New Moon Solar and Lunar eclipses in Scorpio and Taurus may have culminated in an ending of a way of lifethe sudden news of a retrenchment, an illness that initiates us into a new way of being, a divorce that reveals our bare bones. Taurus brings us down to earth—money, property, and those things we value—Scorpio dredges up those things we prefer to keep hidden from view.

The luminous lives of public figures portray the astrology of the moment. Prince Charles became Charles III during this eclipse season, and he will be crowned on May 6th during a Mercury Retrograde cycle and the day after a lunar eclipse—two celestial significators that suggest he will not settle comfortably on the throne. Charles was born on an eclipse, and will be familiar with this energy, so it’s unlikely that he will be beheaded like his predecessor, or banished to Europe. His Solar Return in 2023 (Sun/Mars conjunction in the 3rd house and Neptune on the Descendant) also suggests that his reign will not be an easy one as ghosts from the past return. Already truths blend with fantasy as the acerbic effect of the Mars/Neptune square can be seen in the “dangerous lies” peddled by the media, portrayed in season Five of The Crown.

Jupiter moves Retrograde at the poignant final degree of Pisces until December 20th and will make its third and final semi-square to Uranus on December 23rd, so the cult of progress and growth continues to take its toll on our ailing  planet. The astrology describes big wheels spinning, capricious dice that wobble and roll for those who fail to observe the cycles of life and death. Joe Biden celebrates his solar return on Sunday as Mars rises and squares Neptune, he attends to the nation’s petroleum reserves. Jupiter’s Wheel of Fortune turns for nations and humankind, as bellicose Donald Trump thrusts out his chin and turns his best side to the camera. An inflated Jupiter squares his Moon/South Node, and a battle-weary Mars takes a long shot, opposing his Moon, and moving back and forth over his Uranus/Sun/North Node in Gemini until March 2023. Saturn in Pisces will square his luminaries between May 2024-March 2025, not a great omen for a despot.  This week, Elon Musk’s fortunes plummet. Rotund Jupiter, purveyor of big dreams and big talk, opposes his power-over Pluto.  A disenchanted Mars Retrograde in Gemini conjoins his Venus (money, ruptured relationships, angry words) as his imperious demands for “a loyalty clause” raise mutiny and mass resignations.

The Mars/Neptune cycle began in on May 18th, 2022, and will peak with an opposition in August 2023, coming full circle with the next conjunction in Pisces in April 2024. The shadowy side of Mars Retrograde in Gemini erupts in hate-speak; language that severs bonds of relationship, switchbacks and U-turns, confusion, and utter exhaustion, and when Mars meets Neptune things become murkier, our will may be thwarted, our heartfelt desires swept away by things we simply can’t control. Mars is the war god, and this archetype describes battles, divisons, desire and action. This cycle may escalate a silencing of free speech, more emphasis on the currency of information, data and misinformation; cognitive dissonance, or pivotal events that challenge our beliefs as we defend or assert our version of the “truth”.

Yet the Sun joins Mercury and Venus in optimistic Sagittarius on November 22nd, Jupiter stations direct in Pisces, indicating a shift in circumstances, or perspective is possible. When the Sun moves into Sagittarius, we raise our hearts, our glasses, our vision, find magic in the mundane.  The New Moon on the same day escorts us into the season of goodwill and thanksgiving for Happy Days.

 As we pare down our expectations of how things “should be”, redefine what is truly important, we can practice being content, even happy, with the way things are. This New Moon wraps endings and new beginnings in the darkness of the heavens, so let’s toast to changing the old stories, finding what is possible within this new normal. As we review this year almost gone, may we celebrate how far we have come. May we give thanks for those bonds of friendship and heartfelt belonging that holds us to what really matters.

May we take time to reflect, to rest and restore, as winter draws us into the crucible of change. And in the intimacy of darkness, may we hold our loved ones close, find hope in hardship, opportunity in obstacles.

May we engage our imaginations in the darkness of the year almost gone, and re-discover joy and abundance in life’s simple pleasures. Here’s to Happy Days.

For a personal astrology consultation, please get in touch: ingrid@trueheartwork.com

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Rooted—Taurus Full Moon Lunar Eclipse—November 8th.

To be rooted is not the same thing at all as being tied down. To be rooted is to say, here I am nourished and here will I grow, for I have found a place where every sunrise shows me how to be more than what I was yesterday, and I need not wander to feel the wonder of my blessing—Kevin Hearne.

Her arrival is imminent. A tension building. On November 8th, a blushing, expectant Full Moon lunar eclipse brings this month to a climax, her subtle silvery light illuminating things as they really are.

This corpulent Taurus moon collides with disruptive Uranus, delivering a jolt of edgy, unpredictable energy that reflects both the pressure for and the resistance to change in the collective, and perhaps in our own lives whether we are ready or not. If this eclipse awakens a planet or axis in our own birth chart, (16° Taurus) stay rooted in the faith that there are miracles wrapped in unexpected news, serendipitous moments, or the brave surrender of letting something or someone, go. This eclipse signifies irrevocable endings as Uranus sweeps through the collective, a harbinger of change.

As our Earth’s shadow obscures the bright face of the Moon tonight, the Sun, Mercury, Venus, and the South Node in Scorpio oppose her, we may be drawn back into darkness of the shadowdy Underworld, where we hear our own thoughts, sense our deepest longing.

Saturn (karma and necessity, structure, and limitation) makes a close square to this lunation, heightening our awareness, our instinctual need to be grounded in routine, well rooted in our relationships, securely connected to our interior life at this time of the earth’s turning.

At Full Moon times, the lunar cycle completes, so we may quite literally be at a time of ending, choosing what we will take in and what we will tune out. This Full Moon in earthy Taurus roots us in those things that matterbonds of love and friendship, our connection to the natural world, those things we hold dear that bring us comfort and joy amidst shifting circumstance. Taurus is associated with material things, property, money, and sensual pleasures. And although “being grounded” can seem like one of those self-help amorphisms, we can hunker down with an audio book, share a delicious meal with someone we cherish, come to our senses with beautiful music, fragrant candles, or freshly baked bread. Grounding, rooting, being in the power of now, affirms the richness of our ordinary lives.

For some, the effects of this eclipse linger, weeks before and after the eclipse, and this Full Moon Eclipse alignment with disruptive Uranus may send shockwaves across the earth throughout November. The race to the White House in 2024 begins on this Lunar Eclipse as Pluto and Mars Retrograde make their fated returns to their natal positions in the US birth chart of July 4th 1776. Mars in Gemini, now a battle-scarred and weary warrior, travels Retrograde from October 30th to January 12th making a jarring quincunx with Pluto, an aspect which so often accompanies ruthlessness, crisis, struggle, uncertainty and imbalances that can affect our health. Mars also makes an enervating square to Neptune in Pisces (exact October 12th, November 19th, and March 14th, 2023) an alignment associated with scandal, disappointment, loss, illness, and vulnerability.

Jupiter Retrograde travels through the heavens at this final poignant critical 29° Pisces, a degree that accompanies a sense of urgency, overcompensation, suffering, or difficulty.

In Ukraine, the grim conflict drags on as a bloom of inflation congeals with fears of recession. Rising energy prices correlate with Jupiter’s return to Pisces (October 28th-December 20th) and its subsequent move into Aries and semi-square Uranus between December 23-24th may bring further upheaval and shocks politically, economically as the climate crisis worsens.

“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.”  At this in-between time of transition we may feel suspended between life’s crevices and cracks as Jupiter’s lingering longing expands the bitter and the sweet. And as Naomi Shihab Nye reminds us, “before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.”

Now, staying deeply rooted in the relationships, the ordinary pleasures that nourish us;  allowing ourselves to feel the deepest thing inside during this turbulent time in our human history, becomes an act of rebellion. Kevin Hearne writes, “and when you are rooted, defending that space ceases to be an obligation or a duty and becomes more of a desire“.

As bare branches reach towards dove grey skies here in the north, and wild geese swim through the clouds in honking arrow heads, take a moment to look up at the moon tonight. Feel her presence, bathe in her light. This Full Moon/Eclipse is, as Maya Angelou once said, “plump with promise,”  and inspiration and delight will come with the new Moon in optimistic Sagittarius on November 23rd, an emissary of new horizons burgeoning in fallen leaves and rain-soaked grasses.

At at this time of Full Moon illumination and natural ending of a cycle, may we feel peace in our heart as we root deeply in what we cherish and linger a while with what brings us joy.

To book an astrology consultation, please email me: ingrid@trueheartwork.com

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Waking the Dead—New Scorpio Moon and Solar Eclipse—October 25th.

October is the month of the dead. This is the time when the veil between the worlds is thinnest. This is the time of the ancient festival of Samhain when we remember those who have gone before us, when we confront inevitable endings and that great taboo. DEATH.

In October, leaves of gold turn to mulch. Shimmering spiderwebs sparkle in coppery hedgerows. In October, Death is monetised. Brightened, kept at bay with a parody of plastic costumes and grotesque face paint destined for land fill.

“Endings seem to lie in wait” wrote the mystic and poet, John O’Donohue who died as he slept in the January of 2008. Endings lie in wait in those ordinary instants, those unremarkable moments when quite suddenly, life as we knew it is over, our security, sameness, ruthlessly snatched away.

Spectral plumes of mist curl from rust-coloured forests and from the hilltops the plaintive roars of the rutting red deer promise new life and the ambush of death this month. As the Sun moves through Scorpio now, we enter the reflective depths and we think about endings. Many of us may be sitting with uncertainty, painfully paring away those things that no longer serve us. We may feel scooped out, dead inside, the vestiges of a long illness still lodged in our bones. Endings come with the loss of our identity when we retire; with the changes in our body as we age, our brave beauty etched in our faces, our strength shining through our eyes. Endings so often strip us of our innocence. They come in the brutal betrayal that spills diamonds and rust from the forgotten places in our heart. “You sit down to dinner and life as you know it, ends,” wrote Joan Didion.

On the eve of a new Scorpio Moon on October 25th, Sun and Moon hold a séance with Venus in regenerative Scorpio, accenting the cartography of our heart. This eclipse amplifies the finality of endings; fertilises a new cycle of growth with the dust of demolition. Tonight, we come back to what we deeply value. And what we must discard or choose to keep. A solar eclipse is a high-voltage new moon, and a new moon encapsulates the seed of a new beginning, a new shaping of our expectations, though we may not be able to see just what they are until the Moon is ripe and full. And as this new moon travels between the Earth and the Sun, darkening the Sun’s brilliance, something, someone may be eclipsed. This symbolism is made all the more poignant in a culture where the brilliance of externalised power and earthly matters command the spotlight in 24-hour news loops and on social media. The essence of eclipses lingers like an expensive perfume, for two weeks before and after the eclipse. They act as celestial highlighters, amplifying, intensifying energy and they can be game changers.

As the UK Tory party faces yet another crisis, transiting Uranus symbolises the unexpected changes in political fortunes—“I’m a fighter, not a quitter,” said Liz Truss before being routed within a day. Uranus was moving over Mars in her birth chart. As I write, Boris Johnson gains the necessary 100 MP nominations for the leadership, then pulls as transiting Venus conjoins his Moon. Uranus conjoins and Saturn squares Rushi Sunak’s Mercury/Sun conjunction in Taurus. Will he become prime minister or could Boris volte face again and return as PM to dismember the Tory party?

The darkly brooding presence of Pluto, Scorpio’s modern ruler, casts a long shadow over the month of October in world events, perhaps in our own lives with news that has reminded us of the impermanence of this life. Pluto stationed direct on October 8th and the heightened effect may have lingered for a week before and afterwards in our own lives, most certainly in world events. There is a quality of the absolute that lingers and settles over us all now and presses its hard edges into our daily lives. Writes Joan Didion, “It’s easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.” Something bigger than us, something fated, is at work.

We may remember that for the ancient Greeks, Fate came in the form of three Moirai, those three sisters who determined the Fate of every living creature. It was Atropos who cut the thin thread of life. We meet Fate when the Nodes of the Moon transit the planets or angles of our birth chart. The South Node draws us back, into the undertow of the past; we hesitate at the threshold, we circle endlessly in our place of discomfort. The North Node is where we see the diamond of our destiny, although the threshold crossing is never easy. Something is calling us to our purpose, our ability as a race to love and heal and to nurture one another and all creatures great and small.

Jupiter slips back into diffuse Pisces on October 28th and will tread water at 29° till November 12th, drawing us collectively and personally into the shape-shifting realm of water that washes and dissolves the structures of life. Jupiter represents our search for meaning, faith and hope, yet also accompanies bloated optimism, grandiosity, and greed. Jupiter moved through this degree point in early May 2022 as Mariupol was besieged and the divisive issue of abortion escalated. Scorpio is a feminine sign, and paradoxically ruled by testosterone-driven Mars. With Scorpio there can be no compromises. Death, darkness, trans-formation, may be unfolding themes in our lives this month and in our collective future “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.

 Mars, the war god is moving wearily through the heavens now. We may need more rest, more space to sit with painful emotions. Mars stations Retrograde on October 30th, and the battle out there may be an inner battle with the simmering heat of our rage; with our thwarted desires, with our view of the world that is predisposed to battle. “We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination,” writes poet, Ben Okri, in Tales of Freedom.

As Nature contracts, exposing an uncompromising knot-work of bare branches and stubble fields; as the primordial pulse of the year stirs deep in our blood and bones, we might 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 know 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.

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

 

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Brave—Aries Full Moon—October 9th.

One wishes that pain weren’t the potent alchemical element that it is―Athol Fugard.

Today, news of two explosions travelled across plaited fibre optics onto our screens and  into our hearts.

In the early hours of this morning,  a bomb on the Kerch Bridge linking Russia to Crimea generated a fireball obliterating the lives of three people.  On the 227th day of a war that continues to send shards of pain and trauma across the globe, the bombing of the symbolic and strategic bridge—“the jewel in the crown of Vladimir Putin”—may be a key event in the gruesome story-arc of this war which has affected us all in some way. In a close-knit Irish community in County Donegal, nine or more people died in an explosion that incinerated a petrol station and demolished nearby buildings. As search teams comb through the rubble, families and friends wait, hearts barely beating.

Pluto, (irrevocable endings, break down, eventual revival and deep healing) stations direct today (October 8th) escorting us collectively and personally into the dark of the year as Saturn (structure, authority) and Uranus (rebellion and breakthroughs) form a tense, explosive square (2nd-12th October.)

Tonight, a blood-red Full Aries Moon rises over the Earth’s soft curve. Mars has sovereignty over this warrior Full Moon as she travels in tandem across the night skies with Chiron, the wounded healer, symbolising the grief and suffering so many may be experiencing now, and the promise of deep healing if we are brave enough to move more consciously through painful rites of passage.

There are many ways to be brave in this world. For most of us, bravery, raw courage, comes when death ambushes those we love, when our income withers, when we must muster up the courage to love again. We may discover that courage is concealed in the small choices we make each new day. That act of will that gets us out of bed, the strength to put the kettle on, when all the colour has faded out of the world we once knew. “We never know how high we are till we are called to rise,” writes Emily Dickinson.

Mars goes Retrograde on October 30th (25° Gemini), a celestial injunction to rest our fried and frazzled nervous systems and make space to reassess our goals as economies collapse and ice caps melt.  Mars Retrograde cycles often coincide with low energy levels as Mars, the war god, retreats from battle. We may need to reassess our goals, or even postpone things till he stations direct in January 2023. The last time Mars moved Retrograde in Gemini was at the beginning of the financial crisis of 2008, and as we prepare for a long cold winter, Jupiter returns to that last potent degree of Pisces between October 28th and December 20th amplifying spiralling inflation and soaring energy costs.

We’re entering the winter eclipse season, a time that is vaguely described by some writers as “a portal” time, though what precisely this means is unclear. Eclipses come in pairs and there are four eclipses each year. An eclipse happens when there’s an exact alignment between the Sun, Moon, and Earth. In the affairs of nations, and in our own lives, eclipses herald times of endings; they ease our ability to release, to let go. In the mandala of the Zodiac, we are now moving through a series of eclipses on the Scorpio/Taurus axis, and it may be helpful to recall the events in our own lives as the series of Scorpio/Taurus eclipses dropped across the heavens in 2003/2004. In Scorpio, we encounter the inevitable: death and taxes. In Taurus, we dig deep into earthly matters. We may experience profound changes in our finances and in our shared material resources as the climate crisis continues to destroy our home planet.

“Things do not change, we change,” wrote Henry David Thoreau, a pioneer in minimalism and authentic living, a man who knew the seasons of nature intimately. As we seek our quiet centre at this monthly moment of Full Moon illumination, may we see more clearly all the ways we have changed, we may be setting out on a new path of our journey, embarking on a new stage in our life’s journey.

The October 25th  partial Solar Eclipse (2° Scorpio) is one of the Saros Series 6 eclipses that Bernadette Brady suggests “is about being forceful and taking power. It has a maniac flavour about it… with great force or strength manifesting in the relationship area…”  This may be a time of re-imaging an old story about a person or an event that has left us feeling disempowered in some way. In her new book, Trusting the Dawn: How to Choose Freedom and Joy After Trauma, Mary Firestone describes her long recovery after the trauma of childhood sexual abuse and a catastrophic mudslide that demolished a mountainside and her home.

She describes how she managed to move from Victimhood and change her perspective, and says that by “understanding that just like the mudslide was a force of nature that came down that mountain and I happened to be in its path, whatever was moving through that man was a force of nature and I just happened to be in his path. So for me, switching that story around again, it actually had nothing to do with me. It had to do with the force of nature.”

 On November 8th, the Moon will slip through the shadow of the Earth and a super-charged total Lunar Eclipse will energise and sensitise planets in our birth charts that fall at 16° Taurus, Aquarius, Leo, or Scorpio. Eclipses upend the natural order; they stir up those things we’d thought we’d burnt and buried, nine, eighteen years ago. They are forces of nature that catapult us to the crossroads of choice; exposing uncomfortable truths about triangular relationships that usually accompany power-over someone else, reveal our Shadow, tip and topple those rose-coloured glasses from our eyes, bringing new understanding.

At the start of this eclipse season, we may feel as if we are stepping onto foreign ground. So much has changed, so much is changing.

Dr Edith Eger’s inspiring book, The Choice: Embrace the Possible, describes a journey of healing, of forgiveness and of faith. A journey that began in her family home, with her parents and sister, and ended at Auschwitz. Her mother’s words as they travelled have been an integral part of her healing and her work as a psychologist: “We don’t know where we’re going, we don’t know what’s going to happen, but no one can take away from you what you put in your own mind.”

For a private astrology session please get in touch: ingrid@trueheartwork.com

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