New Moon in Aries: Fear and Courage

In the wee hours of Tuesday morning, the Moon will reunite with the Sun at 4+ degrees of Aries initiating a new cycle of growth and awakening for humanity. It’s a time of darkness and new beginnings, as we dwell in the unknown. The coming month may present the greatest challenge of this year.

Aries is about the Self, the irrepressible, fiery energy of being. It begins the circle of the Zodiac with the statement “I AM.” Aries initiates action, exploration, curiosity and creativity. Coinciding with Spring, we naturally want to get outdoors, breath air with fragrance in it, feel sunshine on our bodies and experience the pleasure of being alive. Instead we are under quarantine and must find a different focus for all this energy. We are being asked to take the Aries journey within – take all our curiosity, our passion to discover something new, eagerness for new experience and focus it inward where we can connect with our Selves.

The New Moon chart reveals the power of this moment in a Grand Cardinal Cross. There are four Cardinal signs which coincide with the four cardinal directions as well as the Equinoxes and Solstices. Aries begins the zodiacal year with Spring. Cancer ushers in Summer. Autumn begins with Libra and Winter with the Solstice in Capricorn.   

Today the Moon and Sun unite in the 4^th house of the USA chart which is the realm of home. And here we all are – confined to our homes. The New Moon is telling us to focus here for this month. Our bodies are home, our dwellings, our families, our neighborhoods, our nations are all variations of home. The fourth house is the realm of our intimate experience of self, of our deepest feelings, insecurities and fears.

Fear is the first challenge of any initiation and life has delivered us a truck-load in the form of a pandemic. I had a full dose of it over the last few days. The more I watched Covid-19 coverage, the more my fear increased. I am at risk and gradually became convinced that this was it – I was going to die. Fear is not a rational thing. I tried logic. I recited to myself how safe I was. I live in a very small town, isolated at the beach, taking all precautions. I tend to live a hermit’s existence anyway, so this is not new. My life isn’t changing drastically. I have a strong immune system.

Nevertheless, I couldn’t stop visualizing scenes of my deathbed, my final words to my daughters, my grief for my husband. I would attempt to negate them with positive thoughts to no avail. I asked my meditation teacher for help. He suggested I make peace with death. Now before you jump to conclusions, he was not suggesting that I was going to die and should get my affairs in order. He was saying that my fear of death was the root fear.

I thought I had already come to terms with death, but evidently my body had not. While all this mental/emotional turmoil was going on, my body was under great stress. My blood pressure went up 40 points. I was having heart palpitations. I actually had a stomach ache and my neck was seizing up. I finally recalled some practices I had done when my mother died. I began repeating the soothing mantra for the first chakra: “In this moment, everything is fine, and I am safe.” I learned this from astrologer, Tom Jacobs. Thank you Tom.

The more I repeated that mantra, and really thought about the words, the more my body calmed down. Then I increased my grounding exercises. Another gift from Tom. I visualized cords of energy or light flowing from my body down through both feet and my 1^st chakra. As I exhaled I sent my energy into the Earth. On inhale I drew Earth’s energy back up into my body. I repeated the cycle three times, making sure all the energy penetrated every cell of my body. Then I gathered the energy into my heart chakra on the inhale and sent it up through my neck and the top of my head out to the center of the universe. Breathing the cosmic energy back through the top of my head, I flowed it down through my body into the Earth and repeated the process three times. This exercise has a cumulative effect. It centers us midway between Heaven and Earth, it brings our attention into our body, and it gives us a sense of the strength available to us.  

Aries is about saying “yes” to life – all of it. The body is our greatest resource right now. It holds all our pain, our shame, our fear, our grief – all waiting to be seen, healed and released. The New Moon is within a degree of Chiron and Black Moon Lilith. Chiron is there to help us heal our wounds and release our pain, to find our inner strength and wholeness. Lilith is there to remind us that we are not whole without the feminine energy.

Several heavenly archetypes of the Feminine are active right now. Our understanding of the Feminine is expanding beyond the roles of lover, wife and mother. Lilith represents the original polarity of Adam. She was his equal, but when she demanded equal treatment, she was rejected and eventually demonized. The Feminine has been wounded and suppressed for the last 5000+ years. Now Lilith is joined with Chiron and the New Moon. The message is clear – it’s time to heal our relationship with this feminine archetype and integrate her powers. As a society, a humanity, we cannot face the challenges of our world when each of us is split asunder, at war with ourselves. And this is also the message of Capricorn – integrating all the disowned parts of ourselves into a healthy whole.

We are passing through the ending of one era and into another. We are entering the Age of Aquarius. In this time of darkness, this birth canal, so to speak, we are being asked to heal ourselves, to shed our misconceptions, to question our beliefs, to face ourselves head on and take stock. What isn’t serving us? What is still wounding us? What makes us mad? What breaks our heart? What are we afraid of?

When I faced my body’s fear, my blood pressure went back down, my heart beat steadily and something else happened. My fear didn’t disappear, but it wasn’t predominant any longer. I realized that all emotions were flowing through me. Sadness, excitement, gratitude, anger, laughter, tears, and yes fear, but it no longer had a hold on me. Or rather, I no longer held on to it.

Yesterday, for a few hours, I felt rather crazy watching the kaleidoscope of emotions, but I didn’t become attached to any one of them. I didn’t identify with them. They weren’t my emotions. They had nothing to do with me. I let them come and go. Today the torrent  has slowed to a trickle.

This Aries New Moon offers us the opportunity to face our fear and strengthen our courage. The New Moon Squares the lunar nodes. In the USA 1st house, the South Node is asking us to remember who we are, to let go of the past and liberate ourselves from our karma. Opposite in the 7^th house, the North Node is conjunct our natal Venus reminding us to care for one another and have compassion for each other’s suffering. Finishing off this Cardinal Cross in the 10^th house is Make Make (pronounced Mah-kay), a creation god who speaks to us of initiation rituals that we must survive in order to become the wise leaders our world is going to need.

So don’t run away from your fear. Face it head on. Get your journal and find a quiet place. What are you afraid of? I discovered I wasn’t afraid of death. I was afraid of suffering. Ask fear what it has to teach you. I learned that emotions, like thoughts, flow through me impersonally and only distress when I identify with them. Once you name your fear, you disempower it, just like Rumpelstiltskin.

Remember that we are all going through this together, even though we are isolated. Feel your compassion for those who are suffering and bless them. Venus and the North Node remind us to keep our hearts open, to love one another and hold onto our humanity. Jupiter conjunct Pluto in Capricorn asks us to keep our faith as things fall apart. We volunteered for this duty. We chose to be here on this planet at the most remarkable event in human history. We are evolving and while it hurts because so much of it looks like loss, we can’t even begin to know how glorious it will be on the other side of chaos.