Full Moon in Leo: Tending to your heart
Full Moons are notoriously powerful. They shift the tides, both literally but also metaphorically within our lives. Guided by the light corals spawn for a few days following the Full Moon. Its light is a trigger for all of us. And even though Full Moons are more associated with culmination and release, this is part of a cycle that clears a pathway for new life to emerge.
Wednesday’s Full Moon in Leo (February 12, exact at 8:53 a.m. EST, 5:53 a.m. PST) invites us to step forward into the light. In the theatre and film world, finding your light has multiple meanings, it can literally be standing in the correct spot so the light shines upon you, but metaphorically and in my mind more profoundly, it is a term that calls us to step out onto the stage and find our spotlight. It is about responding with grace under pressure. When we shine wholeheartedly from our authentic selves, we can be fully seen both by others near and dear to us. When we put our true selves forward, we are met and can experience being met by the world.
The funny thing is often what prevents us from “stepping into the light” is our inability to see and recognize our authentic selves. To do this, we have to learn to effectively come from the heart. The Sun rules the sign Leo, the sign of this Full Moon, and also rules the heart. The heart is a perfect metaphor for this Full Moon. What function does the heart have? It is the pump that keeps the blood circulating. It keeps us alive. That’s the role of the Sun in our lives, it is the life-giver.
The magnetic field produced by the human heart has been found to be more than 100 times greater in strength than the field generated by the brain. It can be detected in all directions up to 3 feet away from the body. The heart beats before the brain forms. Yet, most of us, much of the time, live our lives from our heads. We try to make things make sense to us based on what we have been told about who we are and how the world works. Yet, I don’t know about you, but in my experience, all the most glorious, miraculous experiences of life including falling in love are anything but reasonable. The heart wants what the heart wants. It doesn’t have a strategy.
That’s the message of this Full Moon; it calls us to profoundly tend to our hearts.
Admittedly, this Moon is a bit volatile; Uranus, the “great awakener,” in Taurus is activating the opposition between the Sun in Aquarius and the Moon in Leo, shaking things up. For the last time in the next approximate 84 years, so this is the last Full Moon in Leo in most of our lifetimes that will have this particular energy.
Uranus is an outer planet, meaning it can’t (usually) be seen with the naked eye. When the outer planets activate something, they are in effect inviting us to move beyond our limits, both conscious and unconscious. Like a lightning bolt, Uruanus in the guise as the higher octave of Mercury can, if we are willing to see, move us beyond perceptions about ourselves and the world that effectively “keep us in our place.”
Full Moons always fall in polarities, a tension of opposites that ultimately balance each other. During a Full Moon, the Moon itself is reflecting the Sun’s light.
The Sun and the Moon are classical partners in alchemy. The marriage of these two is symbolically seen as the union of opposites and the key to transforming lead into gold.
The Aquarian Sun is illuminating the path forward, made visible in the night sky in the reflection of this glorious Leo Full Moon. For all that Aquarius is known as the sign of the humanitarian, at its core it is the sign that exclaims “I’ve gotta be me!”
Full Moons shine light on things. This one is urging us to genuinely listen to our heart’s yearnings. Astrologically within our charts, our Moon connects us to our past, and our body, and holds the keys to our inner world through which we respond, most often unconsciously, to the world around us. It’s where we dwell and what we dwell upon.
The Moon is where we live, and its patterns within our chart play an immense role in how we keep “doing the same things again and again, expecting different results.” If we merely have an unconscious relationship to our inner world, how can we create anything new? The only way to shift this is to nurture your relationship with your inner world so that you can rediscover and understand yourself more deeply. All relationships need care and attention to thrive. All of them, most importantly the one you have with your heart.
Tending to our heart requires that we listen to it and be moved by it rather than be afraid of it. Our heart requires us to be connected to it, it doesn’t work when we try to logically analyze it. Our hearts are messy and complicated, they don’t follow plans. So it is laughable when we try to make them do so. As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said in his classic The Little Prince “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
Jungian analyst James Hollis asks "Where do you repeatedly undermine yourself, shoot yourself in the foot, cause yourself familiar griefs? Where do you flee from your best, riskiest self?” These questions lie at the core of this lunation. Allow yourself to be bathed in the light of the answers you find.
