Full Moon in Pisces: Journeywork for Existential Dread
And then we saw the daughter of the minotaur by Leonora Carrington
How are you planning to harness the power of the Pisces full moon?
Do you want to harness this celestial opportunity to perform emotional alchemy on our griefs, fears, and anxieties?
Do you want to travel into your watery depths and return with greater skill in this earthly form?
Then read on, my friends!
The moon, our celestial queen opposes the sun right now from the watery, expansive sign of Pisces.
This full moon forces the Virgoan Sun to take a few days to reflect and surrender to the emotional truths that the busyness of the harvest season distracts it from.
The full moon in Pisces is the best time to dig into your psyche and look at the fears, griefs, and disappointments we habitually avoid feeling...often causing many of the classic anxious, mildly OCD stereotypes we associate with our Virgoan peers.
The perfectionism,
anxious checking of doors,
nitpicking at tasks,
editing of commentary,
and constant tidying...
...are all excellent means of preparing for the dark, dangerous, and sparse times ahead...
... but these habits also serve as avoidance of feeling and therefore digesting and integrating our fears, our griefs, and our disappointments.
This is where the Pisces full moon comes in to do her work.
Pisces holds down the opposite end of the zodiacal spectrum from Virgo and offers relief from its side of the seasonal wheel. Pisces is the sign that has already survived the sparsest and the darkest part of the year.
Therefore, when the moon enters Pisces during Virgo season, she casts the light of the immanent expansion of spring as a distant but intimate memory back into the Virgoan psyche. This light sounds like, “You also have to surrender to survive."
As many of you may have noticed, we are living through a true mental health crisis right now, and many are feeling or are desperately attempting not to feel the existential dread of these high-pressure times.
Alcohol and drug consumption is at an all-time high, therapists are overbooked, and young people struggle between acceptance of a grim global fate and a David and Goliath struggle against a finely-tuned and well-armed power structure.
We are forced in times like these to develop our healing techniques and hone our internal technologies to re-create the world in a shape we can fit into...
...And there are no greater technologies to harness for this purpose than those of the imaginal realm—a realm where Pisces delights.
In the imaginal realm...
...nightmare fears transmute into talismans of power and protection,
griefs melt into pools of creativity and inspiration,
and anxiety unfolds into adventure and excitement.
All we need to do is be brave and proactive enough to meet ourselves here.
Journeying to the imaginal realm is our birthright and serves as an unassailable font of power, compassion, and wisdom.
The full moon in Pisces is a perfect portal to discover the gifts and tools our ancestors and guides are waiting to deliver in the imaginal. Our psychic windows are open and our intuition is at its loudest during this moon.
I recommend that you use this opportunity to journey to all of those little nooks and crannies where you’ve stored the dread that your anxiety and compulsive behaviors like to protect you against.
Journeying requires a light trance state. Drumming, light entheogens or hypnotic herbs, and dancing are some of my favorite ways to enter, but there is a more simple and always accessible method that I’d like to take the opportunity to teach you now.
Full Moon in Pisces Journey
This practice is best done outside or with natural light. Simply begin to notice your peripheral vision.
Allow your field of vision to expand to an enormous circle.
Keep your awareness at the edges of your vision: left, right, above, and below.
Now notice the play of light within this circle.
Imagine that play of light pulsating with your breath, in and out.
Let the edges of the circle expand and contract with the rhythm of your breath.
See if you can even find a harmony with the flow of the blood from your heart to your extremities.
After several minutes in this state, close your eyes, turn your attention to your body, and allow your breathing to normalize.
Now ask yourself, where does your anxiety live?
Locate it as a physical sensation: a tension, a tingling, a stiffness, a heat, a numbness, an ache. This is where we will travel to meet it. Feel free to allow the location to shift and travel.
Allow that area of your body to become a landscape. Meet the landscape with as many senses as you can. Feel free to fake it til you make it! Don’t worry about whether you are just “making it up.” Just try not to let your mind take over.
Imagine the colors, the shapes, the textures, the smells, the sounds. Wind blowing on your skin—is it humid? Dry? Smell of sea water or must? Are there rolling green hills or frozen tundra?
Now visualize your anxiety as an anthropomorphic being: any being who can speak to you and give messages. They may already be waiting to meet you there without any effort.
What do they look like? How old are they? What is their name? what do they have to teach you? What gift can they offer to take back to the material realm?
Allow them to show you their story.
You may stay here for twenty minutes, an hour, or perhaps just a few minutes. When you are complete, you will know.
Finally, thank them for their service for you before you open your eyes again and enter into your body.
Want to practice journeying in a group every full moon? Join us in The School of Heaven and Earth!
Want to dive into the Piscean powers of Dreamwork & Channeling as a means to fuel your creative power and skill as a writer/wordsmith? Join us in Sibyl's Cave!
With you in your travels,
Crystal