Full Moon in Leo
Today, January 25th, we experience a Full Moon in Leo, which is in relationship to both Pluto (intensity, regeneration, deep truth) and Jupiter (luck, abundance, expansion). This full moon brings up many themes including creative self-expression and the earth-shattering power of Love, but the element upon which I will focus is a quality inherent to the sign of Leo: courage.
I want to take a moment, however, to address the heaviness that so many students and clients have been experiencing this month.
Pluto and the Sun have been together as they both have moved out of Capricorn and into Aquarius. While the Sun is our battery and life-force, the overwhelming intensity of Pluto drains the juice. With Jupiter, the planet of expansion, in the mix this sense of overwhelm is only made greater. But not to worry! The Sun moves much faster than Pluto, and as it continues its journey through Aquarius it will leave Pluto behind allowing for much more levity and ease.
But back to the full moon….
When I was in meditation on this moon in Leo, I was reminded of Narasimha — the half man, half lion avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu.
Vishnu always incarnates on Earth when it seems to be moving farther and farther away from Dharma (Truth). His two most famous incarnations are that of Krishna and Ram, both of whom restored balance to the Universe through embodying and acting from the seat of Sat Cit Ananda — Truth, Consciousness and Bliss.
When he came to this plane of reality in the form of Narasimha, it was to defeat the demon, Hiranyakashipu, who was starting and perpetuating religious persecution on Earth. This demon, however, had once been a great yogi and from this he had been granted a large gift from Brahma: he could not be killed on land nor in the sky, in the day nor in the night, inside nor outside, and he could not be killed by any human, deity, demon or animal nor with any weapon.
Knowing of this boon that this demon had received, Narasimha cleverly incarnated as half-man, half-lion, killed the demon at the turning of day to night, at the opening to his palace, which was neither inside nor outside, upon his lap, which was neither earth nor sky, and with his claws, which were not a weapon.
This story reminds me of many things, one of which is that healing rarely happens within the mindset that says things must be black or white. Such binary ways of thinking leave little room for creativity (a characteristic associated with the sign of Leo), which is necessary when trying to understand how to solve a seemingly unsolvable problem.
Opening oneself to the idea that the answers might lie in the grey, in the in-between, requires immense courage for many reasons. The two that stick out the most to me are that 1) society constantly tries to find the answers regarding anything that is mysterious thereby exacerbating the notion that something must be this or that, so one must be ready to swim upstream; and 2) one must be willing to acknowledge that they could very easily be wrong in a culture which screams that not being “right” is a personal failing and stain.
Leo is also the sign of love, which is a very large part of the meaning of capital “T” Truth, and love disregards any barriers of religion, race, country or ideology.
Being loving requires immense vulnerability, which therefore requires immense courage.
Can you do this? Can I do this? Can we all find it within us to find new pathways informed by both/and rather than either/or? Can we step into our capacity to truly love?
I pray that we can because I believe that we can.
