Lunar Eclipse in Leo

The Leo Full Moon presents a powerful opportunity to heal our hearts and expand our capacity for love. Because it’s a total lunar eclipse, when our shadows are revealed, we can see more clearly everything in our life that is not yet love the places where we’ve closed our hearts and restricted the flow of love. Feelings of resentment, loneliness, or self-pity are signals to take the risk of opening our hearts and sharing our love with others.

The Moon is conjunct the Leo North Node, helping us to feel into the openhearted state that represents our highest soul growth. The Moon is also precisely conjunct Ceres, bringing opportunities for healing our mother wounds. Leo is the Divine Child in all of us who wants to be adored, appreciated, and celebrated just for our very existence. Allowing ourselves to grieve softens the armoring around our hearts, and dissolves the past so that we can come fully into present time. The more present we are, the more available we become to the love that is always around us.

This Leo moon is exactly conjunct the dwarf planet Ceres, the harvest mother, and this is in opposition to Venus which is conjunct the Sun in Aquarius. The Moon and Ceres are focussed on fertility and protection of the young crop, and in Leo, loyalty to the family is paramount. Venus, on the other hand seeks pleasure, beauty, balance and artistic expression. And in progressive Aquarius, her love is more freely distributed, more idealistic, she is committed more to society and to the wider community than to the nuclear family.  These very different priorities can create tensions within us over this lunar eclipse, and can become a theme for the next three to six months.

The Sun opposes this strong Leo Moon along with South Node, Venus, and Juno in Aquarius. Our attachments to unrealistic ideals of love and relationships are ripe for releasing. Where are we limiting the definition or shape of love? With the South Node in airy, intellectual Aquarius, our mind might manufacture compelling reasons why we should protect our hearts and stay detached and defended. It can feel safer to stay in our heads, telling ourselves we need to wait until we and our circumstances are perfect before we risk revealing our hearts.

Rather than get caught up in the stories we tell ourselves the path of healing is to follow the stories down to their emotional root, and be willing to feel our fear of hurt, rejection, abandonment, and loss in love. We’re being called into greater self-love by releasing comparison and ways we might put ourselves down, and by recognizing that we are a unique creation of the divine.