And the Sign of the Lion
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.”
(Antoine St Exupery)
Let’s talk about the heart. It is a good time to do so, because on Friday (may be Thursday where you are) the New Moon falls in the sign of Leo – the sign that rules the heart. Leo’s ‘body part’ rulership tells us something of this most exuberant and expressive of signs. The sign of the lion is to do with our creativity – that which makes our hearts sing. Our innate self-expression, or the mysterious inner compulsion to express ourselves in the outer world falls under the auspices of the Sun in astrology. Our self-expression is infused with the vibrational frequency of the sign in which the Sun falls in our own charts. Most of us know our ‘sun signs’. So, if you are a Pisces Sun, the way you express your inner nature will be Piscean. That is, the archetypal field of Pisces/Neptune will be conveyed through you, into the world.
The planet acting as agent to meet the needs of the sign Leo – is the Sun. Be all and end all of our solar system. The Sun in our chart fuels our life force, our passion, our joie de vivre, our pleasure – just as the Sun generates and fuels life in this system. It makes sense then, does it not, for the Sun to be assigned dominion of the heart in our bodies. The physical heart is the generator of the life force, beating from the very first coalescence of cells at our beginning, until our last breath moment. The psycho-spiritual heart is the seat of our souls.
Shamanic and indigenous grassroots cultures the world over have for millennia understood the importance of the heart. The Heartmath Institute in America began its studies on heart coherence and the benefits to our health and wellbeing of attending to our hearts in the 90’s – bringing to our awareness a vital but long suppressed aspect of our humanity. Timely and important – but not new. Our ancient ancestors living in shamanic cultures in deep connection with the feminine, nature and the land, understood the power of the heart– and still a sprinkling of cultures today living close to nature, on the outskirts of civilisation, do. They cultivated and practiced a path of the heart wherein the wisdom, the intelligence of the heart was held in reverence and the mind and thoughts were secondary to it. They knew there was a power in the thoughts that arose from the heart; a power not present in mind-generated thoughts. It was the power of a soulful consciousness. Soulful consciousness comes from the heart – the body’s soul vector.
Leo in astrology is the sign associated with worldly power. The lion, emblem of the sign is the ‘king of the jungle’ – likewise human royalty falls under the domain of Leo. There is a kingly, or queenly aura around Leo natives and not uncommonly a taste for ‘holding court’, for performance, drama and being the centre of attention. There is also an innate joy present in people with Leo strong. A love of life. Bring to mind a joyful person or expression and you can sense a happy heart. We see again the macrocosm within the body of the microcosm of man.
So what of this Leo New Moon. It may well have passed by the time you read this but that doesn’t matter. The energy of a Leo New Moon comes once a year and as it does it signals the opening of a new cycle. The cycle that begins now is one in which we are invited to create and express….and be joyful! Every sign compensates in some way for the sign that goes before it. Cancer is the sign before Leo and we have just (July 23) emerged from a month of Cancer energy holding the reins. Cancer is the most emotional, the most feeling of the 12 signs. With the Sun here all of us have been experiencing heightened emotions. Are you feeling a lightening up now? I hope so. Of course I am generalizing here. We all have our individual charts and a multitude of (often) contradictory energies impacting our body-heart-minds. But generally speaking, there ought to be a feeling of things lightening up now that the Sun is firmly in the sign of Leo. The New Moon on the 29th (or 28th) signifies a new cycle of joy, pleasure, creativity and fun! Should we invite it in and allow it that is. We’ve become so tense with all of the ‘worldly developments’ that many of us are habituating to a furrowed browed unease. And indeed, soulful and reflective Cancer may have felt deeply painful for many of us as the feeling nature is not only sensitized at this time but a lot of disturbing ‘stuff’ has been happening. Emotional defensiveness has been amped up. We’ve armored ourselves, in true crab-like fashion – to protect ourselves from the slings and arrows coming at us. But now is the time to make an effort, if that is what it takes, to shake off that old brown overcoat and have some fun! Did I mention fun is a Leo thing ? Fun, joy and creativity make our hearts sing!
We may have to dig deeper than we used to, to find and feel joy in our hearts because we’ve been shunted out of that mode. With all the fear and anxiety inducing propaganda being continually pumped into our mind-space, we’ve been saturated in a low vibe energetic. There is much to feel joyless about, that’s for sure – if we let ourselves go there. (I talked in an earlier post about bringing our fears and worries down into our hearts – breathing them there. If you tried it, you will know it is a powerful practice to dissolve painful emotions.) Now we are officially in Leo we are being given a boost from the kosmos to be more heart-centered.
Astrologers are talking a lot about the conjunction of Mars with the North Node and Uranus on August 2nd and how it promises to be really really volatile, explosive even. Uranus is the planet of shocks and surprises. Anything could happen, be prepared, they say. Uranus is also the planet of freedom, awakening and liberation! Mars is energising that. So what if we decide to just enJOY ourselves now, change our frequency from anxious to happy (fake it till you make it if need be) – let’s see then what happens. We may discover a new sense of freedom and liberation! Those three (Mars, Uranus, North Node) are in the sign of Taurus. Taurus is about sensuality. This is what we are here, in this body for! To experience the experience of being physical. To experience the delights of our senses as they perceive the bounty of our mother earth. Nature – with her generous offerings of beauty, flavour, fragrance and feel. We get to live the deliciousness of the smell of a rain-soaked forest; to feel the delight of a loving embrace, a soothing massage, a hot bath on a cold night, the mute awe of a spectacular sunset, to savor the taste of a ripe peach. Or a lemon. We get to experience so much of nature’s unstinting generosity. Every day there are a truckload of experiences our body and senses can enjoy. And all it takes is a simple thing. All it takes is our attention. That’s it! The mind, as they say, makes a wonderful servant but a terrible master. We are so laden with mind-stuff in this so-called information age, we have forgotten how to just BE in this physical world in the pure awareness of our sensory experience. We have become so weighed down with worry for the future that our fears and our depressions have become our default mode and in doing so they have obscured the reality of actual reality. Reality is in THIS body, in THIS physical realm. There is no such thing as ‘virtual reality’. Reality just is. It’s not virtual. We need to get real, get off our damn devices and come back to reality, back to the physical, sensual, lived experience of being in our bodies in and on the body of our mother planet.
And so good people, this is my wish for you now, in this new cycle of the heart-ruled Lion: BE the joy, the creativity and the sheer pleasure of life that you were gifted with when you took embodiment here. BE in the experience of your amazing body, here on earth, for this brief time. Let’s, for a time at least, put aside our knowing of what ‘they’ are trying to do and take the firm faith view that we have the power to live the joyful lives our hearts desire. This is true soulful living. We must believe, with every molecule of our Being that in doing so, our collective frequency will rise and as it does, magic can happen. Let’s use this Leo month to ignite a renewed awareness of the joy of embodiment. Let’s determine to live this way going forward. Even if we don’t ‘change’ things in the outer world (and I don’t believe that for a moment), we will feel so much happier when we live from our hearts, instead of our heads, for that is where the real power is. Our ancestors who lived attuned to nature and her cycles knew it – our intuition, our heart-centered knowing has a power our minds do not.
With heartfelt gratitude to you for connecting with my heart in reading these words. And may your heart be light and joy-filled with the beauty that surrounds us.
O Kosmic Linda,
Thank you for your stellar writings – stellar in topic and in style, I mean. Reading your posts reminds me of what Phillip Lindsay writes.
As you know, astrology doesn’t do much for me since I don’t know when I was born – while you’re one who has given it much devotion and study for four decades… Hence it is a ‘system for knowing and understanding’ that is worthy of respect for its deep practitioners (it has been cheapened, alas, in the modern era).
On a theoretical level, I wonder why it does not align with sidereal astrology. I wonder about the big differences between western astrology and other major systems like the Jyotish of India.
And more than anything else, a constant question in my mind is – why is it all about how everybody/everything else out there in the kosmos affects Earth and her denizens, when it would be so interesting to know how Earth and earthlings affect the others out there?
An archontic plot to make Earth – as arch-Feminine planetary being – as passive and helpless as everything feminine during the millennia of a patriarchal paradigm?
Is Earth the only celestial body that sits solely at the receiving end of kosmic stuff?
In another post: astrology as worthy of mythos status. How would John L. Lash’s Sophia-Earth mythos fit in?
And, having read my book Krivda you know that I perceive – esoterically and rationally, without the astrologer’s skills – Earth to be a key provider of Kosmic Medicine, to quote your own title.
(Continue reading on Substack.com – Kosmic Medicine by Lindastrologer)
A Cosmic Ride 