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“Many of us resemble the drug addict in our ineffectual efforts to fill in the spiritual black hole, the void at the center, where we have lost touch with our souls, our spirit—with those sources of meaning and value that are not contingent or fleeting.” ~ Gabor Maté 

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Addiction is a fickle beast.

Cunning. Dark. Tantalizing. Seductive. Full of promises and hope of rescue. Wise. So very wise. And so very misunderstood.

We are just now learning and still in the beginning stages of learning about the nuanced layers of trauma, epigenetics, nervous system disregulation, and somatic based healing. Of why the addiction rooted itself into the psyche in the first place. Of how the thing, substance, or behavior took the evolutionary place of what we needed most: a safe, secure, and loving relationship, at a formative time when our brains were still developing and learning about what it meant to feel safe and loved in this world that so often teaches the opposite: separation, pain, and loss.

A vulnerable baby born into the world and taught that separation from the divine meant a flood of fear, pain, and anguish of this human existence based on the fears conditioned and mirrored in others set in as default. We didn’t even have a fighting chance.

The deceased and beloved Matthew Perry says the same thing in his memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, that he too didn’t have a fighting chance when he was born a colicky baby and prescribed the highly addictive drug, barbiturate phenobarbital. Thus ensued the next 50 years of a life of deep, abhorrent, dark, and dismal struggle of addiction to drugs and alcohol.

His story is a tragic retelling of so much pain and suffering amidst the life of a well-loved and highly praised celebrity, who seemingly had it all. But he too had early experiences of abandonment and the impactful separation of his mother and father through divorce.

A perceived separation from love is the pain addicts desperately try to soothe. The felt pain from this separation from God, source, love, what have you is the indescribable ache many try to fill with substances or behavior. The one reliable relationship we have. The only thing that won’t abandon us and will always be there for us. Even if there is pain in that too. Because many addicts didn’t receive healthy models of a loving relationship, of a secure attachment to their parents and to love.

And addiction comes in all forms. To technology. To work. To busyness. To our phones. To our thoughts. To our suffering even. Because if there is a hole, the mind can’t help but want to fill it with something, anything to avoid feeling the ache of the void. Many of us weren’t taught to commune with the void. Because if so, we would have learned that the void (the darkness, the shadow, the unseen) is not to be feared, but a place of deep power, mystery, and divinity, and dare I say it, God. So we place fear and God/love in the same corner and run in circles trying to find one without meeting the other. Flip sides of the same coin. Presence of fear equates to an absence of love.

We are in a time of deep relational alchemy and healing. A portal back to divine and sacred union within and without. Of moving beyond the threshold of codependent relationships. As we have had the south node of the moon in Libra for a while now, showing us our relational shadows. Our outdated ways of relating to other. To depending on others to rescue and save us. Of trying to save and rescue someone else from their own suffering.

Libra’s shadow is connected to the mirror of relationship. How we’ve learned to hide, manipulate, and posture ourselves in an attempt to earn love, to keep love, and to withhold love. To hoard our love for fear of losing it. Because if we learned early on that love was a resource that dwindled or decayed depending on someone’s ability to give it to us or not, we would have certainly learned adaptive strategies to not lose this love. This is where addictions come into play. A safer way to fill the hole of love when the other couldn’t. When another’s own relationship to love was faulty and precarious, a scarce resource that never got filled either.

We are approaching a changing of the guards though, a time when the cycle breakers stood up in their own addictive cycles of pain and torment and said “Enough! I will not continue these cycles of self-abuse and self-hatred even if this is what I learned from my own born-in family, how to soothe the ache of the God-sized hole in me.” Because we had to become the healers we needed when we were young.

We had to rise up and stop the cycles of abuse. Our souls signed up for it, plain and simple. We are the cycle breakers, and that is some heavy sh*t. Not the light fluffy memes you see on Instagram. It’s the real deal of facing our shadows every day, deep in the trenches of our own subconscious rewiring, digging for the truth amidst the pain and suffering. And maybe, some days seeing glimmers of our soul truth sparkle and flicker like sunlight dancing on the ocean of our consciousness.

Libra energy as the south node ruler is pushing us to heal our relationships. Our relationship to Spirit and God and even to our souls. Because at some point, we might have learned that belonging to our families meant betraying our soul’s inner truth. So we did what we had to to survive. And maybe the pain and ache of that separation from our soul’s truth was too much to bear so we ran into the arms of addiction to save us.

Addiction is not weak. It is not unwise. It is wisdom stitched and woven into the fabric of our survival brain. Until one day we could save and rescue that inner child who couldn’t save and rescue themselves. To give that inner child the love, safety, comfort, space, belonging, and reassurance we desperately needed. We are re-parenting the parts of self that went through such pain and heartbreak. Libra energy is relationship to all things. To past self. To future self. To present self. To inner teenager self. To inner addict self.

This energy will be with us for the upcoming lunar eclipse and full moon, landing on March 25 at 3 a.m. EST at 5 degrees of the air sign. This is the first of the two eclipses this year straddling the north/south nodal axes of Aries/Libra, as the second will be a solar eclipse on April 8 in the sign of Aries and our north node ruler.

The sun enters Aries on March 19. We finally made it. Aries energy is fire. A palpable shift from that watery, dreamy, emotional Pisces energy. Aries is the season of get up and go. Of renewal. Of passion. Motivation coming back online. Of new beginnings. New frontiers. Of more energy to start things up. Aries energy rules that north node too, initiating us deeper into soul sovereignty, of stepping out into our independence and autonomy, with a deep soul trust because we are partnered up with our souls now.

Because we have been healing the fracture of relationship to our soul as our counterpart first and foremost, above all other relationships. This is the healing of Libra energy. Here to awaken our souls to sacred union within self, feminine and masculine in harmonious and divine union. Give yourself grace. Lots of it. We are learning as we go what it means to be in loving relationship with ourselves and other, and how that can feel safer than the false comfort of conditional, abusive, codependent, and harmful ways of giving or withholding love from self or other.

This eclipse season is here to shake us awake even more. As all eclipse energy can bring in new energy, fast-track us to a whole new trajectory, often times like a snow globe shaking away any faulty foundations that were bent to crumble anyway. Eclipse season is often feared. And fear is a funny thing. Put too much focus on it and imagination into it and it becomes as big as a four-headed monster looming in the shadows. We fear the unseen and unknown. Yet, our fear is often where the greatest untapped power lay.

Eclipse season is a quickening. And these times are pressurizing us. Our souls are asking us to step it up. In the name of love. For love. In love. Through love. Let love be the guide always. And stories bent on empowering you. Stories bent on fear or disempowerment must go. The shaming, judging, belittling voices in our heads are not us. They were given to us. They convinced us they were protecting us from feeling pain. But we get to have a voice now. We can start to speak to ourselves differently. Tell different stories. Stories of love, of healing, of self-trust. Your voice is vibration. And words are the spell. And we commune daily within our heads and hearts. The throat as chamber to connect it all. Cast spells of love. And watch your body and nervous system shift and tune like the tuning fork of energy you are.

This Libra full moon and eclipse is setting the stage for soul partnership. For getting us aligned within the self to start harmonizing healthier relationships to others. Relationships of all kinds: work, familial, romantic, and otherwise. We know what healthy love feels like, even if a little bit more because of the inner work we’ve been doing. Keep orienting toward that and watch things shift and change externally.

With the sun in Aries and north node in Aries, we are deep in the process of individuation, based on soul codes and soul autonomy now. Your uniqueness and gifts are so needed at this time on the planet. You being fully and authentically you is exactly what is needed. It’s safe to be seen and to come out of hiding and let yourself be seen. Of course if we have any sort of trauma or shame, we may have believed there was something innately wrong with us. And this might have been reinforced by our family’s conditioning or cultural programming. But we are the phoenix rising now, out of the ashes of other’s projections and judgments. We get to decide who we are. And that comes through a relationship so deeply intimate with ourselves and our souls. And at times it can and may have felt lonely as f*ck, as if we might be alone forever.

Libra brings the self to the mirror of relationships and tells us we can no longer look away. So we must stand and face the self in the other, or the self we see in the mirror that we judge so harshly still. Soften the lens and soften the judgments. Look into the eyes staring back at you. God is staring back. Do you see it? Do you feel it? It’s all right there, within you too. The eyes are a portal back to soul truth and knowing. Let the ego fall away and we will know God again.

Venus is harmonizing our relationships with this full moon, in the sign of Pisces, bringing deeper empathy, compassion, and soul richness. Venus is the ruler of this full moon too as Libra is governed by these feminine Venusian energies. An amplification of relational themes, encouraging more soul harmony and beauty in our relationships. A time to reflect on what we value and need now on a soul level for our relationships to blossom and prosper. And eclipse energy is moving us through that threshold of soul evolution.

Eclipse season is a time of change, of letting ourselves be changed. Of deep soul surrender. Because so much is out of our control. And we can fight it and exhaust ourselves endlessly. Or put down the sword and let God have their way with us. And that takes f*cking courage. Courage that no one tells you about but that you do have. Courage to surrender the addictions. To stop the inner struggle. To let go and let God. The courage to heal. The courage to start again. To not know. Soul is courage and courage is our birthright.

Let this be a season of unraveling. Of changing our relationship to our beliefs. To our thoughts. To our emotions. To our souls. To our addictions even. Because we all have them. We need not be a famous celebrity on a world-renowned and loved sitcom to have one. Because Matthew Perry touched and impacted so many lives when he was living and even more it seems now since he has passed. Because the loved and culturally celebrated “Friends” show is about relationship and these are the themes we are all healing with this Libra full moon. Matthew Perry’s life was a testament to the suffering we endure when trauma gets buried and burrows into our psyches, when the God-sized hole never gets filled. When love went missing. And when love was there all along, and we just had to bravely open our hearts to let it in. How so much light and humor inside someone could still get drowned out by darkness many days.

We all carry a light. A light of soul. And it’s our choice what we do with it. And sometimes darkness casts upon us, eclipsing our own light. And the soul journey is the one we bravely take to reconnect back to that source of light. Out of the shadow of addiction and suffering. A journey Perry fought tirelessly to take. And now may his death be the reminder to us all how needed our inner light and soul journey is.

Because as Phoebe so candidly said in “Friends”(and slightly adapted here), we too partner and mate with our own souls, our own inner lobster, walking around our tanks holding claws, in sickness and in health, until death do we part. It is a lifelong commitment and not to be taken lightly or without sacred respect for the soul and human journey together. One we recommit to each day, we wake up and say, “I still choose to be here.”

Let this Libra full moon remind you that being here is the most courageous thing you could do. That your soul journey is the most worthwhile one to take. That life may pressurize us, but we get to choose how much grace we give ourselves. That our relationship to self and spirit is the most sacred.

Let this full moon and lunar eclipse soften you. Remind you how to soften. Remind you how to see beauty in the eyes looking back at you. Let the full moon show you the radiance of your inner light again. Whole. Beauty. Lightness abound. Self coming out of the separation that once fragmented you from your own essence. And addicted you to fillers in attempts to fill the void of love. Because love is here. Love never left.

Let it in again. Let. It. All. The. Way. In. And. Watch. Yourself. Become. Whole. Again. Not a hole to be filled. Wholeness abound. Whole. Holy. Wholy.

Check out Anna’s podcast on the Libra full moon on Spotify or Apple.

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