Full Moon Lunar Eclipse
Full Moon Lunar Eclipse 27º Taurus November 18 2021 1:57 am MT
This full moon lunar eclipse kicks off our next round of eclipses (we have a minimum of four eclipses each year (though we can have up to seven!)—and not just another season, but a whole new cycle of eclipses in a new part of the sky begins.
Eclipses block the light—they return us to darkness, and in their wake, what was buried, ignored, shrouded, comes to the surface. What was hidden becomes illuminated.
The eclipses for the next 18 months will occur along the Taurus and Scorpio axis (alternating back and forth between the two signs). The Taurus-Scorpio axis is the material earth and its depths, the world and the underworld, the sensual and the sexual.
Taurus is fixed earth, the bull—the deep appreciation and pleasure of the body, the earth, incarnation. Scorpio, meanwhile, is everything beneath—beneath the earth, beneath the surface, beneath the veneer of society. Scorpio is the taboo, everything a culture represses and denies. Taurus is the earth unfurling in the height of spring; Scorpio the inward coiling and falling leaves of deep fall.
If you have been feeling so many emotions, if you’ve been having surprising, difficult, tense situations arise in your life or in the people around you, or you’ve had experiences that feel fated, bigger than you, outside of your control—well, my dear, you’re not alone. That is the flavor of eclipse season.
And with all the other intense astrology we’ve been having this month… shit’s up.
(As for the other astrology… Mars opposed Saturn last week, after Mercury did the same. Mars square Saturn is a rock and a hard place; it’s one foot on the gas, one on the brake. Then this Wednesday Mars opposed Uranus, bringing shocks, aggression and intensity to the game. This all plays into the larger scaffolding of 2021 and the Saturn-Uranus square. There’s more on this in last moon’s post if you want to revisit it.)
Remembering that this is a season, that this will change and pass like the all the seasons before, can help us get through.
How to Use this New Moon for Your Creativity + Creative Projects
For me, I’ve been grappling with the emotions of anxiety and shame—and I’ve been trying (as much as possible) to observe them from a more objective perspective and watch the way they dance with and feed off of each other. How feeling shame brings up stories of being bad or not good enough, which then sparks anxiety that I’m not doing enough or doing it well enough, which, yes, feeds more shame.
It’s a tricky, complex, highly uncomfortable dance that I mostly try to push away. But I’ve been working on the practice of sitting with it more and more. Just not trying to make it stop, change it. Just letting it be, and again, taking distance and watching it, almost as if it’s happening to someone else.
What does this have to do with creativity? Well, I personally find it highly difficult to impossible to create in a shame spiral. I am using this eclipse season to process some of the blocks that tend to derail my writing and creative practices. I’m spending this time with focused on the patterns that get in the way of my creativity, so they don’t crop up unconsciously and unexpectedly later.
Sometimes the process isn’t about the productivity, but about the inner work that helps nurture and support the work.
If you’re feeling similarly, there are some writing prompts below to help support the unpacking and processing of some of your own personal blocks and blocking emotions.
I’m also noticing how issues related to the Taurus-Scorpio axis in particular play into this specific emotional soup, and how these themes are being activated in my life. How does my shame relate to my sensuality and sexuality, my caring for myself and my body, my finding pleasure in things that may be taboo or disallowed by general (polite) society? How does my shame around the erotic block or hinder my creative expression? How does my creative work align with and process these themes?
As you know, I see creativity and the sexual, sensual, erotic deeply intertwined and inextricable. And a lot of the work coming up for me right now involves working with the complex layers of these connections.
Full Moon Creative Ritual + Writing Prompts
I don’t have a ritual for this lunation, since I do not recommend doing manifesting work during the eclipses. The energy is very volatile right now, and they call the places eclipses occur the “nodes of fate” for a reason. This is the time to let the universe do its duty and basically just stay out of the way and ride the waves.
Which isn’t to say we’re helpless or at the whims of fate—but just to say there are times to let go, to trust, to practice the lessons that we’re not in control and we don’t always dictate the winds of change. It is a time to process what comes up, what has been sown and now must be reaped. There will be another season for manifesting and planting and exerting our agency. But this ain’t it.
Because of this, I see eclipses as part of our learning of ourselves as parts of a whole that’s larger and more complex, and more important, than our separate little egos always want to (or can) recognize. We’re not always the main character, and eclipses are times to remind us of this.
So how can we honor or use this eclipse energy? My main advice is to FEEL IT. Sit with everything that comes up, all the uncomfortable stuff. I do think the more we pay attention to and honor the emotions and experiences that eclipse season may churn up from the depths, the less this energy tends to, or need to, externalize and show up in our lives as difficult circumstances.
And I want to be clear that I’m not saying we can avoid difficult circumstances. Those just happen and they come when they will. And I’m definitely not saying that if bad things happen it’s because you didn’t sit and process enough. No no no. What I’m trying to say is that the more we are able to be present with all the layers and emotions—the hard and the breezy—the more we work with and honor the eclipse energy and lessons, and the more inner strength we may find to navigate the churning waters.
To support yourself in this work, take a long, hot bath (Scorpio) or go out into the woods and forest bathe (Taurus).
Full Moon Writing Prompt
Make a list of things (feelings, stories, responsibilities, belief systems—I recommend focusing on the internal, rather than the external, or the way the external influences your internal responses) that block or get in the way of you pursuing and achieving your dreams and goals.
Choose one thing on that list that feels especially prickly right now, especially charged, that may be rearing its head internally or externally lately.
Sit quietly and try to imagine that emotion or internalized story as a being, a person or other embodied creature (no need for it to be human—how does it come to you?).
Ask that being, what they want from you, what they need you to do, what they’re asking of you? (Try not to think of it as, what do I need to do to be rid of you? Though that’s a valid approach. But more, what is it you want me to learn, to discover or uncover, to transform?
Write their answer, any words, images or sensations that come through to you.
Photo by Oscar Keys on Unsplash