The Virgo full moon opposite the Pisces sun
Gratitude for the services of absorption provided by our feet and our guts
Hola queridas,
I hope this season of melting, thawing, and flowing is treating you gently so far. Tomorrow’s earthy Virgo full moon, opposite the Sun (and Saturn and Mercury) in Pisces, should provide a moment of grounding stability amidst our current oceanic Neptunian surroundings.
I’m writing you from the banks of a gushing river near the Arenal Volcano in Costa Rica. For the past week, I’ve been busy submerging myself daily in waves, waterfalls, rivers, and aguas termales, the abundant hot springs that flow all around this volcanic rainforest jungle. The air here is dripping with humidity and nothing quite ever dries, but I’ve never felt so comfortable putting on a damp swimsuit day after day to enter these healing waters. Pisces season has never felt so wet, and I’m so here for it. It’s making me want to retreat from the dry desert winter of my hometown to somewhere green and water-saturated every year during the season of the fish!
Being raised as a desert child (with 3-minute shower limits imposed by my parents), I almost feel guilty being around so much water, but wow, do I love it. My awareness of. the lack of water growing up makes me deeply appreciative of the rarity of the most precious element. Even in this tropical paradise there is drought and many issues with access to safe and clean water. Water is life, and it must be treated with deep reverence. Being in these oceans and pools and streams over the past week has felt like going to church, truly, an embodied Pisces-season prayer.
And prayer feels so necessary right now.
This year we entered the cool, ethereal waters of Pisces season right after leaving some Aquarian-themed turbulence. Right on time for Valentine’s Day, Mars and Venus both entered Aquarius and each conjoined Pluto at 0 degrees of the Water Bearer. Then, a couple days ago on Feb. 22, Mars and Venus met up for a hot love affair in Aquarius. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear many tales of deep unearthings and re-birthings that have transpired for you recently in the realms of love, sex, power, and your values. Astrologically, we’ve been going through the birth canal to a new age, and it’s been a lot. But you probably don’t need astrology to tell you that, either.
With the sun entering the sign of the fishes and transiting through their waters from February 19 to March 20, it is a perfect time to integrate some of the transmutations and upheavals that were brought on by the recent Aquarius stellium and heavy Plutonian clashes. And this full moon in Virgo will provide the energy needed to catalyze these processes of integration.
Today the first post I was delivered on social media was perfect for this moment in time, reminding me with this striking visual that the Earth herself is decidedly a Water planet:
Wow. Water, water, everywhere…..
Pisces is Absorption Season: Subterranean Compost & the Feet
Pisces is the great unifier, the line-blurrer, the sign that throws out boundaries and borders in favor of the integral whole. It is a wonderful season for looking at how the disparate parts of your life are deeply intertwined.
In the ecological life cycle, the upcoming equinox of Aries season represents the sprout cracking open the seed, sending roots downward and leaves upward, with new life emerging above ground. But before this can happen, the seed must sit in the dark quiet of Pisces, containing the code for everything that will come after it, waiting for a sign to begin a new cycle of growth.
Pisces is a unified subterranean compost, made up of all the decayed plant matter that merged with the ground during Libra season. In the deep rains of fixed-water Scorpio season and the controlled burning fires of mutable-fire Sagittarius season, the remnants of spring and summer were composted into to soil. In Capricorn season, ice and snow eroded hard rock into new sand and dirt, and in Aquarius season, mycelium created aerated channels to create a fertile loam soil, where seeds of the plants now await their next rebirth.
Pisces, the mutable water sign, enters this spongy soil in the form of melting snow and ice and early-spring rain showers. It couldn’t soak in without the beautiful, timely interplay of each season that came before it. Pisces is a season of absorption, of soaking in all that has transpired during the rest of the year, from Aries to Aquarius.
In medical astrology, Pisces rules the feet, the body part that both holds the weight of the rest of the body and absorbs energies from the earth. We have 26 bones, 33 joints, 7000+ nerve endings, and more than 100 muscles, tendons & ligaments in each foot. Essentially a sack of tiny bones encased in a gorgeous web of fascia, our feet are among the most complex structures in our entire body. Each individual joint works seamlessly together to support our weight, maintain balance, and help us walk, run, jump, and leap.
Since I’ve been in Costa Rica, I have been walking barefoot a lot atop the rich soil and jagged rock, absorbing the energies of everything that is going on beneath the surface. Using the muscles of my feet to walk and run has made me so aware of the points of reflexology that the soles of my feet have. Our entire body is represented within our feet, just as the entire Zodiac is represented within the sign of Pisces.
The practice of earthing, or grounding, where people deliberately walk barefoot on the earth or submerge in natural bodies of water is growing in popularity. Earthing is done in order to receive health benefits by absorbing the free electrons and energy emitted by the earth through our skin. The idea is that humans are essentially electrical beings, as we need electricity to beat our hearts, pump blood, and perform countless chemical reactions throughout our bodies. Since we are made of mostly water, we also make excellent conductors, and having skin contact with the Earth allows us to absorb the energy Earth generates through lightning strikes, solar radiation, and the inner core of the planet.
Pisces is the final sign of the Zodiac, the sign who’s absorbed all the lessons of the previous 11 signs. The glyph for Pisces represents two fish that are swimming in opposite directions linked together by a band, or two crescents of receptivity open to the world around them, held together by the line of matter. As recently pointed out by Mario of symbolic.studies, the glyph also symbolizes the cross-section of a torus field, a system where energy flows from inner to outer in a looping cycle.
Watch their reel about it by clicking the post below.
Toroidal shapes can be found everywhere in nature, from trees to apples (to the infamous bagel from the fantastic and Piscean film Everything Everywhere All At Once…). It is believed by many physicists that the toroid is the shape of the universe itself. Energy fields of planets are torus shaped, called magnetospheres. The human biofield is a toroidal electromagnetic field that extends several meters from the body and is composed of electromagnetic energy. The energy flows out of our heads, around our bodies, down into the earth, and back up through our feet and into our root chakra, then inside us through the rest of our chakras, in an infinite loop of energy.
Now that I’ve seen the Pisces glyph as a toroid, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to see it any other way. It is in Pisces season that we recognize the flow of energy inherent to everything, flowing inward to out, outward to in, absorbing everything in its path. The feet are the pathway up receiving far more than we’re consciously aware of.
The full moon in the opposite sign of absorption: Virgo’s Discernment, Discretion, and Digestion
Speaking of deciphering new images within astrological glyphs, let’s take a look at Virgo. Like the glyph for Scorpio, Virgo begins with what looks like the letter M, but instead of a tail pointing outward like the scorpion, it loops back around and completes itself. This symbol is representative of the Maiden’s shaft of wheat, and also of Virgo’s self-containment, introspective nature, and…. the looping intestines of the digestive system.
Virgo is a sign ruled by these looping intestines, the gut and stomach, and all parts of the body that harvest and intake the world, digest what is nutritious, and leave the rest. Virgo is the final sign of the first-half of the Zodiac, representing the personal and the upper part of the body. Pisces is the final sign of the second-half of the zodiac, representing the transpersonal and the lower part of the body.
Both Virgo and Pisces are always on, always serving us through taking in the energies of the earth and the food we consume. The digestive system and the feet are both parts of us that work SO hard and do SO much for us everyday, yet are oftentimes overlooked and under-appreciated. Virgo and Pisces both represent service- Virgo being of service to the material plane, and Pisces being of service to the ethereal plane.
On this trip to Central America, I’ve been hit hard by the power of the Virgo and Pisces body parts, and the truth of how much I normally take them for granted. (The astrological parallels of the moments seriously never cease to amaze me in this way. I had no idea what I would write about until a few days ago, as I’ve been in serious tune-out vacation mode. But as I started to think about writing this post on how the Virgo/Pisces axis of this full moon relates to the body, I had to laugh because the only things I could think about were my feet and my digestive system!)
I bought new flip flops right before this trip, and since I didn’t wear them in, they cut me between my toes, so every step I took was noticeable and painful. Ouch. I bought some superglue as a quick fix to close off the wounds, and ended up gluing my foot to a cushion… double ouch. With the humid 95 degree heat by the beach, my tennis shoes-enclosed feet then started swelling, and I had to take an afternoon to put my legs up the wall and soak them in ice baths. After a while, I managed to find some Tevas to buy, which has made life so much better… and I’m now thanking my lucky feet for every step they take!
Once my feet were healing up and I stopped thinking about them so much, the water and food of this unfamiliar biome finally caught up with my digestive system. Overall the food has been whole, fresh, and absolutely delicious, but some little bug eventually caught up with me. I’m not super ill, but I’m definitely noticing my digestion more than usual, and this fact makes me more discerning when it comes to what I’m putting into my body. Luckily I’m a Virgo sun, and this comes fairly naturally to me… but far less so on vacation! At this point I’m actively thanking my guts for their constant hard work and discernment, just as I’m continuing to thank my feet for every step.
This full moon, give thanks for the great powers of digestion and absorption
As this full moon in Virgo reflects the Sun in Pisces, I invite you to take some time to give gratitude to these amazing parts of yourself that absorb so much of the world around you, in service to your holistic well-being. Give yourself a foot rub (or ask a partner or friend for a trade), and eat some fiber or take some probiotics to show your gut some love! I’ve seen this moon described as a moon of self-care, and your feet and digestive system are perfect places to start loving up on yourself- click this link for a Youtube video guiding you through a self-foot massage (no affiliation).
Also- whenever you feel annoyed with your Pisces placements or relations for being too sensitive, think of your feet, and how grateful you are for their sensitivity to the energies of the earth beneath them. If you ever get frustrated with the overly-picky nature of your Virgo friends or planetary placements, remember your digestive system, and how grateful you are for it’s ability to discern ripe from rotten and absorb precious nutrients.
Throughout Pisces season, we are asked to surrender to the flow of everything that is larger than us, to know that the whole truly is greater than the sum of it’s parts. We are asked to dream, to imagine, to float in the waters of potentiality as the seeds germinate within our rich soils. This full moon is the mirror point of the other end of the spectrum of health and spirituality, providing us a fleeting but poignant opportunity to see where we can impose our own sets of boundaries to support us in the long term. (I, for one, am taking this moon as a cue to lay off of the sparkly cold cervezas and sugary paletas for a while!)
Sitting on the axis of healing, this full moon helps us find balance between surrender and control, between paddling to catch a wave and battling a riptide, between opening our arms wide to the weather and going inside by a fan to avoid overheating. The dances between polarities that full moons ask of us can feel like a lot. But when we find, in our lives and in our bodies, the link between opposites, magic can truly be realized.
I wish you the very best this full moon, as I slink into the cavelike room of my cabina and luxuriate in a few minutes of air conditioning, returning some sense of structure to my melted body.
Sending you love and care until the new moon in Pisces,
<3
Alison @ Astrosomatics
