Dear Friends,
In honor of this very Pluto full Moon, I am releasing a conversation I recorded with Theresa earlier this month. I meant to post this episode two weeks ago, but I was swallowed up first by finals (summer school, ew, gross) and then by my birthday, which was not just any birthday but was, in fact, my 40th birthday—a milestone for which I felt a sort of uncharacteristic reverence that I didn’t know how to meet or what to do with.
I ended up spending the day with friends and family, and the next morning my boyfriend took this photo of me eating cake for breakfast on the couch. The photo made me smile because, as a child, I was notoriously unable to keep my eyes open for pictures, and I felt, somehow, like I could reach through the image of this forty-and-one-day-old lady into the heart of my inner child (who, by the way, has ALWAYS loved chocolate cake as much as the photo suggests).
My boyfriend has a theory about kids who can’t keep their eyes open in family photos. He says these little squinters are the “good” kids—the attentive, hyper-attuned, eager-to-please children who wait with their smiles and faces camera-ready while the rest of the group gets wrangled and wrestled into order. By the time the camera flashes, the good kids miss the moment; their eyes flutter shut from the fatigue and unnatural straining. I have no way of assessing the accuracy of his theory, but it certainly falls under the category of feels true. And yesterday, as I relistened to parts of Theresa’s and my Pluto conversation, I felt a powerful kinship with the good little kid inside me and a reverence for all the transformation she’s undergone to get to where she is today.
The truth is I still am the good kid. I am terrified of messing up, of disappointing others, of being misunderstood. There is a part of me that still wants to smile when it’s time to smile; to get the best grades; to be the perfect homemaker; to embody the pleasing visage of feminine grace my mother hoped and prayed and begged of me. But my life had different plans for me.
In this episode, Theresa and I dive deep into all things Pluto, but if I were to sum up the Lord of the Underworld in one line here, I would say Pluto represents the layers of deeply held, conscious and unconscious fears that barricade our path to transformative change. His transits tend to correspond with one or the other side of this process: encounters with the fear and/or experiences of transformation.
This morning, the Moon reaches the apex of her fullness at 6 degrees of Aquarius in conjunction with Pluto, opposite the Sun-Jupiter cazimi. It also happens to be a full Moon on top of my natal Moon, which, for those of you beloved astro nerds who are paying close attention, means I am currently in the throes of an extended Pluto-Moon transit. Pluto has become my Moon’s multi-year bedfellow, and today takes a highlighter pen to this very long transit, the transit I believe represents the real force underlying the heavy reverence I felt about turning 40, as well as the weepy, yearning love I feel for that good kid inside me.
Robert Hand described the Pluto-Moon conjunction as a powerful transformation of the most intensely personal and preconscious part of the psyche. I was born with Pluto in Scorpio in the 12th house, and I suffered from extreme anxiety and terrifying intrusive thoughts as a child. For the most part, this went unnoticed by others because—hello, Saturn, planet of boundaries and responsibility, on my Ascendant—I wasn’t much of an externalizer. I kept my complaints and feelings to myself.
What were the root causes of my childhood anxiety? Probably a lot of things, but fundamentalist Christian day-school is high on my list of prime suspects. I was, for better or worse, both an innately spiritual and innately serious child—a perfect storm of vulnerabilities that resulted in my taking the greatest hits of Christian fundamentalism much too much to heart at far too young an age.
You were born wrong, bad, sinful, broken. Your mind is not to be trusted. Your heart is corrupt. God can save you, but only if you think the right, rightest, most righteous thoughts and remember to ask forgiveness for the wrong thoughts! That is, if you have time and you don’t get caught sinning with your bad, broken mind at the very end—which is totally near, scheduled for a time nobody knows, except for… this fucking thief in the night guy?
To a large degree, the 12th house represents the unconscious mechanisms of our psyche that color our experience of our innermost selves. The 12th house contains places of retreat, experiences of isolation, and the mental states and physical places we enter into during forced and voluntary solitude. Sometimes I think of the 12th house very simply as what being alone feels like. And as a child, being alone was the fucking worst. Alone is when my mind would begin to swirl and struggle against the rip current of the underworld. Pluto, through his fear-inspiring religious actors, had managed to isolate me almost entirely from myself. I couldn’t trust my own heart; I feared doing wrong; I feared harming others; I feared the end of the world; my mind projected violent, intrusive images of the worst things I could imagine. I felt trapped in a prison inside myself, all the while smiling when I was meant to smile and doing my best to project my perfect, rule-following trustworthiness.
In my forty years of life, Pluto has moved through three houses in my chart, and my relationship to these early childhood experiences has transformed and evolved. I no longer feel the acute pain that raged within me throughout my 20s and 30s; I have come to accept that an intense relationship with spirituality is part of my path. I wish it had not started with harm and religious trauma, but the intensity never stopped; it transformed into a deep, profound, personal, sensory, heart-centered relationship with the Divine. And when Pluto opposed my Sun for nearly three years in the early 2020s, I cultivated a unique and personal spiritual practice that I might not have gotten to if I hadn’t had the harm to press up against with all the force of my unyielding anger and indignation. But my spiritual practice didn’t fix everything. In fact, the most consistent effect of my practice is that it reveals what has yet to be resolved and routinely sets me down new paths of healing, equipped with the internal and external resources I need to help me change myself. (This, by the way, is my definition of grace, but that is the topic of another essay.)
What is relevant now is that even though my spiritual trauma is much healed and largely transformed, I am still working on the raw sensations beneath the Christian schoolgirl story. As transiting Pluto comes to sit on my Moon, I am still learning to trust myself. I am still cultivating an inner sense of my own goodness. I am still interrupting both the impulse to seek external validation and the extreme pressure I place on myself to perform—to be insightful, to say only the right, correct thing, and never the wrong, accidentally harmful thing. And as Pluto transits around my chart, he will always bring circumstances to the surface that will threaten to isolate me from myself. How I respond to those circumstances determines if Pluto will tug the knot tighter or loosen its hold.
When I turned 40 last week, I moved into a Mars profection year. Mars is a troublemaker, but he is also my favorite of the planetary deities. I love him like you love a brother you’re always fighting with. Mars never holds back—not on criticism, conviction, or love.
On the eve of my birthday, I went into meditation and found Mars inside myself. I asked him to help me face this very Pluto-Moon year with grace and determination, to help me move through the world with more courage, and to help me overcome the patterns of dissociation I’ve been running since childhood. I asked Mars to help me learn how to stay in my body when I want to eject, to follow through, to fight for myself, and to believe in the value of my own work.
And this, to me, will always be the real value of astrology: not to determine what will be, but to help us strive toward what we wish to become, with the aid of beings who exist beyond us and within us. Between them, they hold expressions of every quality—the familiar and the unfamiliar, that which comes naturally and that which feels distant and inaccessible. We have access to so much help and so many teachers. It is a wonder to live this life. Thank you for being here with me on this very Pluto Full Moon.
Here’s to another 40 years.
Warmly,
Christina
www.skiesofgrace.com
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