Full Moon in Virgo

This is coming up on Sunday, 12th March – about 3 pm GMT.

This full moon in Virgo - the sign of order, precision and hygiene - looks medicinal and astringent to me. It's a wound-healing moon. The wounds being healed are mental ones: confusion, delusion, addiction, self-deception, laziness of thought.

The new moon in Pisces a couple weeks back looked like a confused, angry mess – well here is the corrective. A dose of harsh reality.

Try to hold still – this may hurt a bit. It's for your own good though!

The sun at 22 degrees Pisces will be conjunct Chiron and Mercury. This denotes a painful, messy sense of unease – a wound to our minds and to our sense of collective reality. I'd say this has to something do with all the “fake news” stuff in the news lately. It has become very hard to know what to believe, and our confusion is being cynically manipulated for political ends.

But this has been a theme across the board, from the collective level to the individual. Look at your own life: what lies have you been telling yourself, how have you been evading reality, how have you manipulated and decieved others, how have you colluded in your own manipulation by others?

I think at this full moon, the extent of the cover-ups, obfuscations and distortions of reality will be coming clear. Information is bound to come to light that puts hidden things into proper perspective. We will be seeing through the lies and bullshit – lord knows we've had enough of listening to blatant liars discounting all criticism of their behaviour as “fake news”. Facts are facts.

Mercury in Pisces will be exactly square Saturn in Sagittarius for the full moon. This is harsh but credible communication – the voice of moral authority cutting through the smokescreen.

We'll see how it plays out on the world stage. But your own stage is where this really matters: if you've been zoning out, not facing reality, pretending life is whatever you want it to be and facts equal feelings – here is your wakeup call. Reality is reality, and it doesn't care about your feelings or your victim-story. This is harsh, astringent clarity, like disinfectant being poured on a wound. It's meant to wake you the fuck up, so please don't be resentful.

If someone calls you out on your shit or tells you you're being sloppy / lazy / careless / delusional, there's no point getting all indignant and defensive. The point is to heal the wound, remember. That means addressing the underlying pathology instead of denying or defending it.

Taking criticism on board in important here. With the Mercury-Saturn square, you can trust the information you're given – people are not going to be spouting off for the sake of it, or trying to wound you out of malice. They will be trying to convey their observations in order to help, and out of an uncomfortable desire for fair-dealing and justice (courtesy of a tense inconjunct between sun-Mercury-Chiron in Pisces and Jupiter in Libra).

The take-home message here: ignore criticism at your peril. We all have bad habits, and sometimes we all need a bit of a shove to show us what needs changing.

Listen to your inner critic as well. You know deep down what you have to get rid of.

It's important to remember that at a Virgo full moon, we are at the midpoint of the Pisces lunar cycle. Pisces is, at best, about acceptance and letting go – releasing, forgiving, forgetting – so that energy can flow freely instead of remaining stagnant and congealed.

Virgo is what helps us to clear out all our rotten gunk and blockages. You can take this literally and use this energy to organize your living space and get rid of whatever is cluttering it up – or you can apply it internally to clear your mental and emotional garbage. Or both!

The point is, we need to make some space for the new moon in Aries, which is a fiery rebirth – a time for focusing on new prospects and what we really want for the year ahead. (It comes on the 28th March this year). You can't really think about starting anything new when your life is cluttered up with old garbage! So this is clear-out time.

A caution about new prospects though: your dreams have to line up with what's actually possible and practical. There are hard limits here – you can work with them but you can't make them disappear. With both Venus and Jupiter retrograde, don't jump headlong into new ventures, especially ones involving relationship and money. Hold back until you have a clearer perspective. I'd say that'll be mid-April, and it's unlikely to feel so great – Venus goes direct on the 15th April conjunct Chiron and in square to Saturn. Bear in mind that your hopes may not measure up to the realities, or may require a lot more work and committment to fulfill than expected.

But don't let it get you down too much. Take the long view and plan to work toward the life you want in a methodical, stepwise way, and you'll be on solid ground.

PS- Venus retrograde is traditionally held to be a bad time for making important purchases. You'll regret your impulse-buys. Remember we are in a phase of clearing out here, not adding to the clutter of stuff we don't really need.