What Are We Protecting?

What are we protecting and what lies beneath that protection?

On October 10, we have a New Moon in Libra. And instead of using it to set intentions or manifest something, I’d like to offer a different way in.

Before we begin something new, we might want to look at something first. Something we’ve experienced. Something we’ve taken part in. Something we’ve become so familiar with that we may never have recognized how it came to be established in our lives.

We might recognize what we want, what we value, and what we believe we are defending without yet seeing the deeper patterns shaping those desires and responses.

This week’s sky seems to ask something similar.

Venus, the ruler of Libra, is retrograde in Scorpio. Mars is in Leo. Saturn is retrograde in Aries. I don’t read any of that as a prediction. I read it as an invitation to inquire into what we weigh, what we value, and what we’re willing to defend.

That led me to Cancer, and to a part of its mythology I’d never really considered.

In one version of the story, the crab is sent into Heracles’ battle with the Lernaean Hydra by an authority greater than itself. It enters a conflict that was never its own. It’s crushed, and then its act of defence is placed among the stars.

It made me wonder…

how often do we defend something simply because we were taught to? How often does familiarity get mistaken for safety? And how often do we keep protecting something without asking whether it was ours to defend in the first place?

That’s what the new talk is about..

We may recognize what we want, what we value, and what we believe we are protecting, without yet recognizing the patterns from which those desires and responses arise.

In it, we move through the mythology of Cancer, the Hydra and her regenerating heads, the difference between thinking and discernment, and a practice of returning, which isn’t about reaching a permanent state of awareness. It’s about learning to come back to what’s true.

A few questions to carry with you, whether or not you press play:

• What have I always believed was good for me, and have I ever examined why?

• Can I question a pattern that has worked for years without assuming I have to abandon it?

• And who might I be without having to defend it?

There’s nothing to solve here.
These are the kinds of questions that become part of a relationship with our own experience

With Love,

Veronica ☽