When I checked in with my guides about the topic of this Aries New Moon edition, “Initiations” was the immediate answer. Like my logophile self, my guides apparently love wordplay.

The word “initation” has two meanings, of course: beginning and challenge. Aries is the first sign of the zodiac, so today’s New Moon is the initiatory New Moon of the astrological year.

Every New Moon is a beginning of course: a seed-planting for the moonth. Since this is the first of the year, both the feeling of fresh new beginnings and the opportunity for setting powerful intentions for what you desire to create from now through 19 March 2019. Yes, that’s the next 11 months.

The other meaning for initiation—and here they’re telling me to use the plural, initiations—comes thanks to the fact that the planet Uranus is sitting right next to the Sun-Moon combo at this New Moon. Uranus is the modern ruler of quirky and brilliant Aquarius. This blue planet doesn’t spin on its axis the way all the others in our solar system do—horizontally, like a top—but vertically, like a wheel in motion.

Uranus is a wild card.

Uranus is the planet of the lightning bolt, the flash of insight, the revolutionary. When Uranus is at play, as it will be intensely for the next couple months and really for this whole astrological year (more on that later), you need to be on your toes, ready to pivot at a moment’s notice. Uranus brings sudden shifts, so expect the unexpected.

Uranus asks you not to be too attached.

Chances are, your personal landscape will change over the coming months, probably in an instant, and probably more than once. Now, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing—these are always, ultimately, changes for the better, though we humans tend to find them challenging in the moment. Choose to breathe and look for a silver lining. For example, being laid off might make paying one’s bills tricky for a while, but chances are it’s also a freedom card. Choose to see the bright side as soon as you can.

And while Uranus is adding volatility to this already fiery Aries New Moon, it’s not going away any time soon. A month from tomorrow, on the 16th of May, it enters Taurus. The last time it entered Taurus, it tempered world financial market volatility and Great Depression woes with the New Deal. That was in 1934. When no one expected an end to the trials of the Depression, here came Uranus into Taurus. The Lightning bolt was grounded.

Because this planet takes about 85 years to pedal through the entire zodiac, this is probably the one time in your life you’ll be able to witness Uranus entering Taurus, the sign of creature comfort and financial stability that you create for yourself. This Earth sign is ruled by Venus, Goddess of Beauty, Pleasure, and Abundance.

But before we get there, our Aries-New-Moon-to-Vernal-Equinox year will be ruled by today’s sky: the birth chart for the year.: with explosive + unpredictable Uranus in volatile Aries right alongside the Sun and Moon.

Also playing a big role today is the Sun-Moon-Uranus combo in a hard angle to a Mars-Saturn-Pluto lineup in Capricorn. These tough-as-nails planets want something other than the Uranian New Moon. But both sides of this equation want you to be ready for big transformation. Think long-term: the next two years. Saturn in Capricorn is here to make it real. To write it in stone.

If all of this is feeling a little oppressive (it IS about initiations, after all), here’s some good news you can appreciate right away: Mercury stationed direct this morning, before the New Moon, so the entire year will NOT—I repeat, will NOT (there may be some of my own will entering in here)—be shadowed by the communication issues that we find so irritating during Mercury retrogrades. Again: Mercury Retrograde officially ended early this morning! Huzzah!

When setting intentions for the rest of the year, take Uranus and Pluto and the promise of rapid shifts into consideration. Ask your Guides which ones are the right ones to formulate, and stick with those.

Any intentions you set starting at 10 pm Eastern tonight (not before!) will apply not only to this 30-day lunation, but really to the entire year up to the Vernal Equinox of March 2019.

If you participated in my Equinox crystal-pulling party, you might want to go back and see what your intention was and either reiterate it tonight or tweak it a bit. For those crystal parties I tell people to only have one so as not to muddy the waters, but here you can have from 3 to 10. The window for setting intentions starts at 9:58 PM Eastern tonight, and stays in effect, except for a few overnight hours on the 17th for the next 44 hours. The earlier the better, but never before the New Moon is exact.

Look for the house containing 26 degrees of Aries in your birth chart to see what area of your life might be most affected. For me, it’s right on the cusp of my 4th house (of home) and a few degrees away from my North Node, or my evolutionary path. Uranus and I are good friends, so I’m not afraid of what’s about to come in to rock my foundations. I’m not sure exactly what it will look like, and it’s won’t be easy, but I know that it will be for the best.

In my Priestess Mystery School, there’s a favorite phrase: “Life is the initation.”

What I understand that to mean based on my many many initiations is that when you’ve done the work, cleared your field and upleveled inside the temple (where everyone around you is aligned and operating in an energetically coherent field), you do actually have to go home to your life.

And that life does not occur in a coherent field where there might occasionally be little ripples of wobble that are called out and brought back into alignment. No, life occurs in a pretty messy, loud space, with people who are perhaps not as energetically sensitive as you are, who tread all over your boundaries, and who couldn’t tell you what alignment even means, much less looks or feels like.

“Life is the initiation” means that you are the architect of your experience.

Your Higher Self is gleefully following you around rubbing her or his hands together, saying “oh, yes, now s/he’s ready to put this new understanding to the test!” Not to make you a victim—au contraire! To help you to see yourself better, both the good and the bad. To help you to love yourself and those around you more. To bring more compassion and also nimble-footedness to your responses as your life unfurls itself before you.

It’s up to you to respond from a place of Sovereign self-knowing. And this knowledge does not come from your head. It comes from your heart.

On Friday the 13th, my colleague Kai Ashley and I did a whopper (and I mean WHOA! I was knocked on my ass for 24 hours by the intensity of the energy flowing through me!) of a healing for women who feel they might have been burned at the stake or otherwise persecuted for their sacred gifts. Near the end of the channeled part, before Kai took over to do some intensive emotional processing through EFT tapping (that was great and so very needed), the Keepers told the listeners to BE the Rose Quartz.

Rose Quartz entrains everyone around it to a place of more self-love and compassion; to be more open-hearted. If we can see ourselves AS Rose Quartz—fully open-hearted and transmitting Love on all stations, this is a primary and essential step to shifting the world out of a fear-based paradigm into one based on LOVE.

We’re having great discussions over there. The 2-hour livestream is also available on my personal page if you’d like to check it out. Please let me know your aha’s.

There’s a lot more happening energy-wise on Tuesday when the planet Venus conjuncts the Moon in her home sign of Taurus at the “Second Gate.” This refers to the Inanna story as she’s leaving the Underworld and re-collecting her personal power. This conjunction (there are typically 7 gates, but this time there will be 8) is aligned with the Womb—Venus’s chakra—so her energy is extra strong then.

Be on the lookout for the themes of feelings of Love, pleasure, sensuality, as well as flow, beauty, art, sexuality (possibly even sacred—healing–sexuality), abundance, and more. Shadow aspects of this event might include being too focused on beauty or pleasure. This is when we can really, truly connect to Divine Feminine energy of surrendering to BE-ing (as opposed to doing) and trusting that the Cosmic forces have our backs.

Also on Tuesday, Chiron, the Wounded Healer enters Aries. At the New Year’s “natal chart” it will still be in the final degree of the zodiac at 29 degrees 55 minutes of Pisces (and therefore quite intense right now). This asteroid circles the zodiac once every 50 years, so this is a Big Deal. The healing and mentorship we may have been offering to the world might be asking to be applied especially to ourselves for a while.

Wishing you a fabulous Aries New Moon tonight. Many Blessings!

Remember to Own Your Magick!

xo,

P.S.: Beloved, have you picked up your free gifts yet from the Inspired Living Giveaway? There are more than 50 in there, so I’m sure there’s at least one offering for you! And while those who are offering their gifts are all women, I’ve had plenty of men pick up my gift. Let yourself go nuts! It’s only available until next Sunday, so don’t wait. This is your final reminder.

Here’s my gift, and it’s a 2-parter: first, you can download my “WALK AS LIGHT: Crystalline Light-Anchoring Meditation” which is really a wonderful way to both anchor divine and crystalline light into your body AND put two filters (gold and pink) on it so that it’s not “too bright” for some people.

Part 2 is a short 1:1 zoom call with a Crystal Blessing! I’ll pull stones from my bowl and tell you what the blessing means/the energy it convey to you. If you’ve ever been a part of my crystal-pulling parties, this is the same thing, but one-on-one. Yummy, right? Right.

(My product image designed by the very talented Nedjma Tara!)

Click here to join at no charge: bit.ly/Inspiring_GIFTS