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It’s a busy week in our cosmos. And, for many of us at this time of the year, it’s a busy week in our lives, whether busy through external movements and experiences or busy with emotion, reflection, and pondering on the chapter that awaits ahead. As the week begins and we find ourselves bathing in the light of the full Moon, we are invited to honor our emotions, a natural space to be for some, a foreign space for others.
Full Moon in Cancer
December 26, 2023, brings our final full Moon of the year in the waters of Cancer. It is a Moon that invites us to feel and to finalize. It illuminates and brings warmth. It invites us home in its many forms—home to ourself, our comfort, our bodies, and our families.
Cancer connects us to the sense of home deep within ourselves—that sacred space, that sanctuary within, that holds us steady more than anything else ever could. The full Moon in Cancer invites us to take a moment, an hour, a day to come into that home within ourselves at the end of the year. To touch our inner sanctuary. To nurture ourselves so much that we may come home to ourselves. The more we can find home within ourselves, the more at home we can find ourselves in our outer experience.
Both the Moon and Cancer are ruled by the tides of the ocean. They are similar in their intentions. They are water. They are movement. They are the tides that flow in just as beautifully as they flow out. This full Moon isn’t about our mind. It’s about our emotional body. Our inner tides. The safety of our our heart. The safety of our body as our home.
This full Moon is a window of reflection onto this year, this chapter, and this moment in time before it comes to a close. It is an invitation to honor and create space for the goodbye of this chapter. It is a chance to recognize the hurts of 2023 just as we recognize the beauty of 2023. And, with that, to feel the tide rising within us, feel it carrying us home, and feel safe here.
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Chiron Direct in Aries
Hours after the full Moon on December 26, 2023, Chiron finishes its five-month-long retrograde and begins moving forward once again in Aries, where it has been since 2018 and will linger until 2027.
Chiron is the healer of our zodiac. In mythology, he was the wounded as well as the teacher, the healer, the mystic, and the sage. He was the philosopher and the guide for all around him. It was through tending to his wounds that he began his studies of medicine and healing modalities and gained access to the wisdom that would be shared for years to come.
We all have hurts. In retrograde since July, Chiron invited us to reflect and contemplate the spaces in our life that can feel sensitive. To be compassionate toward ourselves. To tend to ourselves with ease and curiosity so that we may begin to witness these hurts from another perspective and reframe our connection to and narrative around these spaces within us. Chiron is the medicine, wisdom, teachings, compassion, and knowledge found within our wounds.
As Chiron stations direct and moves forward once again, we are invited to take a more active approach with our healing. The emphasis turns from reflective to active, from inward to outward. As it moves forward, we are offered greater access to the wisdom, medicine, and strength available to mend these tender spaces. And we are offered more energy and courage to be with all that is intended to be ours.
While Chiron remains in the realm of Aries, these invitations come so that we may tend to the building of our inner courage, to the reclamation of our individual selves, our unique path, our desires, and our willpower. It is an invitation to take up the space that is ours, to direct more of our energy into our sense of selfhood, and claim with confidence the direction that we our life is taking.
We are reminded of our unique medicine found within our unique hurts. No one experiences life the way that you do and no one has walked the same path as you. Only you have access to the medicine held within your life.
Venus Enters Sagittarius
December 29, 2023, brings the movement of Venus—our planet of beauty, connection, harmony, romance, and love—from the waters of Scorpio and into the fires of Sagittarius, where it will remain until January 23, 2024.
As Venus shifts, the way in which we relate to others shifts. Our lens through which we regard and connect with pleasure, art, beauty, and romance shifts. Our feeling of magnetism and receptivity shifts. It all becomes filtered through the lens of Sagittarius.
Sagittarius is an adventurous sign. Its energy is outward. It invites us to explore and truly savor the moments of our lives as we move through the external world. It reminds us that it is only through being fully human and following our passions that we can come into a deeper relationship with being alive. It seeks meaning, purpose, and wisdom that permeates the vast existence that we find ourselves in.
As Venus travels through Sagittarius for close to a month, our passion and desire for being alive is turned up. Life becomes art, the search for meaning becomes pleasure, and wisdom becomes beauty. In our own unique way, we are invited to bring love to our experience of being alive, to feel into the purpose, guidance, meaning, and divine nature that lies within all the outward movement. Whether that is found through external movement, exploring creativity, swimming within different philosophies and cosmologies, or playing in the dreamscape of something divine. How can you fall in love again with being alive?
Jupiter Direct in Taurus
At the very end of 2023, we are offered one final gift—a beautiful and supportive energy as Jupiter Retrograde comes to an end. Jupiter has been retrograde in Taurus since September 4, 2023, and on December 30, 2023, this seeming backward motion comes to an end.
Jupiter, the biggest planet in our solar system, is expansive and inspiring. It is optimism, faith, trust, and confidence. It invites us into growth, bringing our attention and vision into the future so that we may envision new possibilities for ourselves. It encourages us, cheers us on, nudges us to take a chance, and wants us to actualize our dreams.
While it was in retrograde, we were invited to reflect on our relationship with our faith, with the idea that we are held within the guiding arms of something that is on our side, supporting and holding us. We were reviewing and reframing the dreams that were held closely to our hearts and our sense of worthiness and value alongside them. And we were invited to reflect on our relationship to physical resources, to abundance, to material safety, to the belonging we feel within our bodies, and our ability to create our dreams for ourselves.
Connected to our “higher mind,” Jupiter offers clarity to our vision and path ahead as it stations direct. This higher mind offers wisdom, sight, and direction, and becomes more readily available as Jupiter moves forward. We are invited to look to new possibilities for ourselves. There is a greater sense of ease as Jupiter stations direct. A flow. An opening.
Grounded in Taurus, Jupiter direct is a beautiful opportunity to begin clarifying our desires, hopes, dreams, visions, and goals for the new chapter ahead. It is an invitation to feel into the stability and security that we desire, our relationship with safety and belonging in our bodies, our relationship with finances and other resources, and our connection with the Earth. It is an opportunity to nurture our dreams, physicalize our desires, and create a sense of long-lasting beauty, security, and stability, both inwardly and outwardly.
Your Invitations
As we find ourselves bathing in the light of the full Moon, we are invited to honor our feelings—a natural space for some, a foreign space for others. This full Moon invites us to let what is coming in to come in and what is moving out to move out. To allow our emotional body to move as freely as the tides of the ocean—unattached from the grasping mind, the stories, the narratives, the shoulds and shouldn’ts—and to be cleansed in the process.
It is through this full Moon of emotion and closure, on the same day as Chiron stations direct, that we are offered a new sense of vitality, as if we are gifted a knowing that we’re okay, that we have the courage to continue, to find strength within ourselves, and to stand tall. There is a vast amount of medicine and healing and beauty within the first half of the week.
As we continue on and Venus shifts into Sagittarius while Jupiter stations direct, things may feel a little less tender and a lot more fiery. Both of these cosmic movements bring a sense of vigor, of life force, of wanting to be as alive as we can be. We close the year with a reminder that life is an adventure and to take this way of seeing into the chapter that awaits us.
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Learn more about the influence of astrology in your life, including astrological events the Moon cycles, your Sun and Moon and rising signs, how journaling can help you connect with the current influences, and more with Jordane Maree at Girl and her Moon.
About Our Contributor
Jordane Maree is the founder of Girl and Her Moon, a platform and community exploring Soul through the lens of astrology, tarot, and energy healing. She is a writer, intuitive astrologer, energy and soul guide, and host of Girl and Her Moon, The Podcast. She is inspired, every single day, to be the mirror for you to see all that you truly are, you in all your infinite abilities, in total expansion, in infinite opportunity and love.