“], “filter”: { “nextExceptions”: “img, blockquote, div”, “nextContainsExceptions”: “img, blockquote, a.btn, a.o-button”} }”>
Heading out the door? Read this article on the new Outside+ app available now on iOS devices for members!
>”,”name”:”in-content-cta”,”type”:”link”}}”>Download the app.
As we look to the week ahead, we look to the beginning of an entirely new era. We do so in classic Aquarian style as the Sun and, on the same day, Pluto make their entrance into this future-oriented air sign, initiating a nearly two-decade chapter ahead.
Aquarius is known as the water bearer, pouring into the collective from its sacred vessel. According to myth, it isn’t just water that this air sign shares with the masses, it’s consciousness, offering new streams of inspiration, vision capacities, and a different way to go about life.
Sun Enters Aquarius
The Sun is our consciousness. It is our center, our life force, vitality, expression, sense of identity, and light that emanates from each of us in any moment. As the Sun shifts through the zodiac, we find our light shifting its expression, too.
The Sun enters Aquarius on January 20, 2024, and remains there until February 18, 2024. Those of us born within these dates find ourselves embodying and expressing this sign in each moment throughout our lives. Regardless of when we were born and what our Sun sign might be, it is during these weeks that we all get to explore the ethers of Aquarius. We get to see the world through its lens, feel it in our bodies, and allow it to shape the expression of our life force.
Aquarius, as an air sign, looks to the future. It is given a vision from beyond the tangible expression of reality in our current time. It looks at what is current now and then looks beyond it. It is the zodiac of innovation, change, and evolution. It shows us a new way, a better way, to serve humanity and the evolution of life itself. It is intellectual, free-thinking, humanitarian, innovative, and inventive. It is here to reach beyond the status quo.
As we journey through the realm of Aquarius, we each become our own unique expression of Aquarius. Something inside begins guiding us to new and different ways of experiencing the world and going about our everyday lives. We begin thinking outside of the box, leaning into change and innovation, and opening to alternative ways of being and doing. We approach our visions differently and, therefore, perceive ideas and opportunities opening in front of us.
It is throughout these next few weeks that we are gifted with the opportunity to open to new, different, innovative, and exciting ways to go about the building of our dreams and the living of our lives. If ever there was a time to lean into change, letting our future selves take us by the hands and guide us forward, it is within Aquarius season.
Pluto Enters Aquarius
In a synchronistic and almost magical way, on the very same day the Sun enters Aquarius, Pluto does as well.
Although the Sun shifts through each zodiac within a few weeks, Pluto can spend up to 21 years moving through one sign before entering the next. Its movements are a big deal, era-defining, and generational. The movement is a marker of an entirely new chapter within our individual and collective experience.
We have been dancing within the two very different worlds of Pluto in Capricorn and Pluto in Aquarius for almost a year. And it is during week that we take a significant step of the dance. For the first time since the 1700s, Pluto entered Aquarius in March 2023. It remained there until May 2023, when Pluto retrograde’s spin moved it backward into Capricorn.
On January 20, 2024, Pluto returns to Aquarius. It will remain in this future-oriented sign until September 1, 2024, where it moves back into Capricorn while in retrograde for the final time in our lifetime. On November 19, 2024, Pluto will reenter Aquarius, where it will remain for almost two decades, until 2043.
Pluto is our inner underworld. It is our unseen, our mystery, and our unconscious. It can be found only through journeying deep within, far past the aspects of self we show to the outside world. It represents death, transformation, rebirth, and empowerment. It is our darkness, shadows, and vulnerabilities.
Aquarius is the new way, the different way, the realms not yet ventured, the realms perhaps not yet understood. It is the beginning of a life we don’t yet know, yet we feel the call seemingly from within each cell of our bodies.
Pluto entering Aquarius brings a shift in both our own consciousness and the collective consciousness that we find ourselves swimming within, unable to be separated from. It invites us to break down the status quo, the consensus, and the accepted normal way of doing and being in the world so that we may access the unknown gifts that live beyond it. It wants empowerment, it asks us to look at anything, within and without, that disempowers us so that we may begin to reclaim our authority, step by step.
The shift of Pluto arrives with the opportunity to bring profound inner and outer transformation to the structures that hold us, both as individuals and a society. Although the movement of Pluto is deeply transformative, working with us from the core depths of self, it is a slow massage over two decades. We cannot know who we will be in 2043, but as we continue to move with Pluto, we can only imagine it will be a vastly different self and world.
Your Invitation
This week is our opportunity to begin swimming within these waters of change, observing how both Aquarius season and Pluto in Aquarius feel different from within our bodies. Observing what kind of thoughts dance within the spaces of our minds, the types of ideas that find us or even, the things that begin to shift in our own lives. It is our invitation to open to this change.
Life is forever presenting us with opportunities for growth, for us to become the embodiment and expression of more of who we are, and for our desires and visions to come into our lives. Yet we are in active collaboration with this life, with these invitations. This week, this season, and these next two decades, we are gifted the opportunity to transform our relationship with change, growth, the new and unknown, and the future that calls each of our names toward it.
RELATED: A Complete Guide to the Full Moons of 2024, Including What They Mean for You
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.