HOW to Be in Your Body
Jamaica 2024. Image credit: Jill Allyn Peterson
Last weekend was the beginning of the end of a chapter: it was the last Sun-Uranus conjunction in Taurus in our lifetime. In mere weeks, Uranus will commit the vibe-shift to end all vibe-shifts when it leaves languid Taurus for jazz-hands Gemini. Get ready for Explosions in the Sky.
Say what you will about volatile Uranus having been dragged down to earth in Taurus, but, with Taurus as my 5th house of creativity (and other fun things), my raison d'etre as well as my je ne se quoi have been at the whims of this planet's power surges for the last 7 years, and I feel both sad to see it go and ready to put a bow on whatever I'm meant to have learned from it.
We've already got one foot out the door of our collective earthship era with this year's major outer planet movements (Pluto having left Capricorn, Neptune leaving Pisces and Uranus leaving Taurus). I have a feeling any residual mud from those long transits in water+earth signs will dry up and blow away so quickly once we get to August that we'll forget we ever begged for a quicker pace of transformation, maybe even forget we weren't born wearing running shoes.
Image of an “earthship” building from theregeneration on Flickr
So, I want to pay special attention to this moment of intense earthy fusion we're about to have with the Sun conjoining Uranus in Taurus, before everything changes. A moment where inspiration has one last chance to move our bodies (so brightly!), not just our minds. Where we are offered the opportunity to radically indulge the senses and maybe experience the kind of transcendental pleasure that could also contain evolutionary purpose as well.
What could that mean for you? We can play astrological mad libs (Uranus = innovation+ Taurus = earthiness + Sun = life force energy + your Taurus house) but I think this alignment is offering an even more vital invitation than that.
For me, this invitation couldn't come at a better time as I'm coming off a major Virgo bender. You can probably guess what that means. It started January of 2024 when I stopped eating processed foods, then over the next year and a half got so much pleasure out of curating my habits that I also stopped drinking coffee, then almost completely stopped drinking alcohol, totally lost interest in weed or gummies, started going to bed at 9:30, reducing my screen time, downing my many grass-fed organ meats supplements with the right number of ounces of warm lemon water for my body weight daily, earthing with the sunrise. I became increasingly committed to a morning routine involving cacao, some kind of proprietary mushroom supplement, welcoming the directions, calling in the masters of reiki, sigiling-a-day, everyday. All the things. Fitter. Happier. More productive. Etc.
And of course this perfectly aligns with the timeline of Saturn traversing my 3rd house—putting my daily structure under the microscope and granting me the fortitude to see anything through. Until now.
Initially, this had been about removing all my small hiding places: a yummy snack, a glass of something, a relaxing puff, a caffeinated ritual to punctuate the day. All incredibly acceptable habits which get all the more elusive in their ubiquity. I could live my whole life thinking I didn't have any addictions because I rotate through little rituals that don't add up to incarceration or other regrettable events, but, nonetheless exist as a little escape hatch for mild emotional discomfort or that quietly nagging desire for something just a little bit... more....
So, I thought, why don't I get to the bottom of this?
And while mine is by no means a "rock bottom" situation by most accounts—the aforementioned habits are pretty much standard American lifestyle necessities—I did feel I had hit rock bottom in a creative sense. With the highs and lows of Uranus yanking me in one direction after the next in my house of creativity (the last 7 years saw me get certified in reiki, hypnosis, Feng Shui and Human Design coaching while feverishly continuing my ongoing study of astrology) I wondered if I would ever see the day when I'd stop seeking and start... vibing?
It's been a strange Uranian experience of feeling both electric with possibility and yet completely drained of direction. I thought clearing out these minor compulsions might restore that sense of direction, or at least hold the key to what was holding me back.
So, after 16 or so months of self-imposed, multi-sensory-semi-sobriety, I can report back that I did not in fact experience a newfound glorious state of being “high on life”, nor instant clarity about the way forward. But, I did feel a calmness that gave me a starting point. I was under-stimulated enough to notice the feelings in my body that predicated those little consumption rituals, the soft purring of the engine that runs the marionette strings that have me reaching for whatever reasonable consumable will quell said feelings. The choice then became either sit with those feelings, or see how they respond to a single dried fig instead of a cookie. Wah-wah.
Simple recognition was a first step. And when my big Virgo bender broke last week, it was because I discovered what comes next.
It started (or rather ended) with an afternoon glass of wine. Again, it's not that I was stone cold sober for 16 months prior to this, more that I reset my defaults to “no” rather than “yes” when it came to indulgence.
I was meeting two colleagues at a nearby vineyard to run through the workshop we planned to hold there the next day. I was dressed for a yoga class immediately following our meeting, which I thought might preempt any afternoon wine drinking. But when Phoebe said "I'll get a glass of wine if you will" even my awkward leggings-with-socks-and-shoes couldn't remind me that I had set out with other intentions. How wonderfully indulgent it sounded... wine at a vineyard in the afternoon! Not only drinking but... DAY drinking!
So I drank the first afternoon glass of wine I've had in a long while and canceled yoga. But it didn't stop there.
The next day I happily bought a glazed donut when picking up the coffee for our workshop, then sampled the high-end pastries we offered to our attendees. Look at me, eating SUGAR and CARBS! Go ahead and laugh at my goody-two-shoes version of going off the rails.
Image credit: Jill Allyn Peterson
That evening, I opened a bottle of whatever-wine someone left behind at New Years and smoked some dried out old weed that has been abandoned for just as long. It was glorious, and more because of the intention that the caliber of the consumables. I knew I was indulging for the pure enjoyment of it, not to avoid, hide or run away from anything, and I loved every last mediocre bit of it. Where did this shift come from?
In a nutshell, undeniable astrology and a social media influencer. LOL. Let me explain:
In my life, the sixth house asks “what's your devotion to devotion?” and Jupiter, being in that house for me this past year, hasn't really gotten a word in edge-wise (ironically in Gemini) as it has been under the thumb of a Saturn square from Pisces. But as both planets are wrapping up their stays in each of those signs, Jupiter's voice finally came through, asking:
“What's more compelling - a vigilant devotion to your regimented health-scape, or an indulgent devotion to experiencing each and every moment, whether it's feeling what you're feeling, or feeling the enhanced texture of reality that comes with ingesting certain compounds, so long as you devote yourself to feeling what's real rather than escaping whatever feels less-than-ideal?”
(Classic Jupiter in Gemini in the 6th. Oh and my moon is there, too.)
My 16-month healthy-habits-bender helped me see how my minor and socially-acceptable addictions were keeping my creative energy in a tiring loop; the little daily indulgences were like pit stops to switch out my tires and get me back on the race track of familiar “progress” when a feeling in my body was begging me to actually pull over.
And the reason I was able to return to enjoying things like pastries and wine and THC (I’m still off coffee and love it) without the fear of sending my creative energy back into dissociative loops was because... drumroll please... I finally had a proper somatic healing experience. Something that I've conceptually gone "yeah yeah yeah" to for years, but never thought I needed. Hello, shadow.
Most fascinatingly, the reframe I needed in order to take the off-ramp and venture into the unknown came from an influencer who uses the pursuit of fame as the vehicle for somatic healing. She helped me understand what so many others in the less audacious/more predictable self-help space talk about; that to process and release the feelings that my habits were unsuccessfully managing-through-muffling was like the oil change I didn't know I needed so that I could exit the race track and hit the open road of my creative energy. That I started this exploration by wanting to remove the hiding places I had created in my daily life, and ended by learning somatic healing from a “fame” coach, felt very full-circle.
I say “ended” but with the Sun conjoining Uranus for the last time in Taurus, it's both an ending and a beginning. As this weekend consecrates a new cycle for how our life force energy (the sun) serves our evolution (Uranus) through physical experience (Taurus), we are invited to bring the sensory lessons of the last 7 years into the next chapter of our lives. We are invited to expand our consciousness of and reverence for the transcendental indulgence of simply being alive on earth with our bare feet on the ground. Returning to our bodies and feeling whatever is alive there before the spin masters of ego, not-self, manager-parts, programming and shadow get a chance to rebrand our experience to fit a narrative - that's a big and radical gift that I'm accepting wholeheartedly.
Jamaica 2024. Image credit: Jill Allyn Peterson
Between now and July when Uranus leaves Taurus, I invite you to co-create a souvenir with the earth (dried flowers? pottery? special river rocks?) to remind you of this big water+earth era we're leaving behind, to remind you of how to be in your body, and to keep it as a touchstone for when the rest of the world spins off into untethered chaos (coming soon to an everywhere near you). Let it be a reminder that, in true Taurus fashion, being an epicurean when it comes to the texture of your feelings can be a way to connect to your true home—the earth that has always lived beyond the narratives of “progress”—and your true-self who lives there too.