August 8, 2021
6:49 AM PDT / 9:49 AM EDT / 1:49 PM GMT
16 Leo 14
Every New Moon plants a seed, launches a cycle, or simply refreshes an area of life. The fresh start of this New Moon comes with personal liberation and a dramatic surge in self-expression and just plain enjoyment of living.
Leo is the energy of the child, the performer, and royalty. It’s a wide-ranging mix, with attention as a common trait – welcoming it, inviting it, enjoying it, or demanding it.
Odds are you’ve been thinking about attention lately. The quality of attention you’re receiving has certainly been up for review. Last month’s Aquarius Full Moon directed a dispassionate light onto the state of your friendships and community. Lightbulbs have been going off and switches going down taking you out of some of those, particularly since we’ve entered the lightning field of aspects to changemaker Uranus that’s leading us to the New Moon.
The lightning has brought moments of clarity about who gets or appreciates you and who does not. Some realizations have been disappointing. Likely you haven’t responded by waving wildly and working all the harder to get notice. The more probable response has been taking your toys and moving elsewhere.
The Leo New Moon takes you further into self-respect and acceptance. This is a moment for committing to your self and your birthright to be the center of your world. Childhood talents, interests, and companions could be circling back, perhaps for healing, perhaps for finding a new place in your life. Circumstances may be ripe and supportive for them, in ways that have not been possible for years.
Only a few aspects are adding textures to the Leo look-at-me vibe, but the ones that are in place are power players.
Mercury is conjunct the Sun and Moon. The messenger god’s proximity has us aware of our impulses, sharing them (not that Leo is prone to keeping them under wraps), and excitedly, dramatically expressing ourselves.
The New Moon locks into the ongoing reality-testing Saturn/Uranus square, the aspect that has been rocking and reshaping our world all year. This pair is stress-testing systems and structures, pitting old ways against new, and forcing innovation and radical approaches. Their battle is personal now, and it’s reshaping each of us.
The Sun, the Moon, and by extension Mercury are opposite Saturn, enforcer of order. We’re intellectually and emotionally aware of walls, obstacles, delays, and issues of authority, looming above us and putting a damper on us (or posing the threat of a damper).
Both ends of the opposition are squaring Uranus, which is the focal planet in a t-square. Self-expression, entitlement, and me-me-me-me-me impulses are bearing down on the radical change agent from one direction, while forces of order and stability and fitting into civil society are pressuring him from the other.
The line up has a decidedly child vs adult vibe. Neither is going to entirely get its way. The pressure is uncomfortable to the point of being untenable and will force change of a concrete and practical nature, since Uranus is in concrete and practical Taurus.
Emotional liberation is the result. The pressure is breaking you out of a constraint and propelling you into freer experience. It could be that your inner kid and adult have been at odds. It could be that you have held yourself back in the face of convention or authority or rules about fitting in. Regardless of the specifics, the effect is like chains coming off your feet and your cage blowing open.
The release is healing. Whether you consciously force change or welcome it, whether you set intentions to update your self-expression, whether you pass through this New Moon without awareness of its qualities or even that it is happening – your relationship to your self is undergoing a beneficial therapeutic process.
The New Moon is trine Chiron, the wounded healer, in the sign of the individual, Aries. The link stokes your fire. It encourages boldness and self-starting. It makes you excited to be you. Whatever you begin now, whatever you change, whatever comes back around from your early days, watch it catch fire. And have fun.