So We May Become Healers: Virgo New Moon

The Virgo New Moon (28 degree Virgo at 10:30pm PST on September 19th) crystallizes the Virgo themes we’re already working with, with five planets in Virgo. The mutable earth sign seeks perfection in body and mind. With a keen intellect turned within, Virgo seeks practices, nutrition, and exercises to sift through, edit, refine, release, detox, purify.

Why is Virgo so keen on perfection and purification? Because its highest purpose is service. More than anything else, Virgo seeks to serve, to be useful, to help, to contribute. And, health and vitality are required to serve effectively. Naturally humble, Virgo is happy to take on the tasks that others may find beneath them. Virgo does what needs to be done.

Virgo is often found in the background, behind the scenes, doing the unglamorous grunt work that rarely gets much credit. Which is not to say Virgo isn’t skilled: Virgo is a keen editor, health practitioner, nutritionist, healer, researcher, yogi, and priest(ess). Virgo has great expertise, it just often goes unrecognized.

If Virgo is sometimes associated with anxiety or pickiness, it’s largely because this sign has been misunderstood and unappreciated. And without appreciation, without understanding, this aspect within all of us becomes confused and distorted. So honour the Virgos around you, and the Virgo within you!

Virgo causes its own undoing when its critical capacity becomes so fixated on the self and can see only failure. It serves to remember that perfection incorporates an acceptance of imperfection, perfection requires forgiveness and compassion--all qualities of Pisces, the opposite sign where we find a natural counterbalance to Virgo. Pisces is highlighted at this time as the New Moon is exactly opposite Chiron in Pisces.  

Chiron is the wounded healer. When Chiron is activated, so are our wounds, but not in order to retraumatize us--Chiron’s intention is to show us where we are hurting so we may tend to our wounds. So we may confront ourselves with what we need to change. So we may learn, the hard way, through healing ourselves, how to heal. So we may learn to be healers in our own right.

With Jupiter continuing on in Libra, we’re asked to consider what is just. There are so many Virgo-related injustices. To mention only one, in a moment when health is commodified through private healthcare, expensive yoga, green juice, and organic food, we might ask, what do we really need to be healthy, who gets to be healthy, is it fair that health is so exclusive, and if not, what can we do about it?

How can we heal? Not only ourselves, but also our communities?