The full moon in Scorpio on May 15th, 2022 (at 11:14 p.m. CST) is a total lunar eclipse. Big emotional waves reveal hidden parts of ourselves. Our subconscious programming, grief, and pain rise to the surface. We shed layers of old conditioning and strip to our raw, naked essence to remember our primal self.
This total lunar eclipse is visible in the central, eastern, and European time zones. The totality lasts 85.5 minutes. We will feel the impact of this eclipse up to a month before and up to six months after.
This lunar eclipse is the second of two in two weeks, and it provides an opportunity for a deeper, more honest connection with ourselves and others. Eclipses facilitate a shift in consciousness and bring us closer to the next steps of our soul’s journey.
During a lunar eclipse, the Earth’s shadow falls across the Moon’s face, bringing unconscious feelings to the surface and anchoring them in reality. Lunar eclipses are about purging and removing old skins. They inform us of what is ending so that we can be reborn. We are tasked to feel into what needs to be released during this time.
The previous eclipse in Scorpio occurred on April 25th, 2013. How have you been growing since then? What adjustments are you feeling called to make?
This Energy Has Been Building Since November 2020
The last 18 months have been an initiation into our shadow and helped shed light on some significant internal patterns. How have we integrated these awarenesses? What are we still holding onto? Where do we go from here?
This eclipse brings intensity, mystery, and alchemy. We open to a part in ourselves that we have not yet healed, or perhaps even still carry through our genes, our lineage. We decide how to respond or react to life. We investigate what truly motivates us. We feel into what needs to be released. We are swimming in ancestral waters. We surrender what isn’t ours to sustain. We uncover treasures to align with integrity. We enter the underworld.
“When a feeling of sadness, despair, or anger arises, we should stop what we are doing in order to go home to ourselves and take care. We can sit or lie down and begin to practice mindful breathing. The daily practice of breathing can be very helpful. A strong emotion is like a storm, and when a storm is about to arrive we should prepare so we can cope with it.”
Thich Nhat Hanh
Eclipses reoccur in 19-year cycles. The last total lunar Scorpio eclipse was in May 2004. Looking back to that time, what themes were emerging? What was the beginning and ending? What layers have been shed?
This total lunar eclipse is an initiation into the shadow. We are invited to create space for all parts of ourselves and offer presence, love, and acceptance. It is vital to be present and radically honest with what’s arising so that we can make room for something new and shiny to enter our lives. We have the ability to recognize opportunities and make the most of them. This moon is an unmasking. Our pain is medicine that nourishes renewal and regeneration. The way out is through.
Scorpio as an Archetype
Scorpio rules the reproductive and lymphatic systems and body liquids. It is associated with our unconscious patterns, psychic intuition, and profound transformation. Within the archetype of Scorpio is the evolutionary process of developing emotional maturity and mastery. Learning to be present with the most vulnerable and volatile of emotions allows us deeper understanding as to why we react, project, dominate, and control and opens a pathway to new strength.
Scorpio is the archetype of the detective, the researcher, and the alchemist. Scorpio’s transformations are fueled by passionate, deep, emotional surrender. Cunning and mysterious, this archetype symbolizes the death of the human ego in order to be resurrected as a universal force beyond our personal self. It represents strength, transformation, and union.
Scorpio’s bond to the underworld (unconscious, instinctual nature) creates a fertile ground for profound transmutation and metamorphosis. As a result, it’s hardly unexpected that Scorpio has become connected with life’s depths and heights. Scorpios are driven to experience what is real and fundamental to human existence. Feelings fuel our passions and convictions but also the intensity of what we feel can overwhelm us at times and feel like a tidal wave pulling us under.
The Shadow of Scorpio
The shadow of Scorpio is trauma bonding, avoidance of emotional pain, mistrust, addiction to drama, holding onto emotional connections and survival strategies long after they become toxic, and having to hit rock bottom with a pattern of self sabotage to start anew. They frequently see in others what they are afraid to see in themselves. Scorpio’s shadow causes us to act viscerally and defensively, rather than intuitively and lovingly.
Scorpio urges us to investigate the unseen sides of ourselves. We can bring attention to our behaviors and make conscious choices by meeting the unconscious portions of ourselves. We frequently meet our shadow through projection and conflict with others. What we can’t claim and accept in ourselves we blame, scapegoat, and attack in the other. Jealousy, envy, suspicion, and betrayal can arise when we are reacting to the outside, instead of connecting to the waters within.
Fundamentally, Scorpio is about our relationship with power. We witness where we hold onto our conditioned ideas of power: of needing to be right, of controlling others and environments, of taking someone out to dim their light because it triggers our own insecurities. Our society has taught us in our patriarchal culture that vulnerability is a weakness and feeling can be a way to leak our power, so we may hold our cards close to our chest, avoid our own intuitive guidance system and not let anyone in. Our true power comes when we connect to what we are feeling and allow it to inform us about ourselves. We are meant to use our power to empower others and better the world, not just acquire power.
Scorpio is on a quest to understand our deeper behavior patterns and unconscious motivations to awaken to a new level of our empowerment. Scorpio shines the light on the toxic within so it can be purged and reveals our repressed parts so they can heal. Through this process of regeneration, we can return to wholeness and bring our transformative nature to better society. In order to do this we must have a healthy and integrated shadow.
This Is a Time To Return to Your Wildness
This total lunar eclipse asks us to shed our layers of conditioning to remember our wildness. Before there was shame, insecurity, projection, we were in our purest form. We are invited to remember more of who we are at our core and make space for our wild nature. We have believed there was something inherently wrong with us, that there is a core part of us that is unacceptable or unlovable, and we have forgotten who we truly are beyond the individual self. We have gathered stories from our ancestral lineage, family conditioning, and cultural shame that are not ours to hold onto. How are we managing shame? What adapted survival patterns now pollute our path of destiny? This eclipse initiates us inward to tend to our own healing. We flow with alchemy and release the toxins within to reclaim our own light.
During this eclipse and in the month to come, we are offered the opportunity to be present with what arises each day and commit to the necessary inner work.
“To be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves.”
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
The Cosmic Weather
This lunar eclipse forms a T-Square with Saturn in Aquarius serving as the focal point. Squares often serve as a call to action to “stretch and expand” and try new approaches to problems.
This lunar eclipse is conjunct with the South Node in Scorpio. The South Node represents our soul gifts as well as our past life karma. This alignment teaches us to harness our emotions for the betterment of our path and offers a chance to forgive and release a part of our past that we have been holding onto.
Saturn in Aquarius challenges us to accept responsibility for our part in the collective, to look at all we imagine for our future with a critical eye, and to approach everything with an objective, scientific perspective. We are asked to take responsibility for the pain that we have caused others and put into the world.
Uranus is in a wide conjunction with the Sun and North Node in Taurus, as well as opposing the Moon and South Node in Scorpio, providing a bit of unpredictability, expected changes, and innovative approaches to meet these unprecedented times. We meet another layer of resistance and adapted patterns that keep us from truly honoring ourselves, and we invite the changes that welcome a more authentic foundation.
Venus aligns with Chiron in Aries at the time of this eclipse, offering medicine to heal our relationship to our identity and our wounding around love. We face a part of us that thinks we are unlovable. We uncover our perception of ourselves and ideas about love that make us feel like we are not enough as we are. We uncover patterns that manage our shame and insecurities so that we can affirm a new level of our worth and show up as we are.
This eclipse is opposite the asteroid Hekate. Hekate is the goddess of witchcraft and magic. She meets us at a crossroads and offers psychic sight. Hekate’s presence in this eclipse chart is inviting us to feel into our intuitive sight and to see beyond the structure of the ego.
The sun in Taurus is conjunct with the fixed star Algol, the head of Medusa in this lunar eclipse chart. Through the patriarchal interpretations of the myth, Medusa is feared and vilified, but her journey is one of powerful alchemy and rebirth. Medusa is a powerful symbol of healing, transformation, and feminine power. Her myth speaks to betrayal of the feminine. This theme has been ignited in the collective with the leak of the Supreme Court draft opinion to overturn Roe vs. Wade. Medusa’s head became a powerful talisman of protection and was used in Pallas Athena’s shield to win battles. Those who looked into Medusa’s eyes were turned to stone. Those who stood behind the shield of Medusa were protected. Algol in this eclipse chart reminds us of the importance of standing on the right side of our power and to do all we can in our means to truly own our power and guard our civil rights and the divine feminine.
The Invitation
This lunar eclipse facilitates deeper understanding into our primal nature, repressed emotions, and conditioned patterns so that we can shed old layers and return to a place of wholeness. The previous solar eclipse in Taurus activated themes around our self worth and where we have been asleep at the wheel in our life, which keeps us from embodying our innate worth. To help us reclaim more of our soul gifts and our power, this lunar eclipse presents a deeper layer of our conditioned patterns and shows us specific ways that we manage our feelings of inadequacy.