Reclaiming Our Power from Abuse and Trauma

It’s Sunday morning, the day after the Scorpio Full Moon. I’m in a motel room in Los Angeles, listening to the sounds of traffic on the street below and thinking about the Japanese man who survived both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb blasts at the end of World War II.

I’m thinking about my own life journey as an abuse and trauma survivor. And I’m thinking about my female clients, friends, and colleagues who have spent a lifetime struggling to overcome the insidious effects of sexual abuse.

I’m thinking that the bad news that fuels the patriarchal control systems continues to seep like radioactive waste into the ground water of the collective consciousness.

And I’m also rejoicing because it’s clear to me that our filtration systems – our psychological and spiritual immune systems – are evolving.

We are evolving.

It’s clear to me that, collectively, we have reached a tipping point in human consciousness.

We are, some of us more willingly than others, entering a new reality. In this new vibration the parasitic fear virus may still infect us and temporarily sap our energy. But it has lost its power to cripple us as it did in the past.

Freedom from the Past

This current lunar cycle, beginning at the May 4 Taurus New Moon and peaking at Saturday’s Scorpio Full Moon, seems designed to free us from the grip of past suffering.

In the two weeks leading up to Saturday’s Full Moon we were repeatedly confronted with our society’s ritual abuse of the feminine. This includes the sexual abuse so many women in our society have endured. It also includes any abuse designed to shut down our creativity, our ability to be in community, our sensitivity, and our capacity for living in the present moment.

Scorpio dares us to recognize where we were shamed, wounded and shut down – and then to feel the feelings that we had to stuff and repress because it wasn’t safe to feel them at the time.

When we do this, when we are willing to descend into the underworld of the soul and sit with the feelings we are most afraid of and ashamed of,  we reclaim our power.

We reclaim our joy. We reclaim our hope. And we get back our energy, our daring, and our verve.

The return of our power doesn’t always happen immediately. But it always does happen.

Venus conjunct Uranus in Taurus

A dear friend sent me a poem this week that made me cry. It was about mothers who are unable to open their hearts to their own children. And about how those children grow into adults who are constantly searching for love but unable to open their hearts enough to receive real love.

A society of overgrown children conditioned to feeding on scraps.

The exact conjunction of Venus in Taurus (the sensual, nurturing aspect of the divine feminine) and Uranus (the awakener) at the Scorpio Full Moon empowers radical breakthroughs and liberating insights in the last two weeks of this potent lunar cycle.

To access this new awareness, we need the courage to dive into the Scorpionic places of the soul. And we need to be witnessed. We need to the pain and the grief and the powerlessness we feel and have felt to be acknowledged by other humans.

Being ‘seen’ as both our wounded and our competent selves is one of the most profoundly healing experiences we can have. And it’s an experience that most of us got precious little of in early life.

Do you have the courage to stop hiding? Do you have the grace to allow the people you love to be all of who they are – not just the nice bits?