FULL MOON IN AQUARIUS
Every planetary alignment serves our evolution, offering daily opportunities to grow, evolve, and simply be with what is. The last few weeks have been devoted to heart work, asking us to meet the tender layers of our being in deeper, more intimate, and more authentic ways.
As we travel the spiral of life, we gain the ability to revisit past experiences, memories, and feelings with greater attunement, awareness, honesty, and truth. The retrograde energy has been particularly potent—bringing vivid dreams, signs from spirit, and extraordinary access to other realms. The veil is remarkably thin right now, creating a heightened sensitivity that allows us to touch and feel more than ever before.
This increased sensitivity functions like exposure therapy for the heart. When our hearts crack open, we feel more of what's happening in the world. While there's always immense pain and suffering present, we typically dissociate from it to some degree because feeling it all at once would overwhelm our systems entirely.
Our capacity to sense and feel pain depends on our internal mechanisms—our heart walls, security systems, and protective structures. Those who identify as empaths often have thinner heart walls, making them more sensitive and providing greater access to experiences beyond themselves. This mirrors the principle "as above, so below; as within, so without."
BUILDING CAPACITY
The work of this time, particularly through August, Cancer season, and Leo season, is building more capacity to feel more, sense more, love more, and hold more. Cancer invites us to feel deeply, while Leo season asks us to move from those feelings into creating a healthy sense of self while keeping the heart open—experiencing life through the heart's wisdom.
Mars spent significant time retrograding through both Cancer and Leo in late 2024 and early 2025, forcing us into this profound heart work. It pushed us to access deeper core layers where we hold pain, where we close off to love and experience, where we shut down to avoid feeling because those are the same spaces where we're afraid to feel love.
When Mars moved into Virgo, we received a brief respite from this intense heart work. Virgo's practical energy focuses on immediate tasks and tending to what's directly in front of us. But this week, Mars moves into Libra, immediately forming supportive aspects with Pluto and Uranus in Gemini, encouraging us to return to self-work and address layers of freeze and codependency.
The crucial work right now involves understanding how to be with the pain of the world and others without allowing it to completely hijack our systems. We're learning to sense, feel, and remain open while maintaining a healthy sense of self and connection to our own being.
This requires two essential components: a healthy connection to self and appropriate boundaries (not walls). When we deepen our connection to ourselves through whatever modalities call to us—somatic work, breathwork, meditation, bodywork, therapy, or EMDR—we create the foundation for authentic openness. From this grounded self-connection, we can open more fully and connect more authentically with others.
A strong, healthy connection to self, combined with an open heart and strong boundaries, creates the balance we need to navigate these times with grace and authenticity.
MARS IN LIBRA
On August 6th, Mars enters Libra, where it's in its detriment, providing extensive opportunities for deeper work around the axis of self and others. Mars immediately begins forming a harmonious trine to Uranus in Gemini, setting the stage for significant relational and internal work.
Mars represents how we assert ourselves, take action, and pursue our desires. Libra, the seventh sign of the zodiac, focuses on the other—balance, intellect, harmony, and collaboration. This is where we begin meeting others and exploring relationship dynamics.
However, Libra's shadow includes codependency, self-abandonment, dissociation, freeze responses, and decision paralysis. In its pursuit of harmony and balance, Libra's shadow will abandon the self to maintain peace. While Mars finds its fullest expression in Aries—where it can be driven, expansive, and fully mobilized—in Libra, it can become frozen, remaining in the mind rather than embodied action.
Though Mars is in its detriment in Libra, this challenging placement brings essential work forward. In Libra, Mars must learn to move from the self while considering others—a rebalancing opportunity that emphasizes relational strategy over pure raw life force.
Unlike Mars in Aries, which can be reactive and impulsive, Mars in Libra draws everything into mental processing. This can create overthinking and decision paralysis from fear of making wrong choices. However, when used constructively, this transit reveals where we make decisions and why, whether we consider others more than ourselves or ourselves more than others.
Mars will remain in Libra until September 22nd, giving us ample time to work with this energy. The shadow manifestations include passive-aggressiveness, indecision, and people-pleasing—patterns that will be exposed over the next month and a half. We'll see where we abandon ourselves to keep peace, where fear of rocking the boat prevents decision-making, and where we avoid meeting life or others fully.
Another significant shadow is avoidance—hoping situations will resolve themselves without direct confrontation. However, when we can acknowledge these patterns within ourselves, we can alchemize them into the transit's mastery: diplomacy, authentic partnership, and collaborative co-creation.
MERCURY RETROGRADE
This week also brings the final push of Mercury retrograde in Leo, which stations direct on August 11th. Mercury opposes Pluto (also retrograde) and forms supportive trines to Saturn and Neptune, bringing deeper excavation of unconscious beliefs, patterns, and narratives about self, belonging, identity, expression, and worthiness.
This retrograde period has been calling us to examine where we hold unconscious material connected to the heart, self, belonging, confidence, power, courage, identity, and expression. The Mercury-Pluto opposition provides an even deeper look at power dynamics in our relationships and how past experiences shape our current reality.
FULL MOON IN AQUARIUS
The week culminates with a Full Moon in Aquarius on August 9th at 12:54 AM Pacific. This full moon is particularly fascinating because it's unaspected—a pure, potent opposition between the Sun in Leo and the Moon in Aquarius without other planetary influences.
This full moon also opens the eclipse window, occurring one month before the first eclipse on September 7th. It's the last full moon before eclipse season begins, making it a significant clearing opportunity.
The Leo-Aquarius axis presents the fundamental tension between self and collective, heart and mind. Leo represents healthy ego development, personality, and individual self-expression—essential for navigating this world. Aquarius embodies the mind, futuristic thinking, innovation, and collective consciousness, seeking liberation from outdated systems.
However, as fixed air, Aquarius can become rigid in beliefs and mental positions, sometimes seeking homogenization where Leo seeks authentic uniqueness. This full moon illuminates where these opposing energies need rebalancing, how heart and mind can work together harmoniously.
All our recent work has focused on accessing the higher heart—moving beyond the limitations of pain and suffering by honoring and transmuting emotional experiences. This Aquarius full moon invites us to access the higher mind, moving beyond ego limitations to reach elevated consciousness.
This moon will illuminate our connections to tribes, groups, affiliations, friendships, and communities that may be constraining our expansion. Where have you been hiding within group identity? Where can you access more personal individuality, truth, and authentic expression?
The moon exposes where we operate too far in either direction—stuck in mental loops or lost in emotional overwhelm. It reveals old programming that keeps us boxed in, limiting beliefs, and outdated identities, while also showing where we need to return to heart-centered truth.
This transit could bring sudden clarity about what's not working and what needs to be released or transformed. It questions established ways of doing things, asking: Is there a new way? A better way?
COLLECTIVE HEALING
Collectively, this week may bring significant information, headlines, and revelations around technology, AI, scientific breakthroughs, protests, collective action, and conversations about infrastructure, systems, and climate. The systems that hold communities together are being illuminated—what's working and what isn't.
We're being asked to examine where we operate from mental default patterns simply because "that's how things have always been done" and how we can return to meeting uncomfortable experiences within ourselves and our communities to find heart-centered solutions.
LIONS GATE
This week also encompasses Lionsgate (August 8th), an annual portal bringing an influx of light and consciousness. This timing coincides with the second anniversary of Soul Archaeology, launched on August 5th, 2023—a Leo baby that thrives in this energy.
The Lionsgate portal represents renewal, courage, heart wisdom, and clarity. It's connected to the rise of Sirius, the star aligning with the Sun in Leo, echoing the ancient Egyptian New Year. This cosmic timing supports our work of integrating solar energy with emotional wisdom, bringing together the fire of Leo with the nurturing waters we've been navigating.
Astrologically, this week particularly affects those with fixed sign placements between 13-21 degrees (Leo, Aquarius, Taurus, Scorpio) and early degree cardinal placements due to Mars's aspects with Saturn and Neptune. We're experiencing activation from multiple angles as we prepare for eclipse season, which will activate mutable placements.
This full moon serves as significant clearing before eclipse season begins, helping us release what no longer serves while integrating the heart-mind balance we've been cultivating.
This entire journey represents a return to the heart—learning to move out of survival mode and into heart-centered living. While we can always access our hearts, the goal is creating a sustainable practice of heart-centered living rather than fleeting moments of connection.
This requires continuously meeting the parts of ourselves uncomfortable with feeling, emotion, pain, suffering, and grief. Through this ongoing work, we develop the capacity for sustained heart-centered action in the world.
The path forward isn't about choosing between heart or mind, self or other, individual or collective. It's about finding the sacred balance that honors all aspects of our humanity while maintaining authentic connection to our deepest truth.
As we navigate this powerful week, remember that every challenge is an opportunity for deeper integration, every trigger a doorway to greater freedom, and every moment of tenderness a gift that expands our capacity for love.
Trust the process, tend to your heart with gentle courage, and allow yourself to find the exquisite balance between being authentically yourself while remaining beautifully connected to the greater whole.
This is the sacred work of our time. not just personal healing, but collective heart repair that will transform how we love, connect, and belong in this world.
Soul Archaeology
— ALI OFSTEDAL
THIS BLOG IS A REVISED TRANSCRIPT OF EPISODE 112 OF MY PODCAST “SOUL ARCHAEOLOGY”.
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