FALL EQUINOX 2025 + LIBRA SEASON

Finding balance and nervous system resilience in the aftermath of karmic transformation

We made it through the eclipses. Hallelujah. We're still within the eclipse window for another month as we integrate the profound medicine that began with the New Moon in Virgo on September 21st—a solar eclipse that marked one of the most intense karmic completion points many of us have experienced.

The eclipse window remains open as we complete this lunar cycle, integrating this transformative energy throughout Libra season until we reach the New Moon in Libra. Eclipse windows open a month before the first eclipse and close a month after the last one, creating extended periods of integration and recalibration.

This represents a particularly poignant time for healing and rebalancing. While we'll continue working with the South Node in Virgo and North Node in Pisces through 2027, the intensity begins to taper down, offering us six months to integrate these lessons before our next eclipse cycle next spring.

KARMIC COMPLETION

We've just experienced a climactic Solar Eclipse in Virgo at 29° on September 21st—the anoretic degree representing ultimate completion and karmic resolution. This eclipse completed the arc that began with the New Moon in Virgo at 0° on August 22nd-23rd, creating powerful bookends around an entire month of karmic purification.

We needed a place to land after this intense journey, a space to rest, integrate, and gain clarity about what we experienced and what wants to be brought forward versus what needs to remain in the past.

Right after the solar eclipse, on September 22nd, the Sun entered Libra and we experienced the Fall Equinox. That same day, Mars moved into one of its happy places—Scorpio. On September 23rd, the Sun opposed Neptune and trined Uranus, followed by the Sun trining Pluto on the 24th.

BREAKTHROUGHS

The Sun's interactions with outer planets this week provide different insights and zoomed-out perspectives. Outer planets represent bigger life themes and collective influences that can help us understand the minutiae when we're caught in day-to-day experiences.

During intense periods, we can get lost in inner planet interactions—the Sun, Moon, Venus, Mercury, Mars—remaining stuck in daily grind tunnel vision. Eclipses serve as major realignments, sometimes forcing changes without our conscious choice. If something happened over the past month that felt fated or beyond your control, there's a strong possibility it was happening for your highest evolution.

Eclipses bring things in and out of our lives, pushing us back into alignment like chiropractic adjustments. This week provides space for clarity, realizations, and new perspectives that help us understand why events unfolded as they did.

Mars entering Scorpio brings intense but breakthrough energy—deep, penetrating, and powerful. The Sun trining Pluto opens underworld realizations that might feel shocking or sudden, especially with the Sun also trining Uranus and opposing Neptune. These outer planet influences can pull us out of chaos and daily tunnel vision, offering expanded perspective.

NERVOUS SYSTEM UPGRADES

Our nervous systems filter all of life—everything we intake gets processed through our capacity for regulation. We need expanded capacity to meet the rapidly changing world, which asks us to hold more nuance, expansion, change, chaos, uncertainty, and unknown variables.

Building this requires a strong vessel—a robust digestive system and nervous system capable of processing and holding increased complexity. The collective polarity is intensifying, with separation between poles pulling wider and wider. Both sides fundamentally want the same things: freedom, rights, and acknowledgment of their values, but they approach these goals differently.

What we're witnessing now with censorship and canceling mirrors what occurred in 2020-2022, just with flipped sides. If you think current events are unprecedented or that your neighbors are enemies because they hold different beliefs or political affiliations, I encourage deeper investigation.

Our enemy isn't the person on the opposite pole. There are external forces pulling us apart, creating conditions where we have no choice but to view others as enemies. When this happens, a middle wave naturally emerges to balance the extremes.

MIDDLE GROUND

We're witnessing extremism on both sides because extremes generate media attention and sales. However, there's a strong, often quiet middle ground where people take time to research, regulate themselves before responding, and remain open to dialogue, nuance, and the possibility of being wrong.

This is Libra's medicine—the rebalancing we need after experiencing extreme tension, chaos, and uncertainty. However, holding middle ground requires nervous system resilience, which is why we're being stretched beyond our previous capacity.

We can choose to retreat into echo chambers on either side, surrounding ourselves with people who share identical beliefs. But that's not growth. Growth emerges from discomfort, breathing through challenges, and meeting edges with presence and support.

I've been through a massive ego death over the past month—fast, intense, and ongoing. I'm still meeting edges, knowing I need to stretch more, hold more, and build greater capacity and resilience for what's emerging.

After completing advanced somatic practitioner training earlier this year, this initiation has revealed parts of myself I didn't know existed. We're each individually sitting with our edges, witnessing firsthand the expansion available when we allow it while meeting the fear we hold around accepting that expansion.

I'm discovering extraordinary things about the body-mind's capacity to heal, grow, and expand—how all systems communicate and how genuinely psychic we are, especially when embodied. The South Node in Virgo teaches us that we need practices to tend the physical vessel so we can loosen our grip and trust unknown spaces.

We're meeting collective edges too. We've never been at this exact evolutionary point before. While we've experienced similar periods through revolutions, renaissance, and golden ages, this moment is unique, requiring us to meet it differently.

FALL EQUINOX

The Fall Equinox on September 22nd marked our shift from internal purge and purification into relational balance as we entered Libra season. This represents a major reset moment, asking how we can orient our lives toward greater harmony, fairness, reciprocity, and balance.

The equinox means "equal night"—a balance of light and dark, day and night. It's the threshold into autumn in the Northern Hemisphere, marking harvest time, integration, and preparation for winter's descent. This liminal portal thins the veil as we shift seasons, honoring cycles of death and rebirth, endings and beginnings.

We meet this equal point of day and night before expanding into the underworld, darkness, and descent. Leo season brought fun, adventure, heat, and play. Virgo season was sobering—requiring us to examine what we've had to release, what has been fragmented, rigid, or perfectionistic.

This equinox into Libra season feels like stepping into a new season with fresh soil cleared of weeds, ready for intentional planting. After this karmic storm, what needs rebalancing?

Think of it like recovering from a stomach bug where you surrendered completely—purging, releasing, unable to consume normally. On the other side, integration looks like slowly testing foods again, not immediately jumping into heavy meals but moving gently, starting with simple nourishment.

You've cleared significant space. How can you be incredibly discerning about what gets invited back in now that you have new information and insights? How can you walk gently and move intentionally?

LIBRA SEASON

Key themes for this equinox include balance and reciprocity. Where are you giving too much or taking too much? What have you learned from eclipse season, and how can you align your life more balanced to meet new conditions after this karmic storm?

Fall initiates the inward journey toward winter—time to inventory and gather resources (physical, emotional, spiritual) for darker months ahead. We're no longer in summer's fast-paced external energy but moving into quiet, internal, soft, introspective winter preparation as we begin coiling inward.

This week offers opportunity to discern what we want to carry into this spiraling inward process. It's deeply connected to relationships as we enter Libra season—a time for taking inventory of partnerships, collaborations, friendships, and all relationship forms. Where exists harmony? Where needs rebalancing?

LIBRA

Libra embodies balance, harmony, beauty, and justice. The shift from Virgo to Libra moves from self-purification to relational equilibrium. Virgo refined the self through discernment; Libra asks how you bring that refined self into balance with others and relationships.

Libra isn't just about keeping peace—it's about aligning with right relationship, truth, fairness, and reciprocity. Libra's evolutionary goal involves relating to experience through reflection in others, focusing heavily on relativity at this zodiacal point where we shift from self-focus toward considering others.

I think of Libra as the zodiac's nervous system—constantly taking in data and information, computing optimal outcomes for all parties, testing multiple possibilities before landing in equilibrium. Peace isn't inherent; it's earned through practice and intention. Balance is ongoing practice, not an end goal requiring maintenance and conscious choice.

As a Libra with Sun and Mercury in the 12th house, I constantly crave peace—sometimes treating it like a destination rather than a practice. Peace requires showing up, embodying, and choosing it repeatedly. It emerges through radical self-awareness, capacity building, and meeting our edges with acceptance.

We must create peaceful space within ourselves, establishing a center point, otherwise we chase peace eternally without finding it. Libra is initiatory as a cardinal sign, beginning new seasons through exploration and testing outcomes in relationships, teaching us to give rather than just take.

Libra's shadow includes becoming unhinged, flighty, indecisive, and uncommitted while searching for others. It can become imbalanced and overwhelmed trying to find balance, leading to dissociation, fragmentation, people-pleasing, and self-abandonment when we lose our center seeking something in others.

MARS IN SCORPIO

Mars moves into Scorpio on the 22nd, and intensity deepens. This empowers Mars—focused, strategic energy bringing more shadow work and transformation opportunities. Mars in Scorpio after the Virgo solar eclipse pushes us deeper, encouraging research, sitting with anger and fear, and moving energy through the body.

Mars in Scorpio can be reactive, so we want to lean into Libra energy for rebalancing, accessing practicality and rationality as we move from expression and illumination into depth, decay, and preparation for winter's death portal.

SELF REGULATION AND CO REGULATION

This Libra season will illuminate opposites and poles even more because we need recalibration toward anchored center. Not everyone can remain at extremes—when large groups migrate to poles, it becomes heavy and scary, which is where we find ourselves currently.

I encourage focusing on self-regulation and co-regulation this month. Examine what you've learned over the past month, allowing it to download, integrate, and marinate. Many people currently feel a subconscious need to rescue everyone else, but dysregulated, triggered people operating from pure fear often spread more fear and dysregulation.

Co-regulation—Libra's highest expression—occurs when one person maintains anchored, regulated space for another to meet them there. Two dysregulated people cannot meet in coherence. If you're spreading information or reacting from dysregulated space, you risk becoming what you oppose.

INTEGRATION MOVING FORWARD

This Libra season offers respite and integration after the karmic storm of eclipse season. Focus on finding balance between challenging yourself, meeting edges, and creating pockets of peace within that process.

We need to be resourced to help others. Like putting on your own life jacket before rescuing others, we must tend our center before attempting to help others find theirs.

Continue emphasizing small, simple practices that orient and ground you. Take what worked from Virgo season and this eclipse portal into the next season. Create precise, healthy boundaries—energetic, emotional, and verbal—while being extremely discerning about what you consume: food, news, media, content.

Take what resonates, release what doesn't. This isn't meant as absolute truth but as collaborative reflection that hopefully activates something within you.

The medicine remains surrender, faith, and trust, going deeper and deeper. Healing requires perfect balance of faith, trust, surrender, belief, and aligned action. Aligned action emerges from faith, activating the Piscean-Virgo axis that will guide us through the next two years.Trust your body's wisdom, embrace the discomfort of not knowing, and allow this eclipse to refine you into the clear, resilient vessel you're meant to be.Soul Archaeology

— ALI OFSTEDAL

THIS BLOG IS A REVISED TRANSCRIPT OF EPISODE 118 OF MY PODCAST “SOUL ARCHAEOLOGY”.

Tune into the latest episode of soul archaeology for a full energetic download. available on all platforms.