Healing Creativity and Relationships with the Libra Full Moon
Today’s Full Moon is exact at 2:11 am UT, at 12 degrees, 20 minutes of Libra. The sign of the Scales illuminates themes of relationship writ large. How can we have balanced, fair, deeply loving, truly nourishing connection with other human — and more-than-human beings?
And how do we build that skillful art of heart-centered connection within, with our own inner parts of self, so that our connection with others stems from someplace of real substance inside of us?
In our relationship with Life itself, Libra invites us to make art. Libra knows that to bring beauty, artistry and creativity forward — whether simple or elaborate — is to weave the threads of Life’s tapestry stronger and brighter.
Growing up, there was a humorous song on the radio by the Argentinian band Los Auténticos Decadentes, called “La Guitarra” (you can listen to it here on youtube if you’re curious). The lyrics portray a two-sided argument between a young man — and his father’s voice in his head. The son loves music more than anything and wants to become a musician, but he remembers his father scolding him to stop being a bum, essentially, and become a contributing member of society instead.
The song’s chorus went:
Porque yo
No quiero trabajar
No quiero ir a estudiar
No me quiero casar
Quiero tocar la guitarra todo el día
Y que la gente se enamore de mi voz
Translation:
Because I
Don’t want to go to work
Don’t want to go to school
Don’t want to get married
I want to play guitar all day long
And have people fall in love with my voice
Meanwhile, his dad’s voice in his head admonishes him:
Vos
Mejor que te afeités
Mejor que madures, mejor que laburés
Ya me cansé de que me tomes la cerveza
Te voy a dar con la guitarra en la cabeza
In English:
You
Had better shave
had better grow up, better get a job
I’m tired of you drinking all my beer
I’m gonna smack you over the head with that guitar
Putting judgments aside about the long-term outcomes, the maturity and responsibility or lack thereof of the budding musician’s sentiment — have you ever felt (your equivalent) of his words and longing? Have you ever had another person put down those feelings? I’m willing to bet you have. This lunation is a good time to tend to any art and creativity wounds we may be carrying.
Contrary to what our reductive cultural narratives often tell us, creating beauty and art, whether privately or for others’ appreciation is neither frivolous nor lightweight. More on that in a moment.
In its most generative expression, Libra is a sign of emotional and social skill, taking the raw material of our loving feelings, and applying the intelligent know-how required to weave a container where those loving feelings can thrive into something much greater than the sum of the parts. This can look like the skill needed to paint a heart-wrenchingly beautiful landscape, or the skill needed to build a romantic partnership where each person feels seen, held and supported.
Psychological Patriarchy
This is where we need to jump to the deep end.
One of the biggest enemies to the Libran vision, AKA “World Peace”: a loving, beautiful world where our relationship with Self, with Each Other, with the Universe, and with All Living Beings is one of mutual benefit — is the dysfunctional, life-divorced structure of psychological patriarchy.
We’re seeing obvious and larger-than-life expressions of it in the news and media — the Epstein Files for one, and the Manosphere/ Incel subculture for another glaring example. But those are big, hot-button, monolithic parts of the problem. I feel we can shift much of the issue personally and interpersonally by addressing it in its most subtle manifestations, in service, ultimately, of cultivating relationships that thrive, one relationship at a time. This is a huge cultural lever. From decades of experience as a professional in the self-development sphere I can say, attaining the love we crave in our lives is one of the top motivating forces for change.
Before we dive in, it bears repeating that patriarchy is a culture-wide phenomenon that transcends individuals (it doesn’t boil down to “men” either). It exists as a trauma-driven, living construct, internalized by people of all genders.
In his 2002 book, How Can I Get Through To You?, psychologist Terry Real describes psychological patriarchy as a three-tiered construct built on division, contempt, and silence. This is one of the most helpful definitions I’ve found to spot patriarchy as it moves in real time through our relational circuitry.
It highlights that by definition, patriarchy is cloaked behind other pretexts such as rationality (this ties in to the themes I tackle in relation to “woo woo” as well here). Because of this, we’re apt not to realize what’s truly happening when this pervasive pattern shows up in everyday, normalized interactions.
Here is Real’s breakdown:
The pattern of psychological patriarchy can be envisioned as a set of three concentric rings surrounding each of us as individuals, both men and women. The first of these rings is a process in which all the properties granted to us by nature, the elements of one whole personality, are bifurcated. It is as if we as a culture have taken a blank piece of paper and drawn a line down its center declaring all characteristics to the right of the line “masculine” and all those to the left “feminine”. (…) On the “masculine” side lie such qualities as strength, logic, aggression, antidependence, goal orientation, and insensitivity. On the “feminine” side lie such qualities as weakness, emotion, yielding, dependence, process orientation, and oversensitivity. (…)
The first of the three rings is the division of a whole human’s qualities into two halves. The second ring is a relationship between the two halves marked by the disowning, controlling and despising of the “masculine” toward the “feminine”. The third ring is that this toxic relationship, this dynamic of domination, remain hidden, unaddressed. If those inhabiting the “masculine” side of the equation act out contempt, those inhabiting the “feminine” instinctively move to protect the other, even if they’re being abused.
Though modern astrology no longer sees planets and signs as essentially “masculine” and “feminine”, and though collectively we’re making strides away from narrow and rigid gender roles, it is interesting to me that the sign of Libra, together with its ruling planet Venus, tends to reveal relational maladaptive patterns that have to do with the feminine side of the equation as articulated above. Meanwhile, Aries — where the Sun is currently facing the moon 180 degrees opposite — and its ruler Mars, show us the places where we may be acting out the “masculine” dysfunctions as described in this quote. In our collective unconscious, Venus = Feminine and Mars = Masculine still holds some sway, though of course men, women and non-binary folks all have both planets, and their respective signs, in their charts alive and well.
I think this is because, regardless of our values and conscious stance towards gender, the patriarchal programming we all were born into relies heavily on these concepts, almost like a kind of memetic code. It behooves us, then, not to bypass this paradigm, but to understand it well enough to break free from it at the deepest levels.
This is why I brought up the song about the would-be musician and his dismissive, even threatening father, to illuminate that there are layers of our relational experience we often don’t recognize as relational at all, such as our creative sphere, and where we might not suspect (internalized) patriarchal conditioning is what’s hijacking us.
We were all born with a part of us who wanted to tap into our inner sense of beauty and awe, and share it with the world, whether that’s through interior decorating, playing an instrument, singing, drawing, performing — or something else.
Patriarchy codes that as a “feminine” endeavor — creative expression requires Libra’s emotional skill, as we saw above — and places other endeavors that rely on logic, rationality and machine-like productivity as morally superior. Then we wonder why we can’t justify taking time out to make art instead of cleaning the house.
Ultimately, the web of life on this planet is relational. We’re in relationship with our own Spirit, with Source, with the beings that give their life to feed us, to the Internal Family within us, with the Land, Water, Air, Sun, moon and Planets, and of course, with all the human beings who share our existence. We cannot escape Libra’s lessons, and what’s more, they are topmost on the curriculum.
Terry Real’s relational prescription for us is also perfectly Libran. His work as a therapist relies on helping couples develop emotional intimacy by cultivating a sense of true equality and unity— your needs matter as much as my needs, because we’re an ecosystem together. Your thriving is my thriving. For those of us who have taken refuge on the “masculine” side of the divide, we’re invited to soften and become sensitive and vulnerable; to come down from a morally superior stance to equal ground with the other. For those who learned early on that safety meant applying “feminine” strategies, our path ahead is about becoming open, clear and lovingly direct about our needs — coming “up” into equality — rather than trying to control situations through indirect communication (hints and “signals”), caretaking or management of the other. In each case, every person participating in the relationship must be able to be perceived and treated as a whole person, not as a fragmentary role.
(This is, of course, the briefest of summaries. I encourage everyone to read Real’s books, as his simple relational tools and underlying framework translate far and wide, not just to romantic partnerships).
For those of you looking to explore these themes in a deeper, more personal way, from a soul-level lens, I offer astrology readings, psychic readings, and healing sessions. Each of these can help you find your own spirit-led way into richer relating and more vibrant creativity. Check out my services here, and for questions or to book a session, reach out at hello@karineglinton.com
Updates from Karin’s Practice
As many of you know, I moved to Greece at the end of September last year. If you’ve ever moved countries, you know that the process upends all sense of stability for a while. Despite that, I’ve continued to see clients 1:1 as normal — however, my writing and other fun public-facing projects have taken a backseat!
In case you missed this, I shared on my notes a few days ago:
Last September, my husband Merlin and I drove away from our apartment in cold, rainy North Germany, in a fully packed car, and made a beeline South, through Austria and down the Adriatic coast of Italy. We drove as many hours as we could handle each day and overnighted at whatever little hotel granted us the best comfiness/price/proximity ratio. We hopped on an overnight ferry from Bari to Athens (first time on a long distance ferry for me). And then we got to exploring.
What ensued was a crazy wild chaotic few months of hanging out in different areas of Greece to figure out if –and where– we’d want to stay long term. Which has included renting an apartment from the kindest people ever, who nevertheless have had their newly renovated property break down in the most ridiculous, never ending stream of “WTF!???” while we’ve been living here. I could write a novel just about the hiccups and all-out fails in this rental. We still love it here and we’re not sorry.
Greece is complicated: systems and justice don’t provide for the Greeks. Yet community, care, and joy are very much alive here in ways that Germany can’t even dream of most days.
Astrologically, I was expecting that anything we might initiate while the cosmic forces of disintegration were in full swing (prior to the Saturn/Neptune Conjunction a few weeks back) would feel like trying to build sandcastles on the surfline at high tide. That prediction bore out. But even that being the case, it was very much time to leave our old life, and sometimes you just have to choose the more adventurous obstacle.
When I step outside at night, a chorus of frogs, owls and jackals fills my ears. It definitely sounds like adventure.
I have a video project also waiting on the wings since last year. Last Summer, I began a series of intimate, recorded dialogues with fellow neurodivergent human beings, which I’m calling “Way Out There (Is My Normal)”
Each of the people sitting with me in these conversations identifies as neurodivergent, and each of them is a complex feeler and thinker. The twist is that each of them also checks one or more of the following boxes:
- They may have had mystical experiences,
- They’re psychic, intuitive and/or empaths
- They have cultivated an authentic spiritual life, which can often look very outside the box;
- They’ve had paranormal experiences
- They have an innate connection with the existential and metaphysical realms and have a lot to share about how that’s impacted their philosophy and life.
In the recorded discussions (I’m not calling this a podcast at the moment, it may be a very time-limited project and it is still emerging) we’ll go deep into each of my guest’s unique vantage point, and we’ll focus especially how they each experience the metaphysical side of life.
My hope is that through these dialogues we’ll be able to showcase the incredible diversity of possible experiences and experiencers, and normalize the fact that many, and I mean MANY of us are psychic, are mystics, are empaths – but also that we need to craft authentic spiritual and holistic philosophies to account for how our differently wired brains and bodies make sense of all of these experiences.
It’s my hope to start to publish these conversations in the coming weeks, and to record hopefully many more this year — feel free to reach out if you’d like to do one of these discussions publicly with me.
As always, thank you for reading, and thank you for being here.
Karin
