What if the parts of yourself you’re trying to perfect are actually the very places where your soul is trying to find grace?
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There are moments in life where the pressure to be better, to be more useful, or to finally get your act together feels less like motivation and more like a weight you carry alone. It usually starts quietly—a nagging inner voice pointing out what isn't working, a feeling that you’re not quite measuring up, or a sense that your daily efforts have become a ritual of obligation rather than a source of meaning.
Why We Need the Karma of a South Node Virgo Lunar Eclipse Right Now
In this episode, we explore the nature of that weight through the lens of the current South Node Lunar Eclipse in Virgo. This is not about adding another task to your list or finding a new way to critique your flaws. Instead, we look at why the soul sometimes needs to visit the terrain of self-examination, humility, and service. It’s an invitation to understand the difference between the humility that connects you to a larger whole and the humiliation that leaves you feeling isolated and inadequate.
Virgo’s journey is ultimately about initiation—entering a bigger world and finding your place within it. But the path there is often paved with small, irritating crises designed to wear down our rigid need for control. We explore the karma of self-improvement: how to pursue refinement without self-rejection, and how to discern what is genuinely impure in our lives without condemning the entirety of who we are.
The voice that tells you you aren't good enough is often the very thing that needs to be healed. We spend so much time trying to fix the parts of ourselves that this voice points at, not realizing that the harshness of the voice itself is the real karma. Releasing yourself from judgment doesn't mean you stop growing; it means you finally allow growth to be a graceful, fluid process instead of a slow, painful crucifixion.
As the eclipse approaches, we look at how to hold the tension between the Virgo drive for precision and the Piscean need for flow. It’s a chance to ask if you are serving from a place of alignment and joy, or if you are simply keeping busy to avoid a deeper uncertainty. The goal is not to escape your responsibilities, but to find a way to move through the world with a sense of wholeness rather than a feeling of constant deficiency.
If this resonates with your own inner work, please subscribe for daily reflections on the soul's journey through the stars.
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Transcript
Hey everyone. This is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology [https://nightlightastrology.com/].
Today we're going to take a look at the upcoming lunar eclipse that's taking place in the sign of Virgo, and we're going to look at the underlying evolutionary lessons that the soul needs or tends to experience when major events happen in the sign of Virgo.
This could be something that you use to understand a placement in your own chart, an eclipse, obviously like this one in the sign of Virgo. But my hope is that it will be useful for helping you understand the sign on an evolutionary level in a deeper way, what we might call a karmic level.
I'm going to tell you what we mean by evolutionary and karmic before we get started today, and then we're going to go into kind of a deep dive into the sign of Virgo and what we are likely to experience, given that it's the south node that's there. South node and north node, eclipses are very different from one another, so we'll explore all of this today.
Before we get into it, remember to like and subscribe, share your comments, your reflections. It's always good to hear from you guys and what you're experiencing or going through. You can find transcripts of any of these daily talks on my website, which is NightlightAstrology.com.
When you're over there, a couple of promotions for the day. The number one thing: on March 13 or March 14, I should say, our retreat will close for registration. We have, I think, about 12 spots left, so you can check all of it out there under the Events page, immersive retreat. We're meeting in Mexico for a week of training and study.
The focus of this retreat is on how to cultivate a relationship with an oracle, which is a part of the craft of astrology that goes well beyond learning theories and techniques. And this will be really immersive, hands-on, experiential. We're also just going to have time to hang out in a beautiful location as a community, do a lot of yoga together, some meditation. So if that's your kind of thing, you're looking for maybe a little healing retreat, check that out. Registration closes March 13.
The other thing I want to make sure you're aware of is that you can get some daily healing and community time right here every day free. Morning meditation is now free, and it's an offering I'm very excited to provide to the community who go through our school, our programs, who listen to this channel daily.
We meet seven days a week, 9:30 Eastern Time, Monday through Saturdays, and you can find the link to join. It's a Zoom link; the passcode is right there on the page. You can join us any morning for 20 minutes of quiet meditation. Usually I have something that I say that's just like a little centering moment for us, then we have 20 minutes and we're off to the rest of our day.
Then on Sundays, we have Silent Sundays, which is like quiet time church. We get together, we talk about our experiences. It's a little time for group processing in a safe container. Really excited to be offering this. If you like the content on this channel, it comes from daily spiritual practice. It always has. So if you want to join in and kind of deepen that part of your own life and connection to astrology, that's now something you can check out.
Finally, check out the readings: need-based astrology readings, different tiered pricings that make sure people aren't priced out of getting a birth chart reading. I do horary readings if you're interested in that. You can check that out. And then finally, check out the Events page. Go to Live Talks. My talk for March is on the 12th. It is all about the first house. I'll be saying more about that closer to the time.
So hopefully you'll be able to join us for that talk, and you get all the talks recorded if you can't attend live. Okay, let's turn our attention to the real-time clock, and we're going to talk about Virgo today. We're going to talk about what we mean by the word evolutionary, what we mean by the word karma, and get into it a little bit.
So let's move this forward. And you can see right now, if I go forward just a little bit, the lunar eclipse is going to come through early next week, so we're getting about a week out ahead of this, and that's a good thing, because the material of eclipses do not just suddenly manifest. They come from long cycles. And so the themes we're talking about today should be things that you notice are—what's the word—like percolating. There's a way in which the evolutionary content should be sort of rising to the surface, or the pot's about to boil, whatever image, I guess, works.
You'll see here that the Full Moon in Virgo is with the south node. This is Tuesday, March 3. So the idea today is to just prepare ourselves for this. We've got horoscopes happening Friday of this week, and so with the team unpacking the meaning of the horoscope relative to the Mercury Retrograde ruling, it will be our focus. I'll have more horoscopes next week for the actual whole sign house of Virgo, kind of focusing in. So we've got several different horoscopic takes for you that will hopefully land close to your lived experience.
So today I want to talk about what it means when there is karma to be harvested or burnt off in a Virgo kind of way. But let's talk about these words first, because we don't want to just start tossing words around like karma and evolution and not know what the heck we're talking about. So there is an evolutionary school of astrology in the modern era that focuses on certain technical uses of the nodes of the moon, Pluto. Jeffrey Wolf Green and Steven Forrest are two of the luminaries of that tradition. But there have been many others who have since, you know, kind of established themselves as very well-known evolutionary astrologers.
I had Ari Moshe Wolf on the show last fall of 2025, I guess, in the northern hemisphere, and we had some really nice conversations about the crossover between evolutionary astrology and ancient astrology. All the techniques are different. The basic idea is pretty similar in terms of the philosophy. The philosophical premise of modern evolutionary astrology, like ancient astrology, is that the birth chart reflects something of the karmic conditions of an evolving soul that's been transmigrating from one lifetime to the next on a journey of evolution, meaning unfolding and spiritual enlightenment.
Unfolding means that we are our own nature, our own divine nature is in a process of being revealed to us and unfolding naturally through experiences and lifetimes and time. There's also a very felt sense that the evolutionary journey requires that we learn and see and understand different things in different archetypal dimensions of the zodiac. Often reflect those kinds of lessons or insights or evolution. You can think about them as lessons, but sometimes I feel like the language of lessons and curriculum is a bit heavy-handed. It's a bit Saturnian, you know.
So you can even just think of these as like experiences. All experiences are enlightening, you know, illuminating about the nature of truth and about the nature of who we are. So it's a process of self-discovery as much as it is any set of lessons. And I think it's important that we not think about these things too narrowly. Karma just means cause and effect, or action and reaction. And so when we talk about why we need the karma of a South Node Virgo lunar eclipse right now, all we're saying is, why do we need to be studying chains of actions and reactions that constellate around the Virgo archetype? What does the soul learn from this? Why does the soul occasionally need to see itself through the lens of this archetype unfold through seasons that we could describe archetypally as Virgo? And that's all we really mean by the title of today's talk.
Now what we're going to do next is just get into the evolutionary signature of Virgo. And I've said this many times before, I'm a remix artist, so what I'm going to tell you is really a combination of what I've learned from, you know, people like Steven Forrest and Jeffrey Wolf Green. When I started my career for the first three, four years of my practice, I practiced as an evolutionary astrologer, utilizing the nodes of the moon in the kind of common, modern way. Everything's changed for me since then. I'm now a Hellenistic astrologer, but the roots are still there.
So I can remix sort of the evolutionary perspective on Virgo, and I often still use those evolutionary perspectives in my Hellenistic practice, because the language is really the same when it comes to looking at the soul and karma and the journey of enlightenment from lifetime to lifetime and so forth. I don't really use the nodes and Pluto and the techniques any longer, but the core ideas about the signs have always been a part of my practice. So what you find here, you would find in some of the writings of Stephen Forrest, Jeffrey Wolf Green, just to really cite them as the main people that started me on an understanding of the signs through this perspective.
I always like to make sure that I'm being clear about that when I start dipping into the work of other astrologers and other schools of astrology, just to really be like, "Aye, aye, Captain, you guys." You know, I wouldn't be here if it weren't for these astrologers in many ways, anyhow. But this is, in my own language, how to understand that evolutionary core of the sign of Virgo.
So first of all, Virgo is a sign that's taking place, as you probably know, from the standpoint of the Northern Hemisphere, in the journey of the solar year, defined as an alternation of light and dark that happens in a solar year. It takes us into the dark half of the year, and that dark half of the year is a kind of a moment of entrance into the underworld that reflects maturation into a larger civic, social, cosmic context.
When we're that—you know, if you think of Aries through Virgo just purely in a developmental storyline—we're talking about light. We're talking about youth, and the archetype of Virgo, very much like the archetype of Aries, is associated with youth. They have antithesis with one another anyway. Virgo is the Virgin, often depicted as the youth who enters, you know, the initiatory experience of the underworld. But what that really means is initiating the soul into a bigger sense of what is real, a bigger sense of who we are, a bigger sense of what the world is. So initiation is a Virgo archetype.
So one of the main things that Virgo karma does, and with the South Node we're thinking specifically about old karma that's getting burnt off or that's internalizing in the sense of crystallized wisdom because of experiences ripening and really gaining the insight psychologically and spiritually, as opposed to the north node, which is often about the path of desire that's taking us into unknown spaces that we desire to explore or move into because we haven't yet been there. I still think that pretty much holds up in the Rahu Ketu symbolism, with some caveats, but anyway.
Crystallized insight around Virgo right now could be understood primarily as experiences of initiation that help us to crystallize Virgo's lessons and insights, which tend to be about the individual now being in a bigger world, a more adult world, a more complex world. And this typically means that certain lessons are common around initiation worldwide. In all initiation rituals ever, when a youth enters adulthood, they have to have an experience of humility. The humility is not about being humiliated. It's about recognizing, "Oh, I'm a part of a tribe. Oh, I'm a part of a larger world, or civic or social arena."
Initiation experiences in our day and age are not very great. I'd say, like graduating high school, maybe, you know, or going to college and getting a diploma, maybe losing your virginity, kind of like that. Is it really, you know, like, what are our initiations any longer? We don't have a lot, and this is something many people, including myself, sort of lament, especially because in my early 20s, my initiation was, you know, drug addiction, and then going and working with ayahuasca really provided me with the initiation that I was lacking. In many ways, the drug addiction was directly connected to it—it was connected to a lot of things—but a lot of young people, when they're searching for something bigger, we have poor substitutes, right?
So part of the Virgo landscape is about portals that take us into a bigger sense of the world and what's real and what's true beyond ourselves, that suddenly we find ourselves in the context that produces humility. It produces a sense of being a servant, serving a larger whole, finding your role within the ancient village. This will typically coincide with things like needing to build or develop skills that can be practically useful in a bigger world that you are now a humble part of. These are all Virgo lessons, and that's that concern with being practically useful that we see so frequently in Virgo.
But then also just like, where can I be contributing in functional ways that reflect skills that are actually meaningful to me? Because it's not enough to just say—again, in this day and age, it's like, "Go get a job." Well, that's not really the way that you would find your place in a village in many indigenous traditions and cultures all around the world, right? It wouldn't be just go find a job. An initiation experience might be a critical part of placing you in the right lanes that are connected to your—what we might call your dharma—your actual selfhood and gifts. And finding that alignment is part of the initiation that Virgo points to.
So it's not just "are you practically useful, if not get out," that can produce shame and humiliation, which are shadows of Virgo. Instead, it's how can I help in ways that are aligned? Otherwise, the humiliation tends to be about servitude and the feeling of not humility, but obligation and indebtedness and subservience and all sorts of twisted things, because we recognize there's a bigger world, but no one's told us that it's also important that we feel joyful and connected to what we're doing.
This is where some of the polarity point we'll talk about. In Jeffrey Wolf Green's evolutionary astrology, Steven Forrest's evolutionary astrology, both spend a lot of time talking about polarities. Ancient astrologers did too; it's not foreign to ancient astrology either. Anyway.
So there are some core lessons you might call them, or experiences, that Virgo tends to have that come through often, like initiatory crises. We'll talk more about that in a second. But one is going to be just that sense of being in service to the whole, learning to fulfill a specific function within a family, or again, in the ancient world, maybe a tribe or a village. Or in today's society—it came out—sorry, it just had to, had to speak. If you're new to my channel, if you're new to my channel and you have no idea what that was, it's a long inside joke on my channel. Okay, I'm gonna keep going.
Okay, so you, in order to find your role in a society, you have to figure out the combination of work, duty, service that represents some level of sacrifice on the part of the ego. There is a humility required, but it can't be degrading. It can't be so menial or whatever that you feel like you lose self-respect, or you are hiding, or something like that. But the core lesson here is that you're part of something bigger. You're a part of that bigger world.
The second lesson we can talk about would be discernment, or discrimination, between right and wrong, between pure and impure, between something that works and something that doesn't work, something that's useful or something that's wasteful, what is aligned or what is not aligned. So that discriminating quality in Virgo is one of the most stereotypical parts of the sign that we always talk about, right? It's like, you know, they're so picky. Well, what they're really trying to do is move with sophistication into a larger world in which your own will and your own way and your own needs and desires are not the only thing that exists. But in order to navigate that larger framework—and remember the very next sign is Libra, which continues on many of the same themes—in order to know what is right in the sign of Virgo, it's very practical. It's like this works and that doesn't work. What is considered useful and what might be considered wasteful.
I'm thinking a lot of my Virgo daughter, who's had the south node—she's a Virgo rising. She had these South Node eclipses in her first house. Since they started, she's been getting an allowance because she has a list of chores and she has a little checklist that she keeps, and then she's been refining like, what does it mean to successfully accomplish a task like the dishes? And there's certain things she's learning works and don't work when it comes to doing the dishes. It's that simple for, you know, a 10-year-old.
What is aligned, what is not aligned, though, is also about ethics and a sense of spiritual ethical purity. And the division between ethical, moral, earthy purity or a practical sense of right and wrong is not always the same as the spirit's sense of right and wrong. And so this discernment has to do with discerning what is right through a felt sense of what is right, not just a memorized, practical list of earthy rules. It's the spirit of the law versus the letter of the law dichotomy that's a part of the kind of discernment that's being developed or cultivated. And issues come up when the split happens between the two. "Well, you followed the letter of the law, you followed the instructions, but you missed something that was just intuitively obvious right in front of you."
So the shadows, of course, as we always talk about with Virgo, are going to be things like being super, super critical or perfectionistic or overly analytical, like analysis paralysis, or becoming obsessively self-analytical. And we want to develop that discernment or discrimination, but we also want to be flowing and fluid. That's where the counterpoint of Pisces comes in, the next evolutionary dynamic. And this is something Jeffrey Wolf Green talks about that's really, I think, really profound. One of the most profound things I think he has to say about Virgo is that Virgos go through these cycles of intense self-examination and self-judgment, where a heightened awareness of flaws, inadequacies, or imperfections are being dealt with, and there's a constant adjustment or refinement and kind of purification of selfhood that's usually also alongside of, like, what can I do that's practically useful that actually makes me happy?
But what happens is frequently the voice of that self-examination becomes overly critical and not demonstrating grace or forgiveness or a kind of softness and flow and fluidity. And so everyone, if you've ever gone through, you know, any attempt at sobriety, for example, this is very common in 12-step programs when people are just getting started, or in, you know, any kind of self-improvement lifestyle, fitness. In the beginning, you can be really, really obsessive, and you can overcompensate for the feeling that, you know, I should be somewhere that I'm not yet, and so you become way overly strict. This is part of the Virgo self-improvement cycles.
There's a real need for self-improvement that we all have. Virgo is a sign, you could say the karma of a South Node Virgo eclipse is like, get better. I know people don't like to hear that, because it's so offensive to imagine that we could get better. And there's a very Mr. Rogers, Pisces kind of way in which you're beautiful just the way you are. You know, don't you know that you're so loved? And that's true too, and it doesn't negate the fact. If you take that seriously, there's also no pressure. You can still get better, and you don't have to get better from a standpoint of "you're bad." You know, it's like saying you could use—it's like saying, you know, clean eating. But clean eating doesn't mean that if you're not eating clean, that you're dirty. It's like some people will tend to hear it through that kind of dichotomy.
And so the important thing is to continue the process of self-analysis and self-improvement, or even skill improvement and service improvement—like, if you're an astrologer, improve your skills. If you're a therapist, get better. If you're a nurse, get better. If you're a craftsman or craftswoman, get better. But can you do it in a way that is graceful and flowing? That's the tension that tends to come up with self-improvement in the sign.
This is also why the sign will frequently deal—I've seen, I've said this many times on the channel before, but in my practice, the most common sign that I saw manifesting planets, placements, whatever, with eating disorders in young women was Virgo. I think that this is why. "Oh, my body is this way or that way," and it's like, you know, you have to be so kind and loving to yourself. And maybe there's something like, oh, well, you could get a little fit, or you could eat a little healthier, or whatever. But if it's coming from "you're ugly" or "you're bad" or "you're not enough," then that ends up becoming the karma, even more than the state that's trying to be fixed.
For example, many people go through this again in 12-step programs. At the beginning of a 12-step program, the thing that keeps you sober is saying, "I have to keep the bad part of me away." But that judging part ends up being, probably in the case of many addicts, in myself included, when I went through early couple years of sobriety, that judging part of you, you learn, is more tied to the addiction than the quote-unquote "bad part" of you. It's the judging part that is sort of egging on some shadow part. I don't know how to explain it, but you get what I'm saying. The point is that the judgment is tied—it's as much about releasing ourselves from judgment as it is anything else.
Now, releasing yourself from judgment doesn't mean that you suddenly have permission to go and drink again if you're an addict, but it does mean that the way you deal with the path of sobriety can't come from a voice of condemnation and punitive judgment about your deficiencies. This is why the whole 12-step program starts with "I surrendered to a higher power, whatever that means to each person. I realized that I was unmanageable." What we mean by that is really that a voice of judgment can't be the one that controls your purity. Your purity is a constant. It's a moving target, and it's something that daily, by grace, we find our way into.
It's like trying to balance on a bike when you're first learning to ride it. This is so much of what Virgo is about. Is, how do you find that space of pure-heartedness, pure consciousness, pure living, pure health, pura vida? So Virgo, if you know from Costa Rica, how do you find that sweet spot? But it's more like a wave pattern you have to get connected to than something you control. And that's the polar opposite of Pisces anyway. Just kind of riffing here.
Another thing that's important is, with all of this purification, guilt, atonement, penance, salvation, damnation, some of these things can get really epic in the sign of Virgo, where there's a sense of almost carrying around an unconscious sense of guilt. Sometimes that guilt comes from people in the environment who are constantly demeaning or degrading you and telling you that you weren't enough. And then the sense of having to be more and more and more is like an unconscious response to feeling like you've internalized guilt or shame that someone else put on you. That can be very Virgo.
And I have to be so careful about that with my Virgo rising daughter. Whenever I use a corrective, like, "You didn't do this" or whatever, and I am angry or frustrated, I can see how quickly she internalizes guilt or shame. And I've gotten a lot better over the years at being like, let's—certain tones I cannot use, you know, and I have to be so careful of it. And then if I do use it, I have to take some time to really make sure I'm like, hey, everyone makes mistakes, and I was frustrated. And, you know, like, because there's such a youthful, impressionable quality to Virgo that you have to do a lot to say, if I made a mistake, if there was an ethical lapse, if I didn't do what was right, it's okay. I'm not unconsciously carrying the sense of not being enough or of shame.
Now, Virgo karma, just to be completely fair to the other side, can point to a need for atonement and improvement. And so, you know, it's sometimes we want, in the need to be graceful and forgiving and accepting, we can enable something to continue being problematic and legitimately sort of impure, or destructive, you know. So however, whatever word works for you. I know some people don't like the word pure/impure, but what we're talking about is like, what is health? What is vibrancy? What is alignment? What is when you feel healthy and there's a just a feeling or a sense of relative purity compared to times where you feel relatively cloudy or dark or clogged up and a little gunky?
The point is that this sign legitimately points to cleaning gunk, and so you can't just eliminate that and covertly continue to enable the same problem by saying, "Oh, well, we should just be forgiving and accepting." It doesn't work that way. Virgo is taking us to task a little bit. That's why Virgo is task-oriented. So the need to atone is also real in Virgo, and we have to look very carefully at where we're being asked to become more pure, become more ethical, become more aligned. But we can't do that in a way that is all about workaholism or self-punishment and shame and doubt and "I'm ugly or stained inside." Like that kind of harsh voice is honestly like the karma.
Let's just imagine it could be that—just imagine if you, in a previous lifetime, were someone who inflicted pain or suffering on others, somewhat regularly, gross, subtle, who knows how big or what scale. And at the end of the life, you had some realizations: "Wow, I inflicted pain on people." You could understand how in the next lifetime, you might have the north or south node in Virgo. And in that lifetime, there may be a way in which you feel the need to atone. However, that need to atone is still carrying the same harshness that you demonstrated to other people, but now it's to yourself.
Now, please don't misunderstand me to say that Virgos are all former life abusers or something. I don't mean that at all. I'm just trying to help us think of evolutionary storylines from one life to another, where, you know, like, what evolutionary purpose does that kind of lesson serve over the course of many lifetimes? You can imagine, right? But there are, you could imagine 100 others, literally. So please do not take that to mean that I think that my daughter was beating up her schoolmates in a previous lifetime. So, anyway.
So, but I mean, the idea here is that there's a purification theme, and you can feel how complicated it gets. Now, there's also something that happens for Virgos, which are these—when I talk about this, I want you to know that this can be of all different sizes and scales of magnitude—but it's a crisis that tends to happen, and evolutionary astrologers talk about this with Virgo. The crisis could be little. It could be punctuated, regular crises, like, if you've ever known a Virgo who's kind of always got some kind of problem or itch or skin condition, or like, they're constantly dealing with irritations, agitations, problems, you know, just kind of regularly. There's a feeling like crisis is sort of part of the time signature of the music of their life, or big crises. But often it's like small, kind of semi-consistent ones.
So the reason that this tends to happen is back to the idea of initiatory crisis and transformation, that it sits on the threshold of entering the solar underworld. It was a sign that was associated with initiation. But one of the things that happens is like little—whether it's repeated little crises or like big ones at certain key times through major transits—what it's going to expose are different kinds of internal contradictions. Like, "I know I need to get better at something, but I also have a really mean voice inside of me. And I can't try to get better. I'm not wanting to go down the path of getting better because the voice is so mean."
Even if it's something even simpler: "I really know that I need to get a little bit more organized. I need to get more organized with my time, space, energy, my physical things in my house, whatever, my workspace. But as soon as I try to tap into that part of me that organizes, the voice really makes me anxious and obsessive and controlling. And then I feel constantly stressed out, and then I have to give up in patterns of collapse and exhaustion." Do you see what I mean?
So these crises come up as a way of pointing us toward needing to hold the process of service, of improvement, of learning discernment and discrimination in ways that are fluid, thoughtful, soft, graceful, eloquent, artful, emotional. You know, the best kind of Virgos, in my experience, that have to deal with these repeated sense of irritations, little crises, are those that are like, "Oh, it's you again, and I've learned how to flow through you." I've learned to flow through crises. It becomes part of the Virgo karma through perpetual little things that bother or irritate. The way to adjust, the way to find alignment, becomes more and more fluid. And the only way you can find how to be more fluid in the face of imperfections is to have them happen somewhat repeatedly, and it wears down your rough edges.
A lot of Virgos, in other words, are learning to be more flexible, and the only way to do that is through repeated difficulties that sort of force the need for flexibility by wearing down your sense of control. All right, that's another thing to keep in mind.
All of this can come up pretty intensely around Virgo eclipses. We don't talk about this a lot, but it is something that evolutionary astrologers talk about, which is that Virgos will often feel somewhat alone or different or separate. And this isn't the same way that an Aquarius feels it, like ideologically. It's that sense of suffering and constantly trying to find alignment that can make a Virgo, or the Virgo parts of our chart that are connected to certain parts of our life or our psychology, it can make us feel like I can't just ever feel natural, or I can't ever just feel like I'm in a flow. Like, you know, the anxiety is really what it boils down to.
I guess that sense of aloneness can be connected to the anxiety, because it's like, well, why does everyone else have such an easy time? Like, why is everything so kind of tricky and tentative and a little anxiety provoking for me? And that can make a person feel really alone over time. It makes it really, really important that you have spaces in your life where there's just relaxation and flow and acceptance—really, really important. And Virgo karma can bring up the need for that as a kind of polarity point, right, of Pisces.
And that brings us to this polarity point. The karma is always working in an opposition. Mercury-ruled versus Jupiter-ruled. Mercury exalted versus Venus exalted. There's a kind of faith and fluidity and adaptability and flexibility born of things like compassion, imagination, forgiveness, a broader, more holistic sense of being able to perceive life in the world that's intimately connected to Virgo's karma. You have to—these, in a sense, the answers to the test for Virgo tap into knowledge from Pisces.
There's also a shift in reasoning that has to happen. And Jeffrey Wolf Green talked about this from deductive reasoning, which is the analyzing of parts—my daughter loves to do this—to inductive, which is perceiving the whole. When we are watching a movie, my daughter, Virgo, will get caught in analyzing little, little things. And I am always gently saying, "Sweetheart, here—" we actually set a rule that you can ask, I don't know, four or five questions per movie. We'll pause it and answer your question, but then, once you're out of them, you can't ask any more questions. But what we tell her, alongside of that, is that if you keep watching the movie, you're going to naturally be able to perceive the whole. That's the inductive piece, that's the Jupiter piece. And so Pisces is like that as a counterpoint to Virgo that we need.
Now, here's the things to really watch for, in terms of the shadows that can come up around an eclipse like this. If you are living in a constant hamster wheel of work but don't feel like you're serving something you care about. If you stay busy all the time and are avoidant. If you are filling your life with tons of obligations to avoid an inner feeling of being alone or having to deal with anxiety when there's nothing to do and facing it. If you tend to be constantly critical of yourself or others, that's a problem.
Self-denial can be a way—you can disguise self-denial as virtue and secretly feed your ego in a way that is not so healthy. You need to feed your ego, but maybe not that way, by telling yourself that it's virtuous to be self-denying, because that's not the same thing as humility. You know, feeling crushed by responsibilities—obviously, earth signs in general are prone to this, Cap and Virgo especially—but you identify your self-worth with how burnt out but useful you feel. You know, it's like, again, Caps, I can identify with this as a Cap moon. Sometimes, if you're dealing with chronic guilt, physical illness can arise from repression or overextension. These are the Virgo shadows, you know?
Yeah, so the illnesses tend to come when you're being self-denying, when you're retaining emotions rather than sharing them and expressing them. When you don't have containers where flow can take place, the illness will come up as a crisis. And little irritations, micro-agitations, are pretty common for Virgo. They're like micro-illnesses that reflect not being fluid enough, in a way.
So how do you—like, what are signs that you're kind of doing good in Virgo school? Not to beat up the school image, right? But you, through a Virgo process, you start learning that humility does not mean that you self-deny. You can be humble but not self-harming. You can be a servant but still feel joy in doing something that feels aligned for you. You can be skillful and competent but not feel burnt out or overextend yourself with too much work. You can make a practical contribution to a larger world but have done the work of figuring out what that means within yourself. All of these kinds of things.
You can be discriminating, discerning, and care about getting better, but not be judgmental or punitive or condemning. You can be analyzing without getting paralyzed by analysis. You can be self-improving or improving on skills without self-hatred, with a foundation of self-love and acceptance. And you can function as a humble servant to a larger whole without losing the absolute radiance of your individuality. Look at the best Virgos, you know, I bet you anything they'll demonstrate a variety of those kind of syntheses.
Some questions that you could ask yourself right now coming into this eclipse would be: What habit of self-criticism is ready to go? Where does there need to be more joy involved in service or work? Where do you need to just forgive yourself and take yourself off the hook? Where is busyness happening as a way of avoiding a base condition of uncertainty or anxiety? And how can you make some space to actually feel that and get to know it? Maybe that looks like therapy. Maybe it looks like joining our quiet meditations and checking that out. Excuse me.
Where is perfectionism or criticism harming your relationships? How do you typically respond to crises, and are you adaptable and fluid in finding that as they occur? You're finding easier ways of moving through them, getting thrown off less. What does it look like to live, serve, and move in the world from a space of wholeness rather than deficiency? And how do you do that while still constantly being excited to get better at things?
All right, that is what I have for the day. I hope that this was a useful export—excuse me—useful exploration of Virgo karma. If you like this kind of thing, I couldn't recommend people like Ari Moshe Wolf, the writings of Jeffrey Wolf Green or Steven Forrest, and the evolutionary community in general, because as you can see, there's really rich, deep material here to work with. And it really does help us to clarify, like, what's going on when a Virgo experience goes on.
Or, as you saw in the last couple episodes I did, what's going on with Aries, or we recently did one with Aquarius. So it's been fun to do these talks and kind of revisit some of my roots. But totally applicable—different set of techniques, but are the ideas off? I don't know. You tell me. I don't think so. Anyway, that's it for today. I hope you guys are having a good one. We'll see you again tomorrow. Bye.



Adam, I just have to say, your episodes are always amazing and enjoyable, but lately they have been absolute chefs kiss. So in sync with my inner work and narrative. They content flows so brilliantly, and poses such thoughtful insights and questions, and to me at least, highlights the direction we need to be moving in, I have my MC in Aquarius in the 9H, so go figure!
Thank you again.