The Meaning of Venus Retrograde in Leo: Dependency Isn’t a Dirty Word

Hi, everyone; this is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology. Happy Monday, everybody. Today we're going to take another look at Venus's upcoming retrograde in the sign of Leo, and we're going to be looking in particular at the tension that is present between the themes of independence and dependence with this upcoming transit and the reason for that is that Venus is the goddess of relationship, while the Sun remember Venus is in Leo, which is the sign of the Sun, so the Sun is the natural symbol for individuality, purpose, the heroic journey of the self.

These are all themes that have long been related to the Sun, and so, the potential for archetypal tension or tug of war between the themes of independence, heroic independence, and romance and dependence are a big possibility for this upcoming retrograde. So we're going to look at that today. That is our goal.

Before we do so, don't forget to like and subscribe, and share your comments in the comment section. I'd love to hear your insights and reflections as we go, and not only now but as the retrograde unfolds, it'd be cool to see you come back to this video, listen to it again, maybe, and drop a comment as it's all unfolding.

If you want to find a transcript of today's talk, you can find it on my website, nightlightastrology.com, where you can also check out all of my courses and readings. If you have any questions about any of that, email me at info@nightlightastrology.com.

Now, many of you know that in the new year, we're going to be starting a donation-based Reading Clinic, which will expand our reading services and offer more affordable services and also services that you don't have to wait as long for because currently, my wait time is about a year. In the meantime, we get a lot of questions from people saying, Who would you recommend if I don't want to wait a year and your donation clinic isn't up and running yet?

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Today I want to talk with Venus's upcoming retrograde in the sign of Leo; I want to talk about some of the shadows of the Sun that can sneak in and that we might see Venus working with over the course of this Venus retrograde and it really brings up the tension between individuality and dependency or independence versus dependence. I want to read you something that is coming from a book that Ashley and I are reading.

Over the years especially, and I think you guys dogs I, but I've told the story like a million times now. But prior to us having kids, we had a practice of prayer meditation, you know, gardening and reading books and stuff like that, and taking walks; our morning time was like our sacred marital ritual time, and then kids came along, and it was like well see in a few years, but it's been good, and so now we've been getting back to that the kids are a little bit older like they're more capable of taking care of themselves in the morning. So we have our morning rituals back.

So we've been reading again; we read this book I told you guys about recently called Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, which was super fascinating, really interesting for both of us. We started a new book recently called Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find and Keep Love. Now, this was recommended to us by another; we have another couple friends of ours that were they were in our wedding, and they've read this, and they're in their marriage, and it's been really nice for them to read together; they were talking about it with us we're like, oh, we will check that out. I'm really loving this so far. Ashley and I both really enjoying this book. It's very fascinating. It's filled with things that I think a lot of people could benefit from, like reading if you're into that kind of stuff. Anyway, there's a section I want to read today that is perfectly appropriate for Venus's upcoming retrograde in Leo, and it starts with a section called the codependency myth. Here it goes.

The codependency movement and other currently popular self-help approaches portray relationships in a way that is remarkably similar to the views held in the first half of the 20th century about the child-parent bond. Remember the happy child who is free of unnecessary attachments. Today's experts offer advice that goes something like this. Your happiness is something that should come from within and should not be dependent on your lover or mate. Your well-being is not their responsibility, and theirs is not yours. Each person needs to look after himself or herself.

In addition, you should learn not to allow your inner peace to be disturbed by the person you're closest to. If your partner acts in a way that undermines your sense of security, you should be able to distance yourself from the situation emotionally, "keep the focus on yourself," and stay on an even keel. If you can't do that, there might be something wrong with you, you might be too enmeshed with the other person or codependent, and you must learn to set better "boundaries." The basic premise underlying this point of view is that the ideal relationship is one between two self-sufficient people who unite in a mature, respectful way while maintaining clear boundaries. If you develop a strong dependency on your partner, you are deficient in some way and are advised to work on yourself to become more differentiated; they could easily have used the word individuated and develop a greater sense of self.

The worst possible scenario is that you will end up needing your partner, which is equated with addiction to them, and addiction, we all know, is a dangerous prospect. Well, the teachings of the codependency movement remain immensely helpful in dealing with family members who suffer from substance abuse that can be misleading and even damaging when applied indiscriminately to all relationships.

Here is the next section that says the biological truth. Numerous studies show that once we become attached to someone to form one physiological unit, our partners regulate our blood, our blood pressure, our heart rate, our breathing, and the level of hormones in our blood. We are no longer separate entities. The emphasis on differentiation, we're again, you could say individuation that is held by most of today's popular psychology approaches to adult relationships does not hold water from a biological perspective.

Dependency is a fact that it's not a choice or a preference. It goes on to quote some studies that were done at the University of Virginia, and he talks in this study; I'll just summarize because it's really long. They show people who are about to be submitted to like an electrical shock, and if they're just by themselves, the stress response is like insane, and if they are holding someone's hand that they don't know, it goes down moderately, and if they're holding the hand of someone that they really love, like a spouse, it's almost like there's almost no stress response and then, of the people that they had hold the hands of spouses, those that reported the greatest closeness and intimacy, and boundedness with their mates also scored even higher.

Anyway, that was the point of the study, and he goes on to say this is the dependency paradox; well, before brain imaging technology was developed, John Bowlby understood that our need for someone to share our lives with is part of our genetic makeup and has nothing to do with how much we love ourselves or how fulfilled we feel on our own. He discovered that once we choose someone special, powerful, and often uncontrollable, special, powerful, and often uncontrollable forces come into play.

New patterns of behavior kicking regardless of how independent we are and despite our conscious wills. Once we choose a partner, there's no question about whether dependency exists or not; it always does; an elegant coexistence that does not include uncomfortable feelings of vulnerability and fear of loss sounds good, but it's not our biology.

What proved through evolution to have a strong survival advantage as a human couple becoming one physiological unit and goes on to talk about that for a while, and then, paradoxically, the opposite of this is true. It turns out that the ability to step into the world on our own often stems from the knowledge that there is someone beside us who we can count on. This is the dependency paradox. The logic is hard to follow at first; how can we act more independent and by being thoroughly dependent on someone else?

If we had to describe the basic premise of adult attachment, in one sense, it would be if you want to take the road to independence and happiness, find the right person to depend on, and travel down it with that person. Once you understand this, you grasp the essence of attachment theory.

So anyway, I'm not trying to present this as God's truth or anything; I just think it's an interesting set of ideas and propositions that run contrary to so much of the New Age dogma that at least that I was exposed to coming up in the sort of New Age culture of astrology and yoga and, you know, psychedelics and stuff like that, so often the goal is about making sure that you're not someone who is dependent on anything other than the wellspring of divinity that's living in your own goddamn heart!

Hahaha. Oh, do you get what I'm saying? That's it. I mean, that's so it's just, I don't know it's never struck me as like, that's how it just feels like, oh, that's a little crazy. Isn't life about relationships? It seems a little insane to suggest that we should all be like fully functioning, self-regulating sovereign individual self-sufficient machines, you know, like marching on to our purpose in eternity.

But that's how I mean that's the I don't know, I think that's the new age dogma; it's a solar dogma. That's the point; it can be another; all Leos are like this or anything, but it can be a solar, a sun-based idea. There is a reason, for example, that the sign of Aries is the exultation of the Sun. The sign of Leo, another fire sign, the fixed sign of the lion. You know, the king stands alone, the you know, that the king wears a heavy crown, it's lonely.

So I don't know this myth of individuality is it permeates our culture, and I suspect that a Venus retrograde in Leo will force us to tangle pretty deeply with how dependent our strongest sense of individuality and purpose is upon the quality and depth of our relationships. Amen. So anyway, five shadows of the Sun that I want to talk about today that I think Venus, especially Venus in Leo, can force us to take a look at while she's retrograde.

Number one is the pressure to individuate, and I've been, you know, we've been all of these are, should not surprise anyone, right? We've sort of already set it all. But the pressure to individuate is like this; someone comes into an astrological session, and they say something like, Well, you know, all of my problems that you know, at work or love, or money, or you know, health or whatever, it's all just because I know that I'm needing to evolve, and I'm meeting to take the next step in my personal evolutionary journey, and once I do, then the karma and all of these areas will get better, and it's, you know, it's like, can I deny that is, like a real part of life, it's a real archetypal experience to individuate and for karma to change because we grow as individuals.

Of course, it's, that's real, it's true. But also, like, it's a lot of pressure, especially when people are smoking it like crack all the time, you know, what it means like, like, people get so high on this idea that your individuality is going to, you know, deliver you from all of your problems and the shadow, of course, is that, first of all, that the simple shadow is disease, right? Wherever there's a pressure to become, to realize some further potential that rests solely within yourself, right? It's like a vacuum of purpose or something, and there's something about that that is lonely and stressful, and It feels very performative.

Like your individuality starts to feel like it's a performance, and you gotta; you gotta just nail it. You know, it's a lot of pressure; I think Venus retrograde and Leo can relieve us of that pressure by saying, you know, what, it's actually the quality of how you love who you love and the reciprocal nature of what you love, what you get back from what you love, how the quality of how much you give to what you love, that helps you to become more of what you are. You can't do it in a vacuum.

That's number two, the denial of dependency. The myth of individuality that is so prevalent with the Sun and Leo tends to deny. It thinks of dependency as a dirty word. It is exactly what we read in this section. There's one part, in particular, I want to go back to because it's just this is it.

Your happiness is something that should come from within and should not be dependent on your lover or mate. What if Venus retrograde in Leo has the audacity to say, know your happiness comes from your lovers, your mates, your friends; it comes from your relationships, not that it comes only from the other people in them, but it comes from the depth of your intimacy, your closeness, your sweetness, your generosity, your sense of humor, your playfulness that you share with other people. These are the things that bring you happiness, as much as any kind of heroic, you know, marching, you know, to the beat of your own drum, off to the Halls of Nirvana or whatever.

Number three is the heroic overcompensation. So the Sun is emblematic of the mythology of the hero; it's one, and Mars is another one. But there's a reason that Aries, the sign of one of the signs of Mars, is also the exultation of the Sun. They're very closely related. The hero is constantly struggling and overcoming to achieve or accomplish something that is a noble mission that you've been tasked with a special purpose. How many times have people come into reading? I'm not kidding, and they're like, What am I here for? You know, and I'm like, You're here to live a life, you know, in the exploding now. What else do you need, Jesus?

And me too, like I, I get that way to where I'm like, am I living my purpose? You know, and I'm like, Who are you talking to? Yeah. I mean, like, so there's always room for the hero's journey. It's a hugely important myth. It helps us to overcome struggles that helps us to define and understand our unique individual gifts, and there is such a thing as purpose and calling, and I don't mean to like laugh or diminish the importance of those things.

It's just absurd to me how dominant they become that we can't ever set them aside and imagine that today can be a day without a purpose. This life can be a life that has elements of purpose, but it's not bound and confined by some moral purpose imperative, you know? How can we live with a lighter, like holding the notion of purpose a little bit lighter. Not everything in life has to be about the heroic need to overcome and, you know, struggle on until we reach some goal. Morally, spiritually, and, you know, at any level.

The opposite idea is that life can be lived for nothing other than the sake of pleasure, and we don't mean cheap, hedonistic. The pleasure of love, the pleasure of relating to a life, a universe just teeming with life. Like, it's so funny to me how bored people get in such a magical universe, and I think some of the boredom comes from a lack of imagination, and the lack of imagination comes from a lack of relatedness. When you start relating to things, you start imagining, and when you start imagining, you start loving.

This comes back to the quote we read from James Hillman the other day, to imagine is to love, and to love is to imagine. I see people, frequently in, you know, in my practice, struggling with this feeling that I have to be a better parent. You know, I gotta be better spiritually. I'm not very good at meditation; got to be better with my diet; I gotta be better with my body, and I don't hear people as much saying, I've got to have more fun. I've got to spend more time with the people I love. I have to find more ways of laughing with the people that are special to me. Gotta find more time to be in community with people that I like. I gotta find more time to do things that bring me smiles and laughter and make me feel creatively satisfied, even if it's just for a few hours.

I don't ever hear people with a sense of impending doom; it's like, if I don't, I know I've got to do these. It's there's such a weightiness with the Sun and the heroic journey.

Anyway, Number four is the impossible standards of success. The Sun is like, you know, in the allegory of the cave when the prisoner escapes, Plato's prisoner escapes the cave and sees the light of the Sun illuminating the real world. The higher the world of higher forms, it gives us a real glimpse into what the Sun is like. The Sun was called daimon by ancient astrologers and Vettius. Valens said that the diamond would present humans with ideal images, like a platonic image of something, and stir them up with ambition to undertake a life for actions that would be in pursuit of that ideal image.

It is absolutely beautiful to live a life stirred up by our daimons with a sense of purpose with, ambition, with ideals that call to us like the shimmer like gold. But it's also really important that we understand that it's the, you know, it's such a cliche, but it's the journey, not the destination that this world is, is frequently going to disappoint us when it comes to meeting the gold standard of the Sun.

Well, there's a way that the alchemist said that you can't get to gold until you've gone through silver, and I think what that means, and I heard James Hillman say this in an essay once, was basically that you can't get to whatever alchemical gold is, whatever the ideal is, you can't get there until you have learned to look at the world. In the light of the moon, which means to look at the world as a reflection of something beautiful and transcendent, yet right here, spread before us.

It's like until you can learn to see heaven in the grain of mustard seed, you're not getting to alchemical gold, and I think we skipped that part of the process. You know, it's like, we have to learn how to see all of the little nooks and crannies and all the little imperfections and flaws and faults and farts.

We have to learn to see them with divine eyes, the world just the way it is, that our life just the way it is, who I am today, just the way that I am, and in that sort of silvering of our consciousness, we make it possible to shape our lives into something resembling gold, but not if we skip over, somehow seeing the divinity in the here and now in the imminent that which is embodied in here. So I wonder when it comes to Venus is retrograde in Leo, not just about relationships and dependency. But in general, I wonder about making peace with the way that things are and coming to accept and fall in love with the way that things are.

Rather than obsessing about how to take something from the way that it is to some perfect gold standard so something in this Venus retrograde says, can you just love things the way that they are, even if they have somehow fallen short of the gold standard? I think that one of the easiest ways to do that just sort of overall, you know, as individuals who are met with our failures, our shortcomings, or the imperfections of the world, where is it that we find relief from that failure or shortcoming? It's in relationships.

At the end of the day, I failed as an astrologer. I didn't make a video I liked. I'm not, you know, I'm not hitting the mark or whatever. I sit down, talk to a friend; talk to my wife; and spend time with my kids. I talk to a family member; I connect with someone in the heart, and it's like the heart-to-heart connections that we have, even if your heart-to-heart connection is with something more abstract like your guitar or nature or poetry or whatever.

When you connect with something, it's that connecting that somehow just pulls in all the imperfections and all of the falling short, and it just brings it right through the river of the heart, and it says yes, it's all okay, and somehow, this place where we have fallen short is golden. We can't get there unless we have some way of inviting failure, disappointment, and shortcomings.

We have to make peace with failure before we find real gold, and I think for us, so much of that pressure to find real gold exists in the myth of individuality; you have to do it on your own. It's something you find within yourself. I don't know; I think it's when our individuality fails, and we have to come back to the things that really matter, which are our relationships, and never put us under the pressure of perfecting anything. They're so ready to say yes to just the way you are.

Number five is the inflation of purpose. So we already talked about this, but just the idea, what does it look like to live a life that is ruled by Venus's interests, not the sons, or that Venus gets to redirect our life purpose or our interests in terms of her desires and her interests? Chief among them would be play, would be erotics, would be art, would-be relationship, would be love, creativity, and not for the sake of anything other than the sensual experience and feeling that comes with it, joy and happiness. The way our five senses engage and appreciate it is really helpful from time to time to just let go of purpose and trade it in for beauty, you know, easy-to-find beauty when that's your goal. It's harder to feel like you've fulfilled some sense of purpose.

Now I say all of this as a person who takes a lot of joy in the discovery of purpose and the pursuit of purpose; I think it's a real archetype. But boy, it's just gone berserk at times, right? So it'll be interesting to see how Venus plays and riffs on those themes.

Well, before we close, I want to remind you to use the promo code ac10Adam at astrologyhub.com if you want to get 15% off from one of their readings, which I think would be a great idea. Let me just I want to take you back over to let me just take you back over to their website and show you how you can do that. I'm not sure if I put the promo code up at the beginning or not so, so here is the website once more; if you want to check out their service, you go to astrologyhub.com and go to the readings tab, and when you book, use the promo code ac10Adam to get 15% off, and you can use that up until the end of July, and I'll feature that the rest of this week as well and we'll make sure to share that with you guys and remind you that it'll be in the comment section, description of this video, and all that good stuff. All right. Well, thanks for listening today, and we will see you again tomorrow. Take it easy, everyone.