First name / Hey there,
Venus is now in Taurus and moving toward a square to Pluto in Aquarius (exact on June 9). This transit could correspond with intensified nervous system feedback around pleasure and displeasure, which gives us an opportunity to update our self-concepts around desire. Meaning: what we like and don’t like is big important information and it might be coming in hot.
Venus-Pluto contacts are a rich field about the depth of beauty, the depth of pleasure, the deeper treasures alive in our sensual experience of life and love. But, Venus-Pluto contacts are also a gnarlier thornier thicket of repulsion and ugly — our experiences of rejection, self-rejection, and disgust. Sometimes the attachment to what we want or think we want can be so intense with Venus-Pluto that it brings up feelings of torment, self-hatred, or other shadow experiences that might constellate around whether or not we feel good enough or worthy enough to have what we desire. This can also be projected onto others or we can feel it as a projection — given that we generally treat others how we treat ourselves when it comes down to it. Venus-Pluto transits can also highlight transformations in how we love, such as when we encounter new types of love relationally that uplevel our self-concept, or we open more deeply to ourselves and experience new dimensions of others as a result.
Venus is at home in the sign of Taurus, and there is a lot of resource in this placement for enjoying sensual pleasures. In the sign of Taurus we are learning about what we like and value, what matters to us. This can include value concepts, but we can also speak largely here of the kinds of touch or smells we like for example. Visceral value. What is physical and tactile and how the experience of pleasure can affirm a sense of self-value (and how our struggles with pleasure can also impact self-esteem, or how struggles with self-esteem can affect our relationship to pleasure and so on). Having a meaningful sensory experience goes beyond enjoyment, and can affirm we matter.
Pluto in Aquarius’ deeper offering is to create increasing freedom in our nervous systems such that we are increasingly free agents in our lives. My favorite place to focus on the question of freedom is in the body and nervous system itself. This may be where we recognize that our ability to be present and lucid represents the places in our life (and our body itself) that we are freely “allowed” to go. The experiences that trigger trauma responses (any fight, flight, freeze or fawn) or disassociation are the places we are not so free, alternately. At one level, we might organize our lives to avoid these triggers, but we also discover greater freedom and possibility and ability to be with reality as we develop more awareness and flexibility with our responses to the various sensations we will encounter in life.
As simple as knowing what we like and don’t like may sound, this is loaded material psychologically and somatically. Taurus, relating to our pleasure aesthetic and values, also relates to survival and belonging. Experiencing resonant touch, taste, smell, can register as belonging or as being deeply worthy of love in some way. And, experiencing displeasure can go beyond inconvenience and feel even like a betrayal of what we value: or some level of panic or distress is activated, which we maybe have also learned to numb or have not yet discovered how to address in an empowered way. Especially if we had experiences in the past that taught us powerlessness in this realm — which simply for having a childhood, most of us have experiences of not having a lot of choice. Even as we have grown up and updated these storylines, a visceral young part of us can still get activated when we don’t have what we want and we don’t know how to have it. Thus any pursuit of feeling good in our bodies, our clothing, in our eating, in sensuality and sex, can always take on much deeper and more primal proportions than what meets the eye.
The square between Venus in Taurus and Pluto in Aquarius came into my mind loudly because of an experience on an airplane a few days ago. I wasn’t thinking about the transit or necessarily planning to write about it, until a person came down the aisle (to then sit next to me) smelling strongly of body spray, which I clocked immediately, and I was not having it. The last few week I had noticed myself becoming actually viscerally disturbed by artificial/chemical smells in Ubers or Lyfts on my visit back to the states - whether body spray or those scent pods that go on the vents. Noticing the trend of events, the transit popped into my head — like of course I’m viscerally triggered and disgusted by a bad smell (Taurus) right now. Especially one that I consider unnatural (artificial, manmade, can be an Aquarian thing). It takes me into a Venus-Pluto channel of ugly because now I’m also judging a person, and rather than meeting a person from some preferred state of love and wellbeing, a meaner part of me has entered the chat. And often these Venus-Pluto themes are usually too taboo to name directly, which only intensifies their charge.
Have you ever noticed that food choices (Taurus) is a source of primal conflict within families or communities (Aquarius)? Like if a vegan shows up to a function and is immediately questioned, “do you think you’re better than us?” Or the person with food sensitivities or allergies is disregarded or mocked by a group who can’t understand why they can’t just eat the cheese or the bread “like the rest of us”. Or even me cause I’m also human, losing my mind internally that someone would choose these chemical scents. Every now and then, preferences for taste and smell hits a deep, rage-inducing nerve for people. Which I think is so worth noticing rather than just being inside of without reflection. I suspect the Venus in Taurus - Pluto in Aquarius field is full of these moments and alternately: moments of extreme delight and connection through these sensual pleasures. Having come back home to Crete to home cooked meals and grocery shopping (done for me!) I can attest to having a heightened moment around love and food. These are just more examples of Venus things running deep.
Back on the airplane with the person whose body spray set me off, I did the normal thing anyone would do and after I couldn’t take anymore of the smell, got up to go to the bathroom and make up a dis rap on an autotune app about the bad smell and ‘taking reprieve in my own energy’ (also very Taurus). Lol. Because this is how I blow off steam. After thoroughly amusing myself and expressing my discontent, I noticed that there were in fact empty seats on the plane and I had the ability to change my situation. Interesting that I hadn’t even noticed or considered that as an option until I embraced my pettiness and disgust and made a dumb little rap with it. Taurus loves the finer things in life and is also can relate to deep grumpiness when those values are betrayed (to use a strong, but properly dramatic word here for the Taurean experience).
Which led me to reflect on where displeasure becomes an increasingly angsty or loaded situation when we do not feel we have the resource (Taurus) or empowerment (Pluto) to change the situation. Whether it’s for some petty inconvenience of the day or a longer term, multi-year issue in relationship to our deeper desires. Whether it’s for ourselves or for our ideals for the world. Have you ever felt powerless to remove yourself from an upsetting situation, or to have what it is you really want? Have you ever felt powerless to change something happening in the collective? How did that show up in how you engaged yourself and the situation? While I had no business with the person and their body spray, my spring-loaded disgust the last week from smells actually prepared me for my arrival home. The windows had been shut for a month and it was stuffy. And so I was prepared and inspired — I spent time immediately freshening up the whole house (windows, dusting, laundry, everything) instead of just enduring it and trying to take a nap. I traced it back to the person on the airplane, and the uber cars, self-consciously. Often a real acknowledgement of where we are and what we are feeling in any given moment can empower us to make relevant decisions when a moment of agency (like making the house nice) appears. This shows up in much deeper ways in how we might learn from patterns that show up in romance, relationship, and dating — learning from what works and doesn’t work and change actually happening.
This transit offers a moment of friction for coming into greater awareness or power around basic desires. Some of these issues are highly consequential, like belonging art large, feeling good in our bodies or enjoying intimacy with others. Additionally, experiences of deeper disconnect and repulsion do also happen in close relationship and can benefit from repair processes. It’s one thing to not like how a stranger smells or fight with some random people on the internet, but its harder when these nerves are struck in closer, deeper, bonds, and it’s not so out of the ordinary. It’s whether or not we have developed presence and skill with navigating those waters without jumping straight into reactivity or entrenched positions.
So my point or my advice? Often inside of our most intense attractions and repulsions, we get into a lot of psychological complex, compulsion, and strategy to try to secure the good experience and avoid the bad experience. This is painful whether or not we have what we want, because having what we want comes with neurosis and a tight grip. What may be more deeply impactful and powerful is learning how to stabilize (Taurus) greater levels of love and acknowledgement to the parts of our experience that are exiled (Aquarius). While part of this is mental and conceptual (Aquarius) it is also very physical (Taurus) - an embodied posture toward ourselves of warmth, permission, recognition, and validation of the simplest layers of what is happening. Like our basic emotions about a thing. And also the shame and self-judgement that’s on top of the experience, and letting that be okay too. A lot of spiritual people have a hard time embracing ‘baser’ parts of themselves (like anger, disgust, for example) and it hurts our range, and the repression takes energy. We try to optimize ourselves into a shape and lose the willingness to embrace our humanity.
When we de-escalate our own resistance to our experience, more creative and lucid possibilities for engaging the world naturally emerge. We might learn under this transit that forcefully having exactly what we want is not the most important thing of all, but being able to be our own friend amidst fluctuating positive and negative experiences can make everything flow more joyfully and even empower us to have more of what we wanted, after all.
My astrological takes are inevitably affected by my studies of EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique). Astrology allows a high-level, at-a-distance view of patterns and phenomena. The things I have been obsessed with lately feel like expanding the opportunity to zone into things that are emergent in the now moment, like what is actually happening in the body at any given moment. For example, a lot of what I wrote about above has been impacted by learning how to accept more of my experience — not just intellectually -- but with somatic techniques like EFT that have resourced me to feel lucid and present in places that used to feel off-limits or out-of-range to me, from small petty things to the deepest stored pain points and wounds. I would love to share these kind of sessions with you for your process.
My books are currently open for EFT sessions. These sessions look like addressing or working through a problem you have (something you want to change or be relieved of) or a greater experience/desire you wish to open yourself up to and address the shadow material around your upper limits. You are guided in the session through a somatic trauma healing technique (EFT) to create more resource and spaciousness in your system and new possibility around these issues or themes. Because I’m also an astrologer, I do look up your chart beforehand and allow that knowledge to inform subtleties of the session.
You can book here.
If you have any reflections from this article feel free to share!
With love,
Sabrina Monarch
