Pain As A Portal: Super Pink Full Moon in Scorpio

*Image credit: kdshutterman (Shutterstock)*

The Super Pink Full Moon in Scorpio will be exact tonight at 11:31pm ET. No, the moon itself will not appear pink — the “Pink Moon” is a name given to this month’s moon by indigenous people in North America based on the seasonal flowers in bloom at this time. As the first super moon of 2021 (meaning the full moon occurs at the same time that the moon is closest to earth, making it appear bigger and brighter than usual), this particular full moon is especially potent. Full moons occur when the sun and moon are 180 degrees apart in the sky: what is known as an "opposition" in astrology. Full moons can therefore illuminate tensions, bring difficult dynamics to light, and dredge up things that we might prefer stay submerged in darkness. In Scorpio in the eleventh house, this super moon is poised to bring up some of our deepest issues regarding how we all relate to one another collectively. Scorpio is about as dark and twisty as it gets, so it’s no surprise that the collective reading for this full moon is chock full of intensity.

Buckle up, because we’re about to take a deep dive into pain as a portal to individual and collective transformation.

*Deck: Next World Tarot by Cristy C. Road*

The theme of this full moon is Five of Wands. Five of Wands reminds us that with expansion comes contraction. It’s hard to create much of anything without, at some point in the process, feeling totally lost or overwhelmed. Nicknamed “strife” in Cristy C. Road’s Next World Tarot, this card suggests that we are being invited to examine the areas of our life where we have been experiencing difficulty. As we can see in the illustration, however, the Five of Wands provides an opportunity to pause and really get in touch with the places we are struggling. When we’re feeling upset, can we bow to that experience and allow it to exist? Can we put a hand on our heart and sense into how we can best offer ourselves love and support in the midst of a difficult situation?

This full moon is illuminating some deep shit around how we engage with our trauma — and how our trauma shapes our ability to communicate, relate to others, and bring love and acceptance to our most vulnerable selves. It makes sense that it’s not exactly going to be a walk in the park. More like a trip down the rabbit hole. But Five of Wands reminds us that we’re in the exact right place on our journey. Growth is often uncomfortable.

But rather than resisting or trying to run away from our Intense Feels, what would it be like to invite them to the table, sit with them, listen to what they have to say?

The challenge of this full moon is Three of Swords. Yep, sounds about right. For most people, the Three of Swords is not exactly the most welcome sight. Nicknamed "sorrow" in the Next World Tarot, this card clearly evokes pain and heartache. We need to remember though, that each tarot card serves as an invitation: in this case, the Three of Swords invites us to consider how we engage with that pain and heartache. After all, pain is an inevitable part of life. Try as we might, there’s no avoiding it. We will inevitably experience loss, disappointment, grief, and heartache. We do, however, have a choice as to how we respond to these emotions when they come up.

This Scorpio full moon, we have a chance to transform our relationship to the painful feelings we experience. For most of us, when painful feelings come up we tend to greet them with resistance, denial, anger, frustration, or annoyance. We look for someone or something to blame. We do everything possible to escape them. Unfortunately, none of these methods actually work. Because pain isn’t something we can run away from or repress or reject. It’s part of us. It belongs, as Tara Brach so beautifully reminds us. The task for us is to learn to engage differently — and if we are able to do so, we can actually prevent a huge amount of suffering.

The Three of Swords feels like a pretty accurate card to represent the human condition in late capitalism. Pretty much everyone (except Jeff Bezos) is experiencing the disappointment of having our hopes and dreams trampled, over and over again.

But the question is: will our shared experience of pain lead to further suffering, or to healing?

The card that is providing us guidance on how to heal is Ten of Swords. Now, at first glance this card looks a lot more like suffering than healing. You thought three swords were bad? Try ten! But this card contains an important lesson: one of the biggest barriers to our healing is the unnecessary suffering that we inflict upon ourselves. I love the illustration of this card in the Modern Witch Tarot: a femme-presenting person lies on the ground in a dark and frightening landscape with ten swords sticking out of her body. She is looking at her phone.

*Deck: Modern Witch Tarot by Lisa Sterle*

When we feel like shit, how many of us automatically pick up our phones and start scrolling through social media in hopes of an escape or distraction? And after spending 5 — oops, I mean 45 — minutes comparing our lives to the shiny happy filtered images we see of everyone else who seems to be doing just great, how likely is it that we will end up actually feeling even worse? How often do our "coping mechanisms" actually increase the suffering we experience?

Consider this scenario: It’s month 13 of a global pandemic. You have been stuck in a cold climate all winter and want nothing more than to lie in the sun on a beach. As there are no warm beaches for miles, you spend months planning a COVID-safe trip involving 32 hours of car travel to a destination that promises sunny beaches. You even find a secluded place to stay with private beach access and nearby hiking trails so you can stay safely away from any and all social contact. After two days in the car, you finally arrive to discover that said private beach is located adjacent to a busy highway with trucks zooming past at 60 mph. It turns out that said hiking trails are heavily infested with ticks and mosquitos, and occasional bear (!) sightings. Worst of all, it ends up raining almost the entire time

Pretty shitty spring break, amirite? As you may have guessed from the level of specificity, yes this did happen to me earlier this month. And with all due acknowledgement that getting rained out of your beach vacation is the definition of a #firstworldproblem, it’s pretty hard not to experience some major disappointment in this kind of situation. In my case, my inner child threw a giant multi-hour temper tantrum in the car on the way there — just based on looking at the weather report.

As it turns out, my vacation disaster contained some important lessons about the Ten of Swords moments in life, and how we deal with them. I share these lessons in the hope they might help others navigate their own experiences of disappointment or other difficult emotions.

Buddhists distinguish pain from suffering — while we cannot control the painful events in our lives, we can control how much suffering that pain causes us. We can’t do anything about external things that happen to us: weather, for instance, or misleading Airbnb listings. But suffering is something unnecessary that we often bring upon ourselves — based simply on the beliefs or stories we make up in our head. When I was losing my shit in the car on the way to the beach, nothing bad had even happened yet, but I was already creating a story that my entire vacation was ruined, and the story alone was making me totally miserable. Humans are unique in that we are able to experience suffering without pain: the anticipation of disappointment, not the disappointment itself, was enough to send me spiraling into a pity party.

As it turned out, the weather report was not entirely correct and we did in fact have one glorious day of sun (and even managed to find a quieter beach away from the highway traffic). You can bet that I appreciated every single moment of soaking in that sweet vitamin d. And even though yes, it did rain the rest of the time, I actually managed to not let it ruin my mood. Sure, the trip ended up being a bit of a fiasco, but once I was able to let go of my attachment to one specific desired outcome, it didn’t actually cause me any more suffering. Once I stopped telling myself the story that everything was ruined, I was able to regroup and become available to receive the gifts that this trip brought me.

One of which was the opportunity to practice what Tara Brach calls "radical self-compassion." Coincidentally (or not!), I happened to be taking an online class with her on this exact topic. I begrudgingly realized that my vacation disaster offered me plenty of opportunities to practice what I’d been learning.

And I think one of the deepest lessons of Ten of Swords is the invitation to practice radical self-compassion in the face of pain and suffering. Because as it turns out, our own response to pain is what often causes unnecessary suffering.

Think about it: I absolutely could have spend the entire week being incredibly upset that my ideal vacation had gone down the toilet. A couple of years ago, I absolutely would have. (I have a stellium in Taurus — I am not exactly known for my adaptability. And I take vacation extremely seriously.) Yes, I did throw a tantrum. But it lasted hours rather than days. And I know for a fact that the reason I was able to recover as quickly as I did was because I recognized the disappointment I was experiencing, I allowed it to be present, and I was able to have compassion for myself (and for my inner kid).

There’s this fundamental paradox when it comes to pain: our natural instinct is to run away from it. We do that in all kinds of ways: numbing ourselves, escapism, addictive behaviors, distraction, you name it. Tara Brach calls them "skins." My personal go-to for not wanting to feel my feels is to launch into an angry rant (either regarding the subject at hand, or really any random subject I can think of). This strategy temporarily helps make me feel like I have some control but I’ve learned that ultimately, it completely fails to actually make me feel better.

The thing about pain is that it turns out that the best possible thing we can do with it is the exact same thing our instincts tell us not to do: make friends with it. When we experience physical pain, we naturally avoid it, and this works great to prevent things like getting burned by a hot stove. However, emotional pain is a different animal. It’s not a poisonous snake — it’s more like a rescue puppy. It might be growling at us but that’s just because we need to take the time to get to know it and show it that we care about it.

We need to approach our emotional pain like we would a rescue puppy: with patience, kindness, and an authentic desire to communicate with it.

We have a choice. We can take our pain and pile on the suffering through the stories we tell — blaming ourselves, perhaps (hello shame and guilt), or others (hello bitterness and hatred). We can take the pain we are currently experiencing in any given moment and tell ourselves that this pain will never go away so what is even the point (hello despair and hopelessness). I’ve done all of these, and I’m guessing so have you. It’s not exactly the most fun way to live your life.

But there is an alternative. Not to the pain — again, we can’t control that. But we can decide what to do with it when it arrives. We can bar the door and hide under the bed and hope it just decides to go away (spoiler alert: tried it; does not work). We can throw a tantrum and point fingers and try to scare it away by yelling and shaking our fist (again, tried it: no luck). We can agonize about why it’s here and what we possibly did wrong and what we should have done differently and whether we’re being punished (you guessed it: not effective). Or: we can take a deep breath, open the door, and say "hello, how can I help?"

This is of course easier said than done. And the card that is here to help us with our communication is Seven of Wands rx. The Seven of Wands card typically depicts someone holding a wand, in a defensive position against another six wands that appear to be threatening them. Upright, this card can be a call to courage, but reversed it often indicates that we are unnecessarily defensive, anticipating an attack that may or may not actually happen. When we get locked into fight or flight mode it is basically impossible to communicate effectively; all of our energy is tied up in our limbic system, and the prefrontal cortex where we do our logical reasoning and higher-level thinking is not operating at its full capacity. (Imagine trying to solve complex math equations while being chased by a bear.) When we’re feeling threatened, our ability to empathize — or even to listen — is greatly diminished. This is true for our relationship to ourselves, as well as with others.

During this full moon, Mercury, the planet of communication, is in close contact with the Sun, Venus, Uranus, and Black Moon Lilith. That’s like a Virgo hosting a dinner party with a Leo, a Taurus, an Aquarius, and a Scorpio (no, Scorpio doesn’t technically rule Lilith but they have a similar vibe). In other words: things are very likely to get intense, and nobody is going to back down. All the more reason for us to pay attention to our communication, particularly our tendency to get defensive when we feel like we’re under attack.

The Seven of Wands reversed invites us to let go of hypervigilance (more on that here) and embrace vulnerability as our superpower. This can feel counterintuitive; our first instinct, of course, is to put up our defenses. But the more that we can recognize when we are feeling activated, pause and then actually explore the fear or wounding underneath, the better we will be able to communicate our needs and actually get them met.

Our emotional pain has a lot to teach us, if we are willing to listen. Once I did a little digging, I realized that my initial reaction to my rainy vacation forecast was less about the trip itself and more about the fact that something had recently happened at work that triggered feelings of being exploited and disrespected that I hadn’t felt since I decided to leave my academic research career two years ago. Vacation represented an escape from this exploitative situation. And my tantrum about my vacation being ruined was actually about feeling a sense of helplessness in the face of larger abuses of power that I had worked so hard to disentangle myself from.

As is often the case, beneath the anger was trauma. That trauma needed to be met with radical compassion — not with angry diatribes. And once I paused my diatribe to touch into the trauma that I was experiencing, I was able to communicate what I was feeling to my partner, who in turn was able to express care and support. My willingness to be vulnerable opened up the space for my partner to empathize and hold space for me — something that would not have been possible had I remained closed off in angry rant mode.

Now, choosing to make oneself vulnerable in the face of pain is not what most of us feel naturally inclined to do. It’s something that we have to practice; with ourselves and with others. Many of us are much harsher and more unkind to ourselves than to our friends and loved ones. Even during my own tantrum, I felt annoyed and angry with myself for being so upset: Why was I being so childish? Why couldn’t I just get over it? What was wrong with me?

One benefit of sharing our pain with others is that they are often more likely to be able to give us the compassion we so fervently need. Of course, we need people we trust — but in order to build trust we also have to take risks. This full moon is an opportunity to take a look at what your own communication patterns are when it comes to expressing and sharing your emotional pain. Where do you tend to get defensive? Where do you tend to shut down? What would it be like to choose a different path; one that might lead to more authentic connection and support?

As I was writing this post, my cat came over and pawed at my tarot deck, knocking a card onto the floor. It was The Star. Because of course: Healing is the single most important thing that we can do right now. We are so grateful to the scientists who developed the COVID vaccines — and yet, you don’t have to have a PhD in microbiology in order to have a profound impact on the health and well being of your fellow humans (and nonhumans!). After all, viruses aren’t the only things that cause suffering and death. Racism, capitalism, and settler colonialism are way ahead of the ‘Rona and they are still going strong. To say nothing of ableism, transphobia, misogynoir… the list goes on. What would it look like to take this opportunity to devote our individual and collective energy toward healing: not only from illness and disease but from all forms of violence that continue to plague our society?

This Scorpio full moon forms a square to Saturn in Aquarius, bringing up the question of whether the structures and rules our society has established are leading to our liberation, and if not — well, it might just be time to throw them in the compost bin. With Uranus, planet of transformation and upheaval joining the Sun, Venus, and Mercury in Taurus, we have an opportunity to rethink how our identities, desires, and forms of communication might be mobilized toward large-scale forms of change.

Let’s recall that December 2020 inaugurated the Age of Aquarius, marking a new 200 year period in which existing structures and beliefs are subject to complete overhaul. With expansive Jupiter joining practical Saturn in the idealistic sign of Aquarius, literally anything is possible. When we are feeling trapped in Five of Wands or Three of Swords, it’s hard to have a sense of perspective outside of our own little bubble of suffering. But let’s remember that 200 years ago, things that seemed entirely unimaginable included: the abolition of slavery, the end of European colonization, and women owning property. A lot can change in 200 years. Especially if we act like we have the power to bring about that change.

As one of the radical visionaries of our time has said: “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.”

There is no question that we are in a time of great transformation — the question is, what are we doing to shape that transformation?

The card that is helping us to expand is King of Cups. King of Cups is the healer of the tarot. It’s also the card that represents the culmination of one’s own individual healing journey. Becoming the King of Cups involves devoting yourself to healing on an individual and a collective level. This card reminds us that the well being of our species depends on interdependent forms of care. We cannot heal alone. We must seek out guides and teachers and we also must become guides and teachers.

For me, writing this blog post is part of an effort to share the knowledge and tools I’ve gained in my own journey, in the hopes that it will be useful to others. This kind of sharing feels vulnerable — I often ask myself who am I to presume that my little corner of experience and expertise will be of value.

But as my own coach has told me many times: other people are the ones who determine what is valuable to them. All we can do is make ourselves available in the ways we feel called to teach and guide and provide support: to ourselves and to those around us. The King of Cups is not invested in being seen as an authority figure; rather, they are simply here to offer the medicine of their own unique wisdom, experience, and understanding to whomever is in need of it.

This Scorpio full moon wants us to stop hiding in the shadows; stop letting our fears get the best of us; stop playing small. You have immense power to transform your own life and the lives of those around you. Are you willing to allow pain to be your portal?