The Potency of the 2024 Solar Eclipse
Seven years ago, I was blessed to see the August 2017 Great American Solar Eclipse in its path of totality. For the recent April 2024 Solar Eclipse, I was able to enjoy a 65% visible eclipsing of the Sun here in Colorado.
The impact of both of these eclipses continues to live powerfully within me, and I believe within all of us, heralding significant change that is much needed for our times.
I wrote about my 2017 eclipse experience in my article An Eclipse for Freedom.
You might enjoy reading that as a precursor to what I’ll share in this article about my 2024 eclipse experience and what I’ve come to see as a powerful 7 year cycle that’s set us up for a new path forward.
Living into the 2024 Eclipse
Palo Santo incense burning, candle lit, Native American flute music* playing in the background, I settled into a Sacred Space for the duration of the Solar Eclipse. For just over 3 hours of the eclipsing period (which was 10:38 am to 1:55 pm MT), I journaled, meditated, and periodically peeked at the magical Sacred Union occurring between the Sun and Moon from my front porch.
I’d felt a fair bit of tension building up to Eclipse day.
Only 18 hours earlier, our power was restored after an outage of over 27 hours due to a destructive wind storm. Three large pine trees had been ripped out of the Earth by the wind, only 2 blocks from my home at the edge of my neighborhood.
I’d also been dealing with various inconveniences, perceived injustices, and bureaucracies that had me feeling on edge.
I felt peace in the calm of the Eclipse energy.
The squirrels, rabbits and birds all seemed to become still as the Eclipse began. There was a sense of quiet I felt inwardly, even if outwardly I could see the clear oblivion, as my neighbors moved about seemingly disinterested or unaware of the magical event happening for us.
A few birds sang a love song to the joining of the Sun and Moon, but all else felt still.
Solar Eclipses happen at a New Moon, when the Sun and Moon are conjunct from the perspective of the Earth.
(For more information on the dynamics and potency of Eclipse Energy, join my free Inner Wisdom Circle where I shared the recording of my Navigating Eclipse Energy event, as well as additional information to guide us through Eclipse Season and the energy of our times.)
The Solar Eclipse on April 8th was a Monday. I have a weekly ritual of planning on Monday mornings, pulling an oracle card for the week and setting my intentions for tasks to be completed that week.
I also have a monthly ritual of journaling, meditating and contemplating for each New Moon. This ritual includes pulling an oracle card for the New Moon cycle, as well as intention setting for the month.
With the Solar Eclipse being on both a Monday and a New Moon, I decided to pull an oracle for my week, an oracle for the New Moon, and an oracle for the Eclipse.
Oracles are most helpful when we pose a question we’re seeking guidance around.
My question was simply to ask what guidance I needed as I entered this week, this lunar cycle and this post-eclipse season. I pulled a card from 3 different decks for the 3 different energies, and was stunned that the overarching message from each of them was the same.
Surrender. Let go. Release control!
The perfectionist in me doesn’t like to let go of control.
Yet my ongoing striving to integrate and embody more of the Sacred Feminine in my day-to-day life requires it.
I’m still learning…always learning!
In my pondering of the oracle cards, as well as the Laws of Nature I’ve been working with, I had a beautiful insight about the non-grasping, surrendered way the Sacred Feminine manifests.
The Power of the Sacred Feminine
The Feminine is receptive. She invites, rather than demanding, grasping, or taking.
Our dominance and control culture has conditioned us to believe that we must go after what we want, focus on the destination, and believe that achievement is the only option for “success.”
Yet the Feminine honors all, realizing the interconnectedness and polarities existent in all of life.
She is more concerned with the journey than the destination.
She is interested in presence more than outcome.
She surrenders to what is, rather than striving for some version of what we think “should” be.
I contemplated how I might be better at inviting without grasping.
I considered what I would do if I were to invite guests to my home.
I’d prepare a lovely meal, set the table with clean linens and dishes, and arrange a beautiful bouquet of flowers. I might prepare a bedroom for them if they were staying awhile, providing fresh towels and a clean home for them to walk into. Perhaps I’d set a fire in the wood stove for them to warm themselves by, and light a few candles.
In other words, I would prepare.
One of my words for the year is “prepare.”
While I was starting to see what preparation and invitation were about, I’d soon learn that I hadn’t fully understood these Sacred Feminine gestures yet.
This concept of preparation helped me see that invitation on its own isn’t enough.
Yet it’s also not of the Sacred Feminine to go out and “make” someone accept our invitation.
This is true for anything we invite into our lives.
Whatever it is we’re inviting into our life, be it a partner, health, a home, money, etc., we must prepare a space for these guests to feel safe, nourished, and at home.
We must also extend the invitation to these potential guests, and not simply spend a lot of time preparing while never actually inviting them in.
However, the bigger lesson came for me a few days after the eclipse.
The Pain and the Breaking Open
The days after the eclipse felt intense. I’d dealt with some challenges that had me wondering why things have to be so hard sometimes, not just for me, but also for some of my clients and loved ones.
I noticed myself feeling agitated, expressing a lot of “shoulds,” indicative of how I felt things ought to be. I wasn’t thrilled with the way things were going, but I was dealing with them…or so I thought.
Then on Friday morning, I broke.
As I was standing at my kitchen sink looking out the window, I noticed a large black cat gazing intently in front of him. I leaned forward a bit to see a little bunny there on the ground before the cat. Suddenly, the cat pounced on the bunny and tossed it aside with its mouth. I immediately knocked on the window and the cat was startled, backing away.
I ran outside to the back yard to scare off the cat and save the bunny. I saw that the bunny was alive, and I quickly went back inside to grab a small towel I could pick it up in.
In the moment, I didn’t know what I was going to do. My emotions were getting the best of me.
I picked up the bunny in the towel and it was breathing heavily, but looked ok…at first.
As I looked at it more closely, I saw that its skin had been torn open a bit near its tail.
That’s when I lost it. I started sobbing.
I yelled at the cat, noticing another fat cat in the background, looking on as if waiting for its share of what the black cat was about to capture.
I walked into my front yard, looking around aimlessly, wondering what to do, asking Great Mother for some guidance.
Suddenly, a larger rabbit came hopping by.
If anyone had seen me, they’d have thought me mad as I walked toward it, my arms outstretched with the bunny in my hands, sobbing and asking, “Is this your baby?”
The rabbit hopped away, seeming to look over her shoulder wondering what this crazy woman walking toward her was going to do, yet she didn’t go too far.
I found a little covered area in a yard across the street and decided to gently place the bunny there.
I surrendered to the idea that one of four things would happen. The rabbit would come to its aid, the cat would find it and finish what it started, it would scamper away to find another place it could heal itself, or it would simply die there where I placed it.
I felt awful, fearing I might’ve only prolonged the suffering of the tiny creature in my emotional upheaval.
The Bigger Lesson
I came inside, and lost it again. For the next half hour, I cried and cried, clearly needing a big release.
I knew as soon as I walked into my front yard that I had no business interfering with Nature as I had.
“I teach about the importance of aligning with Nature in my work as a way for us to heal, and here I was thinking it was my place to interfere in the Natural process of an animal interacting with its prey,” I sobbed to my son.
I felt so much anger and sadness well up in me, filled with the pain of seeing the giant pine trees that had ripped out of the Earth from the wind storm earlier in the week, the pain of corporate entities completely void of any personal customer service in favor of AI and systematic responses, the pain of clients suffering in ways that felt so unfair, the pain of seeking support and not finding it in the ways I needed, and countless other little things that had added up and were purging in that moment of sobbing release.
“I feel like I’m on a hamster wheel and I cannot get off no matter how hard I try!” I sobbed to my son.
His response was, “That’s what we’re here for.”
I wanted to bark back at him in anger, insisting that this is NOT what we’re here for. After all, my teachings speak of the ever spiraling nature of our evolutionary unfolding, and not a blind spinning in a closed wheel of existence.
Yet something in the simplicity of what he said caused me to pause.
“What if that IS why we’re here? What if that’s all there is…to step into our assigned hamster wheel, run in it for a while, repeatedly pausing to rest before running some more, and then die?” I thought to myself.
Needless to say, this was not one of my more joyful moments.
Yet the more I thought about this idea of “What if this is it?” the more I found myself surrendering. To what, I didn’t know. I just knew that I started to feel less pain, and more calm.
Later that morning, I shared my experience of my meltdown with a friend, and we got to laughing so hard talking about my moment of madness.
“If I’m supposed to run on my hamster wheel,” I said to her, “then I’m failing miserably because I’m too busy trying to save bunnies!”
The morning’s mix of lamenting and laughter awakened me to the bigger lesson.
I noted before that I was coming to understand more about the Sacred Feminine gestures of invitation and preparation. What I did not understand until now was that the invitation and preparation is for “potential guests.”
The Sacred Feminine honors that the potential guest may decline the invitation. They may not be ready to show up when we wish for them to. They may show up and behave completely differently than we’d expected. Yet all responses to Her invitations and preparations are welcome.
What I saw in my morning’s experience is that I was attached to my way of things happening.
I do long to live in alignment with Nature, but I didn’t want to allow for ALL of Nature.
I didn’t want to feel the pain of the trees uprooted in the wind storm, or the cat torturing its prey.
Similarly, I don’t want to feel the pain of the inhuman recorded messages when seeking customer service, or the injustice of corporate greed, or the grief over loss.
None of us want to feel pain or suffering, and so we resist.
Freedom and Love
I remembered the 2017 Eclipse for Freedom, when I felt the lesson of Compassion becoming Freedom, a gift of Leo, the constellation in which the 2017 Solar Eclipse occurred (astronomically)..
(Download my free Balance and Empowerment Cards, which share the gifts and messages of each of the 12 zodiacal constellations.)
I wrote in my Eclipse for Freedom article about freedom as the “Law of Love.”
In true compassion, while we may wish to alleviate suffering, we also honor that every being on Earth has its own suffering to endure, and to try to take that away infringes upon their freedom.
This is not to say that we cannot be of support, and extend love. But we must remember that it is suffering and pushing up against resistance that helps us to grow and evolve.
Through our discomfort and resistance, we become more of who we’re here to be.
Yet we also don’t need to resist the force of resistance life gives us.
We don’t need to run away from the discomfort, or push through the pain.
These things only cause us more suffering and exhaustion.
When we fully love ourselves, life, and Nature, we allow for freedom. We live according to the Law of Love.
We prepare space for our invited guests in love, and allow for their freedom to show up or not.
We love ourselves enough to not take it personally if they don’t show up, and perhaps even enjoy the space we’ve prepared, trusting that perhaps they’ll come at another time when they’re ready.
We remain detached from the outcome and live in presence with the journey, doing our best and letting go of the rest.
In Freedom, we can live in Love.
Interestingly, the 2024 Solar Eclipse occurred in the constellation of Pisces, who reminds us that Magnanimity becomes Love. Magnanimity is the ability to “bear trouble calmly for worthy ends.”
What more worthy end is there than Love?
When I looked at things from this angle, I could see that perhaps we are all assigned a hamster wheel to run on in this life. Perhaps that wheel serves as a container of the lessons we’re here to learn and the interactions we’re here to have.
Maybe in accepting the hamster wheel, we stop resisting life so much and thinking it’s supposed to happen according to our “shoulds” and “ought-tos.”
When this thought came to me, the hamster wheel in my mind suddenly opened up and stretched out into an ever-spiraling and evolving path forward that is mine to walk.
The week prior to the 2024 Solar Eclipse, my oracle card for the week spoke of “staying in my own lane.”
Perhaps it is the resistance to accept the ugly with the beautiful, the dark with the light, the pain with the joy, and the containment with the freedom that keeps us suffering more than is necessary.
Perhaps as we learn to see the hamster wheel as a container that can open us to possibilities and learning, instead of only limiting us, we can experience the true freedom and love we are here to experience.
A Season of Preparation
The last 7 years between these two Great American Eclipses of 2017 and 2024, have been powerful preparation for rebirth.
While I’ve shared my experiences of these two cathartic events, and each of us will have our own unique experiences, I also believe that the Eclipse Season of the last 7 years has been one of preparation for the future of humanity.
The Eclipse of Freedom in 2017 offered us a capacity to step into more of who we are, and begin to see others for more of who they are in compassion.
The Eclipse of Love in 2024 in Pisces has revealed to us how to live according to the Law of Love, i.e. the Freedom that the 2017 Eclipse in Leo introduced to us, with a sense of magnanimity.
We will continue learning and integrating these lessons of Freedom and Love.
While they feel like huge aha moments for me right now, tomorrow I may forget.
I’m challenging myself to surrender and trust that the lessons will continue to reveal themselves, rather than trying to capture them in stone.
I’m preparing a space with love for the guests I wish to invite on my own path of rebirthing, and doing my best to accept that they may not arrive as I long for.
The Sun has rebirthed again with this latest Eclipse, and there will be future rebirths.
The Sun and all of Nature accept their hamster wheel, repeating cycles and staying in their own lanes as needed for the sake of growth and evolution. Perhaps we can find the magnanimity and compassion to do the same.
Oh, as for the bunny, I’ll never know exactly what happened to it. All I know is that a few hours later in the day, I walked by where I’d left it, and it was gone.
Share your Eclipse experiences in the comments. Let me know how these ideas land with you.
May the Sun rebirthed be felt within you. May you find the Freedom and Love to persevere as we realize the fullness of our potential!
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