This weekend marked the kick-off of my Astro-Play workshop series in conjunction with Vera Silva, certified Kundalini yoga instructor and owner of Yoga Grounds studio in La Crescenta, California. The series takes participants through a variety of exercises — kinetic, creative, sensory, meditative — that deepen their relationship with the upcoming astrological sign in their own lives. They are fun, lively, interactive sessions designed to integrate sign energies in an interesting and different way.
Afterwards, one participant e-mailed me:
“Thank you sooooo much for allowing me to participate and enjoy your AMAZING workshop … It was such a beautiful, educational, nourishing experience. What an extraordinary experience you are offering the world … and you conducted it so organically and effectively. I kept all of the materials of the day and hope to create an entire zodiac notebook!”
We did a number of exercises exploring the Libran themes of beauty, love, partnership, balance and compromise in the world and in ourselves and told stories of Venus, the goddess whose namesake is Libra’s ruling planet. The wrap-up included reflections on keeping in touch with our own inner beauty throughout the upcoming Libra month — and fruit and chocolate to boot. And everyone left with a flower!
Perhaps my favorite Venus story is the one of the goddess’s marriage to Vulcan. Ve
nus was born of the churning ocean foam but chose to be a goddess of the sky instead of the sea — a horizontal energy reflected in her Libra and seventh house rulership. Vulcan, on the other hand, was born on Mount Olympus to Juno, who found him so ugly and deformed that she threw him off a cliff into the sea: a deep and vertical energy if there ever was one.
So already, the couple’s birth stories have them going in different directions: Opposites attracting, or at least being forced into coupledom. Venus went on to play out much of her divine drama with earthy humans — a social, desired, sought-after goddess — whereas Vulcan made his life rather solitary, deep underground in a forge, shunning the other gods. Even today, he is often left behind or forgotten in the litany of ancient deities.
Both could be jealous, vengeful and spiteful, however: Venus demanded impossible tasks of Psyche — including a trip to the underworld to get a bit of Persephone’s beauty in a box — when the beautiful human wanted to marry Venus’s son, Cupid. And Vulcan ensnared his wife and her lover, Mars, in bed with a golden net he had made, then invited all the gods to come and laugh at them. Both incidents ended grudgingly with the release of the “guilty” and a bit of egg on the face of the vengeful one.
And both Venus and Vulcan were artistic in their own way, though Vulcan’s artistry was more about process — forging metal into intricate and powerful pieces — whereas Venus’s was more about product: What is the aesthetic of the body, of the room, of the home? How best to make people comfortable, social, relaxed? How to render harmony and maintain its delicate balance? There is purpose and relationship in Venus’s art — which makes it no less deep than Vulcan’s own. The art of love and relationship, in fact, is one of the most subtle, difficult and demanding arts there is. Libra is equipped to manage this balance in a way that no other sign energy can.
In a way, Venus and Vulcan are the original Beauty
and the Beast, the archetype of projection itself. Venus can’t own or abide ugliness in herself, yet must be married to the very essence of it. Vulcan can’t stand the beautiful but must persist in making it, owning it and capturing it. Each resents and even despises the other, even as they each live out beauty and ugliness in their own unowned ways. Owning your own beauty and your own ugliness is essential to the balance for which Libra is renowned. Reclaiming your projections — from beauty magazines, from people you shun, from wherever you have trouble looking at yourself honestly — is the hard work and the art of Libra.
And it’s what ultimately disarms the most genuine of suitors.
Don’t miss the next workshop on Scorpio — a very different energy indeed! It’s scheduled for Saturday, October 20 from 12:00-2:30 p.m. $25 first-timers, $20 returning participants.
(Workshop photo: Participants do Libra-inspired yoga)
(Venus and Vulcan image credit)
(Beauty and the Beast image credit)
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