About 18 hours after Mercury began moving in retrograde motion, Ceres begins its own retrograde motion at 12:10a PDT on Wednesday, 31st August 2016. Being in its home sign of Taurus, Ceres is very focused on our personal lifestyle values and resources – making sure we each and all have what we need to sustain our self-identities. Yet in retrograde, we are being asked to look and listen to how others around us live their lifestyle values and utilize their resources. It should prove to be an interesting time.
Taurus is the energy which gives us our “survival” needs – the fundamental physical, material, and financial resources which support the self-identity established by Aries. Ceres – the “earth mother” – is the ruler of the sign, and her energy provides us with those resources. Both the sign and the planetoid give us clear information about our lifestyle values as our values are often determined by our own personal needs and desires.
The challenge is (and always has been) that societal values often influence our personal values, and these two sets of values don’t always blend easily or well. We get a special taste of this dilemma with this 2016 Ceres Retrograde in Taurus.
Let’s start with explaining why this is a surprisingly potent influence.
We tend to give value to whatever (and whomever) makes us feel stable, safe, and secure. We often want (or perceive we “need”) what we believe will ensure our stability, safety, security, and comfort. Therefore, our personal values and lifestyle needs and wants will reveal not only our perceptions of the world and our place in it – they will also reveal our deepest fears. The positions of Ceres and Taurus in our individual charts will help us recognize what we each value and why we value it.
Yet we each and all are currently experiencing a significantly-increased awareness of societal values and the personal values of other individuals. We had a big dose of this with the Taurus Ceres trine Virgo 8 Sun transit which has influenced us over the last 7 days (most exact on 27th August). You may have noticed that as result, we’re being pushed to look at the values we personally hold, and we get to ask ourselves if we share the same values as other individuals in our circles, as our own and other communities, as our own and other nations, as our own society and other societies in our world…
What some of you may be finding is that your values may not align with those around you, creating quite a personal dilemma and presenting you with a big question:
How do you honor your truth and the values you want to hold when others do not share your values?
The way to answer this question is to first ask yourself another question:
Are you valuing your own values…or the values of someone(s) or something else?
First of all, don’t beat yourself up over this one if you recognize that you’ve living by others’ values. It’s easy to get caught up in values which don’t align with your own. Every day, we are surrounded by various energies, and most of us have to deal with being in varied environments which have different standards of and expectations for behavior and/or belief. This thing is, as we navigate these varied environments, we can easily lose track of our own inner truths. It’s difficult to maintain your sense of self when everyone around you has different inner truths, and for whatever reason, we humans tend to seek community with like-minded individuals. So in order to make it emotionally, intellectually, and in some cases, physically comfortable for us to exist in our environments, we are sometimes (and for some of us, often) willing to give up our own values to…adapt.
But when we choose to adapt, we often wonder why we have everything we’re supposed to want yet still feel unhappy or unfulfilled. The unhappiness and lack of fulfillment are the result of breaking from our inner truth and our true personal values. On a subconscious or superconscious level, we know we’ve disconnected from our essential values and neglected our true lifestyle needs. We realize we aren’t living in alignment with what we (individually) value most, despite valuing what we think we’re supposed to value. The puzzle pieces just don’t fit, no matter how hard we try to make them.
Yet that’s the beauty of this 2016 Ceres Retrograde in Taurus. When you are on the receiving end of others’ personal values – when you are on the receiving end of their words and actions which they say are aligned with what they value most –they can help you see your own true values more clearly….
…and it provides you with an opportunity to adjust your course to find the pieces of you which do fit. That makes this 2016 Ceres Retrograde a great time to consider some lifestyle changes.
Now some of you may read this and say, “those adjustments are easier said than done”. I would agree wholeheartedly, and add that the further you are from your inner truth and your true values, the harder these lifestyle changes are going to be.
The numerological energy of the next month will help you quite a bit. As of tomorrow, 1st September, we enter a 9 Universal month in a 9 Universal year. It’s a month-long purge fest! It will be easier than most times to bring what no longer aligns with your values to an end. However, you have some choice over the values you consciously choose to release and change.
But what you may need to come to terms with is that this 2016 Ceres Retrograde in Taurus will also initiate a period in which the personal values you hold which no longer align with the Highest Good of your social circles, your communities, your society, or your nation will also be released. With all of these purges happening, you may be forced to change what you may think or believe serves you…but in reality, no longer does serve you (or anyone else) any good.
The interesting thing about this 2016 Ceres Retrograde in Taurus is that there is only one transit with Venus over the next three weeks – a quincunx transit on 3rd September which indicates that your one-on-one interactions may make you aware of your personal values in very unexpected ways.
Otherwise, only the Moon will make transits with Ceres Retrograde over the next 3 weeks. The lunar transits with Ceres Retrograde will occur anytime the Moon is at 5° of any sign:
- trine Virgo Moon late 31st August/ early 1st September, finding emotional support for what is truly working in and for your life (which means little to no support for what isn’t)
- quincunx Libra Moon on 3rd September, through which your one-on-one interactions with others may find you awakening to how some of your other relationships or partnerships may need some adjusting or releasing
- opposite Scorpio Moon on 5th September, bringing transformative emotional responses to the functionality of your life…or the lack thereof)
- quincunx Sagittarius Moon late 7th/early 8th September, an indirect path to emotional recognition of which of your personal values align with your inner truth and which ones don’t
- trine Capricorn Moon on 10th September, aligning your resource needs with your personal and professional goals brings emotional clarity and relief
- square Aquarius Moon late 12th/early 13th September, which may find your personal lifestyle values being strongly challenged by popular opinion, which could bring up some emotional drama for you
- sextile Pisces Moon early 15th September, which may find you feeling very emotionally and energetically sensitive and responsive to the changing values of the individuals and communities around you
- semi-sextile Aries Moon on 17th September, an emotional need to assert your individuality may find you having strong emotional responses to your shifting values as you realize that as you change your values, your self-identity must also change
- conjunct Taurus Moon on 19th September, bringing awareness of your emotional state of mind in connection with your changing and/or strengthening personal values
There is one more thing for you to know about this 2016 Ceres Retrograde. Though it begins in Taurus, Ceres will continue its retrograde motion back into Aries, re-entering that sign on 12th October 2016.
Thank you for reading and sharing Signs and Numbers. Until next post…
~ Light, Love, and Blessings,
Grace
