What a wonderful way to start this week with full moon energies. The moon is in Leo and the sun is in Aquarius, so sun and moon are in opposition. 

I love full moons because they help us learn a lot about ourselves. They give us an opportunity to grow through bringing the opposing forces into a healthy balance.

Both Leo and Aquarius are friendly and fun to be with. They are both very self-conscious about how they interact with others, especially in group settings. They both deal with issue of personal uniqueness and standing out in a crowd.

But the way they deal with these topics, is very different.

Everybody Feels Like You Do 

My son loves a graphic novel series called Wings of Fire. It tells the story of a world ruled by dragons. The sixth book in this series, Moon Rising, tells the story of Moon, a mind reading dragon. In one of the scenes, Moon discovers that her friend, Sora, committed an awful crime. 

Sora: “Then everyone was looking at me. Thinking about how much they hate me. They could see right through me. I know it. “

Moon: “No. Sora. Truly, dragons think mostly about themselves. Believe it or not, no one is thinking about you as much as you think they are. That’s…. actually reassuring. All my self-doubt and nerves and feeling like an outsider – turns out everyone feels that way.”

Leo is the side of us that thinks that everybody’s eyes are on us. It’s the side in us that wants everyone’s eyes to be on us. Leo feels the heaviness of everyone’s expectations. She is the queen, the center of the universe, and she has a lot of pressure to act as such.

Aquarius is the side of us that tends to feel like an outsider. It does not want to be the center of attention, but it needs friends and a sense of belonging. Feeling like an outsider is heavy too. Sometimes you just want to feel “like everybody else”. 

If Leo does not feel loved, adored, or central enough, she creates drama to attract attention. In the high road, Leo learns to moderate her need for attention. She knows to ask for the attention she needs pleasantly, without blowing up. 

Aquarius deals with social challenges with detachment. She becomes the outsider, the observer. In the high road, she learns to form meaningful friendships and creates a group of people that she feels she belongs to.

Sometimes we make such a big fuss about something we said or did while we interacted with others. Just yesterday, I spent the first half an hour of a yoga class, feeling bad about squeezing in my mattress and my friend’s mattress in a way that forced another student to move aside.

Then I reminded myself that the student who had to move a little, probably did not give it a second thought, while I was torturing myself about my hutzpah. That was such a relief.

So often we are so sure that everyone thinks bad of us when we gain some weight, when we have dark circles around our eyes, or when we have a pimple. The truth is most people are so busy thinking about their own issues, they don’t even notice ours.

Listen

On the other hand, we don’t want this realization to turn us into sociopaths. Acting with kindness to others, caring for others, is important, mostly to our own wellbeing. The question is, to what extent?

If you care so much that you agonize yourself whenever you think you might have made a mistake, it becomes harmful.

Most of us need to learn to be more relaxed socially. 

If we are authentic and come with a clear heart and mind, our interactions will be magical.

If while we talk with others, we constantly think of how to impress them (Leo) or how to show we could not care less about impressing them (Aquarius), our interaction will not flow naturally. We will leave thinking we failed in some way.

The more you truly open yourself to others, and listen to them, instead of planning what you are going to say once they finish their sentence, the more relaxed and real you are, the more pleasant your interactions are.

You Are Not Your Ego, You Are Not Your Observer

Aquarius needs to learn from Leo to be more engaged with others, be romantic, passionate, loving, and personal. Aquarius can sometimes be too identified with the observer. While seeing the world from the eyes of the observer is one of the goals of meditation, the observer is still just one component of our being.

We need to learn to take care of all aspects of our being, including our mental body, our emotional body, our physical body, our heart, our ego, our psyche, our feminine side, our masculine side, and our soul.

Leo needs to learn from Aquarius to avoid creating unnecessary drama, to see things from the point of view of the observer, to be a free thinker and to stop trying to always do what other consider as “the right thing”. She needs to learn to not be so identified with her ego and acknowledge the other parts of her being as well.

On this full moon week, pay attention to your inner dialogue. How much do you care about what others think of you? How negative or positive is your inner dialog around your social interactions? Try to implement the three keys I listed here and let me know if it made any difference.