How was your week? Mine was messy.

It started with a wonderful podcaster who hosted me on her show. Our session was supposed to air last week but has not and I still don’t know why. It continued with an awful fight with my husband, which involved lots of screaming on both ends. The next day, in our couples therapy, I felt completely misunderstood by our therapist and I left the session feeling depressed.

It has been a long time since I felt so low. While I allowed myself to feel my heaviness, sadness, frustration, and pain, I also reminded myself that there was a purpose for every experience I was going through. I asked myself, what were these challenges trying to teach me? How was I meant to grow through them?

The answer was very simple and so well connected with the theme of this week. I had to work on my confidence and self-worth.

It became especially clear to me when I met a new friend for dinner. So far, she got to know my well-established confident self. It was the first time I allowed myself to be vulnerable and show her my fears and insecurities. I must admit that I was not certain whether she would find me worthy of her friendship after she saw this side of me.

Leo is the sign of self-confidence.

On the high road, Leo is a charismatic, creative, and playful leader. She loves the spotlight and the stage, she wants to be the center of attention, and she feels great about it. The low road of Leo is to want to be a leader in the spotlight, but to feel ashamed about wanting it, or to feel that you are not worthy enough to get it. Another manifestation of this is being self-centered, egocentric, or narcissist.  

Leo is ruled by the sun, which relates to the solar plexus chakra, the chakra of self-confidence and self-esteem. Leo is here to teach us to build our confidence. The sun of Leo shines on all the places where we feel we can’t make it, or we can’t break through. It highlights our lack of confidence so that it can fill up the empty spaces with its nourishing rays.

I’ve been recently feeling like a seed planted deep down in the ground. I am gathering all my energies with the aim to sprout and reach the sunlight and fresh air above ground. This is a potent place to be. But the seed needs confidence that it can get to where it wants to be. Otherwise, it is not motivated to do the hard work required to break through the layers of earth that cover it.

Venus retrograde has started today, Saturday, July 22, and will last till Sunday, September 3.

Venus speaks of self-worth, which is the deeper layer behind confidence. Self-worth is what we feel inwardly, while confidence is the way in which we emanate our self-worth to the world.                                           

Many people who seem confident do not have an established self-worth. The confidence they radiate takes up a lot of energy, because they use it to hide their insecurities. People with a healthy self-worth are naturally and effortlessly confident. They are not afraid to admit their insecurities.

When Venus retrogrades in Leo, we are called to deal with everything that makes us not feel worthy enough to shine, succeed, be appreciated, and be loved.

I strongly believe that self-worth is deeply rooted in our childhood. If we felt loved, appreciated, and capable as children, self-worth is forever engrained in us. Unfortunately, most of us did not get what we needed to feel worthy. But this too has a purpose. It means that we came here to cultivate our self-worth and confidence by working hard, so that we become so good at it, and our self-worth and confidence are unshakable.

When the universe does not work the way we want, when we deal with many confrontations, or when we feel unloved or misunderstood, we tend to lose our confidence and self-worth.

For a few days last week, I lost my desire to create, to write and to focus on achieving my goals. Everything felt pointless because who was I to shine? If my husband and my therapist didn’t understand me, how could I write a book and be understood by people who didn’t even know me?

Then I reminded myself that this was only one way to look at it. As I talked with my husband, we realized that his behavior derived from his own fears and inability to trust. It was not out of lack of appreciation or love for me. As for our therapist, we realized that she was just not the right therapist for us. I could see that I was as worthy as I thought I was last week, I was just going through a challenge.

All this pressure was there to make me stronger, to solidify my self-worth and confidence, to make my coal turn into unbreakable diamond.

Suggestion for practices that will help you grow through the astrological energies of this week:

• Journal about your self-worth. Do you feel worthy of love, of success, of fulfilling your dreams?
• Journal about your confidence. Do you feel that you can achieve what you want? That you can break through the challenges?
• If you feel lack of self-worth or lack of confidence, can you trace the roots of it? Can you reframe the story and see how your lack is meant to teach you to build an unshakable inner self-worth and confidence?
• Perform Fearless Heart Mudra.
• Do something that requires some confidence. For example, tell someone something that you’ve been wanting to say but did not have the courage, or ask for something that is not easily given to you.

Please share how you experience Leo season and Venus Retrograde in Leo.

More Astrological Information for This Week:

Important retrogrades: Venus retrograde.

Dominant elements: earth and fire.

Aspects of the week: Neptune trine sun, Pluto opposite sun. Jupiter square sun from Wednesday.

More details:

• Sunday, July 23, sun, Mercury and Venus in Leo, moon in Libra, Mars in Virgo.
• Tuesday, July 25, moon enters Scorpio.
• Thursday, July 27, moon enters Sagittarius.
• Friday, July 28, Mercury enters Virgo.
• Saturday, July 29, moon enters Capricorn.

Have a wonderful week, 

With love,

Yael