Tom JacobsMars entered the sign of creating fairness, harmony, balance, and justice on December 7, 2013. This planet is about beginning things, action, making decisions and choices, and experiencing and navigating expressing desire.
When Mars travels through the sign of Libra we are treated to reflections from others about the impacts of our choices, actions, and desires.
Planets working through the lens of Libra are not necessarily good at creating balance, etc. They are trying to figure out how to do so. Because here’s the thing: In order to learn through the lens of Libra we need others, and it’s a learn-as-you-go type of thing. How others receive and experience us means everything as we learn through Libra.
For Mars’s passage through this sign we’re all in for the treat of learning to express desire in new ways (and perhaps express new desires) and learning about how they affect those around us. All learning through Libra can invite some tension as we sometimes are not sure how others will receive us. We might want to edit ourselves or not be authentic given how we suspect another might react to us. But when we learn to negotiate and co-operate, learning through Libra is deeply fulfilling and enriching.
And yet we need to make sure we’re working with definitions of the terms negotiation and co-operation that are actually helpful. Some of us can slip into deferring and believe that it’s co-operation – part of making someone else happy by giving him or her what he or she desires.
Negotiation can be experienced by any of us at times to be a situation in which we assert what we want, someone else poo-poos or criticizes it, and we decide we should have kept our mouths shut. That’s not negotiation! That’s being in need of learning how to work together in order to co-create.
Mars will also retrograde while transiting Libra, a biannual event that brings cause to re-evaluate what we want and why we want it. The retro period is March 1 – July 25, 2014. You’re going to find your desire function a bit unfocused. You may want things impulsively just to try to move Mars energy. You might also feel that what you want isn’t available, especially from others as they try to figure out what they want and why. For everyone, that process necessarily involves encountering what we don’t want and learning to respond to that. Given that the sign is Libra, chances are you and yours will edge up against each other in sometimes stressful ways as you provide each other stimulus re what you have, do, and used to want from and with each other.
So what to do?
- Be honest even when it’s difficult.
- Stay present even when it’s tough.
- When you’re discussing things with others, be/stay in your body. Breathe and take time to respond – choose to edge away from being reactive, which is without thought and emotional in a not-grounded way.
- Stay in your heart.
- Decide to learn a new level of negotiation.
- Listen to what others say and what you’re saying – again, stay present.
More detailed analyses of Mars’s transit through Libra as well as an in-depth treatment of the ins and outs of its retrograde period will be available to subscribers of my new in-depth monthly astrology service, which goes live on the Winter Solstice – December 21, 2013. Each month I’ll cover ingresses, retrogrades, major aspect patterns, lunations, and other astrological stuff all with a mind to explain in plain terms what is happening and how you can make it work for you. Read more and sign up.