Portals
On doors of transformation and Venus retrograde affirmations and blessings
At the entrance to our language school last week in Monteverde, there were two archways that we passed through.
We started playing a game, calling them attitude-changing or mood-changing portals. Several times as we were leaving school, Daphne was whining- wanting more Spanish class, more cookies, things that weren’t possible in the moment, and she seemed stuck in the wanting. So the portals became a playful way to try to shift the energy of the moment, to choose our mood and attitude and how we wanted to feel on the other side, what we wanted to leave behind. It has had me thinking a lot about portals and thresholds.
Anything can be a portal if we want it to be.
How the simple act of claiming something as a moment of transformation can make it so.
How we can begin again each moment. Yes, this one, right here. Even this one.
This weekend, we enter Leo season and Venus stations retrograde in Leo, also portals and energetic shifts. Past Venus retrogrades in Leo have been very powerful periods for me, full of magic and falling in love, so I am meeting this moment with a lot of curiosity. What wants to come through, be reclaimed, repaired, reviewed?
I wrote these affirmations for myself, inspired by some of my favorite astrologers’ takes on Venus retrograde in Leo (Chani Nicholas, Virginia Rosenberg, Jessica Lanyadoo) . May they serve you or inspire you to write your own.
I am wildly in love with life. My life, all life.
I reclaim the expansiveness of my love.
I am radically committed to my creativity and honest self-expression.
I lead with integrity and heart.
I center my values in my relationships and my life.
And a Venus in Leo collective blessing and wish:
May we reclaim the expansiveness of our love
To create a world where it’s easier to love* (and live)
Which we need with the utmost urgency.
May we break love free from institutions that confine it
And recreate containers that free it and allow it to flow rather than hold it.
May we root our structures and ways of organizing ourselves in it
To allow it to permeate and be at the base of all of our collective efforts.
May we recreate a world with love and care at its foundation,
With conditions for all beings to thrive and flourish
And may infinite beauty, art, and well-being grow from it.
What are your wishes?
I leave you with a song, sung softly at Playa Manuel Antonio, with the ocean singing louder than me. This is a song I learned from my friend Areefa at the Re-imagining Education Conference this past April, which was shared in the spirit of portals and thresholds in one of our sessions.
The words are:
Doors closing
doors opening
I am safe
it’s only change.
What are you reviewing, reclaiming, or reflecting on in regards to relationships, love, desires, values?
What desires do you want to reignite?
What lost parts of yourself are you ready to reclaim?
What loves are you ready to recommit to?
Write your own Venus retrograde in Leo affirmations or blessings - and if you do, please share them! Words are spells and we can cast the widely to wield other worlds into being.
*creating a world where it’s easier to love, paraphrasing Paulo Freire