By Amanda Painter

Do you ever find yourself letting beliefs that were handed down to you (such as by your parents or religion) run away with your feelings about who you are in your relationships, or about what counts as ‘success’ in love? Do you sometimes let disappointments in love (and in your financial habits) dictate your beliefs about what can happen for you in those areas?

Watching the fog roll in at Pine Point, Scarborough, Maine. Photo by Amanda Painter.

Both situations are common, and it’s absolutely possible to detangle yourself from those mental-emotional snares, especially with counseling.

Or, at the very least, one or more insightful friends who are not about to let you get away with self-flagellation, pessimism or blindly following what magazines say you need to do to land and keep the ‘perfect’ relationship.

Nobody really wants to fall into debilitating self-criticism or making rigid demands on others. Yet many of us do as we search for something to validate that we are worthy of love and abundance. Fear is rampant, including the fear that one might not deserve to be loved, or that one might be incapable of loving.

Without getting into all the various heartbreaking ways a person might come to believe such a thing about themselves, it’s enough to acknowledge how common this fearful belief is. Even people who normally are (or seem to be) functional, optimistic, easy-going people may experience moments (or entire years) of falling into this kind of thinking. Sometimes it operates so deep in the background that you might not even realize it’s running the show, until someone helps you to see a layer deeper.

How do you see or feel beyond it, though? And then what?

At the risk of seeming flip or too simple, consider this bit of wisdom I encountered this morning on the Planet Waves Facebook page; it’s a quote from one of Eric Francis’ past horoscopes that got posted today:

“Fear is best understood as a thing of the imagination. It’s creative energy that’s been turned on itself… the mind only really has one kind of energy, and that is creative. It’s up to you to use this human gift on your own behalf.”

Really, this gets to the core of the issue: recognizing that fear — even the fear of being unlovable or unloving — is energy. And as such, your imagination — your mind — has the power to see it for what it is and redirect it by using it for creative, positive purposes.

Sometimes that takes some introspection, or some therapy, or an unexpected encounter that instigates an epiphany. Sometimes it takes doing the un-romantic, non-mystical work of getting out the self-esteem workbook and doing all the exercises, so you can get a more rational handle on an inner landscape that swirls with unchecked emotion and other people’s belief structures.

So what does all this have to do with astrology?

This weekend Venus in Virgo makes a square to Saturn in Sagittarius, exact Saturday at 10:31 am EDT (14:31 UTC). Then on Sunday, Venus opposes Neptune in Pisces at 1:03 pm EDT (17:30 UTC). Those aspects form one event, in effect now.

Taken together, these planets speak to the themes I’ve mentioned. The energies can be challenging due to the sense of limitation Saturn can impart, the potential for illusions that Neptune brings, and Venus currently in a less-than-comfortable sign for her.

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They make a T-square, which can be a tricky aspect, thanks to the need for you to complete the picture. This T-square is in the mutable signs: Virgo, Sagittarius and Pisces, with Gemini left ‘empty’.

But any astrology chart that shows a potential problem also holds its solution — and this one does.

To find it, I had to combine intuition and pattern recognition with some hands-on research into the ‘empty’ quadrant, trusting that a little digging might confirm my hunch. I mention my method only because it seems to fit with what Eric describes in this week’s Planet Waves TV broadcast about another aspect that’s exact Friday: Jupiter in Virgo opposite Chiron in Pisces. (I highly recommend watching the video for his take on Jupiter-Chiron; it’s only about 25 minutes long, and it’s very useful.)

In essence, Jupiter-Chiron indicates using things like tangible research and documentation to investigate and confirm non-linear ways of knowing, such as intuition, dreams and pattern recognition. A quick look at Serennu.com, an online listing of many objects used in astrology, shows two objects in Gemini exactly aspecting Venus-Saturn-Neptune: Amor and Altjira.

“Amor,” of course, is a word for “love.” Altjira is the name of an aboriginal creation deity who made the Earth and the Dreamtime.

One delineation of Altjira is that it can stand for a blind spot in a person’s chart. With Amor right there, could it be that not only do you deserve love, but you are loved — right here, right now, as you are — no matter how long you’ve held onto those illusions, disappointments and inherited beliefs? I certainly think so.