On Tuesday August 28th at 6:37 am EDT, there will be a full moon lunar eclipse! In astrology lunar eclipses, the ones that happen at the full moon, are very different from solar eclipses. The lunar ones, are told to involves some sort of loss of the old–symbolically something has come to fullness and now is going to part from our lives. Whereas, solar eclipses, (and one of these will be coming up on September 11th) are supposed to herald a start to radical new changes to come in our lives.

A lot of times, astrologers will say that the loss of an eclipse can even be a person in your life. That perhaps a person will be leaving either physically through travel, or because of an end of a friendship, or otherwise. I, however, am not so keen on always seeing that loss has to involve either an actual person, or event. I think too many times, astrology is seen as something that predicts actual physical events, rather than changes in consciousness and energy. I like to think of the stars as seasons, and that just as you wouldn’t wear a wool coat in August in the Northern hemisphere (unless you were at the pole), you flow with the transits of the planets and realize that they are the enviroment in which you are living, giving you energy to move towards certain actions.

So, when a lunar eclipse comes up, with the Sun in Virgo and the moon in Pisces, I don’t think that necessarily loss will manifest in a physical way. However, as I discussed earlier, Virgo is the sign of the Realist. The Realist who knows that whole wheat is more healthy than pasta stripped bare, and that “reality TV” isn’t reality at all! Pisces on the other hand, is the sign that involves Fantasy. Fantasy can be great in that we can envision a new and better way to live, but it can also cloud our judgement for hankering for something that doesn’t actually exist or that is a goal that doesn’t necessarily help us in the long run. Like being on a “reality” tv show or thinking that “someday” we’ll acheive fame that will solve all our problems in life.

Instead of necessarily bringing physical loss, I think this lunar eclipse may bring a realization that in order to achieve the dream (moon in Pisces) one must do the work (Sun in Virgo) and that without both the dream and the hard work, nothing will come to pass–at least in the physicaly world that is. The end result of the eclipse then may be the loss of a false idea or belief that has held us back from acheiving our full potential or hasn’t allowed us to grow. Loss doens’t always involve losing physical things, and loss of less tangeable items can be quite powerful in transforming our lives.

For there are times when one realizes the lynchpin in one’s existence revolves around a certain idea, and once that idea is gone, one can see the possibility of living with entirely different thoughts and emotions, and therefore, consequentially we can live an entirely different life. In actual reality, not on TV.