Article Window — Mar 17 to Apr 17
• New Moon is Saturday, March 17,  6:12 AM PDT
• Sun is 27° Pisces, Moon is 27° Pisces
• Next Full Moon: Mar 31
• Current New Moon Theme (Mar 17 to Apr 17): Finding Fulfillment

The New Moon releases a wave of new potential that sets the overall theme for the entire month that follows. This month’s Lunar cycle offers a new tool-set that creates momentum for energizing your life’s purpose. To experience your fullest potential in the coming month allow this energy to guide you, especially while adjusting to life’s changing circumstances.

Astrology Article: Living for Fulfillment

Our Pisces New Moon Astrology is cultivating the inner desire to experience a greater level of personal fulfillment in your everyday life. This month’s Lunar energies are bringing new insight that will expand your ideas of fulfillment and help us learn how each of us can, in practical terms, live a more fulfilled life.

This article will explore exactly what I mean by this quality of personal fulfillment, and how you can access it in the context of your busy life, especially  in the face of our pervasive cultural push toward instant gratification and external measures of success.

Achievement versus Fulfillment

It is hard to pick up a magazine or watch a television commercial in today’s world without being presented with a distorted view of what you need to do to achieve success, and therefore happiness. I want to be very clear from the beginning: achieving external success and experiencing personal fulfillment are not the same thing.

Our current cultural definition of achievement is related to our external accomplishments, which are judged by what our culture defines through external measures of success and failure. Through this understanding, one can achieve both success and failure by cultural measures and still be completely unfulfilled.

According to dictionary.com the word fulfillment means “to bring into actuality; to effect or make real.” What this New Moon is allowing us to explore further is the actual “process of fulfillment,” which is the true actualization of our life. The question we must each explore is how this process of personal fulfillment actually happens.

Reaping what has Been Sown

The process of personal fulfillment can be related to cultivating and nurturing the harvest of what you are creating in your life. Fulfillment is an experience that exists in the present moment. It is directly related to the ability to fully participate in all the processes of life that enable you to cultivate and bring to form what has been sown.

Just planting a seed isn’t enough to bring it to completion. The act of planting a seed doesn’t automatically mean that it will grow into its full potential. The ongoing processes of nurturing and cultivation are required in order to experience a successful harvest. The key insight here is that intentional cultivation must occur for the process of fulfillment to fully flower.

These terms of reaping, sowing, cultivation, and harvest are directly connected to ideas and teachings about karma. We commonly define karma as experiencing the consequence of what we have sown, the actions we have taken. There’s an expanded idea of karma worth consideration here, related to the commitment to the present moment.  You can’t just sow a seed and then down the road reap the harvest, without the ongoing processes of cultivation and nurturing of what has been sown.

In this way our experience of karma has a direct relationship to that which we cultivate and nurture. In practical language, this aspect of karma is akin to the process of creating and reinforcing habits and daily practices of attention. It also has a great deal to do with our ability to experience fulfillment within the present moment.

The question you can ask yourself is, “Are the habits I’m nurturing and cultivating in my daily life in alignment with my larger purpose?”

Finding Purpose

A key spiritual principle for life is the ability to find purpose in everything we do. It’s easy to say this and understand it as a principle. Applying it to our lives is the greater challenge! Having said that, this Lunar cycle may in fact make this key spiritual principle more accessible to us all.

Committing to this practical principle of finding purpose in the present moment can be a simple strategy to help you start living for fulfillment instead of achievement. In fact, a simple self-evaluation you can consider is to regularly ask yourself whether or not – IN THE MOMENT – you’re pursuing your highest potential.

Are you intentionally cultivating your potential by creating habits that support your life’s purpose? This refocus of the meaning of potential can be a powerful tool toward living for fulfillment. Fulfillment can then be experienced in the moment as reaping what you have sown, and supported by the habits you’ve continuously cultivated.

Fulfillment and purpose need to be working together to help you access your highest potential. This isn’t an achievement that exists in the future. Rather, it’s an experience available in every moment. Our New Moon energies are bringing these ideas into your conscious awareness. Living for fulfillment means working to understand your unique purpose and then cultivating and nurturing your own karma and habits to come more and more into alignment with your potential and purpose.

Astrology Pattern

We have an interesting planetary configuration occurring during our New Moon. Looking at the chart you will see a four-planet stellium sandwiched between Neptune on one end and Uranus on the other.

The overall significance of this configuration can be seen in the meaning of the Neptune/Uranus pairing (a new phase relationship) that’s separated by less than 45°. This signifies the potential for new type of thinking to come into our awareness. Neptune’s role in the configuration is to slowly dissolve in order to begin forming a new level consciousness in the world, whereas Uranus is rapidly transforming and breaking down old structures that will no longer have a place within the new potentials that are forming.

The central stellium as a whole holds the energy signature of creating new experiences in which there’s the opportunity for the fulfillment of desire, coupled with the understanding and identification of a new relationship to life and living.

There is a strong message of hope and new possibility in this New Moon. With the Sun, Moon, Mercury, and Venus all new-phase to Neptune, and balsamic to Uranus, it’s clear to me that this represents new potentials and a second chance for lost opportunities. In fact, the Sabian archetype for Uranus is “THOUGH IMAGINATION A LOST OPPORTUNITY IS REGAINED.” This clearly reinforces that we can each  receive another karmic chance.

In addition, the Sabian archetype for the New Moon, “THE HARVEST MOON ILLUMINES A CLEAR AUTUMNAL SKY,” speaks to a definite new opportunity to plant, cultivate, and harvest your potential at a new and higher level.

With an abundance of new-phase energies and balsamic energies combined, you may experience an uneasy feeling just below the surface of things during this Lunar cycle. Uranus is the planetary connector to electromagnetic energy. Watch for shifts and adjustments within your own intuition as well as our electromagnetic spectrum worldwide, throughout this cycle. You can also expect a shift to occur in your inner personal need and desire to better relate the actions in your life to your larger potential and purpose.

Summary

There is a new opportunity this Lunar cycle, from New Moon to New Moon, to create a deeper understanding of what it means to live a more fulfilled life. With Spring Equinox just around the corner, this is the time of year in the northern hemisphere to plant and sow new seeds of potential in expectation of a fall harvest.

This analogy of harvest is reinforced in our New Moon energies and suggests that the time is ripe for positive changes in day-to-day habits and the ways in which you pursue your purpose. During this Lunar cycle pay conscious attention to how you go about finding purpose in the details of your life and the choices you’re making. This commitment will enable you to experience a greater level of fulfillment in your life and a new level of alignment with your larger purpose.