Full Moon in Virgo: When Your “Great Work” Doesn’t Feel So Great Anymore

To the Virgo (in all of us) in Service to Love:

Life ain’t been no crystal stair. 

Like a ceremonial drum, the beat-beat-beat of this one line of a Langston Hughes’ poem, called me to rise this morning before my alarm ever had a chance.

I tried to go back to sleep, shut off the hum of those words, but the energy preceding this Virgo Full Moon lured me out of bed, into our living room where I was greeted by the seductive rays of Lunar Love pouring into the room.  I bowed to her Great Goddess Light. 

The mind can be a curse for someone who lives to learn, whose brain runs round the clock, who sometimes scrambles to put her thoughts into tiny, beautiful boxes before the lightness of the words and the learning she loves become stuck in the icky places of the subconscious where the Critic lies…

…in bed with the Perfectionist, filling themselves up on a diet of “self-loathing” and “I’m not enough.”

You know this duo. 

The Critic and the Perfectionist (C & P) working hand in hand, burrowing their way into your inner dialogue before reflecting all sorts of anxieties, insecurities and disappointments out into the world, showing up as a hurtful comment from a friend, an unkind remark from a colleague, a cruel diatribe from a “well-meaning” parent. 

I confessed to my friend the other day, “My job is killing me.”

Who said that? I wondered.

First of all, not once, never, as an adult have I called my work my job. I love the essence of what I do. 

My Great Work. 

A Virgo-infused sentiment that calls us to unfold our sacred offering of what meaningful service to Love is.

The Great Work is something we feel called to do. We must do. Most often we think it’s our job, but it’s more of a tireless movement, an inner longing to create something of lasting value in the world that could take form in the work we get paid to do, but it could also be the families we create, the causes we support, the love we have for the planet.

The Great Work will eventually bring us all to our knees, forcing us to see on any given day if our faith or our fear is stronger, calling us to surrender when the resistance has grown too strong at any point in time. 

The caterpillar into the cocoon into the butterfly, over and over, shapeshifting us each time into the One who has the love, the faith, the courage, the resilience to endure the times when it’s hard to be the caterpillar slowly inching along and even harder in that chrysalis of no return.  

Having accepted our devotion to the Great Work, knowing parts of us will want to keep us from growing, once we understand that sometimes we’ll feel the pain of being the caterpillar liquified in the cocoon, we’ll go in search of the tools, the practices and the guides that support this evolutionary process.

My job is killing me. 

I saw the ink-black energy of those words flying out of my mouth until I saw them be absorbed into the vastness of the sky.

Was this true? 

I heard a trembling voice, which sounded a lot like mine, plead my case:

I sit all day. Every day. And you know sitting is the new smoking. I’m 50 years old–what have I really accomplished? I have no time to exercise, to connect with friends, to hang out with my mom who said she talked to me more when I lived out of town. There’s so much to do. When I’m not with my clients, I’m alone a lot of the time–too much some days. Lately, I can feel the dark clouds roll in long before I ever see them.  

“All in Service to True Love, don’t forget,” C & P poke whenever they see I’m up too high or down too low. 

What have I done? What have I said?

I didn’t care. 

It felt good to admit that I’d been struggling a little, some days a lot, that this belief “my job is killing me” had been lurking in the dark corners of my mind for a while, asking to see the light of day. 

I’d said it and like a prisoner who’d just sprung free from behind her bars, I was delighting in my newfound freedom while still looking behind me to see what karmic repercussions would hunt me down. 

And a couple days later, I did get caught, in the middle of a yoga class. During the third cycle of an inhale/exhale holding up my downward dog, the Witness switched on the light to set the record straight.

“You’re killing you,” She mercifully said.

Ahhh, yes. The truth of the matter. 

The years of inner practice, of daily ritual and weekly ceremony coalescing for this moment of clarity. 

When we give ourselves the time and space to quiet the mind, we eventually see the patterns of our resistance more clearly and where we have carelessly directed our projections. We see the mental conflicts, the self-limiting narratives, the inner dialogue running amok causing all sorts of drama. 

But when we grow tired of the chaos and want to understand why some things never change, we invite the Witness to step forward, leaving C & P behind. 

And even through the simple act of noticing, the Witness’s lovingly detached gaze has the power to create a space between our thoughts wide enough to allow the soul’s love and soul’s light to dissolve the victim story and the ego’s agenda so we emerge from the chrysalis to continue our Great Work as the Butterfly.