Libra: A Guide to Descent

On descent, the scales, and finding the balance within

Do you know how to descend?

Do you know how to let the drawing down happen?

For all its autumnal beauty, Libra can be a tough season. It sits at the threshold of a jarring turning point: the equinox. Day and night hold equal for a moment, and then the light gets dimmer and dimmer.

Aries opens the doorway into the growing light of spring, but Libra opens the doorway into the growing dark. That shift into fall can slap HARD and be a lot for our sensitive emotional body to make sense of.

Because it's also harvest, a time to enjoy the fruits of our labor. Do you know how to do that? How do we take pleasure as the light leaves us?

Libra's symbol is the scales, the only symbol in the zodiac that's an object instead of a creature or a person. I don't know about you, but I experience that as a bit confronting... like it's asking me:

What is the balance within?

We spend so much time trying to balance from the outside: "How do I make this person respect me, love me?" "How do I fit in this group?" "How do I get my boss to see that I'm breaking myself for this job, and get the promotion?"

Libra is a cardinal air sign. Air lives in the mind, and cardinal signs want to take action. Put those together and you get a mind that can easily fill in the blanks with shadow stories.

Speaking of shadow Libra: it will also try to control through relationship. Another way to say it: people pleasing. When Libra is in fear, it still goes looking for balance, but it looks outside. It tries to manage everyone's imagined reactions so it can feel steady inside. We hand the scales over to someone and ask them to tell us what we weigh.

This rebalancing happens inside too. Am I sad? Am I depressed? How do I balance this moment of slowing down without turning it into a story that something is wrong with me? How do I balance into a season of doing less after a heavy season of doing more? How do I bring a body that's been pushed to highs back down the mountain and eventually into the underworld?

So this season, I try to balance from the inside by asking myself: what the heck am I desiring right now as I feel the pull of gravity more heavily? What choices do I need to make in order to move from desire (instead of fear)? How do I use these scales differently, from my center?

The Descent

All this drawing down, the light leaving, the slowing, the sadness, reminds me of the oldest descent stories. Inanna's descent. Or Persephone, Demeter's daughter, taken to the underworld, the gods conspiring to make it happen. In one telling, it's Aphrodite who wants her taken. Aphrodite is Venus, the planet that rules Libra. Even the goddess of love and beauty has a hand in the going down. But Persephone comes back up every spring. The descent is part of the cycle.

Venus is in her own descent right now. She's currently retrograde in Scorpio, another way we're being drawn down. Scorpio is related to death and composting, and eventually being reborn. And any retrograde is a going back, a reflecting. It's not a time to be pushing into action.

So, the new moon in Libra was yesterday, trailing after the start of this Venus retrograde, which ends November 13th. I have been feeling this new moon experience differently than I usually do. Has it felt different to you too?

Often I find new moons exciting, a time for dreaming into possibilities, new dreams, new intentions. This one has been tough. At the new moon, Venus (the ruler of Libra) was also caught in a T-square. It's a geometry of dynamic tension. Libra can inhabit the feeling of the mounting tensions of two sides before a battle. Did you feel that?

I still want to set intentions, but they have a Scorpionic quality. Side note: the best time for new moon intentions is about 24 hours after the new moon, once you've had time to listen to what's been percolating. Today is a great day for it if you're reading this on October 11th.

This time my intentions are questions:

How do I be in relationship to the descent?

What's the best way for me to do that?

And how do we balance in the face of this dark drawing down when it isn't only our own, with the horrors happening all around us?

Here's what I've been playing with. I don't touch my phone for the first hour after I wake. I let myself do nothing. I let it be okay that getting out of bed has become harder for me this month. Facing the time, facing the change, the sadness, the drawing down. Noticing the changing morning light.

Because a productive morning routine can bring me out of balance too, that pressure to be healthy in a wellness-industry kind of way...

Where Libra Lives

Here's a little more about Libra and where it fits in the seasons of the zodiac, because we live the seasons of the zodiac. So what is this season?

Libra is the seventh sign, and it opens the second half of the zodiac. The first six signs, Aries through Virgo, are mostly about becoming someone. Aries sparks, Taurus grounds that spark into a body, and by Virgo we've sorted through what got made. Libra asks a new question: now that there's a someone, how does that someone meet the other? Libra knows itself through relating. I know myself through my experience with the other, whether the other is a person, a tree, a book, the cosmos, whatever.

The birth chart holds the same threshold. The seventh house, Libra's natural home, begins at the Descendant, the western horizon, the point where the Sun sets. Aries is the sunrise. Libra is the sunset, the painted sky, the moment you stop, look back at the day, and recalibrate.

Look outside and the season is saying it too. The air has cooled. The leaves are turning from green into reds, oranges, and yellows. It's harvest, when what got planted in spring gives back. It's a social season, with potlucks and gatherings, sharing food and music before everyone turns inward for winter. Libra loves company btw. And then, slowly, the long nights come.

You don't need planets in Libra to feel this energy. Libra lives somewhere in every chart, and the season moves through all of us. If your mind has been spinning, like a nice little cardinal air sign can do, try asking yourself: how is Libra expressing through me right now, and where can I find the balance?

Practices for This Air Season

Listen to or read the myth of Inanna. The book I love is Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer by Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer. Or listen to it here.

Or read the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. You can find it here, in Gregory Nagy's translation.

These are kind of wild, the way they're written. Don't read or listen to them with your brain. Let them waft over you and feel into them. What catches your attention? What phrase makes you feel something?

Put your hands on your lower back. Find the spot just above your waist, on either side of your spine, where the kidneys sit. This is Libra's territory in the body (in medical astrology). Let yourself drop into this part of your body. Sense the weight of yourself here as a way to bring the body back down the mountain or into descent.

A Closing Thought

It's interesting to find the spirituality in the pain of it all. The spiritual path can be so fraught, and the hard parts are necessary. That's where the maturing happens, even when I don't like it, even when it doesn't feel good and it's deeply uncomfortable. Like Persephone, we go down, and something eventually comes back up.

(New here? These essays come out once a month at the intersection of astrology, somatics, and the strange, embodied experience of being human. Welcome.)

Scorpio Is Coming...

These essays move with the seasons, astrology as ecology. Next month the Sun moves into Scorpio, and the descent goes deeper. More soon.

This intersection, somatic work, astrology, and ecology, is where I've done my own deepest work. It's also how I guide clients in session. If your body responded to anything in this piece, a tightening, a softening, a quiet yes, that's the doorway.

If you want to explore it together, book a free discovery call below.

Book a Free 30-minute Discovery Call HERE

Everything is in conversation. You included.

Cristina Maria Fort Garcés

Creative Now Therapy & Beyond