Venus Direct in Gemini: Return to Love

“It takes courage ... to endure the sharp pains of self-discovery rather than choose to take the dull pain of unconsciousness that would last the rest of our lives.”

-- Marianne Williamson

The goddess of beauty and love is finally coming out her 43-day retrograde stance on June 27. Of course, this reversal cannot happen a moment too soon if you’re in the beauty or love business. Have you struggled with issues of your inner worth or outer beauty?

You can thank Venus in Gemini for showing you straight to the core of the matter: the mind can play tricks on us as we look into the mirror. Whether that mirror is a relationship or the one on the wall in front of you is inconsequential. The point is that we can easily be duped by our own insecurities and projections.

“In the absence of love, we begin slowly but surely to fall apart.”

Just as with any planetary reversal coming out of retrograde motion, this is the chance to walk our talk. What have we been blah, blah, blah-ing about in terms of our relationship patterns since Venus went retrograde? We certainly have had to face our fears and shadows, as Venus brought many clever teachings about the paradox of love.

Gemini is the sign of duality, so we have been invited to look at where we may be duplicitous and tricky in relationships. Commitment-phobia, anyone? Do words help or hinder our feeling of being related? Gemini is the sign of the perfectly chosen verbiage. If we were willing to look at all of the inherent contradictions of our relationships and the difficult task of embracing the “otherness” of the other without trying to make them into our vision of the perfect partner, we will have made Venus happy during her retrograde tutelage.

If we insisted on only seeing things one way or collapsing into our own projections of everything “wrong” about our partners that we actually just don’t want to see in ourselves -- we still have some work to do. The task is to now put these lessons into practice.