Virgo Horoscope for August 2013

The inner exploration keeps building, Virgo. This is a month of breakthrough and integration, following and partially based upon the recent retrograde of your ruler, Mercury, through your sector of friendship and group affiliation. You have therefore been reviewing and renewing yourself with regard to your societal participation, attempting to find the fit that will take you to the next level of your life purpose. You are more ready to make use of what you have gleaned from self-examination, and yet still in many ways dwelling within unconscious realms as you push forward into further discoveries. By staying open to your inner world you find new ideas and cosmic epiphanies that shake you up in a good way, and that create a new form of intimacy with others as well as with yourself.

As the month begins, you are feeling the excitement of shifting energy, since the month and also the progress of the July lunation cycle is equally in the flux of its turning. Your ruler, Mercury, is coming out of its dungeon in these early days of August, as it begins to escape its retrograde shadow. Then, too, the beautiful six-pointed star that marked the beginning of the current week is also fading out, as the Moon and Venus move beyond their Monday positions and as Venus in your sign opposes Chiron exactly and also makes an inconjunct with trickster Uranus. This latter configuration speaks to you of surprising enlightenment unfolding, possible in the context of relationship issues that could suddenly change, potentially bringing up old peer-to-peer woundings. If such factors do arise, there is a way to make the best of it by looking more closely into your own depths as they reveal themselves through these potentially taxing situations.

This has been an intense Mercury Retrograde period, inwardly inclining, and punctuated by several peaks, right up through the first weekend in August. Since the retrograde took place in your sector of friendships and societal involvement, your plans there might have been subject to multiple reversals and reconstitutions. On the surface level annoying, but the deeper spiritual meaning is that through these intense meditations you look to the inside and grow in your awareness of yourself at all levels. Nothing that you find within you truly carries a stigma; as Blake stated it, "everything that lives is holy." This is an entirely worthwhile concept to bear in mind as you pass through these difficult times, and as you discover fresh facets of your own inner world.

This month's shifting patterns also emphasize at various times both trickster Uranus and transformative Pluto, as they continue their square alignment, now growing closer toward another exact hit in the fall. Uranus is located in your sector of intimacy and personal transformation, and there speaks to epiphany as an evolutionary process. Although long-winded psychological therapy — the so-called "talking cure" with what is still playfully called a shrink — can take years, important progress can also occur in an instant when a significant realization hits your mind at just the right time. Pluto, the other important outer planet archetypal factor this month, resides in your self-expression sector, indicating that your creative output is still radically changing and that as it does, the seismic shift can be felt in all the areas of your life, most especially in its opposite sector of societal involvement and future plans.

By the end of August, after such an intensely transformational period as this summer seems to be, you come out the other side older in knowledge and wisdom, and yet perhaps younger in spirit, with a better will to move forward with your life in ways that satisfy deep down. This is an essentially fortunate period for you, one in which you come into much that you can treasure, perhaps even financially. The greater part however is what you can find not in terms of outer rewards but inside yourself.