Venus Retrograde: October 3-November 14

Venus retrograde is happening during this new moon and Navaratri, and invites us to turn our attention inward and become more conscious of our relationship with love, worth, and the agreements that shape how we relate to ourselves and others.

Through the Vedic Astrology lens, Venus represents attraction, relationships, and what we value. As Venus moves retrograde through Libra and Virgo, we have an opportunity to look more deeply at the beliefs and patterns that influence our relationships and how we experience love.

We can explore more deeply now how our understanding of love becomes distorted through conditioning. From an early age, we begin to form agreements about what love looks like, what makes us worthy of receiving it, and what we must do to be accepted. We may learn that we need to please others, sacrifice ourselves, seek approval, or become someone we are not in order to be loved.Over time, these agreements can become so deeply ingrained that we no longer recognize them as beliefs. We mistake them for truth and begin to organize our lives around them.

We may abandon our own needs to maintain a relationship, tolerate behaviors that do not honor us, or look outside ourselves for the validation we have not learned to give ourselves. We may measure our worth by whether someone chooses us, desires us, or approves of us. Without realizing it, we can become so focused on receiving love that we lose touch with our own value.

These distortions can keep us repeating unhealthy patterns in our relationships, seeking something from others that we have been conditioned to believe we cannot provide for ourselves.

Venus retrograde offers an opportunity to bring awareness to these agreements and begin to question them. Where have we learned to associate love with sacrifice, rejection, control, or the need to prove our worth? Where are we abandoning ourselves in the hope that someone else will choose us? What have we come to believe about ourselves that keeps us from experiencing healthier, more authentic relationships?

The work is not to judge ourselves for the agreements we have made, but to become conscious of them. Through awareness, we can begin to distinguish between the love we have been conditioned to seek and the love we are capable of experiencing when we are no longer operating from these distortions.

As Venus moves back into Virgo on November 6th, we are invited to practice greater discernment. We can begin to recognize where we have been giving our energy to patterns that diminish us, and where we have confused perfection, pleasing others, or being needed with being worthy of love.

When we become aware of the agreements that distort our experience of love, we have an opportunity to stop reinforcing them and choose something different.

As artists of our own dream, we can begin to create new agreements rooted in awareness rather than conditioning. We can learn to honor ourselves, take responsibility for our own experience, and relate to others without making our worth dependent on their behavior or approval.

This Venus retrograde is an invitation to examine the stories we have been living by, reclaim the value we have given away, and become more conscious of the kind of love and relationships we are choosing to create.