This month also begins with an exact Full Moon with all the luminosity, heightened emotion and primeval awe of its monthly occurrence and the tension and potential unity between Cancer and Capricorn. Not unrelated, the other major emphasis of the month is on relationships, from multiple indicators including Venus sitting with the Saturnian end of the exact opposition between Saturn and Neptune.

The July Full Moons occurring early in the month always have a funny polarity, with the masculine Sun in the feminine sign of Cancer and the Moon goddesses strong in the more masculine Capricorn. It's like the masculine has a month to revisit its emotional origins, a kind of coming home to get reacquainted with the nurturing qualities of both male and female. Meanwhile, the Grand Feminine meets form and structure to use containment and focus in its expression in the outer world.

Both this and the early January Full Moons remind us how important it is to balance the needs of both home and heart with the drive to express and manifest in the world. Not to do so brings internal disharmony, emotional dissatisfaction and often illness and relationship conflicts as each individual is pushed into narrow sex-roles that diminish one's freedom to express both male and female aspects of the psyche. These Full Moons provide health enhancing challenges for the escapist workaholic, as well as those who are stuck in domesticity or are using their emotional patterning to hide from the warriors within who want to wrestle with the world. For all of us, a timely reminder to rebalance.

Speaking of rebalancing opportunities, this month brings the last in a series of Saturn/Neptune oppositions, which in many ways has been the signature lineup of the last 12 months. It has represented huge, yet often subtle, shifts in the inner and outer structures of our lives, one that has been disintegrative and anxiety producing as things we've felt were solid have lost their energy. And yet these changes have, and will, continue to open us to a much greater integration between what we can poorly call the worldly and spiritual sides of our nature. The beauty of this alignment is that it dissolves some quite masculine defences to allow our essential sensitivity, creativity and openness to the mystical to resurface and be claimed by the conscious ego. Simultaneously, the gruff yet gracious voice of Saturn encourages the notion of "either use it or lose it...... again". At least, this is its greatest possibility, but the journey towards this goal will still be rather turbulent as reality, inspiration and delusion continue sorting themselves out.

Venus sits exactly with Saturn on his end of this spectrum, so we can expect relationships to get a little wobbly in such a fluctuating zone, but also because Saturn demands that we sort out what is truly real here, usually by temporarily cutting us off from others. This deliberate isolating gives us space to simply be with ourselves without any props to find out more of what we truly need in the way of intimacy, sexuality and connectedness, as well as to face the inner inadequacies and projections that undermine our ability to create the appropriate form of relating for our essential individuality.

As the Goddess of Love moves through this trickier zone, she emerges into far more empowering territory by trining a rather awesome conjunction of Pluto and Lilith in Sagittarius. For those Indiaphiles like myself, this is akin to having the darshan, or an audience, with Shiva and Kali. More personally, it represents a linking with some of the deepest primal psychosexual parts of self, connecting us with the transformative and tantric powers at the core of our spirituality. This then has the potential of changing our ways of relating to intimate others, of deepening our connection to our sexuality and of further balancing the sacred male and female parts of self.

This is also significant as, for many months now, the various archetypes of the dark feminine, like Lilith and the Black Moon, have been unhappily aspected. This uniting with Pluto, coupled with good supporting aspects, is the happiest of recent positionings and can be seen as an expression of "conjunctio" or sacred marriage. She can show her most empowering and grace-bestowing face, supporting the equal union of the masculine and feminine at their deepest, while clearing some ancient blockages to our hearts and sexuality and generating some pretty awesome sexual and creative energies in the process.

This theme of healing of and through our relationships is repeated in other parts of the month's charts. Juno, the goddess of marriage and commitment, is in her home of Libra and is opposing the serpent healing goddess Hygeia in Aries, while trining the other great healer of Chiron in Aquarius. This challenges old codependencies while offering a balancing between relationship and individuality. Certainly, there's much movement and some great opportunity.

Daniel Sowelu (B.Sc.Dip.Ed) is a therapeutic astrologer, primal therapist and groupleader in his 21st year of private practice.