Ashlesha | The Embracer

Moon in Ashlesha + Shukla Shashthi (6th lunar day after new moon)

Ashlesha is always one of the trickiest nakshatras to discuss. For one, I have many friends with this energy so I always want to make sure I am accurate and respectful with my words and sensitive to this energy. For some reason, I have collected a ton of Ashlesha people in my practice and in my life. Maybe they feel safe with me.

This is the ninth nakshatra and also the last of the first spiral of development. When I speak tomorrow, we will be starting a new spiral inward.

As the last of the first spiral, you start seeing a new kind of energy, a certain fierceness that seems unlikely to come from a Cancer person.

Ashlesha is symbolized by a serpent, yes…a snake. Which gives it all kinds of bad PR on the interweb. Snakes can inflict with poison and that is the shakti/power of this nakshatra. But snakes are also associated with wisdom.

For the Ashlesha dominant person, there are seemingly unending lessons that are teaching them to self-embody and thus learn to take full responsibility for themselves. They are designed for this with a super-sensitive nervous system that “knows before knowing.”

Often they are reacting to something they intuited long before it reached their intellect. It can look like inflicting venom with their words upon another. Or withdrawing, coiling up like a snake in their safe place underground to resource. In this coiling up, if (or when) done in the embodied way, they learn to access their inner wisdom and bring it into the world.

This is a heavy task for them because to be in this energy, they feel like they have no skin. They feeelllll everything! They need so much restoration and rejuvenation just to live a somewhat normal life.

This last nakshatra (of the first part of the Zodiac) is preparing us for the new spiral inward with access to our wisdom if we can muster it but also the autonomy to give a healthy dose of venom when the situation requires it. As we fully come into this energy, no longer are we projecting venom or sticking our heads in the sand, we are using this divine shakti as the embodied feminine to take her place fully on Earth.

Ashlesha is known as the embracer. She is squeezing and flexing her internal landscape to figure out how to let that energy run up and down inside and be contained in some way. The journey ahead requires it.

Other symbols that seem relevant are the medical caduceus and the spiritual energy that runs through the six chakras in the subtle body (the energy being coiled at the root like a snake retracts in response to threat).

Ashlesha is ruled by Mercury, and Mercury is known as the communicator, the messenger, intelligence, understanding, and also blocked expression and social difficulties. It is working out me vs. not-me.

When Moon transits Ashlesha, like it is doing today, you might notice you are extra sensitive, you might find yourself projecting venom upon a threat, or you might be extra intuitive.

And my song pick…I still need to find a better song for Ashlesha so all you Ashleshas out there, send one my way for consideration, but for now…

♥♥♥♥