Virgo Full Moon: Discerning What Matters

When I think of the analytical sign of Virgo, what often comes to mind is the word discernment. And I’m reminded of a story, told to me by two teen siblings I once knew. It's an appropriate tale for the Full Moon, taking place at 27 degrees Virgo on Friday, March 18, 2022 (2:17am CT).

In my work finding adoptive families for teens in foster care*, I worked with many sibling groups over the years, and heard many stories. But this one has really stuck with me.

This story happened before I knew the kids, but it went something like this:

Sisters Samantha and Anna** – ages 13 and 15 – were living in foster care but had been introduced to a prospective adoptive family.*** They were out at a restaurant with the family, getting to know one another.

Samantha, the younger one, really wanted to be adopted. Hope was powerful: The possibility of a sense of belonging was so strong that Samantha unintentionally overlooked any red flags.

Anna was more hesitant. Sure, she wanted to be adopted. But she also secretly thought the adoptive mom was trying to buy their affection with games and treats. And although Anna liked games and treats, it didn’t do a lot to boost confidence in her parenting ability.

During dinner, as the family and the sisters were sharing a meal together, something happened that gave Anna deep pause: She watched as the mom treated the waitress rudely.

And she felt uneasy.

After leaving the restaurant, Anna thought carefully about what had taken place. She reflected on the mom treating the wait staff poorly, and asked herself: If she’s rude to the waitress over ketchup, what does that mean about how she’ll treat me if things don’t go our way? What if we argue? What then?

Discernment is a deep canyon: It can include taking action, but it can also be thinking carefully about observations that you’ve made.

Samantha wanted to move forward with the prospective family; Anna didn’t. That was hard on the sibs, of course – they loved each other dearly. But Samantha wanted adoption so badly. And Anna simply didn’t trust the family. So after a lot of conversations with a lot of therapists and child welfare workers, the sisters split up.

Some months later, Samantha moved into that family’s house. And of course, things got hard, as things usually do when a teen moves into a new family.

Eventually, the family didn’t honor their pledge to adopt Samantha, and Samantha was forced to move out and start over once again. It was a terrible loss for Samantha – a kid who’d already had a lifetime of grief.

And I will share: Eventually, both Samantha and Anna did get adopted together, by a different family.

But the point of this story is in the discernment – which isn’t to say Anna was right, and Samantha was wrong. Not at all.

There’s a lot of Pisces energy in the sky these days. And at this Full Moon, as the gentle Pisces Sun opposes the rational Virgo Moon, we are asked to balance these two energies: Can we balance sensing and intuiting with analyzing and sorting?

Samantha took a Piscean approach to the prospective adoptive family: She felt, in a profound way, that she wanted to be adopted. She imagined it; she craved it. A sensitive soul, she understandably moved toward the feeling that granted her a sense of belonging.

Anna had a more Pisces/Virgo approach: She wanted to belong and to be adopted, but also sorted the information that was presented to her, evaluated it, and concluded that the family was not for her.

So at this Full Moon, how can we balance the empathy, compassion, and Spidey-senses of Pisces with the dissecting and analyzing capacities of Virgo? Ask yourself if there’s a thread in your life right now connecting to a story that began two weeks ago with the Pisces New Moon – a story that might also connect to mid-September 2020 and mid-June 2021.

And consider: What information is being revealed to you at this Full Moon? How can you intuit everything about a situation by sitting with it and feeling it, and then take a step back to really evaluate what you’re perceiving – like an observer of your life?

This Virgo Full Moon invites you to be discerning about what really matters.

Essay and photo ©2022 Jen Braun, JJ Boots Productions LLC

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*To learn more about my past work, visit my About page.

**Names have been changed to protect privacy.

***When a teen in foster care meets a prospective adoptive family, there’s a lot of work that has already gone on behind the scenes to get to that point. Once the kids meet the family, however, they have a lot of say in whether to move forward to each next step – and lots of conversation happens with the youth and the team of workers surrounding each teen.