Blocks To The Flow of Love: Water Signs

This is part of a series: love in the zodiac.

I’m thinking about blocks as sacred pathways - doorways to the expression and exchange of love. We don’t experience love without an experience of a lack of it / or obstacle to it. So this emphasis on the “blocks” is in the spirit of moving toward love.

When the emotional planets (Moon, Venus and Mars) - as in - the planets that tell the story of how one connects to others - are in Water signs (Cancer, Scorpio and Pisces), one of the blocks is the nonlinear potency of emotional memory. As with all these aforementioned blocks (see series for other elements), the super power is also the block. The gift, the talent, is embedded within the struggle, or the other way around.

Water signs’ experience of time is fluid. A smell triggers a memory, and suddenly they are in 1992 in that time when their mom told them not to wear that outfit outside. It’s not that other signs don’t time travel - all these minds of ours do it. It’s that the vividness of the memory collapses the sense that it’s over at all for Water signs. This shows up in relationships as a difficultly letting go of past wounds. It’s not that Water signs are even trying to hold on to them consciously, it’s just that they’re not in control of what sensory experiences provoke the immersion into the memory. It’s difficult to discern time, space, and people, from each other. There’s this emotional truth that Water signs experience directly, not conceptually - the emotional landscape is truly fluid, it functions like water, exchange is constant between all of us, at all times. So a conflict arises with a loved one, and it’s not even conscious but the conflict also becomes one from a childhood dynamic, or a conflict with the same person, but in the past, and the time and wisdom and understanding that has accrued between the people, or within one, is forgotten, erased, temporarily.

Another one of the blocks for Water signs in these planets is basically the same but has more to do with spatial awareness than temporal. Water signs lose track of what was past present or future because the sensation of the feeling is so astoundingly vivid. But they also lose track of what is theirs and what is another’s, because of the sponge-like quality to their emotional body. What is mine? is a confusing question for these signs, because the experience feels the same as answering the question where does the Pacific Ocean end and the Atlantic Ocean begin.

The way we understand the distinction is through land, which is also similar to how we might think about our separation as humans. There’s a world ocean, because the truth is the waters are not separate. But it’s useful for various reasons to delineate the waters temporarily. Humans aren’t separate from Earth, or each other - we are made of the same thing. But in this very bizarre earth school, we are, it seems, in charge of this entity we temporarily call “I", in a particular way.

And so an invitation for Water signs to melt the blocks to love is to paradoxically discern and differentiate more often. To understand that, however temporarily, as in the duration of one’s life as a human on planet earth, differentiating between what is your emotional state, feelings, thoughts, experiences, and someone else’s can increase the sensations of love that are possible to exchange.

A possible path to doing this is through the supportive qualities of Earth specifically for Water. In this case I mean the body, your body. The body offers information that grounds the container-less quality of water. So when asking the question, What is mine? The answer might arise from the sensations of the body. When is your body a yes? When is your body a no? What foods, interactions, locations, emails, body positions, etc, feel like yours? Which ones feel like not yours? Also - what time is it? What day is it? Where am I located? (Calendars can be sacred.) These earth cues help us re-ground into the present, as distinguished from the past! Practices that connect you with these questions via the body can help filter, and when you filter more (aka find edges, locate yourself - people sometimes use the word boundaries for this), you can feel love more.

We come here, it seems (?!), to feel separate, to cosplay that we’re separate in these body entities, and find our way to each other through that sensation of separation. For some of us dissolving the sensations of separateness might be what is in order to touch love.

For others, Water signs in this instance, it might be shoring up one’s sense of self as a way to feel located enough, safe enough, grounded enough to love and be loved.