Venus Cazimi: new Solar cycle in Capricorn

On these past few days that Venus starts a new cycle around the Sun in Capricorn, I have been asking myself what it would feel like if we start moving through the world from a place of appreciation rather than attachment.

Yes, this is one of those astrological moments that asks big questions.

Astrology is essentially pattern recognition, it studies the reoccurring relationship between celestial movements and human experience. It’s a bit like an emotional forecast that supports self-awareness and growth.

I know that sounds a bit vague, so let’s ground it.

Venus is the celestial body that governs our values and by extension the dynamics that arise in our relationships — our relational values.

In Capricorn, Venus starts asking practical questions like: is this sustainable? Does this relationship align with reality?

Right now, Venus’s placement relies heavily on the condition of Capricorn’s ruler, Saturn, who is currently in Pisces—a sign traditionally associated with the spiritual and unseen realms. A placement that is invested in feelings, intuition and dissolving boundaries.

In astrologer-speaking terms that which feels poetic, and mildly inconvenient in practice.

Saturn in Pisces is asking: “how does this relationship, this situation actually feel?”

Much like astrology and relationships, words can also remain hollow when approached purely cognitively. Take for example the words that this transit is bringing forward: appreciation and attachment.

(I know your nervous system probably yawns while your mind pretends to understand them).

But if you follow me on this embodied inquiry, you will soon (hopefully) begin to feel these aren’t just ideas. They’re lived states that shape the way we experience love and (or) freedom.

Over the past year, I’ve dedicated myself almost entirely to Building the Habit of Being Myself, a practice that involved dropping out of my head and into the sensations of my body.

In somatic therapy, we dedicate time to becoming aware of our internal world. The more we give language to our felt experience, through colours, shapes, textures, the more we begin to understand it.

As I started noticing how meaning and feeling intertwine, I also began to see how my emotional reality was being shaped by language. Or rather, this past year trained me to link language to lived, physical experience.

Isn’t that what wisdom is anyway? When a cognitive understanding becomes embodied knowing? When language and feeling come into coherence?

Like walking the talk—without pretending? Or at least that’s what I tell myself as I become my own guinea pig in this ongoing experiment.

The THING

Okay, let’s start with attachment.

When I’m attached to something, I become goal-oriented.

I want this object, this person, this experience, so that I can feel something about myself.

It’s a love-affair—but with myself, really. A very one-sided relationship. The object of my desire isn’t the THING at all. It’s in fact the feeling I derive from intertwining my sense of self with it: freedom, value, a sense of worth.

Attachment feels like taking an inhale and refusing to let it go. (Unsurprisingly, this never ends well for the nervous system).

Somatically, it begins with a contraction in my chest and abdomen.

My hands curl into claws. Hooks. To latch, to collect and own.

The moment I outsource the feeling I want to experience, I become dependent on the source that provides it. I stop sourcing myself.

That’s classified low-key addiction, the socially acceptable version.

I see it everywhere, including myself. Addiction to love (the hormone oxytocin) through lovers, pets, friends. Addiction to power through money or objects. Addiction to being seen, chosen, validated.

Attachment says: I want to feel valued, seen, heard and this THING or this PERSON will give me access to that feeling. It’s unsustainable. It keep me in loops. When the feeling runs out, as feelings inevitably complete their cycles, guess where I go for my next hit?

Back to the THING that supplies me with relief.

Intrinsic worth

Appreciation feels entirely different. It’s expansive and reassures attachment that it’s safe to exhale.

My chest softens. There’s an openness in my abdomen, like breathing that cool, minty air in the middle of a pine-tree forest.

My fingers relax. My palms open into an almond shape. Almost like a cup. Open enough to hold the moment without clinging to it.

The word appreciation, εκτίμηση in Greek, has always been linked to assigning value, a price even. A reward, which works well until we start applying it to humans.

Market-based systems teach us to measure value through comparison, effort, achievement, rank, metrics. We learn to belong by keeping score.

To be clear without structure, goals, or feedback, we wouldn’t evolve. We can’t live on intuition alone.

The question I’m sitting with is: are we measuring the right things?

For example, in nature value works differently.

A tree isn’t valuable because it is owned, compared, or extracted from. It is valuable because of how it participates in the ecosystem—by producing oxygen, stabilising soil, transmitting information and shaping the conditions for life around it.

Its worth is intrinsic, not contingent.

Our nervous systems evolve not only through harmony but also through tension, friction and difference. Through rupture and repair, love and loss. Humans, like trees, are already contributing in the ecosystem through our relational impact.

Friction reveals where growth is happening. Have you ever experienced a major breakthrough after a breakup, or during a period of instability in a relationship?

In an ecosystem, everything has value simply by existing because it’s already connected to a greater whole, not by comparison, but by relation and complementarity.

Value and its capacity to be received (what we often call abundance), are inherent qualities of our lived experience.

That’s the poetic part of Saturn in Pisces while Venus is in Capricorn. Now let’s get to the mildly inconvenient one.

When value no longer needs external proof

If that sentence sounded like something you’d normally scroll past, I see you.

If you’re curious where I’m going with all this, you’re welcome to stay. No pressure though.

If anything this text is about challenging how we value our experience, by offering a different interpretation that is connected to feeling than belief.

So if you had a reaction to the sentence, “abundance is an inherent quality of human existence,” I invite you to stay with it.

Before analysing it, I invite you to notice.

Is there ease—an embodied yes, rooted in lived experience?

Perhaps there’s nothing. No reaction at all. That’s information too.

Or perhaps there’s resistance. A tightening.

Boredom. (boredom is positive, it happens as your nervous system is resetting.)

Or a “This makes sense, but I don’t believe it yet”.

The invitation here isn’t to convince yourself of anything. It’s to become curious about the feeling that is arising. To validate it. Not to turn away from it or argue with it.

If resistance is present, welcome to the remembering-your-worth club. Membership is automatic, being human is the only requirement.

Here’s why you might be feeling this way:

When value is something we’ve learned to quantify, to price, or earn as reward through the THING that gives it to us, the idea of abundance as something intrinsic can feel unfamiliar, unsafe, even ungrounded.

Our bodies haven’t been trained to receive without evidence, which is why this isn’t a philosophical exercise. It’s an embodied one.

Not being able to recognise abundance, isn’t a failure, it’s a learned response.

If I learned that only certain emotions are acceptable while others are bad.
If I learned to shut down, to guard, to numb.
If I struggle to see how my full emotional range, from love to loss, as meaningful information that helps me grow, rather than a problem.
If I learned to look for relief when these emotional activations arise.

To look for the THING,
then of course abundance feels abstract.

Each time I stay with my feelings instead of abandoning them, each time I validate and support my felt experience, I gather evidence. Evidence that I matter.

Through self-appreciation, I begin to trust that, like a tree within an ecosystem, my value is intrinsic not contingent. My emotional and sensory experience becomes valuable first to me, as an inner compass offering feedback and guidance within my relational world.

As you read this, I invite you to notice what is happening inside.

Instead of arguing or turning away, mentally say to yourself:

Of course. Of course, you feel this way.

If you read this part and felt something move—tighten, soften, resist, or exhale—consider this your invitation to reach out and let me know.

Leave a comment

If you made it past this mildly inconvenient part, congratulations. This is usually where self-compassion enters the conversation.

Here’s the difficult and easy news.

The easy news is that our inherent sense of value can be remembered, and no you’re not required to return to foetus or seed form to do so.

The difficult news is that there’s no magic pill. Like any other skill, remembering is practised.

Appreciation understands something attachment resists: for something to enter, something needs to leave.

Inhale and exhale.

Like a tree shedding its leaves before winter so it can grow new ones in spring.

(I’ve never seen a tree try to staple its fallen leaves back on, which I hope helps illustrate how unnecessary attachment can be in the cyclical process of growth.)

The sooner you accept that love and loss are always working together, the easier it becomes to remember your intrinsic sense of worth.

What if freedom is the feeling we’re after, not love?

By definition, love is described as affection, care, commitment, desire—usually manifesting as emotional attachment to another person, animal or THING.

The THING. Claws. Hooks. Attachment.

When love transforms into something we learn to experience inwardly it transforms into a container, a cup. Appreciation.

It becomes permission to be messy.
To be wild, to follow my instinct.
To be seen.
To be heard.
To be held like a child.
To be witnessed by myself, in my evolving humanity, and valued for it. Like the tree.

This is were appreciation diverges from attachment, and an inherent sense of worth is remembered. Rooted in how I choose to show up for myself.

From self-appreciation, a new relational value system begins to form, one based not on comparison or competition but on complementarity and care.

I’ll give you a few examples.

Attachment tries to freeze the moment.
Appreciation is there for as long it lasts, then lets it move.

Attachment internalises hardship as an identity.
Appreciation understands the lesson and recognises the silver lining.

Attachment keeps seeking revenge or closure.
Appreciation recognises that the deepest form of justice unfolds internally before it ever manifests externally.

Attachment collects, hoards.
Appreciation receives value without needing to own it.

Attachment clings to relationships past their expiration date.
Appreciation values relationships for what they were, without demanding they remain what they no longer are.

Attachment controls, speculates, projects.
Appreciation is free to receive life as it’s happening without fixing, changing or clinging to it. Trusting that things are unfolding within a larger intelligent synchronicity.

To care and to be free

When I honour myself, when I respect my needs, when I meet the most shameful, difficult emotions with kindness, especially the ones I was taught to suppress, I begin to feel free.

That’s where love and freedom converge, through self-appreciation.

Yes, the thing nobody really talks about is that you can give yourself the appreciation you’ve been waiting for.

Unlike goal-oriented, attachment-based spirituality and market-based logic, self-appreciation doesn’t ask you to prove yourself. It just asks you to slow down. To soften. To cultivate an honest dialogue with yourself and to appreciate the life around you.

To heal the old Piscean wound (thank you, Venus and Saturn) that taught us that our thoughts and emotions are separate things with different values.

Thanks to science, we now know they’re not.

Story follows state. Our internal emotional or physiological state often determines the narrative we construct to explain it.

Awareness and embodiment are part of the same nervous system, and the real work—pookie—is remembering to integrate them, with kindness. Letting them work in union and coherence, so they can support you rather than work against you. So you can remember your relational value, and the abundance that is your birthright.

Then you can go after what you came here to do:
to care and to be free.

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