January 2020, it seems this month is never ending yet, it’s only been four weeks! On the 27th January Eris the dwarf planet that was only discovered in 2005, conjuncted Pluto, the planet of death, transformation, secrecy, and the underworld. Eris is a fierce goddess planet orbiting around the sun 556 years. Therefore, everyone who is alive today have Eris in Aries. This combination alone brings chills to my Soul.
Who is Eris?
In ancient mythology Eris is the goddess who was not invited to a big wedding. Every goddess and god had an invitation. Eris, showed up anyway. And with her she had a golden apple which she threw at the goddesses, Aphrodite, Vesta, Medusa, Kali, Lakshami, Saraswati, Isis the lot… all of them. And said, whoever gets the golden apple is the fairest of them all! Of course, everyone scramble for the apple, beating each other up, ripping clothes, pulling hair, playing tricks the works. It was a war ground. Aphrodite grabbed the golden apple and gave it to Helen, who was the most beautiful and loyal goddess.
In this act Eris showed the world, that in all our power we have some shadow work that we must process in order to feel whole. Eris is born from the void, she has no father and no mother. She is fierce, brutal, destructive, activist, powerful, she is dark and she is light. Her ability to show us what is behind the curtain of our own deep psyche is a gift for us to embrace.
Eris’s teaching
She is the embodiment of working through shadow. She will fight for what is unfair, what is unbalanced. She is the voice for those that cannot speak, women, children, plants, animals, the mother earth. She is the furtherest away from Earth, Gaia, yet her power, is more ingrained in our psyche than we want to believe. The discord she brings, is to shine light on parts of our shadow, what we hide or what is hidden from within us, so we can work through and find inner deep balance.
She moves so slow in our galaxy that we will be feeling restless, perhaps angry, perhaps having vivid dreams or even saying things that we wouldn’t to others. She brings destruction, like the Australian bushfires, the virus in China, impeachment in the USA over the president and much more on a global level. And for us on a personal level we can feel her. Like Durga, we have to invite or invoke the goddess Eris, to our psyche in meditation and be willing to work through the shadow that she will unveil.
There is no bullshit or pussy footing under the table with Goddess Eris. She demands to awaken our inner activist. We cannot continue with a collective moral compass if things do not may logical sense. For example, the spiritual community have many dogmatic ways to state what makes a great spiritual being. These rules, these limitations, these judgements are the very inactive ways of not healing the ‘spiritual bypassing’ that we witness so often. Things such as “they eat meat and yet teach yoga”, “they just had a few wines and now they are praying” “I saw them buy some cigarettes and now they are teaching a breath work class” This is not the fierce that Eris condemns.
Eris is all about the sacred rage, which simply means we condemn the behaviour rather than the person. She comes when there is a need. And the way 2020 is going to pan out, where Eris will meet Pluto another two times this year 14th June and 10 December indicates times of rude awakenings. The impact she has on our own psyche is magnificent, slow, and unravels at the time we need it, not when we are ready.
Working with Eris
We have to be willing to work on our shadow. That means, meeting the parts of ourselves that bring shame, anger, betrayal, judgement, fear, guilt, lack of confidence and low self-esteem and the undigested past. If, and it is a big IF, we want to feel whole, live a life that we’ve experience our own underworld and brought it to the surface and survived then we will benefit from this work. Our shadow becomes our gift, it empowers us, it allows us to walk with grace, with confidence, we are liberated, healed and we have healthy boundaries.
We must invite her. She will bring trouble, she will bring destruction because she is helping us to collate the fragmented parts of our being and making us whole. She will expel what is toxic from our psyche, our society, the collective. It is important to connect the shadow work with the heart because it gives rise for us to deeply look at ourselves first. A true activist will do most of the ‘inner’ work and the rest ‘outer’ work is created from a space where ego, martyr, pride, arrogance and channeled anger is not projected.
Eris awakens the phoenix within us, it is nice to be the phoenix but we must remember that the phoenix had to burn, to be destroyed, to break down all that it was to rebirth and rise from the ashes. This is what 2020 will bring, a shift of perception means shift of our psyche, moral compass, acceptance of what is now and how we can make it more harmonious.
This year, is about us waking up, no fluff, no pretty stuff, no princess archetypes, just the fearless power we all hold within ourselves.
If we are angry, then scream so loud and let it out. If we feel shame, work through this emotion by sitting in the discomfort what the emotion is communicating. We are not these emotions, they are informing us, so we can have healthier relationships with all that we know.
Feminine rising
If we go back to 2019 January, we had eclipse season with a feminine astroid, shining through. This birthed in our own psyche the awakening of the sacred feminine we all embody but do not give it any power. 2020 is when we will experience the warrior goddess energy rise within all of us. We will feel rebellious, we will feel as though we need to come together, perhaps the governments will shift their thinking. Perhaps those people who are stuck in situations because they feel there is no other way, this is the year that will change this! It may come as an awakening in your heart, it may comes up within us like a pressure cooker and we cannot take it anymore.
The sacred feminine, is the part of ourselves that deny the pagan, earth loving, plant loving, animal loving, healers, the service providers because they want equality of all beings. Because they want freedom for all beings, they want everyone to live in harmony. And that cannot come overnight. Work has to be done. We have to destroy parts of who we are not! We cannot deny that niggling feeling the unresolved shadow, let it take over our lives and we project or leak it when we least expect it!
Lets do the work. I will be doing astrological readings with the goddess Eris in your chart. Connect with me if you would like some insight. Also I will be holding a two hour masterclass on ‘the power of the planets’ on Friday 28th February at Botannix Yoga Studio, come and join me!
Invite Eris the goddess of discord, to awaken us from our sleep!
Sandeep Virdi 
This is fascinating, thank you so much for sharing!