Venus in Leo Retrograde 2023: Creation through Heart Coherence

On the 23 of July 2023, Venus in Leo stations to start her retrograde phase. She will station direct on the 4^th of September 2023. Venus will be promenading up and down in Leo’s house from 12 to 28 degrees. She first touched 12 degrees on the 20^th of June, 2023 and will finish again at 28 degrees Leo, where she stationed retrograde, on the 7^th of October, 2023.

The culminating point of Venus Retrograde is when Venus joins the heart of the Sun at 20 degrees Leo on the 14^th of August 2023.

For more about Leo energy, including medical astrology, click here.

Venus in Leo

Venus transiting through the temple of the Sun is not the best experience for Venus. Venus is a nighttime planet that loves quiet places that are cool, moistening, soft, relaxing, and penumbral. She likes to keep her desires secret.

When she is in Leo, the weather becomes very hot. Water or humidity is only a dream, and the Sun is permanently in the sky. Venus in Leo is forced to act under a spotlight, making her longings and moves in broad daylight for all to witness.

Venus in Leo has to abide by the Sun’s law, which is to consciously choose what her desires are and embrace her seducing personal power, publicly displaying it.

Although Venus is a benefic, she brings us experiences that we usually like and want; when Venus goes retrograde, moving backwards in the sky, Venus takes on a more spicey feel.

You may be asking in what way?

When a planet goes retrograde, the standard rules of the planet’s behaviour do not count. For Venus, this means that all niceties are thrown out of the window or shall we say, in the consuming fire of Leo. Venus does not always play fair; as they say, in love and war, all is permitted. A retrograde Venus is all up for experimenting and trying new experiences with little caution or modesty.

Leo is all about the unceasing expression of fire at its utmost. Leo rules the heart and the dorsal vertebrae.

Venus in Leo will dig deep into the recesses of our hearts. And as she approaches the engulfing flames of the Sun, she will toss with glamour in the fire all those desires acting counterproductively to what our soul truly wants.

In making us question and ache for what we truly desire, Venus in Leo straightens us up from the inside out with dignity.

Of Air and Fire

This current Venus cycle began way back on the 22^nd of October, 2022.

On that day, Venus, who was staying in her own house of Libra, met the Sun at 29 degrees in a superior conjunction. By superior conjunction, we mean that Venus met the Sun on the other side of the Sun, away from the Earth. Imagine a straight line connecting Venus, then the Sun and Earth. Venus was the farthest from us on Earth. Ancient astrologers talk about the superior conjunction as Venus conferring with the gods.

What was particularly important in that conjunction was that it was the first Venus-Sun conjunction in Libra we have experienced for the first time in 150 years. Venus has started a new conjunction point cycle, lasting till 2133, shifting from Scorpio, a sign ruled by Mars and terribly uncomfortable for Venus, to Libra, Venus’s daytime house. That is quite an energy shift feel and a move that sees Venus gaining strength, tools, and resources for her agenda.

Something back then has been seeded for the first time in 150 years, and its fruits are coming to fruition for the first time in the upcoming Venus retrograde cycle.

When retrograding, Venus comes nearer to us, bringing down to earth the information she has gleamed when conferring with the gods. Imagine a straight line. The inferior conjunction that always happens in a retrograde will be: Sun, then Venus and then Earth.

Venus’s last time she reversed in Leo was between July and September 2015.

What was happening in your life back then? Because now, we will revisit that story with a completely new paradigm, that of Air seeding Fire which are complementary elements. The energy between these two elements flows easily, and one element nurtures the other.

I couldn’t help but wonder and ponder how Venus’s new Libra cycle will contribute to further incarnate the Air Era we are living through. In December 2020, Saturn and Jupiter had their conjunction at 0 degrees of Aquarius ringing the ultimate bell for the complete elemental change from Earth to Air Triplicity age.

The following are some of my thoughts on such an elemental shift through Venus.

What is Mine to do?

During Venus’s galvanising experiments in Leo, she will be receiving encouragement from Mercury in Leo and rowdy incitement from Jupiter and brusque friction from Uranus both in Taurus, Venus’s own house.

It is worth remembering that when Venus entered Leo on the 5^th of June 2023, she immediately opposed Pluto at 0 degrees of Aquarius, reactivating the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction of 2020. And Venus was traveling very near Mars in Leo for all of June and part of July 2023.

This Venus in Leo retrograde has an extra punch and much more than meets the eye. Big movers and shakers are at play, and the invitation is to bring together all those elements inside ourselves that ignite creativity and dig deep down into the true motives of what sparks our joy for life.

In Gordon White’s Foundation Magic course, Gordon frequently repeats the concept of “What is Mine to do?” “What is the Universe trying to express and create through you?”. Reframing desire as the expression of the Divine trying to birth something new in this dimension has been and still is a profound reflection, at least for me.

Most of us come from a culture where desire is seen morally negatively. Desire is something to suppress and not to cultivate. Or else only specific desires are allowed and not others. But if one looks at how we as individuals and as a collective work, desire is the glue, the fundamental driving force that moves creation. And that is what Venus is all about.

Venus in Leo Retrograde offers each one of us the opportunity to explore the desire we feel in ourselves. With Pluto, the journey will be the literal descent into the Underworld, evocating with extra oomph the myth of Venus going into the underworld.

Jupiter and Uranus in Taurus will have the upper hand tipping the balance towards their agenda. They are both in Venus’ house of Taurus, so Venus is obliged to comply with what they are urging her to explore.

Venus’s experiment triggers a part of our lives that we prefer to remain as they are. Habits in this area are hugely entrenched, and changing them requires soul-searching work.

The journey will feel uncomfortable, to say the least, because we will be thrown into areas we usually do not even look at for peace’s sake in ourselves and with others. And yet they hold the key to our own journey in this life.

The Breath of Life

For the ancients, the heart was the seat of intellect, not the mind. The heart was where the soul resided, where the essence of the individual ensconced itself for this incarnation. It is interesting to note that the more we have placed the mind as the individual ruler of our lives, the more we have departed from our true nature, our desires which only the heart knows.

For ages, the breath of life has bookmarked our existence.

A being was defined as alive when a creature newly born took its first breath. Death has been determined as the moment when the breath of life leaves the body. In the second half of the last century, this has changed. Death is now defined by the absence of electromagnetic waves in the brain, creating an artificial definition of death used lucratively for various medical procedures that, in my opinion, are highly debatable, but that is another story.

And yet the heart has an electromagnetic field much bigger than the brain. The heart sends more information to the brain, not vice versa. The brain only interprets what the heart signals. In other words, we colour the experiences we live.

The HeartMath Institute has much research showing how building coherence through the heart diminishes stress levels. When we are in a space of heart and mind coherence, we flow through life effortlessly, even if “bad” things happen. Magically life starts clicking into place.

Venus is the energy that brings together different isolated things, events, and people to create something new. Venus attracts what it needs for her desires to be fulfilled. And this is not something that is switched on and off. It is a magnetic field always there, continuously transmitting, always attracting. Not being in coherence will bring more things into existence that are not coherent with our true nature, heart desires, and soul desires.

Venus in Leo Retrograde offers the opportunity to experiment with desire, to feel its burn and consciously become a co-creator with the Cosmos.

The following is a short horoscope to help you feel what Venus in Leo Retrograde might mean for each sign.

Horoscope User Manual:

Remember the above planetary story when reading the following horoscopes and that these horoscopes can never replace a reading of your natal chart.

Read your Ascendant first. He is the helmsman of your whole life. (If you need to calculate your Ascendant, click here.)

If you were born by day, also read the Sun.

If you were born by night, also read the Moon.

Generally, the Sun represents where consciously we are shedding light, making sense of life. The Moon is how we react emotionally to the situation.