Best way to know you are in shadowy territory? You can't make it all add up. There are holes in your position you could drive a bus through. It's not working anymore. Because everything becomes business under capitalism - just ask organised religion - we all have a glaring stinking problem in the whitewashed West. Find it at the intersection of spirituality, capitalism and abundance.

Try as we might it is nigh on impossible to ignore the siren song of the shadowlands when it keens to you. All this shedding year and well before it, shadows bigger than just the wayward facsimiles of tender selves and past participles, the vaster kind we pretend are not ours too.

The online inversion of our shadow, lightwashed for those looking for cheat codes to their underworld, isn't working. There are none but there is just so much more to authentic shadow work, the kind that changes lives and communities. Any wilful refusal to partipate in unspooling the cultural shadows that hold our worlds stuck at the crossroads of evolution is not everybody else's fault.

The strange in between is here. We have arrived to the stormy half moon fulcrum that dangles us precariously between solar and lunar eclipse. Neither here nor there, travelling between past and future without anchor or orientation by design. This place is both portal and portent, shimmering like cut glass and razor sharp on its edges.

The notion of “shadow work” had been clouded for me by the overuse of the phrase. Kerrie helped me to redefine what shadow work needed to be for me… a reuniting of all the parts of myself I had denied or cut off as a survival response to pain and trauma.

I spent a decade living in a flood zone. It is terrifying at first, often unheralded and arriving out of the blue with a disconcerting inevitability. But over the years as I would sit and watch storms dump rain in my tank and crossings go under, I began to see how unwilling we are to accept nature in whatever form she arrives.

A shout out and a salutation to my shadow dancers, old and new. I see you. Diving to unexplored outer reaches in search of buried treasure and fresh currents. Whose courage crackles and arcs even when the tides are strong and the crossing asks for confronting new medicine.

I see you. Your shadow lit from within and curling about you like a glittering shroud. Your eyes bright and clearer. Your bones shifted by the work. Your face taking a fresh shape.

Personal power is actually built by chewing on your own gristle. It is strengthened in times of adversity and challenge, particularly those that kick out the crutches and leave you to go it alone. Power is not restricted by external conditions, dictates or the actions of others - though all can knock you off your spot. It pivots on perspective and is nourished by our whole truth.

Maybe you have been lucky until now. Your life has whirled along, a sea of experiences that never stopped you in your tracks. That bad break up? You drowned it and moved on. The career hurdle? You switched gears. Life as you knew it had bones you put your weight on and the day to day was regular. Its tone and timbre was reliable. Your place in it and part to play known and understood.

The storm is here darklings and the sirens are ringing out around the world. To your bunkers, they cry. Seek shelter and protect yourself from the marauding virus that threatens life as we know it.

I bloody hope so. This tipping point has been ratcheting for some time.

Though Chiron has been in Aries since Feb last year, with the world burning then flooding then completely freaking out there has been precious little time to dive into our deepest existential identity wounds. Survival mode makes hasty decisions and rash vows. But there ain't nothing like isolation - and a gentle shunt from the stars - to push the world's individuals to grander considerations.

You don't have to do it alone, darklings. Just ask Stell and that big smile, the one borne of patient encouragement and unconditional belief. I know she can swim. I know you can too.

A word to the wise mermaids, as we navigate the fathoms of Pisces season and Mercury's emo retrograde. Though this sign cultivates the shamanic depths and our emotional currents, it also has a spectacular penchant for drama, delusion and evasive bypass. Pisces is just as great at opting out or cultivating unconsciousness. Everything has its shadow.

Not any journey to the shadowlands is a sunshiney walk in the park but all are undeniably worthy and transformative, a revolution within. When we accept the result is guaranteed - and my darklings it unequivocably is - we are better able to submit to the process itself. All of its many twists and turns, its great pain and even greater healing, its stunning capacity for teaching and understanding our sweet self.

Sometimes we aren't sure precisely how to do the good work of our life. We want to but we don't know where or how to start. That's where I come in and whisper softly to your soul to help her remember. Beyond my readings, I offer sessions to enhance your connection to your intuition and personal power. We dive into my full medicine bag, working together through whatever is vexing you.

Beware the Ides of March, they say. Gah. We have all been settling karmic debt and shadow dancing for weeks before that - and since. As we plunge into the sweet dark of the moon after a month or more in Meltdown City, the reckoning is here. When the moon makes new in Aries in a few short days, it will be dragging Chiron into its fiery imperative and kicking Mercury into forward gear. This will be a high impact transformation, the kind that we crave and quake.

Both Pluto and Mars have turned retrograde, joining taskmaster Saturn and truth bomb Jupiter in reverse gear. And although it may well feel like the brakes have been slammed on, in truth this an invitation to enter the shadowlands prepared to spend some highly instructive and revealing time walking among our skeletons, the denizens of our dark.

These beauties came home with me last night after a delicious full mooner, direct from the altar. Honouring the Virgo moon I chose to focus meditation on the shadow side of this energy that can often wallop us by fuelling our inner critic. This in-house naysayer, whose oxygen is criticism and whose routine belittlement serves only to lower our head, tries to keep us safe by keeping us small.