The Summer of 2012 has been a challenging one for many on a personal and collective level. Circumstances beyond our apparent control seem to come at us in waves. At times we can dodge the waves, other times we can ride them and sometimes they seem to overtake us. It would be safe to say that no one has gone unscathed on some level.

Friday August 17th there is a New Moon in the sign of Leo. Leo is the sign of creative self-expression and self-actualization. The ruling planet of Leo is the Sun, the center of our solar system. The star whose gravitational force holds all the bodies that orbit it in alignment. In an astrological chart it is the Sun is the integrative or wholeness principle. All experience is filtered through the energy of the Sun. It is the bottom line.

The overall energy of 2012 has been one of reevaluation, review, release and transformation. This has been especially true of our mental bodies and most specifically our logical left brains. Many of the ideas we have held sacred have been challenged, we have had to move away from our more logical mind as an overloading of information inundates us each day, and toward our intuitive or right brain. How the information feels has become more of an accurate representation of whether or not the information is viable.

This New Moon in Leo invites us to recreate ourselves. To take the lessons we have learned over this tumultuous period and integrate them into a more authentic ’self’.

Leo rules the heart, the central core of our body. This NM requires us to move into our central core touch our joy and build from there.

There are some very helpful aspects in the New Moon chart to aid us in creating just that. Most notably are two sextiles to the NM from both Mars and Saturn in Libra. These two planets just began a new cycle of becoming on Aug 15th when they were conjoined at 25 degrees of Libra. These sextiles offer us the structure and the energy to build our new selves.

As Saturn has been moving through the sign of Libra since October 2009 we have had much opportunity to renegotiate our relationships and come to understand what is necessary in our relationships. In 2012 Mars had it’s biennial retrograde phase in the sign of Virgo, requiring us to review and reevaluate how we expend our energies and how we could improve ourselves to be more healthy and whole. With all this behind us we are in a much better position to base our ‘new selves’ on hard earned wisdom and experience.

There are also some more challenging aspects to this New Moon. An inconjunct between Pluto in Capricorn and Mercury in Leo requires us to make adjustments in how we get our creative self-expression out there to the masses. As much as we would love to blurt out our new understandings, there are socially acceptable ways to get the information out without creating a backlash. Sometimes it’s best to blurt, this is not one of those times. Our information is valuable and even though you may have to jump through some hoops, it’s worth the trouble.

An opposition between Venus in Cancer and Pluto in Capricorn asks us to be aware of power struggles within our relationships, especially those within the family of origin. Uranus in a square to this opposition creates crisis that can free us from some of the constraints we either put on ourselves or are put on us.

And last, but far from least, Neptune is in a square to the nodes of the Moon. This square has been in force all summer, creating confusion as our cherished ideas about the structure of our reality dissipate into the ethers. Letting go of old mental structures while searching for spiritual meaning. Soon (August 30th) the nodes will shift into Scorpio/Taurus and the direction of our evolution will shift yet again.