08/18/2026
Eclipse Season shadow work reflection 🖤
PSA: Apparently its necessary to announce that you're a human these days, because the new black and white theme is to either recycle AI written cliches, or announce that you are against AI at every single turn hoping for some kind of badge of honor. I'm not doing either of those things, just sending out a collective disclaimer that I have always written my own thoughts authentically, I have never needed AI to teach me how to speak, think deeply or write well, and I do not expect anyone to sing my praises or give me a gold star for that. If everyone could just take a puff of the Jesus flower and eat a sandwich when it comes to this, that would be great. Now, teacher face on.
One of the biggest lessons of my life, and of this entire eclipse season, has been the importance of not making decisions from emotional places. Even when the emotion is valid, pure, well intended, profound, but ESPECIALLY when it is pulling at your body and mind and nagging you nonstop. We have developed a habit of telling ourselves that this is intuition, as opposed to personal emotion.
Emotions are valid and have a place in our decision making, but forming habits around discerning whether or not that emotion has served you in the past when it was the driving force is critical right now. We are confronted with multiple scenarios everyday, and during the eclipse these scenarios are heightened.
I think sometimes we underestimate just how much our previous experiences shape what we interpret as an internal knowing. If something has happened enough times, or if we have responded to something the same way enough times, our nervous system can become very familiar with that response, and familiarity can feel an awful lot like intuition. We can feel something intensely and assume that because we felt it in our body, it must be telling us something important, when sometimes it is actually showing us something that still needs to be understood.
That does not mean you should ignore your emotions or distrust yourself. Quite the opposite actually, it means learning to stay with the feeling long enough to figure out what it is actually communicating before you turn it into a decision. There is a difference between recognizing that something is happening inside of you and deciding that what is happening inside of you requires you to act on it immediately.
And I think that distinction becomes especially important when you are dealing with situations that have a history. When you have already made a certain kind of decision from a certain kind of emotional place and you already know where that decision tends to take you, the opportunity is not necessarily to judge yourself for having made the decision before. It is to notice that you are standing in a familiar place again and ask yourself whether you actually want to follow the same path this time.
That is where accountability comes in, and I think accountability gets confused with shame far too often. Accountability is not beating yourself up for what you did when you did not know what you know now. It is being honest enough to acknowledge what your choices have produced, including when the outcome is uncomfortable, and allowing that information to actually influence what you choose next.
If we are constantly saying that we have learned something, but every time the same emotional trigger comes around we make the same decision anyway, eventually we have to be willing to look at whether we have actually integrated the lesson or whether we have simply become very good at explaining the pattern to ourselves.
this is also where things can get really complicated in relationships, because a lack of accountability does not always look like someone openly refusing to take responsibility. Sometimes it looks like changing the story after the fact, minimizing what happened, denying things that were previously acknowledged, shifting the focus onto your reaction instead of their behavior, or becoming so committed to protecting their own version of events that you start questioning your own memory and perception just to make the conflict stop. When dishonesty becomes a way of avoiding accountability, it can create a very specific kind of confusion, because now you are not only trying to process what happened, you are being pulled into an argument about whether what happened was real in the first place.
I think this is another place where emotional discernment becomes incredibly important. You do not have to prove your reality to someone who has already decided that acknowledging it would require them to take responsibility. You can listen to what they are saying without automatically accepting their version of events, and you can also step back from the need to convince them. Sometimes the most grounded response is to stop arguing with the narrative and start paying attention to the pattern, because patterns tend to tell the truth in ways that individual conversations sometimes do not.
That does not mean assuming that every disagreement is gaslighting, or that every person who remembers something differently is being dishonest. It means becoming willing to look at what consistently happens when accountability is requested. Does the person become curious about your experience, acknowledge their part, and participate in repairing what happened, or does the conversation repeatedly become about why you should not be allowed to have the perception you have?
There is a very big difference between someone saying, "I remember that differently," and someone repeatedly trying to convince you that your feelings, memories, observations, or boundaries are invalid simply because accepting them would require them to examine their own behavior.
That is one of the biggest pieces of this eclipse season. Not learning how to feel less, or how to become less emotionally responsive, but learning how to feel something without immediately assigning it authority. To let the feeling exist, to understand where it came from, to recognize what it is connected to, and then decide what deserves to happen next from a place that is a little more grounded than the initial reaction. That includes knowing when something inside of you is asking for patience and reflection, and knowing when something inside of you is asking you to stop arguing with what you have already observed..
