What a pairing of seasons it has been. A season of deep watery contraction to a season of fiery demanding expansion. They were exposing, they were raw, they were a real confrontation within our hearts (moon) and our egos (sun).
As Cancer season ended, Leo season began on July 22 2026 at 12:13 pm pst and ended on August 22 2026 at 7:18 pm pst.
And as promised at the end of last month’s post, this reflection would hold both seasons. Leo illuminated what Cancer stirred loose…
Cancer season showed me that we are on an infinite cycle. The infinite journey of life, death and rebirth. And sometimes that is a hard thing to come face to face with. The knowing that nothing is ever really finished, only passed through and returned to again.
A few years ago I learned something about Cancer energy I didn’t know before. That it is this energy of healing. With our Cancer placements, there is a specific kind of healing that the soul is asking us to undergo. This season brought on a new felt experience of healing for me and what it really takes to heal. What works, what’s needed, how differently that can look from person to person, and yet how there is still a kind of formula underneath it all. It’s body (moon) and mind (sun) integrating with one another.
Cancer season taught me the importance of healing and that it’s a lifelong ebb and flow, just like how the tides and moon always come and go.
We heal so that we can live more freely, more openly and freedom always asks us to release our grip first.
The surrender to the tide is the lesson. Letting go is hard for Cancer because the archetype is built to clutch. It has the claws for a reason. Its instinct is to hold onto family, memory, safety, history. But the shell is not the source of safety, it is only a tool. When we over identify with protection, we go stagnant. The ocean, Cancer’s true home, only stays life giving because it never stops moving. Our emotions have to move and that is why they are represented as the tide. The work is to realize that true security isn’t found in our comforts, but in the moon-like capacity to wax and wane, to let the tide go out and trust that it will return, without needing to hoard the water. Misbalanced Cancer is often caught in a loop of nostalgia, feeding on the past because the present feels too exposed. It forgets that the shell is meant to be outgrown. This has been a big reminder for me.
Allowing a return requires a terrifying kind of faith: the belief that you are resilient enough to survive the interval of being empty. It is the wisdom of the Moon, which proves every month that disappearing is not the same as dying. To let go is to trust that your internal vitality is not something you have to manufacture or defend with walls, but something that belongs to the rhythm of life itself. We must not be the administrator of the water but the one who swims in it.
So why is the hardest thing always the letting go yet staying in your centre? It’s an answer I’ve been searching for these past two astrological seasons and probably most of my life so far. I search for it because I don’t know how to do it. With my own personal Mars in Cancer, I’m terrified of it.
I kept coming back to the body this season too. Our emotional body is so wired into our physical one. And having this play out in my own life, unprocessed emotions, buried emotions are what wreak havoc on us until we actually, honestly feel them. If we never feel them, do we just spiral with them indefinitely? Some days I’m too emotional to play it cool, and as hard as that is for me, I’m learning how to be ok with that.
Looking back on both these seasons now, I can see that Cancer was our emotional incubator and Leo was the fiery manifestation of everything that incubation stirred up. All that emotionalism has to go somewhere. Leo wants us to transmute our emotional experiences of life into creative self-expression, but that means we must then be seen and recognized in it.
I’ve been sitting with Leo energy a lot this season. I was in my head about all that it symbolizes, represents and evokes energetically within us. I had lots of thoughts around my own creative self-expression. I kept circling the question of why we need, want, and sometimes strive to receive attention? Why do we as humans need to be seen? Validation feeds us in some way right? It’s a real and healthy part of being human. I just know I struggle with accepting that side of myself.
I think this is exactly how Pluto in Aquarius opposing the Sun for the majority of this season revealed itself to me. It had me questioning what we share, what we consume, and the ethos underneath all of it that I don’t fully align with. The consumerism, the validation-chasing, the shadows of Leo laid bare.
Leo season brought up, in a very real way, the shadows within myself that still have control over my own vitality. That’s still a process I’m inside of, not something I’ve resolved. It’s even shaping what I feel comfortable sharing here. Back in Cancer season, I started to feel like some of what I wanted to write was too personal to put out into the open, so I waited to let things incubate in the season of self-expression. I thought about releasing some of these essays as paid posts, to have a little more privacy. I let that thought drift for now, though I’m not entirely sure why. I’ve had the same instinct with my social media. I made my profile private for the first time in years, and I haven’t posted most of the photos I’ve taken in months! I went dark in the season when the light is at its fullest. Because expression is also exposure. I know we all love being seen and validated. Even in my struggles with it, I know a part of me likes it. So there’s this tension within me that Leo illuminated, a fear of being seen because being seen feels vulnerable.
In being honest with these essays, I’ve actually been losing momentum with this project of seasonal reflections I committed myself to writing every month. I let Cancer season slide by waiting to fully feel my way through Leo season before I could write about either. Cancer season was all about feeling for me. Trying to navigate and actually understand my own emotions is always a process. And I think because Cancer season felt so raw, Leo season became more about reassessing my own Leo shadows and wounds. Pluto opposing the Sun can do that.
Throughout these two seasons, I’ve relearn that you cannot think your way out of a feeling. You have to feel it, and then find some healthy way to let it out. Maybe creative self-expression is the best remedy there is? So I’m still showing up here not to be seen but for my own promise to myself to give life to this creative muscle and form of expression. To practice sharing even in times I feel delicate.
It flows almost too perfectly sometimes, how one season’s ruffle can be remedied by the one that comes next. Cancer is followed by Leo, meaning deep emotional contraction is followed by the authentic, creative expression of it.
I can’t fully know if anyone else moved through these same themes because I’ve been so far inside my own experience these past two seasons. The retrograde in Cancer season pulled me fully into my feelings. Pluto in Aquarius opposing the Sun in Leo season pulled me into a tension with my own ego. We even had a Solar Eclipse in Leo that I barely mentioned that definitely evoked energy related to our purpose and vitality that we had to release in order to create fresh space.
So maybe that’s the real handoff between these two seasons. Not resolution, but just sharing honestly. Cancer asked me to feel it all the way through. Leo asked me why it’s so hard to be seen and that question will ultimately lead me to deeper alignment within myself. And for now I’m still in the process of it all, exploring those parts that are still sticky, still needing integration between my own heart and ego.