Monika Bravo I AM OPtimist
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Being Born Again While the World is Resetting:
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Being Born Again While the World is Resetting:

Why Individuation is So Meaningful in My Life

Fragmentation

Here I am, contemplating all the changes that I have witnessed in my life and in the world, and looking back and looking forward is something that I love doing, but always anchoring myself in the present moment. Because I love studying my chart and the chart of others, as I do many readings a week, and I also look at financial charts, I am observing how the behavior of the world is unfolding. I am observing behavior, but I am also tracing patterns that repeat themselves through history and patterns that repeat themselves in my own life. It is interesting to see that while I cannot predict things, I can start observing also my behavior and how I respond to the environment, how more or less the upcoming transits or progressions in my life could unfold. Again, I am not making predictions. I am just saying, oh, I have this sensation that this probably is going to unfold this way. And then I can look back and say, because in the past, these were the patterns and the tendencies.

Uranus is about to turn retrograde at one degree of Gemini (09/04/25), moving back into Taurus and traveling all the way to 27°. It will remain retrograde until February 4, 2026 — five months exactly before the next eclipse season — and then moves forward again, re-entering Gemini along with Venus on April 26th, one day before my birthday. This is the last revision before the leap forward, the last pause before individuation jumps into new form. Uranus propels us to change; Uranus says this is no longer needed; Uranus deconditions what has crystallized and stopped growing.

As Uranus goes retrograde, I think back on the last seven years since 2018: what values I was able to give myself, where I am heading, what the new territory is. And even if I do not yet know it fully, I can begin to sense it.

So I do this myself, but I also have two anchors that I work with. Two practitioners that I work with monthly and mirror and hold space for my unfolding. And I make recordings of my thoughts daily. Some of them become articles in Substack. Some of them go to the pool of the chapters that I am writing for my book. But mostly it is something that is a mirror that helps me reflect the progression of my life.

The word individuation is central to this. If you are into Jungian psychology, you will be connected to it. It means to liberate yourself from trauma, liberate yourself from your conditioning. Jung started using this word in his early work and made it central in Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (1928). He wrote:

“Individuation means becoming a single, homogeneous being, and, in so far as ‘individuality’ embraces our innermost, last, and incomparable uniqueness, it also implies becoming one’s own self. We could therefore translate individuation as ‘coming to selfhood’ or ‘self-realization.’” (CW 7, §266)

For me, the path of individuation is a path toward joy and toward self-love. It is far from aligning with powerlessness or staying bound to victimization; it is about discerning the strength that comes from embracing my inner child, letting that part of me be seen and integrated.

In my life, there have always been disruptions that make me land in new territory. And it is always about initiating these shakes. The world is shaking, and at the same time I am awakening into new realizations. I carry a Moon balsamic to Neptune in Scorpio, fused with my Midheaven, so the emotional field and the dissolving of form have always pulled me toward closure, toward endings that feel like gateways yet full of divine inspiration.

In studying evolutionary astrology, I found some tapes from my first classes with my teacher around the end of 2017. It is interesting because in one of those tapes we were talking about how my chart is pretty much about balsamic (ending) relationships. Jupiter is balsamic to my Sun, Mercury retrograde kazimi leans toward the Sun in Taurus in the third house, always pulling thought and voice into integration, into distillation rather than expansion, a grounded synthesis emerges in every query.

But I also have a couple of points that balance the chart: the oppositions of Saturn and Uranus, of Chiron and Pluto, and of the Moon and the Sun. These are like anchors in the chart. They give me the polarity that I need in order to snap out of whatever individuation I want to do. Saturn in Pisces in my first house faces Uranus in Virgo in the seventh, an axis of endings and beginnings of form and disruption, of structure and sudden needed breaks. The Sun in Taurus opposes the Moon in Scorpio, a full moon written into my birth, teaching me how to stand in polarity and let both sides speak with intensity yet grounded in the embodiment of the material experience.

I do it even with so many balsamic signatures. I do not simply rest in dissolution. The Aquarian Rising, the quincunx from Uranus in Virgo to the Ascendant, the South Node of the Moon in the eleventh house — the constant impulse of Uranian energy keeps me awake, keeps me starting again each day. This is the energy that brought me here to myself now, but it is also the energy that is helping me define the direction of my life. And one component about Uranian–Aquarian energy is using the practice of observation. So I am always observing, and also the balsamic part is about synthesis. And this, with my 6/2 profile in Human Design and the Left Cross of Alignment, proves that my design is here to realign with the new person that I need to be and utilize the aspects that are supporting this realignment into a new reset. I am ready to be walking the walk and not just talking the talk.

This is why I see individuation not only as closure, but as beginning. Without the component of individuation, I could just rest in the dissolving movement of my balsamic chart, but individuation insists on birth. It insists on waking up every day, all the time. The quincunx between Uranus in Virgo and my Aquarius Ascendant is the signature of daily adjustment, of being pushed into alignment again and again. This tension keeps me alive, keeps me refining my choices, keeps me awake to beginnings.

So I am looking at this and I am looking at the world reset of February, and I am looking at my next birthday, and I am seeing that Pluto is ascending. It is going to make me go into a completely new me. It is almost like I am in a new shop trying on new clothes, not yet ready to wear them outside, but becoming familiar with the new clothes and the new ways of seeing myself. I was born into a balsamic chart, where so many cycles are closing — the Moon to Neptune, Uranus to Pluto, Jupiter to the Sun, Mercury leaning into the Sun, Saturn in Pisces. Dissolution and completion are written into my beginning. But now, as Pluto rises on my Ascendant, it does more than continue that balsamic tone: it forms a quincunx to my natal Uranus in Virgo. This is not the Virgoan 150° quincunx of internal crisis pushing from within; this is the outer 270° quincunx, the pressure of society, environment, and relationships demanding alignment. The emphasis to break free is amplified — it is now or never. I am already there, but not yet fully there, standing in the passage between what has ended and what is demanding to begin.

It is incredible because my North Node is in the fifth house. So part of my vulnerabilities is to really show up and validate myself and give myself the value that I need in order to just come out on the stage and be completely me with my arms open. And I am starting to do that more and more. It has been a beautiful unfolding for me. The South Node rests in Capricorn in the eleventh, ruled by Saturn, which sits in my first house in Pisces — the ruler of the past positioned in the house of the self, at the end of the zodiac. A cycle closing, a new one opening through me.

I have given myself so much time in the last few months to really integrate this. It feels like a very big rehearsal for something unknown, because we do not know what the great reset is going to be. It will not be only financial, but societal and many other things, integrating numerous dimensions.

And while I prepare for this reset, I notice how much of individuation is also tied to the way I have carried the gaze of others. The inherited gaze has shaped my nervous system since childhood, teaching me to anticipate judgment before it arrived. Individuation along cycles and transits, it is also about how I learn to see through my own eyes.


The Inherited Gaze: The Frequency of Judgment

The meditation is this: how does it feel to be seen through your own eyes, with no correction, no defense, no anticipation? To allow criticism when it serves refinement, but not to breathe it in as the condition of love. This is the new form of security Uranus is opening: a nervous system not wired to adapt to judgment, but wired to carry value as its baseline frequency. To be present without bending, to breathe without anticipation, to see through your own eyes.

This insight comes from the fact that I have attracted many people in my life with Virgo or sixth-house placements, and also early Gemini placements, that bring me back into resonance with my mother. My mother’s Chiron and Sun shaped my nervous system in my fourth house, and that is where Uranus is right now: destabilizing the inherited gaze and opening a new form of security, one not conditioned by judgment, but built on presence.

At the same time, my seventh and eighth houses carry Virgo energy. The nodal axis of Virgo–Pisces has tested this polarity again and again. These placements have shown me how relational patterns, projection, and judgment were the fields where my value was measured. My second house, with Chiron squaring my Venus in Gemini, reveals how this sense of value was shaped very early in life: my nervous system learning to anticipate love by avoiding judgment, adapting to the gaze of the other. That gaze I felt was filled with judgment, but these last months I checked and it was my projection — yes, they might be judgmental but that speaks more about them than me, and I noticed I was very judgmental with me too, not too perfect, human.

I see how every relational field has tested my boundaries in different ways. At times I have had to cut things short—when someone tried to take what I was not willing to give, or when the space of respect was crossed. At other times I have been able to stay, to soften, to integrate without abandoning myself. What I am practicing now is this: to remain in presence with another’s gaze, even when it carries criticism, and not to let that criticism define the space. To see someone embodying their own path, their own rhythm, and to hold myself steady enough that I do not kill the relationship, nor bend under the weight of their eyes.

Recently I was in a situation where normally I would have been very aware of the gaze of others, insecure about being judged. But I followed a sense of presence and watched myself speak without that gaze, without feeling judged. I was free, and I loved that.

The last two days have carried an unmistakable theme of release and clarity. I finally closed a storage unit I had been paying for since moving in 2020. Inside were fragments of past work and process, things I thought might one day matter. But after five years of not opening those boxes, I knew the truth: they no longer belonged to my present or future. Letting them go cost me something in money, but what it returned was freedom, openness and trust.

That same current moved into relationship. For months I had carried the weight of the gaze of others’ judgment, replaying the fear I was wired with growing up. With the transiting Sun conjunct Uranus in my seventh house this week, I initiated subtle contact. The answer does not matter as much as the act of giving space to doubt. It was about clearing the projection, stepping out of silence, and initiating from my own clarity. Both actions—the storage and the messages—were mirrors. They showed me what Uranus in the fourth and Uranus entering Gemini is demanding: movement, liberation, and the courage to dissolve what no longer has value. Venus retrograde has tested me on value, accountability, and the unnecessary need to be liked. These decisions have broken that loop. What remains is lighter, freer, and unmistakably my own.

“The more you try to erase yourself, the more you appear. Every attempt to vanish leaves another trace. Every time you try to make yourself invisible, your outline grows clearer.”
Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

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