Virgo season: boundaries, discernment, and the digestive system

somatic guidance for virgo season

The sun moves through the mutable sign of Virgo from August 23 until September 22.

Cardinal Air sign Libra will announce the official beginning of Autumn, but Mutable Earth Virgo holds the bittersweetness of endings in these last days of summer.

In traditional astrology, each sign rules a part of the body. Sagittarius rules the hips and thighs, Taurus rules the neck and shoulders, and so on.

Virgo traditionally rules the digestive system, which makes sense when we consider how this archetype is known for having exquisite boundaries. (This doesn’t mean all Virgos have this, because we’re all human and we’re all flawed and fallible. But the archetype of Virgo is known for this).

The digestive system decides how our most intimate, inner worlds will relate with the external world. We bring the external world in, in the form of eating and drinking, and then the digestive system decides what is nourishing, and what will be eliminated.

Virgo season in general, and specifically a Virgo season with all these retrogrades, is a wonderful opportunity to consider what nourishes, and what it ready to be released.

Because Virgo season rules the digestive system, it also rules the mesentery, an organ in your belly you may not even know about, as the mesentery was only classified as an organ in 2016. Prior to that, the mesentery was considered connective tissue, with the primary function of essentially anchoring and suspending the belly organs into the back wall of the abdomen. In 2016, medical technology had improved enough to let researchers and surgeons recognize what had been right there, in the center of us, all along: The mesentery is in your belly. In some very important ways, the mesentery is your belly.

The mesentery is the embryological origin of the belly organs. The stomach, spleen, gallbladder, pancreas, intestines…each of the belly organs develops in utero from the mesentery, like flower buds along a stem. Some researchers hypothesize that an adaptation of the mesentery is how humans became bipedal. It is highly innervated, highly vasculated, fatty and squishy, and central to our biology.

People who know me know I am a bit enamored of the mesentery. So much so that in my upcoming book I devoted an entire chapter to the mesentery and all it can teach us. It’s a bit strange, perhaps, to be so enthralled by an organ in such close relationship with the intestines. But as we learn more about the mesentery, we can see that not only is this previously unrecognized organ the origin of the belly organs, it holds the belly in what scientists call systemic continuity. Making the mesentery, in all its squishy glory, quite radical, if we really think about it.

Systemic continuity is in essence, community. The mesentery holds the digestive system in community, offering increased lymph and blood flow where and as it is needed, coordinating nervous system responses, and generally offering support.

There is no digestive system without the mesentery. So Virgo rules the mesentery as well as the digestive system.

Without getting into details that might be too much for the average reader, the digestive system has the role within the body of deciding what is useful - what will nourish - and what is not. What is nourishing is kept, and like Rumplestilskin spinning straw into gold, our bodies turn zucchini bread and potato chips into muscle and blood. What is no longer needed is eliminated, and we don’t need to talk too much about what that becomes.

We don’t need to talk about it because we already know that digging into it isn’t a fruitful activity as a daily practice. Is it good to keep tabs on? Yes. Can we learn some important things by examining it closely from time to time? Absolutely. But is this something I want to dig into ad nauseum day after day? Not me, no.

So why do we (why do I) do this with old relationships or relationship dynamics that have shown themselves to no longer be nourishing? Why is there this need to rehash over the details of what went wrong, to villainize and condemn those who have hurt us?

I’ve been thinking about this, in this Virgo season of retrogrades. Venus, which has been pulling our past up to be looked at since it went retrograde in July, officially stations direct today, September 3rd. In these months of Venus retrograde, I’ve been shown, at times quite uncomfortably, where some relationships, and some patterns within relationships, were pulling away my vitality rather than adding to it. With the help of friends, my therapist, Tarot cards, and long walks in the woods, I’ve been able to sort through many of these old patterns, searching for what was nourishing, and letting go (or at least trying to) of what isn’t.

Through the nature of our very physiology, the mesentery can teach us about the importance of nourishing community, rather than the dominant social paradigm of hyper-focusing on the individual. The digestive system is a lesson is the exquisite boundaries and discernment we each already contain as we daily go about the work of finding what is nourishing and simply eliminating the rest. In these last few hours of Venus retrograde, with Mercury, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, and Pluto all either in retrograde or heading there soon, there is a golden cosmic potential to take stock of what is nourishing, and what is not. The dominant cultural paradigm would have us closely examine what is no longer nourishing with the aim to pathologize - to turn those that have hurt us into villains and narcissists. Which, they might be. But for the far more frequent occurence of people being flawed people, as we navigate all of the intensities of life in 2023, perhaps it might be helpful to use these lessons from Virgo to simply discern what is nourishing, and put our energy towards that, and let that other shit go.

Drawing (c. 1507) by Leonardo da Vinci showing the principal organs, vasculature, and the female urinogenital system.

Source: http://www.visi.com/~reuteler/leonardo.html