The natural wisdom of Libra: finding balance in motion

September’s equinox signals the Sun’s ingress into Libra.  And, as the Sun crosses the equator, day and night are exactly the same length. Ancient people were much more in tune with seasons, so it’s no coincidence that Libra is the sign that represents balance.

The equinox marks a turning point and the need to adjust and realign with changing temperatures and daylight hours.

We can understand Libran energy more clearly by tapping into the natural wisdom of the seasons.

If it’s spring we think about ‘spring cleaning’, of our houses, bodies, even our minds. Throwing off the stodginess of winter foods and feeling our muscles relax into the warmth of summer. If September means winter, as it does in the traditions of the North (which we still hold to in the South – making for a bit of a topsy-turvy effect ), then it’s a time for consolidation after the pleasures of summer. Virgo is the harvest sign, and with the harvest now collected Libra prepares the village to hunker down for winter.

For those born when the Sun is in the sign of Libra, balance becomes an important theme in your life. This doesn’t mean you’re born knowing all about balance and how to do it, or that your inability to find balance is an indication you’re a failed Libra!

It simply means that discovering the art of balance is part of your lifetime’s work. Your experiences, your talents, your challenges will all be woven through with what you discover, and what balance means to you.

There’s much to learn from Libran energy about seeking equilibrium while also being in relationship with all things.

While those who have strong Libra in their chart are overtly working with the theme of balance, there’s very few of us who aren’t trying to find our ‘centre’ in the midst of exciting and chaotic lives.

This is not helped by the fact that many of us in this modern world are living split lives.
Maybe it’s that our work, where we spend the majority of our time and energy, is ultimately unsatisfying and purposeless. For some it’s a feeling of being an outsider in your family of birth, leading to a strange sense of exile, split off from the ‘tribe’. Or perhaps we love our partner dearly but the compromises we make in the relationship leave us feeling that something is blocked within us, or in the atmosphere between us.

More recently I’ve met people for whom this split comes from a sense that they are not of this world, because they feel so estranged from this earth reality. For these people it seems like either the world is just a weird, confusing place, or they’re the weird ones. (Let me just say, it’s not you, it’s this bizarre unbalanced social system that we live in!)

Libran energy is about learning how to relate with reciprocity and cooperation in a world that seems greedy and self-serving to the core. Mostly this has to be learnt through living it.

We lose our balance when we’re split off from some sense of feeling ‘true’ to the self. Like a carpenter with a ‘spirit level’, Librans are ‘truing’ themselves – bringing the self into the exact position or form required – in the face of forces which would resist balance.

A perfect symbol for this is not the weighing scales often associated with Libra, but the dynamic looping of the infinity sign. This symbol reveals the movement of energy that happens when scales or pendulums seek the balance point. It gives us a clearer understanding of how to work with energy to be in balance, rather than to simply observe it without feeling it in our bodies.

The natural world reveals balance to be a dynamic equilibrium. A continual movement between polarities that underpins the foundational electromagnetic energy of our bodies and the earth.

Here is the real secret at the core of Libran wisdom: balance is the continual motion back and forth between opposites. There is no permanent safe harbour, where the still centre is fortified against the crashing chaos of life. For that would end up being resistance, and a state of siege. Very un-Libran.

Instead Librans need to call upon their air element, to practice lightness in the face of heaviness, and movement when confronted by rigidity. Librans are cultivating the ability to continually return to balance. This is not the about holding fast to a position, it’s the ability to flow easily as air.

When Libra is emphasised in your chart, you’re not a fence sitter as many like to say. Yes, Libra vacillates, but this is only a negative trait in a world fixated on dualistic thinking. Your vacillation is not indecision, it’s the evasion of rigid and fixed states. There’s no balance to be found there.

The Libran soul finds centre while in motion between the dualities.

Through Libra we learn how to pull off a balancing trick where one thing never dominates another, and thus each is able to find their place of ease and grace in the world.