In The Book of Water: Healing, Regeneration, and Recovery, Steven Forrest brings us to the final step in the healing process that began in the sign of Cancer. We first need to feel, he tells us, experience and accept our emotions. In Scorpio, we do the hard work of confronting the truth at the heart of our emotions, facing our fears and guilt – and our accountability. But these steps were just the beginning. In Pisces, we come to understand that we all are part of a large fabric of human experience, and we all suffer and struggle to find our way through the dark. There is a lightening which comes with this realization, Forrest writes. We can see the humor in the situations we fall into, the faults we exhibit on a regular basis, and the way life’s frustrations unite us all. And “we find compassion,” Forrest tells us, and “perspective, and forgiveness. We let things go. We get over ourselves.” Our passages through Pisces, if done consciously and without sinking into escape mode, bring us to healing, regeneration, and recovery. We no longer need to carry the life-denying burden of our wounds.
I turned to the chart of Drew Barrymore, a Pisces, who has also written a memoir giving us a window into her emotional journey through loss and addiction to a place of positivity and happiness. She was born into chaos, with an absentee father who would reappear erratically to terrify and abuse her mother and her. Drew’s mother was a failed actress and full-time party girl who used Drew’s earnings from movie roles to support them from the time Drew was a young child and starred in ET. From a young age, Drew was given drugs and alcohol by her mother and mother’s friends, and by the time she was a teen-ager, she was living in a state of anarchy, with no boundaries, rules – or family. In Drew’s chart, can see this challenging family experience with the Moon, her nurturing, conjunct Saturn in detriment in Cancer (a mother who could not meet her own needs and so could not parent her child) opposite Mars in Capricorn (a distant and yet aggressive father).
Drew’s Pisces journey began when she, lost in the emotional chaos of her Cancerian Moon, faced Scorpio Uranian crisis in her sixth house, and tapped into her Piscean idealism to realize she did not like the person she was becoming. She had an innate desire to be good, positive, and loving, as shown by the gift of her Sun’s ruler Jupiter being in its own sign and conjunct Venus in its exaltation. She sought out friends and mentors who could help her in her quest to be a better human, and she gradually built a life with valued work and the family she had always craved.
But she admits in her memoir Wildflowers that she is still a work in progress. She has been divorced three times, with the challenge to relationships suggested by Neptune close to her Descendant squaring her Piscean planets, bringing illusion and then disillusion to marriage. Neptune’s long transit through Pisces would be emphasizing this square in her chart, and Saturn now beginning its journey through Pisces suggests she may be working on the healing around relationship wounding.
In fact, as Saturn is in Pisces, we are all given the opportunity to complete the water cycle and work towards healing old wounds – particularly in the Pisces place in our chart. “Life is very interesting,” Drew Barrymore once said. “In the end, some of your greatest pains, become your greatest strengths.”
