What I learned about myself in the last Full Moon Eclipse? Is that I have so much fears within me. I wrote it all down, and I burnt it under the eclipse totality. All these fears are not just what’s on the surface. Every fear has a deeper meaning when you dare to dig deep enough. For example, underneath my fear of driving lies my fear of death. Not my death, but the death of my children if we got into an accident with me driving them, or what happens to them if I’m dead too soon in a freak accident. I learned that fears have layers, it is never just about that one thing you think you fear. I had been doing hypnotherapy to overcome my fear of driving, and through this process, I uncovered more issues that were just lying in my subconscious mind. The fact that maybe it had something to do with the guilt of my dad’s passing, or that weird childhood room warping nightmare that often woke me up running to my parent’s bed in the middle of the night, I had to relive it all. You can imagine, it’s not very pleasant, but at least I have a new understanding of my fear now.
I have also gained clarity about my most important relationship in my life. I had to let go of the version of the husband I once knew, fell in love and got married with. Everyone told me the Maunga brings people here to heal. I guess here I am, going through it all one thing at a time. I have also come face to face with my deepest upset with myself of feelings of jealousy. I thought I was jealous of what or who some people are naturally, but I am not jealous of them exactly. I am jealous of the friendships or relationships they have, that I myself yearned for. You see, I truly believe we all need to feel connected and belonged and I know deep down I want to feel connected to someone or some groups. The kind of connection that is not just linked by hobbies, but beyond words can define.
Through the mundane of dishwashing and internal self-talk after the eclipse, I realize that if I want to have such connections, I need to be willing to open up myself to trust those I wish to connect with. But trust is a difficult thing for me, because I have been betrayed by friends I thought I could trust but only ended up hurting me badly. I am not the kind of person who needs a big group of friends to hang out with, in fact I avoid that. But I like to have my close knit friends around. You can imagine moving countries means having to make new connections and new friendships. The older one gets, the harder it literally is to make new friends. To meet someone new, it takes time to cultivate trust, honesty, openness and see if we vibe. I have definitely found a few good friends here whom I feel easier to open up to than others. Perhaps at the back of my mind, I also remember an Indian restaurant owner in Nelson, the original city we wished to settle down in told us that everyone will check you out for at least 2 to 3 years before they will decide if you are worthy to be a friend or not. That hit me hard. It had made me feel that me and my family are baits in the ocean, being eyed by sharks around us, unsure when we’ll be eaten up. Maybe that is why I just can’t feel quite 100% at ease here, knowing that some Kiwis are close knitted and perhaps not quite as welcoming as we thought when foreigners enter the land.
A client of mine back in Singapore had also told me about her experience living with a Kiwi partner in NZ. Her exact words were, in Oz, racism is in your face, but in NZ, people are nice to you on the surface, but you can feel the racism underneath. That honestly came as a shock to me back then, because I never felt it during our visits as tourists. However, having lived here for more than a year now, I can finally understand her sentiments. I won’t deny it is not true. So this also means that it will be way harder for me to discern who’s real and who’s not. Luckily for me, my senses and vibes about people are pretty accurate, and I trust my gut about who I meet. There’s another thing about Kiwi time. You know how everything can be so slow and relax, and messages are also replied in Kiwi time. So I have to learn not to take it personally when people simply took their time to reply, and assume they must be busy, or they just don’t think I’m worth their time replying and actually be OK with that. The Singaporean efficiency in me does not like that one bit, but in order to adapt, I have to learn to reply slowly too.
Eclipses are famous for shunning people back onto the paths they are meant to be on, so under this eclipse, I’m not surprised by my desire to drop some fears, loose some inhibitions, and letting some people fade into the background without thinking too much into it. It’s a chance for ‘cleaning house’ if you imagine yourself, your body, your spirit as the house you need to declutter of some energies from time to time. So what lessons have you learned in this first Full Moon Eclipse in Virgo for 2026? If you are a foreigner new to living in NZ, I would love to hear how you relate to the community you live in.
