top of page

July Solar Eclipse: Feeling safe and protected


This week’s Solar Eclipse in Cancer is happening pre-dawn July 3 for Australia, and July 2 for most of the rest of the world.

Cancer represents the Mother, and the Feminine. This sign is all about what makes you feel safe, protected and nurtured. These topics might be on your mind a lot more this week/this month. You’ll have a stronger sense of what makes you feel safe, protected and nurtured, and what doesn’t. Some of you will feel compelled to take action to move toward what does – and ditch what doesn’t. In some cases the eclipse will do much of the work for you. That is, eclipses are times when fated events happen to accelerate our life path. People enter or exit our lives, doors open and close, things happen that change everything.

Old wounds and current issues can be triggered related to anything you’re doing to push away what you truly need on an emotional level. Themes can come up related to intimacy, connection, old ‘inner child’ patterns, rejection, and situations regarding home and family.

Questions to ponder on this week (use your journal for deeper insights):

  • What do you truly need right now on an emotional level? For example, you might want a new relationship, a new job or a new home. Ask yourself: What am I seeking from a new relationship/job/home emotionally? What is it that I want to feel? Why do I really want this?

  • Are you over-protecting yourself from being hurt or failing? Ask yourself, what am I really afraid of?

  • Are you living life in a comfortable, yet uncomfortable, shell, (Cancer is the sign of the Crab) hiding from the world? Ask yourself, Can I allow my fears to be what they are, and go for what I want anyway? Ask yourself: how is this shell serving me? (or was it once serving me, but now it is sabotaging me?) As children we can take on beliefs that protected us then, but are non-helpful in our now adult lives. We may have learned that keeping quiet or being good made our parents love us or kept us safe, but as adults we now find it hard to voice and express our true selves. We may have created a pattern of constantly needing to be saved in order to get a parent’s attention, but now as an adult this pattern is keeping us from living a thriving, functioning, successful life. We can associate staying small with being loved, and thus we subconsciously associate expansion and independence with losing that love. Cancer is the Child Self to the opposite sign Capricorn’s Adult/Parent. So a lot of people will feel a big push to ‘grow up’ during this eclipse, and let go of old restrictions that have stemmed in some way from one or both parents.

  • Are you hiding who you really are to protect the feelings of others, or to protect your own self? Ask yourself, can I express more of my truth? If it is genuinely not safe to do this in your current situation, can you acknowledge your truth to your own self without shame and with love and compassion?

  • Are you holding yourself back due to fear of being judged, ridiculed or trolled? Feel into your most healthy version of self-protection. For some, getting off social media feels liberating. For others, it’s about being on there, deleting feeds that don’t make you feel good and blocking unwanted comments. Cancer is about setting and maintaining healthy boundaries. It can be a process of trial and error to find what works best for you in the boundaries department, be it related to your relationships, work, social media or anything else.