Exploring and Excavating your shadows: The Venus Retrograde In Scorpio as a healing tool.

You might have heard already, but Venus, the planet of love, beauty, value, worth, and money is retrograding in the sign of Scorpio and Libra from October 3rd to November 13th 2026 and then back again in Scorpio. As she is retrograding, she is completing a 100 year cycle, finalizing her Venus Start point (with a Venus conjunction with the Sun, a Cazimi on October 23rd). This is her descent to the underworld, your underworld. What does it have to say about you? Have no fear but fear itself, for the treasure it will unearth will bring you completion.

I was born with Venus in Scorpio, and I was struggling to understand what this meant for me. I had heard all sorts of preconceived notions from people around me about this placement and frankly, it never made sense to me.

Today, as I feel more in touch with my personal astrology and the energetics of it, I am being ushered into my underworld and how it holds the roots of my light. Through this journey, my spirit team is being led by what I call “shadow guides” who are here to help you in navigating your shadows, and mine is none other than the Greek Goddess Hekate.

What is Venus in Scorpio?

Venus is the planet holding the energetics of abundance, love, and money. All of us have a different meaning and relationships with those themes, so being clear about what power they hold will help you get a more personalized understanding about Venus’s influence in your chart.

In astrology, Scorpio, a water sign, is about depth. Picture water that is so deep, it’s hard or impossible to explore, but also the stagnant water that is murky and hard to see through. Exploring such water requires a lot of preparation and inner work to protect you from its impact. Scorpio gets a bad reputation as a sign of darkness and evil. Scorpio is usually a misunderstood sign because they are able to perceive and reflect the wounds and dark parts of a person. They cannot prevent it, it is their design. What you are perceiving in them is nothing more than what you are holding in your own depth. They are not scared of exploring the depths of a situation, but at times, when they do not manage their energy well, they tend to stay in the darkness and embody it, rather than embodying the light that comes from it. A healthy scorpio energy is able to go in and out of the depth to gather the treasures and bring it back to the surface. Just like Hekate who is able to move to Hell and back while remaining powerful in both.

When a benefic planet like Venus is in a sign so deep and dark, the contradictions of energies can make it hard to understand its message: the water is not clear. However, it is in discomfort that we can find the treasure holding our light. When Venus is in the light of Scorpio, it reveals all of its facets and tend to make the less confortable more noticeable: obsession, jealousy, manipulations, … So this Venus retrograde in Scorpio is bringing you back to feelings and emotions that were triggered by this uncomfortable traits in order to teach you something valuable, worthy about yourself.

So, think about it, since October 3rd (and until November 13th) what has come to the forefront that is putting you back to the feelings of jealousy, manipulations, and obsession? It can be a new situation in appearance with the redundancy of unpleasant feelings. But this time, you are a different person, more aware, with more tools and more self-sovereignty to address them.

What Personally came for me

As a personal Venus in Scorpio, I am used to deal with darkness in my relationships. I tend to be unconsciously attracted to suffering and darkness because it means that I will find a lot of light. As an energy healer, my practice is often about going through uncomfortable feelings, emotions and stories of people in order to get them to the same enlightened place of understanding and forgiveness.

So let me give you a personal example of what this Venus in Scorpio has dug up for me.

Around the end of September, I received an email from a company claiming to have rights to photographs I had apparently used in blog posts written for my language school back in the days. This company wrote several threatening emails asking me to pay or else, I will be sued for copyright enfringement. This looked like a scam (we get so many of them these days), but for some reason, I felt as if my livelihood was at stake. It was the most disturbing email I had ever received and felt it to my stomach and felt like I was going to throw up. Then, I went on auto pilot, and I watched myself react as if all the work I had ever done was gone. I could not recognize myself through this reaction and I became scared of being reprimanded, punished, and almost as if I was going to go to jail and die. Such a dramatic reaction that pulled me back to past experiences. While all this was unfolding, I knew that I was being taught a lesson.

After this first wave of fear, came the more calm and logical parts of myself that asked the right questions: “who is this compagny?” “why are they reaching me through email?” “what rights do they have on these pictures?” “why would they go after a language school’s blog from 10 years ago that is aimed at disseminating information and therefore has a right to fair use of photography as long as the source is mentioned?” Slowly, it started to make no sense, but I did not feel safe yet.

So instead of staying in fight of flight, I decided to use the tools I know and I consulted my Akashic Records to see what was going on and here is the message I got:

“I am walking in a long hallway, walked side by side by two guards. I am far outside of Earth, on a possible spaceship or space station.

I am sad, sad to have left Earth. I have left people behind that I cared for a lot. I am so sad in fact that my fate doesn’t matter anymore. All I can think about is going back to Earth to continue whatever I was doing with the people I loved.

I am walking in this never-ending hallway, towards A King that used to scare me: a person that stands high on their throne surrounded by their court who is only around because of his loudness. But I am walking towards this fate, with a fear of punishment that I did not fear anymore because something greater than me had lived through me, Earth.

I walk into the court, and the king , high on his throne is screaming at me. I cannot hear or understand anything he says. I am paying looking back to Earth, not him. He keeps screaming louder and louder, until the court realizes that his screaming does nothing to him. I ignore him, I am focused on what is important to me.

Little by little, the court around him switch their gaze from me to him. pointing out to him that he has no effects, and in fact, no power. The only power he ever had was given by the very people he was screaming at. As the court gazed at him longer and longer, he ended up having to justify himself about his screaming and lost all kind of power and legitimacy.

Then, I was escorted back to the hallway by the guards. Nothing happened to me. In that moment, my guides said “You give power to people by your reaction. Power is in the hands of those who wield it. The loudest people have the least to say”.

My experience with the email was a reminder of what needed to be healed: manipulations of narrative and smear campaign can only hold if I give it power and attention. The appearance of power does not have a hold over me. This is nothing but an illusion. I must stand strong in my power and yelling louder does not mean that you can do anything other than yell.

Then, I chose to consult with a copyright lawyer to get a better understanding, to reclaim my power, by understanding the situation rather than taking it at face value; because now, I am a different person and I know I can stand up for myself. The lawyer was familiar with that company, copyright trolls, and explained to me their tactics, saying “they bark louder than they bite”, which I thought was a very validating phrase for me, and recommended me to ignore them. If they wanted to sue you, they would have and If they were to sue you, you’d have a strong defense of fair use. I felt reassured of course and validated.

I wanted to go deeper because this is not the first time that I have experienced such things. What is this wound? Why is it showing up now? After all, things repeat when we have not learned the lessons. That’s when I related this story to past stories of people creating false narratives about me, sharing it with people who would then turn their back on me, without hearing my side of the story.

Manipulations was a recurrent theme in my life since I was 7 years old.

The Teacher Who Taught me Pain

I have always loved school, the structure of it made me feel safe, but when I was 7 years old, I had a teacher who decided to make me his personal scapegoat. He became my first bully. This story takes place in France.

To give you a bit of backstory, the teacher I am referring to started dating the mother of one of my classmates who happened to be my neighbor as well. The street I grew up on felt like an extended family because we were all close to each other and all the kids would play together and go to the same school. This teacher started to show up in my neighborhood with his own kids from a previous marriage and one day, his son decided to break into my house. My mom caught him and told him to get out, which he didn’t like. He went to complain to his father, my teacher, and from that point on, I was at the center of this intensive bullying.

Many times, during class, he would humiliate me referring to my work, or my appearance. One time he also made fun of my because I had a stomach bug and couldn’t attend school. Made no sense to bully and emotionally abuse a child who is 7 years old. Today, I realize that I was being abused emotionally and psychologically. Strangely, it never killed my love for school. It made me dislike authoritarian authority (which is good in my opinion.)

The worst part was the fact that this teacher started not to give me grades which reflected poorly on my overall progress, lowering my GPA which would force me to retake this year again. He was manipulating the facts to depict me as a failure, abusing his authority on me. I was being punished every night for acting out in class with extra grammar homework which I hated.

Eventually, my mother met with him because this was uncaracteric of my behavior at home and the way I was being treated did not make sense. We went to the principal of the school who told us to be more understanding of the teacher’s situation because he was going through a tough divorce (I bet!), but my mom was not letting this go and told her that he was ruining me. She met with the teacher, and that day, on the spot, I had to change school.

A part of me felt relieved, but the other part of me felt punished. I did not deserve to be treated this way, and it felt like I was being punished for something I didn’t do because I had to leave behind my friends. He was the one who should have been punished not me.

As an adult, I have seen this repeating many times, and especially through people who happened to be my teachers. Many times, teachers would simply abuse their authority to get out of accountability or simply target me as the person to use to establish power. The pattern repeated from regular school, all the way to my 13th Octave LaHoChi teacher who claimed on the internet that I copied her and that I had no personality and that I was just part of the patriarchy and colonizers who had hurt her in the past. IT was tough to read, because we had come close and I thought I was being respectful of her, but she had a different experience, without letting me know any of it at all, but I moved on for I knew then what I know now, the truth endures the lies.

Later on, since I became the teacher, I outgrew this level of authority and moved on to the next level of authority would be the legal authority. I went through a divorce, a lawsuit against my former landlord, and now the threat of one. In all cases, I experienced lies, manipulations that would attack my character for which I felt the need to fight, and later on, decided to let they scream, after all, the loudest people have the least to say. Letting them prove their point and seeing them fail was how I won those fights because lies and smear campaigns simply do not hold against facts.

I looked at what was showing up for me and realized that for a long time, I let the story repeat itself. There is a part of me that had accepted that I was less than, that people were more important than me and the comparison game was running at full steam creating the repeated pattern. Through inner work, I realized how much was in my power: my choices were my freedom and my way out of a toxic karmic cycle of persecution and victimization.

I cannot control people’s reactions, or their pain, that is for them to deal with. When they don’t deal with their pain, they become loud and try to spread it. I am better than that and with this Venus retrograde in Scorpio, I had the pleasure of seeing and feeling how important I was in the life of people I impacted.

The Friend Who Showed me Betrayal

Venus in Scorpio is about diving deep into the darkness.

The corners of our psyche that are left behind, abandoned, or misunderstood because they were traumatic, are a place of gold for our light. When we are ready to look there, and grow from the pain and transmute the pain into stories of strength and inspiration.

My pain was painful to live. My pain was real. My pain is present. But my pain turned into beauty, strength, and wisdom anchored on this planet in this lifetime. Let me exemplify how beauty can come out of pain.

I had a friend who I used to be really close with. We used to spend a lot of time together more time than I would spend with anyone really. It was really fun and I felt like we were supporting each other for a long time.

Everything changed when I met someone and decided to be serious in my relationship with him. When this happened, her behavior changed and she decided to start asking strange questions about my newfound partner, trying to instill doubt. I had been in a very emotionally volatile relationship before, one of narcissistic tendencies and one of my fears was to fall back into a relationship that would repeat this pattern.

I was in therapy at the time and it was helping me navigate the dating scene, my own wounds, and how to move forward. Therapy had worked for me, giving me more confidence in choosing what I wanted over what others wanted for me. Having built this self-confidence and authority, it became harder to manipulate me directly so this friend tried to use my soft point and depict my newfound partner as a narcissist. My alarm went off and I felt really destabilized at the time, but I did something I would have never done before, confronted her about her findings. For background, she herself was a therapist, a profession I respected and to which I would give a lot of power.

Her arguments were not holding and were really thin, and when I asked her to develop, she used the spiritual card against me and said that she had an intuition telling her to warn me. In my experience, intuition does not work like that, and people warning you about something under the disguise of their intuitive hit is usually a projection of their own fears. While standing up against her I made a choice: I chose myself and my self-knowing over the noise of the outside world that he was creating, taking her and therapy down from the pedestal I had created.

I chose my relationships and of course this had created a divide in our friendship and eventually, it ended the friendship. That’s when the smear campaign started and she went on to describe me as the villain in her story.

Fast forward to this last month, one of the friends we had in common reached out to me to apologize and tell me that my decision was the right one. Her friendship with that one friend was over, and she recognized a lot of the manipulation tactics that she was using. She told me she had always respected my decision but wanted to be loyal to her friend and frankly would fear her reaction. We came together during my October trip in NY and when we reconnected, it felt like another revelation from the Venus retrograde in Scorpio: a dark time, a story of a fall, made me realize that standing up for myself brought me closer to my own freedom and authority which can only be recognized once I feel it for myself.

Out of the dark, I brought back the light onto my own self-worth

So what themes have been swirling around you lately? Go deep and try to see what theme is being repeated for you to draw the light at the forefront? What needs to be transmuted for your next chapter?

Light Guides and Dark Guides

This journey also brought me towards my own discovery of light and dark guides. In the spiritual community, there is a tendency to focus on all that is love and light as if they are the only part of the spectrum that matters and can be respected.

However, in our moments of darkness, we are guided by guides who know darkness the best and who are not afraid of it. I can only name 2 archetypes of guides that I have work with: my own and one of my clients.

The guide that accompanied me in this journey was Hekate, the ancient triple Greek goddess of magic, witchcraft, darkness, the moon, ghosts and crossroads.

She is the mother, the maiden, and the crone, representing cycles, the passing of time and its complexity, as well as the invisible transitions from one state to another. I have always been fascinated by her. She is a perfect representation of my Venus in Scorpio.

The dark feminine forcing me to see that pain creates pain if it is not dealt with. She is particularly relevant to me because of the work that I do. She is all about stages of life, transmutation and deep dive into the dark parts of our hearts that need transmutation.

In my work, the heart is my central focus and the parts that need to be transmuted are rooted in experiences of darkness. Her guidance felt powerful, protective, and undeniable. This is not your typical Divine Feminine that is nurturing in a soft way. This is the tough love, but it is the most raw power of love itself.

I feel grateful for her guidance.

The second guide I met was through a client who was going through an overthinking phase (kind of like me in a way) and their dark guide was the Minotaur. I asked why he was showing up and he said that they were always lost in the labyrinth of their mind, and the Minotaur was the only one who knew the way out and how to help them navigate in the dark corners of their mental maze.

This archetype felt so powerful and protective; it only wanted what was best for my client, and take them away from the place they easily get lost in.

In conclusion, I would like to say something regarding our healing journey.

We tend to idolize and put on pedestal people who are leading others in life; but the reality is that in order to grow, we must see the power within ourself.

To feel safe in a space created by healers, the healer must be doing their own work as well.

I see myself as holding the light ahead of a path we all walk, that needs to be discovered. Leadership in the healing field is about wisdom, and wisdom is about personal experience.

I am meant to work with people I have a shared experience with, a feeling, an emotion, a situation that brought me to the same questioning as they are. I am not meant to work with people who have a totally different path than mine and for that reason, I can see and understand my worth.

My pain, my trauma, and my difficult experiences of life have brought me compassion and trust in a higher path, so that when we are at a crossroads, we can work towards the healing we need, together, when needed.

To be understood is to allow trust to set in. When you trust your path, there is no stopping you ever.

I am grateful for the uncovering of this Venus in Scropio. She has brought to my eyes where my values find its roots.

What has it revealed to you?