The Leo Phase Of Seven Year Cycle

Leo is the fifth phase of the seven year cycle and it’s archetype is The Lion. The Lion symbolizes regal dignity, authority, the demand for acknowledgment, self centeredness.

This phase is a struggle with your self expression in relationship with others. It is a struggle with a sense of disacknowledgement or the needing of acknowledgment, or more so, the willingness to assert your needs over against the resistance or the apparent resistance of others. This grows directly out of the struggle in the previous phase to commit to securing a more nurturing or emotionally connected relationship to life. In this phase, you begin to “express” your needs as a way of identifying who you are.

Your needs appear to be the essence of who you are and you are no longer willing to suppress expression of them or yourself in a ‘go along’ way. The midpoint of this phase represents a “break” with a past of going along, and a break toward a future of more clearly defined needs in relation to others and yourself. It can be a period of struggle with others in determining what you truly need and struggling to express that to others. It is a break away from a more dependent past toward a more relational future, away from a more introverted life orientation toward a more relationally oriented future.

There is a need for a sense of self-hood, identity as a separate individual operating under your own steam. The driving need is to identify your newer self over against your ” older or lesser” self. Leo is about the identification of self through the expression of self. There can be a seeking for a sense of identity, a sense of a truer self. The phase may manifest as doing things that drive a sense of yourself and your needs as OK, whereas before you may have viewed aspects of yourself as not OK and not acknowledged. Your environment, as a manifestation of you, gives you the opportunity to find out that you are not who you have previously identified yourself to be and you struggle to express your sense of who you are truly.

The midpoint of the phase is a break from holding the expression of who you are in check, and expressing your identity forcefully in relation to others and their apparent disacknowledgement of you. The midpoint in this phase forces a fundamental change in orientation in your life often associated with actual physical changes in your circumstances. This midpoint crisis may be associated with an experience of feeling that who you are has been violated by others and that you must assert yourself in order to not lose your sense of identity, being, and self-hood.

In the Cancer Phase there was struggle to establish a ground, a place, a sense of security and home with which to move into relations with others. As that process completes itself, the Leo Phase then represents the struggle to individuate, to define oneself as an individual over against all others but with the necessity that others acknowledge this selfhood. “I am me, this is who I am, acknowledge this” is one way this process might manifest. It can manifest in life as the necessity to express ‘who one is’ and ‘what one’s needs and life principals are’ in relation to the perceived sense that ‘others’, whoever they may be, do not acknowledge these or actively disacknowledge these. One can appear arrogant, socially inept, dissociative, and aloof…yet it is the result that one is concentrated in the process of becoming self conscious.

Last updated on July 6, 2014 at 9:56 pm. Word Count: 596