Venus Removes Her Breastplate

The First Square to Pluto and the Descent into the Vast Sea of Love

The first square between Venus and Pluto has brought me to the entrance of the underworld. This is not yet the deepest part of the descent. It is the threshold where I am shown what cannot travel any further with me.

At this first gate, I am being asked to remove my breastplate.

The breastplate first appeared in my contemplation of Inanna’s descent. I understood it as the protection I had built around intimacy, desire and the vulnerable places where my heart had met love, fear and loss. It guarded the part of me that longed to surrender completely, yet had learned through experience that opening could lead to abandonment, misunderstanding or horror in the eyes of another.

I believed I was protecting my heart, but much of the time I was standing outside it with a sword. I watched the world for signs of danger, searched for changes in people’s voices and prepared myself for the moment when connection would be withdrawn. I became extremely sensitive to being misunderstood because misunderstanding did not feel like a small and ordinary distance between two human beings. It felt like the beginning of exile.

Every time I left my heart to guard it, I repeated the abandonment I was trying to survive.

This pattern reaches far back into my relationship with my mother. I carried an endless longing to be loved as I am, alongside the anger of believing that I would never truly be seen or accepted. I experienced her as controlling, suffocating and blaming. Now the mirror is turning, asking me to recognise how these same qualities have lived in me through subtler forms. Control has appeared in my attempts to understand every movement within a connection. Suffocation has entered through the enormous weight I have sometimes placed upon being understood correctly. Blame has lived in the expectation that another person’s inability to see me must mean that I am once again being rejected.

This does not make the wounds unreal, nor does it place all responsibility for them upon me. It reveals how deeply I have internalised the relationship. The child who expected not to be seen became watchful. She remained partly hidden while carrying resentment that no one could find her. At other times, she tore herself open before another person with an almost desperate force, hoping that complete exposure would finally bring complete acceptance.

Neither hiding nor exposure allowed me to inhabit my heart. Both were ways of looking at myself through the eyes of another.

Now Pluto approaches Venus as Hades and whispers at the edge of her ear: Whose gaze have you been using to decide who you are? What do you do to love when you fear it will leave? Where have you mistaken vigilance for discernment, exposure for intimacy and control for devotion? How much of your life force has been bound to the hope that someone else will finally reflect you back to yourself?

These questions are not accusations. They are keys.

Pluto does not expose the shadow in order to condemn it. He reveals the places where light has become compressed into protection. The anger, control, withdrawal, hypervigilance and desperate longing to be seen are not evidence of a heart corrupted beyond repair. They are forms of condensed light, life force held so tightly around an old wound that it can no longer move.

The descent asks me to meet these places in innocence, the orginal purity.

Vast sea of Love is not a love that remains above the mess of human experience. It reaches into the places where shame, grief, jealousy, fear and self-judgement have been waiting to be forgiven. It does not ask me to become pure before I enter the temple. It reveals that the whole spectrum of my experience has always been held inside something larger and more tender than the strategies I created to survive it.

The Open Heart does not lead me towards a distant or elevated heart. She initiates me into the indwelling temple at the centre of my embodied being, the place where my most intimate and honest self already lives. She asks me to stop observing myself from outside and to enter my own experience so completely that another person’s gaze can no longer exile me from it.

This is the deeper meaning of removing the breastplate. I am not being asked to become defenceless. I am being asked to discover a form of protection that does not require me to abandon my heart.

The sword taught me to fight. The shield taught me to survive. The turtle taught me to slow down, to honour my own rhythm and to carry my refuge within. Now the breastplate must be removed so that I can discover what has always lived beneath it. There is no helpless wound waiting there. There is an indestructible innocence, a living heart capable of holding the totality of my human experience.

The best protection is my open heart.

An open heart is not open access. It does not require me to reveal everything to everyone, ignore danger or remain where my body says no. It does not mean tearing myself apart in front of another person to discover whether they will stay. An open heart is a heart I inhabit. From within it, I can feel my yes, my no, my desire, my boundary and my need to move slowly. I no longer have to close my heart in order to protect my life, because I am finally present inside it.

The dream that came to me at this threshold was about the survival pattern and the way it keeps generating further experiences to survive. It spoke of deprogramming, locating the beliefs that remain active within the survival field, creating new settings and finding a formula for coming back to life. Its movement was clear: from survive to thrive, from vigilance to curiosity, from control to faith, from protection to innocence.

Survival taught me to explore the world deeply so that I could anticipate what might happen. It made understanding feel like a form of safety. Yet the search for complete understanding can become another endless task when it is organised around danger. There will always be another movement to interpret, another wound to locate and another possibility to prepare for.

Curiosity carries a different quality. It does not demand certainty before it allows me to remain present. Faith does not promise that I will never again be hurt, misunderstood or left. It gives me the courage to stay with myself when I am.

This first gate is therefore not asking whether I can make myself trust another person. It is asking whether I can remain inside my own heart when love awakens the expectation of abandonment. Can I stop organising intimacy around what I may have to survive? Can I meet a trigger without turning it into a prophecy? Can I allow the heart to remain open without demanding that another person prove its safety?

The answer will not be found through a perfect declaration or a new belief placed over the old one. It must become an embodied return. Each time fear pulls my awareness towards the other person’s gaze, I am invited to come back. Each time the survival pattern reaches for its sword, I can place my hand upon my heart and remember that it is no longer alone. Each time I feel the urge to disappear or reveal everything at once, I can slow down enough to hear what is actually true.

This is how Venus begins to return to life.

She does not return because someone rescues her from the underworld or finally loves her correctly. She returns because she learns to receive the Love that has always lived within the centre of her being. The life force once bound to waiting, proving, explaining and anticipating begins to move again.

At the first gate, Venus kneels before the altar of her own heart and lays down the breastplate. She does not know what the descent will take from her, but she knows what can no longer lead her. The old protection has brought her as far as it can.

Hades does not ask whether she is worthy of love. He asks whether she is willing to stop abandoning the place where Love already lives.

I am not returning Love to myself.

I am returning myself to Love.

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This first gate has also brought through an invitation. I feel called to create a small and intimate Telegram circle for the duration of the Venus retrograde, a shared space for transmissions, contemplation and honest witnessing as we move through the Venusian underworld together. We will explore the places where love meets survival, desire meets attachment, and the protections around the heart begin to reveal the Vast Sea of Love living beneath them.

The final form is still emerging, but the call is clear. If this journey speaks to something deep within you and you feel drawn to enter this work, send me a private message.