The Wisdom Beneath the Skin . Lilith

We are always experiencing something.

There is always something moving through us, something asking to be understood, something taking shape beneath what we can immediately see. There is what is happening, and then there is everything quietly moving behind the scenes | the invisible threads that pull at our attention, our emotions, our choices, our encounters.

This relationship between the visible and the invisible has become the foundation of my own practice. Over the years, my work as a life coach has naturally evolved into an exploration of those strings that pull our animus, our soul, through experience. I have come to understand that we do not need to become astrologers, nor do we need to become preoccupied with every movement in the sky. Astrology, for me, is a language of context. A way of stepping back from the immediate experience and asking: | What else is weaving here?

Because the forces that move through our lives arrive in so many forms. Sometimes they arrive through a friend. A sentence in a book. A podcast we almost did not listen to. A teacher. A guide. A chance encounter. A synchronicity so precise that we pause and wonder.

We have called these forces many things throughout time | signs, guardians, angels, ancestors, God, intuition, synchronicity, the intelligence of nature, the movement of the cosmos. I am less interested in naming the force than I am in learning to recognize the string it is pulling.

Because when we become conscious of what is moving us, something changes. We can begin to co-create with it. We can work with the current rather than simply being carried by it. The experience becomes conscious, and consciousness gives it direction. And perhaps this is why I share these journal entries. To stay in FLOW!

They are fragments of my own process of integration | the experiences, symbols, studies, synchronicities and teachings that become my guides as I move through a particular moment in my life. It is the same methodology I bring into my work with others. We look at what is happening, but also at what is weaving underneath it. We follow the threads until the experience begins to reveal its deeper architecture.

And right now, one of those threads is Lilith entering Capricorn.

Black Moon Lilith is a mathematical point in the lunar orbit, yet in the symbolic language of astrology she has long been associated with the untamed feminine, the part of ourselves that has been exiled, silenced, shamed or asked to become more acceptable in order to belong. On September 14, she entered Capricorn, where she will remain until June 2027.

For me, this is particularly intimate because Capricorn lives in my fourth house: | the house of home, belonging, lineage, ancestry and roots. The place beneath the visible structure. The place from which we draw nourishment. Roots do not ask the soil to explain itself before they receive from it. They descend into darkness and absorb what has been cultivated there, by us and by those who came before us. And perhaps this is one of the mysteries of the fourth house | nourishment is not always found in the light.

There is something profoundly Capricornian about the wisdom of the elder, the sage, the crone. The one who has lived long enough to understand that preservation is also a form of devotion. That some things are protected precisely because they are sacred. That knowledge does not always need to be exposed to be transmitted.

And then there is Lilith | the wild woman of the dark moon, the instinct that refuses to be domesticated simply to remain inside the boundaries of belonging.

I have been feeling this archetype very closely since returning from Ecuador.

My time there was devoted to studying Kambô, not only through the ancestral knowledge of the Katukina ethnic in Brazil, but also through a scientific lens, sitting with a biologist who has spent years studying the medicine alongside Katukina knowledge holders. This intersection matters deeply to me. I do not want to romanticize ancestral medicine, nor do I want scientific language to erase the lineage from which the knowledge comes. I want to sit at the meeting point between the two and allow each to illuminate something the other alone cannot fully reveal.

One of the distinctions that became important to me was the language we use around Kambô. It is often colloquially called “the poison of the frog.” Yet the secretion of Phyllomedusa bicolor is an extraordinarily complex mixture of bioactive peptides, and its pharmacological activity has been studied for decades. Among the compounds identified are phyllocaerulein, phyllomedusin, phyllokinin, sauvagine, dermorphins, deltorphins and various tryptophyllins, alongside antimicrobial peptides such as dermaseptins. These molecules act on different physiological systems, including opioid, bradykinin, tachykinin, cholecystokinin and other receptor pathways.

This is part of what fascinates me about the medicine | the frog is not producing one singular “active ingredient.” Its secretion is a living biochemical orchestra.

And this is where language matters.

Poison and medicine are not simply interchangeable words. A poison is defined by its harmful potential, while a medicine is something used therapeutically. Yet the boundary between pharmacological effect and toxicity is profoundly dependent on substance, dose, route, context and the physiology of the person receiving it. Kambô is biologically active, and its effects can be intense. It can produce vomiting, changes in blood pressure and heart rate, fluid shifts and other profound physiological responses. Serious and, in rare documented cases, fatal adverse events have occurred.

For this reason, I have become even more respectful of the word medicine.

Medicine does not mean harmless. Medicine means that something has a biological action that can be engaged with intentionally, and therefore requires knowledge, discernment, preparation, responsibility and respect for contraindications.

That distinction has become especially meaningful to me after this experience.

The secretion is applied through small superficial burns, allowing the peptides to enter the circulation. The body responds almost immediately and dramatically. Vomiting is one of the most recognizable responses; gastrointestinal and cardiovascular systems are strongly engaged, and the experience can move through the body with extraordinary intensity. Some of these effects involve pathways that intersect with autonomic and neuroendocrine regulation, but I have also become more careful about the language of “resetting the nervous system” or “removing toxins.” Those expressions can describe how an experience feels, but they are not simple scientific descriptions of what is happening physiologically.

What I experienced was less like being given an answer and more like being brought into direct relationship with my own physiology. And this is where Lilith meets Kambô for me.

Because my experience in Ecuador was not easy.

I had come with a very clear purpose. My days were intense, divided into three shifts of study | morning, afternoon and evening. I knew why I was there, and that knowing became my Capricorn. But I was not surrounded by the jungle in the way my senses had imagined. I was in a rural environment, and instead of birdsong, flowing water and wind moving through the trees, I was receiving the sounds of ordinary human life | disturbances, machinery, movement, the noises of the day-to-day. My senses struggled to adapt.

There were moments when the environment itself became part of the teaching.

Because Capricorn asks something very different from comfort.

Capricorn asks | Why are you doing this? Really, why would you put yourself in this situation?

What are you willing to dedicate yourself to?

What is worth the discipline?

What are you building that requires you to stay when the circumstances are not exactly as you imagined them?

This is the wisdom of Earth.

And perhaps this is where Lilith becomes so interesting in Capricorn. She does not simply bring darkness to be illuminated. She brings us into relationship with what has been kept in the shadows, asking whether the structures we have inherited still have life within them.

Capricorn knows the language of time. It understands that wisdom is not accumulated simply through knowing, but through living, refining, enduring and discerning what is worthy of being carried forward.

Lilith brings the wildness that refuses to preserve something merely because it has always been so. Together, they create a different kind of ancestral conversation | one where we can honor what has been transmitted without becoming bound to it; where rebellion can become discernment, darkness can become depth, and structure can become a vessel for something alive.

This is what I am taking from Ecuador with me...

To study deeply, but not lose the mystery.

To honor the lineage, without turning it into something untouchable.

To meet science with curiosity, and ancestral knowledge with reverence.

To understand that what we receive becomes ours only when we have lived it enough to know what it asks of us.

Lilith moving through Capricorn invites us into this particular kind of wisdom | the wisdom to know what belongs in the future, what belongs in the past, and what is still waiting in the dark to be understood.

So look to your own natal chart.

Find the house where Capricorn lives, and notice what territory of your life is now being touched by this long passage of Lilith.

Where does the wild woman meet the elder?

Where does rebellion become wisdom?

Where has something been silenced that is ready to speak?

What ancestral knowledge is asking to be preserved, transformed, or finally released?

You do not have to force an answer.

Enter the darkness slowly.

Let time reveal what has roots.

And listen for the quiet voice of the wise woman who has been there all along.