Our incarnations can be heavy. Lately I’ve been helping with the lambing at a local farm and I’ve just wanted to hang out with the sheep. They are silent and calm, more understanding than humans, and when I’m with them the world feels less heavy. Time feels cyclical as I stand in that liminal place between birth and death. Some lambs come to stay, and some do not make it; the hours are slow with waiting and aligned with forces greater than myself. I step into the barn and enter another world where I’m unselfconsciously human. We watch each other and move slowly. I can breath outside of expectations and life breaths with me.
Working With The Lunar Cycle
There is lots of advice out there these days on how to work with the lunar cycle for healing. You can find a lot of Full Moon and New Moon rituals on-line, and I like to read them when I’m preparing my moon related ceremony. I usually practice this by myself, and it feels difficult to add my voice to all the voices of advice on how to work with moon. There can sometimes be contradictory information; I seriously argued with a woman once on when the best time to fast is, the New Moon or the Full Moon. You can find justifications for both practices. I’ve read that it’s good to make intentions with the New Moon, and to release what you need to at the Full, but also that its good to plant seeds when the moon is full and release with the dark moon. At some point though I realized I needed to be rid of the prescriptive. I can’t tell you how to honor your cycles any more than you can tell me. How my own physical cycle aligns with the moon also changes, and so how I want to feel in and interact with it. I think part of reconnecting to the Moon is trusting your intuition about how to do it, in your own way. How does she speak to you? Where are you in your cycle? What ways does the moon ask you to be honored?
Drawing Down The Moon
But there is one practice I would like to suggest. It’s called drawing down or calling down the moon. I don’t know if or where I read about it. It feels intuitive, but I just found it described as a Wiccan practice on a website. I like it because, like being with sheep, it’s nice to step outside of oneself sometimes and forgot you’re human. Maybe it’s just my misanthropy, but I like to become the moon from time to time. I generally do it by meditating (with a candle, after making an offering of scent and smoke) and visually imagining myself as glowing like her. This morning, at the time that the full moon went exact, I sat in the sun and imagined I was reflecting it back, filled with light and wisdom, full and round and whole. It was freeing. My intentions were about being free as well, and as I was the moon, I imagined myself being free of what I wanted to release.
This was the second full moon of March, a Blue Moon it’s called, and it’s in Libra. You can also look up the meaning of the sign the moon is in, here the balances, and visualize yourself embodying the qualities of that sign as well. There were two full moons in January too. During the second one in January, which was also an eclipse, I was standing on the beach in Findhorn, Scotland, holding hands with a group of dear souls, as we all stated our intentions and made our offerings to the sea. We all called down the moon together, and this felt powerful. This was the first time I had led a group in moon ritual and I enjoyed it, though I do love my solitary magical workings – you can play with both!
Working With Gorse
The flower essence I’ve chosen to work with this cycle is Gorse, for strength and courage to own what our time on Earth brings us. I made it the week of the eclipse in January, 2018, in Findhorn, Scotland. See the flower essences tab on this site for more. Contact me if you are also interested in working with this essence.
A book I’ve been enjoying on the moon cycle is Mysteries of the Dark Moon : The Healing power of the Dark Goddess, by Demetra George (1991)
Blessings to your relationships! May your love for yourself become more balanced and whole as, in the next cycle, we let go of what wants to be let go of and reclaim our freedom.
(Originally posted April 1, 2018)