New Moon:
Up early exactly at the New Moon, greeting the sky, clear and beautiful, Venus shining bright.  A pleasure to be awake, early, alone, in beauty.  I am at the Dark Moon Gathering with the Four Seasons Journey in Mullumbimby, awakening from a potent Dark Moon ritual into the Underworld the night before.

A friend says thankyou for my New Moon email, which rippled its way out quietly, right on schedule.  I had forgotten all about it, but it feels so satisfying that it can happen without me, and I am reminded that this is a form of New Moon prayer, paying for the ability to communicate via email with greater nuance and flexibility, resourcing my communicating self in this way.  It’s terribly satisfying!

Later, we drum our New Moon prayers wordlessly for an hour, deeply entrained.  Then, laying these drumming hands on womb and heart, I am filled with ecstasy, flooded with tears.  The magic so real, recalibration at a cellular level.  This conversation with Life itself.

Out of this emotion, unbidden, words for my prayer:
“I speak with no fear.”

These are words beyond me, almost fearsome, certainly potent.  I hold them gently within as I listen to Jane Hardwicke Collings teach, these words of hers ringing:
“We are beyond survival, we’re into THRIVE!  So, what do we need to add to the soil/epigenetics to affect our seeds now?  What would be good fertiliser?”

Called to thrive.  In retrospect, I can see that’s what this whole month has been about, seeing where I’m not thriving, and feeling able to speak up to change this reality.

Crescent Moon:
Conflict arising with a friend, feeling wobbly around our communication.  A big soul question emerging with clarity, a question I’ve been travelling with for a while:
“How do I clear the energy channels with someone once something’s happened to impede them (which is inevitable)?”

I often feel like the only way to clear these field between us is to talk things out, but then I feel stymied if I sense I won’t be heard.  There’s a familiar sense of lose-lose.  How can I transmute the blockage on my own, without doing a spiritual bypass?

A powerful coaching session with a teacher.  What daily practices and mindsets would help me live as ‘primo warrioress,’ ready for anything, no depletion to trip me up?  Multiple practical possibilities and suggestions.  I end up feeling totally changed, resourced, at peace.  That’s real magic, being able to help someone change state!  Deep, deep appreciation for this wise friend…

My teacher reminds me that it’s been a year since my placenta rebirthing ritual, as per Minmia’s suggestion.  One year on, I am still deepening and grounding.  The changes are tangible.  My branches are spreading, and here I’m hitting my own limitations.

I start experimenting with a ketogenic eating regime (low carbs/high fat/moderate protein) – a conversation with my body.  So much about it makes sense to me – fat as a more stable fuel than sugar (which is what carbs turn into).  Fat feeding the mitochondria – the energy source of our cells, passed down from our mothers, like a literal Red Thread.  Yet the paradox of fat being so reviled in our culture – I take that as evidence of fat being powerful, like so many things our culture has made taboo!  Bring on the fat revolution!

First Quarter Moon:
I start a resolution process with a friend, for a brokenness between us that has existed for more than a year.  There is a big relief to be talking about it, even without any resolution.  A part of me wonders what took me so long?  Why has it been so very hard to come to this conversation?  But I know that, prior to this, I couldn’t envision this conversation ‘working’ at all…

Waxing Gibbous Moon:
Feeling deeply churned up about four key relationships of mine feeling difficult or broken, regardless of whether I’ve brought my best self or worst self.  Feeling like I am missing something, some obvious pattern – why do I keep creating these painful interpersonal situations?

This lament:
“Oh Scorpio, you eighth house moon,
square my Sun & Mercury, opposite my natal moon,
I feel so raw under your light
as you shine into my uncomfortable places.

I’m trying to hear your invitation,
have been for a while.
Are your sure it’s safe to be seen here?

My experience has been when others see these
places in me, they judge the f*** out of me.
My heart can barely transmute your transit each month.

Today, back to the wall, my resolution:
to pay someone, once again, to listen to me with non-judgement,
to give my heart room to be in its sad truth.
Truth as sadness.
Grief as truth.

I am so very sad about certain things…
And the way forward will not show itself without full feeling,
this I know, Scorpio moon.

Oh, these seeds of speaking with no fear,
but I have lost the knowing of what is helpful to speak
and what is not.

I feel the transmutation of this creative act, writing my heart onto the page.  Certain things clarifying.  Grief as grist.

I call to make an appointment for counselling with my dear friend Kairava.  (If you’re in Melbourne and need someone to help you process your stuff, I can’t recommend her highly enough – heartful, resourced and loving!  She practices her Soul-Centred psychotherapy in Warrandyte).

I call a friend to name that something is broken between us – another conversation I had written off as impossible due to lack of feeling heard.  But I can’t keep avoiding the conflict.

I meet with my friend, a week on from our First Quarter moon meeting.  Neither of us want to show up, but we do anyway.  Some of the practical actions suggested last time have to be rescinded – it’s too soon, and there’s a relief in just be in process, trusting the steps to practical resolution will become possible at the right time.

We leave things here to compost and germinate over the winter, as I head to Canada for two months.  This feels good and right…

I can feel some energy freed up almost instantly, following our conversation.  Because what happens when one or a few relationships are broken is I start thinking I am socially broken.  That I am too introverted, too sensitive.  I have been holding this heaviness for more than a year (or a lifetime, perhaps!), and it’s made me tentative in the social realm, to the chagrin of my husband, social butterfly that he is – another relational difficulty!

But like I said, I felt the energy freed up tangibly.  I send out an email to host a women’s circle at my house later in the month, something I’d been thinking about for months!

I can feel a big piece dropping in, which feels familiar as soon as it arrives.  It’s around realising that I need to keep coming back to speak my truth in my relationships.  It’s one of the areas where I really procrastinate on doing the work, because my inner child or Loyal Soldier lines up the evidence, based on history and the original hurtful incident, and says ‘You are not safe to talk about this stuff, there’s no point, you won’t be heard…”

And if I can’t talk about it, I feel very stuck.

This no longer serves.  I want to come back to connection quicker.

Full Moon:
My New Moon seed: ‘I speak with no fear.’  And since then I have seen with painful clarity all the places where my not-speaking is holding up or blocking my energy.  Four relationships and a spectrum of me involved, from my worst to my best self.  So it’s not even about how I respond to an incident initially, but how I respond when I feel hurt or betrayed by someone, when the communication goes down, when I don’t feel safe to speak anymore, when I can’t orient to or make sense of how they’re acting.

Full Moon now, and I have much more clarity about where the issue lies – the question is, how do I come back to these people and advocate for what I need?  How to come back when my impulse is to build walls…?

I see Kai, in her studio by the river, that beautiful river where I baptised myself so long ago.

I lay before her these four relationships, and a pathway emerges within myself, from kidney points/heart down to solar plexus – a visual and kinesthetic Way within.  I reach down to a young self, maybe four years old, though that’s too static.

What does she want to say, asks Kai, to these relationships?  What version of her truth has gone unexpressed based on my old patterning of retreat and silence?

And what came:
I am a good person.
I hate feeling alone.
It’s so scary when the conflict is abrupt (which it all has been – or perhaps it will always feel like this…)

These are her truths. 

This young self felt far away; unknown; new to me.  I feel like I have heard my raging inner child self a lot, or my Loyal Soldier expounding various defensive postures, and others down there who are angry and defensive.

But not her.  Her voice was quiet and still.  I could feel my nurturing parent in response, a desire to cup her truths gently in my consciousness and not forget them.

I feel the possibility of being able to validate her fundamental innocent child truths – this most sensitive soul within – my truths, my bedrock – and become a filter, more than I have been able to be thus far.

I also see how my childhood patterning was strongly that ‘there’s no room for my story.’  My dad took up all the room.  The risk of speaking my truth was physical violence.  Feeling alone happened whether I spoke up or not.

I come by my patterning honestly, but just like my dad has changed since then, I too can choose how I want to be in the world.  There is room for my story, within myself, regardless of anyone else and their capacity to hear me or not.

My Full Moon prayers, written by the river:
Giving great thanks for fully feeling this life, this world…
Giving great thanks for feeling and loving all parts of myself…
Giving great thanks for the strength to live open-hearted…

And a full-moonlit walk with my man in the state park down the road, trees as a “great crowd of witnesses,” silence except for us.  Practising letting go and reconnecting our hands to skip mud puddles.  Cuddling in bed together.  Tender self more intact than ever before… life is very very good…

The next day I resolve things with one of my friends.  Hearing each other.  Back to a friendly footing.  Glad for the interactions that can now flow…

Disseminating Moon:
And a shift, now, in the tone of this lunar cycle.  All this inner work comes to a great sense of peace and motion within me.  All the stuck energy is now flowing.  The relational theme begins to play out in other spheres.

Misbooked plane tickets, unexpected visa requirements, missed flights.   Midwifing my husband and kids as it takes three days for them to leave the country, after super-smooth travel back and forth to Canada for so many years.  I feel my shamanic midwife muscle, deep breaths, stress present but never overwhelming, offering empathy, making room for disappointment and sadness as they all digest the changes.

Then finding myself home alone.  Feeling so lonely in a house filled with echoes of them.  I feel how much they fill my life, every single day, every single hour – so much so that between them and lots of other beautiful people in my life, my attention regularly shifts to ‘where will I find some space to tend to my quiet soul?’

Yet in their absence, I would fill my life with people – oh the irony!  I may be an introvert, but I need friendship and connection as much as the next person.  What a gift to feel this truth deep in my soul, and to update my identity which has felt so socially crumpled!

A huge ovulation, reflection of a huge cycle of inner shifts.  An ovum flowing from my left ovary, calling for my attention.  I dedicate it to a safe and joyful time in Canada.

And then, the peace of the house, winter sun flooding through the window.  Yes, so many to-dos… yes, nauseous with this ketogenic transition…  but there is space and time to go slowly.  The invitation is to take my time and find the enchantment in the silence.

Third Quarter Moon:
The women’s circle I called into being just happens to fall on the Third Quarter Moon, and it is a harvest, for me.  I feel I have fully shown up, this lunar cycle, gave it my all.  And here is a place to receive my sisters and be received in love.

There are many nourishing things: the pleasure of offering the peace of my home; hosting with full Hestian joy; feeling the generosity of friends travelling to be here; the strength of the circle able to hear and hold joy, grief and tragedy; knowing we don’t have to hold these things alone.

Unplanned, I share in circle of my grief at feeling folded in on myself.  Socially broken.  The journey of this last lunar cycle, and the shifts I am feeling.  Yes, it is Winter here, but I feel as if I am emerging from a hibernation.  The loving witness of friends is a powerful medicine/healing/completion.

Balsamic Moon:
Winter Solstice Eve.  I am alone, flowing with a fire ritual of healing for my great-grandmother and all her descendents.  Making it up as I go.  And in true Gemini form, it involves researching her history, finding her birth certificate, calling my grandmother to ask questions, writing her story (as much as I could gather) and reading it aloud to the night.

I call her present.  I feel her via my emotion, and sometimes the fire hissing in response.  Tears of grief at her tragic story open my heart.

I write the names of all her children and grandchild on paper in the darkness.  I burn them to ash, every one, claiming freedom for each, from this lineage of abandonment, grief, isolation, depression and suicide.

I claim this freedom for me.
I claim it for my children.
May we be free, and may she be free.
May we know ourselves connected, safe and loved.
Winter Solstice Eve.  So mote it be.

Dark Moon:
I meet with sisters in a hive nestled in gentle hills.  We gather self-awareness, like bees collecting pollen, each grain turned to honey in our hearts.  And with this inner nourishment, we travel deep into the Underworld, Inanna descending, Ninshubars at the threshold.  Not alone.

Perhaps now I am living my New Moon prayer.  I ‘speak with no fear,’ or really, I speak a little more with slightly less fear, but in the Underworld, there is no need to speak at all.

I relinquish, for now, the questions that drove me in the first half of this lunar cycle, the questions that came to such a welcome fruition.  I leave them all, now, to rest in the velvet embrace of the Dark.

♡  ♡  ♡

This last cycle has been such an education for me about how the ‘seed’ of an intention can grow – questions arising, hitting limits, struggle, illumination, living the gifts, sharing the gifts, distilling the essence and letting go of the rest…

Makes me feel like we are ‘being grown,’ as clearly as any plant.

And now, at the end of the lunar cycle, I’m feeling this quieter time as a form of existential rest.  We don’t have to live our questions all the time – in fact, it seems good to take a break from them in order to come back to them fresh and hear what wants to emerge.  A time for the body-wisdom of Be-ing to come to the fore.

Really hope this helps you reflect on your own last month and all that arose within it, especially relationally/communicationally!

And blessings on your seeds/intentions/prayers, emerging over the next few days.  We take what we’ve learned and use it to make some extra room for our hearts and feeling selves, this coming lunar cycle, it seems to me…

New Moon love to all, go gently!