Welcome to the Full Moon in Aries, which was exact on:
Sunday 13th October, 4.07pm (CDT)
Sunday 13th October, 10.07pm (BST)
Monday 14th October, 8.07am (AEDT)
Aries is the fiery forerunner, pioneering new terrain, taking action based on gut instinct and a strong urge for Life!
Aries is also the warrior, who approaches said Life with a sword! Attack is an effective defense against the inherent vulnerability of showing up to Life when it is new and unknown to us!
If you have a Cardinal Ascendant /Sun/Moon/Ascendant Ruler, you may feel this Full Moon in Aries more strongly than others, with its compelling call to take action towards your life vision, and live on purpose.
Or maybe it feels like running at speed into a brick wall. Hmmm.
These differing experiences can be equally informative, of course, though one feels more painful than the other.
❤️
Live on Purpose.
That’s a concept that just won’t go away for me at the moment! And neither should it. I hope that as each day passes, our sense of who we are and where we are heading is crystalising.
Living on purpose means you’re living at your coalface of what’s possible.
Living on purpose means feeling a longing for something that seems to require qualities that stretch you to the edge of your being, skills that were not at all included in your karmic/ancestral inheritance.
Living on purpose means acknowledging this Call, and acting upon it, even though you feel that others could do it better than you, and even though there’s no magic wand to wave away the fear and doubt.
We have to call on some Aries pioneering passion to put a fire in our belly and fuel us with courage! Leaning in 10% totally counts!
Full Moon in Aries journal prompts:
What has this Full Moon in Aries ‘illuminated’ for you, in regards to your vision, and implementation of that vision?
Do you have a sense of vision, of where you are heading, say over the next 90 days?
What does ‘vision’ mean, in a cyclical reality where we (or maybe it’s just me!) get fired up, then disillusioned, then fired up again, in a constant round (hello, menstrual cycle!)?
What self-care practices help us ‘circle back’ to our vision?
On a different tack:
What ‘armour’ do you wear every day?
How do you try and keep yourself safe?
Where is your gut urging you to take action?
Menstrual Lament
Earlier this month I participated in a facilitator training to be equipped to offer Celebration Days for Girls to maidens aged 10-12, and their mothers/female care-givers, in my community.
I got to hang out with my CDfG trainer friend Rachel Pilgrim in beautiful BC terrain, as well as meet women from all over North America who are passionate about this menstrual work! Felt blessed and enriched!
To be involved in this restoration work, of valuing the Feminine and our embodied experience, at this potent pre-menarche time, makes me feel excited and hopeful!
On the flip side, this immersion in Menstrual Cycle Awareness (MCA) led to unexpected Full Moon grieving, last night. A soulful lament for all the lost opportunity of twenty-seven years of cycling in a culture that has never understood or valued this significant aspect of my/our existence.
Grief that even some of my most recent menstruating experience – after all these years of conscious cycling, and being a family that talks about it openly – led me straight to that place where it feels like others (my husband) are just waiting for me to “get over it” and “return to normal.” (Less get over the physical bleeding and more get over the insular emotional state.)
I remain pained at the lack of accommodation and celebration of this part of me, and how my need to retreat into my inner world is judged and pathologised.
❤️
I’ve been reading Wild Power: Discover the Magic of Your Menstrual Cycle and Awaken the Feminine Path to Power by Alexandra Pope and Sjanie Hugo Wurlitzer (of the Red School) since I got home. I think it’s their bridging, in words, of the blood and the sacred – menstruation as a spiritual practice – that has once again reminded me of what’s possible, and face clearly what’s not yet here.
(Jane Hardwicke Collings has an excellent article on The Spiritual Practice of Menstruation.)
Alexandra and Sjanie speak of our cyclical nature – our Wild Power – as a ‘holy intelligence‘ and invite us to ‘ordain‘ our menstrual cycle as sacred. For someone who grew up religious, this spiritual languaging is so very powerful.
I am also appreciating their naming of the ‘premenstrual deflation‘ that occurs each month, as a direct counterweight to Ego, “an inbuilt antidote to invincibility and hubris.”
I often experience this ‘undoing of ego’ in the second half of my cycle as a wide-open door to my ancestral inheritance of negative thinking. My visioning and ‘planting’ of ideas during the menstrual ascent has felt tender and cautious, lately, cos I know that in a few weeks time, I’ll be shooting holes in anything I’ve Dreamed up and my ability to manifest my vision.
How to live with this cyclical reality, in a world were success seems to require a bulletproof sense of self-esteem?
Hence, Celebration Days for Girls, I guess! A celebration of our cyclical reality, the ups and the downs. The medicine I long for becomes a guide, my pain informs a giving back to the world…
Mental Spring-Cleaning
Underneath all my ‘stories’ about why I am the way I am, my stories of my menstrual experience, etc, is that I’m habituated to my negative thinking – it feels like home!
This is one of my ‘coalfaces of purpose,’ to meditate and love my way out of such strong dark neural pathways and the heavy feelings they sing up. Cos I know my brain is able to change in ways I can hardly imagine. More is possible, and these possibilities simply await my choice, my will and intention, my movement towards them.
(Hope, BC)
I am slowly working my way through a book called The Master Key System by Charles F. Haanel which is guiding me into a meditation practice, and more to the point, a slow re-working of the way I think.
It’s helping me feel hopeful as I experience small shifts in my brain wiring. I re-read each chapter, cos they are so dense, or I am so dense! 😊 This teaching dropped in a little more, under this Full Moon:
“How may we develop the faith, the courage, the feeling, which will result in accomplishment?”
ie. how do I not lose all my faith and courage each month, with the ebbing of my cycle?
“The reply is, by exercise; mental strength is secured in exactly the same way that physical strength is secured, by exercise. We think something, perhaps with difficulty the first time; we think the same think again, and it becomes easier this time; we think it again and again; it then becomes a mental habit. We continue to think the same think; finally it becomes automatic; we can no longer help thinking this thing; we are now positive of what we think; there is no longer any doubt about it. We are sure; we know.”
And this:
“We are today the result of our past thinking, and we shall be what we are thinking today…”
My Mental Home – the home I construct of my thoughts – has some serious structural weaknesses, based on my past thinking, my default neural pathways. Like constructing my reality with rotten, mildewed timber.
The solution is to build my Mental Home from “courageous thought” rather than negativity.
The pathway to those “courageous thoughts” is twofold:
I need to keep choosing them, very painstakingly and deliberately at first, and slowly more naturally.
And also, I need to Spring-Clean my Mental Home every day! I mean, I have a lifetime of clutter in there!
I understand this when I think of my physical Home – clean spaces facilitate rest and creation. But mentally, I allow rotting junk thoughts to linger.
I even give them pride of place in the most visible parts of my head. All because they currently feel native and ‘homey.’
My husband threw out the image of me as a cat with fleas, lately, ie. with a pathological need to be scratched. And I caught myself fully taking that image on and installing it as something to fester – in a homey, native way, of course! – in my head, before I even questioned its accuracy, let alone simply whether I wanted to have that kind of visual kicking around inside of me, as a way of imagining myself.
Clearly, it’s easier to envision myself as a mangy cat than anything more positive. The ‘mangy cat’ image has a fast-track to my subconscious that the image of myself as a ‘sleek, powerful, graceful lion’ (or Snow Leopard!) simply doesn’t have.
(Or how about a ‘gentle Deer,’ just like these wild creatures I camped with on my roadtrip across half of Canada!)
I’m grateful for the Masterkeys book, cos it’s slowing down that fast-track, just a little, so that I have more autonomy about what I take on at a subsconscious level, and therefore what I live out, and what I sing up in other people (hi, husband!).
Wildfire Clearing
I’m reminded of the clearing, cleansing power of Fire – say in the form of a bushfire, clearing the undergrowth, renewing the forest. A bonfire of rotten wood going up in smoke.
So, somehow, this Full Moon in Aries has three distinct invitations for me. (And my Ascendant is in Aries, so no surprise that my Ascendant/1st house ‘sense of Identity’ is getting a workout, and I’m being invited to envision myself anew):
- Commit to Spring Cleaning my thinking every day (I think for me this looks like writing down all my negative thoughts, and writing a corresponding positive thought, very similar to what we do in the Shamanic Dimensions of Pregnancy workshops).
- Celebrate my menstrual experience – even the ego-busting parts of it!
- Say Yes to a new possibility suggested by my husband, rather than stay in my armour about ‘why has it taken so long?’
❤️
Thankyou, Full Moon in Aries, for this illumination of my armour, and lack thereof… and the possibility of blazing some new mental trails…
And for you? How has this Full Moon in Aries burned through some of your old stories?
What mental Spring-Cleaning is required?
(Here’s a bit of Canadian Rockies ‘perspective’!)
Free Mentoring Once A Month
As part of my gift to the world and living in service, I am offering a free Cyclical Mentoring session once a month.
I see these CM sessions as a great privilege – a shared glimpsing of your ‘living on purpose’ coalface. I honour the work it takes to stay present to these new possibilities, and know there’s a power in journeying these places together, rather than looping through our own familiar (negative) thoughts.
You can use this space to explore where you are in the four main cycles of life – menstrual, lunar, seasonal and life cycle – and beyond! What is Life Calling You to do and be?
If you see a session available, it’s yours!
You’re also welcome to book a 15-minute call if you want to bounce an idea around, or simply say hello!
xxx Grace
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