We’ve travelled for a month through this last lunar cycle, with its New Moon in Capricorn on the 29th of December through to the New Moon in Aquarius on the 28th January.

How has it been for you?  What messages have you received?

I found each week quite distinct in energy.

• New/crescent moon:   I spent New Year’s Eve at home, quiet, hibernating and dreaming into 2017.
• First quarter/gibbous moon:   Much goal-setting and planning, following on from the dreaming!
• Full moon:  powerful prayers on the beach with my family, a highlight of my summer holidays.
• Disseminating/last quarter:  I managed to make a gift for my daughter that I have been thinking of for literally years!  A big harvest!
• Balsamic moon:  I voiced my need to let go of a volunteer position for which I no longer have energy.  A friend and I decided to cancel a workshop.  Much letting-go!  It was also my birthday, and I felt like hibernating!  Lovely food while journalling alone at a cafe was exactly what I needed…

Using the Lunar Journal helped me see these patterns emerging, all on one page!  (Head here if you’re after a copy!)

Rest

In that uncomfortable place (for me) of letting-go, under the balsamic moon, I noticed how hard it was to get myself to do nothing more than read a (fiction) book.  More to the point, to just be, with a book or not, but preferably lying down in bed!

One night, even though my head wasn’t really functional, I sat there late into the evening with a diary attempting to plan things, and researching stuff.  Despite all the achievements and other gifts of this potent cycle, I was still wanting to do more.  Perhaps that was a bit of ambitious, achieving Capricorn energy at play?  Why is it so hard to rest and do nothing – even when I know that this is the RENEWAL place?!

A friend is sick.  She’s receiving the message over and over to rest.  How do we be gentle with ourselves when our bodies are not at full capacity?  When our heart’s not in it, whatever ‘it’ is?  Ignoring and pathologising this yin place of emptiness and letting-go has led to so many of the problems we now face – burnout on personal and global/environmental levels.

I received an invitation to rest more fully, this cycle.  An invitation to see how and when I don’t rest.  An invitation to make space and time to go slowly – more being, less doing – in order to live a long-term energised life.

So in this next lunar cycle, I want to experiment with really letting that last quarter of the cycle – from the Third Quarter Moon through the Balsamic and down to the Dark – be a week of BE-ing, rather than doing…