January Full Moon Sunday, January 4th at 22:52 CST Moon in Gemini and Punarvasu Nakshatra Full Moon Intention: That is full: this is full. From fullness, fullness comes out. Taking fullness from fullness, what remains is fullness. - Isha Upanishad Full Moon in Punarvasu nakshatra invites in blessings from Aditi, the “Mother of all goodness”. She brings us awareness, blessings of unity consciousness, growth and expansion through wisdom. Aditi cares for and nourishes us like a mother cares for her children. She brings us peaceful and non dualistic experiences. Punarvasu Nakshatra is ruled by the planet Jupiter which is retrograde in Cancer currently. Jupiter continues to invite us to revisit our emotional body wisdom, our heart centered awareness, and the needs we have for comfort and nourishment emotionally. This may include a re-visiting of themes, stories and experiences from our past as well as parts of our emotional body wisdom that need to be re-examined and reassessed. Use this Full Moon to create and clearly identify what your deepest needs are. What nourishment are you lacking in your life? This is the container that needs the majority of your attention right now. Seek to create a container that can hold exactly what you need for deeper nourishment in your life. We can really only get our needs met when we can clearly identify and express them. This Full Moon is a time of creating new kinds of structures for your life so your container can be filled with exactly what you so greatly desire. This will require some depth and intimacy with what is not working in your life (your shadows), in order for you to start identifying where your greatest needs and deficits are. Your ability and willingness to dive into the emotional body pain and wounds of your life will determine how able you are to create the true nourishment you need on a deeper level. What is it that you truly wish to fill your container with? What is the nourishment you need for fullness? Let your light and dark pieces dance together, so that you can expand your capacity to hold the nourishment you need. Expand your nourishment container by integrating the shadow and light. Creative Ritual Identifying Your Inner Landscape I consider the three level check in to be the most basic self care resource. It is an identification process, a tool that can help us honor what is happening in the now. We can then create the nourishment we need through proper resources. The three levels of awareness are: the mental body, emotional body and physical body. I encourage you to self track daily, hourly, or even moment to moment. Your identification process can then be taken into drawing, movement explorations, journaling or music, in order for you to deepen, directly work with, and transform what is arriving in your inner landscape. The three level check in is a simple, yet vital resource for self tracking. Document your three level check-ins. Use a Self Care Journal as a way to track your ongoing, ever changing inner landscape. This journal can be a helpful resource for identifying emergent themes in your healing and transforming process. Steps for A Three Level Check In 1) Whatever you are doing right now, hit the pause button and bring your attention inward. It may help to close your eyes, but this isn't necessary. You may be sitting, standing or walking, but bring your attention to the now regardless of what is happening around you. 2) Notice the mental body. What is coming to you? What is the mental body sharing with you? Be present to images, colors, words, expressions and shapes that arise. 3) Notice the emotional body. What is coming to you? What is the mental body sharing with you? Be present to images, colors, words, expressions and shapes that arise. 4) Notice the physical body. What is coming to you? What is the mental body sharing with you? Be present to images, colors, words, expressions and shapes that arise. My 2015 Moon Wisdom Calendar is coming soon!
Do you love my monthly Moon Wisdom and Creative Ritual posts that I share at the time of the New Moon and Full Moon? Well, I've created a new ebook calendar just for you! All of these special posts will now be offered in a convenient calendar format available for purchase, so you can easily track the Moon Wisdom and intentions of each new and full Moon during 2015. Set your intentions and get inspired! Integrate the Moon wisdom with my Creative Rituals that help you embody the depth and purpose of each Moon cycle. The 2015 Calendar will be available in ebook format in the coming weeks with a print version to follow. Pre-order my 2015 Moon Wisdom + Creative Ritual Calendar eBook in advance and be the first to receive this new offering! ** Special $29.00 price for advance purchases! ** Purchase Now.
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The new Moon is on Sunday, December 21st, Winter Solstice, at 19:36 CST. Moon is in Sagittarius and Mula Nakshatra at this time, joining Sun in this same position. Sun and Moon conjunct Mercury and Venus, who are both in PurvaAshada nakshatra. This is a particularly unsteady new Moon, with a lot of movement, shift and restructuring potential. It is also a particularly dark, inward and demanding empty Moon- which will ask us to dive deeply into our beings, let go and release from a very core level. The release is necessary in order to increase flow and fluidity, change and movement in the coming cycle. In order for deeper nourishment to arrive in the coming weeks and months, we must be willing to deeply release and let go of any parts of ourselves we have been clinging to. This is a time to be re-tracing our steps, enliven our deepest needs, and awaken our innate truths. This new Moon is also intensified by Winter Solstice, the darkest night of the year for the Northern Hemisphere, and is marked by a natural turning inward, towards our depth and darkness. The need for this turning inward, touching the depth of our darkness, is as natural as turning towards the light. Nature reminds us with her cycles and rhythms, the potency, power and necessity of both light and dark, and our dance with both. This is an ideal time to be working very intentionally with our shadows, our own darkness. Please join me for my free online class this Sunday, Resourcing From Your Shadow on December 21st at 6pm CST. The coming waxing Moon cycle will continue to stir our deepest longings, truths and inner wisdom, while digging up some dirt in the process. As we expand our depths and our darkness, we also expand our container and capacity to hold truth and light. The willingness you have to explore your depths and dive deep, will determine the gifts and awakenings you will be able to enliven and hold in the coming cycles. Your efforts are not futile. Working consciously with your shadows is not for nothing. Strengthen your ability to dance with both your light and your dark parts with more awareness and life will expand in all forms. Creative Ritual for the Waxing Moon Cycle
Expanding our container, our capacity to hold and to release, can physically and metaphorically be done through the breath. Jupiter's retrograde motion through Cancer, is allowing us to retrace steps within our heart, work intentionally with our emotional body, our capacity to feel, while also giving us new opportunities to work with healthy boundaries. The open and close dynamic of boundary work (yes and no) is signified by our inhale and exhale. Below is a breath dance, designed to enliven and maximize your breath awareness and your container for sensing and feeling. 1. Breath Dance. Begin standing, lying down or sitting. Bring your awareness to your breath as it moves in and out of your body. Filling and letting go, opening and releasing, like waves moving in and out of the body. Track the movements and sensations in the body and let these guide you. The sensations will guide you into the physical body impulses, the messages of the body. As you continue to breathe and become more and more aware of the movements of the ribcase, let these movements exaggerate. These exaggerated movements are the making of your "breath dance". Continue to move from and with the movements of the ribcase as you breath. Explore, expand and develop your breath dance for at least 10 minutes. Let it evolve and as it does, continue to self track, noticing the body parts most alive and awake as you explore your body part sensations present. As you bring your breath dance to a close, ask yourself these questions: I sense, I feel, I imagine. 2. Create an image of your ribcase. What colors, textures, shapes and images arrive on the page as you draw your ribcase? I encourage you to get your hands involved in this process whether it be through painting directly with your hands, or smudging the craypas with your fingers. Let the hands be sensitized through the process. Get messy. Let the hands and fingers fully engage in this image. (Working with clay may be an alternate medium to work with). Title your image. Take at least 15 minutes for this. 3. Harvesting. When your image is complete, use it to harvest with further inquiry by asking it these questions: Ask your image if it has anything it would like to share with you: If your image could speak, what would it say? I am I want I need What am I opening to? What am I closing to? Need some extra guidance and clarity? Schedule a session with me. Plan your week in tune with nature. Never miss a planetary update. Sign up for my weekly newsletter. Was this post helpful? Please share it with a friend! Thank you. New Moon Wisdom + Creative Ritual for the Waxing Moon Cycle {November 22nd to December 6th}11/21/2014 Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change. ~Brené Brown The New Moon is at 06:32 am CST in Scorpio and Anuradha nakshatra. Saturn, Venus and Sun are in Scorpio as well, which puts four planets in this sign at this time. All four planets receive drishti from Ketu and Jupiter. Three of these planets are in Anuradha nakshatra, while Saturn is still in Vishaka. This combination of energy exemplifies change, transformation and working with our darkness, in very tangible ways. While also enlivening a certain theme of gaining insights from releasing and letting go. This new Moon invites in a certain mystical element, one that invites us to go into our depths and harvest our inner riches. But don't be surprised if you discover shadows instead of light, as this is the gift of Scorpio, the 8th house, and its ability to transform our beings. But from the depths of our darkness, we can truly access our vulnerability. It's here in this fragility, where our deepest and most profound ability to transform and change exists. Vulnerability truly is our power, our strength. It is in our willingness to work with our shadows, our own darkness, that we can transform ourselves. Scorpio is directly connected to the eighth house and all eighth house matters of the zodiac. The body parts connected to the eighth house and Scorpio are the genitals and the excretory organs. These parts of our human body, our physical cosmic form, exemplify our vulnerability, as well as our ability to release and transform. These parts of the body are also part of our second chakra, which correlates to our sensing and feeling capabilities, our animal instincts and our human animal needs. This is also why the Moon (the sensing and feeling, emotional body of our being) is debilitated in Scorpio. We must not negate these aspects of our being. Our sensing and feelings, our vulnerabilities and our ability to release and let go are vital for our health, well being, our sense of vitality and wholeness. These themes are alive in this coming waxing cycle so pay close attention. This cycle in many ways is the final extraction process of our past many months of dancing with all that has transpired in and through Libra. We are finally able to release what needs to be released, while keeping parts and pieces that we want. The next step will be to use what we've harvested and let the manure become the necessary nutrients for our garden of life. With multiple layers of Mitra influencing this new Moon, fine detail becomes another part of our theme in the coming cycle. Mitra is a deity that rules precision, exactness, focus and detail, while also being considered the "friendly star". This soft, mild and gentle star, allows us to probe into the details of our being, contemplate, honor and acquire the details we need to tend to our heart, and our emotional body wisdom. Use this time to dig into your depths, your shadow parts, and seek wisdom for honoring these aspects of yourself. Look for the gifts within your darkness. Put pieces together, in order to help make sense of the nonsensical, to attend and tend to your brokenness- the illusion of the shadow. Make your emotional body and physical embodiment practice your priority at this time and harvest from the wisdom of your own knowing. Creative Ritual for the Waxing Moon Cycle The emotional body and physical body become potent messengers for us at this time. These body's can be entry points for our deep harvesting process. The cosmic and creative intelligence coursing through us can be accessed as we cultivate a relationship with our senses, feelings and sensations. This is the beauty and strength of the body- which gives us access to our deepest needs, desires and wants. This creative Ritual is designed to get you gently attuned to what these messages may be. I also recommend using the 3 level check in to help you make vital distinctions between the messages of each body: the physical, mental and emotional bodies. For more information about getting embodied, read this. 1) Sitting, standing or laying down, begin to notice your breathing. Notice the quality of your breathing. Get intimate with the sensation of how the breath feels moving within your body. Feel the breath as you inhale and the chest expands. Feel the breath as you exhale and feel the chest collapse. 2) Notice any sensations in the body that are arriving for you. Is there a certain body part that feels tight? Cold? Energized? Painful? Throbbing? Seek out any sensations that are present for you and let your attention go to this part of the body. 3) Use this sensation for greater inquiry. Does this sensation have a color? Maybe it has a shape or brings with it an image? Perhaps it has a sound? Be curious and ask the sensation to give you some deeper information. 4) Harvest this information. As you gather these pieces of information from your body ask the sensation to answer these three questions: I am, I want and I need. Based on the answers you receive, you may wish to begin moving with the sensation and let it inform your physical body movement exploration. You may also wish to do a drawing in order to harvest your findings more intimately. I suggest exploring both of these processes in order to awaken your dialogue and start deepening your relationship with your physical body. I am passionate about embodiment! This is why I offer my clients a very unique synergy of modalities to help them get embodied. Using jyotish insights from your own karmic life map, I am able to prescribe individualized and specialized body part work, in order to maximize healing and transformation. My embodiment prescriptions are ideal for overcoming obstacles and blockages that may be hindering health and wholeness. The body is our biggest resource for awakening, and I'm here to help you awaken through the messages of your body wisdom! Want to learn more about transforming your life through jyotish and embodiment work? Schedule a session with me. Plan your week in tune with nature. Never miss a planetary update. Sign up for my weekly newsletter. Was this post helpful? Please share it with a friend! Thank you I used to be the yogi who hit the mat every day. Yoga was my life. I understood the purpose of yoga and used the brilliance of proper sequencing in my practice. I incorporated pranayama, asanas and sivasana as an ideal three part system of wholeness, or yoga, and as preparation for my meditation practice. Yoga wasn't the only part of my movement story though. Dance has been a staple of my life since I started ballet at the age of four. Later I moved on to modern dance, various styles of African dance and Afro Brazilian dance as well. My love of dance, moving the body, and my passion for understanding the arts as a necessary language of culture, led me to an undergrad in Ethnodanceology. Since I come from a yogic family, creating a life for myself that embraces daily and regular practices of awakening, have seemed normal, healthy and even necessary for me and my evolution. My upbringing also helped me understand that the body is a vital resource for one's awakening, evolution and ultimately enlightenment. These values hold true for me still. But five years ago, I stumbled upon Body-centered Expressive Art Therapy, and my spiritual views, my body practices, and my movement exploration began to radically shift. My practice of awakening is still centered around my body and my practice is still daily. But the rest of my process is entirely different. In the Body-centered approach to art therapy that I work with, we understand that we have more than one body. We have the physical body yes, and we of course have the mental body, but we also have an emotional body. These three bodies are upheld by the spiritual body. (This corroborates with the Vedic understanding as well). Each body in fact has the ability to communicate with us and has a language all its own. In order to be fully embodied, we must learn how to speak with each of these bodies and to harvest their unique wisdom and messages. The fact is that most of us are working entirely with the mental body- day in and day out. And this is where we get stuck. We let the mental body tell us what to do. What it needs. What it wants. We let it tell us how to behave, what is acceptable, what isn't. We let it tell us all kinds of stories, and we listen to it! We even let the mental body tell us how to move our body. This is vital to understand. When we do yoga asanas, dance techniques, and other mechanical movement practices, we are letting the mental body tell our physical body what to do. This can strengthen the mind/body connection, but it doesn't guarantee nor imply embodiment. What is embodiment and why does it matter? Embodiment implies that we are working with the wisdom and knowledge of the physical body, not separate from it, outside of it or against it. That we are in direct dialogue with the language of the body and therefor harvesting from its immense wisdom. It's about resourcing from the messages of the body and letting your body speak to you very intimately. Most importantly, it implies the capacity to deeply listen to its messages. This is why I love somatic and body-centered approaches to movement and therapy. Through a body-centered approach to movement, we are creating a special dialogue with our body and its messages. We have an opportunity to build a relationship with it in very intimate ways. We can resource from the body and the innate and vast wisdom of the body. We are then able to let these impulses of the physical body inform our movements in order for deeper awareness. This is a very big distinction between most yoga and dance practices, and embodied movement practices. In an embodied practice, the body informs the movements, not the mental body, not the mind. It's true, a yoga asana practice and even some dance practices, might make you feel more in touch with your body and its messages as a result of moving it into certain shapes and forms. This is the gift of working with what is known as the "mind body", but I invite you to take this a step further. In this place of deep listening that may arrive during or after your yoga or dance practice, spend time with your body's wisdom. Hang out here and harvest. Listen. Inquire. Ask questions. Get really good at asking your physical body what it needs and wants. Use these tips for greater embodiment during your movement practices: - Start with a four level check-in. Embodiment begins when we can clearly identify what each level of awareness is offering and sharing with us in any given moment. Check in daily with what is arriving on your mental body level, physical body level and emotional body level and spiritual body level. This will get you started. - Instead of doing a set sequence of asanas, postures or movements, start your practice by listening to your physical body's messages. Is there tightness in a certain part of the body? Can you sense openness and space in another part of your body? Go into these sensations and inquire about them. What message do your tight shoulder or hamstrings have for you? Ask and ye shall receive! - Notice when you are pushing yourself to achieve an objective or outcome. Do you "push through" your practice even when you are tired or worn out? Do you force yourself into a posture just to arrive into a desired shape or form? Do you notice inner dialogue about what is "right" in your yoga practice and what is "wrong"? Notice where your practice includes "shoulds" and "have to's" as well as "supposed to's." What happens when you release these? - Build your movements based on deeply listening to your body's impulses. Let the impulses that are present in your body, be the catalyst for your movements. This is a profound step towards embodiment and it will allow you to deepen your relationship with the messages coming from your physical body. This is very different than imposing postures onto the physical body. Embodiment is intrinsically connected to the now. It doesn't actually require long, arduous physical body movement practices, but it does require willingness to let the physical body speak to you. Use these four steps to help you become more adept at listening to your physical body's messages: 1) Sitting, standing or laying down, begin to notice your breathing. Notice the quality of your breathing. Get intimate with the sensation of how the breath feels moving within your body. Feel the breath as you inhale and the chest expands. Feel the breath as you exhale and feel the chest collapse. 2) Notice any sensations in the body that are arriving for you. Is there a certain body part that feels tight? Cold? Energized? Painful? Throbbing? Seek out any sensations that are present for you and let your attention go to this part of the body. 3) Use this sensation for greater inquiry. Does this sensation have a color? Maybe it has a shape or brings with it an image? Perhaps it has a sound? Be curious and ask the sensation to give you some deeper information. 4) Harvest this information. As you gather these pieces of information from your body ask the sensation to answer these three questions: I am, I want and I need. Based on the answers you receive, you may wish to begin moving with the sensation and let it inform your physical body movement exploration. You may also wish to do a drawing in order to harvest your findings more intimately. I suggest exploring both of these processes in order to awaken your dialogue and start deepening your relationship with your physical body. I am passionate about embodiment! This is why I offer my clients a very unique synergy of modalities to help them get embodied. Using jyotish insights from your own karmic life map, I am able to prescribe individualized and specialized body part work, in order to maximize healing and transformation. My embodiment prescriptions are ideal for overcoming obstacles and blockages that may be hindering health and wholeness. The body is our biggest resource for awakening, and I'm here to help you awaken through the messages of your body wisdom! Want to learn more about transforming your life through jyotish and embodiment work? Schedule a session with me. Plan your week in tune with nature. Never miss a planetary update. Sign up for my weekly newsletter. Was this post helpful? Please share it with a friend! Thank you Don't Miss My *free* Embodied Chakra Class!
- Gather resources, tools and guidance for deepening your connection to all seven Chakras. - Discover essential manifestation resources in order to up-level your life. - Awaken the chakras and step into greater clarity and purpose. - Identify and release blockages keeping you from fully embodying your full chakra power. - Understand what your jyotish chart shares about your chakras. Join the List Moon is completely full on November 6th at 16:21 CST in Aries and Bharani nakshatra. The Vishva Devas are enlivened when the Moon is in Purnima, fullness. Creativity, light and expression are available to us in greater capacity. With the Moon in Bharani nakshatra at this time, Yama brings an element of restraint and containment to us. He is an enforcer- of Natural Law, of right and wrong, of karma. He insists on transformation and brings it to us through his truth. Everyone at some point will have to face the scrutiny of Yama. He tells it like it is. The harsh realities of life and death. Bharani is therefor considered an Ugra nakshatra- one that is harsh and dreadful. Cutting, executive decisions and abilities are possible, as well as success in destruction and interrupting. There is a strong element of clearing, destroying and removing with this full Moon. There's harshness available for taking care of these tasks. The need for removing the old and outworn, all that is creating our malnourishment, is very strong right now. We are being asked to find a greater sense of balance, while deepening our container, so that we may hold more of the vital nutrients we need for our lives. Our ability to be nourished is directly connected to how much we are willing to remove the old, outworn, unhealthy parts of our lives and work with our shadows. Libra reminds us that there is a flip side to everything and that we must always look deeply into our own mirror- the mirror of other. Every shadow has a gift and can bring us light. All light, has a shadow and darkness as well. When we are willing to dance with all parts of our being, we come into greater balance and wholeness. This is unity consciousness. In this cycle, relationships require and request our re-balancing. They can continue to serve as our resource for deep awakening, for looking at our own shadows and darkness, and the places within us where we need to shine more light. Additionally, the resource of creativity brings us more flow, more life, more love and resources, including money. The pelvis becomes a primary resource once again, so use it as a stabilizing force. And our sense of self, our ego and our ability to resource within our own being, becomes vital in this waning cycle. Embodiment, and listening deeply to the impulses, the messages of our body, is a potent reminder for our path. The physical body, is where we have the ability to harvest our nourishment and the greatest knowing of our needs. Within the junction point of the physical body and the knowing it provides us, is where the felt senses enliven and our emotional body wisdom can be activated. Get embodied and listen closely to the messages that will be arriving in the coming cycle. Intuition will be strengthened once the planets start passing through Scorpio. This balancing act, the stability that we are moving into, moving towards at this time, gets transformed, changed and re-imagined as we near the new Moon on the 22nd. For now, create gentle undulations and ride your own waves, by rooting into your depths. Creative Ritual for the Waning Moon Cycle ::: As I mentioned above, we are working with a dance of balance during this waning Moon cycle. Balance requires that our various needs, wants and desires- the various parts of ourselves- find some integration, some greater sense of wholeness and equilibrium. Libra represents our "other" half, our mirror. Our shadows and light, our depth and our surface, our need for communion and separation, our walk with life and death. Extremes, polarities and difference come into view and provoke us, if we choose, to go deeper into our being. Libra reminds us that we are multifaceted, and have more than one side to ourselves. This is our dance for the waning cycle. Working directly with our two halves- perhaps the oppositions within us. This creative ritual is designed to help bring more synergy within us, more balance. 1) Identify a conflict within your life. What are you aware of within your life that brings up a sense of opposition for you? Maybe it's staying in a relationship or leaving. Perhaps it's losing weight, but uncertainty about how to do that. Maybe you want more money in your life, but it feels impossible. What is the greatest challenge that is present for you right now? Notice how it makes you feel. What sensations in the body arrive when you think of this issue, problem or concern? Where do you feel this arrive in your body? Again, be present to how this problem shows up in your body. Be present to the sensations, body parts, and any imagery that arrives. 2) Create an image of this conflict, this problem, and how it makes you feel, and how your body responds to it. What colors, textures, images and shapes arrive on the paper? Use craypas for this one, as the solid consistency of this medium will help establish the feelings onto the page. Use your creation process to fully translate this life issue for you. Get messy and wild if you need to! Let your image speak to you. If your drawing could talk, what would it tell you? Take 20 minutes for this. 3) Move your image. The next step is to get your problem moving, to get the mass of energy that this life problem poses for you, to shape shift and start flowing more. Look at your image and let yourself be attracted to a part of it that interests you or intrigues you. Perhaps a color, texture, line or shape beckons you. Go there. Then, begin to move this part of your image. Let sounds emerge. Notice the body parts being utilized. Notice the responses in the body as you move and listen for impulses from the body. Let it keep speaking to you and keep following its impulses. Move your image, develop your movements and explore your conflict image through this movement exploration for at least 20 minutes. 4) Harvest from your experience. What pieces of your personal mythology arrived through your image and movement exploration? What resources did you discover through your image and movement exploration? Need some extra guidance and clarity? Schedule a session with me. Plan your week in tune with nature. Never miss a planetary update. Sign up for my weekly newsletter. Was this post helpful? Please share it with a friend! Thank you. |
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