We are the walking wounded. Exposed to all manner of salts. Tears. Oceans. Irritants. Disinfectants. Cleansers.
We trip over the graves of one another’s un-grieved sorrows. Unknowingly. Knowingly. Raising ghosts of the past. Unresolved woe. Stirring all manner of emotional hornets nests.
These stirrings, these little earthquakes, these eruptions of feelings can overtake us. Wipe us out. Wipe us clean of the residue that has built up.
We have no control over what flips our emotional switches on. But once lit, our feelings carry potent lessons if we know how to learn from them. Once lit, our emotions can lead us back to the wounds we originally incurred if we know how to track them. Once lit, our senses can send us the information we have been too busy avoiding for fear of having to re-live the pain we try so desperately to escape.
But, the only way out is through.
How we work with this aspect of our experience depends on our nature and the way we’ve been nurtured. The power of our emotions is undeniable. Our ability to work with that power is in large part dependent on the opportunities and guidance we’ve been given to do so. Developing a mature response to our emotions takes time. A life-time. And a desire to do so.
Developing the ability to hold our emotional reactions long enough to understand them takes practice. We need patience and strength to sit with our feelings. We need to develop the sturdiness of character to allow that kind of process to move through us. Especially if we have grown up with excessive trauma and/or adults that were unable to do so for themselves.
Eventually we have to decide what we want to do with our feelings. Do we use them to justify our bad behavior or do we use them as gateways to greater self-awareness? Developing our ability to detect and identify our feelings is of paramount importance. We have to know that we have a feeling before we can begin to understand it.
The full moon in Cancer arrives 3:34 AM PT on Thursday, January 12th, peaking at 22° of the crab’s sign. Cancer feels. Everything. All the time. It feels what you forgot to feel. It feels the music that is too loud, the lights that are too bright, the too-scratchy tag in the shirt its lover is wearing. Cancer cares. Too much. Too tenderly. Too exposed to walk through the world, Cancer needs its shell. Needs to curl in. To sort out its feelings from the feelings of others. To understand its emotional reactions. To digest all the different sensations that it encounters, making sense of their meaning. Cancer needs to cry. It’s like breathing for most other creatures. Its water ducts are always at the ready. Ready to release the excess of water it carries.
This full moon sits with the goddess asteroid, Vesta. Goddess of the hearth, keeper of the flame, devoted servant and patron of priestesses, devotees and ritualist of all cloths, Vesta helps us pull focus and dedicate ourselves to something greater than ourselves. In Cancer, Vesta is focused on the feelings of the moment.
The full moon sits in a cardinal grand cross with Jupiter, Uranus and Pluto. It lights up some of the larger, more disruptive themes of 2017.
Currently in a tug of war, astrologically known as an opposition, Jupiter and Uranus produce unforeseen and unpredictable growth. Shocking and abrupt, Uranus in Aries tries to tip the scales of Jupiter in Libra’s even-keeled and equitable plan for expansion. Jupiter being the planet closely connected to our ideas, ethics and morals, opposed by Uranus, the planet known for its inventive experimentalism, may inject into the world all manner of new beliefs, both intriguing and unfathomable.
Gas-lighting can thrive under the shock and awe of Uranus’s derailing influences making it supremely important to be devoted to knowing our emotional reality.
The moon square Uranus and Jupiter makes the disruptions all the more felt. It makes our emotions all the more exaggerated. It makes this full moon in Cancer all the more emotionally unpredictable and all the more likely to receive an emotional wake-up call.
The moon in opposition to Pluto sets up a dynamic that makes the need to empty out our emotional storehouses impossible to ignore. The moon in opposition to Pluto makes emotions all the more intense. The moon in opposition to Pluto makes it all the more obvious what grief we need to allow ourselves to grieve.
In Cancer, the moon is at home and able to maximize its effect. When working with the moon we can open to our own intuitive and psychic capabilities, heal old wounds and learn what we need in order to feel at home in our lives. Conjunct Vesta, this full moon reminds us of the importance of tending to the sacred fire that is at the center of our lives. Our hearts. Many winds will try to blow us about, much chaos will try to avert our gaze from the truth, but, if we are focused on what matters to us, focused on what we know to be true, in our heart of hearts, we cannot and will not be lead astray.
Full moon blessings,
Chani