Lunar Love Letter 🌒 - August 16, 2023 — Blue Moon*
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Important dates this cycle (in EST):
Lunar Cycle Duration: 8/16-9/13
New Moon: 8/16 ← we are here
First Quarter Moon: 8/24
Full Moon: 8/30 Blue Moon*
Last Quarter Moon: 9/6
Happy good day to your beautiful heart 💜
How do your heart and mind feel after diving into the work centered around abundance?
It rattled some deep stuff loose for me, and dare I say it — I feel a bit freer. And excited for it to all integrate. And to explore it more as it comes back up over time.
I’m such a nerd for this stuff. And I’m mega excited for this next lunar cycle 🤓
It’s bringing a blue moon* — the second full moon in August 🌕
I was brainstorming ideas for what magic I want to call in, and it feels like a chance to dig deeper and get more raw — a powerful mirror to reflect where our energetic investment within ourselves is best placed. Perhaps to light up some things we’ve been too stubborn to see or acknowledge. To tackle honesty — true honesty with ourselves, even if it’s a little scary.
Enter the Yamas and Niyamas of yoga.
If you’re not familiar with these, they’re essentially ten tenets of living well and in harmony with everything (including yourself), and I'll tell you a little bit about them throughout this lunar cycle. I had a mini re-discovery of them during this past lunar cycle with my abundance work, and I realized that I wanted to use this blue moon* as an opportunity to dig into these within a devoted container and offer some interesting lenses to get curious through.
Fall is not far away and is usually about preparing our material resources for the shift to winter, so as we move toward that, can we shake up our internal resources and explore what we might be doing that is standing in the way of the life we want or cultivating the life we want? The feeling of the life we want? What can we do more wholeheartedly that is feeding that life with vigor and vibrancy? What’s distracting from our journey through it?
Can we take a hard and honest look at these things with a lens of love and compassion for ourselves? Leave the judgment out of it. It doesn’t have a place here.
For example — self-imposed busyness. This is a BIG one for me.
Life is so fucking busy — I know you know — but sometimes I find I am making myself unnecessarily busier — like overidentifying with it and hoarding all the busyness that’s out there. When I’m really honest with myself, when I’m doing this, what’s really happening is that it’s giving me a sense of validation and importance, and distracting me from dealing with hard feelings or personal work. I’m doing harm — not maliciously, but harm nonetheless. And that’s contradictory to what I’m trying to do.
I think we often avoid the hard look because we can’t unsee something. Even if we pretend we didn’t see it, it still latches on somewhere in our consciousness. And it festers until we deal with it.
Instead, if we courageously look and acknowledge and accept, even when it feels ugly and we dread dealing with it, this is an act of self love. If we know we’re about to face something and we gear up and resource ourselves as best as we can, we are as prepared as we ever will be. And we are better positioning ourselves to change and receive support during that change within our community.
So let’s get in there.
On our own terms.
And that ⬆️ can feel like a big game changer.
And make no mistake — those feelings will come up. Don’t ignore them. They are part of the package, and sometimes, probably a lot of times, just as important to work through as the actual behaviors we might notice.
So have grace. Call in support. Ask for kind words or helpful energy. Stay loving with yourself 💜
🪄 May this lunar cycle show you the light you offer the world ✨
*The moon names and phase details given here are as given on the Farmers' Almanac website. There are many other moon names and stories from other cultures that are not included here, but I encourage you to do your own research. It’s fascinating!
All resources mentioned in this newsletter are included for research purposes only and are not affiliated with Zenful Mindings LLC.
