Oh Heart, Great Sage of Love, Show Me What You’re Made Of

Full moon at 4° of Cancer

At 4:33pm PST, on Tuesday, December 26th, the full moon peaks, and everything peaks with it, at 4° of Cancer, the moon’s home sign. This year started with a full moon in Cancer (Open Channel), and now it ends with one. Cancer is cardinal water, initiating water. It’s an archetype of mothering and emotional nurturance and protection. Like the moon herself, Cancer teaches us about being full of needs and feelings, about water and tides and cycles, about sensitivity and attunement. It wants to help us develop a pragmatic relationship with our bodies and others’ bodies. It wants us to learn how to intuitively read the signals of all these emotions and sensations and instincts, how to honor our physical and emotional intelligence, how to live in ways that promote well-being. If we do learn this, over time, it will help us grow wise in the ways of love. We can learn how to be our most authentic, most vulnerable selves, and hold the authenticity and vulnerability of others in a good way. We can learn how to care exquisitely for others and the world, and how to include ourselves in that care. Essentially, Cancer introduces us to ecstatic states of liberation only possible when we have devoted our lives to love, and the labors of love.

It’s an emotional high tide to end the year on. It may ultimately be healing and clearing and clarifying, but first it will probably be too much. Let’s just acknowledge that. If you are feeling totally pummeled by this full moon, at the end of this intense year; if you’re feeling tender and sensitive and weirdly insecure, you aren’t alone. Full moons in Cancer tend to tend to highlight any part of us that’s been neglected or overworked, and could use a little extra love and support. This moon has also been building through the holidays, for many an insane time of obligatory overdoing, and it’s peaking just as we’ve all been drawn in to or avoided the powerful vortex of family and giving and ritual togetherness. Families and mothers and homes are prime Cancer territory, and depending on your own history with all of that, and your own present with all of that, the swell of feelings could be beautiful, or profoundly difficult, or both. Our hearts will be on our sleeves either way; our true feelings nearly impossible to hide.

Cancer lunations always make me feel like singing songs of love to the world’s emotional laborers, to the people doing the laundry, washing the dishes, cooking and feeding everyone, holding the babies, holding the hands and feet of the dying and grieving, asking everyone else how are you doing? Can I get you anything? These are the people making the world go round, tending the bodies and the hearts. This moon is their moon, and! It could be especially hard on those who been giving too much, meeting others’ needs at the ongoing expense of their own. This is one of the paradoxes Cancer specializes in. For Cancer, there is no higher ethic than love and care, and it calls us to care deeply and give selflessly. But at the same time, if we don’t tend to ourselves and our own needs, if we don’t practice self-care, and include ourselves in that love, we become out of balance and depleted; we have nothing to give. We may even unconsciously cause harm to those we are trying to be of service to. So Cancer wants us to tend to our own needs as consistently and wholeheartedly as we would tend to the needs of someone we loved. It wants us to be deeply nourishing and resourcing ourselves, so that our cups are full and overflowing. It us to have the capacity to give.

Luckily, this full moon is not on her own, riding a sensitive wave in the middle of an end-of-year Mercury retrograde. She’s receiving a supportive trine from Saturn in Pisces, helping us invent more fluid, adaptable, intelligent boundaries; let go of old definitions; and allow ourselves to be reshaped by more spiritual values. The moon is also getting a sweet sextile from a retrograde Jupiter in Taurus, which could help our generous hearts to stay open and expanded but a slower, more careful retrograde pace. The Sabian symbol for 4° of Cancer is “a cat arguing with a mouse” — a symbol of internal struggle, rationalization by our more powerful parts, and making self-serving claims without apology. So we might be getting that extra push to just be about self-dominion; to like what we like, and take what we need, and enjoy it without guilt or shame. Other people may not like it so much, and it may have consequences, but those consequences will not include resentment for not having our needs met.

All-together this feels a little likely to provoke everyone’s emotional woundedness, but in a way that also calls in a lot of compassion and healing, possibly even the Christmas miracle of forgiveness. If Cancer could give us a gift to help us stack the deck in our favor, it would be an activation of the powers of the heart. Sometimes I put a hand on my heart, I take a breath on purpose, and I say this prayer: oh heart, great sage of love, show me what you’re made of. And then I keep breathing. If I feel resistance in my heart, if, for example, I am afraid of feeling what’s there and crying—I get a lump in my throat—I see if I can just notice that, without needing it to change. I see if I can send some love even to that. I love you lump. I love you lungs, for trying to hold my breath, so I don’t have to feel this. I love you defenses, doing your job, trying to keep me safe. Thank you. I love you. That’s the power of the heart, if only we remember to use it. We can give ourselves compassion, and receive it, anytime, for exactly where we are at. In doing so, we invite a shift in state, we create the conditions for mind to soften, and for the heart to open. We can immerse ourselves in a field of compassion. And once we are receiving that kind of compassion, it naturally wants to return the favor to the world, and flow everywhere. Love and compassion for all sentient beings, you know? All beings. All of us struggling, suffering, petty, greedy, angry, grieving, and frightened beings. All of us.

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That’s it for the year friends! Just a reminder to all paid subscribers, if you would like to enter yourself in the winter chart-reading giveaway, there is still time. You can enter just by replying to this email and saying yes please, or sending an email to thecultofmindy@gmail.com with “Yes I want a chart reading” in the subject line. If you are not yet a paid subscriber, but the prospect of getting a chart reading is sweetening the deal, go ahead and upgrade your subscription and then send me that email. Enter by Sunday, December 31st at midnight PST! 4 winners will be pulled on new year’s day, and if it’s you I will send you an email with instructions on how to book a reading this winter.

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Ritual & Writing Prompts

(Disclaimer: Prompts are suggestions, not instructions. Play with what inspires you, ignore what’s doesn’t. Adapt in any way you see fit.)