Nancy Lankston
Full moon in airy Libra, the champion of balance and fairness and equality.
Where are you out of balance with your true self?
What small steps can you take towards alignment and balance? What can you shed from your life? What can you add?
Who or what can help you create more balance?
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Image: Full Moon Over Alderfer
by Nancy L
New moon in airy Libra, the queen of justice and fair, balanced, egalitarian relationships.
A Libra new moon is the perfect time to sit quietly and contemplate if there are places in your life that are out of balance.
Look at your life like a loving gardener; even the most perfect, beautiful gardens require tending to stay balanced and beautiful.
What needs to be tended to in your life? What needs love and feeding? What needs to be cut back? What needs to be removed?
What is missing from your garden? What do you want (or need) to add to make your heart sing? How can you create a little space for the things you truly love and desire?
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#selfcare
#balance
#innergarden
#tending
New Moon in Libra, champion of justice, balance and equal relationships. But imbalance and chaos rule right now in the outer world. The crazy roller coaster of events and emotions continues day after day.
The Goddess of Justice reminds us that true justice and equality are rarely easy to achieve. People who have amassed power and riches from playing by the rules of the current system will fight to keep the system as is — even as the unfairness and inequities of the system are being exposed to everyone. As Machiavelli noted centuries ago, “power corrupts.”
But the Goddess of Justice also reminds us that true power is not about status or position or money. True power flows from within. True power is grounded in knowing and trusting in one’s self and one’s gifts. And standing in a place of true inner power, one person can change the world. Remember Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Joan of Arc, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Lasting change grows out of people standing in their power and their knowing.
Get off the roller coaster of news and rumors for awhile. Focus on you. What does your heart need right now?
Allow yourself to feel everything that this time is bringing up in you; fear, rage, confusion, despair, hope, love. Those feelings are markers pointing you towards what matters most to you – and what parts of you need extra care and healing right now.
You can cultivate your internal power and knowing by listening deeply to yourself and all your fears and desires. Inner balance, peace, wisdom and power lie just beyond all those difficult feelings you’ve been trying to avoid.
Your Soul is always there, beneath the outer noise. Listen.
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When I say the feminine, I don’t mean gender. I mean the feminine principle that is living—or suppressed—in both men and women. The feminine principle attempts to relate. Instead of breaking things off into parts, it says, Where are we alike? How can we connect? Where is the love? Can you listen to me? Can you really hear what I am saying? Can you see me? Do you care whether you see me or not?
Now, these are very serious questions. And the feminine is difficult to talk about because so few people have experienced it. The feminine is presence, and relatedness, and a heart that can open so that when you meet another person you actually are seeing that person’s authentic self. What meaning does human life have if nobody has ever seen you?
… The great work of our time is to bring the feminine into this culture. And it’s not an easy path. How does each one of us contribute? Believe it or not, it’s done in the most personal ways. Take time to listen to your dreams, to write them down. Take time to recognise that there are things going on within you that need to be felt, or said, or lived, or grieved. Pay attention to these things both in yourself and in the people in your life. Pay attention to the authentic self.
~Marion Woodman
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#WhyIDoWhatIDo
#ChangingTheWorld
#OneBreathAtATime
Image: Mother and Child
Frances Hodgkins
Why do I rail on and on about the patriarchy on social media? Because it is essentially a state of great imbalance in our world. We must honor and respect BOTH the male and female, both the yin and yang energies to be in a healthy, balanced state. A man named Robert Bly explained it well:
‘I Came Out of the Mother Naked’
“In every past society known, a matriarchy has preceded the present patriarchy. Just as every adult was once inside the mother, every society was once inside the Great Mother…what we call masculine consciousness is a very recent creation. Men prefer to remember back only to that point in culture when they took over….archeologists have found hundreds of statues in caves and settlement ruins…going back many centuries, and they have never found a statue of the Great Father—the statues found, all over the world, are statues of the Mother.
If it is true that mother consciousness preceded father consciousness, then two further things follow:
women at some time must have had immense power, running all areas of life: law, agriculture, division of wealth, social custom and especially religion.
there must have been a war … Beowolf I think describes the destruction of Great Mother culture in Northern Europe; it is a historical poem, and perhaps three thousand years of fighting are summed up in it.
We have then inside us two worlds of consciousness: one world associated with the dark, and one world with the light. The dark half corresponds to the consciousness developed in the matriarchies, the white to the consciousness developed in the patriarchies that followed. Mother consciousness was in the world first, and embodied itself century after century in its favorite images: the night, the sea, animals with curving horns and cleft hooves, the moon, bundles of grain. Four favorite creatures of the Mother were the turtle, the owl, the dove, and the oyster —all womb-shaped, night, or ancient round sea creatures. Matriarchy thinking is intuitive and moves by associative leaps.
Bachofen discovered that it favored the left side (the feeling side) of the body. When the Nicene Creed says Christ sits on the right hand of God, you know you are in a patriarchy.
The right hand became favored over the left, mountaintops over valleys, one and three over two and four, the square over the circle. It creates straight roads. Matriarchies are interested primarily in what is inside walls, but the patriarchies become aware of the space between walls; empires grow from patriarchies. The patriarchies plot out the ground in huge squares. In thinking, Socrates sounds the note: avoid myths – which are always stories of the Mother anyway – and think logically, in a straight line.
Father consciousness tries to control the mammal nature through rules, morality, commandments….The Chinese describe it as the south side of the mountain (on which the light always falls), the rational, the hard.
In mother consciousness there is affection for nature, compassion, love of water, grief and care for the dead, love of whatever is hidden, intuition, ecstasy. The Chinese describe it as the north side of the mountain (always in shadow), the valley of the world.
Before the white people came, Drinks Water, an old Dakota holy man, dreamed that the Indians would be defeated, and warned that when that happened, they would have to live in square houses. Black Elk mentions this in 1931. He was then living in a square house, and said, “It is a bad way to live, for there can be no power in a square. You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round…the wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours…Our teepees were round and always set in a circle.”
Men’s fear of women seems to be a fundamental emotion on this planet. It is rarely talked about, and in the U.S. it is getting worse. It is possible that when a culture refuses to visualize the dangerous mothers, men then become vaguely afraid of all women, and finally of the entire feminine side of the their own personalities. That is a disaster.”
Robert Bly, 1973
New moon in Libra, the wise, airy queen of Justice and balanced relationships. Is it a coincidence that Justice and our ideas about right and wrong are being debated on both the US and British political stages right now? Perhaps the Libra queen, Justice herself, is schooling us.
The queen of Justice holds the scales of balance in one hand. She uses the sword held in her other hand to cut through deception and illusion in order to expose the truth. Owl, ancient symbol of wisdom, sits on her shoulder guiding her actions as she restores balance to the world.
What does Justice look like and feel like when she shows up in your personal life? Now is the perfect time to align more closely with your definition of Justice. When you acknowledge and serve Justice, balance and peace of mind naturally follow.
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New moon in fiery Leo, the king of all he surveys.
As summer reaches its zenith, you may feel the need to DO something big and dramatic to shift things. But with Venus and Mars in the underworld and a host of retrograde planets, now is simply not the ideal time for big, consequential actions.
Do whatever it takes to maintain your balance. Eliminate some of the excessive stimulation bombarding you. Chill out. Slow your roll. Think everything through.
Get yin to counteract the yang of this time.
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