You Were Born for This
Page 9
Having a difficult time confronting the people you love is par for the course with this Moon. So is feeling plagued when faced with the need to choose between options, people, or main courses at dinner. Reminding yourself to prioritize your needs above all else should be a daily practice.
You may have had a parent or caregiver who had a hard time dealing with confrontation, someone who was overly concerned with appearances, or who was extremely likable and social. You might have also learned how to be pleasing to make up for their lack of tact.
Affirmations
Disagreement is part of the peace process.
I focus on my needs as a way of being a better partner to everyone in my life.
Reflection Questions
What helps you remember that conflict is a necessary part of life?
Where in your life do you seek justice as a daily practice? Where in your life do you create beauty as a daily practice? Is it part of how you live out your life’s purpose?
Did you have a parent or caregiver who was averse to discord, taught you to be “good” or “nice,” or was graceful and easy to be with?
MOON IN SCORPIO
The Moon seeks comfort, stability, and security. It likes to be in a sign that facilitates a sense of grounding and ease. It wants to settle in and celebrate the mundane. Scorpio yawns at such simplicity.
In the intense, extreme, and resilient sign of Scorpio, the Moon is in its fall. This doesn’t mean that life in and of itself will be difficult, but you will called on to dig deep and transform your pain into purpose.
The Moon in Scorpio unpacks its soul’s purpose in ways that might evoke intense emotions, creating bonds with others that are deep, transformative, and possibly possessive at times (either you are or others are with you). When distorted, this Moon can become fixated on maintaining control instead of finding ways to compost difficult emotions to allow for new experiences.
You have the ability to move through difficulties, work through emotional intensity, and face extreme situations with a greater ease than most. You innately understand all manner of abuses, misfortunes, and difficulties, lending you an incredible depth, sensitivity, and emotional endurance.
This Moon may represent a parent who was emotionally powerful, overbearing, manipulative, strong-willed, resilient, resourceful, magnetic, or a combination of all of the above. Because Scorpio deals with death, loss, and transformation, sometimes having the Moon in this sign speaks to not only experiencing these issues in childhood but also having them as part of your professional interest or expertise.
Affirmations
My depth of feeling is a resource that can teach me how to have compassion for others.
I honor my intensity; it is a wellspring of creative energy that I can channel in a million different ways.
Reflection Questions
What helps you to process your more intense emotions? How does your need to maintain control impede your ability to do so?
Are intense emotional experiences part of how you live out your life’s purpose?
Did you have a parent or caregiver who had an especially difficult time or who was dishonored or disrespected in some way?
MOON IN SAGITTARIUS
The Moon in Sagittarius seeks what it needs with bravado. It takes care of itself by taking action. It nourishes itself by pursuing the truth.
The Moon in Sagittarius needs adventure. It is comforted by travel, leaps of faith, new ideas, philosophical study, and anything that helps it feel expansive, alive, and in motion.
Its optimism makes you resilient. You survive by searching for the best in people, places, and situations. You connect to others through positivity and need to feel like you are growing and developing every day.
If your Moon is in Sagittarius, you’ll function well when you allow yourself to be led by your inspirations, insights, and intuition. You may be extreme in your emotional responses and feel the need to take off in a direction before you have really understood the consequences, especially if you are trying to avoid something.
You might have had a parent or caregiver who was a scholar, traveler, adventurer, or free spirit. You may have experienced them as too distracted by bigger things to be interested in your needs as a child. Having your Moon in Sagittarius can sometimes point to parents or caregivers who were extreme in their ideological or religious beliefs.
Affirmations
I expand my options every time I listen to my intuition.
I believe in the abundance of my life.
Reflection Questions
Does traveling, learning, and doing things that are spontaneous help you regulate emotionally? Is it part of how you live out your life’s purpose?
Do you feel safest when you also feel free? What does it mean to you to feel free? When do you feel unfairly limited or restricted?
Did one of your parents or caregivers feel larger than life to you, know a great amount, or need a lot of freedom? What meaning did you make of that when you were young?
MOON IN CAPRICORN
Here, the Moon creates safety and security through accomplishing tasks, climbing to new heights and proving itself as a responsible, reliable, productive member of society.
Capricorn Moons might do their due diligence before they do self-care, but like any other placement they can learn otherwise. As a way of establishing security in life, Moons in Capricorn will work harder than expected, putting in consistent effort until they feel depleted (though their stamina may be legendary).
Extremely self-reliant, Capricorn Moons feel safe when in control of their situation. Austere and diligent, this Saturn-ruled sign can use self-denial as a coping mechanism, and in some cases as a way to care for themselves. You may go without in order to feel good. Restraint may feel rewarding but must be balanced with a keen understanding of what you need to give yourself.
You might struggle to find connections that feel easy. A sense of lack can permeate, especially in early life. Emotional and physical comforts might feel unsatisfying or be missing completely. Because the Moon rules the physical self, you may have a hard time in your body, connecting to your body, or nourishing it.
Boundaries are important to your Moon. Emotionally speaking, there may be parts of you that few to zero people get a glimpse of, but the ones who do will be sacred to you. With an acute awareness of the bleak and grim realities of life, you might have an incredible sense of humor and deal with painful and delicate emotional material in very practical ways.
You might have had a parent or caregiver who was too burdened with responsibility or tradition to be able to care for you. The work of a Capricorn Moon is to understand where malnourishment occurred, so that there can be a repair of harm and a replenishing of whatever the lack in early life was. Whether you have parents or caregivers who were responsible, reliable, and accomplished, or too out of touch with their own emotional life to be able to recognize yours, you need to learn to replace constraint with comfort, whatever that means for you.
Affirmations
I am committed to being kind to myself.
I pause to replenish myself whenever I feel empty.
Reflection Questions
What do you feel guilty asking others for? Is this a feeling that you experienced in childhood or with a parental or authority figure? How can you support your own healing of this?
Is being pragmatic and driven toward accomplishing tasks a central theme of your life?
Was one of your parents or caregivers overly burdened with responsibilities or unable to meet your emotional needs? What meaning did you make of this?
MOON IN AQUARIUS
The Moon in Aquarius needs space. Here the Moon is fed by learning, communicating, and understanding the systems we live within, how they work, and how best to innovate them.
This Moon needs to be understood and intellectually challenged to feel emotionally safe. Creating security through detachment, the Moon in this sign needs to find logical conclusions to the pr
oblems of the heart, and logic is hard to reach when it is embroiled in emotionality. Distance is needed if this Moon is ever to sort itself—and the solutions it needs—out. An incredible stubbornness can set in with this placement, creating difficulty in being fluid with the ebbs and flows of emotional life. Others may experience you as emotionally remote, but none should mistake your Moon’s style for a lack of feeling. The emotions are there, even if nowhere near the surface. Feelings aren’t facts, but they do lead you to your truth.
The Moon in Aquarius wants to find solutions that work for all involved and can often leave its needs on ice to achieve a kind of equality. But nothing can be fair when you are forcibly denying your feelings. Your work is to learn how to create space for your own emotional experience and to value your body, heart, and soul as much as your mind and intellect.
You may have had a parent or caregiver who was intelligent, emotionally reserved, cool, or driven by needing things to be a certain way.
Affirmations
I am open to the wisdom that comes when I am able to sit with how I feel.
I give myself the space I need.
Reflection Questions
Do you tend to push others away when your feelings are overwhelming?
Do you feel that your life’s purpose is lived out, in part, through your ability to manifest your intellectual talents?
Was one of your parents or caregivers known for their intelligence or emotional reservedness? What meaning did you make of that? What did they teach you about working through difficult emotions?
MOON IN PISCES
Your Moon in Pisces wants to help you live out your life’s purpose through implementing the power of your imagination, sensitivity, creativity, and compassion in your daily life. Your Moon will imbue the mundane with either a fantastical sensibility or a deeply empathetic one—which is, in part, how you meet your emotional needs and create safety. Moon in Pisces wants to either merge with others or escape when the situations get sticky. This can be frustrating for others who felt so witnessed by your understanding ways. Here, your Moon wants to reflect to others their feelings and beauty, but it balks at any and all restraints on its ability to make a move. The fish is good at swimming, not always at staying still.
With this placement, it is often too tempting to escape the confines of daily life. Your Moon will most likely do well in the environments that encourage your intuition, sensitivity, imagination, and creativity.
As a way of protecting yourself, you might space out, check out, or peace out when others least expect it. Music, movement, art, creativity, and any healing work or endeavors help you channel your Moon in Pisces. Your Moon might need many ways to manifest its talents during the day. Pisces always wants a smorgasbord of opportunities and delights. This Moon wants those kinds of options daily.
Incredibly empathic and tuned into the suffering of others, you may get lost in the pain that you feel from the world around you. This Moon can act like a healing balm to many, but often to its own detriment. Your boundaries are the best attribute to beef up on. Helping others means you need to know where you begin and end.
You may have had a parent or caregiver who was extremely creative, sensitive, and caring, emotionally dependent on you, or prone to martyrdom. Parents and caregivers with addiction and mental health issues might also have been present in your childhood.
Affirmations
I honor my boundaries, giving what I have in excess and keeping what I need for myself.
I can tune into the pain of others while releasing it from my system.
Reflection Questions
What helps you to keep your center and not lose your sense of self when those around you are in pain?
How does your sensitivity serve the unfolding of your life’s purpose?
Did one of your parents or caregivers have difficulty with substance abuse or mental health, or show a great gift for being creative and intuitive with the needs of others?
House of Your Moon
Where Do You Meet Your Physical and Emotional Needs?
What House Is Your Moon In?
The house that your Moon is in is where you find comfort, where you get fed, and where you need to connect in a meaningful way with your life’s purpose. The house that your Moon is in is one of the most important areas of life for you to understand, live consciously into, and develop your relationship to. Since the Moon comments on parents and caregivers, the house that it is in can speak to something regarding your childhood, the person who birthed you, and your lineage.
With an exalted Moon in Taurus, in the 10th House of career and public roles, Frida Kahlo had one of her key planets at her professional aid. Set to work in the area of her life that was the most visible, her exalted Moon in the 10th House helped her to secure a place in the world for herself, despite many substantial odds. Just having a planet in its exaltation has the ability to bless the house that it is in and its significations will be brought about more easily. The way in which Frida Kahlo needed to live out her life’s purpose and find emotional and physical comfort (the Moon) was through building and securing (Taurus) a body of work that would become a monument and testament to her life (the 10th House). As mentioned earlier, Frida Kahlo’s home was both the place in which she created most of her works of art, and it has also become its own museum. The pain and beauty of her physical existence (the Moon) was the most common theme of her work, and her career was one of the places in her life that granted her some ease and much success.
Now it is time to choose your own adventure. Skip ahead to read the section about the house that your Moon is in.
MOON IN THE 1ST HOUSE
The 1st House is the house of identity, self, body, appearance, vitality, character, and strength of spirit. As one of the most prominent houses in the chart, having your Moon in the 1st House makes the Moon a very active planet in your life.
This placement can heighten your sensitivities, making you a natural nurturer. Feeding others emotionally, physically, and spiritually will most likely be second nature to you. Here, the Moon can create a personality that reflects others back to themselves. This can be an intense or calming experience depending on the sign that the Moon is in, but it is alluring either way.
In constant exchange with those around you, the Moon in the 1st House wants to give and receive information. Highly responsive to environmental conditions, here the Moon is impressionable, moody, and changeable. Having the Moon in the 1st House means that part of unpacking or living out your life’s purpose will be through developing yourself.
Reflection Questions
Are you someone who wears your emotions on your sleeve?
Do you get the feedback that others feel reflected, witnessed, or comforted by you?
Do you tend to focus on your appearance when you feel out of sorts, uncomfortable, or insecure?
MOON IN THE 2ND HOUSE
The 2nd House is the house of livelihood, assets, moveable resources, self-esteem, and self-confidence.
Having the Moon in the 2nd House means that you need to unpack and live out a part of your life’s purpose by understanding how to successfully work with your resources, inner and outer assets, money, property, and issues of self-worth.
Here the Moon wants to create security through developing resources and maintaining them. You might find that you need access to, or need to be engaged in the development of, material comforts in order to feel secure and safe enough to thrive. Your work may have something to do with fertility or infertility, conception, women, gender-nonconforming folks, femmes, caregiving, nourishing others, child care, the Goddess, writing, or communicating.
Reflection Questions
What role does the development of your resources play in your life’s purpose?
What was your parents’ relationship to money when you were a child? What is your first memory of money?
Does your work have to do with the body, reproductive health, caregiving, Goddess culture, or writing?
If so, what do you find that you are particularly skilled at in these areas? When was the first time you realized it?
MOON IN THE 3RD HOUSE
The 3rd House is the house of siblings, extended family, communication, daily rituals, short-term plans, local travel, and neighbors. It is also known as the temple of the Moon or Goddess. The 3rd House is the house of the Moon’s joy, making the Moon especially strong in the 3rd House. Here the Moon helps you connect to a great many people, ideas, conversations, rituals, and spiritual practices or sentiments. This placement wants you to live out your life’s purpose by writing, teaching, learning, or working with divinatory practices.
Movement might be an important aspect of living out your life’s purpose, with teaching, circulating information, and providing care and nourishment to others as part of your daily routine. You may need a lot of mental stimulation, information, and data, especially when you feel insecure or unsure. You may also have important relationships with siblings, extended family, and close friends with whom you share familial-like bonds.