This month’s full moon is in Cancer at 11.13 am on 25th December 2015, Christmas Day. This makes for some potentially intense lunchtime cooking, as all full moons generate high emotions. Yet fortunately this is a kinder full moon than most.
With Mercury trine Jupiter, Christmas day should be filled with abundant, open-minded, philosophical discussion – ideas should be flowing. Uranus is stationary direct on Christmas day after being retrograde for four months. This might bring a breakthrough, a turning point in which you experience more freedom to be who you truly want to be. It might be that those Christmas conversations awaken new perspectives in us.
All this week though, emotions are likely to run high, which can be both challenging and fun. Tuesday 22nd the Moon will be journeying through grounded Taurus, a powerful position for the Moon, in its sign of exaltation. This time suggests paying attention to the simple things, slowing down, enjoying beauty, nourishment and sensual experiences. Jupiter makes a supportive aspect which lends the moon some buoyancy.
All these helpful Christmas aspects are a touch of grace in an otherwise challenging astrological outlook and heavier part of the year. We are, of course, sojourning through the darkest time of the year. The celebration of Christmas is the triumph of light over the heaviest darkness. Soon the light will gradually increase after the December Solstice on 22nd December.
But while this time of year can be joyous for many, it can be intensely lonely for some. It’s a time when we are astrologically pulled back towards our roots, to our past, our mothers, our families, to where we feel a sense of belonging, all of which rules Cancer, the sign of home and the home sign of the Moon.
Some do not have the luxury of a family to belong to, or have deep wounds at the hands of their families. At Christmas, there are strong, hidden themes of abandonment, isolation and loneliness, which is like society’s elephant in the room. Understanding this deeper will help us all heal to realise more of our potential.
To some extent, we are all holding these wounds, and to some degree, learning to gently tend to these unmothered parts of ourselves. As a part of the Divine Feminine, the mother archetype has been long misrepresented and misunderstood within western culture. Humanity is still searching for its Mother, and substituting Her with all manner of things in Her seeming absence.
As individuals, we need to grow our own internal Divine Mother. Our abandoned, orphaned, neglected and abused parts need Her to heal.
For we abandon ourselves all the time without knowing it, we abandon ourselves when we most need to stay close to ourselves. When we most need warmth, love and tenderness, we criticise, judge and shame ourselves. We must to go outside ourselves to find our Mother rather than make do with a surrogate.
We abandon others too, as individuals and as a society. We project out our feelings of abandonment, not able to tend to our relationships with care, awareness and attention, expecting others to pick up the mother for us, aka the responsibility and accountability.
I often think that perhaps we are not prepared to touch and feel the wounds inside. We are not ready to take in the magnitude of what we have been running away from. It takes a lot of courage to face our own feelings and pain and not run away. So if you are even doing this a little, that’s great.
This time of year, we are reminded of the children. Of what it means to live with the boundlessness, abandonment and joy. We want to nurture that childlike joy in each other as we get ready to receive and give our abundance, sharing ourselves with one another. We all want to make contact with that glee, no matter how much we try and deny it, and even if just for a moment, as we look into our children’s eyes and see their joy.
But for the most part, or at least through more cynical eyes, Christmas is a time of accumulating more material things to avoid seeing, or witnessing the painful loneliness that our soul’s actually endure but rarely allow ourselves to acutely feel.
We try to fill ourselves up with phoney material things. Or with all our determination we attach ourselves to our obsessions, which we can’t relinquish. If only I had this one thing, or person, my life would be perfect. It’s just another way of avoiding the hunger, the loneliness and suffering that we refuse to feel. Hopefully with Mercury transiting disciplined Capricorn, it might be easier to at least avoid mindless over spending.
Our ‘not feeling’ forces others to live this out for us, others who are less equipped to deal with suffering, who don’t have a supportive network to call upon at difficult times. When we don’t consciously connect with those abandoned, lonely parts within ourselves, the energy gets displaced onto others who are easier channels (shamans) for the energy to be expressed. These feelings have to be expressed somewhere, they don’t just disappear if we marginalise them within ourselves.
I’m thinking of that desperate loneliness of the aged (society’s eldership) who have no family, or those without homes, who live on the streets, on the outskirts of society (our shamans). They have no roots, no sense of belonging, nothing to belong to or to help them feel like they belong. Of course its their chosen journey too, but as world, we all need to take responsibility for what we marginalise. These are two of many groups that are pushed out to the edge of society and ostracised, seen as useless, in the same way which we push out and denigrate our own disowned parts.
If we allowed ourselves to truly connect with that place within, which feels so lonely and abandoned, if we shared this load, then others would not need to carry this load for us in its magitude. This is what it would mean to deeply love ourselves and encompass others in that love. But instead we have our hunger and think it’s ok that we try to take what we want to feed it. We see homeless people as poor, but the reality is that some people are so poor all they have is money.
So our obsessions, be it a person, a thing, our hoarding, our security blankets are there to satisfy our insatiable hunger. They make us feel like if we can just consume that one thing, have that one more thing, like a baby devouring his mother as he feeds at her breast, then we will no longer feel that loneliness.
The problem is that we just have no sense of belonging. We try to anchor into this or that thing or person – we keep moving from one thing to the next, evermore hoping that we will be satisfied. Our satisfaction is short-lived.
At Christmas, we need to really, and I mean, really, contemplate death and darkness, as well as resurrection and renewal. We are so fond of the renewal and light though, in a world where humanity refuses to journey into it’s own dark corners.
We need to understand our fear of death (which is at the heart of this isolation and abandonment) and why is it that we avoid journeying to this place? What is it that we feel we will encounter there that we can’t for the life of us really face?
In our darkest moments, it can seem like we are being invited to entertain death, an ego death and for some it becomes a literal reality, rather than a metaphor – literal and figurative death are not so far a part. It is this death, and the immense fear that it generates that we are constantly running away from, abandoning ourselves in the process.
Apparently Arnold Mindell, the founder of Process Oriented Psychology, once did some work with some of the most powerful families in the world… at the heart of their reasons for taking so much was a huge fear of death.
Christmas is a truly magical time of year, a time where we have actual ‘time’ to really enter into contemplation. This reflection is what the twelve nights of Christmas is actually for!
but if we grow our own internal Mother, Our Divine Mother who lives within and through us eternally, we begin to change this pattern of abandonment.
Many feel like they haven’t been mothered, or for many lifetimes, have been working towards mothering themselves. Actually I would say, everyone, to some extent is learning to mother themselves.
If we make a conscious reconnection with the earth, the water, the stones and trees, and stay close to Her infinite abundance, this abundant Divine Mother eases the hunger, so we begin to feel less consumed by it, so we can begin to feed the abandoned, neglected child within with the right stuff.
As she receives the light she needs to grow, nurtured and loved, and this isolation, this ill at ease feeling in the world, of being without resources, status, energy or time, begins to lessen.
It is said that Jesus’ parents were exiles, seeking refuge in a stable. Christmas is the time when the exiled light within has the opportunity to return.
So this time of year is effectively an incubation period, a time of retreating to our home, our roots, our wombs. Cancer symbolises the pregnant mother who nurtures her unborn child, and this process, like that of the inner psyche, requires great heat. That heat comes in the form of resources – all of which temporary drain in these processes and make us feel drained. But we must not be mistaken into thinking that this sense of being drained makes the journey or process wrong. It’s a necessary part of the process while not of course ever being easy.
In the same way as a woman’s energy turns inward during her pregnancy to give energy to her unborn child, processing yourself is a consuming process. It’s a heating up, it’s an alchemical process – transformation of psychic energy requires heat. But new life and renewal will be creatively born.
To stay centred and balanced in our lives, make contact and grow the inner Mother so she can radiate out the light and guide you – a mother source within us that eternally contains the heat or the light.
And know that this process requires making contact with death and becoming its best friend. As the Tarot’s Death Card reveals, number thirteen, incidentally the number of the Divine Mother, when we make contact with our bones we feel our eternity, and like the moon, there is always rebirth, She never dies, She continually rebirths herself in another form.
The potential is always there within us, waiting to be born, waiting to be resurrected from the ashes. The battle cannot be lost, but it must be fought. We must expand into all our darkest corners, moving over our edges, expanding out, becoming full and whole.
So, this Christmas, I want to invite you to connect with your unmothered child within – to feel or acknowledge her. And then to mother yourself. To feel what she deeply needs, the pain she feels, the isolation, the abuse, neglect, not from a fixating, obsessive need, but from a making this contact with your internal Mother who can hold her in her darkest moments.
I also want to invite you to reconnect with your life myth which is always trying to wake us up to our eternal nature. Do you have an old reoccurring childhood dream? Or do you remember your first ever childhood dream? Or even a numinous moment as a child, where you felt some strange wonder at life?
With Neptune active at this full moon in an imaginative, inspiring way, it’s a time when you can reconnect to the deeper reasons why you incarnated on this planet. Reconnecting to our soul purpose through our life myth held within the numinous in our early dreams or early life memories helps us tend to that feeling of isolation or exile, that sense that we are alone and that our lives have no meaning.
Our dreaming world present us with the very ‘edges’ of our psychic growth. They hold the secondary processes, the parts and processes we dis-identify with, marginalise and reject, they also hold the patterns we need to grow into our wholeness
When over identified with one part of our personality, our dreams bring in the other, often as a disturber. Dreams will help you grow your own inner Mother. Observe the patterns in your old and new dreams, and perceive how the dream is happening in the moment, here and now, how it’s the blueprint your life myth.
We can easily fall into believing that life will never change, that we will continually experience this or that block, those old negative thoughts. Connecting to our dreams somehow connects us into the sentient, the bigger picture, where there is always a dreaming behind our experiences.
Life is not random, it is meaningful in every moment and so we should honour it thus, even if we have no idea what that meaning is. This is the ultimate mothering, to guide and stay close to yourself, even in those darkest, nebulous moments, knowing it’ll take time, resources and energy, and that the process requires it to get hot and uncomfortable.
Enjoy your Christmas, your own mothers, both biological and Divine.
