An Easy Way to Work with Moon Energy
I post Tarot energy readings for each Full and New Moon, because these changing phases have been noted as influential to humans since before we had language enough to talk about them. It’s also interesting to consider what other layer of energetic formation might be sifting into our experience, and be ready for it.
Diverse religions build their observances and feast days around the lunar calendar, and gardeners plant by the moon. The Old Farmer’s Almanac lists appropriate activities for all the moon’s phases, right down to the best times to get a hair cut if you wanted it to grow faster, slower, or thicker.
I don’t worry so much on any given day if my hair trim appointment lines up neatly with the moon’s current situation, but I do know if it is waxing or waning, and make that awareness a general guardrail to channel my energy.
If you don’t channel your efforts and attention in some sort of direction, they so often have a tendency of getting away from us. And then, like the full moon we were just noticing the other night, we look up and realize it has disappeared into a slim crescent, and ten more days have somehow gone by.
In posting all these energetic moon readings, I realized that you might want the option at some point of taking the opportunity further. If you really want to dive in, there is no lack of resources and references online about working with the moon but they can feel complicated, too heathen, or unfamiliar and awkward.
This is an easy way to try it, instead, and requires only a piece of paper and a pencil. Maybe you already have a journal, written prayer practice, or gratitude list that you update more or less consistently. This exercise can be folded into anything you have underway, or it can be recorded in scribbled notes on an old spiral bound pad you’ve got shoved in a drawer.
These are the only requirements: know if the moon is waxing or waning, and give it a few minutes each month.
In a perfect, perfect world, we would write every day, even just for five or ten minutes, about what happened to us and how we felt about it. We certainly blow that much time doom scrolling. But the practice of noting what is going on in our lives is often seen too much like schoolwork and something we’ll be graded on, and simpler to avoid.
It is always much easier not to pay attention to ourselves, which might demand something of us, and instead pay attention to other people because we can simply enjoy that drama without being responsible for it.
Right, back to the moon and how it can help you steer your life into something that could feel more productive and satisfying (as the Tarot continually encourages us to do.)
During the Full Moon and until the New Moon, try to take a little time every day or every few days to casually list what is “full” in your life; what you are actively working with, what is occupying your time, what you are thank-FULL for, where you are invested emotionally, and good things that happen.
This is the full basket of treasures the moon has brought to your shore during high tide. This is the engagement phase, the pantry the moon has stocked for you.
Then, two weeks later when the New Moon comes, you change what you are noting in your life to make yourself aware of what you’d like to pursue, what you are setting aside or ending, what new interest is circling and nudging you to explore further, what you would like to alter, and what steps are needed to advance from wanting to having.
That’s it. You can keep the lists, or you can let them go as ceremonially (or straight into the bin) as you like, if you’d rather start a completely new list every time.
I, rather ridiculously, record and keep all sorts of daily details from running my life as if someday there will be a college asking to archive them in their Important Papers collection. For some reason, I like to remember what I served at Christmas five years ago and see the shopping lists, and notes I added to the recipes. I want to know this because I would give anything to read what my great-grandmother served for her Christmas dinner a hundred years ago, and see her handwriting in the margins of a battered church cookbook.
It’s worth keeping up with your life, and how you are living it, even if you are the only one who ever sees it. And it is good to let the universe as a whole, and the moon that rides along in it and influences us so deeply here on earth, be aware of it, too.
The intersecting energy fields of humans and the world in which we live, everything in our environments and the atmosphere and components that support us, are crossing wires somewhere. Why shouldn’t we add, to this enormous consciousness, the benefit our own experiences, desires, failures, successes, imaginings, and yearnings?
Especially when we are assured by several world religions, our ancestors, the tides, and no less a resource than the Old Farmer’s Almanac that the greater unseen and celestial forces are working with us in concert?