Cancer New Moon

•   18 July 2023, 5:32am (local time: Bilpin, Australia)

A New Moon is when the Sun and Moon conjoin (line up). It is a time for your head and your heart to be on the same page – your conscious, yang, self-identity directed motivations (Sun) and your intuitive, yin, feeling, self-nurturing directed motivations (Moon) can find common ground. I don’t know about you, but the speed of life has really picked up in the last several years and more and more I am feeling scattered, fragmented and compartmentalized. The New Moon is a time when I intentionally try to make a bit of space for all of the me’s to breathe together and re-cohese.

This New Moon is a perfect time to do any kind of self healing, coming back into your center kind of work. Cancer is the energy of the Great Mother – the one who is soft and tender on the inside and tough and resilient on the outside. Cancer energy is cardinal water. So water, ruling the emotional and intuitive realms, really knows how to flow and merge. Water is powerful – think about the Grand Canyon. Think about how we are mostly water. Think about how long any of life is possible without it. Water is transformative. Think about how many other things you know of that have several distinct forms and is still itself – water can be ice, liquid or vapor. Water knows how to circumvent all barriers because it can morph. This also makes Water a very wise Teacher. Cardinal energy is that initiatory energy. It not only begins things, but it enlivens us so that we are motivated to begin. Fixed signs hold space, Mutable signs change space and Cardinal signs reform space, they organize the chaos and possibility created by the Mutable energy into patterns. So anytime you want to begin something, choose a time when the planet most associated with that activity is in a cardinal energy.

This time is a time to begin a healing journey. The Sun-Moon are at 24 degrees Cancer and they form a sextile with Uranus at 22 degrees Taurus. Uranus is the Change Agent – he is the electrical energy that comes as a surprise, a flash of insight, a curve ball, the jolt of reality from left field or the consideration just outside of your scope of vision. In Taurus, Uranus is really trying to wake us up to the considerations of our physical forms (Taurus is Fixed Earth energy) which we have taken for granted and neglected to consider. Uranus in Taurus is bringing the reality of our consumer choices into our awareness. Uranus in Taurus is highlighting the plights of our planet and environment as well as our personal physical health and resilience. A sextile energy is very potent. It stimulates and supports. As a 60 degree angle it is close enough to us that it feels graspable and of similar mindset (unlike the 90 degrees of a square or the 180 degrees of an opposition), but unlike a conjunction which sometimes can feel like preaching to the choir, it sits far enough away that it offers stimulus and fresh ideas and perspectives. Sextiles can feel very passionate and awaken that level of aliveness within us.

Pluto retrograde in Capricorn is sitting in opposition to this New Moon and so we have some truth telling to contend with. Pluto wants us to take responsibility, not only for ourselves, but when in Capricorn, for our community as well. Capricorn energy is cardinal earth, so it likes to build and climb vertical structures. Patterns of habit, which in the highest Capricorn ideal is the integrity of body-mind-spirit. Pluto is putting our patterns of the less than ideal habits also in our faces. This means owning our shit, both figuratively and metaphorically. We all know that we consume to excess. Combine that lens with the Uranian Taurus energy juicing up our conscious heart (Sun-Moon conjunction in Cancer). We all know that we consume to distract and comfort and compartmentalize. This New Moon might not feel great, and that is ok. Part of making new habits, building new paradigms, creating new patterns is that its uncomfortable at first. Think of getting a seriously drastic hair cut – or stepping out of your own framework in any way. It can be scary, it can feel very isolating, it can make us hyper-self-conscious. If we feel that way with superficial things, then how much harder is it for things that run much deeper – that is where Cancer energy pushes that probing. This New Moon can give us perspective on that Pluto energy, but if we aren’t able to sit with discomfort for a bit, then how can we be sure that what we think feels ‘wrong’, isn’t actually just what ‘different’ feels like? Our primitive brain is hard wired to find safety in the fold. But its truth telling time... the fold (by this I mean the society of all of us) is an often very unhappy place. We live from a story of scarcity and hierarchy (Pluto in Capricorn). And in doing so stimulate more of the same Capricorn garbage can – climbing long lasting structures that support our sense of isolation. Pluto wants us to look at power structures and take responsibility for what we create when we are not in our own alignment and integrity. Uranus trining from Taurus can encourage us to play with the simple truth of individuation through the radical idea of our own nature as medicine. This New Moon can be a time to spark the building of new patterns that actually Heal Us. Trine energy is stabilizing. We can choose to stabilize helpful or unhelpful patterns with the Uranus-Pluto trine. An unhelpful pattern looks like keep doing more of the same: trying to gain and accumulate more (Taurus) in a vertical hierarchical system (Capricorn). Either way we will still have to face the cold hard truth (Pluto) and deal with some bolt of lightening surprise (Uranus).

There is really no way around that Capricorn fact that in a closed system (which our planet is), we are kin to each other, the plants and animals and the water and the minerals and the air. Plastic are our ancestors. And there is no way around that fact that we all share this very precious, and very unique planet. And like it or not, face it or not, the more we engage with vertical hierarchy, the more we contain ourselves with an old linear model of the world. The more out of alignment things feel. I don’t know about you, but that story has gotten really boring to say nothing of how utterly unsustainable it is.

This New Moon is an opportunity to sit with our discomfort at the mess of all these truths and get a bit more comfortable with sitting with it. That is the first step to making real change. Use this New Moon to come into resonance with yourself. What is it that you really feel just inside yourself? What do you really need to be healthy or happy or nourished? Remember that the pitfalls of Cancer energy is taking care of everyone else so that you don’t have to take care of yourself. Cancer in the garbage plays the martyr. It fears intimacy with itself, so it rushes around and tends to 100 million hungry mouths, collapsing at days end in a stupor to rise and do the same the next morning. The other side of the Cancer energy has to do with being able to lovingly apply strong boundaries – with self and with other. It also has to do with creating a bit of space for itself so that it can listen deeply to its own needs and take responsibility for them. It is only from this place that we can work to wisely respond to this time that we are living in NOW. We can shift the patterns now more easily, we can choose to move into new paradigms of integration and integrity, but it will require us to be centered and honest and above all, willing to be uncomfortable. Sit with your feelings this New Moon, particularly the hard ones. Your discomfort doesn’t have to only hurt. If you feel pain, follow it down to your own truth and look at it from the perspective of kinship with the whole world. Our discomfort can be a guide back into alignment with ourselves.