New Moon Wishes: Don't Wait for Liberation. Create it.
Dearest,
Today, I want to talk a little bit about our wildness. Taking deep care. And liberation.
Right now the new moon is waxing into a beautiful crescent in the sky above us. On the 4th of July, when the New Moon was at it’s true peak, it was in Cancer — which, according to my internet-astrology-crush Chani Nichols is the sign of caring and the true depths of our emotional lives:
Cancer takes care. Good care. Cancer holds you close. Gets you a hot meal and a cool drink. Embraces you with its warmth. Cancer creates a space where you are allowed to feel deep needs, your deepest needs, the needs that lie within the depths of your soul. The needs you didn’t know needed you to know them... It initiates us into feeling. It refuses to let us refuse our needs. It reveals the depth of our emotional life. It tips us off to the fact that if we want to feel ecstasy we have to open to feeling despair. There is no one without the other.
This past week, as we’ve begun leaning into the new moon energy and then through it's dark, womby portal, I’ve been thinking a lot about care, ecstasy, despair and liberation.
In the US, this is a time of year when there’s a lot of hoopla and rhetoric around liberation. But liberation is a theme that’s come up a lot lately in my coaching work, as well.
It started earlier this summer when another coach I know challenged me to look at what “wild success” would mean to me, and to look deeply into my shadow, which had recently been spouting a lot of negative thoughts and judgements about other people.
What I found there, beneath the judgement and negativity, plus a whole lot of other embarrassing, dark stuff, was a deep thirst for liberation.
Many people that I work with share this yearning for liberation, often showing up as a dull ache in our hearts for the promised land called freedom: financial freedom, freedom to travel (aka location independence), the freedom to pursue our creative work, unleash our voices, or that special liberty or sexual vivacity we think we’ll feel in our bodies once we lose twenty pounds or complete another cleanse.
Here’s the thing, though: Liberation isn’t an end goal. If we truly want to call it into our lives, it has to be woven into every step of the process, every cell of our bodies, cultivated moment-to-moment and in every decision — most especially, the decisions around how we spend our time and energy.
Freedom has to be in the now, because freedom is completely tied up with presence; it’s an in-the-moment experience, one that calls us to be totally present in our lives, yet at the same time, requires presence in order to be known and felt.
Which is to say— you’ll never feel free unless you are present, so putting it off until some specific goal has been achieved pretty much guarantees you’ll never have it. Because there is always another goal, another cleanse, more money that could be made and certainly more practical things you could check off your to-do list rather then spend time writing or painting or making music.
If you want the freedom to write, or to travel, or to have wonderful fulfilling sex, you have to start by listening to the wild voices inside of you that are calling for a different way of doing things.
And then you have to start doing those things. Not after you start making 10k a month, or once you have a full-time nanny, or after three months of consistent pilates.
It may be in little ways at first: ten minutes to journal in the morning, fifteen minuets of yoga and stretching before bed, an impromptu trip to the park or a museum you’ve always wanted to go to. You can invite Liberation to go on a walk with you around the lake, or to inspire you to follow your heart for the thirty-minute break you have between when you get off of work and when you have to pick up your kids from school. A little bit can go along way.
Besides, I don’t mean to be a downer, but there is the possibility that you may never have all the things you’re waiting for — the 10k a month and the full-time nanny and perfect body and three week yoga retreat in Bali— at least, they may not come in the exact forms and timeline you want them to. Financial freedom, and location independence, and the healthy energetic body may end up being different than you expected.
So don’t wait for Liberation. Create it.
{More on that later}.
With love and magic,
Riyana
P.S. I still have a couple of spots left for my FREE "Live + Write from the Depths of Your Soul" sessions for folks who are wanting to dive into their writing this summer. You can schedule one here... while they last.
P.P.S. Here's what our friends at Mystic Mama have to say about the magic of the sun and moon today:
The Moon is the ruler of Cancer, drawing upon the waters of creation in a tidal ebb and flow. She is the weaver of many stories, the womb in which our psyche/soul grows. The Moon speaks to us through our right-brain imagination—our visions, our dreams, our symbols, our stories…Just as our mothers were the womb of our ‘being and becoming’, so too is the Moon Mother the womb of our collective ‘becoming.’ As She travels across our sky, She shows us the beauty and mystery of Change against an eternal backdrop, for She is never the same on any given night. And neither are we…”
P.P.P.S. Next week.... Witching Hours!