By Phoenix of Elder Mountain – We have been getting a lot of new participators on our monthly lunar practice each month and once in awhile for the newer people, I send out a basic outline of the “Lunar Practice and Disciplines” and how and why its done. The benefits and struggles of our self awareness path can be difficult and very difficult at times, and this continual new moon intention and full moon release practice, helps us emotionally become ‘aware’ of our issues with a steady guide by the moon herself.
Basic Monthly Practice: The New Moon Intention (chose only “one”) is ONLY ABOUT YOU, not anyone else, because self-awareness comes from within through you into your conscious self. After you set the one intention, you will see what arises your original intention and it will be the “opposite”. Example: I am peaceful. For the following two weeks, you will begin to become aware of what upsets you, what triggers your emotions, or what bothers you. Each time you set a new moon intention, this is the what happens. When years go by, you can work on the same issues, and each will be revealed in different ways, depending on the energy of that particular moon cycle.
When the Full Moon comes in two weeks (after the new moon), then you set ONE RELEASE INTENTION on the day of the full moon, to let go and release something within, which was based on what surfaced with the new moon intention. It takes a while to get the practice.
Goals are our relationship to the outer world, Intentions are our relationship to our inner world, and that is the main difference. When this practice is walked along side your other healing work or spiritual practices, it reveals the hidden self to us. Buddhism calms and breaks the mental body down, out of its out of its harsh grip or control of a well worn and grooved path, by making us aware of the minds busy sides of static, noise and constant thoughts.
This practice is only about your emotional well being, and how this effects our soul that is untouchable. Its not about anyone else, except the mirrors of those who come onto our path each month as a reflection of our own shadow or our past life karma. This practice helps you to become ‘aware of your projections onto others’, your emotional resistance (fears or self sabotage), intuitive blocks and the responding mirrors (other people) and how that effect our emotional balance and imbalances each moon cycle.
Our emotional energy and soul energy are just… energy bodies, one feels and one does not. The soul is an untouchable and unrecognizable (astral body) even for those who astral travel (because lucid dreaming and astral travel are confined to the mental astral body). How we awaken to the multi levels self is how aware we are willing to become and that is not always pretty or nice when we recognize our own shadow or behaviors. Otherwise, every alcoholic or pot addict would stop drinking or smoking at will.
Not happening without great struggle, because the addiction has overcome the awareness body of the inner soul self and she is left weak and abandoned. Love addiction relationships are the same, anything where we are bound by habit and unawareness. We are unconscious more than we can possible imagine until we begin a dedicated journey of any kind, but this kind of practice is “emotional intelligence” and the loosening of the “subtle body” called the soul.
This practice is a very simple practice in application, that is slow, mundane, and steady each moon cycle, to reveal our emotional struggles and issues to us (creating self awareness of the intuitive body), yet reveals our very complex nature the longer we do it.
I am in my 23rd year of practicing every single moon cycle with one intention and with one full moon release. The awareness of self to self enlightenment was beyond what I ever could have comprehended in my first ten years of doing this practice. I have walked and teach it as a “living” teaching, a living experience, not a knowledge study reality.
I created this as a life path and did years of testing on myself and spent about eight to ten years doing it in my new moon circles that I taught, which were based on emotional awareness and soul awareness practices. Then I added and blended it into my “moon-goddess” circles to understand the ‘higher self’ of the feminine teachings of the emotional and soul body when it came to “inter-personal” relationships; and lastly, I added “goddess, moon with dreaming” all together in the last ten years of circles for the new, full and dark moon completion. I also tested the self awakening of the emotional soul bodies practices on apprentices since 1995. This practice is very, very subtle for the subtle bodies.
Lunar Cycles
Each Moon cycle is approximately 28 Nights (28 x 13 moons = 364 nights in a year). In nature’s Seasonal year, there are “3 moons” for each of the four seasons (three moons of spring, three moons of summer, etc.) – with one extra moon cycle between the end of winter and the beginning of the spring equinox. As emotional beings we must contend with our karma in smaller or larger ways, that are precisely timed in their calm and intense cycles. These cycles return the burdens of our past life deeds and play out in many simple to complex ways like physical disease, mental illness, and emotional instability including illusions all the way to bipolar and schizophrenia.
The emo-soul flow gets blocked in our memories of our emotional systems until we approach and heal them from a journey into our past (this lifetime) and the woundedness which we have all suffered. That is the wounded psyche or what we shamans call, the fragmented aspects of the soul (of this lifetime). There are soul fragments also from past lives but that is much more complicated. We do what we can, and we are even under the natural age cycles and fated cycle in doing such work. Remember, the Mind-Body reality, its perimeters and jurisdictions are not the same as the Emotional-Soul reality, its perimeters and jurisdictions and perceptions.
Spiral Medicines are the core practice of Lunar or Moon Intentional Work. Its a walking backwards in time, to revisit old wounds in order to free the emotional energy of those woundings, but we need awareness in order to “get it”. When we do not “get it” the ah ha healing moments, we become suspended and stagnant. This is the basis of permanent emotional healing which eventually leads us to our soul. We cannot heal anything we are not “aware of” in our life and along with the mental body’s meditations, the emotional lunar work is the missing half and the remaining teaching for wholeness.
At each moon’s cycle, the subtle energies of nature and our own soul (which is different than the emotional body), begins to flow or has been blocked from lifetimes of karma even at our birth. I learned how each moon cycle was very different in its effects, its energy, its thick or thinness of energy and its effected on each individual person. Around the tenth year into this monthly simple lunar path and its disciplines I saw an awakening process that was coinciding with this work, with my other spiritual path. I also shared it at my monthly goddess circle, then moon circles and lastly, my dream circles.
Building a Monthly Lunar Foundation
In the invisible aspects of our life, which are our feelings, our soul, our intuition, our dreams, our psyche, including our personal illusions and illusions in our dreams, we also build a foundation and that is working with the moon, the cycles of the (energetic) reality of that invisible.
In ancient alchemy, the Mental body and the Emotional body (and the lesser soul that we incarnate with), are called the Sacred Marriage when they are no longer at odds or in battle, and these two bodies are housed in our Physical body and bring health. The lunar life through the night’s dreaming life, and the purification of the shadow self (karma) as a process is what fragments this flow. That is simply called self sabotage, unconscious behavior, projections, neurotic behaviors or addictive behaviors and a host of other dis eases that are mental or emotional resulting in the sicknesses of the physical body.
The actual Simple Practice
Each New Moon, the first step is to set only “One New Moon Intention” … on the day of the New Moon.
The second step in two weeks after the new moon is setting: “One Full Moon Intention Release” from what appeared on your path for two weeks.
The third and last phase is the “Contemplation of the Dark Moon” period that prepares the new intention for the next New Moon.
On each New Moon, set one inner intention (about our emotional life, our creative life, our perception life or the healing of a struggle or sickness). A “Goal” is you in relationship to your greater (exterior) world, and an “Intention” is your relationship with your (inner) world. We work with intention.
When you set your New Moon, then wait for the signs and synchronicity to begin to appear (and they will). For many, this practice is first building awareness to be able see the signs and synchronicity and then eventually to weed out what isn’t important of all the signs.
When the Full Moon arrives two weeks later, we set “One Release Intention” based upon the signs and your responses to it, of what surfaced from our new moon intention. On the full moon, speak out with I RELEASE…. or I LET GO OF…. (something that no longer serves your highest good, that is about only you.)
Then during the duration of the two weeks “after” the Full Moon, this is the time of contemplation and the processes of “awareness” occurs. It is the releases in our life that brings more clarity. We bring one small awareness to us, each month.
Foundation of the following New Moon, one month after another…
The most powerful days of signs and synchronicities are the three days before the new moon, and with practice, we begin to recognize the signs that will play out the entire month. If you do any spiritual work like fasting, or meditation retreats, try to do it the week when the dark moon shifts into the new moon. The amount of information will be doubled. This all takes a lot of practice for the more advanced Lunar Practitioner, but year after year we get one more drop of awareness. A mountain moves an inch every ten years, and so too, with real awareness (consciousness) mental or emotional body.
For most beginners, its more a dedication to begin to see results. Within one year, you have set 13 actual intentions and 13 release intentions that are symbiotic. The next seasonal year, you begin a second layer of the same issues that arise, with the next 13 new moons and so forth. This is a stabling process and practice and we cannot heal anything we are not ‘aware of’ – not mentally, but emotionally. The mind follows the emotional body but in the patriarch that has all been reversed along with philosophy to fragment core emotional truth.
Only my apprentices have practiced the ‘more complex 2nd through 8th stages of this practice’. But at my circles I have taught and still teach, just mastering the first stage is complex enough.
Moon Cultures & Sobriety of the Emo & Astral Bodies
Last and certainly one of the most important aspects of the dreamer, intuitive, and emotional body and soul body is sobriety. This is our eternal body, unlike the intuition of the psychic or medium who works off the intuition of the mental astral body.
The Moon cultures were a living culture and not based on mind-body at all, but body and soul. These were the cultures of prehistory art, dreaming, shamanism, creativity, food, music, dance, sobriety (pre-Dionysus cults), which were rituals around the lunar cycles that included maidens, mothers and grandmothers. Since then, we have all lived without a real ancient awareness practice of our emotional and soul body before the 3rd century and have accrued much karma in our past lives. The purification of karmic lives require us to experience the visions of pain returned into our body, of those we had hurt in past life relationships, be that a antiquity soldier or family issues. What remained after that was the motion, but not the enlightenment aspects of the inner spiral walk that the moon cycles can lead us to, which is first and foremost, emotional rhythm as a healing practice to eventually enter emotional intelligence through nature’s consciousness.
If we drink or smoke pot, we disrupt our emotional body’s natural rhythms and flow and each decade that this has occurred its required about half that time to purify. Example, if you started smoking pot or drinking at 15 and are now 40, the rhythm of your energetic magnetic (soul cycles and emotional body cycles) have been “dried out” and no longer work with natures’s rhythm and emotional intensities. Think of the energetic astral body of our soul and emotional body as a cloud, its moist, movements, and continual flow like a large set of clouds in the sky.
These substances dry out of soul cloud body into small, millions of dried or hardened granular sand that are no longer moist nor unified. Your mind may work with your life and nature and “think” that these are intact, but when you need the power of your soul the most, we fail in not only making large changes in our life but overcoming addicts, behavioral issues etc. The Soul offers us superpower when life hits us the hardest and the “subtle” is revealed between illusions, soul blindness and emotional waves of detoxing.
This is because our magnetic energy bodies are complicated and painful when touched and they get “lost” because pot reduces and dries out the moist “cloud body” of the emotional and soul bodies. Alcohol spikes its rhythms until they are completely off balance. If one does both, it takes about 8 years of sobriety to release what was not seen in awareness of issues or loss of the past. The memory body of the emotional body is emotional energy and the remembrances is the soul body.
These magnetic energies are a great resource that many shadows have tried to steal within our astral light (of our astral, chi or unified chakra body), not only from us in waking life, but also in our dreams at night but luring us away with useless mental, university and mind cult distractions of love and light. Keeping boundaries healthy of our receptive body (soul/emo) requires that the mental body and physical body be clear and aware that the emotional body is subdued even when it shouldn’t be. And aware that the greater self (the soul) has been put into bondage even before we reincarnated.
If mother earth ignored her moon, her tides would not be consistent nor would the germination of her seeds of plants get started. So the moon is important both physically and energetically. Moon is the ancient keeper of the seasons’ natural flow, coinciding with woman’s natural emotional cycles and her bleeding cycles – which were the original time keepers of this planet. This was replaced with the Sun calendars around the time religion came into power.
Please ask Phoenix of Elder Mountain for permission to use her Lunar work in your circle and its partnering of the sharing of our Monthly Lunar Work-study each new moon here on this blog.
There are water women who range from simple to the most complex and to the highest spiritual levels of simplicity. Not everyone will go pass the half way journey because the sacrifices are too demanding in loss and isolation. The mermaid and water sprites are the simplest of all water women, they are maiden regardless of age, and more group oriented. The nymph and rusalka are much more complex and fall into the adult or mother stages as water women who nurture and bring forth life.
Syracuse Arethusa
After her arrival to Syracuse, she who was the River and Springs Goddess, were given to the god Alpheus and she was demoted to Nereid. In Arcadia, in her clear stream and was bathing in the form of a human, not water, not knowing the river god Alpheus was watching her, he flowed down through Elis to the sea. He fell in love with her during their encounter, but she fled after discovering his intentions. She wished to remain independent and the attendant of Artemis who was the newly founded political goddess.
Certain parts of this river, which empties into the Ionian Sea, passes underground. The message of the story, if one can be said to exist, involves more than lust, love or desire. It seems to say something about some woman’s need to be free and escaping judgment and repression emotionally.
Over the next several decades, her head was enlarged to take up most of the coin while the four corners of the squares metamorphosed into four dolphins, re-affirming Arethusa’s status as a water-nymph. By the fifth century, the artists of Syracuse were experimenting with a multitude of different styles and images for the water nymph. Through varied hairstyles and different types of ornamentation, the artists achieved the greatest elaboration when they signed their work.
