Libra New Moon: Monday, October 21st
Especially in the beginning, it is an epic battle to live from the inside out. Often, it is far too easy to allow an inconvenience, a spill, someone cutting you off in traffic, noticing ants in the kitchen, a leak in the faucet, a kink in the hose, a stink in the public bathroom, or poor WiFi signal, to change our entire mood and demeanor - in a matter of nanoseconds. What control these circumstances have over our body’s chemical gatekeepers!
Eclipse season finally drops the curtain in 2025 with the dynamic New Moon in Libra on October 21st:
To have meaningful relationship with others and with our environment, we must first have a meaningful relationship with ourselves. Sometimes remembering ourselves can be challenging, and sometimes it can happen in a moment. I came back to myself while walking on a farm amidst the largest, most deliciously delicate Dahlias I have ever witnessed. I could walk through rows of them, eyes locking with pistils, marveling at each one, getting lost, unable to resist touching the magnificently twisted and curled petals. In that moment, I was not just looking at something beautiful and saying with theatrical bravado, “oh, how pretty,” then in a twitch, returning my attention to my hedonistic worry or my electronic leash. No, in this moment, I became the flower, immersed - my brain waves shifted from crashing to lapping - a gentle alpha wave. I wonder now, sitting at my computer, remembering this bliss, what was the external stimulus that sucked me through the quiet void into chaos again? There are so many possibilities - infinite vectors for my mental and emotional derailing in the subjective world every day.
Joe Dispenza, author of You are the Placebo and Becoming Supernatural, likes to talk about the familiar past and the predictable future. The predictable future is a trajectory that is made up of our well-worn neurological pathways - our habitual thoughts, feelings, reactions and expectant experiences that create similar outcomes even with new stimuli. He speaks of our conditioned emotions and reactions that we return to ever so quickly, like a dog whose ears perk with a sound or smell, then returns to the slobbered bone like nothing happened and nothing else in the world matters. There is a small window when the ears perk, when anything can happen, but often does not. With such persistent habitual patterns of life experience, how can a person create a new future?
“When you are in the sweet spot of the generous present moment, your familiar past and your predictable future no longer exist and now you are ready to create new possibilities in your life.”
Be Here. Now. and Now. and Now. Have your feet planted firmly on the ground, mind in the present, and look for the unexpected, the magnificent, the unordinary. Expect to be enamored by the very moment in which you reside. Our brains have what is called the Reticular Activation System (RAS). Essentially, there is too much information around us at any given moment for our brains to process it all. So we tell our brains, consciously or unconsciously, what is important - and that is what the brain “tags” for us in our everyday experience. Essentially, whatever you are looking for, you will find it. This is why setting intentions on the New Moon is so important. The time is ripe for planting seeds of intention and then watching as those intentions manifest into a conversation with your daily experience.
Quiet the din. This is especially dire if the working memory (RAM) of that ol’ wet computer is being taxed to near capacity. The first thing to go is your creativity. Next, your sense of humor. As you near the capacity of your RAM, your joy and your generosity become a casualty of survival mode, too. Survival mode, by definition, is a selfish operating system. But this is the season of Libra. Of relationship. Breathe, and widen your lens and feel the presence of another human being. Eye to eye. Heart to heart. When you see beauty, try to literally become it. But try softly. Breathe. Ponder the miracle of your just being there to experience it in the unique way that only you can. It’s the Dandelion Principle, explained very eloquently by Lulu Miller in Why Fish Don’t Exist, “To some people a dandelion might look like a weed, but to others that same plant can be so much more. To an herbalist, it’s a medicine - a way of detoxifying the liver, clearing the skin, and strengthening the eyes. To a painter, it’s a pigment, to a hippie, a crown; a child, a wish. To a butterfly, it’s sustenance, to a bee, a mating bed, to an ant, one point in a vast olfactory atlas.” So, who will you be in the world? How will your eyes, your mind, your soul experience it all?
Vigilantly hold the line. Especially in the beginning, it is an epic battle to live from the inside out. Often, it is far too easy to allow an inconvenience, a spill, someone cutting you off in traffic, noticing ants in the kitchen, a leak in the faucet, a kink in the hose, a stink in the public bathroom, or poor WiFi signal, to change our entire mood and demeanor - in a matter of nanoseconds. What control these circumstances have over our body’s chemical gatekeepers! We are getting thrown about like a sailboat in a storm. What other reactions might be available to us in these moments? What can we notice - about ourselves and our environment in times like these? Einstein said the measure of something’s intelligence comes down to just one thing: adaptability. Are we really beholden to such insignificant happenstance? Well, this is for you to decide, dear reader.
To be clear, this New Moon is literally knocking my socks off - it is dynamic and carries some heft. It asks us to be aware of our energy and our focus - our power even as one, small individual. Small, but not insignificant. You are not a drop in the ocean - you are the ocean in a drop. Use that power with intention and listen to your small voice that takes you on mini-adventures, leads to belly-laughs, has the hard conversations and adds a delightful unpredictability to your days. You are paving the way for your future, and our collective future every moment, with every thought.
At this time in the sky, our shadow and our optimism are at odds, how could they possibly find common ground? Perhaps the answer lies in Libra: In each other, in mutual support, in the infinite expressions of beauty in the world, in the ways we leverage our kindness to bend the arc toward justice and fairness, in how we see ourselves in the inexplicably different life experience of another. How we may choose to help just because we can, not because we should or the situation warrants it. How our wounds somehow, in their unparalleled way of shaking us out of our stupor, become our salvation. How we see opportunities for joy because life is nothing but an infinite unfolding of opportunities to rewire our neural pathways, to rewrite our stories, to become one of the most beautiful creatures in the world: a humble, awe-struck, inspired, strong, brave and kind human being. To be a creature that will joyfully accept the paradoxes of life as part of its unending capacity to evolve us into a state of trusting the possibility (probability be damned) in a wondrously unpredictable future. It feels good to feel good. So let’s all get on with it - one drop at a time.
