The Natal Moon: Twelve Principles
by Steven Forrest
The Moon is one of the most important symbols in astrology, but that means it also sometimes gets taken for granted or misunderstood. Here are twelve principles of the natal moon that will help you understand its true function.
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The Moon represents your inward, subjective reality, and is strongly connected to your reigning emotional and psychological needs.
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In street language, the Moon is the heart or the soul.
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If we could average a person’s mood over a lifetime, we would have a good fix on his or her Moon.
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Just as in taking care of the Sun you ensure your sanity, in taking care of the Moon, you ensure your happiness.
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Since half of what we think we see "in the world" is actually more reflective of our own attitudes and emotional biases, in understanding a person’s Moon we discover a solid clue about his or her elemental assumptions about the nature of reality.
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When you are truly intimate with another person, you reveal your Moon. Thus, it is linked to your domestic behavior and style. It reflects the parts of you that must be seen, fed, and respected if you are going to experience a sense of easy, ongoing intimacy.
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Unguardedly unveiling your lunar side is the primordial act of human trust.
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The Moon correlates with the archetype of the Mother. It may indicate something about the nature of your experience of your own biological mother, but more reliably it describes how you can best "mother" yourself—which is to say, how you can most effectively be sensitive to your inner state and nurture your own "inner child."
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A critical step in understanding the role of the Moon in the psyche is to reason from the observation that life is often difficult, exhausting, even battering. Since no one is made of steel, it follows that rest and recovery are absolute psychic necessities. We must re-energize and comfort ourselves. Taking care of those needs is the task of "Mother Moon" within you.
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Mother Moon is the Healer, in charge of keeping you soft, open, loving, happy and healthy.
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The Moon is inherently non-rational, and any strong response to it must entail a willingness to surrender to impulse and whimsy.
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In mind/brain morphology, the Moon is the left side of the body and thus the right brain hemisphere.
The Moon Intensive
Taking care of the Moon in ourselves is the same as taking care of our hearts and souls. It is the secret of happiness. Unraveling its messages requires that we release ourselves from the strictures of reason and instead learn its mysterious, nonlinear, trans-logical language. “Being in touch with our feelings” is only one part of it. Creativity, dreams, healing and being healed—these are all lunar topics too, as are intuition, family, and “the Mother,” both literally and archetypally.In this workshop, we will deeply and technically consider the Moon and explore in depth the mostly forgotten mystery of the Moon’s eight phases.
The Book of the Moon: Discovering Astrology’s Lost Dimension
To follow the Moon down into our hearts is a journey into another reality, the interior psychic world, where our souls collide with ghosts from our past. Intuition, the Mother, Family, Healing and being healed - these are all lunar topics. The story unfolds against a shifting backdrop of epochal changes in our cultural relationship to what we were foolishly taught to call “the Feminine,” forgetting that men have Moons too!Steven's newest book takes a fresh look at the moon, including new insight into the moon's phases, the moon's declination and the "out of bounds" moon.