New Moon in Cancer - If you can't digest your emotions, you can't digest life
This beautiful New Moon will be exact at 18 degrees Cancer Thursday night, July 9 at 9:16pm EST and 3:16 am CET. It will make a sextile to Uranus, trine Neptune, and oppose Pluto.
As our conscious (Sun) merges with the unconscious (Moon), we will be supported in feeling more independent, especially in how we relate to our emotions, transcend our everyday limitations by offering ourselves to something bigger than us (Love, the Divine, God, the Universe, whatever you want to call it), all while exploring the depths of our feelings and allowing their full processing and digestion to transform us.
Mercury trine Jupiter also adds an optimistic buoyancy to this lunation, with an openness to our minds, an expansion of consciousness.
New Moon in Cancer - a fresh start on the level of our emotions
If we set the intention, this New Moon can be a fresh start in how we connect to ourselves as emotional beings. A new beginning. Viewing all emotions as a gateway to something deeper, no matter how painful or elating they feel in that moment in time. There is always wisdom and transformation underneath all those layers. The hardened, opaque shell of the crab reveals a softer, more malleable and fascinating inside.
I am still working on my relationship to my emotional landscape (s/o @ines.heals for keeping it real with me and being a beautiful mirror in this process), however, I want to share my thoughts and what’s been helping me lately. “If you can’t digest your emotions, you can’t digest life” popped into my head a few days ago and it has really stuck!
Cancer rules the stomach, so the digestion metaphor is particularly apt here. If we’re just half-chewing and then spitting out our feelings, they don’t have the opportunity to be fully assimilated by our being. We might not get the lesson, the medicine, the blessings we need from them, whether we label them as negative, positive, or neutral.
Discussing emotions with a dear friend earlier this week, at one point in our conversation I wrote, “I actually don’t think any emotions are bad, really.”
He asked “What about jealousy?”
I replied, “The emotion itself is not bad in that it can lead you to a deeper truth... Why are you jealous of that person? What does that reveal about you?”
Instead of viewing my emotions as something to be conquered or fixed or wrong, I am working on giving them space. Here’s a little process I’ve been working with to help me fully digest my emotions so that I can fully digest life.
How to fully digest your emotions
1. Pause. Put down your phone, remove yourself from distractions.
2. Invite the emotion to stay as if it’s a friend.
3. Let it out physically.
4. Listen to the lesson underneath.
Pause
Last week, when an uncomfortable feeling came up, I stopped what I was doing and sat on the couch. It was incredibly tempting to go make myself a snack, have a scroll on Instagram, text a friend, watch something on TV, or otherwise distract myself. However, I now view the full processing of my emotions as my duty in being fully present to my experience, and have come to understand that letting my emotions flow helps me be in flow in all aspects of life.
2. Invite the emotion to stay as if it’s a friend.
I then invited in the feelings that wanted to come in. “All feelings are welcome here” is something I keep saying to myself. I also like to sing SOPHIE’s beautiful song “IT’S OKAY TO CRY” in my head.
We are often compelled to push the emotions away, try to fix the situation in a rational way, or make any attempt to avoid the pain. It’s the human method, to be honest! Emotions aren’t rational. They just aren’t. There might be a perfectly good reason as to why we’re feeling raw or we might not have an explanation for it. Either way, any emotion coming up is a friendly messenger, and the more welcoming we are to it, the more it can tell us what’s really going on.
3. Let it out physically.
If you have to cry…do it! Don’t rush the process. Sit with whatever’s coming up. Feel into your body. Where are you experiencing this emotion? How can you describe it physically? Aside from crying, do you need to release the energy in some way?
Do you need to stretch, sigh, shake out your limbs? Dance to an incredibly depressing song? Scream into a pillow?
I love the description of emotions as energy in motion. How does this energy want to leave your body?
4. Listen to the lesson underneath.
By inviting in the emotional messenger and letting it do its thing, it will then have more space to tell you what’s up. The message might not be the most obvious, especially if it’s been a while since you’ve properly welcomed your emotions in.
You might be drawn to a memory, another related feeling, or a way to address what’s going on. Again, don’t worry about fixing anything. Observe what’s beneath the emotion and give yourself what you know you need, deep down. Journalling can be helpful at this stage as well. Allow time to reflect in the moment and later on and see what beautiful wisdom comes through.
