Full Moon in Cancer: Nourish Your Authority

I love the expansive perspective that comes with looking at life

through the metaphorical tools of astrology.

In 2022, we’re going to explore the themes and threads

illuminated by the brilliant light of each Full Moon.

This Full Moon in Cancer reminds us that

we must care for ourselves if we want to change the world,

AND/BUT

if we want to fully nourish ourselves and others,

we must build systems and structures that support our human needs.

It’s a cycle of need and necessity that never ends,

and this Full Moon urges us to take up the challenge.

Subscribe! Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Pandora | Spotify | Stitcher | TuneIn

Mentioned:

An amazing add to your must-read list is

Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle,

by Emily Nagoski, PhD and Amelia Nagoski, DMA

Make Magic:

You’ll find the questions for every 2022 full (and new) moon in the book

New and Full Moon Rituals for Entrepreneurs and Changemakers,

co-authored with my friend and fellow witch Leslie Tagorda,

host of The Savvy Luminary podcast.

Transcript: Full Moon in Cancer - Nourish Your Authority

Natalie Miller: Welcome to Mind Witchery. I’m your host, Natalie Miller, and I’m so glad you’re here. 

Hello, my friend. Thank you so much for joining me today. Look, we’re switching things up here in 2022. So, if you’ve been a listener of the podcast for a while, you know that I like to do episodes that tap into the metaphors that astrology offers us. I love the expansive perspective that comes from looking at our lives through symbol and metaphor. 

And all through 2021, I did New Moon episodes. And, can I tell you, for whatever reason, in 2022, New Moon episodes do not want to happen. There was a New Moon in Capricorn at the very beginning of the year, but I had other stuff I wanted to give you. So, I did my best to practice what I preach, and I followed my own intuition and impulse and energy. And, as a result, I’ve decided instead to offer you now Full Moon episodes. So, I hope this is exciting for you. 

I’ve talked a lot about New Moons, and I’ll just do a very quick review so you can remember everything that you learned as we talked about New Moons. So, when there is a New Moon, it means that the Sun and the Moon are at the exact same degree of the zodiac. So, they are in a single sign in a single degree together, and they’re calling our attention to that place in our lives. 

And because the Sun and the Moon are together in the sky, from our perspective, the Moon is dark. There’s no light reflected off of it. There’s no sunlight, you know, shining off of the Moon and onto the Earth. And, so, the New Moon is a time of deep introspection. It’s a time of connecting with intuition. It’s a time of looking within, looking inside. 

New Moons bring our attention to the beginning of a cycle, right, so the lunar cycle, generally speaking. Of course, we could look at this any way we like. But it begins when the Moon and the Sun are at the same degree, and then there’s a 28-ish day cycle where the Moon moves, from our perspective, around the zodiac. 

At the middle of that cycle, the midpoint, we have the Full Moon, and that is when the Sun and the Moon are exactly opposite from one another, from our perspective. So, the Sun and the Moon are at opposing points. They’re as far away as possible from one another, zodiacally speaking. And then the Moon continues to travel around the Earth in the way that the orbits work to meet the Sun again, almost always in the next zodiac sign. 

So, New Moons are beginnings of cycles. They’re times of introspection, of looking deep inside, of setting intentions, planting seeds, and communing deeply with ourselves. Full Moons are different. Full Moons are kind of inherently asking us to reconcile opposites, opposing forces, opposing elements. And for me right now, this is really interesting. I like this idea.

During a Full Moon, the Moon is thoroughly illuminated by the Sun, and so it’s a time when we can see and feel more fully. So, I think I’ve mentioned this study before. There’s this, you know, collective myth that emergency rooms are busier at the Full Moon. And that is not statistically true. However, when you interview emergency room staff, the majority of emergency room staff does believe that the emergency room is busier, more chaotic at the Full Moon.

So, for me, this is—it sort of bolsters the idea that at the Full Moon, we feel more intensely, right. The tides are bigger—tides of the ocean are bigger on our planet. Swells of emotion are bigger. We have literally at night, when we walk outside, we have fuller perspective. We can see more. And not only can we see more, we are also exquisitely aware of the cocreative nature of reality, right?

We’re not in the dark by ourselves. We are in the light of the Full Moon with the witches and the werewolves, with the swelling tides. We are here, understanding that everything is connected, and that, really, we are always in a state of balancing our lives, our initiatives with the reality that is being created around us. And, my friends, for me this year, that is really interesting, and so that’s what I want to focus on in our astrologically inclined episodes for 2022. So, I hope this is exciting for you too.

Just so you know, I coauthored a book with my great friend, Leslie Tagorda. Leslie has her own podcast, The Savvy Luminary. She is an astrologer who helps entrepreneurs to tap into the power of their own personal astrology as they are building their businesses. And Leslie invited me to join her in creating a book for 2022 called New and Full Moon Rituals for Entrepreneurs and Changemakers. It was so fun to join forces with her, and to cocreate this book. 

And in it, you’ll find all kinds of goodies. You’ll find some more information about lunar cycles. You’ll find suggestions for creating rituals for New and Full Moons. You will find guidance for personalizing your readings of the New and Full Moons, based on your own astrological chart, and you will find what perhaps you have come to expect from me. You will find questions specific to each New and Full Moon for your journaling pleasure.

This book is an ebook for now. It is available on our websites. If you go to the Show Notes or to my website, you’ll easily find the link where you can go and purchase it. And it will offer you guidance for the entire year. We explicate and we offer you questions for every single Moon for 2022. So, if you would like questions, go and grab that. In these Full Moon episodes, I will offer you the questions. But if you like to have them in writing, they are all—all 24 Moons are collected in that book. 

All right. So, one more thing about Full Moons before I talk about this Full Moon, this first Full Moon of 2022. I like to think of Full Moons as an opportunity to stretch ourselves to do two opposing sets of things at the same time, right? There’s inherent opposition in a New Moon. The Moon and the Sun are opposed, zodiacally speaking, they are opposite one another in the sky. And, as such, there is an inherent, like, seesaw balancing that is happening with each Full Moon.

So, on the one hand, we are celebrating at a New Moon. We’re looking at the intentions that we’ve set, and we are noticing our progress. The Full Moon gives us an opportunity to acknowledge it, and to feed it, to give it more support and more power. On the other hand, at the New Moon, we are also renouncing. We are releasing. We are seeing fully what is not working, and we are letting that go. We are turning away from it.

So, on the one hand, we are appreciating how far we’ve come. And on the other hand, we are evaluating how far we have left to go. On the one hand, we’re looking at what is working. And on the other hand, we are looking at what is not working. And we do all of this with openness to the realities of cocreation.

We are certainly connecting with ourselves, and we’re looking inside. But we’re also looking at the effects of our actions. We are also looking to see how our intentions are or are not impacting our lives, our beloveds, our communities, our world. You see? So, there’s this expansive perspective in that way.

And, so, one of the things I’m excited to do in these episodes is to always teach you a new way of incorporating even more cocreative insight. So, you’ll see how I do that today. It’s really fun. But that’s really what Full Moons are for. Full Moons are for a wide open connectivity that is rooted or centered in ourselves but is also open to the world. Mm-mm-mm, it’s so exciting. 

OK. So, the very first Full Moon of 2022 is in the sign of Cancer. It’s at the end of Cancer, 27 degrees, almost 28 degrees, which means that the Sun is in Capricorn. Capricorn is the opposite sign from Cancer, at 27 degrees. So, the Moon is the ruler of Cancer. Cancer is a Moon-ruled sign. 

And that just means that, astrologically speaking, the Moon and the concerns of the Moon, which is our bodies, our emotions, the cycles of our being, so our sleep cycles, our eating cycles, our hormonal cycles, the cycles of everyday life, that’s going to have extra focus, extra attention in this moment because the Moon is home. The Moon is in her own sign. 

Now, with the Moon in Cancer, and the Sun in Capricorn, our attention is called to this access, the access, the line, between Capricorn and Cancer—Cancer and Capricorn—two signs which have very different concerns and tendencies in the world. Remember, each Full Moon sort of shows us that seesaw [laugh], right, Cancer on one side, Capricorn on the other side, and asks us to look at how the concerns of those two signs are balanced in our lives.

So, Cancer is all about home, and Capricorn is more about work. Cancer is about nurturing, tending; and Capricorn is about building and achieving. Cancer is about safety through belonging; and Capricorn is about mastery through rising to challenge. And we’re meant to see how these are complementary as well as oppositional. That’s what Full Moons ask us to see. How are these essential for one another, and, at the same time, how do they sometimes pull us or push us in opposite directions?

So, this Full Moon is very much asking us to see that self-care, body nourishing, healthy homes are necessary for all of the building, all of the creating, all of the mastery that we are wanting to achieve. And that in order to be able to care for ourselves, we must build a world, we must build systems, we must build businesses, we must build structures that enable us to care for ourselves and others. 

And, my goodness, here at the beginning of 2022, that is starkly evident. We have a world, a globalized economy that cannot build until we have figured out how to care for humans in the midst of a pandemic. And it is starkly evident that the systems we have in place do not allow for us to care for humans. Right? And, so, we’re meant to see right now in order to care for humans, we’ve got to have better systems, and in order to create better systems, we’ve got to care for humans. You see?

So, this particular Full Moon, it’s an intense one. It’s at the very end of Cancer, the sign of Cancer, which just means that it’s very potent. Those last degrees of a sign are concentrated. It’s the tea at the bottom of the glass that has the most flavor in it. 

This Full Moon is also opposite Pluto, so the Sun and Pluto are together in Capricorn. Pluto has been showing us that the systems we have don’t work, right. Pluto is kind of famous for this. Pluto, is it a planet? Is it not a planet? Does it mark the end of the Solar System? Does it not? It defies categorization, and it demands that we see the truth that we don’t know everything.

Pluto demands that we transform our understanding of reality. And, so, Pluto’s been in Capricorn for a good while now. And Pluto has been showing us how all of the systems that we have created, all of the hierarchies that we have created, it’s shown us how they just don’t work, and it’s demanded us to create new ones—which is energizing.

For many of us who are here to create a better world, we love that Pluto is showing everyone how business-as-usual does not work. It gives us an opening for coming in to create change. But [laugh] that’s the—that’s a very rose-colored-glasses way of looking at it. In reality, it’s been fucking hard because we’ve seen systems breaking down under the strain of stark realities.

So, with Pluto together with the Sun opposite the Moon, there is a stark reality moment here as we are watching COVID cases spiking, with Omicron, which is different than the other variants of COVID that we’ve yet faced, as we’re seeing schools struggle to stay open, as we’re seeing workplaces trying to decide what to do. 

I think we all sort of hoped we’d come, quote, “back to normal” by now two years into the pandemic. And, yet, this moment right now, this fully illuminated moment shows us how far we have to go, and also probably that normal is not coming back, or at least not the normal we knew—that there’s actually too much that needs to change in the way we do things.

One more piece: in this particular Full Moon, Mercury retrograde is squaring Uranus retrograde, and Mercury square Uranus is all about asking us to innovate and also to review our innovations because of the retrograde. Any time there’s a retrograde, we’re asked to review, rethink, reassess. 

Mercury square Uranus has a lot of potential for innovation, right. Uranus is a planet of upheaval and revolution. And Mercury is our quickest-moving planet. It’s a planet of communication and mental activity and business—the way we do business—Mercury like mercantile, like merchant.

And, so, in this moment, we’re really asked to look at some of the innovations we’ve made, and see which ones are working, and which ones are not working. We are asked to look at the places that things keep getting stuck, to think and act differently in these places. 

All right, my friends. So, let me share with you the questions for this Full Moon in Cancer. And, again, these questions are collected in Leslie and my book, New and Full Moon Rituals for 2022, which you can find in the Show Notes and on my website, and on Leslie’s website. 

And while the actual Full Moon in Cancer is on January 17th—so, it’s on Monday, which happens to be Moon Day; Monday is Moon Day, astrologically speaking—the Full Moons have a broad window for reflection and consideration and for rituals. So, you can absolutely do these questions over the weekend, or even next weekend are fine. As you know from being a human on the planet, when the Moon is big and full, it doesn’t really feel like a short amount of time, and the Moon is full, fully illuminated for a while. So, no time pressure here for thinking through these Full Moon questions. 

All right. So, here’s the first one. Tune into your body, we write, and we really mean like take a moment to be in your body. And it might be that this is so challenging. It might be that you’re so comfortable in your mind—I am [laugh], I’m so comfortable up here in my mind—that it takes a moment to really settle into your body. So, whatever you need to do to do that—if a bath would help; if a walk would help; if a guided relaxation would help—do that, and settle into your body.

And then ask body, “What’s not working, and what do you need instead?” We’re starting with this Cancer side of the equation, with the Moon in Cancer in her home sign. That’s where this inquiry begins. What does your body need? And it might be sleep, warmth, luxury. It might be exercise, movement. It might be light, heat, sex, food, water. Check in with your body. What does body need?

And, also, what’s not working? And that could be anything. It could be a relationship. It could be a work commitment. It could be a certain part of the day. So, check in and see what’s not working, and what do you need instead?

Second question: to fulfil these needs, from which expectations do you need to break free? The Sun is with Pluto in Capricorn. Capricorn is a sign of expectations. This is how things work. Here’s what the system needs from you. And, as we know, most of the systems are designed to oppress human needs, and especially needs of humans who are marginalized and abused by those systems. 

So, to fulfil your needs, what are the expectations from which you need to break free? So, for example, perhaps I need more alone time. That is clear to me. [laugh] I need to be by myself. My body is saying, “Be alone. Be by yourself.” And I need to break free from the idea that a good mother is always available to her kids, or I need to break free from the idea that a good coach is always available to her clients. Right.

So, this is just an example. I don’t really hold those anymore, thank goodness. But what are the expectations that you need to break free from in order to fulfill the needs that you have? 

OK, third question: what changes in your home would help you to feel more calm, cozy, and secure? What needs to shift? And you may have noticed that you have already gotten a head start on this. I have to say I’ve been doing this myself. I did, at the beginning of the year, all of this—well, I’d had all these decluttering projects kind of cued up. And, all of a sudden, I had such motivation to tackle them. And I did, finally, do those in the first days of the new year. I’m still working on them because it was clear to me that I needed more spaciousness and order in my home.

So, what are the qualities, what are the vibes, that you need more of in your home to feel more calm, cozy, and secure? This is a very Full Moon in Cancer question. 

All right. The next two questions, I’m just going to tell you right now, are—they pack a punch. So, take a deep breath. Prepare yourself. Question four: where is there a disconnect between what you practice and what you preach? Where is there a disconnect between what you practice and what you preach? Ooh, ooh. [laugh] Please, please, pretty please answer this question with love, with openness, remembering that you are a human.

And then ask yourself question number five. How will addressing this disconnect help create the world you want to live in? And by “the world you want to live in,” I mean that at so many levels. I mean that at the most local level, like your world. How will addressing this disconnect help you to create the life, the world that you want to live in? And then, also, how will you stepping into a next-level practicing of what you preach, how will that ripple out?

Remember, the Full Moon asks us to remember we’re all connected here. How will addressing that disconnect ripple out and affect the circle—your inner circle, and then the circle beyond that; affect your field; affect your workplace? How will addressing that disconnect help you to create the work that you want to live in? I almost want to edit it to “worlds” [laugh], right, because we want to look at it at lots of—on lots of levels.

OK. So, I believe that when you tune into body, when you break free from expectations, when you create a nest, a home that is more nurturing for you, you will be addressing that disconnect between what you practice and what you preach, and you will be creating the world that you want to live in. And, so, remembering Full Moons are the moment where we sort of pause, and we look at the whole situation, we see what’s out of balance, and then we know, OK, it’s time now to feed what’s working, and to withdraw from what’s not. It’s time now to celebrate how far we’ve come, but also to see how far we’ve left to go. 

One more thing—I promised this—in celebration of the cocreative spirit of the Full Moon, in each of these Full Moon episodes, I want to show a way that we can invite even a little bit more cocreative perspective into the moment. So, one of my favorite ways to do this is to pull a book off of the shelf, and open that book to a page, and then see what I read there. And I’m going to do that with you here in real time.

I already pulled the book off of the shelf. The book is called Burnout. Oh, my gosh, I recommend this book so hard. It’s by Emily and Amelia Nagoski. They are twin sisters. They are amazing. And it’s Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle. Highly recommend. So, that’s the book I pulled off the shelf. I’m opening it right now to a page. All right. Here we go.

Ooh. OK. Here’s the book’s contribution to our thinking. I’m reading right at the top of the page I turned to. “With the time and money we spend worrying about the shape of our bodies, and attempting to make them, quote, ‘fit’, what else might we accomplish? Along with that comes, quote, ‘self-regulatory fatigue’; if you’re using up decision-making and attention-focusing cognitive resources on choices about food, clothes, exercise, makeup, body hair, quote, ‘toxins’ and fretting about your body’s failures, what are you too exhausted to care about that you would otherwise prioritize?”

Oh, my gosh. [laugh] I love magic, don’t you? Come on, that’s amazing. So, the Nagoski sisters’ contribution to our thinking here is when we are thinking about our bodies, what are the ways in which we are caring more about our body’s appearances—and this is expectations-related, right?—than we are caring about our body’s wellness, wholeness? Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. What a perfect contribution. So, there you go.

One more question to consider, and I’ll reframe it this way: where’s a place you could rebalance those cognitive resources? Where’s a place you might be ready to begin caring less about how you look, and caring more about how you feel? Ooh, I want to go answer that one right now.

All right, my friends, happy—OK, is it happy? May you have a deep, illuminative Full Moon in Cancer. And may these questions and these ideas help you to look at your life with a fuller perspective. The subtitle of this episode is Nourish your Authority, and I mean “authority” in both senses of the word—your authority as in your leadership; your say-so; your call. And I also mean “authority” in the sense of your authorship, your creation, your writing of this precious life of yours. 

I truly believe when you nourish yourself, your body, your humanness, you will be a most resourceful, most creative, most transformative author of your life. Thank you so much for listening. Bye for now.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Mind Witchery. To catch all the magic I’m offering, please subscribe to the show, or if you want a little bit of weekly witchiness in your inbox, sign up for my Sunday Letter at mindwitchery.com. If today’s episode made you think of a friend or loved one, your sister, your neighbor, please tell them about it. We need more magic-makers in this troubled world. 

Like all good things, this podcast is cocreated by stellar people. Our music is by fabulous DJ, artist, and producer, Shammy Dee. Our gorgeous art is by the sorcerers at New Moon Creative. Mind Witchery is produced in conjunction with Particulate Media, K.O. Myers, executive producer. And I am Natalie Miller. Till next time. 

End of recording