When we feel like we we lost our footing and gone tumbling downhill fast, I try to remind myself (and my clients) that sometimes life is like a superball. The the faster we go down, the harder we hit the ground, AND the higher we bounce back up. There are so many analogies to describe the ups and downs of life, a favorite being the roller coaster of life. And the absolute best advice I ever got about dealing with the roller coaster came from my aunt, "buckle your seat belt, and don't forget to put your arms up and scream WHEEEE!"
This last full moon has felt like this for a lot of people. It is the most significant lunar event since 2019, which says a lot because 2020 was a doozy of a year for everyone on planet Earth. At 6:14am CST today, the Super Flower Moon went into eclipse. Right there is a massive contradiction, flowers and darkness. While the supermoon, the full moon when the moon is closest to the earth, is highlighting and emphasizing the energies of spring, newness, freshness, flowers, butterflies, and blooming, the lunar eclipse is suddenly darkening all that big-brightness and highlighting the shadows in our world. What's really interesting about this lunar event is that it is giving us the opportunity to feel all the feels SIMULTANEOUSLY. I mentioned this briefly in my Empath Energy Report last week.
The absolute best example of this phenomenon of feeling all the feels simultaneously happened to me at the tail end of a shamanic ancestralization ritual I experienced in 2007. The purpose of the ritual is to both grieve my dead loved ones, but also to activate them as members of my celestial team. In this particular ritual, I chose to ancestralize my maternal Grandfather, Edgar, and my paternal grandmother, Alice. Edgar was a highly intelligent jokester of a man with an astute business acumen. But I knew him as a crotchedy old man who scared me as a kid. Alice was a tender and kind, yet extremely resilient and strong South Dakota farm wife who knew how to cry, a lot. But I never knew her in person, she died before I was born. My understanding of the purpose of the ritual was to awaken the cellular memories and genetic DNA of these individuals in me, to activate them inside me so that they could live on through me. Rather than thinking of them as angels guiding me, I prefer to think of them as energies inside me. They are part of me, and to ancestralize them is to awaken the parts of them in me so I could live out their legacies. The end of the ritual was designed to teach us how to communicate with our ancestors by banging a stick while praying.
What happened to me was nothing short of other-worldly.
It started with a giggle. If I'm perfectly honest, I was laughing at the absurdity of banging a stick on a little wooden man and woman that I had dressed in scraps of their clothes while talking out loud to them about what I wanted in my life. I was laughing at myself for how stupid the action seemed. But after a few minutes, the giggles turned to bigger laughs, and those laughs weren't about what I was doing. They bubbled up from somewhere deeper inside me. They were directly connected to the desires I was expressing to live a full and abundant and playful life. I was asking Grandpa Edgar to show me how to be playful, how to laugh. And that he did. Eventually I was laughing so hard that I started to cry. And that's when Alice's DNA activated in me. I felt my laugh-crying slowly flip into full on sobbing. I felt what it was like to love so much that it hurt, and the tears of love-pain gushed. I cried for never having met her. I cried for never knowing Edgar as the playful man he was. But at the same time, I laughed at the silliness of it all. I laughed at the playfulness of the process. I laughed for no particular reason.
And then I realized I couldn't tell the difference between the laughter and the crying. They were the same thing.
I believe THIS is what this supermoon eclipse is about, showing us how to experience the cry-laughing and the laugh-crying at the same time. To see the beauty in the world, and the ugliness in the world, and to mix them up so that we realize that the ugly imperfections of life are beautiful!
For those of us who have experienced this kind of catharsis before, this full moon hasn't been too difficult to process, and perhaps it has even been a blessing. It has for me. While I've experienced some minor sleep disruptions, I have actually thoroughly enjoyed the cry-laughing and laugh-crying that this moon has sparked for me over the last week.
For those of you who have not surrendered to this kind of mixed-up emotion before, this full moon is cathartic, and requires a full on surrender. The more you resist the mood swings and the feely-feels, the more they amp up. The more you beg for them to stop, the longer they will last.
The only answer is to surrender. To breathe through it. To let yourself cry until all the stress hormones have been expelled and the happy ones start spilling out in laughter.
If you are struggling with this Super Flower Moon - Book an Appointment and I can help you find ways to surrender.
To learn the best breathing technique to breathe through it, take my online Focused Breathing course.