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WORKBOOK 4 - PLANETS IN THE HOUSES THE MOON

 

As we move into the Moon we begin to really start working with the nature of the soul activity in the chart. If the Sun is speaking to us of the experience of the lifetime which we are here to embody, and through which we are going to bring in our spiritualising impulse, then the Moon speaks to us of the place, position and the sign in the chart where our soul is carrying in its' cellular memory of the passage which has brought us to this point.

The collective experience of all the lives, and the sum total of the development thus far is expressed in our Moon sign, and in this sense it is easy to see how the automatic response mechanism which takes us through into the more mundane emotional aspects, are all tied up with this sense of the very unconscious automatic part of us; which at all times is attempting to make its' impression felt, and to influence us to honour the true purpose of our soul's passage during this lifetime.

The Moon is so subtle and yet so obvious. On the emotional level we have the sense of the Moon offering us the understanding of how and why we feel, what do we feel. When we speak of our feelings, it is our Moon sign and house that will be generating the place which we feel from. This is where we get the sense of all the encoding, the development of the 'who we are' to this point, which offers us that sense of the source of where we are emotionally connecting with life. What is it that empowers us to feel that we are meant to be doing our soul's work in the world?

The Moon is so very important in the chart. In terms of the behavioral and psychological, the Moon is the Mother, as it is from her that we receive the messages which program the psyche about our "right to feel", There are different schools of thought here ... Buzz Meyers talks in terms of the Moon being the Grandmother. With the genetic thread coming through the matriarchal lineage, we inherit a lot of our Grandmothers' qualities and tendencies, and that this lineage tends to skip a generation. The Moon sign or the house the Moon is in will often be your Grandmothers' Moon sign. The idea here is that the Moon comes to us in many guises.

 

One of the most wonderful symbolic models which I enjoy is the idea of the three faces ... the virgin (or the youthful) aspect of the feminine, the matriarchal (or the Mother-the nurturer-the lifegiver), and then the crone (or the wise women-the sage-the older women). These three facets are all contained within the Moon. It is really worthy of exploration on this level ... to look at the Moon sign in our chart, and to recognise that we are going to embody that Moon in three distinct faces, as three distinct phases& in our life.

Perhaps it is in the youthful maiden phase that this is where we are instinctively attempting to unfold the soul potential in its naive aspect. In the early part of our life, especially up to the first progressed moon return at the 27 mark, we are driven very instinctively by our emotions. Not many of us up until this time have any awareness of our true emotional self and how it directs, guides and activates us.

So the first stage is the instinctive, naive, raw and very reactive. And yet, what is the seed that is motivating this instinctive experience, which then is deepened and made into its women, nurturer birther sustainer phase in the next cycle, and then ultimately to its wise crone aspect in the final stage? Because the Moon represents our soul and therefore our soul's destiny, in our early childhood we all seem to have a sense of what it is that we are meant to do, but for most of us as we mature we lose this instinct.

The first seven years of life are ruled by the Moon. In the Indian culture the levels of protection placed around children for the first seven years always incorporates basic talismans, symbolic uses of pearls, white stones, moonstones and white ribbons. They place these around the neck of the child up until the age of seven so that they are guarded by the feminine principle, the Great Mother. The four stages which can be broken up into the eight stages of the lunation process from first quarter through to balsamic, also fit in with this developmental phase which takes us through to the near Saturn return time. There are so many ways we can look at integrating the lunar principle and ponder the significance of the Moons' influence in our lives at the different stages.

We do the very instinctive stuff early. If you ask a child when it is quite young, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" you will probably get the most honest understanding of the real potential of the person, because the soul impression is still very strong up until the age of seven. At that point, because of our social conditioning it diminishes, and we live in a society that encourages children to become left brained

 

As we move toward the end of our lunar phase at age 7 the solar influence is becoming much stronger, and at that point the Sun as the new spiritualising essence of the lifetime, begins to increase the quality of the energy (by sign and house) which we are meant to be integrating on our path to "individuation".

What we are in a state of becoming in any lifetime, is an integral experience of balance between the solunar experience and eventual integration and expression of those two functions. This does not usually happen until after the 40 mark - after the midlife transits and after the second progressed lunar opposition. The first one of these occurs around the ages 13 - 14 years, and the second one occurs around the age of the early 40's. In terms of the influence of Mother and Grandmother it may be that there is a very powerful unconscious or subliminal experience of Grandmother influence, which may have gone in very early in the piece, as usually we are young when our Grandmother is around.

Our sense of Grandmother is usually kind, soft, nourishing and supporting. The Mother is busy being Mother, laying down all the emotional patterns around our belief systems of whether we have the right to feel, how we are going to be supported in these beliefs, whether we are going to believe we are safe to be nurturers and caregivers ourselves. And to accompany this there is another more subliminal experience of this other Mother figure, the Grandmother.

Men and women as they get older, by the very nature of the life experience, mellow; they work out the life process, they express and develop the 'who they are in the world and what they are here for,' to the point where they have moved through a lot of the more difficult aspects of life. Often our Mothers are still working out and expressing a lot of the original Grandmothers' stuff, which has since mellowed. So the patterns are still there in the Mother, but in the Grandmother we get a gentler experience of it.

We will often get the dysfunctionality of the emotional patterning through the Mother, and the functionality of the potential of what we can grow into, once healed, through the Grandmother. We will get all this information from the Moon and the aspects to the Moon. If we didn't get to work with this consciously with our Grandmother present, it is still all genetically encoded and stored.

This is very powerful territory. This is the key. Apart from the obvious implications of the emotional patterning and the belief systems of our ability to love and be loved, and our capacity to give birth and to support and nurture others, the Moon holds the key to all of this. Working with any client, friend or family member, if you really focus on the Moon and its aspects you will unravel much of the mystery.

This is where a lot of healing lives in the chart & by being able to come into, ultimately, a sense of the value of your capacity to nurture and love. The healing process itself is a profoundly feminine experience. If we are still tied up in the anger, the resistance and all of the old feelings and patterns, we deprive ourselves of the capacity to really have the best of what our Moon has to offer.

That then is when the Soul is fully embodied. It is not fully embodied unless we have gone through the motions of awakening to the reality of it, and beginning the journey back to wholeness. This requires the various therapeutic and healing levels of the areas we are working in. The final ingredient is to begin to surrender to the Soul as the great influence which will take us to our life's purpose and our reason for being on the planet.

To feel the full Soul embodiment is when there is the sense of wellbeing, the inner harmony, the rightness of everything, the knowing of being in the right place at the right time doing the right thing - the knowing of beginning to really honour the highest potential of the sign and house position of the Moon.

When the soul is not embodied we feel lost, alone and alienated. We must recognise that until we completely surrender to the Moons' full potential, we are not fully embodied as a Soul and not living in the highest aspect of what we chose this lifetime for.

Painting the "picture" of the Mother by creating a story of her by Sun sign, house and aspects is very useful for helping the client acknowledge their own issues, as they identify them in the Mother, and in turn acknowledge those issues which they may still be carrying.

 

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