Yoga & Your Lunar Cycle
Embracing the seasons of your natural monthly rhythm, one transition at a time.
Just as we can witness the Moon move through her monthly cycle, we can experience these same seasonal shifts within ourselves. These ebbs and flows in our own natural rhythm provide important signs about where we are in our monthly process. Especially as women, the process of incorporating our self-awareness practice on and off the mat in alignment with our lunar biorhythm can be incredibly helpful.
The Moon guides us into a more authentic way of living with ourselves and others, giving us perspective on why we feel the way we feel or react the way we do, what we need within our environment to feel safe and supported, and gives us sixty-four incredible opportunities to cultivate a deeper level of emotional intelligence. And that’s every single month! When we focus on trying to measure up to the world’s expectations of us, we lose connection to our internal rhythm, and ignore our deeper intuition. The Moon is our gentle, constant reminder to reconnect.
Oftentimes aligning with the moon phases involves a level of slowing down. Most of us are simply moving too quickly and this tendency extends into multiple spheres of our lives. Aligning with the moon phases provides us with an external reference point for our internal reflection process, and because she appears differently at different points in her cycle yet consistent over multiple cycles, we can rely on her to provide a beautiful archetypal journey that we can apply respectively into our own process.
Aligning our yoga practice the lunar cycle has so many benefits, such as:
When to move, when to rest.. and how to optimize our energy resources throughout the month so we fall in line with more sustainable success rather than fall back into some level of burnout. If you are a Reflector, like me, then learning to align with the lunar cycle is really a portal to deeper self-transformation. It teaches you how to unlock the magic of the Moon within YOU. This is where we get to learn the significant difference between THE lunar cycle and YOUR lunar cycle. The moon phases provide a beautiful visual representation of this cyclical movement that when applied to our own internal process can help us radically transform every sphere of our lives simply through subtle shifts in perspective. Excuse my French, but it’s fucking life-changing.
We can gain clarity on what times during the month feel most appropriate to internally reflect or externally communicate, as well as ways to experiment during those ‘gray periods’ where we just aren’t certain. The Moon can help us move even through our uncertainty as she reflects our progression from darkness (confusion) to clarity (light).
How to honor the seasons and cycles within us. Our ability to reference this natural process of life and death, growth and cultivation, within us is essential. You are your inner gardener, the sole tender of your inner landscape. There’s no shame in having a bit of deferred emotional maintenance. Again, we’re human! And sometimes it can feel easier to push off the hard work, because it’s just not the day for the heavy emotional lifting. I get it, really. The thing is, there’s never going to be that perfect day to sit down and get real about what’s just not working. But we’ve got to. It’s our way to clarity. As much as our focus can naturally shift to what’s just not going right, the truth is there are things that ARE working that are simply being overlooked because the fear keeps coming up, and we keep pushing it away.
Find time to connect
The theme of connection rests at the core of yoga. We are never out of yoga, so learning to work with the moon phases as an integral component of your yoga practice is actually simple math. It’s about learning your cycle, more and more every cycle, slowly and one step at a time.
Oftentimes aligning with the moon phases involves a level of slowing down. Most of us are simply moving too quickly and this tendency extends into multiple spheres of our lives. Aligning with the moon phases provides us with an external reference point for our internal reflection process, and because she appears differently at different points in her cycle yet consistent over multiple cycles, we can rely on her to provide a beautiful archetypal journey that we can apply respectively into our own process. So what, then, are we applying it to? The lunar calculations in your chart.
If you are new to working with lunar energies, check out this small introduction to what these mean in your chart.
Working with the Moon and her phases can bring about a deep unwinding, a recognition of your deeper drive and what it means to move in your own natural timing, and to be in harmony with a healthy internal rhythm. When we are in alignment with our differentiated path, it transforms the way we feel, and brings each of us the opportunity to cultivate and co-create a consciously evolving emotional experience in life.
In letting go of who we think we should be, or who the world tells us to be, we can create the space for who we truly are to be revealed right before our eyes.
