deciphering our felt experience
Émile-Antoine Bayard, Illustrations for Around the Moon by Jules Verne, 1870
I have been thinking of the untranslatable, about how we try to translate what’s occurring within us into language or words. Finding language to describe our immediate inner experience is often the final part that emerges in our awareness.
It can be easy to forget that we are more than our thoughts, when our inner orbit depicts a wondrous landscape that would leave a visitor from outer space speechless, in awe of the beauty.
This visitor could be you, too.
When we spend much of our energies on our external world - tasks to complete, outcomes to reach, relationships to tend - our attention can remain in this ‘outer space’. Learning to continually bring our attention back to what is simultaneously occurring within the inner landscape of our soma increases our skills in attending to our own energies. Much of which lands us in what can sometimes feel like the most powerful energies of them all: our emotions.
Wild, unadulterated, seemingly answering to no logic nor reason.
Elementally, our emotions relate to the realm of water. With 70% of our bodies and the Earth made up of water - we can sometimes feel thrown by the waves of our emotions, flailing in the breaking banks of the flooding river.
Mercury - planet of how we communicate and conceptualise through language - is currently wading their way through the watery, feeling nature of Cancer. In the Thema Mundi, Cancer represents the cosmic beginning of the world, the primordial waters that initiates the formless into form. Ruled by the Moon, Cancer waxes and wanes, much like how our mood shifts with the ever-changing tides.
Have you ever tried speaking under water? Sound travels four times faster in water than through air, yet try speaking the same language you use on land, and you may find it undecipherable by your receiver.
If there were no words, how would you communicate the felt experience of your feelings?
The closest celestial body to Earth, the Moon speaks to how our physical, emotional bodies experience Life, how our core needs yearn to be met. We experience the external world through a lunar lens - the impressions and perceptions that arise from our inner realms.
Shun your Moon and you shun the Life within you.
It has only been in recent months that I have deepened into the intimacy and vastness of my lunar nature - how (in/visibly) prominent it is in my life, the way I instinctively reach to care and nurture others, how my 10H Moon always sought to care for the world at large. It has taken me years of learning and practically applying frameworks such as ‘re-parenting’ and ‘inner child work’ to realise how the skills of nurture I have spent a lifetime honing could be re-directed towards myself too - to recognise my needs, honour them with tenderness and respond with appropriate care.
Attune to yourself and ask what your heart and soul needs to feel nourished.
The path back to feeling more at our home within starts here.
play prompts
What emotions do you feel, in the here and now?
What clues within your body lets you know that those are the emotions you’ve identified?
If your emotions could speak, what words would they express?
