Happy Pisces New Moon to all! A great opportunity to write yourself a new story about how you relate to your intuition and imagination. 

Have you allowed yourself to be fully in tune with what you know to be your authentic being, or has some old way of thinking and being held you back? Are you able to dream and imagine the best life for yourself or have you lost faith in the future? Meditate today on how to begin anew, on how to see, think, and feel about yourself in a new way so that you can then manifest what you know in your heart to be your divine truth. I believe in you. 

And that’s not just an amazing Kylie Minogue song. That’s my heart’s message to you.

My mom is thrusting patterned shirt after patterned shirt at me, saying, “What about this one? I just want you to look nice.” At the moment, I may be wearing sweatpants and a t-shirt that says, “This shirt is my Halloween costume.” And it’s August. But I’m also twelve so I think that’s allowed. 

I swat away almost every shirt she tosses toward me, knowing that they won’t fit or will make me look like a large sectional from the seventies. I’m at least fifty pounds overweight at this point. I’ve also tried on at least twenty shirts of varying styles in this store over the past hour and nothing is fitting my body, so I’m tired. And I’m ashamed. I may not know how to intellectualize that or deal with it, but I am completely ashamed.

I’m ashamed that I’m not the kid whose mom is telling him he can’t get everything he wants because he just has so many options. I’m over feeling like a loser and a failure. My mom knows this. And because we’re both young, respectively, she says to me, “Well you just have to lose weight. Nothing is ever going to fit you looking like this.” She pauses. “And no one’s ever going to love you if you look like this.”
Boom.

Flash to me now as an adult who forgives my mother for saying this because she is nothing but pure love for me, and she knows now that she didn’t always say the right thing. But at the time, her statement buckled me and helped to carve out a mentality of never being good enough, of being less than. I forever became that fat kid, a disappointment because I didn’t fit in easily enough. And over time, that idea expanded beyond my looks. (I have since lost the weight and am confident in my appearance.) Subconsciously, I translated that mentality to other areas of my life. In work, I settled for seeing myself as less than, even in positions that I was specifically hired to do. I allowed myself to sabotage a job so that I could ultimately make true the feeling that I was not good enough for it. In relationships, I settled for guys that I knew were no good for me but figured they were the best I could get. Tale as old as time, I know. Most recently, I’ve realized how this works in my creativity, holding back my most authentic voice because “no one’s ever gonna love it.” All old, outdated ways of thinking and being that have taken me years to notice and shift. But with acknowledgment, I am doing my best to move forward and be better.

Now is the time to take responsibility for your own authentic self and give it the freedom to enjoy life.

This Leo Full Moon is here to help all of us acknowledge how we may be holding onto some old, unnecessary baggage, and thus, holding back some of our inner roar. Because it coincides with a lunar eclipse, it’s very connected to past patterns. So we can look to the last eclipses from mid September of last year and August of 2015 to help get a sense of where in our lives we’re supposed to be looking here. What was going on in those two times for you and is there any correlation to something going on for you now? Is there an area in your life where you’re feeling suppressed and just “not good”? That could be a clue in. Whatever the result of your findings, what can you do or what do you need more of in your life to reclaim that joy?

Now is the time to take responsibility for your own authentic self and give it the freedom to enjoy life. Can you own what that means for you without caving into some sort of fear around what others will think of you? Shit, what you will think of you? Because you can have an idea for who you think you should be, or what you should be doing with your life, your job, your home, your relationship, etc., but then you have to ask if it’s really what’s in alignment with your soul’s passion right now. You have to ask who you’re making decisions about your life for: those in your life who you’re afraid will judge you, an old you that you don’t want to disappoint, or the you that is you, right now, reading this. Know that what will make you happy now is way more important that that thing you told yourself would make you happy years ago. And they may be the same thing so that’s dope. But if you’re still approaching it in the same way you did before, then you’re probably just banging your head against a door with no room on the other side of it.

So here’s a full moon ritual for you. Draw a picture of yourself, the ideal you that you’ve always envisioned yourself to be. If you’re like me and can’t really draw, then just write out the important details to help illustrate that person. Put all your intention of who you think you’re destined to be into it.

Then, in a safe way, burn it.

Do this because you need to release the idea of who you think you are meant to be so that you can actualize the authentic you who is all ready to bust through now. All of that old stuff that you’re ready to let go of still has a hand in drawing that picture of the ideal. So let it all go, in one fell swoop, so that you can be excited and surprised by the real you, the present you, that is ready to emerge and claim your space in the world in a way that you haven’t allowed yourself to ever before.