Cancer New Moon
Intellectual understanding of a concept is one thing. Embodied understanding is entirely another. We've all had experience with this. Under times of pressure, loss, conflict, aloneness, and uncertainty, what we understand only through the mind will tremble and shake. Fall apart. Seem to leave us stranded. For example:
We might remind ourselves that we are always worthy, always connected to Source, and abundant in fundamental creativity. But conceptual knowledge of this alone doesn’t hold up in environments that lack external validation, appreciation, empathy and mirroring.
We might intellectually understand that race is a social construct, that race was created for economic profit and power, that racism is dehumanizing and we never consciously want to perpetuate it. But, intellectual understanding and desire alone isn’t enough to disrupt the steady stream of reactions and expectations one has to and of the world, moving through it in a white body or in a Black body.
And, in our minds we might absolutely know that shame is not an effective tool. Yet, if we were modeled it in childhood and if this is what our bodies sponged up at a young age, this is the tool we will reflexively reach for when we feel powerless, challenged, and afraid in hard conversations. And, it can be used against us, keeping us small.
What stays with us is what our bodies know. This is both the hurdle and healing opportunity. This is what either loops us back to the beginning, or spirals us out into growth.
Sometimes, it is obvious when we have been kicked into fight, flight or freeze. And, sometimes, it’s not. Sometimes we have mastered our coping mechanisms and adaptive strategies so well that it seems like we are in control, when in actuality, we have just gotten really good at side-stepping the exact portal of pain* through which consciousness could have come into the body. Through which our intellectual understanding would actually have made it into our cellular knowing. There, to remain with us. To rise up under moments of challenge and organically guide us into each moment’s nexus of integrity and spontaneity.
The week leading up to this New Moon in Cancer was shaped by the energies of a Sun-Pluto opposition and a Mars-Chiron conjunction. These energies revealed the personality structures and habits built to protect a hidden hurt, limiting our options for authentic self expression and thus true belonging. These transits were an exploration around the questions —
How do we heal from a cultural imbalance of rational, left-brain, dualistic thinking, and usher conceptual understanding from our brain and into our bodies? How do we surrender to the nonrational? How do we surrender being right? How do we surrender our own narratives to make space for a divine wisdom sourced from beyond our minds? How do we surrender to feeling? To the inexplicable, unpredictable path of healing?
Opening ourselves up to experiencing more feeling in moments of emotionally dense conversations that involve exposing each other’s hurt, asks for more pauses. More body awareness. More slowing down, tuning in, listening to our body and asking what it needs, akin to how a parent would to their child. Because, again, this is one of those things. We conceptually understand we must feel it to heal it. But before our conscious mind can get behind the wheel and drive us into the healing tunnel, our body is already reflexively protecting ourselves from being hurt, which gets in the way of the heart-felt understanding and connection that’s on the other side of clean pain.
One of the most impactful ways that our conditioning has kept us out of our own authentic power and true belonging, has been by training us to invest, as standard operating procedure, so much of our creative energy into figuring out how to avoid pain, that we not only consent to giving our power away, but we work SO HARD at giving our power away.
But what if, instead, we worked so hard at discerning clean pain from dirty pain? What if we worked so hard at supporting our nervous systems through the process of leaning into feeling clean pain? So that our dependence on intellectual knowledge can be absorbed by our Being? By who we truly are?
With Saturn in Capricorn energy, if we decide to, we are supported in keeping a discipline of body awareness, centering, clearing, and grounding, especially in those moments when it’s just a basic self-care choice, like drinking water and sleeping. When there’s no ego gratification, applause, or pressure. But rather because the goal of creating a more humanizing, healed and beautiful world guides us to. Because, by committing to those small daily somatic practices, we support our divine authority in supplanting our reptilian brain and its chaotic resistance, and re-align ourselves with the sacred process of Life, our very own lived experiences, bringing illumination into our bodies through the portal of clean* pain. And, from there, crack open our heart’s infinite guidance and wisdom.
If you want an abundance of somatic practices and a historical framework of Black body, white body and police body trauma, please read Resmaa Menakem’s book, My Grandmother’s Hands. There are many practices, which build off of each other and involve visualization, breathing, and grounding.
*Here is a quote from this book on clean pain and dirty pain:
“Clean pain is the pain that mends and can build your capacity for growth. It’s the pain you experience when you know, exactly, what you need to say or do; when you really, really don’t want to say or do it; and when you do it anyway. It’s also the pain you experience when you have no idea what to do; when you’re scared or worried about what might happen; and when you step forward into the unknown anyway, with honesty and vulnerability.
Experiencing clean pain enables us to engage our integrity and tap in our bodies inherent resilience and coherence, in a way that dirty pain does not. Paradoxically, only by walking into our pain or discomfort - experiencing it, moving through it, and metabolizing it - can we grow. It’s how the human body works.
Clean pain hurts like hell. But it enables our bodies to grow through our difficulties, develop nuanced skills, and mend our trauma. In this process, the body metabolizes clean pain. The body can then settle; more room for growth is created in its nervous system and the self becomes freer and more capable, because it now has access to energy that was previously protected, bound, and constricted. When this happens, people’s lives often improve in other ways as well…
Dirty pain is the pain of avoidance, blame, and denial. When people respond from their most wounded parts, become cruel or violent, or physically or emotionally run away, they experience dirty pain. They also create more of it for themselves and others.”
Much love and many New Moon blessings,
Nicole
