As a witch, I often feel like I should be more attuned to the moon than I am. (I’ve also thought this in regards to the seasons and the sabbats). Perhaps this is in part due to some idolized narrative of what I think witchery is or part of it is my contrarian nature wanting to find ways to be different. Either way, I do have a sense that being more attuned to the moon would be beneficial to my awareness of energy currents around me and would impact my practice.
I’ve toyed with ways to track lunar cycles over the years, from daily or weekly journals, to sabbat goals/lists as ways to be more aware of energy tides and have found that there is a tension between my awareness/mindfulness and my concentration/discipline in seeing these types of initiatives through long enough to be able to actually see if they have an impact on my practice.
A lot of the work of magic relies on merging intention with belief or knowledge and the inability to fuse the two can often lead to us undermining our own magic. We can will and dare all we like, but if we’re missing the knowledge or belief in self, our workings will likely suffer. We can argue that there is more to it to that in some ways, but in some ways it’s as simple of that. What we believe and focus on shapes our reality, thus we are constantly casting spells on ourselves. Our self-confidence in magic can either make things happen and our insecurities can lead to them failing.
What does this have to do with lunar cycles?
While lunar tides and seasonal energies are helpful to magic, magic isn’t reliant on them. However, given how there are layers and layers of belief and meaning attributed to these things built up in our collective unconscious, it goes without saying that working with these currents can ease the flow of the work.
The work I’m trying to get at, underneath all this charting and tracking, is a depth of core belief that informs and strengthens my own practice. I recognize it’s all a bit neurotic to backtrack in these ways in my practice but as a solo practitioner these days, I’m focused on reworking my foundations and building confidence in my solo practice.
From there, I want to use the lunar cycle tracking to do personal intentional magic for spiritual growth and for my magical gardens by keeping an eye on how planting bio-dynamically influences my plant relationships and my garden. The photo above is actually an example of my first experiment in using the lunar cycle for this type of psycho-spiritual lunar work. Given that the full moon in Cancer is a time of emotions and the new year a time of new habits, I opted to do workings around emotional and communicative mindfulness in the new year. In addition to tracking the lunar cycle, I’m using the chart shown above to track how the working unfolds in my day to day. We’ll see how it unfolds as a practice.
If nothing else, it will be a good commitment to logging my spiritual practice and it’s impact on the mundane.