MOON IN ARIES The Evolutionary Goal: In this lifetime, I resolve to press toward a point where I never allow fearful reflexes to stand between me and any experience that I believe might feed my soul. I may be afraid, but I will not panic – that at least is my goal. My Instinctual Tools: I am cogent and clear under pressure. I can make good decisions when the chips are down. I know how to survive . I can improvise. I have a relative immunity to panicking. I can do battle if I have to; I may not want to, but I am capable. The Secret of Happiness: To be happy, I need to feel that I am pushing myself towards the far limits of my own excellence. I need to feel the dignity of the Warrior archetype in myself – that I am defending those I love, that I am living in an honorable way, that I am doing something worth doing with my life. I need to feel a high degree of autonomy and independence. I do not appreciate being told what to do. It helps me to feel as if I am “the best” at something. The Mood of My Life: I have a sense of constant urgency, even of emergency – it is not fear exactly, but rather something more like a feeling of constantly needing to rise to a challenge. While I do not revel in defeating anyone, I do aim to win. An underlying sense of stress is my constant companion. The Attitudinal Dead End: I can wallow in resentments. I can harbor anger internally – or vent it destructively and unfairly. I can turn rage on myself. I can interpret the world in a fearful, paranoid, overly competitive fashion.
THE MOON IN TAURUS The Evolutionary Goal: I resolve to try to calm down and to remain quietly, serenely centered no matter what happens. I will not sweat the small stuff. I resolve to fully inhabit my physical body and avail myself of the wisdom of all of its built-in instincts. I will learn to trust my guts. I aim to find inner silence in this lifetime – and to listen to it very carefully. My Instinctual Tools: I can quickly and accurately detect insincerity, phoniness , and heart-numbing mental hyperactivity in anyone. I can smell a liar or a con artist a mile away. I can cut through a haze of words straight into the human essentials of any situation. I can stay grounded when others are tying themselves in knots. The Secret of Happiness: To be happy, it helps me enormously to find time to work with my hands using physical materials that come from the earth. I also benefit a lot from quiet time. Dolce far niente, as the Italians say – sometimes it is sweet just to do nothing . Music makes me happy; time spent in nature makes me happy; good food shared with familiar faces makes me happy. As it says in the old hymn, it is a gift to be simple – I really understand that, and I strive to live that way. The Mood of My Life: Let’s keep everything as grounded and as simple as possible. Let’s stay real and authentic in the moment. I am wary of fads and hyperbole. I prepare in practical ways for life’s eventualities, but I do not add unnecessary worry to the mix. I relax and I try to live in the here and now. In general , my mood is patient – but I am impatient with the yackety-yack of people’s overheated theories, especially when they are irreconcilable with obvious, simple truths. The Attitudinal Dead End: I can be stubborn and set in my ways to the point of being closed-minded and impervious to evolutionary possibilities. I can find it unbelievable that another person might be right when I myself was wrong. I can become predictable.
THE MOON IN GEMINI The Evolutionary Goal: I resolve to keep a youthful, open-minded, and curious attitude toward life until the end. I will even view my death as “interesting” and see it as a chance to learn something new. I resolve to accept the fact that whatever I see or know, the truth is beyond my current understanding. I resolve to learn how to express the contents of my heart in clarion-clear language. Rather than blaming other people for not grasping what I am saying, I resolve to take personal responsibility for people understanding me; I will develop the communicative skills which support it. My Instinctual Tools: I can learn anything if I apply myself, and I experience joy in applying myself to tasks of learning that way. I adapt easily to surprise and to the unexpected. I can multitask. I am blessed with language skills and I am also a good listener. Without even trying, I know how to get people to open up verbally to me. The Secret of Happiness: To be happy , I need lots of variety and mental stimulation in my life. Boredom is not good for me, even if it sneaks up on me disguised as maturity or responsibility or some other virtue. It is a great support for me to be surrounded by interesting people who can speak from their hearts and who themselves are interested in life. The Mood of My Life: My reflexive emotional attitude is one of curiosity and engagement with whatever arises, especially if it is fresh and new. I feel as if I am trying to pack the experience of several lifetimes into one life. I am restless, and I do not have a problem with that. The Attitudinal Dead End: I can hide from hard truths behind a wall of words, rationalizing and dancing away from realities whose existence I do not want to admit. I can work myself up into a lather of nervous agitation and activity, all as a way of escaping the scary places in my own heart.
THE MOON IN CANCER The Evolutionary Goal: I resolve to feel whatever I feel without defenses, rationalizations, or editing. I will nurture myself, recognizing the nature of my own woundedness. In that self-healing process, I will be patient and gentle with myself. I do not need to explain myself. I will practice kindness toward all other beings, human, animal, or in spirit-form. I resolve to approach the pinnacle of compassionate engagement with all life. My Instinctual Tools: I can quickly sense the presence and nature of hurt in myself and others. I have the instincts of a healer – and a healer not just of bodies, but of minds and hearts as well. I know how to nurture. I know how to offer genuine comfort. I am a good friend. The Secret of Happiness: To be happy, I need quiet time to myself, away from the noise and distraction of the world. It really helps me to have a home I love and in which I feel safe and secure. Similarly, it helps me to have “a family”, at least in some sense of that word – that means other beings upon whom I can count completely, whether they have two feet or four. The Mood of My Life: My reflexive emotional attitude is one of slightly worried caring and concern – and a little worry only means that I am paying attention to where life’s jagged edges and emotional minefields might lie. I know that they are real; I guard and nurture my sensitivity skillfully by being wary of them. The Attitudinal Dead End: I can be excessively self-protective, to the point that I am only halfway here in this world. Risk can never be entirely avoided unless I entirely avoid life. In the same way, I can be protective of others whom I love to the point that I suffocate them or stand between them and lessons which they really need to learn.
THE MOON IN LEO The Evolutionary Goal: I resolve to conquer my fear of being emotionally vulnerable or of looking silly. Others probably do not see that frightened part of me , but I acknowledge it and resolve to get past it by risking the full expression of my heart and soul and letting the chips fall where they may when I do that. My Instinctual Tools: I am an inherently creative person, at least in some sense of the word. By instinct, I can perform and hold people’s attention – maybe or maybe not literally in front of an audience, but in some fashion. I will identify that tool and I will employ it. Before I die, others will know what I hold to be beautiful or sacred. I will have expressed it. The Secret of Happiness: To be happy, I need applause and appreciation. That is not out of any kind of insecurity or egoism, but rather because it completes a healing loop in my heart. Here is the map of that loop: I risk self-expression; others respond positively; my feeling of “risk” is lessened; vulnerable self-expression becomes easier – and I am happier for it. The Mood of My Life: My reflexive emotional attitude is one of constantly living as if I were on the wings of the stage and about to step out in front of a huge crowd. I feel like I have butterflies in my stomach, but I appear to be supernaturally confident anyway. I feel as if I need to prove myself that way again and again. The Attitudinal Dead End: I can be self-protective to the point of crippling my own evolution, keeping up appearances rather than being sincere and truly present. When I slip into that error, I take on an authoritarian “royal” vibration of stability and false well-being that belies the fearful insecurity which I am actually feeling.
THE MOON IN VIRGO The Evolutionary Goal: I resolve to find a way to be of meaningful service toward other people in this lifetime, and thus attain the dignity of a job well done. I will polish and develop my inborn skills, constantly pressing them in the direction of perfection. Similarly, I resolve to work on myself, always acknowledging the humble realities of my evolutionary predicament, but never slipping into the sinkhole of losing faith in myself or crippling myself with self-criticism. My Instinctual Tools: I was born with the seeds of a specific talent which can make a difference in other people’s lives. I have a good instinct for how to identify that skill set and bring it fully online. I can recognize my teachers and mentors, and I am humble enough to know how to receive their gifts. I am precise. I can think critically without descending into reflexive negativity. The Secret of Happiness: To be happy, I must find work that truly matters. On that road, I find joy in the company of people who can guide me because they are a few steps ahead of me. I will judge myself – but never against the standard of perfection, only against the standard of the intensity of my own evolutionary effort. The Mood of My Life: My reflexive emotional attitude is one of an insecurity-driven concern over details and practical worries. That is not because I am neurotic; it is because I am careful and responsible. I ask a lot of myself. I do not rest on my laurels, but instead I feel moved toward fresh efforts. I am, above all, realistic. The Attitudinal Dead End: I can be overly hard on myself to the point that I lose faith in myself. If that happens, I run out of steam in my own journey – and I quickly begin to project my own self-criticism onto other people. I become picky and chronically dissatisfied.
THE MOON IN LIBRA The Evolutionary Goal: I resolve to prioritize the peacefulness of my soul above all other motivations in this lifetime. I recognize that serenity of spirit is equal in evolutionary value to any kind of intellectual insight. I choose my relationships, my beliefs, and my environment in the light of that priority. Grace is my goal. My Instinctual Tools: I can immerse my senses in beauty, whether it is the beauty of nature or the beauty that human beings create. I can surrender to it in such a way that I breathe out my accumulated tensions. I can recognize my soul-friends and I know how to take comfort in their presence. I see other people as they are, which is to say, as different from me. I don’t say, “if I were you…” because I know that I am not. By instinct, I see both sides of every question. The Secret of Happiness: To be happy, I need gracefulness in my life. That means aesthetic experience and a harmonious environment – but above all, it means companionable people with whom I share affection, mutual respect, and appreciation. Time spent with them is fundamental to my happiness and well-being. The Mood of My Life: My reflexive emotional attitude is that of an artist, even if I am not actively creative… although I may be that too. Taste, balance, and beauty mean a lot to me. My attitude is live and let live. One might call my mood “diplomatic,” so long as that word does not imply phoniness or insincerity, but rather respect and a genuine desire to meet people in the middle. The Attitudinal Dead End: I can be so intent on maintaining harmony in my various relationships that my own soul somehow gets lost in the mix. My actual needs and my own edgy places do not always please other people. I must remember to make sure that a commitment to grace does not eclipse my authenticity.
THE MOON IN SCORPIO The Evolutionary Goal: I resolve to be true to my own heart no matter where it leads me. I will let myself feel anything and everything, no matter how dark or taboo it might be, so long as it rises up naturally within me. I sometimes choose to edit my behavior – but I resolve never to silence my own inner dialog with my authentic emotional states, perceptions, and needs. My Instinctual Tools: I can face any kind of truth within myself without fainting or slipping into denial and rationalization. I am skillful at looking beneath the surface of other people’s behavior. I can see the true story behind their “official” story in very much the same way as a good psychoanalyst does. I have the skills and instincts of a skillful detective. I am good to have around in any kind of emotional crisis ; I can handle it when people express strong emotions. The Secret of Happiness: To be happy, I need a feeling of authenticity and realness in my primary relationships. I need to feel connected in a naked, heart-to-heart kind of way with other people. It feels good to me to be connected with the invisible realms – spirits, God, higher powers, angels, whatever I might call them. To do that successfully, I need time alone. One secret of happiness for me is the realization that I am not required to be happy all the time. The Mood of My Life: My reflexive emotional attitude is intense, psychological , even suspicious – and suspicion only means that I am profoundly aware that everyone has secrets and everyone has a darker side. What people do not understand about me is that my suspicious mood is not really judgmental or negative. It is simply that I see a lot of truth which other people often do not accept – truths which often make people so nervous that they deny the reality of what is actually going on. The Attitudinal Dead End: I can do a tailspin down into psychological and emotional depths from which I do not know how to escape. Lacking deeper, balancing connections with a handful of soul-friends, I could lose balance. I could get deeper a lot faster than I could handle, slipping into isolation and brooding moodiness.
THE MOON IN SAGITTARIUS The Evolutionary Goal: I resolve to devote my life to a quest for meaning and higher purpose. I resolve to deepen my understanding of the laws of the universe and try to align my behavior as best I can with those principles. I resolve to live a life in which I positively believe, trusting my own path – and trusting the higher powers that are watching over me. My Instinctual Tools: I can adapt to alien cultures and new environments. I can connect the dots of experience and weave them into broad principles of understanding – I am, in other words, an instinctual philosopher. The wider my experience, the wiser I will become. The Secret of Happiness: To be happy , my life must be adventurous. Thrills alone are not the point – the point is richness and variety of experience itself, which is evolutionary dynamite for me. I learn from living. To be happy, I cannot be afraid of life. Feeling that I am walking my talk gives me a sense of sustained wellbeing. It boils down to knowing that I am on the right path and that I have not let mere practicality get in the way of learning what my life is really all about. The Mood of My Life: My reflexive emotional attitude is one of damn-the-torpedoes enthusiasm for experience. “Yes” comes more easily to me than “no.” I am not afraid of making mistakes; I embrace them without shame or fear, knowing that everything I do, whether it turns out well or poorly, is ultimately grist for the mill of my own evolution – so long as what I do is aligned with my highest principles. The Attitudinal Dead End: I can be opinionated. My need to be right – or to not be “made wrong” by anyone – can block me from learning anything new. In my zeal to defend my freedom, I can fail to commit to paths in life that could teach me what I have actually incarnated in order to learn.
Evolutionary Goal
I resolve to achieve some Great Work in this lifetime. When it is complete, it will probably be visible to other people, although it is possible that it might be purely an internal, spiritual accomplishment. If it is the latter, then I myself will be the Great Work and that is what will be visible. I will reach the far limits of what I am capable of doing. I will attain excellence in some area of life that is meaningful and engaging to me. I will make myself proud as I look back on my years in this world and on what I have accomplished.
Your Intuitive Tools
I can put emotions, fears, and questions aside and simply bear down on a task. I can be self-sustaining too – I do not need applause or cheerleaders. I have the instincts of an Elder , whatever my current age. Solitude does not frighten me ; in fact, it feeds me. I can persist where others have given up. If I have to, I can make one can of beans last for a week.
Recipe for Happiness
To be happy, I need to undertake projects that are actually worthy of me. I need to always be making an effort, accomplishing something which I deem to be worthwhile. Having a vivid sense of compelling purpose in my life is essential to my feeling good. At a simpler level, I also benefit from having quiet time to myself, away from everybody. The
Mood of My Life
My reflexive emotional attitude is one of endless effort, endless responsibility, and interminable lists of things that must be done. I am not “out of touch with my feelings.” I just refuse to allow feelings to run my life. An attitude of quiet self-sufficiency and endless productivity permeates my days.
The Attitudinal Dead End (Failure)
I can be time-serving and long-suffering in such a way that I live a life of pointless drudgery. I can hang from a cross when I do not have to . I can accept responsibilities that are not truly mine. Even with people around me, I can cast a spell of loneliness on my life by holding the expression of my own heart in check.
THE MOON IN AQUARIUS The Evolutionary Goal: I resolve to align my biographical life with the authentic promptings of my own heart, even if that makes me look weird or threatening to other people. I will free myself from the monkey-need to be accepted and approved of by everyone. I resolve to truly lead my own life, following my soul wherever it guides me. I do not need anyone to tell me that I am on my correct path; I know it myself when I see it. My Instinctual Tools: I recognize the pitfalls of “group think” even when no one else can. I have an instinctive suspicion of the herd instinct. I do not follow leaders. I sense that much of what is taken to be evidence of sanity and normalcy in this world is in fact insane. I question what “everybody knows.” I question authority. When someone tells me to turn right, my eyes turn instinctively to the left. The Secret of Happiness: To be happy, I need to follow my heart wherever it leads me, even when everyone is hellbent on correcting me or saving me from myself. When people imply that my feelings “are not working right,” I need to realize that what they are saying is simply that my heart is not following their familiar script. That script may be fine and natural for them – but for me, to follow it would be a disaster. The Mood of My Life: My reflexive emotional attitude is independent, irreverent of authority, even rebellious. Others can live as they want – I have no problem with that. Just don’t try to tell me how to live my life. Your judgment of me does not concern me; your opinion of me is none of my business. The Attitudinal Dead End: I can become detached and aloof, even cynical, as a way of coping with the social realities of the world. The problem with that defense is that it costs me the right actually to live the life I was born to live. Instead of following my heart, I look heavenward and mutter, “whatever…”
THE MOON IN PISCES The Evolutionary Goal: I resolve simply to prioritize the advancement of my spiritual life over all other concerns in this lifetime. I can love other people; I can live my outward life competently – but nothing will stand between me and what I know is of ultimate centrality, and that is what I will take with me when I leave this world. My soul has priority over everything else. My Instinctual Tools: I have a natural sensitivity to the presence of other dimensions; I can actually feel them. Some people might call that “faith,” but for me it is something closer to direct experience. When I close my eyes, I am in a world that feels deeper and vaster than this material one. Call it spirituality, call it visionary imagination – but whatever we call it, those kinds of perceptions open up naturally in me, by instinct. The Secret of Happiness: To be happy , I need some quiet time alone every day – time in which I let go of my habitual identity and directly experience the natural spaciousness which is the deeper essence of my being. To be happy, I need to feel that I am actively advancing in this spiritual way, feeding my soul’s journey. The Mood of My Life: My reflexive emotional attitude is one of exaggerated sensitivity at every level. It is not that I exaggerate anything intentionally . This level of sensitivity arises spontaneously in me. It is my responsibility to protect it, nurture it and care for it. Much of the mood of my life derives from that overriding necessity. One of the qualities that arises from it is a sense of compassion for everyone else’s sensitivity. Another quality is a mood of humor – of “getting the joke” about the various trivial pursuits that animate most people’s lives. The Attitudinal Dead End: If I fail to take care of my soul , I can become spacey, vague, and unformed. An attitude of passivity and resignation can replace the natural drive toward active evolution in me. I can prioritize achieving numbness over the exploration of the pathways my own sensitivity has opened up before me.
Forrest, Steven (2020-10-11). The Book of Water: Healing, Regeneration and Recovery (The Elements Series 4) (Kindle Locations 3775-3794). Kindle Edition.