July 29th Full Moon

Do not resist what you need to expand into.

This full moon is the height of what has been building for six months. Everything that has been accumulating behind the scenes - the questions, the changes, the things you’ve been working through in the dark - this moon illuminates it.

Not to overwhelm you but to show you how far you’ve come.

July full moons are hard.

They’re the mid-year squeeze between what was and what is.

And this moon in particular is asking something specific of us: stop subtracting from reality and start expanding into it.

Neuropsychologist, Dr. Julia DiGangi talks about meeting reality as it is, not as we think it should be, not as we wish it had gone, but as it actually is.

The beauty of expansion, she teaches, is in that meeting. In the allowing. In being open to the conditions in front of you instead of spending your energy resisting them.

Instead of: it should have been this way. Instead of: why didn’t it happen like that? Just: here is reality…and I am meeting it with a full and open heart.

I won’t pretend this is easy.

I’m working with expansion right now in a way I never have before, and it is teaching me things about myself I didn’t know were available to me.

It’s showing me how much capacity I have to love. To create. To be with the unknown without trying to architect my way out of it. To allow what is unfolding to unfold, without controlling it, without molding it, without trying to make it into the shape I decided it should be.

And in that allowing, something remarkable keeps happening.

The creativity comes. The clarity arrives. The truth of what needs to go on the page becomes undeniable because I’m not in the way of it anymore.

It's teaching me that, much like the tides, if I can sit in the ebb and flow of life, in relationships, in creativity, in beingness, without resistance or grasping, truths I never could have imagined will emerge.

I just need to allow them to make their way back to shore on their own timeline. And they will. They always do.

In the last weeks since the new moon, I’ve dug deep. I’ve found parts of myself that had been hidden, that are now in full bloom. And when I wobble — because I do wobble — I come back to this: the spacious allowing and the safety in it. The trust that what needs to unfold will unfold, and that the information on the other side will be exactly what it needs to be.

That is what this moon is offering you. Not answers, not control, but a great, generous, spacious permission slip to stop subtracting and start expanding. To release the old patterns, at work, at home, in relationships, with yourself, and discover what grows in that released space.

In my Buddhist practice, one of the teachers I return to again and again is Pema Chödrön. In her book When Things Fall Apart, she writes something that has stayed with me, that feels like it was written for this exact moon.

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.

— Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart

There is wisdom in what falls apart. There is beauty in what changes form.

And there is so much love waiting on the other side of the revision that needs to happen.

Patience. Trust. Compassion. Joy. Let those be your guides.

I know they’re mine.

With you,

Licia

Your full moon writing prompt:

Write toward your expansion. Not the idea of it, the actual thing that is happening in you right now.

What are you allowing that you couldn’t allow six months ago? What condition of your life are you finally meeting as it is, instead of as you thought it should be?

Write it without softening it. Write it without resolving it. Just let the truth of where you are right now land on the page.

That is the bloom. That is what this moon came to illuminate.

I’d love to hear from you. Comment below: How does this land? Where are you expanding? Where are you trusting?