My New Moon Ritual

I have been an entrepreneur for ten years, so goal setting is not new to me. I’ve set SMART goals and New Years goals and goals for each Monday, but a business ritual that I carried for years was to set new goals for the month. I would take my planner to a coffee shop and just envision the month ahead. It was a ritual that I loved for sure but what I didn’t love is how some months I would feel totally excited and aligned and other months I would feel just blah and I didn’t understand the formula there. 

Once I walked away from my business and laid so much to rest, I got way more in touch with my daily, weekly, and monthly natural flow and I realized that each month around the same time I would have these wanes and waxes of energy. I began to track the cycles of the moon and of my period. Noticing these changes and being able to rely upon them in this way rather than the way of the sun or the masculine ( the same rise and fall everyday) was so empowering for me. With that, I began to set my goals, or rather, my intentions, with the cycles of the moon instead of the calendar. 

The female body mimics these moon cycles. I had heard this once upon a time but it sounded more like hippie folklore than truth. Like why wasn’t this taught to us over and over again in sex ed instead of just periods and PMS. I’ll save my rage for a different day, but patriarchy. 

Aligning ourselves, as women to the moon is an incredible way to align yourself with the sacred feminine and the Goddess within. It gives your body and soul permission to find your flow in the vastness of the world. 

Ritual is such a powerful word and if you were raised in the church, it may come with a feeling of rightness and wrongness. Like there is a right way to do this and a wrong way to do this. I am here to tell you that that is just not so. I can find making my bed an incredible ritual. Ritual is merely something that you do over and over again with a spiritual flow and resonance. When I was identifying these ritual practices, I started with my morning routine. I went from a morning routine to more of a rhythm – checking in with myself as to what my body and mind really needed on that morning. Maybe it was reading. Maybe it was journaling. Maybe it was pulling cards from an oracle deck. No right. No wrong. And then this rhythm became a ritual, and making my bed literally became a part of that. The slowness, the gratitude, the careful placement. So as you set up your ritual, that is what is needed far more than specific oils or crystals. 

New moon ritual for me is all about how can I best get into the physical and spiritual space to set new intentions. So for me this is a lot about my environment. I want to be in a space that is free of distraction, that feels nurturing and safe, and that has some flexible time parameters. My environment needs to be clean, free of clutter, and often a freshly smudged space is my favorite. Being home with my kids home also makes the vibration very intense and a good sound clearing has been incredibly powerful for me as well. I do like to get oils diffusing, Frankincense being my favorite for manifestations. Often times I will take a bath or a shower that is also deeply imbedded in cleansing in ritual, meaning very deep mindful practice – feeling the temperature of the water, staying in the present moment and connected to my breath, feeling the massage of of scalp, and allowing the water to rinse it all away. Finally, I envision. What do I want to cultivate more of in my life? What needs to heal? This is NOT an exercise in spiritual bypassing. I do not allow answers from a space other than my soul and I do not question the validity as they arise, though rarely do I have to because they usually feel aligned all over my body. After I have my visions set, I journal them out and do very little beyond that because once you are completely aligned and have faith in the universe, your seeds are planted. Sometimes you have to water them, but true alignment means you will be watering them through living your truth or doing your healing. You do not need to take massive action steps or remind yourself. If you do, then you likely weren’t truly aligned in the first place. 

New moon rituals are fantastic to do in circle with friends or on your own. After your seeds are planted, they may start to bloom with subtle appearance in the upcoming two weeks with the full moon, but will more likely appear in the next six months as the full moon enters the sign of your new moon. Meaning a new moon of Virgo in September will mean a full Virgo moon in March. 

Do you do New Moon intentions or moon rituals? How does it work for you?