Full Moon in Virgo Practices

Night Vision

One of our favorite picture books is Dahlov Ipcar’s “The Cat at Night.” The book follows a cat, whose people believe him to be fast asleep all night, on many adventures through the long, dark, wonderful night. Cats can see at night, and the book phrases this so wonderfully: “What can he see that we don’t see?” The pacing of that sentence makes me smile every time I read it: it slows the reader down and attenuates two companion realities: the cat sees something and we do not see these somethings.

The full moon gives us a kind of transient night vision. When the moon is brightest in the night sky— where sun and moon are opposite of each other relative to our home planet— we can see things that are otherwise covered in darkness.

So two questions that are coming up for me around midnight’s full moon in Virgo: “What space is this moon illuminating for me?” and “What have I not been seeing?”

For the past month in the Wildcat Yoga Club, we’ve been studying the goddess Bhuvaneshvari who is the archetype for the space that allows for all creation. The space that exists in the vastness of the night sky and the most tiny biomes of our eyelashes. We’ve been on one of my favorite quests of seeking out space where it seems that none exists. One of the most potent places we can continue to recognize space is in the kumbhak (pot) where inhalation ends, but before exhalation begins and where exhalation ends, but before inhalation begins. Regardless of the shape, size or texture of the space, that kumbhak exists and can be a potent portal to seeing something that we may not have been able to see before.

To support your own space-location practices, I’m sharing a couple of things:

– Bhuvaneshvari Mantra practice
+ Kumbhaka Pranayama practice
I’d recommend sitting with your journal & the questions
i. What space is this moon illuminating for me? and
ii. What have I not been seeing?

This morning (Saturday, hours after the apex of the moon’s brightness), I tip-toed down stairs to write, making my way through an obstacle course of baby gates, errant marbles and a happily sleeping dog. I gazed briefly out the big window in the living room, straight into the eye of the setting moon. These words found their way to the page:

Pre-dawn moon drops in sapphire sky,

Fir forest cradling his fall:

A reminder to look west, too.

LOVE TO ALL+++