Art Journal with the New Moon to Clear Ancestral Money Blocks

Every moon cycle I dedicate myself to a spiritual goal. On this new moon, I start the journey to clear ancestral money blocks. 

Reflect

I’m going on a spiritual adventure.

I’m not sure where it will lead. I don’t have a plan or a map. All I know is I’m feeling called to go where inspiration leads.

The adventure begins with the moon and my art journal

If you love the moon and you have an art journal, or you always wanted to start one, you are welcome to join me. You are also welcome to just tag along and read about it. You don’t have to participate to join me.

I can’t promise you it will be a happy, frolicking kind of adventure. The fact that we’re starting it in the energy of the Scorpio new moon should give you an indication that it won’t be a light and fluffy one.

On this adventure I will face darkness – my own and the collective’s.

This isn’t an easy thing to do.

It means facing grief and rage and shame. It means staring at ugly things without looking away.

On this adventure I will break apart and pieces of me will die.

This isn’t an easy thing to do.

It means changing even when its more comfortable to stay the same. It means feeling lost and confused. It means entering the void and forgetting who I am just so I can find myself new again.

But despite all this, here I go

Every time a moon cycle starts, I will use my art journal to go on a different spiritual adventure.

The adventure I feel called to go on during this particular moon cycle is the quest to Clear Ancestral Money Blocks.

This adventure begins on the new moon and every time the moon changes phases I will take another step on my quest until I reach the end of my spiritual adventure on the balsamic moon.

On the balsamic moon I will end one spiritual adventure and, hopefully, prepare myself for the next one.

And so the adventure begins on this Scorpio new moon with my desire to Clear Ancestral Money Blocks.

My Journal Page

I started my journey by inviting my ancestors to join me and learning a little about their history with money. I then created a page in my art journal to sum up my experience.

Sounds simple but it wasn’t.

It was really hard.

In fact, the page I created in my art journal is still hard for me to look at. I have it sitting in on my living room table and every time it crosses my path of sight, I look away. Its overwhelming. My stomach tightens in on itself and I cringe and shudder. When it comes to my ancestors’ history with money, there’s a lot to see.

But I’m going to break it down as best as I can.

If you look at the top right-hand corner of the art journal page I created for this new moon art ritual, you will see that a spider and her web lives there.

To me, spiders represent weaving the past and the future into the present to support me in creating the changes I want to see. The spider belongs on this page because I definitely want to see changes in my relationship with money.

Money has caused a lot of stress in my life. I’ve lost sleep over it. It has carried more emotional baggage than it should have. It has caused stress in the lives of people I love. At times I’ve avoided thinking about it, even when it was irresponsible of me to do so. I’ve felt shame for wanting it. I’ve felt shame for not having enough of it. I’ve blocked myself from earning it while at other times, pushed myself to earn more of it. I’ve allowed people to deny me of it because I believed being a good person meant sacrificing myself for others.

It’s a tangled topic and I’m hoping this moon cycle magic will help me unravel it. The spider is there on my page to declare that as my intention.

On my journal page, you can also see that the spider is sitting on a web. The web holds the most important meaning on this page for me. I see it as symbolic of the interconnectedness of all living things which is an intrinsic value I hold as an animist.

One of the hardest things about exploring my ancestral past is seeing how my values differ greatly from my ancestors over the last 2000 years. A great percentage of my ancestors hail from Normandy which is a part of northern France that is on the coast right across from the United Kingdom. The area was fought over many times and was under English control many times and at one point Christianity enters the area but before Christianity, Normandy’s cultural experience was that of the Celts, Gauls and Belgae.

This is important to me because it is the period when I most resonate with my ancestors’ spirituality.

2000 years is a long distance to travel to feel spiritually connected to my family.

Celtic spirituality practiced a form of animism. That’s far more my jam than the spirituality my recent ancestors practiced. Animism sees all things as alive and interconnected, as if a great spirit runs through all things and connects them all together. Animism is an earth-based spirituality. I feel connected to my spirituality when I see the life-force in all things and celebrate the changing seasons, the lunar rhythms and the movements in the night sky.

At first, the spider web on my journal page represented this spiritual connection with my ancient ancestors but after learning more about my ancestors’ history with money, it came to mean much more to me than that.

Before I sat down to do my moon art ritual and create this page in my art journal, I researched my ancestors’ history with money. What I learned could be summed up in the story of the beaver.

Most of my ancestors arrived on this land in the 1600s. They were here at the time when Samuel de Champlain was creating the colony that would be later recognized as Quebec. Some of my ancestors were even married in the first Notre Dame church that was erected there and some of my ancestors were traders that lived on the banks of the Saint Laurence river. They would acquire beaver pelts and send them to Europe. Europe had a high demand for beaver pelts since it had depleted its own beaver populations to near extinction.

Prior to contact with the Europeans, it is believed that North America was home to between 60 to 400 million beavers. As Leanne Betasamosake Simpson explained in her 2020 Kreisel Lecture, entitled A Short History of the Blockade: Giant Beavers, Diplomacy & Regeneration in Nishnaabewin, the beaver, or amikwag, plays an important ecological (and spiritual) role.

Amikwag build dams, dams that create deep pools and channels that don’t freeze, creating winter worlds for their fish relatives, deep pools and channels that drought proof the landscape, dams that make wetlands full of moose, deer and elk, food cooling stations, places to hide, and muck to keep the flies away. Dams that open spaces in the canopy so sunlight increases, making warm and shallow aquatic habitat around the edges of ponds for amphibians and insects. Dams that create plunge pools on the downstream side for juvenile fish, gravel for spawning, and homes and food for birds.

Despite its importance to the survival and well-being of the land and many other creatures, the North American beaver suffered the same fate as its European cousin. It was made into hats and accessories to supply Europe’s demand for more and became nearly extinct.

To hunt, kill and use a part of nature in the name of fashion, trade, wealth or profit to the point of extinction is cruel and stupid.

But this is part of my story and it is a story that continues to repeat itself.

When it comes to my ancestral money blocks, I feel like my new moon art ritual is asking me to consider what I’ve internalized from my colonial and capitalist past.

How much land, how many people and how many creatures get exploited in my desire to acquire more…more wealth, more land, more goods, more travel, more experiences?

Acquiring more without holding the web of life sacred seems destructive and ultimately ineffective.

How would my ancestral money story look different if holding sacred the interconnectedness of nature and all beings was more important than acquiring more?

Is it possible to have a relationship with money that is free of exploitation?

I don’t know the answers to these complicated questions but this is where my spiritual adventure begins.

I’m not sure where I’ll go next as I work with this moon cycle to clear my ancestral money blocks but I guess I’ll see what happens when the waxing crescent moon shows itself.

Create

If you want to join me on these spiritual adventures using your art journal, sign up to my email list and every new and full moon, I’ll send you a Creative Moon Guide with step-by-step instructions.

If you end up completing this moon page, I’d love to see what you created. You can even post the finished piece on Instagram or Facebook with the hashtag #danasartrituals or email me at support@danadaponte.com and share with me how it went for you. It’s fun for me to know there are others out there enjoying the moon with me.

with love,

Resources

Connecting to Our Ancestral Past: Healing Through Family Constellations, Ceremony and Ritual by Francesca Mason Boring

Episode 14 of the Healing Justice Podcast “ Ancestral Healing for Anti-Racist White Folks” with Jardana Peacock and Kelly Germaine-Strickland

https://thriveglobal.com/stories/what-are-ancestral-money-blocks-plus-strategies-to-remove-them/

The Numinous Podcast Episode 154: Fuck Capitalism (But Wait – What is Capitalism Exactly?) with Toi Smith

Intuitiveastrology.com

Darkastrology.com

Witchipedia.com

The Element Encyclopedia of 5000 Spells by Jukika Illes

American Capitalism: A History with Louis Hyman and Edward Baptist – Podcast

https://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/discover/exploration-settlement/new-france-new-horizons/Pages/departure.aspx

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-brilliance-of-the-beaver-learning-from-an-anishnaabe-world-1.5534706

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