blog

February full moon 2020

Dana’s Moon Page for the Full Moon February 2020

The February full moon carries with it heart opening energy and an invitation to express love. In the spirit of love, this month’s journal page was created to take you on a journey of showing care and kindness to those hard-to-love parts of yourself.

Reflect

For me, the full moon has this wonderful exhale quality to it. It’s that point in breathing where the breath hits its highest intensity and your lungs have taken in all the air they are going to take in then there is a brief pause. It sits at the highest point of the inhale, the moment with the most tension, right before your lungs let go and start to exhale. That’s the full moon.

In the energy and tension of the full moon it’s easy to see the parts about ourselves we don’t like because they become so loud and noticeable. These are the times when, I confess, I’ve been known to write frantically on an itty bitty piece of paper the nitty gritty details of what I dislike about myself hoping that, as I watched the paper burn in my full moon fire, those parts of me would die too and no longer cause me pain or suffering. But what if, in order to fully release or transform the things I don’t like about myself, I need compassion instead of hate?

Sometimes pain and suffering appear in our lives as obsession, over-spending, clinging, laziness, impatience, poor boundaries, control, yelling, overeating, or any other action and behavior we wish we didn’t do. We usually hate whatever is inside us that makes us do the things we can’t stand doing. We want to destroy or get rid of whatever is making us make the same mistake over and over again and we want to destroy it as fast as we can but what if compassion was more effective than destruction? What if we could love the parts inside us that are causing pain?

Love is a big word with a lot of different meanings so let me break that down a little differently. What if we could trust the part inside us that is causing us pain? What if we could show kindness, care and patience to the parts inside us that cause us to react in ways we don’t want to? What if we could stop trying to get rid of those parts long enough to get to know them?

Six years ago I had a moment where I devoted myself to Divine Mother. It was a deeply personal moment between her and I where I knew my life and my work were here to serve Her, the Great Mother. Ever since that time, I’ve been guided towards compassion to a degree I was unfamiliar with in the past. As a spiritual guide, the spirit of Great Mother encouraged me to get to know the parts within me that have been ignored, cast aside, rejected and buried. She taught me to approach those parts within myself with curiosity, kindness, care and a willingness to help. She taught me how to mother myself and she taught me how to allow the earth to mother me too.

Specifically, that’s what this particular journal page invites us to do, turn to the earth and allow it to nurture us in ways that care for those parts of ourselves that have been lost or neglected.

If you are not on my email list and haven’t received this month’s journal page, visit my homepage and sign up. You’ll receive a link where you can download the hand-drawn page I created for this particular moon. Print it, grab a tea and a cozy blanket, get comfortable then follow the instructions below.

If you enjoy my hand-drawn journal pages, then you may also enjoy the free online Creative Moon Circles that accompany these pages. You can learn more about those here.

Create

If moon rituals are familiar to you, prepare your sacred space and invite Spirit to join you in whatever way works best for you.

If, however, you are new to moon rituals, I’ve included a quick guide to the steps I follow to prepare for my moon rituals in a past blog post. Take a look at it before moving forward.

Print out the February full moon journal page and gather your pens, paints or pencil crayons.

The first thing I want to draw your attention to on the page is the digging bee pictured on the left side. Digging bees that have been hibernating during the winter, emerge from underground in the early spring. If you find tiny holes in your garden soil, don’t harm them. Let the bees keep their underground nests. You want these bees around. They rarely sting and are great pollinators because they have special wing movements that shake pollen loose from inside a flower. After digging bees mate in the spring, the females get busy building their nests. The females dig a tunnel in the earth and make little chambers off it, like rooms coming off a hallway. They fill each chamber with pollen and nectar then lay an egg and seal the chamber. This is where their babies grow. The digging bee gives the earth her babies to protect and keep safe. What if we gave the parts of ourselves we struggle with to Mother Earth for her to care for with tenderness and kindness so they can grow and mature and come back to us in ways that nurture and support us and make our lives better instead of harder?

Imagine the feet on the page are your feet and the lines of energy leaving them represent what you want to release into the earth. Imagine the hands that are underground receiving that energy are the hands of a Great Mother, a mother who loves you just as you are and who easily accepts the parts of you that you have not been able to accept. Draw or write in the palms of her hands, what it is you want to surrender to Her. These are the parts you are asking Her to help you see differently. These are the parts you are asking Her to help you understand more fully and completely so you can finally approach those parts of yourself with patience, kindness and care. Ask Great Mother to teach you how to do this. Ask her to show you what that means in your everyday life.

When you are done, hang this full moon page that now has your magic on it somewhere you will see it often until the next new moon or make a ritual of digging a hole and burying somewhere in the earth that is sacred to you.

If you end up completing this spiritual art ritual, 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,

Dana da Ponte

 

 

 

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This is a space where art and spirit come together. On the blog, I share art rituals for working with the magic of the moon. I also work with the subconscious mind to lighten your emotional load and follow your creative dreams.

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