Worshiping at the Altar of the Moon: Reclaiming lost parts
Overview:
The moon represents our inner emotional landscape, how we feel and how we nourish ourselves and others. Our personal relationship with our inner archetypal moon and astrological moon placement speaks through our body. It is the realm of the inner, personal sacred temple,* a place long oppressed and repressed by patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, and other power over narratives, structures, and institutions. We internalize the values and expectations held in the culture and in our past and current histories – we enforce them on ourselves and project them onto others. This has led to a deep cultural lunar wound that has in large part denied us of an authentic relationship with our inner world – our emotional landscapes and intimacy with our feelings as they live in our body and our psyche.
The moon is an ever-present mirror of the life cycle. In its continuous illustration of waxing and waning it models transformative, cyclical, wholistic process. When we embrace this process within our inner emotional landscape and in our relationship with our body and our nervous system, we can begin and continue the work of connecting, reconnecting, and reclaiming our parts.
Worshiping* at the altar* of the moon is about connecting with our inner lunar temple – our unique, sacred inner landscapes, our bodies, and ultimately our families, communities, the earth and the celestial realms that mirror these parts back to us. It requires taking the time to listen to ourselves, to feel our feelings, to connect with our identity narratives, the motivations behind our personal adaptive strategies, and our beliefs in ourselves and our capacities – all the while re-imagining and re-integrating ourselves in our continually emerging authenticity and wholeness. Re-imagining and claiming our narratives as lunatics – beings deeply affected and integrated with the forces of life around and within us. Beings who follow inner knowings and feelings, and invest and believe in inner longings.
The group container of this class will mirror the inner work we take on as individuals – equalizing power, acknowledging the unspoken and the unseen, and owning and stepping into our unique roles and agency in the group organism. We will learn to see and feel ourselves as individuals, as well as the group, as complete, wholistic organisms – the group as a macrocosm of its members and a microcosm of the cosmos and the cultural contexts we encounter and bring with us.
My, Brittany’s, group leadership style follows a biomimetic process that sees and holds the group as a dynamic, cyclical organism – both a product of and a creatrix in the web of life. All members are held as both members and leaders – nourishing our unique leadership styles as they are born from our continually evolving authenticity and authority.
The structure of the course and the course content will support and encourage diverse and non-linear ways of knowing – through somatic body awareness, intuition and inner knowing, dreaming, and communication and deep listening within ourselves, the group, the more than human world, and the otherworld.
The class journey includes a 2-hour one-on-one birth chart reading with me before the class begins where we explore your natal moon sign and house placement as well as the web that it weaves with the rest of your birth chart, your life experiences, and the stories, values and beliefs you carry. Additional one-on-one mentoring is available at a discounted rate throughout the duration of the program.
The work of this class is in:
-connecting and reconnecting with your inner emotional landscape, your body knowing and wisdom, and your deep authenticity and personal evolutionary journey in this lifetime.
-embodying the truth that we are not separate from our bodies, the earth, or the collective. Bringing our lunar parts into equal partnership with our other parts.
-acknowledging and dialoging with the ways that internalized values of culture, family, and place both hinder and support (y)our beliefs, narratives, and (y)our authentic homecomings.
-experiencing ourselves as vessels of the microcosm and the macrocosm as both members and leaders in community belonging and group process that is committed to self-reflection, transformation, restorative justice, and affirmation.
-apprenticing with the life cycle and learning to worship at the altar of the moon as it is mirrored above, as it exists within your body, and as manifest in your individual and the collective psyche.
-bearing deep witness to ourselves and others in the group we become more fluent in recognizing and relating to our own and other’s wholeness – cultivating lenses of compassion in service to collective liberation.
*A note about how I use the words worship, altar, and temple:
The term worship by definition is usually associated with reverence and devotion to a deity. The term temple is also usually associated with specific religious or spiritual contexts. In the context of this course, we subvert and challenge most religious and social institutional power dynamics by turning the source of worship and the space of the temple inward toward our inner parts, our inner knowing, and the connections that our individual cycles of body and psyche have with the broader life cycle around us (notably the moon and its cycles/phases).
The term Altar is commonly associated with Christianity, but the term and concept are used historically and currently in many spiritual and religious traditions. I use the word altar to denote a sacred place either virtual or tangible, that is held with intention, tended to, and used as a place of awareness and contemplation, and for personal or communal sanctuary and worship.