Joy is a Journey, Not a Job
The Inner Child asks for compassion in a chaotic time
As known, Full Moons magickally function for healing, releasing, realizing, and whilst in Pisces, this pre-Autumn-Equinox Harvest-season celestial calendar date is ripe for inner child work.
Today’s Harvest Moon will arrive at 7:55 PM EST, snuggled into an astro placement known best for tapping into our subconscious sleep sectors and creative cores alike. 2020’s deep waters forced us to “go with the flow” while facing dilemma after dilemma, now a shell shocked mainstay in our daily intake of information. Since last Spring, attachment to control and concepts around resistance and acceptance have been challenged, leading to an emotional well of repressed pandemic trauma and imperative conversations on how to center oneself AND our communities with solutions and kindness in mind, despite the ever changing situations chaotically in flux around us all.
The culture of self-critique, and dare we say even the phenomenon of “cringe” via social media, stems from a very real wound: the emphasized insecurities and abandonment experienced in early childhood. As psych and spiritual spaces offer insight on how to work through the ways we are “hard on ourselves”, sometimes obsessively focused on how bad we feel that it veers into larger detriment, we are simply prey to gurus as we weave a more complicated web around our inner child. From the ridicule and neglect experienced in youth that we had no possible way of protecting ourselves again as such small souls, compassion is swapped for confidence building that puts us on just another risky wayward path of external validation.
These same sources offer “healing” that too frequently operates within the confines of capitalist conclusions: goals will make one feel better, success can be a measure of worth, how we control our output will make us feel better. It is not to say that these markers of “productivity” are wrong or can not be applied in a healthy way. These organizational energies have been strong with us during Virgo season which is soon coming to a close. Into the sign of Libra we go and the balance of work and life will once again be brought to topic. All the more reason to face the reality of how society has failed us from being able to have the financial, physical and emotional health and other dire resources needed since Spring of 2020. Many of us HAVE seemingly “failed” against the old constructs of career, routine and other wildly high-pressure ideologies that don’t really allow room to dream, rest, reflect as they should. We are seeing uprisings against working conditions on all levels.
Pisces energy is prime to revisit the sweetness of our true selves. As an unbiased core that has (surprise!) existed since childhood, our creative kid self can be a helper in the havoc. We often focus so much on our lofty childhood dreams dismissed, ideas we picked up from adults in the first place. We rebel or reform ourselves due to the belittling and bullying of peers and, the biggest wound makers of all, our parents. This inner child entity exists within all of us, no matter how repressed, and usually plays out in our reactions, reluctance, shame and denial of our core joy. Quarantine has been prime time to return to our truest authenticity.
As the Full Moon approaches, the call to release and rest arise. To accept that the circumstances of this time will continue to rearrange what we believe about success, the importance in survival, in our grief and our greed, deconstructing what all of this may mean, and how to be GENTLE and TENDER despite it all, we can fine-tune what it means to dream. To know that creativity is always vital and it does not have to be turned into a constant churn of productivity. That in the chaos of this crumble, we have even more reason to express ourselves and embrace what we truly love more than ever before, not out of desperation but to connect fully to the divine of being alive. The more one is gentle with the inner child, the more one learns from it. The inner child has all the wisdom we need, if we allow ourselves the quiet to listen carefully.
