and fulfillment. Human beings across gender lines are told that discipline and control are the stuff of true success, but consider your wild liberation as the sharpest knife, positioned to slash through all that tethers and confines your greatest potential. Furthermore, consider the ebbs and flows of your many cycles as clues to your purpose in this sacred community of ours; if an area of your life is always waning when another is always waxing, what does this tell you of your path? If we are always unlearning limiting beliefs while gaining layers of knowledge that support our freedom, then what does your inner Witch have to say about uncovering the soul beneath the ego? Ask yourself these questions in a quiet space, and listen not for the loudest inner voice; listen to the soft whisper of the womb-heart as she answers.
1. What area of your life is waxing right now? Financial abundance? Sensuality and self-care? Sacred work? Love? Voice? Creativity? Spirituality?
2. What area of your life is in a period of fullness? You’ll feel this fullness as pure power. This is an area of your life in which you feel you are a formidable force of nature, unstoppable even in the face of adversity.
3. What area of your life is waning, forcing you to let go of something? This letting-go part of the cycle demands acceptance and grace, even when the thing you are releasing weighed on your freedom.
4. Now, and this may be challenging, my Sister, what area of your life is in a dark moon phase right now? You are no longer letting go but rather sinking into a void of sorts. The dark moon period tends to be marked by fear that this thing that is gone may never return, that the black of midnight will endure forever, but this, dear Witch, is not the case.
5. Finally, choose the area of your life that seems most pertinent to your soul’s purpose right now, regardless of which cyclical phase that area may be in. Harvest your memories, seeing if you can trace a cycle of waxing, fullness, waning, and darkness. Have you lived through a full cycle yet? If so, how many months or years did the phases last? Can you predict any future phases, and, if so, what can you do to prepare for this transformation?
Women often have an undernourished need to take stock of the deep self, and, when they do, such assessments can be unwittingly bound to supposed-tos and can result in the automatic scrawling of angry to-do lists that overburden and severely demotivate. Your wild woman spirituality serves you well in these soul-centered evaluations, for the voice of judgment is quieted by the songs of the feminine divine. How can you be so wrong or off the mark if you are the essence of the cosmos? The moon does not berate herself as she wanes, digging her lunar claws into the past, weeping for how beautiful she was when she was full. The natural fallow times are just as honorable as your phases of abundance, my love, and your inner Witch and wild woman know this well. Be patient, and know that all is coming.
THE FULL MOON’S FRUITIONYour Lunar Summer
Ah, the bright full moon! You have felt this lunar phase more strongly than all the other moon seasons. The full moon powers the waters of this Earth, and the land-to-water ratio on our great planet nearly mirrors that inside your own body. Your woman’s tidal rhythms beat the loudest when the moon is full, and it is at this time when your creative sensual power and the divine feminine energy of relationship is the strongest. The full moon is summer returning every month, even in the dead of the solar winter season, and harnessing the magick of this fullness is your feminine birthright.
The energy of the full moon can be fearsome, truth be told, and cognizance of this phase is integral to your life as a Woman Most Wild. The full moon will call you out of the broom closet with a siren song so eerily serene that you cannot help but answer. This lunar phase is one of completion and fruition, when the fragile new you have been so carefully nurturing begins to ripen toward birth. The full moon will not always act in ways you perceive as favorable; She is following Her own program, after all. These so-bright moons will put you back on your soul’s path if you have lost your way, often dragging into the light what has been kept in the shadows.
Mystery and magick vibrate palpably in a night lit so blindingly by the full moon. Spellwork is at its most effective, and the call to wild sisterhood may be strong. You will feel a deeply seated internal need for balance during the full moon, as your woman’s waters succumb to the moon’s pull. I say, let the full moon take you. Any emotions that surface, any desires that seem irrational, any feminine impulse that bites at you from the inside: Do not fight these forces under the full moon. Allow the magick to surge through you. Bathe in moonlight, and sense the wholeness of your so-illumined heart.
Learning to harness full moon energy to infuse sacred work and meaningful relationships is an integral component of the wild woman’s curriculum. The full moon does not exist to serve you, my love, no more than you exist to serve it. The relationship between the Witch and the moon, be it full or at any other cyclical point, is one of mutual reverence and energetic connection. The greatest lesson the full moon teaches us every month is this: Your sensuality and creativity are holy, and there is as much divinity in the erotic as there is in any prayer. The wild woman is tasked with a great unlearning, for she must untangle the knotted twine formed from millennia of profound distrust and strategic suppression of her sexual and generative power. She must unbind wrappings on her sex and spirit, if only to see what lies beneath the tethers others have placed on her.
Moonbathing with the Maiden: The Full Moon and Erotic Innocence
A woman seeking to embody sacred sensuality is challenged to undo not only her own sexual woundings but also those sourced from thousands of years of collective feminine subjugation. Your path toward sensual wholeness is different from mine, my Sister, and I am not so arrogant as to prescribe a specific regimen for you. Erotic innocence is not a goal but a practice, and a necessary one at that. We live in a pivotal age of transformation in which the mysteries of women’s subtle and heavy bodies are being brought to light; and yet, these positive shifts are contextualized within a shadowy soup of media-supported body shaming.
Go into the night now, as a Witch most sensual. Seek out a darkened place underneath the shield of trees if you must, but look for places where the full moon casts its milk-gray glow on a space, however small. If you cannot be outdoors, go into your home’s wild sanctuary and attune to the lunar energy around you. Sit in the moonlight now, Priestess. Let the light penetrate your deepest sacral wound, be it scarred over or still bleeding. Give permission to the lunar light to seep into the voids within your would-be sensual wholeness, and invite the moonlight to electrify the Maiden within. Be who you were born to be, as if you were raised within the Red Tent, a place of historic menstrual support, where all the mothers and grandmothers of this world encircle you and validate your feminine blood as holy. Place both palms flat on your womb-center and affirm thrice: I am Maiden, and I am whole. Whatever your woundings, my love, you are flawless in your soul, body, mind, and spirit. You are not broken. You are not incomplete. You are the wild perfection of all things on and beyond this great Earth of ours. Even if you do not have a physical womb, that fertile space of life, death, and creative power remains inside you, in all its energetic glory.
The womb-wounds of women are often the best-kept secrets. In circles of women where the space is safely held, stories of lost pregnancies, infertility, hysterectomies, and, most commonly, abuse in its myriad forms are often unleashed in an eruption of long-dammed pain. There comes a time, I believe, in every woman’s life when a harvesting of these truths must come. If verbally sharing your story is too painful or would only cause a deeper wounding, write it down, shunning perfection and shame, then burn the pages. Seek out professional support and safe, healing spaces. The act of lifting these experiences out of their sacral depths raises their vibration, permits them to be less manifest as a binding agent to your soul, and brings them into the light. Women who share their sexual stories often begin by believing their story means little, and then in the sharing begin to know the weight of their past and the extent to which it has kept them immobile. A great release comes from the telling, as if a heavy, dreadful something was keeping a critical part of their soul static until their voice could be heard.
Know that you have been infallible in every decision you have made. You are blameless and perfect as you are, in this moment,