Full Moon in Gemini

Early Sunday morning brings to us a full moon in Gemini as well as a partial lunar eclipse.

There is a beautiful story of a Native American man around the turn of the 20th Century whose whole tribe had been decimated, but he had managed to escape, and he went on living on his own for many years. One day he showed up in a nearby town, where an anthropologist happened to be. The anthropologist convinced him to get on a train with him and go to San Francisco. Once there, he was dressed in Western clothes, and learned how to eat in the Western manner as well as many other customs. Years later, he told the anthropologist (who at this point had become a dear friend) that his people had always been frightened of the train because they believed it to be a monstrous snake who belched smoke and ate people. The anthropologist was shocked to learn this remembering how easily the indigenous man had boarded the train when first they met. He asked him how he had managed to convince himself to get on the train believing it to be such a terrifying creature, and the native man replied, “Life has taught me to be more curious than afraid.”

This is the message of this full moon and lunar eclipse.

Lunar eclipses are known to bring up from the depths of our unconscious things that need to be shed. As this full moon is in the sign of Gemini (the twins), the broader spiritual implication is that we must shed any notion that we are ever totally on our own, and the more personal meaning is that individually we have to integrate the parts of ourselves that we have pushed away or separated out. We must see that if we do not integrate every aspect of ourselves into who we think of ourselves to be, our self-image will always be incomplete.

As the twins of the Zodiac, Gemini is often described as the energy of being human coupled with the energy of the Divine - the material world is always in a dance with the spiritual world with one lending support for the other. The material world allows us to experience God through the senses, and the spiritual world reminds us that when things in the material world start to seemingly fall apart, God is always carrying us in a new direction that will serve us most. In this way, we can think of this full moon/lunar eclipse as an exercise in Divine trust - what in Sanskrit we call shraddha, unshakeable faith. We always have our arms reaching out for God, and God is always reaching back.

On a more personal level, today and tomorrow are the days where you ask yourself, “what part of myself am I not allowing to the table, and how does this internal duplicity create a lack of integrity in my external life? Where am I acting as if I, and my actions, exist in a vacuum without being influenced by, or influencing, others?” One of the beautiful things about Gemini is its ability to find connections within things that may seem disconnected so harness that energy today by turning that ability inwards towards yourself.

Another one of Gemini’s superpowers is its enthusiastic curiosity.

So often we are unwilling to look at parts of ourselves because we are afraid that if we open that door it will end up being a Pandora’s box of insecurities, darkness and pain. Just like it is taught in many Eastern traditions, however, the more we allow ourselves to really sit with whatever arises - the more we get curious about how it feels, where it sits in our bodies, the nature of the energy itself - the more the charge of those things weakens. As my stepmother says, “Name it to tame it.” Once named and more deeply understood, we can hold all of the darker parts of ourselves as a part of our own humanity. When we push parts of ourselves away, we strengthen the idea that there is something “wrong” with us. But, when we can acknowledge every aspect of who we are as simply part of our work this time around, we make space for a more sturdy sense of being whole.

We can question ourselves and our lives in a way brutal way, which can only create internal and external division, or we can ask from a place of trying to find ways to bring all the disparate parts together. Which do you choose?

Interested in learning how this pertains to you?