It’s that time again! Please join me for an autobiographical exploration like nothing you’ve experienced before: a journey through your own progressed Moon Phase cycle, a thirty-year period of seeding, rooting, growing, flowering, fruiting, and ultimately, decomposition and rebirth. Humans are distantly related to plants, our kin in the green world, and this technique makes those connections abundantly obvious. Our fortunes wax and wane like the Moon: sometimes it’s all glory and living out loud, other times it’s all shadow work and feeding our demons. This workshop will outline eight phases within a thirty-year period of your life ~ the more years you’ve got on you, the more you’ll get out of the workshop, but people of all ages are welcomed to attend. It’s a process that fosters self-understanding, self-forgiveness, and deep humility for the natural cycles that shape us on this fecund planet.
The Class
We’ll meet for two hours each week for eight consecutive weeks, and discuss a different Moon phase each time. One progressed lunar phase lasts for about 3.5-4 years, and students report that each phase typically describes a personal epoch ~ e.g. your college years, your cult leader era, your tech start-up fluke, depression and invisibility, healing and spiritual redemption, etc. Not necessarily in that order.
While progressed Moon Phase technique has recently grown more popular, it’s still saddled with clunky and unfortunate terminology like “Waning Crescent.” In class I’ll focus on bringing each phase to life with the imagery of the pagan’s Wheel of the Year, plant cycles, and associated lunar deities. For example, this approach transforms the dull-sounding Waning Crescent into the witchy Balsamic phase, where we offer incense (balsam) to the gods in our period of internal darkness. This lunar phase corresponds to the dark of the Moon, the pagan holiday Samhain/ Halloween/ Dia de los Muertos, and the “mushroom” or decomposition phase in the life cycle of a plant. The deities I associate with Waning Crescent are Hekate, dark Moon goddess of the witches, and Santa Muerte, the skull-faced image of Holy Death. Trust me when I say that each of the eight lunar phases is just as iconic and powerful in its themes and imagery.
Participation
In past versions of this workshop, I’ve required all students to commit to giving a five-minute summation of their experiences in each lunar phase, so that the group members can benefit from the pool of data this creates around the unique character of all eight phases. But I’m suspending this requirement for the latest iteration of this class. In other words ~ permission to lurk! You’re free to participate or not, and to just watch the recorded sessions if you’re not able to attend live. I will state plainly that everyone gets a lot more out of the material when we are willing to show up and share; I also recognize that not everyone is psychologically equipped or otherwise resourced enough to be so consistently vulnerable. The class will be structured around a lecture and slide-show in the first hour, with time for discussion, sharing, guided journeying and journal prompts in the second hour.
THIS IS AN INTENSE PROCESS, whether you’re sharing your stories with your fellows or not. Re-membering the past often feels like resurrecting the dead, or bringing to life something we’d rather never see again. Healing can happen when we correlate the themes of the progressed lunar phase to the challenging life event, and understand ourselves as influenced by natural personal cycles of boom and bust, wax and wane. Reclaiming the past with love and self-forgiveness is also productive of integration, or owning the diverse and conflicted parts of ourselves.
At the very least, you should commit to taking some time each week to gathering biographical material for any given lunar phase, say 12.4.93 to 11.17.97. Where were you working? Who were you dating? What were your hobbies in those years? What struggles did you experience? What victories? It’s all grist for the progressed lunar phase mill. I will create a custom Progressed Moon Phase Report for every student in the class. Be wary of free programs that offer to do this for you as they’re not always accurate. I follow the octile technique originated by Dane Rhudyar in the 20th century, and further developed by Demetra George.
Dates and Time
I’m doing something I’ve never done before and running this class in the morning when the Moon isn’t even out for me here in California! I’m hopeful that this will allow my European clients to participate by positioning the class time in the evening for them. I trust that the right folks will be drawn to the class at the right time. Here is a breakdown of the meeting times in different time zones, and the theme for each of the eight weeks. I’ll also send out a pre-recorded “tech track” for those interested in how the Progressed Moon Phase dates are compiled.
Class Time:
10AM-12PM Pacific;
1PM-3PM Eastern;
6PM-8PM BST;
7PM -9PM CEST
June 16th: The Full Moon, Summer Solstice, FRUIT
June 23rd: The Waxing Gibbous, Lammas, CONSUMPTION
June 30th: Last Quarter, Autumn Equinox, FERMENTATION
July 7th: Balsamic, Samhain, DECOMPOSITION
July 14th: New Moon, Winter Solstice, REBIRTH
July 21st: Waxing Crescent, Imbolc, ROOTS
July 28th: First Quarter, Spring Equinox, GROWTH
August 4th: Waxing Gibbous, Beltane, FLOWER
Cost
I’m offering this class for less than I’ve ever offered it before, because I’m in a groove with the material and want to make it accessible to more folks.
EARLYBIRD PRICING: $200 before June 1st
After June 1st, regular price: $250
Register below! Don’t miss this opportunity to nourish the “night time” part of your soul in community, and learn to attune with the 30-year arc of the progressed Moon cycle.