Full Moon in Cancer - the emotional stuff that comes up as we push forward with real world goals

We have the first full moon of 2014 tonight!

This is the culmination of the Cancer Moon from six months ago - it is also the peak energy period for the Capricorn New Moon from two weeks ago and a great time to release stuff that has shown up since the New Year -

self-sabotaging tendencies that surface now around the real world goals we set in Capricorn a couple weeks ago can be released easier as the moon wanes over the next two weeks.

We have the moon (where we've been, what we know, feminine energy, being) and the sun (where we are trying to go/be, masculine energy, doing) as far apart in the sky as they can be from our earthly perspective during a full moon - now we have the sun in Capricorn and the moon in Cancer.

This is the polarity of male/female roles, work and the world vs home and family, how we push ourselves toward meeting new goals vs how we care for ourselves and meet our needs for safety and security, also money vs love stuff - lots of family patterns and soul group stuff coming to the surface now to be released if we are paying attention. This release is our gift to the world.

The moon is at home in Cancer and represents 2nd chakra stuff - our emotional center.

Second chakra health issues (bladder, reproductive organs, lower back, hips) are about imbalances with the Cancer/Capricorn polarity so this is about those who would rather focus on love than money, those who would rather focus on money than love, people who have an unbridled (think of that wild horse, there may be a bit of recklessness in this) drive to move forward in either love or money or people who cannot responsibly handle either love or money.

The negative thought patterns that surface for this polarity create emotions of anxiety, anger or sadness around gender and sexuality and relationships (love and family) and finances.

So if we have physical problems around this what is standing in the way of us making the changes in our finances and relationships to improve our health? Ask. See what comes up for you over the next two weeks.

Cancer energy does not want to be vulnerable, it wants to play it safe - there are mother connections to this stuff and how we were mothered and how we mother and nurture ourselves and others. There are some big energies to work/play with here. This is the time of the rebalancing of masculine/feminine energies on the planet. The spaces in our life where we lead (Capricorn) are asking us to be more open-hearted (Cancer) now.

This polarity is a universal theme every January and July - and right now with the full moon in Cancer is a powerful time for many people to change 2nd chakra thought patterns that aren't working.

(and you will know they aren't working by what is happening in your life and how your body is feeling - our bodies are not the first markers for this stuff, so by the time this stuff hits our physical self it has been active awhile in us - although it could look like something hits us out of the blue)

This is my north/south node polarity (I feel it as work vs family and as work vs self care) and my moon is in Cancer.  Every time it comes up I get the choice of acting, reacting and releasing in a higher way.

Since attachments are ruled by Cancer this is an excellent time to be releasing our negative hooks.

Attachment is conditional love. 

I will love you, if ... I will be happy, if ....

If we need someone to behave in a certain way in order to love them, it's not love. It's attachment. When we put our hopes and expectations on other people or people do this to us it triggers patterns in us and those patterns trigger responses that we need to release.

This isn't happening to us, it is happening for us - if anyone or anything is triggering us now - understand that they are a soul supporting our growth to greater truth and power. They (or the situation) is showing us that we are ready to be stronger in our energy. Whatever is showing up is a gift.

If we accept people (and especially ourselves) as they are - they can reveal themselves in ways we can recognize as true (this allows us to live from a place of truth, too) - that is love.

If we need something to happen in a certain way for us to be happy, this is the kind of attachment to a goal that gives our power away. Life is not supporting us giving our power away anymore.

This change is cyclical - we are on our own hero's quest and we are all on this journey together, too. It is also something we are creating across the planet by asking for freedom from power structures - part of the deal of those power structures crumbling is the safety nets that go along with them crumble, too - we can't take daddy's money and not play by his rules.

If we are awake now, the bad news (which isn't totally bad news) is that we are in an AP class, the good news (which isn't totally good news) is we are grading ourselves now ....

so last month I lost half a million dollars (twice!) and found out I was related to my husband ... part 1 of a 2 part cliffhanger

A couple things happened during the holiday rush while I wasn't blogging that I need to report - yes, this is the mayhem I have been referring to every chance I get so often in a half-baked attempt to create a little viral buzz.

(and I know you might be thinking, after reading my headline, "Cat, how can you lose half a million dollars? Do you even have half a million dollars to lose Cat? well, keep reading ....)

A little background to this: we are planning to move. I have been affirming the right property finds us and the right buyers for our current house find us at exactly the right time and we all live happily ever after (not together of course, but you get the idea).

We have no idea where we at moving to (yes, I will be dangling participles here, if this kind of poor grammar is going to drive you crazy, I apologize in advance). We only know that it is time to go (I will make up for my poor grammar by channeling Dr. Seuss).

OK, here is my story:

A few weeks ago, hubs comes home and announces there is a house he wants me to see and we have an appointment the next day at noon. I tell him I have a doctor's appointment at two, so we have to be quick.

The home's owner has died and the house is about to go on the market for about $200,000 less than the market value

(although market value is pretty much anybody's guess these days) - it was a good deal.

George tells me the house has 20 acres (!) and is "a beautiful and well maintained 70's ranch."

A customer of hubs (everyone within 20 miles of us is a customer of hubs or a customer of a customer of hubs), who happens to have a real estate license (and is an accountant and owns 1/3 of a golf course) can show it to us and get us this amazing deal, but we have to act fast.

There are two little drawbacks - this house is around the corner from where we live now and is a lot of money (much more than we were planning to spend).

So, if we bought this house we would be broke and packing up and moving around the corner. No new town to explore, no better weather, no NEW LIFE IN A NEW PLACE ... you get the idea.

So anyhoo, hubs comes home at noon and we drive around the corner. The house has very good bones, a very solid grounded footprint, a beautiful view from a large kitchen window, a nice fireplace, a gorgeous sunroom and the kind of open ranch feel we want. It is much larger (or at least feels much larger, maybe because everything is on the same floor) than our house.

The house also has horrific wallpaper everywhere, bathrooms and a kitchen in desperate need of an update, no clear space for me to work, a Sears catalog from 1986 with Cheryl Tiegs on the cover lying on the kitchen counter next to the phone as if someone had just placed an order for a Betamax.

Hubs walked the property line with the real estate agent/accountant/golf course owner. I wandered around the back yard with Chris trying to avoid the dozens of piles of deer poop littered across that beautiful view I had seen from the kitchen window and thought about Lymes disease and bullseye rashes.

We had to make an offer by Monday because there was another offer on the table (this was a Friday), so we knew exactly what we had to offer to get the house.

I was just not feeling it (it was a lot of money and I once gave myself a serious carpal tunnel injury removing wallpaper plus did I say it was AROUND THE CORNER). Hubs was salivating (the way some men lust after Cheryl Tiegs or did in 1986, hubs lusts after land).

I ask the universe that if we are supposed to buy this house I get a sign I cannot miss (and yes, I realize there is no 'supposed to' - there is really only what we do, but I get lost sometimes and think like this anyway). I head for my doctor's appointment.

The girl in the office shows me to the exam room and asks me, "so what did you do today?". I tell her we looked at a house, but the problem is the house is right around the corner from our current house. She tells me that she once moved right around the corner and that she did it to get off a busy street. I tell her that this move would get us off a busy street. She says the only regret she has is that she misses her ranch. I told her this new house is a ranch and we are currently in a two story and we would like a ranch. She says to me "well, I say go for it."

Long story short - we don't go for it. The house is just too much money for us with the remodeling it would need and even with a farm assessment on the land, the taxes on the house are double our current property taxes. And we are kind of looking for a bigger change than moving around the corner. It is a very cool house for someone though.

Flash ahead two weeks -

(something else happens within those two weeks, but I will report on that in part II because I need to go to bed now - since I am putting myself to sleep blogging, there is not much chance I can hope to keep you awake much longer, dear reader)

hubs comes home and tells me the real estate agent/accountant/golf course owner stopped by and told him the original offer (the one we had to beat with our offer) got the house.

He also told George that our town, fearing the only large land plot left would be developed into McMansions and needing a park, got some green acre money from the state and is buying 15 of the 20 acres from the new owner for $500,000 ... so the buyer got the "beautiful and well-maintained 70's ranch" with 5 acres for $125,000.00!

(with real estate prices in New Jersey this is kind of exactly like winning the lottery - for days I felt like I had thrown away a winning ticket)

In my defense I should say this was during the hectic holiday season, few people would buy a house so quickly that was so far out of their price range and I had some distracting health stuff going on.

I try to tell myself that this would not have worked out the same way for us because getting hubs to part with 15 acres, even with an offer of $500,000 and a wife threatening divorce and possible decapitation if he wouldn't sign on the dotted line, would have been very difficult. Also the town knows us and maybe would not be fearing McMansions from us (but something more in line with fields of dandelions, which they might hate more actually).

They might not have decided they needed a park ....

but of course, I did ask for a sign and I did get a sign (beginning with the woman asking me "what did you do today?" which is a very peculiar question to ask someone in the middle of the afternoon and ending with the synchronicity of her story and "go for it") and now life has to line something else up for us .... something that may or may not include a $500,000 bonus (I'm affirming that it does).

Next post I will tell you about the second $500,000 (and how all this connects together) - and hubs and my "semi-illegal" marriage .....

if at first we don't succeed .... (maybe we are measuring the wrong thing)

In 3rd grade I had to write my motto in the class yearbook (why did we have yearbooks in 3rd grade - I guess we didn't. It was some kind of written something like a yearbook though) and I remember writing "Try. Try again."

(Childhood memories that are truly our own, not the stories we have heard our parents tell again and again, show us so much about what we are made of now and what we are holding on to. Some people misinterpret this as a way to blame someone from our past, but if that is what we do with our memory we are missing the point entirely. The real question isn't what did the other person say or do to me but "what does it mean that I remember this thing? how am I made of this?")

I have no idea why I wrote this in my "yearbook" because even then I knew I was not a Try. Try again, kind of girl. I was more of a "do the stuff I am really good at only" kind of girl.

I was lucky (or maybe not) that the kind of stuff I was good at was the kind of stuff that mattered to teachers. I remember my teacher nodding her head approvingly at my 'motto'.

(that head nod is actually the part of my memory that is important; the approval for saying the safe thing)

Flash ahead a few years and no one would be thinking "Try. Try again." was a good motto. Not that we had become a world full of quitters, but it wasn't try-ers that were running things now - it was the do-ers that made things happen.

The world had moved on to "Do or Do not. There is No Try." YAY for Yoda! Then Nike eliminated that notorious 'try' word altogether with "Just Do It."

hope locket by cuddly rigor mortis and polarity

I still like the word "Try" though. And Hope, I like the word "Hope". I used to make a locket with the word Hope and people asked me all the time to change the word. They didn't like it.

I see the potential pitfalls with these words, but I still love them. Surrounded by people filled with hope that are trying to make things better is not such a bad space to be.

My favorite quote is T.S. Eliot "for us there is only the trying - the rest is not our business."

We can only do what we can do. The process is what we do. The rest is not our business.

I cannot disconnect Nike's "Just Do It" from the idea of winning and the winning part is sometimes (and often) outside our control and I am over the things outside my control (I have been totally over them since Janelle recommended James Altucher's book a couple months ago.)

being any kind of barometer for how I am doing - not because I am a control freak, really! but because I am committed to being about the stuff that matters and not just about the stuff that can be measured.

What do you all think?

(yes, I am channeling Dolly Parton now, I blame my increased bust size due to the 47 layers of clothing I am wearing right now)

xo I still have a winter mayhem update post to write this week, I haven't forgotten! Stay warm!

this is the year we do it ... better

 .... not better than someone else does it and not even better than we did it last year, because we were in a difference space last year and we don't fit in that space anymore. Doing what we could have (maybe) done then may not be the best thing for us to do now.

(and looking backward only gets us a sore neck and 

embarrassing photos on Facebook

when we walk into things)

We don't do it better by looking at what didn't work. We look at the stuff that went right. We focus on how we want to feel. 

Hubs and I went out to dinner a couple weeks ago. I had been spending a lot of time alone in my studio working and not doing a lot of talking and I shocked myself with the extent of the unconscious negative chitchat we immediately had going on -

about the guy who turned without signaling, the temperature, the shortened day, the pending storm, the traffic, the parking lot, health stuff, customer problems, my daughter's problems, my niece's problems, political stuff, Fukushima (hubs is obsessed with Fukushima) - all important topics, but I realized we were framing all our conversations about what was going wrong.

On the drive home I deliberately refocused us. I pointed out the beautiful holiday Christmas lights and Sully's latest adorableness on Facebook, a wonderful customer email I had received that day, the delicious leftovers we were going to have for lunch the next day ...

Every time hubs brought up a problem, I re-framed it. Every time I was about to say something that wasn't something I wanted or connected to how I wanted to feel, I stopped.

When we got to the house I asked George if he noticed what I was doing and he said "yes, but what good does it do to pretend everything is perfect - how does that fix anything?"

This isn't about pretending everything is perfect. It's not about fixing anything or getting so fixated on who we want to be that we lose sight of who we are. But once we know we get what we focus on, scratch that - once we know we are what we focus on - once we really know this, this mindless negative chatter matters.

It matters alot.

 
We currently have a Venus Retrograde that takes us right into a Mercury Retrograde which takes us right into a Mars Retrograde (some people may feel like they aren't really getting started until May!)  - this can create a whole lot of space for us to reinvent ourselves this year.

So how do we want this all to play out? What are we going to do with this space we have been given now to make the stuff that we know isn't working for us better? Hoping everyone is having a wonderful New Year! We are expecting snow to start any minute here!