Celebrate September's Super Moon Eclipse with Balance + Stealth
Celebrate September's Super Moon Eclipse with Balance + Stealth
a Soul FLOSS Workout feat. the High Priestess, Sharon Olds & Patti Smith
Welcome to Be Happy & Take Care Of Your Teeth
a Super Moon Eclipse Workout
feat. the High Priestess, Sharon Olds & Patti Smith
In this alchemical spiritual workout, you’ll:
Redefine courage.
Connect with divine energy.
Honor your future ancestors.
Wield your inner wisdom with balance and stealth.
Be happy, take care of your teeth, and let your conscience be your guide.
August 2024 Super Moon | Longboat Key, Florida
Super Moon Eclipses are special sauce magic and portals to the divinity within: an invitation to shine a light on the deep, dark, ancient and hidden places of possibility within ourselves. As revolutionary black lesbian poet Audre Lorde argued in “Poetry is Not a Luxury”:
“within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling... This place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep.”
Super Moons also have a way of drawing things out of us—outdated dreams, expired relationships, and other psychic trespassers.
Eclipses bring revelations, plot twists, and sometimes the closure we didn’t even know we needed. This particular Super Moon Eclipse has the potential to release stagnant emotions, illuminate what’s been hidden in the depths of our subconscious, and project us into unforeseen timelines.
I associate September 17th’s Super Moon Eclipse (10:34 PM EST/8:34 PM PST) with the Tarot’s High Priestess—a card that represents our own highest self, the part that can connect with divine energy, the source, which helps us to be courageous, because we are everything, we are as important as everything. The High Priestess is about knowing yourself: casting spells inward on yourself (vs. out into the world like the Magician).
The High Priestess isn’t about performance or pyrotechnics; she’s about balance, and stealth.
As High Priestess of Punk-Poetry and renegade philosopher Patti Smith famously wrote:
“In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life may you proceed with balance and stealth.”
High Priestess | Next World Tarot | Cristy C.Roads
How, the High Priestess asks, can casting a spell inside ourselves help us be more courageous, to not run, to look things in the eye and know that we have divine energy on our side, that we are innately divine?
Patti puts it like this:
“your self is your best ally. You know who you are, even when sometimes it becomes a little blurry and you make mistakes or seem to be veering off, just go deeper. You know who you are. You know the right thing to do. And when you make a mistake, it’s alright—just as the song goes, pick yourself up, brush yourself off, and start all over again.”
Patti Smith (Photo by Linda Smith Bianucci)
This is haaaard psychic labor, ya’ll!
Fortunately, we are not alone! We are part of a larger story, and our ancestors are here to help! As Patti advises in her 2010 commencement address to the graduating class at Pratt:
“When you proceed on your course, never forget you are not alone. You have friends and family, but you also have you ancestors. Your ancestors sing in your blood. Call to them. Their strength through the ages will come into you. And then there are your spiritual ancestors. Call on them. They have set themselves up through human history to be at your disposal. Jesus, he said, “I am with you always, even into the end of the world,” Allen Ginsburg, Walt Whitman—they are with you. Choose the one you wish to walk with and he or she will walk with you. Don’t forget that you are not alone.”
Be Happy & Take Care Of Your Teeth | a Spiritual Workout
Inspired by the Super Moon Eclipse, the High Priestess, Sharon Olds and Patti Smith, this spiritual workout will help you to:
Redefine courage.
Connect with divine energy.
Honor your future ancestors.
Wield your inner wisdom with balance and stealth.
Be happy, take care of your teeth, and let your conscience be your guide.
I wrote it to celebrate September 17th’s Full Moon but you can do this workout ANYTIME you, too, want to access the innate divinity that is your best ally!
Step #1 | Future Ancestor Altar
Future ancestors are people who were born to finish the work you started. In moments of change, it helps to visualize those future ancestors, on alternate timelines, worshipping on the altar of you— right now. Because time is an illusion, and we aren’t boxed in this dimension, this time-space continuum. So there are other timelines in which you are already on someone’s altar as their chosen ancestor. September’s Super Moon is time to call on them: to sing your praises and motivate you to get to work so they have something to finish.
Start by collecting pictures, printing or drawing images, or describing your future ancestors in words. Be as specific and as detailed as possible. Then clear a special space—a windowsill, a bookshelf, the top of your refrigerator, your bedside table, etc.—and set up an altar. Place an image of yourself in the center, and your future ancestors all around you. Adorn your altar with offerings: loose change, coffee grounds, lemon peel, flowers, seeds, Tarot cards, salty water, crystals or stones, candles, chocolate, alcohol or cigarettes, etc.
Step # 2 | Psychological Sighs
Whenever you visit your altar, pause in yoga’s Mountain Pose: close your eyes, extend your hands down to the Earth with your palms forward, and feel the energy radiating out from the top of your head and shooting down through your fingers and your feet.
Inhale and exhale from the bowels of your belly. How delicious is the air?
Now try ten physiological sighs: two quick inhales through the nose followed by a long exhale through the mouth. This breathing technique mimics crying, regulates the nervous system, and releases stress.
If tears come: embrace them. Tears are medicine that releases emotion, connects us to ancient healing practices, and carries stress hormones out of the body.
Step # 3 | Writing Ritual
When you are done breathing, and/or crying, sit down and imagine your future ancestors at a specific age: 12, 29, 34, 45, 52, 81. Pick an age that feels pivotal, a time when you yourself were at a crossroads, felt lost, and had to go with your gut. Set a timer for 3-5 minutes, and list all the pieces of advice you want to give your future ancestors—because you’ve been at this crossroads before, you know the path to take, where to make a hard left turn, where to detour, where to slow down for a tricky curve. Be as specific as you can, and borrow/steal details from your own life.
As Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher instruct in prompt #53 from their participatory art project Learning To Love You More,
“Don't just write Hold on to your heart, but instead say Don't go out with Kevin, he will eventually cheat on you. Go out with Jake instead, he is actually cooler. It is easy to say that everything happens for a reason, but take this opportunity to redirect yourself towards what you think might have been better. Sure everything turned out ok, but maybe you should have quit that job five years earlier, maybe you should have had children when you were 27, maybe you should have flossed, maybe you should have gone to the alternative high school, or not said that thing to your best friend. Tell yourself what to do in clear, specific language. Do not write an essay, make it in list form.”
Add the lists to your altar and, when the time is right, see what happens when you transform these lists into a poem/story/essay written in the form of an advice column—a capacious and delightfully enlivening form!
By all means, make this ritual work for you; you might, for example, offer advice to your parents (moving spiralically backwards in time, because we aren’t trapped in this time-space continuum), as beloved and controversial poet Sharon Olds does in this iconic poem of witness:
I Go Back to May 1937
I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks,
the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips aglow in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,
he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don’t do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.
Sharon Olds (left), with a Girl Scout camp friend | Lake Tahoe, ca. 1956
This poem is permission-giving, risky, glorious—with, like so many of Sharon’s poems, the potential to hurt her parents, her children, her spouse, her friends, and herself. More importantly, however, the poem attempts to understand and contextualize family trauma and abuse—in spite of the enormous pressure not to. This takes enormous courage and compassion.
What happens when you, too, breach inherited/societal silences—fueled by courage and compassion, the divinity within?
(Sharon, for example, iconically refused to take part in a National Book Festival dinner organized by Laura Bush, then First Lady, in 2005, and wrote in an open letter: “So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it.”)
& What About The Teeth?
Patti bookends her commencement address at Pratt with a stealthy story about teeth, beginning:
“Now that I’m here, my greatest urge is to speak to you of dental care. My generation had a rough go dentally. Our dentists were the army dentists who came back from World War II and believed that the dental office was a battleground. You have a better chance at dental health. And I say this because you want at night to be pacing the floor because your muse is burning inside of you, because you want to do your work, because you want to finish that canvas, because you want to help your fellow man — you don’t want to be pacing because you need a damn root canal.”
And, sagaciously, ending:
“When I left home, I asked my father what advice he could give me. My father was very intelligent, very well-read—he read all the great books, all the great philosophers. But when I asked his advice, he told me one thing: Be happy. It’s all he said. So simple. I’m telling you, these simple things — taking care of your teeth, being happy — they will be your greatest allies. Because when you’re happy, you ignite that little flame that tells you and reminds you who you are. And it will ignite, it will animate your enthusiasm for things — it will enforce your work.
Be happy, take care of your teeth, always let your conscience be your guide.”
On this Super Moon Eclipse, may you, too, Be happy, take care of your teeth, and let your conscience be your guide.
That’s all for now, babes!
You can access the rest of my transformative Soul SAUCE workouts on Youtube and all of my alchemical Soul FLOSS rituals here on Substack.
xxxO, Dr. MLE | Beach Witch
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