Monday, July 17th
New Moon
in Cancer 24°56'
11:31 am PT

Break Up with the Rules in Your Head:

How to Change a Pattern

by Sarah Faith Gottesdiener

July’s New Moon solidifies the ripeness of the year. We are in full swing, officially over the halfway mark of 2023.  If momentum feels both sporadic and like molasses, if it’s difficult to keep your intentions and goals in the forefront of your mind, be more gentle with yourself. Maybe all of the external change you’ve had to navigate has slowed down your internal processes. Consistency and discipline might come easier with more confidence. It could be time to address the root causes of resistance through shadow work. This New Moon is a prime lunation to a fundamentally different perspective: the Moon is closest to the Sun on a fresh cycle, and half the sky is retrograde, after all—a prime time for reflection and reorganizing. Be brave enough to break an unhelpful pattern or two. Break up with the restrictive rules in your head.

There are many adages about the consequences of avoiding shadow work:

What you resist, persists.

What you try to control actually controls you.

There is a profound spiritual lesson about patterns continuing again and again, in different ways, until we finally address the root. I call it pattern-jumping. Until we eradicate the limitations born from versions of ourselves that no longer exist, rewire our subconscious beliefs, excavate heavy familial and ancestral stones, alter our actions, resource our nervous system, and reprogram our energetic field, we will find ourselves in a life that feels like a skipping record, a looping pattern we are hooked into.

We have all experienced this personally: Have you ever had the same romantic relationship, but with different people? Do new habits and routines fall off at the same point? Do you tend to self-sabotage after a big growth spurt? When an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.*

We witness it on the collective level: the United States inability to look at its shadows—the foundations of the country—keep the same cycles of abuse alive. The government’s continued denial about how it operates, even though reality and history prove the opposite, keep our nation trapped in its delusional mythology.  This isn’t who we are, after the hundredth school shooting this year. Home of the brave, land of the free, states a nation built on the most cowardly of behaviors: centuries of genocide, slavery, and horrific violence on stolen land.

There are times to rebuild and there are times to create an entirely new foundation.

2023 is the time for entirely new foundations.

Be brave enough to create new neural pathways, practices, and different ways of being.

Love yourself enough to experience different energies and possibilities.

Be humble and accountable enough to know what patterns must end.

— Excerpt from the 2023 Many Moons Lunar Planner. To read Sarah's exclusive template on how to break a pattern, and the Break Your Own Rules Tarot Spread, get your copy of Many Moons. The benefit edition is here. The digital edition is here. 

*Quote by Carl Jung.