97. The Mother Wound: The Moon & The Mother in Astrology
How can you start to see the Moon in astrology differently?
The moon is like the gate way drug into the world of astrology. Once your sun sign and “horoscope” has grabbed your interest, the moon lures you in (as she should.)
When it comes to astrology, because of the way it has been bastardized in the world, we’re missing a lot of pieces of the puzzle when it comes to the planets. My desire is to remedy this problem through my work and help you look at astrology in a fundamentally different way that helps you embody more of who you are in this life.
Open your social media right now, and someone’s probably hosting a moon circle. The moon’s an easy place to start when it comes to dipping your toes into the world of the cosmos. Like a lot of people, when I was at the start of my yoga journey, dipping my toes into fully astrology in 2018/2019, I started by hosting moon circles when I really didn’t know much about the moon beyond the basic information I found with a quick google search. And honestly? they were a delicious way to start testing the waters in regards to astrology and energy. Around the same time I started my astrological mentorship and I was working for my mentor at the time. I had the pleasure of studying the moon’s movements every single week and writing an email for her community on how they could use the moons energy in their businesses.
The moon is a beautiful place to start learning astrology. It’s quick movements help us tune into all 12 signs in a short period of time, and the aspects it makes in a speedy fashion in the sky help us understand what happens when planets get into conversation in the sky above us.
It was with the moons placement in the chart, and through the understand of what I call our emotional karma, that I really began to see the foundational comfort zones that we bring in lifetime after lifetime. By studying the moon, I began connect the dots on the emotional baggage we carry into this life. I’m talking about the engrained, “I am what I am” energy that we feel innately in our beings. The moon exposes the shadow of karmic comfort zones, and aspects of self that feel both natural and also hard to dig our way out.
(I’ve talked about this several times on the podcast, the full episode on Emotional Karma you can dive into here. 👉 Healing Emotional Karma Through Your Moon Sign)
The Mother & The Moon
As we dig into the Moon and the Mother Wound, please note, when I talk about the wound, I am talking about the medicine because the wound is the medicine. The medicine is hidden within the wound, and within the wound is the medicine you seek. I truly believe that we incarnate experiencing exactly what we need so that we can find our medicines as we move through life — especially post Saturn return.
Something that really called to me at the start of my astrology practice was the relationship between the moon, the mother, our nourishment, and our safety in this life. I instantly wanted to understand how this placements connection to past lives could expose old wounds in the psyche, and expose areas in which we as souls are looking to heal. It was here I started to see that what we carry forward from past lives in this this experience through the moons placement was emotional baggage, what I now refer to as emotional karma. I have spent the last 6 to 7 years solidifying my understanding of the Karma of the Moons placement and it’s relationship to our karmic comfort zones, inner security, safety, body and desire to be nourished in this life — and how our connections and contacts to mothering play the key role in how we step into the highest expression of our moons placement in this life.
The moon and the relationship to mother are integral to understanding your karmic and ancestral astrology, and what makes use feel safe individually. This is the lineage that has crafted to your inner mothering story, your fears, and part of that ache to be held, nourished, and loved.
One thing we need to understand about the mother wound is that this wound is in connected to our safety, our security, our nourishment, and our ability to feel like we are secure in this world, while feeling secure in our bodies. That’s a huge part of being human that I feel like humanity is karmically working out right now. The safety to be in our bodies, the safety to exist here on earth, the safety to feel nourished, to have food on the table, to have our bodies be supported. It’s absolutely linked to the chronic health crisis, and severe nervous system dysregulation we’re seeing, as we have become so disconnected from the body, which is associated with the moon in astrology.
The more disconnected we are from the moon, aka mother, the more dis-ease we see in the world.
The moon holds all the subconscious beliefs under the surface when we do not feel safe, and we don’t have enough “lunar food” as astrologer Liz Greene refers to it. (and the results of mass psychosis that happen because of these needs not being met.) The mother wound holds all of the information that is in regards to that safety, that nourishment, that wanting, and craving.
Think of a child reaching out for its mother, just looking to be held and to be told “you’re loved, you’re safe, you are held, there is protection here.” How the mother responds to that child will set the foundation for whether or not they believe nourishment and safety are available in life. The Moon helps us see a long playing out karmic and ancestral pattern that a person is currently working on in this incarnation. Not everyone gets to feel the pleasure of being held, being safe, or being cared for in this life. The Moon in the birth chart begins to expose why, as holds a major part of the wounding, as well as how to alchemize it.
The Mother is more than just your Moon’s sign, it’s your Moon story.
Take one google search and you’ll learn that the Moon is connected with the mother in astrology. The one thing I don’t want you to get stuck on is believing that because you have the same moon sign as another person, this means you’ll have the same experience with mothering as them. That will rarely be the case.
As I’ve mentioned astrology is a multi million point system, with cosmic conversations dictating the experience of a placement in your chart and your own karmic blueprint helping design the fast — oh and don’t forget about that pesky thing called free will.
Your moon sign is unique to you based on the sign, the house, the aspects. When we begin to add in your particular karma and sacred contracts to your mother, to mothering—and to your connection to mother earth and your body—we start to see an entirely unique story unfold.
For instance, my moon sign is Leo, so every Leo moon, and if we fell into the trap of believing that my mother would be represented by Leo energy alone, everyone who has a Leo moon should have the same type of mother for instance, right? Of course not! Every Leo moon experiences a different relationship to the mother based on the karmic contracts within the birth chart, of which there is a multitude.
(I teach you the entire formulas for figuring out what that means inside of the go at your own pace astro immersion, It’s Karmic 2: Decoding Ancestral Astrology)
If we were just to think the moon is the mother, then every single person who had a Leo moon would be just out there experiencing exactly what I experienced when I grew up as a Leo moon child. But if you talk to my husband, who also has a Leo moon, it’s a completely different story because we have different moon signatures and different karma with our mothers.
We have to remember the complexity of astrology, and how the stories we tell ourselves—along with what we experience growing up—are shaped by our birth chart, which then goes on to shape our lives.
When it comes to the Wound of the Moon, this is the starting place for understand we can really heal our inner child because we begin to understand what we were aching for, what we were missing, and where we felt abandoned. Within these stories is beauty, hope, pain, magick, hurt, loneliness, abandonment… the list goes on.
I personally believe I was very intentional about incarnating with a mother wound because it is part of my karmic soul lesson and the medicine I am working with in this life. This is what I talk about when I talk about the wound is the medicine.
Without the disconnect from my mother, without the inability to reach her, without her “abandonment” that I felt, without the lack of food in the house or meals cooked for me from a very young age—all the experiences I had as a child—I would not be seeking to re-nourish myself in this life. Part of my work in this life was to come back to home to myself and heal the inner mother which I have disconnected from. I am grateful to my own mother for taking on the great task of having to separate, re-parent herself, and come back into wholeness with me.
Without safety, how can we express? Without nourishment, how can we flourish?
In the book Luminaries by Liz Greene and Howard Sasporatas, they talk about the disconnection from the mother in order to step into the energy of the father. The mother is to create safety, then the job of the father is to actually be a place where we expand beyond that safety and begin to find ourselves outside of the mother (represented by the Sun Sign). As infants we have a very symbiotic relationship with the mother for good, for bad, for higher, for lower (there’s no “right or wrong” here.)
In the book they speak to how the father is the next person we find “out there” to begin to express ourselves. I really loved the way they presented this because they link it to Carl Jung’s theories around individuation. There’s so much potency in our ability to find ourselves, but we can even examine this in the realm of the Imum Coeli, which I talked about in the Ancestral Karma podcast, and the midheaven. They’re opposing forces, the bottom of your chart and the top of your chart. One represents the inner world, one represents us moving into the outer world. We find this push and pull within mother and father. (Discover more about the Imum Coeli here)
If you are not rooted in your IC, and you don’t feel safe down in the root of your chart, how can you live your purpose, and step into your legacy with your midheaven?
If you are not rooted in your ability to mother and nourish yourself, in your moon’s highest octave expression, how can you express your sun? How can you express your greatest qualities?
Here’s the root of this question — if you don’t feel safe, how can you cultivate all that you desire?
I think about this a lot.
My own chart has several repeating patterns that say “I’ll never have enough, never be stable enough, never feel secure enough”in this life. As an example, my Moon is aspecting Pluto in the 2nd house, as well as aspecting Uranus, Neptune and Saturn in the 4th House. These are houses we crave safety in the chart. This ever-changing force within me and my deep desire for security in this life, and how there’s so many points inside of my chart that challenge that security, that safety, this ever-changing part of me that just wants to be still. And yet stillness is, sometimes it feels, intangible, like I’ll never find that. That’s part of my magic, to understand these pain points of scarcity. That’s part of my medicine in this life.
You have your own signature teaching you inside of your Moon’s placement.
And if my example resonates with you, it’s time to root into your own Moon placement to discover what parts of you are disconnected from our ability to nourish, to nurture, to feel safe and secure, and to root yourself down into this earth and be here on earth, which can be terrifying, am I right?
The connection to your Mother, and to safety exposes and inner truth, you might not fully understand yet. The reasons why you always worry, why you’re addicted to success, why you might believe that your worth is equal to your productivity, could very well be linked into your Moon placement.
My husband will ask, why can’t you just relax? And I’ll say, “ooh, but if I stop, if I stop trying to achieve, if I stop trying to create or build this empire that I want to build, we’ll just die.” That’s how it feels for me with my Moon conjunct my midheaven in my chart. My mother didn’t mean to encourage my belief that I must be special and successful in order to earn love, but it’s what I learned through this placement.
Success = Safety.
I know that’s not true that if I stop trying, we will lose everything, but there’s the sensation that it is from what I was taught and my own karmic patterns.
This is just one example of my past life baggage coming up to bite me in the ass, and stopping me from living a pleasurable life. Because in previous incarnations my saftey was tied to my role as a leader, or how special I was, something in me still believes this is true. I had to perform the Leo role in order to have my Lunar Food.
These are the tricky things I honestly think stop us from achieving the wealth, the health, the beauty that we want to achieve in this life. We’re always seeking through the lens of our karmic baggage, through the Mother Wound, instead of trusting the flow and the gift that the universe is trying to provide for us— the road that the universe has put us on—because we truly believe there’s never enough.
“And if I don’t work as hard as I can, it’ll all fall apart.” How terrifying is that?
If a story exists for you like that, I wonder, did you learn it from your Mother? If not, you might find the story in other areas of the chart, like the Father.
It’s all tangled up in your ability to feel safe, your ability to feel really, truly nourished.
As we come to a close today I want to ask you… have you felt truly nourished in this life? If so, when and by who or what? If not, what was the nourishment you were seeking and did not get? You will likely find the answers inside of your Moon’s sign, house, and aspects.
What did you experience in the moments you felt the most nourished, the most alive, the safest? What did it look like, feel like, contain?
For me, It’s reading on the beach, an ultimate bliss moment that fills my cup. It’s going out and enjoying an extremely fun day with a friend, whatever that means. It’s when I get to be with somebody I really love and have a lot of fun with them. It’s all in laughter and play. It’s humour, and joy. My nourishment comes from really allowing my inner child to come alive and dance. These are all Leo qualities, and I am learning how to feed myself, and heal the Mother Wound in me, by reparenting myself with my own Leo medicine. It’s all a Spectrum.
I teach all of this and more inside of the Curse Breaker Bundle here where you’ll dig into the Emotional Karma Masterclass decoding your Moon Sign, and the Curse Generational Breaker Masterclass decoding your Imum Coeli.
Or take it to the next level and learn exactly how to decode your Ancestral Karma inside of It’s Karmic 2: Decoding your Ancestral Karma through your Birth Chart and get the Curse Breaker Bundle as a bonus gift.
Lots of love,
Vika
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