The annual Gemini Full Moon is always a favourite of mine. It is usually accompanied by tinsel and lights, the yearning tones of George Michael bemoaning his luck last Christmas, and Mariah Carey’s piercing pitch sending dogs around the planet into paroxysms of aural pain. It’s nonetheless a traditionally social time of year. I faithfully meet up with old mates that I’ve known since school days but haven’t seen since this time last year for our annual curry outing under the Gemini Moon’s garrulous gaze. We are regularly surrounded by groups doing the same. Each year, our social gatherings, laced with goodwill and booze, allow us to catch up with loved ones and take stock of what’s happened since the last time we came together.

And how have things worked out? Are we happier now than we were? What kind of (inevitable) shit has hit the fan, and how well did we cope with it? Just as importantly, where were the moments of joyful pleasure, and what state of mind allowed those heady days to arise and even hang around awhile?

Have we taken time to explore the sometimes cavernous gulf that lies between what we think we desire and what actually seems to be manifesting in our lives? Do we actually need what we think we need? Do we truly want what we say we want? Are we content or satisfied with what has unfolded, or do we feel cheated by the experience? Quite often, what we think we want – liberty, love, abundance – is contradicted by our default mindset and behaviour: control, anger, and fear of lack. Guess which message of manifesting desire will be broadcast loudest from our internal transmitters across the universal airwaves this Christmas?

Bizarrely, we humans dwell so intently on the negative experiences we encounter and create, often granting them far greater weight of importance than the positive. Perhaps this is because the positive, in its everyday forms, is less dramatic and challenging to our preferred, sometimes compulsively negative, way of processing reality. A beautiful sunrise gets trumped by the bitchy comment from a workmate, providing countless days of animosity and dreams of justified vengeance. Beauty gets beasted, and we end up feeling terrible. The extreme but pervading outlook of 'life's shit and then you die' does not leave much room for experiencing each day as a living, unfolding miracle in every moment.

Is it possible to contextualise polarised judgements of good and bad into a more inclusive perspective that marries our personal concerns, pain, and pleasure with a wider world to which we contribute through each and every thought, word, and action? As we often suggest in this column, the path of love is a wide one, upon which there is plenty of room to balance the extremes of our conditioned, illusory sense of self with what is true.

The trick to staying upright and travelling in a forward direction on the love track seems to rest in aligning with and accepting circumstances as they arise, then dealing with them in as positive and grateful a manner as can be mustered. This can be a consciously adopted attitude shift that may help even the really difficult stuff lose some of its sting. Life moves expansively forward with or without our consent, so there’s a strong case for immersing ourselves in that flow in order to benefit fully from its mutually motivated beneficence.

In astrological terms, this Gemini Full Moon carries an additional, strong Venus planetary influence which is said to evoke feminine principles. In the next couple of weeks, it may therefore serve us well to pay special attention to the important women in our lives. Honour their femininity. Shower them with gifts and praise. Let them know just how important they are in your life. Flowers wouldn't go amiss.

Primarily, that would be the mums, of course. Whether living or dead, they represent our notions of nurture throughout our childhood and then in our subsequent roles as friends, lovers, and sometimes parents ourselves. The next fortnight could be a beneficial period in which to attend to this relationship with Mother. If you’re lucky enough to still have one around, give her a call or make a visit. If Ma's no longer with us, evoke her presence in contemplation of that relationship and examine whether there are still wounds to heal before only ever remembering her (and her overbearing control mechanisms) with love.

If there are wounds to heal with a living mama then this is the Christmas to give it a go. Let's see if our compulsive, reactive responses can be kept in check...even under provocation. Our mothers, those shining beacons of womanhood, are essentially the physical portal for our own living presence. They’re why we’re here. Let's be grateful. Let's forgive them if there’s stuff to forgive in the process undertaken. They were/are only trying to do their best based on what they themselves have been conditioned to think was good parenting. Let's forgive them if there’s stuff to forgive in the relationship undertaken.

We are born of love; love is our mother.

(Rumi)

And while we’re at it, why not extend that love to the big Mumma herself, Lady Gaia? Need I point out that our relationship with Mother Earth needs some serious attention? Currently, we may as well be sticking red hot pins into her ever receptive, generously supportive body while pouring the poisonous detritus of our lives over the open wounds.

Sooner or later, we will have to recognise that the Earth has rights, too, to live without pollution. What mankind must know is that human beings cannot live without Mother Earth, but the planet can live without humans.

(Evo Morales)

Modern consumerist society is the epitome of an insatiable, abusive, over-indulged toddler, still suckling greedily whilst biting the nipple that feeds. We need to actively wean ourselves off our unsustainable dependencies and let our great matriarch recover and heal. With concerted will, it wouldn't take long for the glowing paragon of her femininity to regenerate and continue to nurture us all with abundant benevolence for many generations and millennia to come.

By necessity, this weaning involves reassessing our own priorities and financial imperatives. Do the cultural, political, and economic systems in which we currently invest our time, energy, and cash support our beautiful Mother Earth's capacity to sustain and nurture us all? If not (and they clearly don't), then those systems need a meaningful reorientation. What part can we play in their recalibration?

Systemic change won't happen without punter pressure. Our hard-earned buck deserves to be consciously placed and wisely invested in those institutions (banks and pension funds1 in particular) with a clear mandate for positive environmental change. Let's explore the possibilities and act before it's too late. Let's not accept the constantly enforced plutocratic storyline that the consumerist, capitalist calamity is the only 'safe', trustworthy economic and political narrative in town. Let's challenge the rhetoric of privilege inwardly and externally by doing what we can to help now, at home, at work and in our local communities. Let’s put our money where our hearts lie in devising new routes to sustainable prosperity for all. Sadly, I’m afraid this does not equate with using Amazon for anything.

As always at Full Moon, our instinctive emotional reactions and habitual patterns of behaviour will be hitting their peak. Under this Gemini Moon, once one has expressed one’s seething exasperation at the corporate takeover of modern democracy, we may become more keenly aware of how to balance our individual needs and aspirations with those of others and the planetary biosphere, of which we are all a vital, interdependent part.

As the festive season approaches, may I offer my top 5 gift-wrapped tips for replacing any perceived sense of lack in our lives with a more holistic appreciation of the unlimited, sustainable abundance that accompanies us in every moment?

  • Make a date with Mummy: find a window in the coming days to devote your attention to her: how she's feeling, what she needs and wants, and how you might help realise those aspirations. If it's not possible in person, do it online or by phone. Make her feel valued and nurtured.

  • Make a date with Mummy Earth: get out in the open air. Breathe her in. See, smell, taste, touch, and hear her. Don't rush her by being in a rush yourself. Devote an open-ended moment to her in which you can be located and spoken to. Be still in her presence and fall in love for eternity. Return to your day-to-day activities when you have truly felt her in your heart and been filled. Make this a regular date.

  • Celebrate the divine feminine: macho folks beware. The divine feminine is around and within you. Make sure you honour it in a manner meaningful to you. I like to paint one fingernail a flamboyant colour in acknowledgement of a softer, subtler expression of beauty in an often harsh, male-dominated world. Sunflower yellow is the current nail varnish hue of choice. Camp defiance? Who gives a monkey's toss what people think? Hats off to all gender- and non-gender-specific souls claiming the divine feminine in themselves.

She is so bright and glorious that you cannot look at her face or her garments for the splendour with which she shines. For she is terrible with the terror of the avenging lightning and gentle with the goodness of the bright sun, and both her terror and her gentleness are incomprehensible to humans.... But she is with everyone and in everyone, and so beautiful is her secret that no person can know the sweetness with which she sustains people and spares them in inscrutable mercy.

(Hildegard von Bingen)

  • Honour the important women in your life: treat them as you would the goddess they represent.

A prayer of gratitude to memorise and recite on the way to work:

Sisters of the world, I love and salute you for the crap you gracefully endure. I honour your balancing, redemptive, intuitive allowance. Thank you.

  • If you’re fortunate enough to have some, make your money work ethically for you and others by investing in the world you want to see. It's a very practical way of making your dreams come true. This is the week to hold your current bank to account. Even if you're still banking with the bank you first joined as a teenager, now is the time to question if that choice is still appropriate. You don't have to look very far to uncover which of the major banks continue to invest in carbon-burning petrochemical multinationals and hold massive amounts of debt over poverty-stricken nation-states in the developing world. Changing your account2 might not change the immediate trajectory of global corporate greed, but it should make you feel better or, at the very least, slightly smug.

We hope this mother of all messages spurs readers to constructive loving action in whatever shape feels most appropriate to both person and moment. Do please share its well-intentioned divine feminine disposition with friends of a similarly sacred complexion – it's another way in which the path of Love may be kept well maintained for clear, safe and enlightened passage.

You carry Mother Earth within you. She is not outside of you. Mother Earth is not just your environment. In that insight of inter-being, it is possible to have real communication with the Earth, which is the highest form of prayer.

(Thich Nhat Hanh)

References

1 Ethical banking in the UK: how to put your everyday account to good use.
2 Ethical banking.