Come Home to Yourself

with the Gemini Full Moon 🌕

Gentle heads-up: This post deals with themes around self-loathing and self-denial. This might be a difficult read if these are feelings you're actively dealing with, so proceed with extra care and compassion for yourself.  

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Hello, and welcome to our last full moon of the year! This one is extra special to me because it's a Gemini full moon, ♊ so let me explain why that's a big deal.

Gemini corresponds to The Lovers card, card #6.

And 2022 is a Lovers year, calculated as 2+0+2+2 = 6.

So we have a Lovers full moon to close out a Lovers year! It's very exciting stuff!

Gemini's Myth

Gemini's symbol is the twins, based on the Greek myth of the brothers Castor + Pollux, who had different dads. One had a mortal father. The other's dad was Zeus, king of the gods. And although this made them very different ability-wise, they loved each other more than life itself.

When mortal Castor died, Pollux sacrificed his immortality and begged Zeus to reunite him with his brother. So Zeus turned them into stars, and placed them in the sky so that they could be together forever. That's where the Gemini constellation comes from.

This story has stayed with me ever since I first heard it. There's so much to dig into – love, sacrifice, duality, oneness, and that's just off the top of my head! But in keeping with today's theme of The Lovers year, let's stay on track and take a look at the card itself...

The Lovers

My teacher, Lindsay Mack talks about this card as an act of reclamation. She talks about how we often hinge our fulfillment on external stuff, be it things or people. How we can't feel at peace with ourselves until we get something, or until someone loves us, or until we fit in with a certain group.

And so a big part of working with this card is finding those parts of ourselves that are standing out in the cold waiting for approval + validation, and gently calling them home. Taking our completeness into our own hands, instead of waiting for someone/something to make us feel whole.

So since this is a Lovers year, this is part of the energy we've been working with since January. I say part of because, of course, archetypal energies are massive and there's never just one point of view. But in my personal practice, this Lovers year has been heavy on reclamation; bringing the rejected parts of myself safely back home, and reuniting with the pieces of me I believe are unworthy of love, time or attention.

Reclamation is a continuous process. The work is never fully done.

To link it all back to Gemini, the theme of reclamation and homecoming is incredibly powerful. Castor and Pollux were different–one was literally the son of a god–and yet their love unified them in the stars forever.

I wonder if we could bring that same energy to our unwanted parts. I wonder when we'll realize that trying to chop off bits of ourselves isn't all that helpful in the end.

Castor + Pollux: two distinct identities, but together forming the Gemini constellation.

Your mind + your soul: two distinct components, but together making you you.

Let's be real, all of us – and I think I'm safe in saying pretty much ALL of us – are predisposed to favor one over the other. Some of us think of our mind as our superpower, and we view our emotions (especially the difficult ones) as inconveniences that hold us back and slow us down.

Some of us think of our soul as our superpower, and we hate our minds for being too critical, blocking us from following our heart and chasing our passions.

Whatever group you fall into, ultimately, that kind of thinking is a dead end, if you'll forgive me for putting it bluntly. It leads to a fragmented Self; a Self who's struggling to feel whole but can't because they've pushed away essential components of what makes them them.

What would it take to love the other half of you so much that like Pollux, you would stop at nothing to reconnect with it?

What would it mean to reclaim ALL of you, even the parts you've been conditioned to withhold love from?

If Pollux gave up his immortality, what would you be willing to give up in order to glue back the pieces of your Self?

What would it take to shift your perspective, to stop thinking of your mind as your enemy when it expressed fear, when it procrastinated, when it was your harshest critic?

Or, on the other hand, what would it take to stop thinking of your soul as an inconvenience when it whispered to you, when it told you it wasn't happy, when it said something didn't feel right and that you need to make some changes?

Seriously, what would it take?

The answer to that question forms the foundation for coming back home to yourself, finding fulfillment, and learning what it means to really, truly, honestly love yourself.

Healing + Reclamation

I pulled an oracle card to serve as our guide in this work, and I got the Rage card from the Reclaim Oracle deck.

It feels entirely appropriate. I don’t know about you, but I feel a lot of anger and resentment towards myself — towards my mind in particular for all the ways it seems to hold me back. If only I didn’t have anxiety, if only I was more confident... if only this, if only that. I’m kinda convinced I could take over the world if I had a different brain.

Rage keeps me in a cycle of self-loathing. Rage sets me ablaze and keeps me stuck in place, crying when the flames burn my flesh but unable to step away. I feel shame about all the ways I’m not enough, and then that shame turns into anger because I should know better. I should be too spiritual to feel shame, whatever the fuck that means. I should, I should, I should.

I never run out of shoulds. And every should pushes another piece of myself out into the cold, telling it that it’s wrong, that it doesn't deserve to exist, that it’s not welcome.

But if pieces of me are not welcome in MY inner world, where the hell do they belong?

No wonder we’re all walking around, trying to find identity in possessions, and partners, and social hierarchies. Because we’ve refused to accept ourselves in the only place that matters. We've made our souls unwelcome in their own home; the only home they'll ever have.

It's time to bring ourselves back home. It's a process, a life's work really, and it's never done. But I hope that this December finds your soul feeling a bit more loved and appreciated than it was in January. 🌻

So yeah, that's the year we're closing out, and we're closing it out with the same card that started the whole thing. It's clearly been an intense year, and it's extremely satisfying to be closing it out with a reflection on how we began and how we've grown through these past 12 months.

And if you're just joining the tarot bandwagon, we get to do this all over again in 2023 when we move into a Chariot year. Like I said, exciting stuff!

P.S. if these words stir up something in you you'd like to explore further, take a look at the spread I created for continuing this work in your own spiritual practice.

Thanks for being here, thanks for reading this, thanks for giving me the opportunity to do this work.