New Moon in Cancer: the Home Within

New Moon in Cancer: the Home Within

New Moons are the beginning of the lunar cycle: they represent an invitation to plant new seeds and set clear intentions for the weeks ahead. On a New Moon, the Sun and the Moon join over the same degree of the same Zodiac sign, forming a 0º angle from our perspective on Earth, an alignment technically referred to as a conjunction. This month, the luminaries meet in the lunar domicile, the Cardinal, Yin, and Water sign of Cancer, bringing us an invitation to renovate our relationship to our emotions, our vulnerability, and our needs.

The New Moon in Cancer begins a lunar cycle focused on deepening our emotional self-knowledge and our awareness of our core needs. This event will offer us opportunities to refine our ability to mother ourselves and our inner child, to recognize what we need, and find a better balance between giving and receiving support, nurturance, and care. 

The Cancer New Moon is going to bring the spotlight on our personal lives, our inner lives, our emotional lives, as well as on home and family dynamics that we need to address or take care of, maybe in a completely new way. The New Moon in her home sign invites us to strengthen our ability to tap into our intuition and reminds us of the value of giving space to our emotions, of letting our emotions flow, of sitting with our emotions without judging them, without rationalizing them, without attaching a story to them. 

This event reminds us of the importance of having access to self-intimacy and self-connection, to a feeling of home within ourselves. The Cancer New Moon inspires us to create our unique definition of home and connect with a sense of safety and security that is internal rather than dependent on external circumstances and situations.

New Moon square the Lunar Nodes

The Sun and the Moon in Cancer are squaring the North Node in Aries and the South Node in Libra. The Nodes of the Moon represent the point of intersection between the Moon’s orbit and the Ecliptic, the apparent path of the Sun from our perspective. While the South Node represents where we come from, what we are familiar with, our karma, as well as repetitive patterns and cycles we get stuck in, the North Node represents the way to balance existing tendencies, break cycles of compulsion and unconsciousness, and evolve both emotionally and spiritually.

Planets squaring the Moon’s Nodes offer us chances to gain awareness of developmental wounds, places where we repetitively get stuck, places where we are somehow frozen in time, as our emotional and psychological maturation process was disrupted early on, or in a previous lifetime. In Evolutionary Astrology, planets that square the Lunar Nodes are referred to as “skipped steps” and point at energies that need to be fully integrated and embodied for us to move forward in our evolutionary journey.

The square between the Cancer New Moon and the Lunar Nodes suggests that, in the upcoming days and weeks, we will have opportunities to become aware of how our past experiences are still impacting our actions, behaviors, and emotional responses in the present moment. We will have chances to see in what ways we are still relying on automatic defense mechanisms or overcompensating for past wounds, for what we lacked, or for our childhood unmet needs. This configuration indicates that we will have opportunities to complete cycles that were interrupted and develop a new relationship with young and vulnerable parts of ourselves, as well as needs and emotions that we rejected or disowned in the past.

New Moon conjunct Venus, trine Saturn, sextile Mars

The Cancer New Moon happens in wide conjunction with Venus in Cancer, sextile Mars in Taurus, and trine Saturn in Pisces. These are all harmonic aspects that indicate an easy connection, flow, and blend between the energies of the celestial bodies involved.

Both relational planets are harmoniously aspected to the Sun and the Moon, which suggests that we are entering a supportive month regarding all relationship matters. Our need for connection, love, and intimacy is likely to be front and center during this time. These days and weeks, we will have chances to improve our ability to share our feelings and ask for what we need, and further develop our capacity to listen to other people’s needs and feelings with empathy and understanding.

The activation of Saturn indicates that opportunities to gain awareness of how we need to mature will continue to be available, especially around the time of the upcoming Capricorn Full Moon, the second one in the sign. In the upcoming days, we will have chances to go deeper into our emotional and relational maturation processes and gain a new awareness of the root of the patterns and dynamics that continue to emerge in our connections with others.

New Moon opposite Asteroid Ceres: Learning to Care for Ourselves

The Cancer New Moon is in very tight opposition to asteroid Ceres, now retrograde at 14º of Capricorn. This aspect is significant because it adds a new dimension to this New Moon’s invitation to renovate our relationship with our emotions and needs.

Ceres is another facet of the Mother archetype. In Astrology, Ceres gives us information about how we experienced care and nurturance, how others took care of us in the past, and, consequently, how we tend to take care of both ourselves and other people. Ceres has also a lot to do with how we relate to loss, grief, and the cycles and seasons of life: she is connected to our relationship to food and to what nourishes us, both in a literal sense and in a metaphorical one. 

The opposition between Ceres, now retrograde in Capricorn, and the Sun and the Moon in Cancer, all squaring the Lunar Nodes, underlines the need to become aware of how we have been conditioned to perceive self-care and self-nurturance and redefine what these mean to us and how we go about them.

Ceres being retrograde in Capricorn points to the necessity of deconstructing and deconditioning from ways of mothering ourselves or others that are distorted in some way, not serving our growth, or not aligned with our true needs. This opposition invites us to learn to care for ourselves in the way we need and recognize whether we hold beliefs about care, love, and nurturance that keep us stuck in conditions of scarcity and lack, where we can’t have our needs met. It is also an invitation to find more harmony between giving and receiving care, love, and nourishment and become aware of any imbalances between how much we give and how much we receive.

New Moon in Cancer: We Are Safe to Feel

The New Moon in Cancer represents an opportunity to develop a new relationship with our inner child, with our emotional needs, and with our sensitivity. This lunation is an opportunity to come into a new relationship with our past, to see our childhood experiences from a new perspective and in a new light, to explore new ways of connecting with our family, either our blood family, the family we created, or our chosen one. The upcoming lunar cycle will offer us chances to discover alternative ways of approaching taking care of ourselves and others and remind us to make decisions from a place of clarity about what our needs are.

The New Moon in the lunar domicile reminds us that, as adults, we are responsible for our emotional well-being, it is our responsibility to make decisions that allow us to have our needs met, it is our responsibility to make decisions that honor our hearts and our sensitivity. This event is an invitation to break generational cycles of suffering, neglect, and scarcity, an invitation to remind ourselves that it is safe to feel and that our sensitivity is not a liability. The Cancer New Moon is an invitation to remember that we are enough and we can have enough, that we are worthy of having our needs met and feel nourished.

New Moon in Cancer Journal & Guided Meditation is available as part of our Full Experience membership. Join Full Experience, receive everything we create monthly and support our work ♥