Humans are wired for connection and to have some sense of spirituality, whether it’s directed at a particular deity, to nature, the moon phases, or to community. And when we lean into the parts of ourselves that believe in the magic of all we don’t know, we are stepping into our own intuitive magic.

The waxing gibbous moon phase begins just after the quarter moon—when the moon is half-illuminated—and ends with the full moon. This waxing gibbous period is a time when energy is growing with the light of the moon; we’ve moved out of the contemplative, dreamlike new-moon phase and are galloping toward the full moon with energy and intention. In this vein, it’s the best time for a more energetic yoga practice. Here is a trio of postures to try.

Are you ready to get down and dirty to tap into the energy of the full Worm Moon?

March’s full moon is called the Worm Moon, likely referring to the movement under the earth that begins in the early spring in the Northern Hemisphere. It’s a time when the ground is melting, the frozen earth is beginning to give way, and the worms begin to wriggle and move beneath the ground.

For me, empathy is a deeply spiritual practice. It’s a process of stepping into the shoes of another, of showing up without judgment to what’s happening emotionally in the moment, not only for the person I’m trying to empathize with, but for myself, too. This requires that I be able to feel my own feelings and take responsibility for them while opening to the feelings of the other. This is easy enough when I am trying to empathize with someone I love and share values with. It’s a more challenging practice when my reaction involves fear, hate, disgust, or confusion. 

For a lot of us, especially when we have experienced trauma, been through difficult times, or, like, ever made a mistake, trusting ourselves can feel more complicated. I mean, trust myself to what, exactly?

I used to think trusting myself meant being able to feel into my gut or intuitions and just “know” something. Like whether or not a certain person was good to date. Whether I should follow a particular career path. Should I buy a yoga studio? What I should have for lunch??

The problem with self-care is that it implies that your care is 100 percent in your control. It isn’t. We also need other-care and community-care. We need infrastructure care like health services and school for our kids. Yes, Zoom happy hours do help. But they aren’t the same thing as a hug from a friend you love or soaking up the music at a concert with your favorite band. We can’t access all the things we need to take care of ourselves right now.

Inevitably we dip into the darkness with each new moon, and that is to help us shed our outer layers and reveal what’s on the inside, what’s new and possible within us. This new moon aligns with Imbolc (Feb 1st to 2nd), an ancient holiday celebrating the midpoint between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox. It’s also Groundhog Day, Candlemas, and Chinese New Year: all over the world, we celebrate the the shifting of the light, the moment where we start to stir from our winter darkness.

Our bodies have a way of expressing what we haven’t been willing or able to. When we listen to our symptoms, we can sometimes learn something about our lives, how we feel, and what we need as we move into the next phase of our lives. What are our symptoms telling us?

The psoas muscles are often to blame when dealing with lower back pain, sciatica, and even constipation and other gut issues. They have a relationship with our organs, nestled up next to the guts and the reproductive system, and they are strongly governed by the nervous system.

We must be gentle when we approach and try to soften the psoas, as they are deeply connected to our spirits and our experience of stress. Stretch all you want—these muscles won’t release until you feel safe enough to let them.

The holiday season is wonderful in so many ways. We get to see family, take a break from work, eat lots of delicious food, and end the year in style. But precisely because the holidays are about family and tradition, this is also a common time for grief to cycle back up. We think of the people who aren’t present, the people we aren’t going to see. We think of the traditions we wish we could share. As another year comes to an end, as much as we are thinking of New Year’s resolutions, we might also be thinking back to what the last year meant to us and what we lost.

Part of the reason there are so many different religious holidays in December is because of the magic of the winter solstice. All over the world, people light candles and bonfires at this time of year, gathering, feasting, and staying up late. The winter solstice is a powerful time of darkness, and darkness is often the place where magic happens.

Everyone wants pleasure—it feels good, gives us energy, helps us manage stress, and keeps us hopeful. Pleasure is the food of desire. But pleasure has a dirty little secret: sometimes it is unavoidably linked with pain. Opening to pleasure means opening to the truth of our bodies, and suddenly all the crap we’ve been repressing rises up to the surface.

In the event of non-consensual penetration of any kind, the vagina might be expressing its displeasure by being “out of balance.” Sometimes the issue is about a spiritual or energetic penetration: someone pressing toxic energy into you or making you do things you don’t want to do (whether sexually or not).

Hunger is a form of physical desire. It is something that we feel in our bodies and, when we’re healthy, it’s unambiguous. We can feel it right there in our stomachs. Fullness is a physically felt aversion, an internally felt “no” or “stop” signal. Feeling and following our hunger and fullness signals is a powerful way to practice consent within our own bodies, to teach our nervous systems that our desires and our limits matter.

Trauma doesn’t respond to conventional ways of healing, so we need our unconventional grimoires. We cannot plan out and micromanage our healing, but we can cast a spell.

When working on supportive practices for the adrenals, we are also working on supportive practices for the nervous system and emotional balance. Chronic stress isn’t just about, for example, trying to get to work on time. It’s about consistently feeling unsafe and never having a chance to come down to a place where you feel totally relaxed and able to be yourself. There are so many reasons that stress can get stuck in the body, but working on loving those adrenal glands might be a really helpful place to start.

Most of the forms of meditation that we have with us today were created by and for men. But who said the body was not a place God could reside? Bodies take the world in, transform it into energy, and dispel waste. Bodies heal, a lot of the time, on their own. Some female bodies gestate and produce life. Patriarchal religions, it could be said, do an awful lot of stretching the imagination to see God in a man’s image. 

It’s not our fault that we are so bad about being with each other in our difficult emotions. Of course, we don’t want to see the people we care about suffering, and gratitude feels like a quick way of getting away from suffering. Also, most of us don’t have a great capacity to feel our uncomfortable emotions because our society does not want us to. If we all deeply and genuinely felt our sadness, anger, and disappointment about the world, we might want to change things. We might connect with each other more deeply. We might feel more richness and sweetness from simpler things. And then we’d need to buy less stuff. Our culture revolves around stuff. How are we supposed to live if everyone is out here feeling their feelings instead of buying stuff?

Most of the time we assume we make decisions with our minds. We weigh the information. Maybe we talk to a friend. And then we come to a rational decision about what to do. That’s how it works, right?

Well, not really. Some of that happens, sure, but there are many decisions that we do not make with our minds, even when we think we’re doing so. Our bodies make our decisions for us more often than we’d think.

There are many treatments available, however, including hip-opening stretches (as the piriformis muscle is sometimes to blame for the nerve compression) and strengthening to rebalance the structures in the hip and pelvis. We understand all this from a physical perspective. But what about the spiritual meaning of sciatica?