Do you ever have those kinds of days where every glass you touch smashes, you are constantly stubbing your toe, and you find yourself covered with mysterious bumps and bruises? Some of us are clumsier than others, but we also go through clumsy phases from time to time. There might even be a spiritual meaning to your clumsiness.

The lungs are particularly associated with grief. One of the likeliest times for us to get a respiratory illness is when we are going through a period of loss or sadness. Let’s talk about the spiritual meaning of respiratory issues and illnesses.

According to TCM, lungs have an association with the emotion of grief. (Read the Spiritual Meaning of Lung Illnesses). When we do not take the time to rest and fully process our grief, it can get stuck in the lungs, making us more vulnerable to coughs and respiratory illnesses. Overthinking and being overly busy can sometimes be a defense against the emotion of sorrow.

These beliefs also give us a sense of control over our lives. When bad things happen to good people—or, specifically, when we ourselves align with goodness and bad things happen anyway—we’re left adrift, feeling abandoned by our gods. Many of us have no choice but to blame ourselves for tragedies. “If only” and “what if” haunt our day-to-day lives. We can’t find a good reason for why something bad happened, so we start to believe we must be bad in some deep, unchangeable way; that we must have deserved this pain. What else could possibly explain it?

Many people experience September as a kind of spiritual New Year—Jewish people, for example, celebrate the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, during the September New Moon. There is a freshness as the cool air sets in and a new energy that may feel quite exciting. Though most of us may not literally be hunting, this time of the year is appropriate for setting clear intentions to achieve our goals, especially in terms of work or learning, and take action on reaching those goals.

To align with the spiritual meaning of the full Hunter’s Moon this October, complete your internal harvest.

The Hunter’s Moon is one of the few traditional moon names that isn’t associated with the month itself, but rather with the timing of the autumnal equinox. While the full moon closest to the autumnal equinox is always the Harvest Moon, the moon that follows is referred to as the Hunter’s Moon, and it makes its first appearance in either October or November.

When we are in a state that requires patience, we are, by definition, uncomfortable. We want something to change because we don’t like the way we feel while waiting. Rather than try to focus on the future change, what if we used compassion for ourselves to explore what the waiting experience is bringing up for us in that present moment?

We all have values, whether we know it or not. Some of them come from our family, some come from our culture, and some are all our own. When we get a sense of what those values actually are, it’s much easier to set goals in accordance with them. If you’re facing a decision—especially a big one—knowing what your values are can go a long way towards helping you decide. When you can see your most important values right there in black and white, you can ask yourself which decision most closely aligns with those, and the decision often becomes clear right away.

The last card is the Star, which is an energy of hope, especially after a difficult period. It’s the energy of early spring, which is when the first flowers start to break through the melting snow and frozen earth. In this image, this woman is surrounded by chaos but calm, at one with it. One of the students in the class pointed out the bird holding a flower resting on her hand, which calls to mind the myth of Noah’s Ark. After God flooded the earth, everything was gone but Noah’s family and his menagerie of animals, floating in an ark on an ocean of nothing for over a year. Noah sent out a raven who didn’t come back, then a dove, then another, until one finally came back with an olive branch, indicating that their long wandering was finally coming to an end.

The word equinox is a Latin word meaning equal night. The Autumn Equinox, usually falling around the 22nd of September, is a time when day and night are roughly equal in length. At this turning point, the fall season begins and nights become longer than the days in the Northern Hemisphere. (In the Southern Hemisphere, the Autumn Equinox falls around March 22nd.) Energetically, the Autumn Equinox is a time of balance and pause, a transitional moment between the bright half of the year and the dark half of the year.

Many early therapeutic strategies were developed by privileged white men like Sigmund Freud. They were revolutionary at the time, and there are undoubtedly helpful pieces in them all. But therapies are always a product of the society they come from, and they tend to reinforce the values of that society. When a patient lies on a couch to be judged by a more powerful figure taking notes on them, they are experiencing authority, judgment, and hierarchy, which are all colonial values.

The Death Light has been something of a theme for me in the last couple of months. It can be metaphorical or existential—working on a will, thinking about changing our life paths, or considering the legacy we want to leave after we’re gone. But sometimes it’s literal. We witness death, face a serious illness, or someone close to us has died. This last month, one of the ways Death came to my door was for my little orange fox dog Finnegan.

During the August full moon, we are working with a double light: the intensity of the summer sun and the peak of the moon’s illumination. If our inner sea monsters are coming to the surface now, let’s greet them with kindness and listen for what they may have to teach us, rather than trying to force them back down into the dark. This doesn’t have to be a struggle. We can allow this time of stirring up to be medicinal.

Meditation should feel like a little bit of time that’s carved out just for you. It could be for five minutes. It could be sitting on a soft couch with your cat on your lap. It could be laying down. It could be guided by someone else’s recorded voice. It could be a practice of imagining, daydreaming, prayer, or connection with a deity or spirit guide.

Greet your inner sea monster as you embrace the spiritual meaning of the Sturgeon Moon.

Each month’s full moon has a special name that represents something about the natural world and the energy of that time. The Sturgeon Moon is the Algonquian name for the full moon in August, when the sturgeon were easiest to catch in the Great Lakes. Other traditions named this month’s moon the Full Red Moon, for the late summery haze that can tinge the moon red, and the Corn or Grain Moon, as this is a time to start gathering the late summer harvest in preparation for the fall.

I’m having one of those weeks that I know many of you have had (or are having right now), where, due to no choice of my own, I’m hanging out in the Upside Down. It’s not my first time here, and I know by now that struggling and fighting it isn’t going to get me out of the tree any faster. I know I have to surrender to it. To breathe through my feelings. To trust that I won’t be stuck here forever. Even if I really don’t want to do any of that.

Feeling wilted in the middle of summer? Channel the spiritual energy of thunderstorms and heat with July’s Thunder Moon.

The Western Abenaki have named July’s full moon the Thunder Moon due to the likelihood of thunderstorms around this time. The Anishinaabe call it the Halfway Summer Moon, which places it right in the middle of the summer as it tends to be felt, rather than according to the seasons or the solstice. Several traditions also call it the Full Buck Moon, referring to the time when the male deer are showing off their impressive antlers.

June’s full moon is commonly called the Strawberry Moon, a name that originated with the Lakota, Ojibwa, and Algonquin peoples. The Haida name for this month’s moon is the Berries Ripen Moon.

Of course, this refers to the fact that many berries begin to ripen in June. It’s a time not only of blossoming and ripening but of animal babies being born. It’s also the month that contains the summer solstice (on June 21st) and the shift into a new season.

Self love is, essentially, the opposite of shame. When we behave in alignment with the idea that we are worth loving as we are, we in alignment with the idea that there’s nothing wrong with us, that we deserve, for example, healthy food, enough sleep, and pleasurable experiences. For some of us, that causes a kind of rebound effect where we end up falling back into self-punishment and in our familiar old hole of shame.

I have been a major nightmare-haver since I can remember. When I was about four, I used to try not to fall asleep at night because I was so afraid of my dreams. They were intense and disturbing, often gory, about things no four-year-old should be thinking about. I’m not sure where I got the information about world wars, tsunamis, and general apocalypses, but I saw them a lot in my dreams. I still get nightmares pretty often, but they don’t bother me as much as they used to. Here are a few things that have helped.