Explore how what we eat and how we feel are connected, and discover new tips for supporting your relationship with food.

When we talk about self-care, we often think of activities like taking a hot bath or going to a yoga class. But self-care truly refers to the most basic aspects of tending to the animals that are our bodies, and one of those aspects is food. There is an intimate relationship between food and mood, and it’s one we often take for granted. The kind of food we eat, how much of it we eat, and when we eat it can greatly affect our resilience, ability to rest, hormonal rhythm, and more.

Follow along with this gentle guided meditation to get to know your inner child better and help them heal.

We know our inner child is present when we feel experience big reactions to relatively small things that are happening in our lives. The inner child often shows up to let us know we're not getting what we need.

Connecting with our inner child can help them get what they need from us and allow us to see our situation clearly. It is also a wonderful way to get to know ourselves better in a gentle and loving way.

The goddess Brigid—widely celebrated on February 1st—and the Star tarot card have much in common. Explore how these two figures represent resilience after collapse.

The Star tarot card is a beautiful, calm, and hopeful image. In the classic Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck, the card shows a naked woman kneeling by a body of water, surrounded by lush green rolling hills, with one large star and several smaller stars shining above her. She is typically holding two jugs of water, pouring one onto the ground and the other back into the water.

I was interviewed by Rabbi Rami, my colleague at Spirituality and Health Magazine, on an article I wrote for the print magazine on the concept of decolonizing therapy. It was a very interesting discussion about the model of therapy and how it’s changing in the modern world.

Honor the pagan festival of Imbolc with a simple ritual designed to release the heaviness of winter and invite in the healing fire of springtime.

Imbolc is a traditional Gaelic festival celebrated each year around February 1. It heralds early spring, and while many parts of the world are still very much covered in snow at this time, Imbolc celebrations honor the fire of life returning to the earth after a long winter.

Imbolc is a holiday of hope, a celebration of the goddess Brigid, and the perfect time to honor your inner fire.

The word imbolc roughly translates to “in the belly,” and refers to the time of the year when the sheep had their babies and produced life-giving milk after a long, cold season when the harvest stores were likely thinning.

Use these tips to get through Blue Monday, the most depressing day of year, and emerge from winter spiritually nourished.

Classically, the third Monday of January is known as Blue Monday, the most depressing day of the year. This first month in general can be tough for many reasons. The holidays are over, which means we’re no longer busy celebrating with our friends, and this can bring boredom and loneliness. The holidays can be expensive, and we’re often now feeling the dent in our wallets.

Shame prevents us from feeling and healing on a deeper level. Explore ways to move away from shame in your relationships and personal life.

Shame is a common condition, if a somewhat mysterious one. We relate shame to guilt because shame often arises when we’ve made a mistake or had an experience of rejection. While guilt can be a useful emotion that tells us we’ve done something we’d rather not repeat, shame is a condition in which we feel there is something fundamentally wrong with who we are at our core.

While guilt can teach us something about how we want to be in the world, shame sends us into a sort of painful paralysis; a feeling that we are fundamentally bad and don’t deserve to feel any better.

Are you on a white moon cycle, red moon cycle, pink moon cycle, or purple moon cycle? Learn more about menstruating with the moon.

Have you ever noticed your menstrual cycle syncing up with the moon? The word “menstruation” comes from the Latin and Greek word mene, which means “moon.” It has long been assumed that menstruation has a relationship with the moon, mainly because a moon cycle lasts about the same amount of time as an average menstrual cycle, 29.5 days.

The goddess Akhilandeshvari derives her power from being broken: in flux, pulling herself apart, living in different, constant selves at the same time, from never becoming a whole that has limitations.

But remember Akhilanda’s lesson: even that new whole, that new, colourful, amazing groove that we create is an illusion. It means nothing unless we can keep on breaking apart and putting ourselves together again as many times as we need to.

We are already “never not broken.” We were never a consistent, limited whole. In our brokenness, we are unlimited.

As all these names indicate, there is something cold, hard, and a little scary about January’s full moon time. From the perspective of people who lived off the land, this would have been the time when food stores from the harvest were running out, and the abundance of the spring was still very far away. It would have been easy to go hungry during this time.

The knees are often understood as a highway joint between the hips and the ankles. Sometimes hip and ankle issues can show up in the knees through what is known as “referred pain.” Energetically, knee pain may indicate that there is a conflict between where one part of you wants to go and where the rest of you actually is—for example, is your heart yearning to go somewhere your feet do not?

When we engage in counseling or other forms of healing work, we often have a story to tell. We talk about what happened to us, how we feel about it, and what we want next. It’s an intellectual exercise of pulling out the useful details and lining them up so someone can understand where we are coming from and where we want to go.

This is useful, as there is plenty of good insight and information that can come from that kind of narrative. But what about the body? How would the body tell that story?

Did you pull the High Priestess card? Learn the meaning of this major arcana card and how it can help us heal the “witch wound.”

In the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck, the High Priestess is a robed woman sitting between one black pillar and one white pillar, a moon at her feet, and a veil decorated with pomegranates (a fruit that is associated with femininity, fertility, and death) behind her.

She is the gatekeeper of the Divine Feminine, the subconscious mind, and the secrets that become available only to the initiated who know how to enter this realm. Anyone who enters must understand the duality represented by the black and white pillars: dark and light, masculine and feminine, conscious and subconscious.

As we turn to moon season, we head inside, slow down, and tend to want to sleep and dream more. This is a time for reflection and inner work, and many of us find that we naturally turn toward our spirituality. As the masculine rests, to a degree, in the fall and winter seasons, Divine Feminine energy is free to roam within us in our dreams, our spiritual connections, and our learning and healing selves. Fall and winter are not times for “doing” as much as they are for “being”: for integrating, processing, dreaming, and crafting intentions we will not yet act on. It is an inward time, and that should be honored and appreciated.

The winter solstice, which falls on December 21, is the pinnacle of moon season. This is the darker half of the year when we tend to see the moon more often in the sky. From a spiritual perspective, this is the time for inward work, like learning, reflecting, meditating, and praying, while the brighter half of the year is better suited to external practices, like producing, creating, and expressing. The winter solstice also comes with the holiday season; the ancient pagans called this month’s moon the Moon Before Yule.

However, dance is a nearly universally accepted form of self-expression. When we dance, we make shapes with our bodies. We can shake, stretch, jump, walk, run, or curl up into a ball. These shapes can express emotions that have been caught inside of our bodies and need to be released.

The Hanged Man tarot card depicts a figure hanging upside down from one foot, usually by a tree or some sort of wooden cross. Despite the explicitly uncomfortable position, the figure often looks peaceful and at rest, sometimes even with a halo around their head. The general interpretation of this card is to rest within chaos, confusion, or uncertainty. To allow yourself to learn from being stuck somewhere you never wanted to be.

November is the month of the full Beaver Moon, according to Indigenous and European traditions in North America. Around this time, beavers settle into the lodges they so diligently built in the spring and summer, preparing for the colder season. The Cree and Assiniboine people refer to November’s moon as the Frost Moon, while it’s called the Freezing Moon by the Anishinaabe, referencing the cold shift we often feel so sharply in November.

The November full moon is the perfect time to wrap up projects and turn inward for the winter. Explore the spiritual meaning of the Beaver Moon.

November is the month of the full Beaver Moon, according to Indigenous and European traditions in North America. Around this time, beavers settle into the lodges they so diligently built in the spring and summer, preparing for the colder season. The Cree and Assiniboine people refer to November’s moon as the Frost Moon, while it’s called the Freezing Moon by the Anishinaabe, referencing the cold shift we often feel so sharply in November.