Somatics and the Moon
There is something about the Moon that makes humans sing, paint, write and wolves howl.
We’ve always looked up to the Moon for light and guidance, and one of the things the Moon teaches us is how to live inside time. Not the kind measured by clocks, but the kind marked by hunger, fatigue, desire, and blood. Moon is the keeper of cycles we cannot override but learn to honor.
In astrology, the Moon is not a symbol to decode but a relationship to tend. She (I’m using classical pronouns here, but that does not equal gender) describes the way we relate to being alive: how we respond before we think, how we care and are cared for, how safety is sensed long before it is named. The Moon is where astrology becomes intimate, where meaning moves from the sky into the body.
The Hellenistic astrologers understood this intimately. Vettius Valens, 2nd-century Hellenistic astrologer, called the Moon the "steward of the body and the witness of life". For Valens, the Moon signifies how life happens: the conditions of embodiment, the fluctuations of vitality, the habits and rituals that shape our days. The Moon does not speak in ideals, she speaks in patterns, in repetition, in lived experience.
Abu Maʿshar, prominent Persian astrologer, centuries later, placed the Moon as the great intermediary. Standing between the incorruptible heavens and the messy, mutable world below. Through the Moon, celestial meaning becomes earthly experience. He viewed the Moon as a vital, active force influencing earthly events, tides, and weather.
Taken together, these teachings insist on something radical: astrology begins in the body.
This is where somatics brings the Moon home. Somatic wisdom teaches that the body is not a problem to be solved but a truth to be listened to. Sensation is information. The Moon and the body speak this language fluently. They don’t demand clarity, they asks for attunement. They tracks safety and threat, hunger and satiety, closeness and retreat. They holds our early learning. What it felt like to be welcomed or rushed, soothed or ignored, and they replays those lessons until we learn new ways to respond.
The Moon is memory.
The Body the library.
In a chart, the Moon shows where we are most porous and most powerful. Where we absorb the world. Where we give and long for care. Where our needs are met and neglected. In transit, she times the moments when feelings expand and contract, reminding us that no state is permanent, but every state deserves attention.
To work with the Moon is to practice consent with your own body. To notice when your shoulders tighten at a thought. To track the sigh that comes after truth. To honor fluctuation as wisdom, not failure.
The ancients watched her to understand life’s changes.
Somatics asks us to feel her to understand our own.
And maybe that’s the Moon’s deepest teaching: that healing doesn’t happen by rising above the body, but by listening closely to its tides. And learning, again and again, how to come back to ourselves.
Join me for AstroSomatics online every Full and New Moon
