The Role of the Moon
In a Healing of the Heart

The Moon in the 4th chakra is the capacity for caring, compassion, and loving benevolence. When I think of the Moon in this capacity, I think about the Buddhist goddess Quan Yin, the goddess of compassion; or perhaps in a slightly different way, of Gaia, the Earth Mother. In the presence of such a Moon, there is a sense of supreme safety: of being cared for and being taken care of; of being sustained and nurtured and held in the arms of a loving, benevolent, caring intelligence that meets our every need with grace, and selfless, unconditional love. As children, this is what we all want our mothers to be; as parents, this is what we all want to be to our children. Of course, the reality often falls short of the ideal, but the longing is universal. This is the Moon in the 4th chakra.

Since the Moon also has natural affinity for the 1st chakra, the Moon in the 4th chakra references that earlier stage. This is where we feel our fears and our vulnerabilities most acutely. So in order to awaken the Moon in the 4th chakra, we must face our fears and our vulnerabilities in the 1st chakra, and get to the place where we know in our belly and our bones, that no matter what, it is going to be OK. The Moon in the 4th chakra is about feeling this sense of emotional resilience within ourselves, and feeling the benevolent intelligence of the life force that sustains us, and carries us through whatever challenges we might face. When we feel this sense of sustenance and support, the Moon becomes the catalyst to the opening of the heart in the 4th chakra, and we ourselves potentially become a source of that same sense of benevolent, caring intelligence in the lives of those we love.

There is also a kind of remembering that takes place with the Moon in the 1st chakra that is essential to an awakening of the Moon in the 4th chakra. This remembering is, in part through the experiences of this life, which is what we do, for example, when we reconstruct a cyclical history – looking back to those moments when important transits or progressions were triggering the chakra pattern we are exploring.

When we do this work, we remember what we have been through, and simply knowing that we made it through, recalling what we learned, and how we grew in relation to those challenges, fortifies us. Or maybe we feel we didn’t handle life as well as we could have, we made mistakes, maybe we hurt others, or others hurt us. Either way, this kind of remembering is important. When the Moon is functioning in a healthy way in the 4th chakra, this is where we both feel our strength, and forgive ourselves and others for our weaknesses. This sense of forgiving and letting go is the root of compassion, and it is an essential task of the Moon in the 4th chakra. This work in turn, is a matter of feeling the wounds, feeling the pain, and releasing it, letting it go, coming to peace in relation to our lives, and the chakra patterns that make them what they are from the soul’s perspective.

Beyond this personal dimension of remembering, there is also a deeper remembering that also comes through the Moon. This deeper remembering is about feeling our connection to an ancestral tribe, to a lineage, a family, a community, a culture, and beyond that, remembering that we are a part of this Earth, part of the web of life that connects us all to each other.

For those of you who have done a sweat lodge, and have said, “For all my relations” upon entering or exiting the lodge, this is an honoring of the Moon in the 4th chakra – that felt sense of being part of a larger whole, that we are not just here by ourselves, that we belong here. This sense of belonging is an experience of the Moon in the 4th chakra. We also have to feel this sense in the 1st chakra – of safety in our own bodies, in our personal lives – before taking our place within the world, belonging to the world in the larger sense becomes possible.