Growing Up in the shadOW: Did Life Feel Like Opposite World? It's Time to Flip the OW into OM and Come Home to YourCELLS

1. Image over authenticity: Your family presents a perfect facade to the world, but behind closed doors, they're struggling with mental health issues, relationship problems, and financial stress. You're forced to maintain the illusion, suppressing your true feelings and experiences to protect the family's reputation.

2. Backhanded compliments and subtle jabs: At a family event, your auntie quietly and quickly whispers under her breath that your years of struggling with mental health issues are all in your head, implying that you're exaggerating or fabricating your experiences. This subtle yet hurtful comment leaves you feeling shocked, betrayed, and paralyzed by the doubt and discredit she's casting on your severe struggles.

3. Power dynamics: Parents use emotional manipulation to create a sense of obligation, making you feel responsible for their emotional well-being and happiness. They prioritize their own needs over yours, never allowing you to invest in yourself, your future relationships, or personal endeavors. This dynamic is rooted in their own unhealed childhood wounds, creating a toxic cycle where they fuel off your need for them, rather than supporting your growth and independence.

4. Scapegoating: You're blamed for all the family's problems, and your perceived flaws or mistakes are cited as the cause of all issues. You're made to feel like you're the problem, and your family's dysfunction is somehow your fault. This scapegoating leaves you feeling guilty, ashamed, and uncertain about your own worth.

5. External validation over family bonds: Your family's reputation and social standing are prioritized over building meaningful relationships with each other. You're encouraged to focus on external validation, such as achievements and status, rather than nurturing emotional connections with your family members. This creates a sense of disconnection and isolation, even in the midst of family gatherings.

6. Walking on eggshells: You're constantly tiptoeing around a family member's unpredictable mood swings, never knowing what will trigger an outburst. You're forced to be hypervigilant, adjusting your behavior to avoid conflict, rather than being able to relax and be yourself. This creates a sense of anxiety and tension, making it difficult to feel safe or at ease.

7. Emotional invalidation: Your feelings are consistently dismissed or minimized by family members, who tell you that you're "overreacting" or "too sensitive." You're made to feel like your emotions are invalid or unimportant, leading to confusion, self-doubt, and emotional numbness.

8. Emotional manipulation and exploitation: Family members use guilt, shame, or self-pity to control you and get what they want. They're experts at making you feel responsible for their emotions and well-being, leaving you feeling drained, resentful, and trapped.

9. Toxic competition and comparison: Your family fosters a competitive atmosphere that prioritizes achievement over emotional well-being. You're constantly compared to others, and your worth is measured by your accomplishments. This creates a sense of inadequacy, low self-esteem, and burnout.

10. Attracting similar energies: You find yourself drawn to relationships or friendships that mirror the dysfunctional dynamics of your upbringing. You're attracted to people who are charismatic but emotionally unavailable, leaving you feeling unfulfilled, anxious, or trapped.

11. Avoidance, alteration, and editing narratives: Your family avoids discussing or acknowledging painful or uncomfortable topics, altering or editing their narratives to maintain a false sense of harmony or perfection. This creates a sense of disconnection and confusion, making it difficult to trust your own perceptions or memories.

This new moon is heavily highlighting the avoided, unaddressed molestations that lead to "whack-a-mole" living – one distraction after that other, running from one facade to the next until the emotions are dealt with properly and the reactive living stops. Highlighting the underlying unprocessed experiences/issues in our tissues affecting our day-to-day circumstances and mindset. This creates distractions and chaos, keeping the cells from processing.

When you don't allow your cells to shift into the parasympathetic nervous system, you're not able to digest and process. Visualize… water element, relationships with self and others, mammalian part of the brain, second dimension, facets of expression, desires, urges, emotional intelligence, emotional maturity. Which version of you is showing up on scene? Who is in your driver's seat!?

This is Cancer's realm, as it governs the waters in your body and outside in nature, waiting for you to parallel and connect the two together. The rivers, oceans, lakes, and creeks that represent your own water – are they clean, clear, flowing, salty, or filled with algae? Are there dams, debris, or litter? What is the pH, the quality and quantity of your water?

Do you have multiple pools, or do you swim in the collective ocean? Can you see all versions of your cells in this collective ocean and stream of consciousness?

When you don't become aware of the larger picture and allow all contributing factors – especially the ones that are hard to swallow – you're creating havoc in your systems. Your karma camera, aka cell memory, records everything. So, you're having to separate from your SELF to create this alternate reality and narrative that makes you feel like you can deal with your circumstances better.

The self has become so numb it will quite physically manifest exactly what or who it needs like a saving grace and remedy, a ladder out of this heavy level and will seriously slap it in the face, avoid it, reject, destroy, doubt, or neglect it altogether. The self has become unhealthily obsessed with giving its power away to the very cycles and patterns tied to the same beliefs that have trapped, limited, and capped their ancestors. Until one brave wounded warrior steps up to cycle-break and start new!

Making the journey even more of a challenge and mental gymnastics —vulnerability and being yourself have become so distorted and confusing to understand, as so many are so far from their true calling or even 1/8 of the full sum of their cells or potential. Trying to fit into limiting lifestyles and communities for ideas of acceptance. The full sun, the persona, that which all planets orbit around, has become the very cell-centered parts of our cells. As I'm writing this, my neighbor Mary comes out of her house, stretching and yawning, greeting Lux and me, letting us know she just arose from her nap.

I replied, "OMazing! That's essentially what I'm writing about – the complete imbalance of our Western society and the juggling act of learning to balance all our responsibilities." Mary shared that her parents who were together taught her the importance of naps, while I shared that my mother, a single parent, raised us in a go-go-go environment with little rest or importance on naps (rest) as we got older.

Patterns and cycles pull so hard – it's the most honest and critical piece of advice I can give you! Pay attention, learn your lineage's themes, lessons, contracts, and dynamics. Help your cells get out of unhealthy loops and traits. You don't have to own or adapt to them, but through awareness and showing up differently, heal the rooted beliefs and layers of karma pulling you into this narrative and past-life inherited cell memory.

With this Cancer new moon post Jupiter's cazimi yesterday, think of a woman in her third trimester preparing her home and body for this beautiful expansion and birth. That's what those two energies are promoting – an opportunity to get all of your ideas that have been held back and hoarded out and into the universe.

Use this new moon to create your master list, help your cells by creating this extension of your brain, and check in with it daily! What's most important on your master list, and why? How do you do it, and when? What do you watch for? What's healing from the root? What cycle and pattern are you healing? By doing so, you'll become a self-master, gaining new levels of consciousness, awareness, and perspective to continue growing into the full sum of your cells!

Cancer, like our pregnant womb-en, governs the ‘mother’, children, hOMe – be mindful of these areas of life getting shaken up to your core values, memories, morals and relationships with these governing themes. Your own mothering energy, ability to nurture, create, and receive, along with your inner children (all of them!) and physical children, if you have them, living or passed.

Your home life and your ability to come home to your own cells and authentic self to charge, reflect, and reset are also under scrutiny. An overall cleansing of your devotion to your inner ocean is taking place – a call to dive deeper into your emotional depths and emerge renewed.

Healing the shell of who we’ve become, one vulnerable step at a time,