This first full moon of the year, and of the decade, brings the focus to your lungs and heart chakra. The energy of a full moon is an energy of expansion, so this is a good time to expand your heart with a metta meditation for loving kindness.  Sitting comfortably in a meditation posture (with your legs crossed or on a chair with your feet on the floor) take your awareness to your heart and breathe here for a few moments.  

As you breathe, begin to feel your heart expanding.  

Centring your awareness in your heart, focus on a person you love, then a person you feel challenged by. Breathe with your heart-centred focus, widening your awareness to your family or community, town, city, country and the world.  Send love to the people and places that need it most: visualising rain falling to quench the bushfires in Australia, for example, and giving love to strengthen the voices and actions of indigenous people.

How far can you expand from your heart centre?  Calling to mind both those people and situations that bring you joy and those that challenge you is a practice in cultivating unconditional love – the ultimate expansion of the heart.  

Gently bring your awareness back to your heart centre, feeling love for yourself.  Self-love is the heart of expansion, the place from which it’s possible to grow.  How comfortable do you find this?  What is your relationship with self-love?  Is it possible to expand your comfort zone just a little and give yourself a little more love?

Returning your awareness to your heart, breathe deeply and feel your feet grounded on the earth beneath you.  When you are ready, open your eyes.  

How Luna Rhythms Yoga can support you during this Cancerian Full Moon:

At Luna Rhythms, our unique system of yoga integrated with the lunar cycles and solar seasons teaches techniques from the ancient yogic practices of asana, pranayama, mudra, bandha and mantra in alignment with the energies of the day, season and cycle. 

This Full Moon in Cancer will connect you with the energy of Lakshmi, the energy of fullness and radiant abundance.  Cancer is the house of the moon, so she is fully at home in her mother energy here, giving birth to the dreams you hold for the year ahead.  

Practising Padma Mudra, the Lotus Gesture, can awaken your heart centre to the energy of Lakshmi’s radiant abundance.  Place your hands softly in prayer position in front of your heart centre.  Slowly unfurl your hands like a blossoming lotus flower, keeping contact at the base of your hands and between your thumbs and little fingers.  Softly open your palms and spread your three middle fingers to resemble a blossoming lotus flower. 

You can create “lotus circles” by rotating your hands forward, down and back, into your heart and open to the sky. Keep some part of your hands in contact as you circle the Lotus Blossom, symbolic of spinning the Prayer Wheel of the Heart.  

Birthing your dreams also requires a firm foundation.  At Luna Rhythms we ‘Ground to Grow’, connecting deeply into our roots from which we can rise, grow and expand.  Ganesha Mudra is grounding and strengthening. With your hands remaining at your heart centre, turn your left palm to face away from you and bring your right hand to meet it, facing towards you.  Interlock your fingers and clasp them together, while gently pulling both hands away from each other.  Feel into the strength that radiates out from your heart to ground and support you.

Another heart-expanding practice is Garuda Mudra, the Eagle Gesture.   Keeping your hands at your heart centre, hook your right thumb over your left thumb. Spread your fingers like the great wingspan of an eagle, with the palms of your hands resting on your sternum.  

Hold Garuda Mudra for ten breaths at your heart chakra and pulse your hands/fingers with your breath. As you exhale, fold your fingers in and make soft fists with each hand, thumbs still connected.  As you inhale, spread your fingers wide and fan them out like wings. Do this ten times, breathing and pulsing your hands, visualizing blood pumping through your body.  

Garuda Mudra activates blood flow, circulation and respiratory health.  This mudra also helps to stabilize your overall emotional field (helping to balance out the expanding emotions that may accompany this Cancerian Full Moon), and enhances deep breathing in stressful situations (giving expansion to the area of your lungs).  

To find out more about these practices and how you can get involved check out our Classes, Retreats and the Luna Rhythms Foundation Course.