384,400 kilometers (238,855 miles).
363,300 kilometers (225,700 miles)
405,500 kilometers (252,000 miles).
0.075 Earth years / 27.321661 Earth days
The regular daily and monthly rhythms of the Moon, have guided timekeepers for thousands of years. Its influence on Earth’s cycles, notably tides, has also been charted. The presence of the Moon stabilizes Earth’s wobble. This has led to a much more stable climate over billions of years, which may have affected the course of the development and growth of life on Earth.
Zodiac Sign Rulership: Cancer
In the birth chart, the Moon is second in importance only to the Sun. Unlike the other planets the Moon orbits the earth, and seen from the earth is the same size as the Sun (hence the possibility of total eclipses). The Moon gives off no light of its own, however, but reflects and polarises the light of the Sun.
The Moon represents memories, feelings and instinctive responses that lie just below the level of consciousness. As the Moon orbits the earth, it generates the movements of the tides and governs other natural cycles, such as the menstrual cycle in women. The Moon therefore symbolises the ebb and flow of feeling and emotion (symbolised by water in Astrology), and the feminine principle in nature and in the individual.
The Moon’s sign position and aspects to the Moon show how we react instinctively, and what we need to feel comfortable and secure. As children the Moon is the Mother, or at least how we experienced our mother. As we grow older this extends to our relationships with women in general (particularly for men), and our instinctive or conditioned responses to the world in general; based on the often unconscious memories of this early nurturing experience (or lack of it).
The Moon represents the emotional and compassionate side of our nature and the immediate emotional reaction to life pleasures and problems. It also indicates attitudes instilled in early childhood.
If you do not know your Moon Sign find out with your Soul Profile
Your reigning need . .
is to be independent or out in front in some way. So you are predisposed to staying as childlike and as unattached as possible and you have a competitive soul. What you want is all-important to you – even though you may not be quite conscious of what that is! Others will find your single-mindedness either stimulating or exasperating. You run on a kind of ‘battle-stations’ program, operating on the assumption that a moving target is harder to hit.
This is all very exciting, but at some point you have to settle for the fact that if wish to have security you will have to make some kind of commitment. But then again, you might just go for being the eternal youth in the eternal now – and let security take care of itself. Your mixed feelings about security mainly have two things behind them: an insecure or pushy mother, or the sense that feeling too secure would dull your spontaneity and need for action.
Your reigning need . .
is to feel emotionally stable and materially secure. The former is taken care of by the fact that you are reluctant to pursue any idea or activity that is going to rock the boat, coupled with the fact that you do have a fairly unflappable nature. Ironically, however, when a change is required you could be slow to act, or become bored, to the point of unbalancing your position.
Where material stability is concerned, you have a natural sense of the importance of property and income. From the word go, you use your developed market instincts and sense of value to satisfy this need. The danger here is that you can let material considerations blind you to your emotional and psychological requirements. In any event though, you are unlikely to get caught without the material wherewithal, and providing there isn’t a mean streak in your personality, you can be of great material support and assistance to others who are less financially ‘together’.
Your reigning need . . .
is to feel constantly in touch with what is going on around you. Equally, you have a natural sense of what is happening at street level so to speak. Such a common touch as you have, and the ready wits and gift of the gab that accompany it, are only too able to keep things light and manageable. That is, until your emotional responses to life around you become inappropriately superficial. You then find that what you are doing on either a personal or professional level ceases to have enough permanence or depth of satisfaction – and is therefore worrying you to death and keeping you awake at nights.
The formula that ‘you only get as good as you give’ is a very apt one for you. Perhaps you originally devised your blend of affability and flippancy to deal with a mother that was not easy to relate to in an honest or consistent way. An important point in your development is when you consciously commit yourself to a deeper involvement with whatever life is demanding of you and then trust your mental alacrity and your ability to dodge and weave when necessary, in order to negotiate the trickier reefs of human interplay.
Your reigning need . .
is to feel familiar with your surroundings so the establishment of a home and garden is something that is important to you and something that you are good at. You are also a sympathetic and caring soul who makes others feel at home as well. However, if you let your need for security and the familiar get the better of your will-power and faith in life itself, then you can wind up feeling uncomfortably needy of others and limiting your sphere of involvement to the point of stagnation.
Behind this is your mother’s influence that probably consisted of the best and the worst of maternal love. She cared greatly for you, but used emotional blackmail to ensure that you cared for her. The chances are that you also tend to do this with those to whom you are emotionally attached. It would be wise to put a bit of a space between yourself and your mother – and anyone else in your emotional life. Your emotional responses are wonderfully fluid and elicit strong feelings from others. You yourself can go up and down like a yo-yo! Owing to the fact that your caring ability is so natural, you can tend to overlook it’s value – and so then will others. So – without being a mother hen – appreciate that this is a very positive asset of yours.
Your reigning need . . .
is to receive attention and acclaim which is most likely owing to the fact that you either did not get enough attention as a child (for probably quite unavoidable reasons), or you got a lot of it and grew to expect it. In the first case, when you do get attention, you may feel uncomfortable and not quite know what to do with it. In the second, you can get disproportionately upset when you aren’t noticed or appreciated.
In both cases what you do require is a means of getting attention, holding it, and justifying it. Because you do have a generous sense of drama, fun, and creativity, this should not be too difficult. At the same time, be prepared to take some constructive criticism of your ‘act’. The child in you who is precious about being unconditionally admired as a sign of love must not be allowed to run the show; otherwise others could express their discomfort at this in a far more dramatically distressing fashion than mere criticism of you. Not surprisingly, with the child so strong and alive in you, you can be a wow with children themselves.
Your reigning need . . .
is to feel pure and that everything is in the right place. This predisposition of yours leads to your having a well-ordered emotional lifestyle as, or when, you consistently weed out influences that are detrimental to your well-being. This can also you give you an instinct for healthcare. The catch here is that your own ‘impurities’ – such as lusts, dirty habits, peculiarities – can get overlooked and so you brand others too easily as being not good enough.
Conversely, you can become obsessed with your own impurities and not feel good or clean enough to be closely, or emotionally, involved with anyone for very long. Your mother’s fastidiousness, or her lack of it, has something to do with all of this.
You like animals, possibly more than humans, because of their innate purity, but then observe how natural animals are with their earthy habits. This is an example of one of those hazy areas which you can fail to see, or avoid seeing, as you are predisposed to viewing life in black and white, as profane or pristine with nothing in between. Your sense of purity, and of service too, is best employed in dealing with what is inaccurate or polluted. Quite simply, you are aware of what needs cleaning up in this world, but should not take it quite so personally and thereby fight shy of your own ‘dirt’ or ‘mess’.
Your reigning need . . .
is to have a partner, to have people around you, to have a definite social position. In order to satisfy this need you have an instinct for what pleases and possess, or acquire, talents for things like cooking, decor, fashion, entertaining or anything that introduces a sense of harmony or togetherness to a situation. Perversely, not trusting this social sense can make you rather anti-social.
Your weakness is that you become so dependent upon life being ‘nice’ and ‘pleasant’ that you find it hard to confront the darker or less attractive parts of your personality. And because you do have grace and charm it is all too easy to maintain a superficial sense of things being all right. It is quite likely that this need to please has its roots in your having felt that you had to please your mother, father or whoever brought you up.
The irony is that your overriding need for a partner ensures that sooner or later you do have to face what it is about yourself that is not at all easy to relate to – either because you have lost a partner or cannot find or keep one. An important advance is made when you have a partner with whom you can rationally discuss your mutual shortcomings without feeling rejected or unattractive – which is basically what you’re so sensitive about.
Having confronted this issue, you then discover that your talent for making others, and therefore yourself, feel good is increased a hundredfold because feeling at ease with your own dark spots enables others to feel at ease with theirs. Ease indeed.
Your reigning need . . .
is to feel close to someone or something. In order to satisfy this need, you have a profoundly intuitive sense of the emotional nature of people and situations. The trouble for you is that your need for closeness is compulsive and so you can feel lonely or abandoned all too easily and then your intuitive sense becomes a radar that picks up anything which bears the slightest suggestion of abandonment or threat towards your vulnerable emotions.
The mistake you’re making is that you are interpreting others’ negative emotional states as being aimed specifically at you. It is then only a matter of time before such paranoid conduct does actually attract a negative attitude or act towards you. So you need to identify how and where in your past you initially felt betrayed or abandoned, and exorcise that demon. Until then you will either be haunted by a fear of being alone, or you will find yourself in solitary confinement.
Having overcome what must be the oldest human fear, that of abandonment – or at least, when you’re not feeling threatened by it – you have an emotional perception of others that is accurate to the point of being deeply reassuring. At your best, you can make personal sacrifices for the good of the whole. and taken advantage of. Spot it yourself first, and you are invulnerable.
Your reigning need . . .
is to believe in something – and to have the freedom to discover what that is. This need for freedom can be so pronounced in you that you instinctively reject anything that smacks of limiting or restraining you, be it physically, emotionally or spiritually.
Paradoxically though, you can be rather gullible because unconsciously you are still looking for some kind of philosophy or adventure. Alternatively, you may just as well be atheistic or amoral for that can appear to be a system of belief with absolutely no laws to keep to.
Behind all this you probably had an upbringing that indoctrinated you in either a dogmatic or free-and-easy way and so now you fancy the open road, so to speak. Deep within you there lies that gypsy soul, that wanderer, who trusts life purely for the adventure that it is.
However, if your own life’s not to disappear into the boundless, some definite philosophy or set of laws to guide you is what you need. This, combined with your natural sense of fun and of life’s ‘story’, can make you into a warm and optimistic teacher, the raconteur, or just someone who is wise as a result of being cheerful and understanding.
Your reigning need . . .
is to feel needed. This can prove quite precarious for you as others, especially your parents, can come to see you for what you can do rather than for what you are. Or, one of your parents was not there for you physically or emotionally.
From the word go, your need for external approval put you in a situation where your own emotional nature was not taken into consideration. As a child, were not acknowledged as one, and neither perhaps is the child in you now. Because your emotional interior was not nurtured, and was possibly even abused, you grew up with only a poor idea of how to cherish and value it.
Such emotional denial couldcause you to be quite a survivor in the harsh outside world as a kind of substitute for a feeling of inner support. This could turn into a rather grim and lonely alternative, although your cool efficiency would possibly conceal this fact. Or again, you may look for the nurturing parent that you never had in a partner.
Conversely you could be a parent to your partner, and others too, as you deftly manage material affairs but this would eventually only serve to isolate you further. What you have to set about doing with your innately industrious nature is to look for, and find, that sad child inside of you, and possibly with professional therapeutic help, look after it yourself. In becoming the parent of your own inner child in this way, you then develop into an extraordinarily balanced and capable human being.
Your reigning need . . .
is to become free of feelings that compromise your freedom. As if to precipitate this, emotional experiences early on in life were shocking, unusual or alienating in some way. Your mother probably related to you mentally rather than emotionally, or she may not have wanted you, so you learned to distance yourself from raw feelings like anger, fear and desire – or even from soft and sentimental ones. All this made you a bit too tolerant of others’ emotional natures, or indifferent to them.
You became an observer of life and so consequently you can be a good listener and provide impartial advice. This might be fine for others, but it all leaves you rather out of touch with the power of your feelings – because you maintain a space between you and them, as you had to do in the past. What you have to do is actually get back in touch with what caused you to feel so intensely in the first place and then prompted you to take that step back.
If you do not do this consciously then you will find yourself in emotional situations that force your real feelings to the surface in quite an unpleasant or disruptive way. But either way, you can then see, with your cool and objective eye, what is preventing you from emotionally responding freely – which is not the same thing as not emotionally responding at all.
Your reigning need . . .
is to feel accepted for what you are and to gain acceptance for others who you feel need it. What is responsible for this is your enormous compassion and sensitivity. I have to say that an equally important need of yours is to find a means of managing this sensitivity.
Without properly handling this openness to the feelings of all and sundry, you can be overwhelmed by something or someone in particular to the point of being emotionally incapacitated. Probably owing to your mother’s unstable feelings, or perhaps even her selflessness, you are unconsciously on the lookout for someone to save or someone to be saved by. Such a predisposition is asking for trouble, in the form of being hopelessly in love, or craving something or someone unattainable.
And even if you do have your dream come true, it is then only too likely that the dream fades and ordinary reality – which you loathe – then returns. Any of these eventualities can lead to quite dubious means of easing the pain of disappointment – drugs and alcohol being the prefered options.
Ultimately, you have to appreciate that you are a soulful being in a rather soulless world and take the necessary steps to protect yourself – like meditation or some other spiritual discipline. Your dream for a better world – through art or healing – can then be more safely pursued and surely maintained
