Happy New Moon in Cancer 🌑 — On Silence, Shakti, and Rewriting the Story

You know the story of Ganesha and the moon — how Chandra laughed at him after his fall, and how Ganesha, in his hurt, cursed the moon to disappear and return, phase by phase, never again seen whole in a single glance. I've been thinking about that curse differently lately. Maybe it isn't a punishment. Maybe it's the truth of all of us: we are not meant to be seen whole all at once. We hide, we return, we hide again. Tonight, the new moon, is the hiding place. It's dark on purpose. Something is forming in that dark that isn't ready to be looked at yet— and that's allowed.

But before that fall, before the moon ever laughed, Ganesha crossed paths with a snake on his way home from puja— and that snake was Shakti herself. The raw, coiled, untamed energy of the universe, crossing his road in the dark. It wasn't an obstacle. It was an introduction.

One of Ganesha's oldest names is Vakratunda — "the one with the twisted trunk." We tend to read this literally, just a description of his form. But look closer... the twist and curve of his trunk is Shakti made visible on the outside of his body. He doesn't fight the coil. He is the coil. The energy that moves in spirals, that doubles back on itself, that never travels in a straight line— that's not separate from him. It's carried right there on his face, every day, as truth.

I'll be honest, because I think that's what this new moon is asking of me... I've had quite the string of initiations lately, and none of them moved in a straight line. It started with a perforated eardrum. Around the same time, I left a relationship that wasn't serving my highest good— someone in his own addictions, who never fully heard me, no matter how I tried to be heard. I had worked so hard on my Vishuddha, on making sure my expression could exist in the world, and still felt met with silence, or worse, an attempt to silence me. Make of that what you will— the body has its own poetry. Ears are part of the Vishuddha.

Then, while helping a friend through a crisis, I hurt my foot badly— I think because I hadn't fully landed in my own transitional space yet. I'm in-between homes right now, with a place that has a neon sign reading "Enjoy the Silence." I'm waiting to return to a place I love, and there's real grief in that limbo. I had been building a life I'd dreamed of— learning to grow food, growing roses for our Ayurveda line— and some of that dream is on pause while I find my footing again, literally. I'm grateful I'll land back where I belong.

This is the teaching underneath the twisting, our own lives rarely move in straight lines either. We turn, we double back, we spiral through the same lesson wearing a different face. It can feel like failure— like we should have "arrived" by now, in a cleaner, more direct way. But Vakratunda suggests otherwise. The twisting and turning is the shape our becoming takes. It isn't a detour from the path. It's the path's own handwriting, curving toward exactly where we need to go.

I've been around long enough now to know this pattern...endings are painful beginnings wearing a disguise. It feels like I'm always writing about heartbreak in one form or another. My last partner was a Cancer, like my father, whose birthday was yesterday. Emotional, crabby caretakers, the both of them, in their own ways– but neither could quite hold my fiercer Shakti. And I've decided, I will not tolerate being silenced. None of us should. We each carry a voice for a reason, and this new moon feels like the right night to say that out loud, even in the dark.

And Ganesha doesn't just carry Shakti's twisting energy— he guards it. He is called the protector, the guardian at the threshold, the one who stands watch before any beginning. That same guardianship lives in the body, at the base of the spine, where kundalini rests coiled, waiting, Ganesha stands entry. He is why that energy doesn't simply erupt unchecked— he tends it, contains it, grounds it, until it's ready to rise with purpose instead of chaos.

So wherever you are in your own phase tonight— hidden, waxing, grieving, rebuilding— I see you. Let's practice together and let whatever needs to stay unseen for now, stay unseen, until it's ready. And when the twists of your own life feel like too much, remember Vakratunda's reminder, not to rise before you're rooted, but to ground through the tumult, and let the coil teach you how to hold steady while everything around you turns.

With love and a little bit of fierce Shakti,

Erika