Last night brought us a New Moon and with it new energy. I’ve been doing a monthly energy call with Donna Heath, a wonderful astrologer who I interviewed in the Journey’s series earlier this year. (click here to listen to our call). Donna described this moon’s Scorpio energy as one in which, as the days become shorter than the nights, is good to use to look inwards – into the dark recesses of our minds and souls…

Our dark sides, or our shadow sides, can teach us a lot. Many of us rarely go there, preferring to leave those ‘dangerous’ thoughts well alone. But, as I learnt on the fantastic Taming Your Dragons course with Aina Egeberg earlier this month, when you explore these deep reaches of yourself, you can literally unlock years of suppressed or buried emotion and stress, let it up to the surface, out into the open and at last let it go.

This process of letting go is so transformative, clearing space for new possibilities and new energies in your own journey through life. Our emotions cause us to behave in certain ways – over the years we create patterns, habits, behaviours and reactions which are often so engrained we don’t even know they are there. We can’t work out why we can’t move forward or why we feel so stuck or unable to decide what to do next – the pattern holds us forever in a loop, like a rubber band, pinging us back to where we started ad infinitum.

But when we can see into our shadows clearly or meet our dragons face to face, (or whatever metaphor you prefer to use) all that can change. For whatever positive reason they first appeared – like keeping us safe or stopping us getting hurt or expressing ourselves when we weren’t being listened to, they often no longer serve us. When we realise this, we can choose to let them go and replace them with more empowering beliefs or behaviours and begin new, more positive, habits.

Of course, this process of facing your deepest fears and the more unpleasant aspects of your behaviour can be painful. Some emotions we keep locked up for ages, fearful of disturbing them in case they flood out in an incontrollable mess. Strong emotions which we often view as negative, such as anger, hate, rage, jealousy, grief and sorrow, are often buried or surpressed inside us for years. Unconsciously, we spend much of our energy just ‘keeping a lid on’ them. It can be frightening to allow the lid to come off.

Often, though, this is the only way you can truly move forward, breaking through the unwanted patterns in your behaviour and enabling a bigger, brighter version of you to evolve – like a butterfly emerges from a cocoon. And if you choose not to face those shadows of yourself, but to carry on evading them, you will probably find you can change the behaviour with willpower alone temporarily, but eventually you’ll ping back to the familiar old patterns you’ve always done, such as being overweight, being in financial crisis, arguing with those you love most, sabotaging your career… the list of disempowering behaviours goes on…

So, is it time to embrace the darkness?

For this coming month, here are some questions to ask yourself that may help;

What is it I regret?

Where am I most stuck?

What thing that I really don’t want keeps coming back into my life again and again and again?

If I could change one unwanted behaviour in myself, what would it be?

Feel free to post your comments below…

Thanks to Donna Heath for her fabulous New Moon Energy calls… click here to visit her website or mail me if you’re interested in joining our monthly calls.