This Wednesday, the 14th of May, is a Full Moon. The phases of the Moon have become very important to me as I continue on my radical self love journey and get more invested in magic and spirituality. Since last summer, I’ve been meeting with a group of very special women every month, to celebrate the Moon and reconnect to ourselves. It has transformed my life!

A while ago, I wrote about living your life by the phases of the Moon, and it seemed to resonate. If you want to celebrate the New and Full Moons, you should, and you don’t need a group to do it with you.

Choosing to focus your intention is a wonderful way to bring your life into focus. Doing a Full Moon ritual like this is totally non-denominational and not intimidating at all. It can be whatever you want: as long or as short as you like, as serious or as silly as you’re in the mood for, and it can serve any purpose you want. It’s really not tricky, and I want to show you how to do it, so today, we’re going to talk about to create a Full Moon ritual that serves your individual needs!

You might be wondering, why is the Full Moon special? Well, the Moon is powerful: it influences the tide as well as our personal cycles, and it has a much greater impact on us than most of us realise. New and Full Moons are particularly potent. We generally say that New Moons are great for setting an intention or a goal, while a Full Moon signifies a release or a letting go of something which no longer serves you.

Here’s how to get started…

Prepare your space
This might be as simple as closing your door, but it could be as involved as cleaning the room, burning sage, lighting candles (I like simple white pillars), or spritzing a room-clearing spray. Do whatever you need to make your space feel special and sacred.

Ground yourself
Get into the ritual mindset by grounding your energy. There are a lot of different ways to do this, for example, using crystals, visualising it through meditation, or the Tree of Life technique. Here are even more ideas. The way that you ground yourself will probably, with time, become unique to you. Practice whatever technique feels best to you! (By the way, grounding yourself regularly — as in every day — is a great energetic exercise with many benefits.)

Chant
Chanting is my new favourite thing. I remember years ago being encouraged to chant in yoga classes, and it just made me feel really uncomfortable. I didn’t know what the words signified, and it made me feel uneasy. However, a couple of kundalini experiences and some time spent with my magical babes has completely flipped the script on how I feel about chanting. Chanting is powerful, it transforms the space (both physically and energetically), and it can alter the frequency of your spirit.

You can chant whatever you like. Om, chanted three times, is easy to remember. Ek Ong Kar Sat Gur Prasad is one of my best-loved mantras, and it puts you into a super-magical manifesting state. You can also chant the elements: earth, air, fire, water.

Meditate
Few things feel as good as a guided meditation, and they feel especially great during ritual. Doreen Virtue has some beautiful guided meditations that I think you’ll love. Try this one to help you release negative patterns and toxic relationships, or this chakra-clearing meditation. I really enjoyed this guided kundalini meditation, too. Blissful!

Pull cards
I love to add some kind of divination into ritual, and often I’ll use tarot cards to help me tune in and receive messages. My favourite deck is The Wild Unknown, which you’ve probably seen on every Tumblr this side of Timbuktu. You can ask any questions that are important to you. At the last ritual I attended, we pulled two cards: one that signified the thing we were letting go of, and one to indicate what we were bringing into our lives.

Focus your intention
This is the really meaty part of the ritual! As I said, you can literally do whatever you want, but here are some suggestions…
Think about what you’d like to let go of, and then do it symbolically. On paper, write down the thing you’re releasing, and then burn the paper or bury it in dirt.
If you have objects or personal effects you’d like to add a little va-va-voom to, place them near a window so the Moon can charge ’em up all night long.
Do candle magic! Simply carve a word into a candle and anoint it with oil. There’s lots of information about how to do it here.
Check out what’s happening in the sky, and tie your ritual into the astrological goings-on. Have a look at this chart of Moons and ritual suggestions: it’s so helpful!

Eat some chocolate!
Okay, this isn’t strictly part of the ritual but it’s something we always end up doing in NYC! As well as being delicious, it’s a good way to get yourself back into your body. Sometimes when you focus your intention like this, you can feel a bit out of sorts, and re-engaging your physical senses really helps bring you back.

Some other suggestions:
Find a friend and encourage them to participate with you. It’s way more fun that way!
If you can, get outside to feel the air on your skin. At our last ritual in NYC, we scurried over to a neighbourhood park to bury discarded rose petals. It felt a little silly, but it was wonderful!
Dress for the occasion. If you’re honouring the Moon, surely you should dress up!

Have you ever created your own rituals? If you end up giving this a try, I’d love to hear all about it!

Magic and moonbeams,

Photos by Nishe.