Lunar Magic: The Moon, Emotion, Intuition, and Inner Rhythm (Episode 5)
In Episode 5 of The Seven: Living with the Planets, Lucy Baldwin explores the Moon, one of the most intimate and psychologically powerful planetary archetypes.
The Moon is the realm of dreams, emotion, intuition, memory, rhythm, and the unconscious. Lunar magic teaches us how to live with our inner tides, how to honor feeling without becoming ruled by it, and how to find balance through cyclical presence.
This is one of the most beloved entry points into planetary practice, because the Moon is not abstract.
It is immediate.
It is the inner world.
Watch Episode 5 of The Seven here:
Key Takeaways (Lunar Magic)
In this episode, Lucy explores:
The Moon as the planet of dreams, emotion, and intuition
Lunar magic as inner rhythm and emotional balance
The Moon’s relationship to the unconscious and shadow patterns
Waxing and waning cycles as spiritual timing
The Moon as a mirror, beacon, and priestess current
A simple water-based Moon ritual you can try immediately
What the Moon Represents in Planetary Magic
The Moon governs the inner landscape.
In classical planetary magic, the Moon is associated with:
nighttime dreams
intuition and instinct
the unconscious psyche
emotional truth
belonging, safety, and comfort
habit, memory, and attachment
Lucy describes the Moon as a liminal realm, the dream world through which reality is constantly being shaped from beneath the surface.
To work with the Moon is to work with what is happening inside you.
Not as an idea, but as a living tide.
The Moon as Inner Saturn: Rhythm and Balance
Lucy offers a striking comparison:
Saturn governs structure externally.
The Moon governs rhythm internally.
Both are cyclical forces that teach balance, but the Moon’s domain is emotional rather than material.
The Moon asks you to slow down.
To rest.
To feel.
To attune.
Intuition requires quiet.
Lunar magic is the practice of that quiet attunement.
The Moon and Emotional Sovereignty
The Moon teaches emotional honesty, but also emotional maturity.
Lucy speaks about the danger of avoiding feeling through distraction, and the opposite danger of becoming emotionally stuck through attachment.
The Moon can “latch on.”
This is one way we recognize lunar imbalance:
anxiety around change
fear of silence or emptiness
compulsive distraction
difficulty letting go
The Moon invites a healthier movement:
Feel the wave.
Let it crest.
Release it.
Emotion is water.
It moves.
Lunar Cycles: Waxing, Waning, Attraction, Release
One of the most practical aspects of lunar magic is timing.
Lucy explains a foundational rhythm:
As the Moon wanes (shrinks), it supports shedding, letting go, banishing
As the Moon waxes (grows), it supports attraction, growth, increase
The Moon can enhance other magical work simply through alignment with its phase.
Lunar cycles teach that growth happens in seasons.
Expansion and contraction are both sacred.
The Moon as Mirror, Beacon, and Priestess Current
Lucy names one of her favorite lunar themes:
The Moon as a mirror into the soul.
The Moon reflects what is hidden.
It illuminates the unconscious in soft silver light.
In magic, the Moon often serves as a vessel that enhances other planetary currents.
Lucy describes lunar energy as the priestess archetype:
The intuitive channel.
The receptive mirror.
The inner beacon in the dark.
A Simple Moon Ritual (Water and Fantasy)
Lucy offers a beautiful, immediate lunar practice:
Go into water.
a pool
a hot tub
a lake or ocean (if available)
even a shower
Look through the water and notice how visibility becomes mysterious, foggy, dreamlike.
Then ask:
What is my fantasy right now?
What is my dream?
What would feel delicious and alive?
The Moon is the dream world.
Let yourself float in possibility.
Notice what arises.
Inspiration often comes from this lunar softness.
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Hello, welcome to another episode of The Seven. I'm Lucy Baldwin, and this is a podcast all about living with the planets, using planets to do magic, to take them on as allies and use their wisdom and guidance to actualize our dreams. Speaking of dreams, today's episode is all about the moon. I want to talk about the moon. So the moon, of course, is linked to our
nighttime dreams and Yesod, which is in the tree of life. Yesod is the liminal space. sort of, it is the dream world. It's the ethereal realm. And we are of course always dreaming reality into existence. so dreams are really important. They're actually wildly good at telling us things about ourselves, telling us sort of
showing us what's going on in our psyche, what's going on in our unconscious. So the moon is also, of course, associated with our emotional landscape, ⁓ intuition, the unconscious, and so much more. And I'm going to get into all of that today. ⁓ But first, I had like a really interesting hit when I was thinking about this episode today, because I was...
of seeing how the themes of the moon mirror Saturn in a lot of ways, but it's kind of this internal version of Saturn. So Saturn is really like the material world, the physical world, the 4D reality, it's time and space. And so there's a lot with Saturn in terms of actualizing things in the outer world.
But the moon is a very similar thing. It's it's cycles and it's rhythms and it's finding balance. These are all themes I talk about with Saturn externally, but with the moon, we're actually we're looking at the similar themes, but it's the internal emotional side. But I also liken Mercury to sort of be ⁓ a counterpart with Saturn because Mercury is the mind.
So we often think of mind, body, heart, right? It's mind is the mind, body is the physical and heart is the emotional, right? So we have Mercury, Saturn and the moon is Mercury is the mind, Saturn is the body.
And the moon is the heart, it's our emotions. And all three of those, what an incredible triad that we have there. the other thing that I want to mention is that there's a lot of intensity with some of these other planets. Like, Saturn is time and death and change. It's all very intense. The sun is like this ever
penetrating force. It's this self-sustaining, just intense battery power source, just emanating energy. And literally everything revolves around it and keeping us all alive, you know? And Mars is going out and doing it. It's really intense. And ⁓ Jupiter is expanding and expanding. And the moon asks us to slow down.
it's kind of like a breath of fresh air. And of course it's cool. There's a coolness to the moon. It's associated with silver. And we associate it with nighttime and nighttime is kind of when things slow down and we rest. And so the moon has a very soothing presence and being associated of course with emotions, it's also associated with water because
You know, water being the element of emotion. So it's also intuition. And I think there's something kind of popping out at me here, which is that, you you kind of have to slow down, you kind of have to have that rest, that dark time in order to be able to sense and...
feel and become in tune with your intuition. Intuition asks us to slow down and feel and to kind of acknowledge where we are in a process and feel ourselves and trust ourselves and take that beat to make sure that everything is aligned. And it's also, you know, there's a lot of wisdom.
in the moon and it's kind of our inner reality, right? So it's our emotional truth, our subconscious patterns. This is one of the main things that brought me to the moon. Initially, I was really into shadow work and shifting my sort of my unconscious and trying to bring my unconscious on board with whatever it is that I'm trying to create is such a huge part of having success in magic. You know, it's like...
I have an episode someday coming out that I've already made. It's like, why magic sometimes doesn't work? Well, if it doesn't work, it's because you've got some unconscious beliefs or identities or patterns that are holding you back, triggers that are sending you down certain ⁓ pathways or reaction formations, things that we get triggered and then our unconscious takes over and avoids whatever it is that we were trying to...
do or whatever it is that we need to do to get the thing that we want, right? So the moon works with that. And of course, because it's the dreams, it's the dreamland, it's the nighttime, it's the darkness. It's also memory and habit. And I think it's interesting how memory and dreams, when you get into studying memory,
We have a lot, a lot, lot of research has gone into human memory. And it is so much worse than we realize. Like we just make up stories about our past. We kind of just have to own that most of our memories, and the more times you recall a memory too, the more you might believe it and think that like, I remember it so clearly. ⁓
they've done a lot of studies around flashbulb memories. For example, 9-11, a lot of people claim that they know where they were on 9-11 and research has showed that most people are like dead wrong. Their memory just, it's a fantasy. It's a dream. It's an illusion. And it's not actually very accurate, unfortunately. So, I mean, it's okay. It's great. we kind of have to, you know, there's something sort of shifty here that's like,
We don't want to be too tied to our memories and our past. I think there's an important lesson here in being really present with ourselves. And I'm really big on, this is sort of a side note, but I'm really big on working with what is here now and not spending a lot of time working on stuff that happened because we don't even know. And that doesn't actually, in my experience, it doesn't actually resolve much.
rehash things and to spend a lot of time studying our past, it's actually much more helpful. In my experience, to work with the sensations and the feelings, the emotions, the patterns, the beliefs, and the things that are coming up now, right now. We don't have to understand them. We don't have to study them. We don't have to have an explanation for them. We can just work with them. We can shift them and move them and ⁓ make a lot
take, make a lot of forward momentum that way, rather than thinking about, you know, where they came from, like how, you know, that's a really nice way to assign blame and to pick ourselves apart and study ourselves, which is fun. And you can totally do that if you want to, but I don't see that. I rarely see that causing major shifts in people's lives, if you know what I mean. Okay, so sorry, that was a little pet tangent of mine. ⁓
safety, comfort, belonging. These are all lunar things. And one of the things that I really want to get into here
Lucy Baldwin (08:39)
is its cyclical nature, right? It's the moon. It comes around every the tides and it governs these cycles in nature and this, ⁓ you know, 28 day-ish cycle of...
bigger and then getting smaller and it gives us a natural rhythm. And this is a really big part of the moon and it also, you know, it helps us, it helps us if we can work within this way ⁓ to understand ourselves, you know, and how growth happens in phases. And we want to honor this sort of
in and out, the coming and going, the inhale and the exhale, the expansion and the contraction, the ups and the downs. And the moon asks us to be present with all of that, be present on the whole path. And it's kind of like how it asks us to feel all of our emotions, even if they're hard, even if they're uncomfortable, to allow them and to work with them and to meet them where they are, meet ourselves where we are. Venus ⁓ is
desire and Venus attracts, right? Venus attracts and receives. Mars pushes. Mars goes out and gets. It pushes. It's an outward facing. But the moon attaches. It of like latches onto things, right? Because the moon is stuck to us. It just goes around. And so we can get stuck with the moon. So one of the ways that we know that we're sort of out of balance in terms of our own lunar
energy, our own lunar archetype internally in our own psyche is when we struggle to let things go, when we have anxiety around change, when we have fear of quiet, fear of silence, fear of emptiness, we seek distraction.
lot of us have trained ourselves to be really dependent on those distractions, to avoid feeling things that are uncomfortable. And the moon asks us to put the screen down, feel the discomfort, just be with your actually be with yourself and your emotions. So many people, and I can relate to this. ⁓ And probably you can too, at times it's
we all have moments where we want to avoid feeling whatever we're feeling. We want to kind of avoid what is present right now. And we use distraction to do that. then, you know, sometimes it'll all bubble up or sometimes it will, it will kind of harden and turn into a trigger or create a pattern.
and it will get stuck in our system, right? And cause friction within our system. So the moon asks us to show up for ourselves and honor our emotional side. ⁓ I think, you know, it's like everything in balance, everything in balance, always, always, always, always, we're seeking balance.
You know, we're seeking balance because we can also get stuck in emotion. We can get, like I just said, you know, we can attach to things and have a really hard time letting go of them. And a healthy way to move through, whatever emotional thing is coming up is to let it come over us, to feel it and to release it like a wave, you know? And of course the Moon is associated with water and emotion.
is associated with water and that's because it moves, it shifts, it's always changing. ⁓ But it's not like air, it's not so fast, it's not just here and then gone, it has an arc, it has ⁓ a wave form that comes and builds and you can kind of get over the crest of it and then you can start to feel the relief and let it go. And it's the same thing with happiness too, it's like we come up and then we can peak and then we can come back down again.
and we move through these natural cycles and rhythms and that's okay. We don't have to feel amazing all the time. We can of course move where our peaks are and where our min's are, right? We can better more of the time and we can try to have higher lows, for example, if that's important to you. Some people like the intensity of having really intense lows and really high highs and...
And we are all kind of honoring and following our own cycles, right? ⁓ So the moon really teaches you to stay with yourself and to honor yourself and to be true to yourself. And also we don't want to get stuck in our emotions. We don't want our emotions to rule our lives. This is very dangerous. This is, you lose sovereignty when you become too attached and brittle about anything.
Right? It's with any planet and anything that I could talk about. It's like you have to hold it and be able to let it go and ⁓ not make your identity around your emotions. So that's also a big part of having a healthy relationship with the moon. But one of my favorite lunar themes here and what has me really excited about the moon right now is
The moon as a beacon. So I'm working on a program that is not going to see the light of day until the fall, maybe late summer. But the idea is that the moon is... I like to think of it as a beacon. It's when we are doing magic, we work with the moon often to enhance the other planets.
So, for example, when the moon is getting smaller and smaller every day, we're thinking of shedding things. We're often trying to do magic where we're shedding things, right? Letting things go. Banishing is the technical, magical term. ⁓ And then when the moon is growing,
We're trying to attract things. We're trying to make things grow also. And so the moon can kind of enhance what else is going on around us or whatever other magic that we're doing. And we can also use it like a mirror. I always think of the moon as a mirror, right? A mirror into the soul, a mirror into the self, a mirror into the unconscious, a mirror in the dark. And so the moon is
it's kind of like a vessel to enhance the other planets. And so when I think of being a priestess and doing priestess I'm tapping into this lunar part of myself where I'm using my intuition and I'm turning myself into a channel through which I'm bringing in the, you know, whatever deity I'm working with.
So I actually use the moon in magic all the time. And even if I'm working with a different planet, even if I'm working with the sun or Jupiter or even a totally different pantheon in general, I will use that moon to become the priestess. And so I'm just sort of planting this seed for you. And there will be more about this later. But in the meantime,
since I'm doing this moon theme episode, I want to give you a fun thing that you can go and do yourself at home. I realize that right now it is the dead of winter, at least where I am in Connecticut. ⁓ It is the dead of winter. But I am so fortunate that I have a pool, an indoor pool at my gym that I can go in. If you have access to a pool or a hot tub, ⁓
then do that. If you're listening to this and it's summer wherever you are or whenever you are, then I suggest going into a body of water in nature because that will make this way better. I just did it in the pool because I can't go into a lake right now. So what I would recommend doing is...
getting into a body of water and looking, try to see the ground or the floor of the pool. And just notice how the water makes it kind of hard to see. This is very lunar. This is a very lunar way. This is like, you know, it's kind of like you can see it, but it's not clear, right? It's not clear visibility.
And that is what it's like looking at our unconscious, feel like sometimes it's, we can see the strokes of it and the colors and you know, certain features, but it's hard to get a crystal clear view, you know, maybe on a still quiet day when the, when the everything is just right, we might be able to see the bottom with extreme clarity, but a lot of times it's foggy and
What I want you to do, or what I'm recommending that you do, as sort of a ritual and way of connecting with the moon, is to just fantasize about, what is your fantasy right now? Like, what do you want? What is your dream? What do you want right now? What is something that just ⁓ would feel so good and juicy and delicious? Because, the moon is, as I said, it's the dream world,
And so there's this sort of fantasy side of it where anything can happen. And because in the dream world, anything can happen. There's no physical limitations. what I would recommend is just floating or if you can't float, and you could do this in the shower. I meant to say, if you don't have access to a hot tub or a pool or a lake,
or pond or a river or anything like that or the ocean, then you could do this in the shower. Because you're just in water. You're just getting in water and you're fantasizing.
See what happens. Notice how that feels for you. Notice what comes up for you. You might notice that you get a really cool idea. You might get a hit of inspiration. You might feel a connection to the moon or any other planet coming through you. Just notice what happens and if you do this and something awesome happens, definitely let us know in the reviews or in the comments of wherever you're watching this.
And with that, I'm going to sign off. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of The Seven Living with the Planets. I will see you next Thursday in the next episode.
New to this work?
Start with Lucy Baldwin’s complete Planetary Magic overview
This episode is part of the broader planetary practice explored in The Seven.
Frequently Asked Questions (Lunar Magic)
What does the Moon represent in astrology and planetary magic?
The Moon represents emotion, dreams, intuition, the unconscious, belonging, memory, and inner rhythm.
What is lunar magic?
Lunar magic is the practice of working with the Moon’s cycles and archetypal currents to deepen intuition, emotional balance, and inner alignment.
How do Moon phases affect ritual?
Waning Moon supports release and banishing. Waxing Moon supports attraction and growth. Lunar timing enhances magical intention.
How can I start working with the Moon?
Begin simply: slow down, feel your emotional tides, track lunar phases, and try a small water-based Moon ritual to connect with dreams and intuition.
Next Steps
If the Moon speaks to you, keep listening.
Lunar magic is one of the most immediate doorways into planetary relationship.
New episodes of The Seven: Living with the Planets are released weekly, and Lucy offers ongoing planetary rituals through her Inner Circle community.