Society places a heavy emphasis on "solar" qualities that are prized in corporate settings, where more "lunar" qualities are not as well-respected in our culture. This can leave us feeling pretty imbalanced. In this episode, Kristen takes you through five ways you can embrace your divine lunar energy, guided by the tarot. Before that, Kristen discusses the recent Oatly drama and helps you decide whether it's the right milk alternative for you.
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Society places a heavy emphasis on "solar" qualities that are prized in corporate settings, where more "lunar" qualities are not as well-respected in our culture. This can leave us feeling pretty imbalanced. In this episode, Kristen takes you through five ways you can embrace your divine lunar energy, guided by the tarot. Before that, Kristen discusses the recent Oatly drama and helps you decide whether it's the right milk alternative for you.
Mentioned in this episode:
Enjoying the show and want a simple way to say thanks? Buy me a cup of tea ☕️
Keep in touch!
Website
Instagram
Email: thelunarbody AT gmail DOT com
Thanks for listening!
Hello and welcome to the Lunar Body, I'm your host, Kristen Ciccolini, period priestess, nutritionist, and the founder of Good Witch Kitchen.
My friends, my dear friends, I have a free workshop coming up in two weeks and if you’re into all the things we talk about on this podcast, living cyclically, smashing the patriarchy, health, you’re gonna want to join us for this one. It’s called The Patriarchy vs. Your Body. When i taught this class last September it was my most popular, ever, class. Like, I had to upgrade my Zoom membership because I was afraid we wouldn’t be able to fit everyone. But we did, and it was fine, and it was a lot of fun, so I’m bringing it back.
It’s going to be a look at your hormone health through a more inclusive and feminist lens. We’re going to talk about:
The goal of this workshop is to help you understand how you can embrace your own inner power and align your life with the flow of your menstrual cycle. This information has helped so many people, ti has changed my life, it’s changed my clients’ lives and I can’t wait for it to impact yours and help you find the power in your period.⠀
The class is happening on May 19, so that’s two weeks from today if you’re listening to this on the day it comes out. If you can’t make it live, no problem, I will send a replay afterwards, but only if you sign up, so go ahead and RSVP at goodwitchkitchen.net/workshop .
This week for the listener question I want to talk about Oatly, because there was an article going around talking about how Oatly is basically soda, and any time there’s some viral article about a food not being as healthy as it’s marketed I get a bunch of people tagging me or DMing me asking my thoughts. I talked a little about this on Instagram but I’m going to elaborate a little bit here.
So. Back story. If you don’t know what Oatly is, it’s oat milk and for some reason it has become the most absurdly popular oat milk. A couple years ago I wrote a blog post with a recipe for a dupe of Oatly because all the coffee shops were out of it and the shortage was making people go berserk and I wanted to help these poor baristas from being harassed about it every day.
Oatly is a brand of oat milk. And recently, there was an article written by Nat Eliason titled Oatly: The New Coke. So obviously, a bit of a sensationalist title, but it’s a really interesting article on marketing strategies that obscure the truth and create confusion in order to sell more product, and there’s also a reason he made that comparison.
I’m going to read you what it says:
“Oatly’s main ingredient is their oat base, which they make through a process of breaking down raw oats into their loose fibers to mix them with water and create a watery oat-based liquid. This process creates a sugar called maltose, which is why Oatly packaging shows 7g added sugar per serving. Of all the different kinds of sugars you can eat, maltose has the highest glycemic index, with a rating of 105 out of 100. For comparison, table sugar has a rating of 65, and the high-fructose corn syrup you get in a Coca-Cola has a GI around 65-75. There’s less of it in Oatly, but the sugar in Oatly has a higher gram-for-gram impact on your blood sugar than the HFCS in Coca-Cola.”
Ok. So — what is the glycemic index? The glycemic index is a measure of how a food will impact your blood sugar levels on a scale of 1 to 100.
The Oatly process uses natural enzymes to liquefy the oats, they said they do this to make the milk super creamy, which is one of its qualities that people really love, and then it’s this enzymatic reaction that creates maltose as a byproduct.
So the article compares Oatly to Coca-Cola by saying that gram for gram Oatly will impact your blood sugar even more than soda.
This is true, and I think there’s more to it than that. What’s missing is the idea of glycemic load. Glycemic load is a more realistic view of the impact a food can have because it’s based on actual serving sizes. For example, watermelon is really high on the glycemic index, but you’re not eating an entire melon when you have it right? You’re more realistically only having a couple slices, so the glycemic load is much, much lower.
The GI of a food also becomes lower when you’re eating it with fat, protein, or fiber because those three things help slow down the release of sugar into the bloodstream.
So, keeping these things in mind, the article likens Oatly to soda and also talks about it in the context of a 12oz serving, which is like a latte size. If you’re making lattes with that much Oatly, do I think you need to stop? No, I think you can do whatever you want to do, and I think it’s important to take note of how it makes you feel afterwards. If you feel like crap after, maybe it’s not the best milk alternative for you, or maybe you’re better off making it yourself.
If you’re just pouring a couple tablespoons into your coffee in the morning, then this article might feel incredibly sensational and in this case it would be because it’s such a small amount and does not equate to you pouring soda into your morning brew.
Do I personally use Oatly? I don’t, and I didn’t before this article either mostly because it’s so easy to make at home and I try to avoid canola oil where possible, because they do add canola oil into their oat milk. In the US, canola oil is highly processed and can be pro-inflammatory, so I just avoid it where I can. I don’t always because it’s in so many things, but oat milk is just so simple to make yourself I don’t think it’s worth even buying honestly, for me anyway.
Making oat milk at home won’t result in the same maltose content because you’re not adding any industrial enzymes that are going to result in that reaction. I have a recipe on my site that I’ll link to and it’s basically just 1 cup oats, 3-4 cups water, a tablespoon of neutral oil and a little salt — all you really need is oats and water but my recipe was intended to be an Oatly dupe so that’s what I came up with. Use less water if you want it to be creamier, and use a neutral oil like walnut or avocado, something that’s stable at room temperature. Coconut oil might make your milk a little chunky in the fridge. The oil is there to emulsify and help with the creaminess, it also helps keep it from getting slimy, which some people experience when they DIY.
If you don’t want to make it yourself but you’re concerned about maltose, you can still use Oatly. Keep in mind what I said about glycemic load — if it’s paired with other macronutrients it’s not going to have as drastic an effect on your blood sugar. So if you’re making coffee, add in a fat like coconut oil or ghee, or protein like collagen powder, to help slow the absorption. And if you’re using it in smoothies, the fiber in the fruit and vegetables that you use will help out, and you can add nut butter, chia seeds, and other proteins and fats to balance it out too.
So — verdict on Oatly? Buy it, or don’t buy it, it’s up to you, maybe you don’t care about this at all. I’m just here to present the information, I am always for being informed about the things we spend our money on and put in our bodies. We deserve to know what we’re consuming so there can be informed consent or dissent.
We all have a relationship with the moon. I talk about lunar bodies and solar bodies in reference to how our menstrual cycles resemble the moon sun cycles, as a more inclusive way to discuss what’s conventionally referred to as the female and male hormonal cycles, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have access to the other’s energy.
A lot of people refer to masculine and feminine energy. Qualities that we all embody regardless of gender. But as I learn more and as I work towards being more inclusive with my language, I question what those words really mean, since we are still assigning character traits and behaviors to binary terms. I think it’s more of an accurate embodiment of the concept to think of the Chinese yin and yang, the receptive and the active. I believe it’s still also explained in gendered terms here too but I like that it gives us additional language to use.
To quote Wikipedia, because I like the way it’s described here and don’t think I could say it any better: Yin and yang describing how seemingly opposite or contrary forces may actually be complementary, interconnected, and interdependent in the natural world, and how they may give rise to each other as they interrelate to one another.
Discussing this dualistic concept as solar energy and lunar energy as I prefer to do is still binary I suppose, but since we all have relationships with these celestial bodies, and can understand their energies using those archetypes, that’s the language I’m going to use today.
So everyone has both solar and lunar energies within them, and as the description of the yin yang kind of implied, when you know how to embrace each one, you can be one pretty powerful being.
The thing is, our world is very heavily focused on what serves the solar cycle and those who live in solar bodies. Confidence, action, extroversion, drive, discipline, productivity, individualism — these are all traits that are revered in society. They set us up for success in the corporate world.
More lunar energy traits (empathy, intuition, creativity, nurturing, sensitivity, receptivity, collectivism) aren’t as respected and are often dismissed as less important. And for the corporate world? If you show any of these in a traditional office setting, you’re often putting yourself at risk of not being taken seriously. It sucks, but it’s true. Have you ever had to go to the bathroom to hide your tears? Or were you told you were too sensitive when someone made an off-color remark? Yeah, I’ve been there.
Now what does this have to do with your health?
Well, in your lunar body, the result of focusing so much on the solar traits is that we feel deeply imbalanced, which affects us mentally and physically. The world revolves around these patriarchal standards of living. You probably already know the harmful emotional toll that this can take, but on the physical front, it can throw off your hormones, because it encourages to actively resist your cycle.
Mentsruator’s cycles are more complex than the 24-hour cycle that governs the hormones of people without ovaries or a uterus. Their bodies repeat the same cycle day after day. Our hormones fluctuate over the course of 28 days on average, and so we change through each phase of our cycle — our energy, our metabolism, our interests, digestion, immunity, and more.
When you try living out of harmony with your natural cycle, it can kind of feel like you’re a square peg trying to fit in a round hole. If you’ve ever felt guilty about not being productive every single day, or for resting even though you needed it, if you’ve ever been told you’re too sensitive, that it’s all in your head, listen up.
Your hormones dictate a lot about your health, so it’s really important to honor your ebbs and flows, tune in to how you feel, and adjust the script accordingly.
Otherwise the more we try to fit into a space that wasn’t designed for us, the more stressed we’re going to be, and chronic stress sets off a cascade effect of elevated cortisol, suppressed thyroid, estrogen dominance, and other hormonal issues.
So I wanted to talk about some practices for embracing your lunar energy today, guided by the tarot. I had fun pulling cards for the last episode so I thought that I’d pull a few more for this one to help us think a little outside of the box.
The first card is the King of Cups. Alright. This is about strong emotional intelligence, and sharing your gifts with others. What does that mean to you? I feel like this is a good archetype to embody when embracing empathy and sensitivity to others. How can you tap into your creative gifts in order to help lift others up around you?
Also there’s an emphasis on order, and peace. What have you learned about managing emotions or maintaining stability through chaos? Where do you find peace show up in your life or what do you turn to when you need to feel calm and collected? How can you share those lessons with others?
Maybe your creative gift is poetry and you offer your readers solace through your words. Or you’re an artist who wants to channel their energy into a painting that can be gifted to a community center. Or you’re an energy healer and your gifts are shared with the community as often as you feel that it’s available to you. Maybe you’re an actual teacher, or a therapist, or another practitioner who helps guide others. The King of Cups encourages you to impart your wisdom through that exchange. Not necessarily in a master-to-student type relationship, more as a peer-to-peer thing. This card is about having a good balance between the head and the heart, and inflated egos are not part of it, and that’s more of a solar quality anyway. So how do we stay on the watery, service-focused side with our shared wisdom?
But maybe that’s not your role, maybe you aren’t feeling like you’re in a place to offer any wisdom to anyone. Sometimes it can feel like we’re flailing and we’re all just trying to figure it out and don’t feel like we have any advice. Have some compassion for yourself. Sometimes instead we lead by example instead. Caring for yourself can show others how to care for themselves. Self-care can also be communal care if we’re filling up our own cups in order to pour it into others.
So that’s embracing lunar energy through the King of Cups.
Next, we have The Star. This is the card of self-care and fertility. Fertility doesn’t always have to relate to your cycle, but maybe thinking about, where are you well-resourced? Think of all the places in your life where you experience abundance. Abundance of material things, abundance of love, happiness, pleasure, knowledge, skill, creativity, friendship.
The Star is also about trusting in whatever higher power you believe in. Trusting in the process. You are intelligent, level-headed. You don’t have your head entirely in the clouds but it’s up there, trying to get a peek.
Think about this card in the sequence of the deck. It comes after The Tower, which is all about tumbling structures, shaky foundations, destruction in order to rebuild. The Star is what comes after. It’s faith that the universe has your back. You got through the destruction of the Tower, you came through, you had all the power you needed inside of you to do that.
So to embrace your lunar energy here, maybe it’s worth taking some time to daydream. What would you do if you knew you would be supported no matter what? What’s something you always wanted to do but were afraid of whether or not you’d fail? What part of you is hiding because you’re worried about what others would say? Dream up all the people you could be and the experiences you could have if you knew, and you trusted, that everything would work out.
This doesn’t always mean it will work out. We don’t just wish things into existence, we have to put work in to make things happen, but getting over that barrier of fear is such a major step in achieving anything that we do.
When I was thinking about doing this podcast, I was afraid that other people would think I’m nuts. That I’m to woo-woo, which is a term I actually no longer use and am planning an episode about, but that’s a fear of mine is that people will use that term to describe me. That people aren’t going to vibe with my politics and my belief that wellness is entirely political and give me low ratings. That people are going to hate my voice and think I’m boring. But I eventually said fuck it. This is something I’m going to do, it’s fun to me, and my belief in accessibility is greater than my fear of something I don’t even know will actually happen.
So do a little daydreaming. Write a story about the person you wish to be and embrace it. Make a bucket list. Do some shadow work. And let go of any notion that the universe punishes you for anything — negative thoughts, misguided actions, situations from the past that you regret — the universe doesn’t punish.
Daydreaming might feel best in your menstrual phase, or during the new moon, when we start to plant seeds for our intentions. It’s also when you might feel the most intuitive, so you may come up with new ideas for things that you never would have realized you wanted for yourself. If your menstrual phase is more of a time for mental rest, the follicular phase, particularly in the latter half towards ovulation, is a great time to brainstorm as your energy is growing.
Next card — Ten of Pentacles, Reversed.
Ok we’re back in the material realm. And maybe a little too much so. There’s a heavy focus on the solar qualities here that we talked about earlier. When this card is upright it’s a lot about security for the future, abundance, making sure you have all the necessary plans in place to ensure future-you is taken care of. Reversed I’m thinking more about how such a focus on the future is taking away from your present reality.
I’ll give an example from my own life, something I noticed recently. This past year has been very up and down for me business-wise. I experienced both my best and worst months ever financially — in my worst month, I made 5% of what I made in my best month. I have had low income for 75% of my adult life, and being home a lot and not traveling this year, despite all the financial ups and downs, actually allowed me to save more, and I finally feel like I’m at a safe place in my savings. But given my experience with low income, I find myself obsessively checking my savings account, like just to make sure it’s still there as if it would somehow magically disappear one day. And that’s one way it can manifest, if you have experiences with money like this that keep you hyperfocused on accumulation and feeling like it’s never enough. That takes you away from appreciating what you do have in the present.
So maybe it’s an accumulation of wealth that you’re focused on or maybe it’s more worry about your 401K or saving for your kid’s college fund, or keeping up with the jones’s and buying things that are beyond your means. Is that even a thing people say anymore? Keeping up with the Jones’s? Keeping up with the Kardashians? I don’t know. You know what I mean.
The point is, if you are hyperfocused on material things that are giving you excessive worry or taking up a lot of mental space, it may be good to ground yourself a little bit and embrace some of that lunar energy through practices that keep you in the present moment. This doesn’t mean to ignore your finances or future plans, especially if you’re working on putting things in the right place, but it is an invitation to pause.
Get sensual. Come home to yourself and this moment. I’ve mentioned before doing this with food, experiencing a meal through each individual sense — sight, smell, sound, touch, and taste. I love having clients do this while they eat so they can see how a more relaxed and present time with food can really change their experience of a meal.
But it can also be a practice as you move throughout your day. Take your time with things. Slow down and pay attention to your senses. You can do this not just with food but maybe also in your daily shower or bath. Take a little extra time to lather up, feel the water on your skin, pouring over your head, massage yourself with oil or a fancy lotion when you get out.
Could your relationships stand to have a little more presence in them too? Think about the people who you want to be in your future, not just the 401K. How can you slow down and give your full attention to those people too?
Ok two more cards, I’m doing five today. Next is the 8 of Wands.
This card sometimes feels suffocating to me, more so exciting, but it depends on my mood that day, honestly. I would love to know how you feel about this one. It’s a simple image of eight wands flying through the air. It feels fast, and fast can feel like too much or it can feel exciting like I said, but it’s generally considered a positive card. It’s definitely about some transformative action, movement, and regardless of how you feel about it, it calls for your bravery in action, because the pace is picking up.
These things are decidedly on the solar, yang end of the spectrum, so how do we access lunar energy through the eight of wands?
Well, the speed of this card kind of suggests you gotta get your shit together because time’s a wastin’. What do you need to do to be able to go with the flow with as little friction as you can? What could stand to be more in alignment?
What I find interesting about this card is that there is really nothing else to it. There are no people depicted in the imagery in the Rider Waite Smith version, and there is nothing getting in their way. They travel together and get to their destination together unobstructed. If we want to take a lesson from that and embrace it in lunar fashion, what about joining forces with others for a common good? What can you offer to eliminate obstacles for others who are trying to achieve a mutual goal? Collectivism over individualism.
Pick a cause that you care about. Maybe it’s organizations that support reproductive justice, or groups that are fighting for a more inclusive sex-ed curriculum, or ones that supply menstrual products to those in need. Maybe it’s trans rights groups fighting against the recent wave of anti-trans youth legislation. Maybe it’s prison abolition or police abolition or supporting the families of Black lives that have been murdered by the police.
We move forward together, and offering your support helps clear the path towards progress bit by bit. You can donate to these causes financially, or offer your time, or your amplification if you have an audience, or by talking about these issues with friends and family and being vocal. If you identify as a witch, this is a highly recommended practice. The witch identity carries with it a lot of responsibility, not just in reverence to our craft but also to give voice or redistribute privilege to those who have less. Witchcraft without communal care is not true witchcraft.
Witches were once known as healers in their communities, they shared their gifts with people in need and I believe if we take on this craft and this identity then we have a responsibility to continue that tradition, both in the material and metaphysical realm. Magic and mutual aid. That’s how we move forward and the more of us that contribute the faster we can get to that destination.
The final card, I love it, is The Fool. What better way to embrace our lunar energy than to be fully receptive to the experience of being in this world?
The Fool has a childlike wonder. The Fool is flexible, young in spirit, full of potential. It’s the first card in the Major Arcana and the beginning of a cycle. I kind of like that this is the last card especially when we’re so focused on our cyclical nature because when this comes up it’s a reminder to forget everything you know. To embrace not being an expert in something. To leap before you look, within reason and safety of course.
It’s a reminder that nothing matters, no one cares, in a good way. To not be so serious about everything and to feel confident in trying new things without worrying about being embarrassed.
For this one I say, plan to not have a plan.
Solar energy vs lunar energy is the same idea as human doing vs. human being. We never really take the time to just be. To be open to witnessing and fully experiencing life rather than just trying to get through the day.
So do something rebellious, like a teenager would, that’s the Fool’s energy, think Big Teen Energy — plan NOT to be productive for a day.
I know, it’s hard. Trust me, my Virgo stellium just gasped from deep within me (I’m also a Generator in human design, so it’s extra freaky for me to say this, but always feels so good when I do it).
Let your intuition guide what you do for the day. You might find it takes you places you never would have consciously chosen. And by letting your intuition guide you, I mean really checking in with yourself for each decision, ask yourself if you’re doing it for you, or for someone else. Are there external expectations at play or are you honoring what you want to do? Of course, this isn’t realistic for every situation, but if you can give yourself a day to just let your intuition do the talking and the deciding, maybe clue your friends in on what you’re doing and see if they’ll indulge you in this, you might end up having some fun, getting weird, and really embracing your authentic self.
Lunar energy is powerful as hell (which is why I think it’s often looked down on, but that’s a rant for another day). And there’s nothing inherently wrong with that yang, solar energy, we’re just forced to use it more often to get by in a capitalist society and so we become imbalanced and neglect this side of us.
So let’s embrace the lunar and bring ourselves back into balance. Learning how to harness this power allows you to better integrate the two in your life and intuitively know when each is needed.
That’s it for today. Thank you for listening!