It’s Here: Cancer Season! Keep Things Simple and Trust Your Intuition

We are ushered into Cancer season with the Summer Solstice and the sun will be traveling through Cancer until July 22. Welcome to the fourth sign of the zodiac!

Cancer is a cardinal water sign and it represents the search for self through an emotional lens. For information or experience to be absorbed, it first needs to be felt. It needs to be processed through the senses and emotions.

One of the reasons why I love the Cancer archetype is that it reminds me of the work we do not just in life, but also in yoga, to discover our own lived truth. You are your own best teacher. While I can suggest practices for you to do or books for you to read, your own experience and emotional response with these things will dictate what you take away from them. What seeps into your consciousness. What direction it leads you in. What realizations you will have, or not have.

That’s why it is so important for you to pay attention to how you feel and how your energy shifts throughout your yoga practice. It’s also why journaling can be so impactful. It helps you to pull back the layers. To dig deeper into what your body and intuition are telling you. To what you already instinctively know.

Because the Cancer archetype is related to experience through emotion it can be sensitive to energy and its environment. Coming after the buzzy air sign of Gemini, Cancer is both reminding and inviting us to be thoughtful of what we surround ourselves with. That we need to remember to protect ourselves and maintain a stable energy within ourselves. To nurture and reduce overwhelm. Cancer season is a great opportunity to begin experimenting with a meditation practice if you don’t already have one!

We don’t need to retreat into our crabby protective shells (the Crab is the symbol for the sign of Cancer) but we do need to be thoughtful of how receptive we are to vibrational energy and make smart choices with how we interpret it and interact with it. Cancer teaches us to take responsibility for our own emotional response. As you learn to connect with your own needs, you also begin to learn how to create any necessary boundaries in your life to maintain your safety.

Cancer is governed by the Moon. The Moon symbolizes emotions, intuition and caretaking. It represents how we nurture ourselves. You can look at your own moon sign to gain a better understanding for how you can best nurture and soothe yourself.

Like all signs, Cancer has both positive and negative expressions. In the positive end of the spectrum Cancer can exude sensitivity, gentleness, and nurturing. When negative, Cancer can come across as moody, irritable or over-sensitive and excluding people who are not “members of their clan.” Notice how all of these are emotional, feeling expressions? Just opposite sides of the same coin. I like to think that in the moments we realize that our expression is on the negative end, we can look to the opposite and choose to behave more often in that manner, instead.

Want to learn more about how you can integrate astrology into your yoga practice? Join me in Yoga Luna, my course where you’ll learn how to combine yoga and medical astrology to personalize your yoga practice.