A Wolf Moon Is Coming & It's The Perfect Opportunity To Cleanse Yourself From Toxic Surroundings

On January 1, New Years Day, our calendar will spontaneously align with the lunar calendar in a beautifully synchronistic way. The beauty of beginning the New Year on a full moon (also referred to as the "Wolf Moon") is how it directs us to ring in the new year with an eye on what we don't want. The meaning of the Wolf Moon on New Year's Day is significant because it points to making some altercations in the way we form our resolutions.

Full moons are about harvest, and New Year's Eve is about setting goals. Ordinarily, the lunar calendar says to save the goal setting for a new moon, and to use the full moon to pull up the weeds and discard anything getting in the way of your best self. It can be tempting on New Year's Eve to forget about last year, and to rush forward to a blank slate as fast as you can. But the full moon asks us to reflect more. The full moon is about harvest, which means discarding the things that no longer serve us, the beliefs, the people, and the activities that actually hold us back from becoming the truest version of ourselves.

Focus and reflect on what you don't want.

As you focus on the last year of your life during the full moon, consider what behaviors you could have left out. Think about the people, places and things that got in the way of you being the best you could be, and as you ring in 2018, consider how you'll phase those out as you form your resolutions.

Perhaps this year you made a ton of new connections who have helped you in your career but at the cost of your much-cherished solitude. Maybe you've attached yourself to a gym membership that ended up filling you with guilt instead of the "confident new you" they promised in the contract. Maybe you've said for years that you don't want to go home for Christmas anymore, but you always end up going because you allow your family to pressure you.

Consider what you have to give up in order to nurture yourself better.

The full moon on New Year's Day will give you the push you need to get rid of these pointless habits that drain your energy and leave you feeling like your life isn't your own. Being true to your own instincts, and parenting yourself in all the ways that your actual parents didn't is part of what the moon's energy has to teach.

One good resolution that sticks to the theme of the lunar calendar's harvest time is to stop saying yes when you actually mean no. The amount of things I agree to do when I know, deep down, I'm not going to want to do them when the day finally comes is infuriating. This year, make a resolution to stop wasting your time on anything that isn't true to your own wants and needs, and stick to that.

Think of what you want to develop emotionally, and what you have to sacrifice to do so.

The moon governs our childhood upbringing, our relationship to our parents or parental figures, and the ways we developed emotionally in the world; therefore, a full moon and in a new year is the perfect time to consider these things.

No parent is perfect, so there are obviously going to be areas of our lives where we are lacking in our emotional development. Consider where yours lie, and don't be afraid to be brutally honest, so long as you are able to do so without judging yourself. In fact, forgiveness and compassion might be the first area you come up against while you reflect on this. Ask yourself: where in your own life are you emotionally stunted, and what can you do within yourself to change that? What beliefs can you discard? What habitual patterns can you see yourself breaking? What stands in the way of your desire to be more spiritually fit? These are the questions that can form your resolutions for 2018.

Working with the power of the full moon will amp up the desire behind what you resolve to do — and desire is really the thing that makes us succeed or fail at those resolutions.