January’s Full Moon is known as the Wolf Moon or the Quiet Moon. The Farmer’s Almanac tells us she is called the Wolf Moon because it was amid the cold and deep snows of January blanketing the night that the wolf packs could be heard howling hungrily outside the villages. The quiet moon refers to the quiet and solitary feeling of knowing that the hardest times have passed but there are still many moons before the return of the fertile season.

It is the awareness of the quietude of midwinter that should be the focus, the stillness requires people to plum deep into their personal stores of drive and courage in order to persevere it into Spring. For many this can be a numbing process, accomplished largely by shutting down sensory input from discomfort or related feelings. For many, the work becomes about calming levels of anxiety  in order to manage the feelings welling up from the quiet season. There is an opportunity here to reconfigure these patterns. While functional, may not be the elevated kind of thinking you want.

Consider this as your time for introspection, a time to save your energy and draw your attention inward. How would this shift your daily routine? How would your spin class, your conversations with co-workers or your circadian rhythms change if you created a more solid internal locus of control? Don’t think of it as being self absorbed, think of it as working on yourself so that you are more available, healthier and have better boundaries and communication with those around you.

It’s still winter but the crocuses are stirring just beneath the Earth’s surface and the same is true in you. It’s a time to nurture those underground bulbs before they emerge and here are some ideas on how you can work on this process daily.

First, become aware of the moments where you are generating negative self talk or negative feelings about other people or situations. Awareness means tracking and witnessing your thoughts a little more than usual, when you do that you’ll notice that there are patterns to your thinking. You might become aware that every time you drive to work you’re thinking negative thoughts about your ex or that each morning as you put on your eye makeup you keep reliving that fight with your colleague in your mind. Once you become aware of these thoughts which are associated with certain activities you can start to interupt them.

This pairing of thoughts and activities is natural and actually an evolutionarily early response that at one point was probably linked to an essential survival mechanism. While the reality it that those old operating systems may not be the most advanced way to function anymore there is no reason to allow frustration to roll in once you become aware of these patterns. This awareness, without judgment is the beginning of the owning phase, by owning and embracing the self-preserving origins of your thought patterns you can move into the next stage of taking action.

The body is economical, it likes to pair things together; the process of disrupting old thoughts and reconfiguring them will require you to find a new thought to pair certain activities with. This is the fun part: give yourself a new mantra to break up those old patterns. Make it something sexy or silly or deep or universal. A really easy one is a seed sound like Om but a lot of people feel the need to have something more complex. A beautiful mantra that stemmed out of an art installation which has been adopted by many Seattleites is, “I am a free witch; I have no guilt.” Whatever it is for you, you’ll know it when you hear it because the genesis of it will come from your own willingness to grow.

Remember Baby, this Quiet moon is a time to become aware of your own outdated thought patterns with love and start the action of creating a new vibration of where you focus your cognitive energy and attention. Quiet your mind and begin to to cast your incantations, you have the luxury of doing this in solitude but those who surround you will feel it too.