The moon:our placenta?

Português: Face fetal de placenta humana. Esta placenta apresenta uma alteração morfológica e se denomina placenta marginada. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The moon: our placenta?

I have been reflecting some more on the fluid movement workshop with Cherionna (Our embryological journey)  and realised that we didn’t do any connecting work with the placenta. It made me recall an experience I had a couple of years ago while visiting the Space Museum in Washington http://airandspace.si.edu/museum/flagship.cfm when I strongly connected with a feeling of the placenta  being the moon: a bit like my sense in Cherionna’s workshop of the womb being the earth and the amniotic sac being space.

Rosa, my daughter and I were in the Planetarium. As we looked above us, in a very realistic re-creation of the formation of space, we were told that one theory put forward by scientists about the origins of the moon is that a meteorite hit the earth in the very early stages of its development and lots of bits of the earth broke away. The earth was nearly destroyed in this process and was tilted on its axis. The bits that had fallen off the earth, eventually become the moon over the course of only about a month. So the moon and the earth started off as the same!

As we saw this process happening in the sky above us, I had a very strong sense of connection with the moon being part of the earth: connected in a way by an invisible cord, like the placenta is connected to the baby. I started thinking of the egg being fertilised by the sperm and remembering that the fertilised egg will form not just the baby but the placenta as well.

As I looked at the moon in the sky that night I felt a deeper sense of connection with her energy. It is interesting that women’s cycles are said to be influenced by the moon and I do find that my moods change according to her waxing and waning energies. Ancient peoples, who were more directly influenced by the moon knew this. They would plant crops at certain phases of the moon’s cycle and some farmers still follow this. We tend to forget the moon’s influence on us as we can often be cut off from seeing her presence in the sky, but she clearly is an important factor in how we feel.

It is fascinating to remind ourselves that the atoms that make up our body are traceable to the stars. Therefore we are connected atomically the whole universe, chemically to the earth itself and biologically to all other species. We are in the moon and the moon is in us! This is what Neil deGrasse Tyson, American astrophysicist,  in a video he has on You Tube has expressed as one of his most interesting facts about the universe.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_deGrasse_Tyson

Thinking of the moon as our earth’s placenta feels a powerful way of connecting with her. The placenta is a very powerful blood rich organ.  In many cultures, the placenta is considered almost as another baby: a twin. For the baby at birth, separation from the placenta, the organ which nourished them in the womb, can be experienced almost like the loss of a twin. Now the baby has to learn to be on their own.  This is why there are some traditions, for eg with lotus birth where the cord is not cut and time is given for the baby to let go physically and energetically of their placenta. In other cultures, the dried placental cord is kept for the baby and seen as offering a form of  protection.

Sometimes the mother would eat the placenta or the placenta would be buried. In some cultures the placenta is said to have a lot of power over the baby and family and has its own spirit and energy.

It is interesting now that the placenta is used to make homoeopathic remedies for the mother and baby or it can be encapsulated. In Chinese medicine, the placenta is an extension of the Penetrating Vessel meridian: this meridian regulates all blood in the body and is seen as nourishing.

We can allow the moon to nourish us, like our placenta.