Psychological Containment and the Wild: Saturn-Moon Symbolism, The Astro Psyche Podcast, Ep. 5

Welcome! In this Episode 5 of The Astro Psyche Podcast, I explored:

• Psychological Containment and the Wild as experienced in nature and astrology

• The Moon in astrology as a symbol of the psychological wild

• Psychological wild as a symbol of portals to the otherworld in Celtic mythology

• The Moon's symbolic correlations to ancestors, family of origin, and our early holding environment (childhood/caregivers)

• My experience of psychological containment while writing my masters thesis

• Saturn as a symbol of psychological containment and our experience of support/containment in our early holding environment (childhood/caregivers)

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Disclaimer: this video may feel therapeutic but it is not therapy. This video and/or discussions about astrology and depth psychology cannot substitute for legal, medical, business, or financial advice, or professional mental health care.

Transcript:

Hello, welcome! I'm Shawna with The Astro Psyche and this is episode five of The Astro Psyche Podcast.

I wanted to share with you some thoughts that I have on psychological containment and feelings of the wild from a psychological standpoint; and how these concepts correlate to the Moon and Saturn in astrology.

This topic is based on an assignment that I had in my MA in counseling psychology program. It was a very brief assignment and I wanted to sort of unpack the astrological correlations to this idea of psychological containment that I didn’t have the space to fully explore in that particular assignment. So, I am gonna look at my my notes here.

I am recording this live, so if you're watching live, let me know that you can hear me. Maybe where you're tuning in from and any thoughts or questions that you have as I'm sharing here. Or if you're watching or listening to the recording as well.

When I'm talking about psychological containment in the context of this feeling of being held. This feeling of safety and security. I really feel that this is related to both the Moon and Saturn in different kinds of ways. This particular content is also coming from an environmental psychology course, so that was kind of like the frame with which we are assigned to this idea.

For this particular project, I connected with a physical place, a physical environment. That was a part of the process to connect with the physical place. I live in San Diego and so I connected with the beach as a place of both psychological containment and an experience of the wild.

Initially I observed the waves and the ocean. The constantly shifting sand as a representation of the wild because of the spontaneous and uncontained nature of the ocean, of the waves, of the sand. And for any of you that have ever been to the ocean for a couple of hours, you've seen how things can change very quickly, even over the course of a couple of hours. The tide can come in. The tide can out and this - the tides are literally connected to the Moon to the cycles of the Moon. So this concept of the wild is connected to the Moon.

In astrology, we see the Moon as a symbol of emotions, of intuition of subjective perception. Our personal internal experience and the Moon is also a symbol of cycles and rhythms and that can be external, like the waves like the tides. It can also be internal. And I think that we often, I know myself I've been thinking about this a lot. About the psychological cycles and how my output, my creative energy, especially in a graduate program, is very cyclical. And I think that we have become very disconnected from that. I know, at least I feel very disconnected from that. When you know we have to work and earn money and go through school and we have to take care of family members, children, parents and family, etc.

So there's this natural internal cycle of . . . we could even think of it as extroversion and then introversion or doing and then replenishing, doing and then not doing. Although I think that's doing and not. Doing this kind of misleading because when you're not doing something like when you're physically not taking action, you are likely still doing something on the inside and that is worthy and valid, and so this is all moon stuff this. This cycle where, for example, I've been writing my masters thesis and that is a lot of psychological heavy lifting and concentration. So I've noticed that I'll go through these cycles where I will write ferociously for several days, and then after that I can't think. I mean I can think but I have kind of like this this need to not do physical activity or to not do a creative output. There's like a resting period, so to speak.

And so, this cyclical kind of theme is very much connected to the Moon and I feel it's very connected to the wild because when we think of the wild, we typically think of like chaotic and that may - I think that is - accurate, and there's a lot of cycle, and repetition and spiraling that's connected to nature, to the wild. Ourselves included.

We forget about the other piece that I wanted to say about this as well, is that: For this particular project I noticed that I had been drawn to the beach to the ocean, particularly at times of either sunset or sunrise. More so sunset during the twilight hours. In Celtic mythology, these are times and places that are considered portals to the otherworld, which is which is very wild.

Celtic mythology considers twilight to be a portal time it considers so sunset twilight. It also considers any place where the water and the Earth meet to be a portal place, so that could be the ocean. It could also be a stream or a well. Anywhere where there's that that meeting of Earth and water that. That transition place where there's a border or a boundary. There's this transitory kind of tone to the physical place. That's also a portal and Celtic mythology sees these portals as a transition from our physical material world, the land of human life, the land of nature into the otherworld, which would be the world of spirit or ancestors or the fairy or the fairy folk. And in Celtic mythology, the other world is quite wild.

And so I thought it was really interesting that there's this theme around the wild and then also that the Moon is connected to our early holding environment but also to our ancestry and to either our genetic ancestry, our family of origin history. And then our subjective experience of our early holding environment. So our experience of our caregivers, our experience of our childhood of our formative years, and that there there's like this connection to the wild to where we come from and to our patterning, to our generational patterning that that we're not even aware of.

This is where our intuition resides. Intuition is not is not rational. Intuition is not something that that makes logical sense that we can usually connect the dots on it. It typically comes from a place that. Intuition typically comes from a place of not controlling. And I think that's really important because we're so conditioned to - I'm speaking from my own experience as well - that we're very conditioned to value control and purpose and execution when a core part of our essence, the Moon, is all about intuition and having no control over when and how that arises.

Now we can certainly do things to cultivate our intuition to channel and to learn how our intuition speaks to us and through us. But it's not something that you can sit down and say, OK, I'm going to you know, my intuition is going to come out in this particular way. I think intuition is more wild and relational. In that way we need to build a relationship with it.

And so I hope that this is making sense. I realize that the way that I'm talking about this is a bit kind of like in a spiral sort of pattern. So I hope that you're still with me. I wanted to just really express this concept of the Moon as an embodiment of the wild and that the wild is not necessarily chaotic that there are themes and there are cycles and there are patterns.

And so what about psychological containment? That's the other piece of this that I wanted to bring in. That was another piece of this this conversation. For this project I wrote in identifying this space of the wild at the seaside. I simultaneously experienced psychological containment while traveling up and down the concrete boardwalk. There's a boardwalk at the beach that. I go to. In a mundane sense, the walls of the boardwalk provide protection from high tides and a convenient boundary between ocean wilderness wildness and common civilization.

I want to share here that a part of my inspiration for choosing this particular place as a representation of psychological containment is because I realized that I felt very psychologically contained by going to the boardwalk. Some of you know that this spring - I think it was like April of 2022 – that I started roller skating and I've been roller skating up and down the boardwalk and it is so much fun! And not only is it so much fun, but I feel like it combines kind of especially skating in this locati