For this New Moon in Cancer, I want to explore how your roots and family conditioning (purview of the fourth house, which is ruled by Cancer)…

…connect to something called your inner Meaning Maker, and what that has to do with your ability to create what you want and need in your life.

As kids, we’re psychic sponges, simultaneously absorbing multiple layers of energetic information from every interaction.

And family dynamics, in particular, are an especially potent source of information, one that shapes how we make meaning of our experiences on both a conscious and an unconscious level.

This weekend, my guides gave me more details about this meaning-making process, and what they shared kinda blew my mind.

First off, they explained that meaning is something that we carry within us, and we imbue our life experiences with meaning.

Experiences don’t, in and of themselves, carry One Right Meaning.

This is easy to see when you think about how differently two people might interpret the exact same experience.

Let’s say I text you, and you don’t get back to me for a week.

I might be over here making up stories about how you don’t like me, you’ve never liked me, and down the spiral I go. I interpret this as evidence that I’m just not good enough, that my worth is reflected in your behavior towards me.

Meanwhile, you’re over there having a very busy week with work, and you just plain forgot. Then Friday rolls around, you’re finally able to catch your breath and suddenly remember my text, and you’re super excited to respond.

Same experience, two very different meanings.

We do this all the time!

We’re endlessly imbuing people, places, and events with meaning. Sometimes those meanings are shared by others, so they feel “real.” And sometimes those meanings are unique to us.

Either way, what I want to focus on here is that we all have this magical capacity for meaning making.

And it truly is magical. I mean, just think about how powerful meanings can be.

If I decide you don’t like me when you don’t respond right away, that no one likes me unless they’re immediately responsive, and that people liking me says something about my fundamental value as a person…

…then I’m walking around feeling like my self-worth is tenuous and volatile, entirely dependent on other people’s responsiveness.

And this will cause me to relate to the world in a very different way than if I believed that my worth was something intrinsic to my personhood, something independent of what other people think or how they’re behaving.

We might think of our inner meaning maker as existing on different planes of reality.

On one plane, we are entirely shaped by our family and cultural environment. Let’s call this our lowercase “m” meaning maker.

If, growing up, I learned that my worth was dependent on getting other people’s approval, then my lowercase meaning maker will assign this meaning to everything.

If someone doesn’t get back to me, this means that I’ve failed to gain their approval and am therefore unworthy.

But we also contain a capital “M” Meaning Maker, our slice of divinity, if you will, that exists beyond family conditioning or trauma.

While our lowercase meaning maker might have us entangled in endless replays, trying to right the wrongs of childhood…

…our capital Meaning Maker understands that we’re not bound by these patterns, that we can feel whole and healed without “winning” the lowercase meaning maker’s battles.

Instead of turning my entire life into a fight to win approval and vanquish feelings of unworthiness, the capital Meaning Maker allows me to see a rainbow spectrum of nuance and rich information that has nothing to do with worth or approval.

My guides asked me to visualize meaning as an energy that I can pour into situations.

Each day I have a pitcher of meaning, and I get to choose what I want to pour it into.

If my lowercase meaning maker is running the show, I might pour my entire pitcher into someone not texting me back.

And whoever’s doing the pouring gets to decide, not only how much meaning is added, but also what that meaning is.

So, I might pour an entire pitcher (a lot of meaning) into this text message, and then I imbue it with the belief “people not responding means I’m unworthy.”

In other words, I’ve spent my entire pitcher of meaning for the day on the belief that my worth is dependent on other people’s responsiveness.

I think many of us can relate to this on an intuitive level.

How many times have you poured a bunch of meaning into something, and this left you feeling depleted and worn out?

Maybe you were waiting for that text message, and by the end of the day you felt like a wrung-out sponge, exhausted from picking your phone up for the umpteenth time to check, thinking about virtually nothing else for twelve hours.

But here’s where my guides blew my mind:

They said this pitcher of meaning–it’s synonymous with our creative energy.

Think about it. When you’re creating something, what you’re creating is meaning. If you write something, relate something, dance something, say something–you’re pouring meaning into that thing.

And if your pitcher is bone dry because you spent all of that meaning on, say, “my worth is dependent on this person texting me back,” there’s nothing left to pour into your creations.

I’m finding it incredibly helpful to keep an image of this pitcher in my mind, and throughout the day, I get to choose: How much of my precious meaning energy do I want to pour into this situation?

What I’m noticing is that so many situations that, before, felt highly meaningful and demanding of my energy…they really only need a drop or two of meaning, if that.

Today on the New Moon, experiment with this imagery for yourself.

What does it feel like to reclaim your agency, to choose what gets meaning–and how much–and what doesn’t?

In every moment, your capital Meaning Maker is here to help.

Call on the divinity within you. Ask for its help in portioning out your precious energy.

You are here to experience what it’s like to be a creative being, whether that creativity expresses itself through art, relationships, health, spirituality…or any number of pursuits that light you up.

You’re not here to earn your worth, because you already have it.

You’re not here to please everyone, because that’s impossible (and, quite frankly, boring).

You’re here to experience yourself as the magically creative being that you are.

What will you pour your creative energy into today?