Better Together: Invitations to Dance with Your Polyvagal Ladder Under the Full Moon in Cancer

Dear One,

When I’m writing this blog

, I’m aware that I’m sending it to the Qoya Inspired Movement mailing list, which is a collective of individuals like YOU! You, who, somewhere along the way, signed up to continue this conversation. And you, who in the fullness of life, opened one of what I’m guessing might be many emails. I’m grateful for the way that life has woven us together, and now, under this full moon in Cancer, at the beginning of 2026, let us explore what is being illuminated.

I didn’t sleep soundly last night. I also didn’t expect to with the stirring that comes with the full moon. In the liminal moments, I found myself contemplating the astrological archetype of Cancer expressed through the moon. Cancer is a water sign and is also the ruler of the moon. When I feel myself emotionally responding to the cycles of the moon, I often think to myself: if the moon’s gravitational force is strong enough to influence the tides of the oceans, it seems understandable that it may be strong enough to influence the tides of our own waters. In this case, maybe that is our tears.

I love being able to look up at the sky and gauge when I will need to sit down and write. I have been writing this newsletter for almost 16 years, and with the frequency of every new and full moon for a decade. As I looked up and saw the moon was building in light, I thought to myself, what might the theme of this newsletter be? I heard...

Grieve.

There are many ways to grieve. There is the grief that brings us into shutdown. There is the grief that mobilizes us into action. There is the grief that weaves together the most intimate, heartfelt connections.

In the midst of the grief, uncertainty, complexity, and change that was 2020, one of the emergent outcomes for the Qoya community and for me was the launch of LORE. LORE stands for Lifestyle of Reverence Everyday. For almost five years now, I have been sharing a practice most days around 11 am EST.

This month in LORE, we are calling on Deb Dana’s book Anchored: How to Befriend Your Nervous System Using Polyvagal Theory. It’s like a month-long embodied book club, taking ideas from the book and offering ourselves the opportunity to include our bodies, our felt-sense, and our lived experiences as active participants in the conversation.

Yesterday, we began our session resourcing ourselves by invoking the healing forces of nature. Would you like to do that right now?

Step 1: Look out your window or step outside. Simply observe without agenda.

Step 2: Notice what you see and how it lands in your body. What sensations arise?

Step 3: Consider how what you're observing in nature might offer wisdom for this moment in your life.

As an example, I just stood up and walked to open the sliding glass doors to feel the 16-degree cold winter air and see the fiery orange burst of color promising that the sun will rise again today. As I observed the paradox of freezing cold ice and snow alongside the heat of the sun that will warm up this day and sensed the cycle of the seasons.

Acknowledging we are in a time of building light, where each day there will be more light and the winter will turn to to spring and spring to summer and summer to fall and then back here again, I thought of that saying, to paraphrase Khalil Gibran's wisdom, “What if we could trust the seasons of our own heart, the way we trust the seasons of the year?”

Light, dark, light again.

Day, night, day again.

Compassion for all beings on all cycles of the journey, including one’s own.

What do you notice, see, hear and feel as you invoke the healing forces of nature? What if there really is nowhere we could be where we would be separate from the healing forces of nature? Oftentimes when I do this, I connect with the living movements of the stream outside my house, the clouds in the sky or a flower readying to bloom. Other times it can be reverence for the trees that made my wood floor or the house plant that absorbs the waves of emotions emanating from my human body, along with my consistent expelling of carbon dioxide and cheers me on with its receptivity to light and water, its willingness to grow and its generosity to alchemize my CO2 into oxygen.

The shift in perception is to move from an isolated individual ego to the context of the living systems around us, honoring the forces that make our lives possible and offering nourishing wisdom that can feel like magical redirection, urging us to merge our love and will. To feel ourselves interconnected to life and our heart connected to what we do. When we connect and collaborate with nature, we notice if we may have more capacity to meet the moments of our day.

Cancer is associated with the archetype of the Mother and the relationship between Mother and Child. What a difference it can make to feel that whatever blessings and challenges cross our path, that we can invoke the healing forces of nature and the presence of our Earth Mother through our awareness, body, mind and heart.

After invoking the healing forces of nature before our session yesterday, we then practiced Orientation, looking over one shoulder, then the other, looking up to the sky or ceiling, down to the floor or ground and then taking in the present moment with our eyes and what we see, our ears and what we hear and our body noticing what we feel. Cultivating embodied presence, we then set an intention for the session. We continued with a body scan to circle through each part of our bodies before we began exploring the polyvagal ladder. What a difference a song of circling can make.

Deb Dana writes, “Polyvagal Theory is the science of feeling safe enough to fall in love with life and take the risks of living,” and refers to the theory explaining the science of connection, exploring the skills that we can practice to strengthen our ability to anchor ourselves and each other in safety and regulation in the midst of challenges.

Resourced and with intention, with an encouragement to focus more on sensation than story, we explored how it felt in our bodies to relate with the Dorsal Vagal system of shutdown, where we might feel like just going through the motions, drained of energy, disconnected, losing hope, or giving up. In the context of journeying through one song, I then prompted to notice what would be nourishing here when we are in this place.

For myself, I felt nature. Others received their own unique messages. The Polyvagal Theory is described with a ladder visual to show the sequential building blocks of the autonomic hierarchy.

At the end of the song, prompted by the book, there was one minute to journal and write down, in shutdown, “The world is....” and “I am...”

In the next song, we explored the sympathetic system of action through kickboxing, and again at the end of the song, we took one minute to journal and write down, in activation, “The world is....” and “I am...”

Lastly, we did a choreographed dance to “We Are Family” to explore embodying the Ventral Vagal system of connection, to engage, to relate and co-regulate and at the end of the song, we took one minute one more time to write down when feeling connected, “The world is....”  and “I am...”

The sun is shining now. It’s been about 90 minutes since I started writing this, taking breaks to mother my well-rested son, whose rambunctious energy is calling me to play. In his desire/demand to be connected, I’m thinking about this full moon in Cancer and how, according to the polyvagal theory, co-regulation and moments of safety when connecting with others are essential for our well-being. Maybe our nervous system is also like Mother Earth, nudging us towards living in a way that honors that we are woven together.

My theme for LORE and myself in 2026 is Connect + Collaborate. One of the things that is unique about Qoya Inspired Movement is that, while many movement modalities focus on the individual journey, in our classes, there are several prompts to connect with another person, to share from your heart, and to listen from your heart. On retreats, my orientation to facilitation is to harvest the collective wisdom of the circle. Teacher trainings offer you an opportunity to build confidence in sharing this practice in your own communities. I’ll also be focusing on offering relational skill-building immersions with James-Olivia Chu Hillman, aka Inquisitive Human on Instagram, and on my first facilitators training program, open to supporting people who are called to gather groups to learn, grow, and be together.

I’m hoping to have registration pages up for upcoming 2026 retreats and teacher trainings in the next week. If you’d like to be the first to know, sign up here.

And, I’m curious, what is being illuminated under this Cancer Full Moon for you? Does it correlate with your intentions for navigating 2026? If you’d like to connect and collaborate in an embodied way, I invite you to pop in and join one of our daily LORE classes, or consider becoming a monthly member.

To learn more about becoming a member of LORE, you can visit our LORE page here. If you'd like to explore joining us once in awhile for single sessions, check out our schedule for January here.

I'm off to make solar system pancakes with my son. Wishing you blessings for all the ways you will connect and collaborate with your Self, others, nature, spirit and Life!

From my heart to yours,

Rochelle