The visualisation and life writing prompts work alongside this blog – The new moon in Libra – balancing your story.

New Moon Visualisation: The Scales in Your Heart

Find somewhere you won’t be disturbed, with your journal and a pen within reach. Light a candle if you’d like to – green or pink if you have one, though any candle will do, and so will the fairy lights left over from last Christmas.

Sit comfortably with your feet on the floor. Rub your hands together briskly until you feel heat in your palms. Now imagine roots growing from the soles of your feet, down through the floor, down through the earth, all the way to the heart of Mother Earth.

Breathe gently in through those roots and up through each of your chakras – root, sacral, solar plexus, heart, throat, third eye, crown – and out through the top of your head, letting the breath fall around you like a cloak and return to the earth. Do this three times.

Place both hands over your heart. Feel the warmth of your palms and the rise and fall beneath them. Your heart has been beating for every single moment of your life. Just sit with her.

As you breathe, imagine a soft green light glowing beneath your hands. With each breath, it grows a little brighter and a little wider, until your whole chest is filled with it.

Within that green light, a pair of scales appears. Notice what they look like. They may be your grandmother’s old kitchen scales, a gleaming brass pair from a courtroom, or something only you would recognise. Let them be whatever they are.

Beside the scales lies a book. This is the book of your life. Notice its colour, its thickness, how worn the cover is. Open it slowly and see what the first few pages look like.

Now take the story you’ve been telling about yourself – the one you reach for when life feels hard – and place it on one pan of the scales. Watch it drop. Notice how heavy it is.

Ask your heart quietly: What have I left off the scales?

Wait. Something will come – an image, a word, a memory, a face, a feeling somewhere in your body. It might be a kindness you forgot, a strength you dismissed, a moment of joy you didn’t think counted. Place whatever comes onto the other pan.

Keep asking and keep placing. There’s no hurry. Watch the arm of the scales begin to wobble, hover, and slowly move towards balance. It doesn’t need to be perfectly level. Simply notice that it moves.

Now, behind the scales, become aware of the dark new moon. You can’t see her face, but you know that on her far side the sun is shining fully. Feel that same light on the hidden side of your own story – the bits nobody sees. Let the light illuminate your stories.

Turn to a fresh page in the book of your life. It’s blank. Pick up the pen and feel its weight in your hand. Ask your heart: What is the first line of my next chapter? Let a sentence come. Don’t judge it. Just receive it and be open.

Close the book, knowing you can open it any time you like. Let the green light settle back into your chest. Take three slow breaths, feel your feet on the floor and your roots in the earth, and when you’re ready, open your eyes.

Before you do anything else, write down the first line that came, and anything you placed on the scales. Write only what you remember rather than stopping mid-visualisation to scribble. More will arrive over the next few days, usually at the most inconvenient moment – in the shower, or halfway down the cereal aisle – so keep a notebook handy.

If strong emotions surface, be gentle with yourself. Pause, breathe, put the kettle on, and come back when you’re ready. Your heart knows what you can handle.

Life Writing Prompts for the New Moon in Libra

Here are twenty life writing prompts inspired by this month’s new moon blog. You don’t need to do them all. Choose the one that resonates, and I always suggest one you don’t want to do.

A few practical things before you begin:

• Write by hand if you can. Your hand slows your mind down.
• Set a timer for ten to twenty minutes and keep the pen moving. If you get stuck, write ‘What I really want to say is…’ and carry on.
• Don’t edit. First drafts are allowed to be dreadful. Mine certainly are.
• Write everything first and decide what to share later. Your first draft is for your eyes only, so give yourself permission to write about anyone and anything.
• Try one prompt a day between now and the full moon later this month. Think of each one as a square of chocolate, savoured before you reach for the next.

Weigh: The Story You’ve Been Telling

• When someone asks, ‘So, what’s your story?’, what do you tell them? Write it in five sentences. Read it back. Which side of the scales is heaviest?
• Which event in your life have you given far too much weight? Which have you barely weighed at all? Write about both.
• Write down one ‘fact’ about yourself that you’ve always believed – I’m the difficult one, I’m hopeless with money, I always choose the wrong men. Whose voice first put it on the scales? Is it actually true?
• Imagine your life story as a book on a shop shelf. What does the blurb on the back currently say? Write it and then write the blurb you’d prefer.

The Far Side: The Untold Stories

• What is the story you have never told anyone? You don’t have to write all of it. Write the first line and the last line, and leave the middle for another day.
• Write about something that happened in the dark – a sleepless night, a hospital corridor, a kitchen at three in the morning – where something changed in you, and nobody was your witness.
• What part of you has been fully lit all along, just facing away from everyone else? Describe her.

Release: Taking Back the Lessons

• Like the tree drawing in its goodness before the leaf falls, write about a painful chapter and list everything you’re taking back from it – the wisdom, the strength, the hard-won knowing. Then write: And the rest, I let fall.
• Choose a moment you’ve always told as a defeat. Rewrite it in the third person, as though you were the heroine of a novel. What does the narrator notice that you couldn’t see at the time?
• Write the same scene twice: once with the scales you held back then, and once with the scales you hold now. What changed – the facts, or the weights?
• Where did your story turn? Write the turning point as a scene. Where were you? What could you smell and hear? What did your body do?

The Others in Your Story

• Who has been sitting on the other pan of your scales for far too long? Write them a letter you will never send.
• Whose version of your story have you been living? Write their version in one paragraph. Then write yours.
• Think of someone you’ve always been scrupulously fair to in your story. Now be that fair to yourself. Write the context, the backstory and the reasons – for you.

The Heart: Grief and Love

• As the old year closes at Samhain, who or what are you grieving? Write to them, about them, or simply write their name and see what follows.
• Which family stories did you inherit? Make two lists: the ones you’ll keep and pass on, and the ones you’re handing back with thanks.
• Write about a love that changed the shape of your story. It might be a person, a place, an animal, or an earlier version of yourself.

Seed: The Next Chapter

• If your life were a book, what would you title the chapter you’re about to begin? Write its opening paragraph.
• Write a letter from yourself a year from now, thanking you for the story you started writing at this new moon.
• Finish this sentence and keep it somewhere you’ll see it until the full moon: The story I am writing now is…

Come and Write With Me

If something stirred while you read this, you don’t have to write it alone.

The Soul Writers Lounge is where my community gathers to write their lives – the hard bits, the funny bits and all the bits in between – with gentle guidance, writing invitations, and the company of others who understand that a story can change a life. Come and pull up a chair.

And if you’re ready to give your memoir some shape, my Memoir Planner or Guide on Amazon will help you map your chapters, find your turning points and plan your story in manageable squares of chocolate.