Embrace the Hunter’s Moon: Set Intentions and Achieve SMART Goals with the New Moon Journal by Namaste Studios

By Dennis Bluthardt at Namaste Studios

The Hunters Moon, usually in October, is when we traditionally gather the year’s harvest and start battening down the hatches for winter. This full moon is about bounty, reflection, and the beginning of hibernation. As the nights get longer, it is the perfect moon to check in on your intentions and is a wonderful seasonal reminder that this is a fantastic way to keep your intentions closely aligned with the world around you.

Use our New Moon Journal by Namaste Studios to make this process more potent. This book has helped me set more apparent intentions, craft SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) goals, and manifest things like a real witch!

In addition to the section for “Future Dreams,” there is a space for “SMART Goals” and “Affirmations.” Take your biggest SMART goal from the previous section, break that down into daily, weekly, or monthly mini-SMART goals, and start achieving your dreams NOW, not sometime in the future.

What is the Hunter’s Moon?

“Hunter’s Moon” is another name for the full moon in October. This moon is the one that follows the “Harvest Moon,” or the moon that shines closest to the autumn equinox. Again, the name makes sense when you consider the timing in the year’s wheel, which is the common task of Northern Hemisphere-dwelling agricultural societies. By this point, all the crops had been gathered: you opened the root cellar to find it fully stocked.

At this time, the men of these hamlets went to the forest to find meat for their families’ larder. This meat would be what the family survived on during the dark months of the year when the snow covered all the land. The meat would be mixed with gathered nuts, dehydrated berries, and scant vegetable gifts from the family garden.

Of course, the moon shines nowhere nearly as brightly as the sun. Even so, a young man of intense back and clear eye had much less to stumble over in the forest if he hunted when the full moon was in the sky. Frightened animals have been known to lose all reason and run headlong into hunters’ nets. It was, therefore, possible (though not likely) for the Hunter’s Moon to have one’s traps full to bursting with the game by the morning sun’s light.

This moon had other names among the many peoples of the world. It was known as “White Frost on Grass Moon,” “Trading at Summer Ground Moon,” “Moon When the Winds Come,” “Dividing the Game Every Place Moon,” and “Deer’s Rutting Moon,” among others. That last handle will sound imposing to us moderns, but “the rut” was an opportune time to hunt. The reason for this is best not examined too closely.

The Power of Setting Intentions

Manifesting what you want is not just wishing it so; you must also set clear intentions. The clarion call of the Hunter’s Moon beckons people everywhere to hone their manifesting muscles as fall slips into winter. What do you want to bring forth into the world? The moon in October has usually been called the Hunter’s Moon, and with its energy, it’s time to push forward into the next season and set not just any plans but real intentions for winter. “Intentions aren’t the same as wishes,” states Beth McCabe, a life coach and author of Manifest You: The Pathway to Positive Change. McCabe goes on. “Intentions are the next step after goals. They are real plans for making something happen, rooted in the changed reality we call our present.”

The setting of intentions during the Hunter’s Moon is clear and purposeful. 

Namaste Studios possesses an extraordinary instrument to assist in setting intentions. This tool comes in the form of a journal, and contained within are a series of thoughtful prompts and exercises that lead toward self-reflection that helps one nail down one’s intentions. What intrigues me about this journal is that it is not only an intention-setting tool but also an intention-tracking tool. It sets up regular check-ins, allowing you to track progress and adjust your intentions as you see fit.

The New Moon Journal can be used in your ritual for the Hunter’s Moon. Utilizing it in conjunction with this lunar phase can amplify the intentions you project and can render an experience with greater significance. To understand how to best work with the journal when the Hunter’s Moon is present, let’s first take a deep dive into the importance of this particular moon. After all, a Moore lunar night is not just any night; what happens under its beauteous beams might transform you and set the stage for what in your life might unfold next.

Creating SMART Goals

The SMART criteria have us thinking about goals in terms of being Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. That means that goals must be clear and focused (specific). You should be able to track your progress (measurable). They should be realistic and attainable to keep you motivated (achievable). They should apply to your life in a positive way (relevant). You should act within a set amount of time.

The Hunter’s Moon rises, symbolizing abundance and a time of culmination of efforts. It’s a time of reflection and to set SMART goal intentions that reflect the energy of the full-on harvest and preparations for winter’s arrival. To have SMART goals within this construct, you must figure out what you want to bring into your life. To do this, consider the example that took my goal from something like “I want to be healthy” to “I will exercise for 30 minutes, five days a week, for the next three months.”

Put your intentions under each SMART heading and consider all the categories and possibilities. What’s specific about your goal? Perhaps it’s related to your very survival. How will you measure if it happens or not? What could measure the alignment of the livability of Earth? 

Robert Swan has measured this by the amount of ice melting in Antarctica. Is your desire achievable? Where I’m at, this hasn’t got Superman written all over it, it would have been “I want to go to the moon in five days in a space suit I made”. Dream a little but stay close to reality.

Affirmations and Their Role in Manifestation

Affirmations help reinforce what I want by planting a seed of positive belief. The act of doing affirmations is effortless: repeat them repeatedly! One thing the Hunter’s Moon symbolizes is abundance. So today, I want to remind you of the ongoing abundance of positive things to write about in your journal.

Create some “I am” affirmations with an abundance approach. Focus on themes of abundance, clarity, and stuff you want (who can guess what mine are, lol). Use “I am” language, e.g., “I am attracting opportunities that align with my goals.” “I am open to receiving abundance in all forms.” Catch the drift?

Make your affirmations specific and believable to you. (If you don’t believe something now but want to, try to make up an affirmation around that.) A dash of emotionality is essential here! It will help you dig—on a personal, ‘deep soul-digging’ kind of level. It goes a long way in placing/releasing new, powerful intentions into the universe.

Some of you may benefit from working these affirmations into your existing journaling practice. If you’re stuck on how to get these incorporated (and you think it makes sense to do so), here are some ideas:

Start each entry with your affirmations. You can date them and write them down each time (to embed their message into your subconscious). Or, you could have a dedicated section where you keep your affirmations. You could choose to refine them as you go. They could also serve as a point of reference to see how you have evolved your thinking over time (and how that new way of thinking is serving you better).

The benefit here is plain as day: write down what you want. It works!

Releasing What No Longer Serves You

Releasing negative energy, harmful patterns of thought, and limiting beliefs (the first stage in using the New Moon Journal) is a key practice for anyone interested in personal development, spiritual exploration, and emotional health. It’s incredibly beneficial because it makes space available for other, more positive energies and experiences.

Depending on the person and the overall situation, the energy being “made available” might form (or refuse to give up occupancy rights to) a significant percentage of the overall energetic body. This means that one “area of life” might receive much attention, emotion, and attached thinking (all just pure energy, for this conversation). In contrast, another area or goal you want to develop is being starved of that energy.

The power of the first ceremony of the New Moon Journal is self-empowerment. In the first step of that kind of (pointed) exploration, you identify what energies and thinking patterns exist within you and acknowledge them as part of your reality and experience.

Grounding Exercises and Meditation

Practicing grounding exercises is essential for sustaining energy balance during the Hunter’s Moon. These timeless practices are offered to help one look within and are an integral part of the portal to making survival plans for the long, cold winter months. This powerful moon brings up deep feelings and evokes potent personality changes for many of us. Often, we find ourselves right on the edge of making a massive shift in some part of our lives when this moon rolls around. And given that it calls for us to tap into parts of ourselves that we don’t always readily access, it is vital that we stay present and connected to the world around us. 

Many of you will be very practiced at grounding techniques, which are simple connectedness measures for both setting yourself in the here and now (as a means of minimizing third-dimensional flight-anxiety and constant examination of the past for evidence to support anxiety contexts) and for improving energetic charges, where the opportunity exists to carry out a version of earthing or grounding. This involves practicing some deep nasal breathing while directly connecting to nature by walking barefoot across undulating ground in a park or woodland, where you can draw up elemental, electromagnetically charged ionic forces through the soles of your feet, bringing a supernatural calmness.

During the process of deep, diaphragmatic breathing, you can move into a modified meditative state to further enhance the exercise as a grounding practice: it’s pretty difficult to breathe and meditate consciously on the simultaneous actions–which are technical alienation exercises from one’s practical thoughts and feelings–because the brain disallows the logical (worrying) and performance-enhancing actions of strong left-brain dominance (which many of us endure without realizing). 

Even less evolved forms of meditating, such as mindfulness, which is a pause-and-observe-your-thoughts-as-just-thoughts strategy, are nevertheless super-useful to explore and build into your daily routine, simply because the focus of the meditation work is on the output of and engagement with the two halves of the brain. Called “inner knowing”, this contemplation or “navel-gazing” practice of examination of the interior of your life will bring forth interesting information from your consciousness that you wouldn’t give yourself time to pull up and list in your mind. 

Now, of course, because this work requires a sit-down, and because you are, in this moment, solely focused on your breath (which is, in effect, literally being present), you are in the here and now while deeply examining inner visible truths that emerge. If you keep breathing deep, long breaths while examining feelings and observing thoughts, you can sit quietly and allow the two emergent brain labs to swim around each other–like tiny fish.

Marrying this inner space work with a journaling practice, which is a capturing state, simply for mechanically observing the mind and systematically then physically recording thoughts, feelings, or emotions, this will significantly aid your understanding of the more esoteric, mystic concepts of daily living, including what “self” might mean to you.

What might it mean to the world? What is the life of all the organic stuff that constitutes “my” body? In fact, where does the “me” fit in at all? Journeying along with the flow of your existence into examining priorities in these terms is an exciting way of marrying the meditative and the journal. 

Use journaling your experiences, insights, or intentions to further ground you by reviewing and reflecting upon what you write and finding positive experiences of your journey in the presence of such incredible beauty. After all, this is a holistic consideration of the many means of attempting to balance out and to take advantage of “hunter-mood” energy.

Energy Healing Rituals and Gratitude

October is the time of the Hunter’s Moon, a powerful time for performing energy healing rituals.

Just figuring out a simple ritual, burning a piece of paper, lighting a candle, sitting out in the moonlight, looking up at the full moon, can help you harness this power. It can make such a difference in your healing. This is a great time to take a few minutes to reflect. Full moons (and especially the Harvest Moon) are a symbol of having more than enough! It’s a perfect time to relax with a journal and dig into your manifestations. What can you do?

Just tune into the moon’s energy and allow it to light your way.

If you’ve been micro-meditating, this is the time to relax and let things flow. Resonate with your manifestations, but most of this process should still be about gratitude.

This is the time to water your plants, have a drink and say a toast, burn a few things, and try to have a few things that symbolize your manifestations.

Crystals, too!

Every fake witch has crystals.

Stop imagining being proficient with your crystal and do it!

It’s a full moon, try getting weird.

Will you ever be ready to cast your stones again?

The great news is that they’ll always be a shitty and enjoyable way to play shadow-tarot with the faerie bag.

Reflection and Journaling

Reflection creates personal growth and intention-setting. Without looking at where we’ve been, we can’t plan where we want to go. Take time to reflect and discern the behaviors, values, and motivations you’ve experienced. This insight will allow you to set goals for the person you want to become. Most importantly, look forward during the new moon phase of new beginnings and intention-setting.

Reflect by journaling about questions like “What lessons have I learned from my recent past?” “What intentions do I want to set for the moon phase?” These questions can prompt a deep dive into what you want and don’t. Journal your feelings, even if you don’t understand what your thoughts mean yet. Verbalizing the problem is the first step in finding a solution. Journal during any moon phase, but bask in the beauty of the pristine night sky and the full moon.

Also, fill out lists – they allow you to see your thoughts on a page. A gratitude list creates a mentality of satisfaction. Try listing three new things you’re grateful for. Doing this semi-regularly forces you to create new things you’re thankful for, not relying on the old faithful “I’m grateful for, family and friends.” This process has enriched my life by making me one percent more positive in every situation and a better person. You can’t keep your goals at arm’s length if you don’t have them set. If reflect

The Hunters Moon in October is so named because it is when hunters would start to gather meat for the long Winter months. This full moon symbolizes abundance, a successful hunt, physically showing the results you have achieved this year, and nourishment you’ve stocked up on.

This New Moon Journal, created in partnership with the beloved astrologers of Namaste Studios, is your complete guide to trading “manifesting” for “making sh!t happen.” This is not a place for writing about fairy tales or things you’d like the universe to serve you. This is where you get started on making things happen. This is you, taking that first, sometimes messy, immature step into what you’re becoming.

This is you, praying with it.

So, what did you get? What happened? It’s October! What has already happened this year that you are proud of and happy to have gone through?

What’s still on your list that you must get through, work out, or handle (regardless of whether you have dialed in the “how” just yet, or you want to do it)?

To learn more, visit our Moon Journal Blogs at Namaste Studios or buy a New Moon Journal on Amazon or our Namaste Studios Bookstore. 

For a Limited Time:  Get your NEW MOON JOURNAL for a massive discount at Amazon here!

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