The next full moon happens in Aries, Bharani Nakshatra, on Tuesday 12 November at 1.35 pm UTC.

When I was a child, I visited Amsterdam on a family trip. I had some kind of tummy bug so I spent most of the time being sick. From then on, Amsterdam was recorded in my brain like an undesirable destination.

Our life is made of likes and dislikes and we swing between them all the time. Sometimes the dislike is not the fault of the object – case in point, it was not Amsterdam’s fault if I was sick. It’s the association that created this illusion.

If I act automatically and unconsciously, I might think “if I go to Amsterdam I’ll be sick again” and avoid going there. But if I change my thinking and think “I just happened to be in Amsterdam when I was sick, so I can go there again”, maybe I’ll be able to spend a wonderful time there.

It takes some conscious thinking to change our behaviour pattern because we tend to take the automatic route. On this full moon and during the fortnight until the new moon, we might want to step outside the box we were always trapped in. That might allow us a complete change of scenery. Om Shanti.