Moon Circle Rituals – Meditation, Bodily Attunement, and the Construction of Self-Determination

This paper examines the process of self-reflexivity, self-determination, and agency within the context of a moon circle ritual. This is a practice arising in contemporary society that seems to intersect across different "alternative" communities such as Wiccan groups, neopagan groups, alternative medicinal practitioners (doulas, massage therapists, and acupuncturists), feminist groups, women business owners and members of higher academia. This paper explores the ways that self-knowledge and reflexivity form the building blocks of healing within the horizon of the moral good for participants and are constitutive of the participants living a "good life". The discussion reveals that although there does not exist a radical separation of the mediated and unmediated, the inherent indeterminacy of culture allows the potentiality of undefined experience to exist. Undefined experience is revealed during moon circles and is utilized to produce the normative self-determination present in much of contemporary society's discourse on the "good life".