If you’re on the spiritual path, connecting with the Moon is pure magic. For one thing, the Moon itself is a reminder that there’s more to life than the goings-on of our daily lives. I mean, just look at it!

The Moon is a seemingly luminous floating thing out there in the sky. Even with the naked eye she looks amazing. (If you’ve never seen the Moon through a telescope, I would highly recommend it. It’s awesome in the true sense of the word.)

Watching the Moon from month to month and year to year will put you in touch with her cycles and rhythms – it will help you to remember that we’re all a part of something much bigger; that we’re kids of the Universe. We’re stardust. We’re so much more than people who struggle to get to work on public transport and once there, compete with others for promotions.

We’re makers of magic on a journey towards enlightenment. We’re at one with the skies and the heavens and all that lies beyond, and even if we can’t observe the heavens fully, or even give too much time to contemplating nature, connecting with the Moon reconnects us with the Divine – with our Divine selves and with the cosmos.

When you start to get in tune with the Moon’s cycles, you start to connect with the cosmos and nature. We 21st-century humans tend to be quite disconnected from the latter. Of course, we don’t all live in cities and spend hours a day in an artificially lit room, perhaps in front of a computer. But oh so many of us do, right? Getting outdoors and engaging with nature by watching the mysterious Moon is a real remedy.

You can watch the Moon from your local park or from your garden. If you don’t have a garden, try your driveway. And if you don’t have a garden or a driveway, you can watch her from the street or from your window. I remember the first time I had a chance to watch the Moon building to full, night after night after night. I was in Thailand, staying in a beach hut. The skies were black and the Moon was a spectacle.

These days, when the Moon is nearly full, I love to have a good ‘Moonbath’ by just sitting under the brightness and soaking up the moonbeams. I do this with my son, too, to introduce him to the magic of the Moon. For the record, the night of the month when the Moon is fullest is a great time to cleanse your jewellery of any negativity: just leave it out (somewhere safe.).

Connecting with the Moon is a great routine discipline to get into. By making wishes at the time of the New Moon, you will start to manifest your dreams. That fact alone means you may come to believe, as I do, that there’s something very powerful about the New Moon.

And as for the Full Moon, which is the time when we let things go, well, that’s just common sense, isn’t it? We need to release control of anything and everything – from toxicity to negativity – and we need to do it on a regular basis.

Top 10 Moon facts

Here are some key facts, astrological and otherwise that it’s useful to know:

1. The Moon is 384,400 km (238,855 miles) from Earth and has a radius of 1,737 km (1,079 miles).

2. It took the astronauts of the 1969 Apollo 11 mission (among them Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong), and the five subsequent Apollo missions, about three days to reach the Moon. But in 2006, NASA’s New Horizons probe – which passed the Moon on its way to Pluto – managed to get there in just under nine hours. However, that was zooming by, rather than having to slow down and aim for a landing.

3. The Moon is estimated to be around 4.527 billion years old: that’s about the same age as the Earth.

4. The most popular scientific theory about the Moon’s origin says she was formed out of the debris thrown into orbit when the newborn Earth hit a planet around the size of Mars.

5. The Moon goes around the Earth, as the Earth goes around the Sun.

6. The Moon takes about 30 days to go through all 12 signs of the zodiac, spending just over two days in each sign.

7. There’s a New Moon and then a Full Moon every two weeks. So the New Moon happens, followed two weeks later by the Full Moon, then two weeks later by the New Moon, and so on.

8. Astrologers use the word ‘lunation’ to talk about a New Moon or a Full Moon. So for example, we might say that the next ‘lunation’ is the Full Moon in Aries.

9. In astrology, the top things the Moon rules are: emotions, food, home, instincts, mother, needs, breasts, nurturing, femininity, the past, roots, safety, and the subconscious.

10. The Moon triggers the planets as she goes around the zodiac, and is thus a great astrological timer.

But far more importantly for our purposes, here is a quick list of what the Moon is associated with, astrologically speaking: feelings, emotions, mothers, parenting, memories, femininity, the Goddess, witches, women, childhood, cycles, nourishment, heritage, habits, sensitivity, moods, fluctuations, subconscious, receptivity, domestic life, the public, feeding, nurturing, home, needs, and more.

Editor’s note: Discover more of the amazing properties of the moon in Yasmin Boland’s book Moonology, which is out now.