Michelle Wollaston On What the Moon Can Teach You About Endings, Beginnings, and Becoming

We’ve all said it: “Oh, it’s just a phase I’m going through.” Usually it’s a way to soften what feels hard — the restlessness, the exhaustion, the change we didn’t see coming. But what if that phrase is truer than we realise?

While we move through the phases of our lives, the moon moves through hers — and if you pay attention, the two are rarely out of sync. The moon isn’t just a distant light in the sky; she’s a quiet mirror of our emotional rhythm. Each phase she moves through echoes what we experience here on earth — beginnings, growth, fullness, release, and rest.

When I discovered that my progressed moon — the moving rhythm that carries each of us through emotional seasons — shifts phase every two to three years and completes a full cycle in about twenty-nine, everything I had been living began to make sense.

The Balsamic Years: 2016–2020 — Preparing the Soil

My Balsamic phase began on 10 November 2016. Balsamic time asks for release, reflection, and surrender — and that’s exactly what unfolded. Around that same time, I met my mentor, the person who helped me see what I had been holding onto for far too long. Her guidance opened my eyes to the patterns I needed to release, the relationships and roles that were quietly draining my spirit.

By 2018, I knew I had to leave my twenty-seven-year relationship that had long since stopped growing. I began returning to my spiritual practice, listening inward, and clearing the emotional clutter that had kept me stuck. Slowly, I started aligning myself with the kind of life I actually wanted.

In January 2019, the opportunity arrived in the form of a new job that carried the independence and stability I had been calling in.

By March, I had left the relationship and moved into a rental for the first time in twenty years. My boys, who were old enough to choose, stayed in the family home, which felt right even though it left me alone for the first time in decades. There was peace, but there was also space — space to notice how much of my worth had been tied to caring for others. Slowly, I began to release the guilt attached to that. If I came home and wanted nothing more than a toasted sandwich or to order a pizza, I could. No one needed me to perform or provide. I was learning how to be my own person again.

By early 2020, I had finalised the financial settlement and bought my own home. Looking back, I can see that even before my New Moon began, its energy was already stirring. The old life was clearing, and the new foundations were forming.

The New Moon: 2020–2024 — Beginning Again

The same month my mother’s health began to unexpectedly decline — November 2020 — marked the start of my New Moon phase. By my birthday in January 2021, we received her diagnosis of terminal cancer. That overlap taught me that new beginnings often rise from endings. Her passing in March marked both a profound loss and a threshold.

I also received her financial legacy — the resources that became the foundation for what I’m building now. It allowed me to move into this new chapter with stability rather than survival, setting the stage for a completely different kind of life. None of it felt random; it was as if the universe had been aligning these pieces for years.

Those years became a time of deep study and spiritual rebuilding. I read spiritual works, purchased too many oracle decks and crystals, and began learning astrology, tarot, and other energetic frameworks that now shape my work. Each one offered a language for what I had always sensed but hadn’t known how to express — strengthening my intuition and grounding it in something I could teach and trust.

In September 2021, I left the job I had manifested just a few years earlier. What had once represented freedom now felt complete. The New Moon called me to align my work with my deeper purpose — to build something of my own, rooted in meaning and service. I began writing Embrace Spirituality and Enhance Your Human Experience in 2021, and when it was published in July 2022, it marked the tangible expression of everything that had been transforming within me.

Through 2022 and 2023, that growth found new ground. My mentor invited me to collaborate with her and two other women — each of us rediscovering our voices after years of disappearing inside lives that no longer fit. That collaboration became seed planting for what followed. It taught me how to create and deliver to an audience, how to share what I knew with confidence, and how to trust the truth of my own experience.

By early 2024, I could feel the next layer of my work calling forward. The rebuilding years had given me grounding; now it was time to step out and be seen. I began shaping the vision of my business, creating spaces where others could experience this work — not through marketing, but through connection. I started writing for magazines, sharing my voice in new circles, and developing resources and masterclasses that invited women to explore their own energy with the same curiosity that had transformed mine. It was the year I stopped preparing and started participating in the life I had spent the past cycle creating.

And here I am now, in November 2025, still learning and refining. I’ve tested, I’ve put myself out there, I’ve let go of what wasn’t working and nourished what is. Each step — even the uncertain ones — has become part of a rhythm that feels entirely my own.

The Phases We All Share

Every woman moves through the same eight phases the moon does, though most never realise it. The New Moon brings beginnings, the Crescent calls for courage, the First Quarter tests our resolve, and the Gibbous refines what we’re building. The Full Moon illuminates our truth, the Disseminating invites us to share it, the Last Quarter clears space, and the Balsamic restores us before we begin again.

Once you recognise this rhythm, you stop trying to bloom in winter. You stop mistaking stillness for failure. You start to see your timing as sacred.

When I look back on these years — the release of 2016, the rebuilding of 2020, the slow strengthening of now — I see a clear map written in moonlight. The moon doesn’t create light; she reflects it. And that’s what she teaches us to do — to reflect, to receive, to illuminate what’s ready to grow next.

So the next time you hear yourself say, “It’s just a phase I’m going through,” pause for a moment. Maybe it is. Maybe the moon is moving with you, showing you exactly where you are in your own cycle of becoming. Because every woman has a moon — and once you learn to move with her rhythm, you stop fearing the dark.