1. To the Moon and Back

In this episode I share with you my journey to finding the moonlit path. 

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Transcript

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Hi there, and welcome to the first episode of the Align and Flow Living podcast. I'm your host, Ava Rose. Happy Lunar New Year! How exciting that we get to be together today, talking about the moon. I don't know about you, but things are feeling so aligned already, it's incredible. On today's episode of the Align and Flow Living podcast, To the moon and back. I share with you my personal journey of lunar living. I break it all down. From how I was led to the moonlit path, the ups, the downs, the otherworldly experiences, the transformation, and the path forward. Please be advised that this episode contains content on sensitive topics such as depression, anxiety, and is in no way to be deemed as advice or substitute for the professional diagnosis and or treatment of such conditions. Now that we got that out, I hope you enjoy the episode. Let's get started. Back in 2017, I slid into a very low point in my life, even though on the outside, everything looked fine. Something inside me was stirring. I found myself really dissatisfied with my life and what it was becoming and what I was becoming as a result of living the way that I was living. I was 31 and was working long hours at an unfulfilling job. I forced myself into an overproductive schedule and I put my dream life up on a pedestal for some time in the future. I cried a lot and I was triggered easily. My husband and I were fighting often and seemed to be on different pages and we had only been married a year. I tried therapy and going to healers and people who had helped me to reset. in the past and nothing helped. I fell hard privately. I was desperate for a reset. I booked a session with an intuitive who I had found on Instagram. While she did provide some helpful guidance, she also projected a lot of junk onto me that I later realized was her own experiences that she hadn't finished processing before she had started working with people. This is unfortunately so common in the spiritual and metaphysical industry and a large part of why I have held back my work for so many years, because I knew that I could only offer it in service when I fully embodied my teachings, when I became the work, when I was no longer a messenger, but instead had become the message itself. Fast forward to the spring of 2018. A friend had invited me to a new moon party at her house. I immediately said yes. It was one of those full body yeses. I didn't care who else was coming. I didn't even pay attention to what we'd be doing. At the party, there were just a few of us. We talked about what was going on in our lives, what we wanted to shift as we mix small crystals into roller balls of essential oils. That were specifically blended for this new moon. This was new to me, and also it wasn't, it felt like second nature. I took it all in immediately. Now, what was going on with me at the time was that my walls were continuing to crumble. I was miserable at my job. I felt trapped. I knew I wanted to start my own business, but doing what I couldn't choose. My husband and I had lost our business and the whole lifestyle that came with it back in 2015. I was still carrying some wounds from that experience. I was scared to leave my job. I had little direction and even less clarity. I was overworking, overproducing and over functioning in all areas of my life. But something deep within me was shifting. And I wasn't able to hold it all up anymore. Pieces of my life would just collapse. I would try to put them back together, but it didn't work. What was I going to do? People were going to start noticing. I wanted some guidance. We came to a point in the ritual where we were pulling cards from a deck. I asked the question, what to do? How could I move forward? Where would I move forward? What do I do? I closed my eyes and I pulled a card. It read, I surrender it all. It felt really powerful. It activated something in my body. My eyes filled up with tears and I smiled to cover it up. But how could that be the answer of what to do? Surrender it all? Surrender how? Surrender to what? I didn't know. I returned to my life as it was, but that seed of intention that I planted in the new moon energy was so powerful and it began to grow. I can see now that even though I didn't consciously know how I actually started surrendering a lot by opening up to new possibilities, new channels that I hadn't tried before. I went where we all go when we feel lost, Google. I searched for someone who could help me make sense of it all. I found a healer and a teacher on the island of Kauai. I began to work with her remotely. and entered her program to facilitate past life regression experiences for people through hypnosis. I completed levels one and two and I offered sessions as I could with the demands of my job and my other responsibilities. I kept it a secret for the most part. It felt very natural, but I wasn't ready to tell anyone. Very few knew about my life on the side, but I thought, this is it. I didn't really start the business, but my life continued to shift. On the outside, I maintained the facade, but my true focus began to go deeply inward. I wondered, how long can I stay at this job? How long can I continue investing myself in what feels like meaningless activity and unnecessary, relentless stress? I soldiered on. In the spring of 2019, during a new moon, I attended a three day event in Hollywood with an intuitive life coach who I'd been following for some time. At the event, I set intentions, and I envisioned who I wanted to be and how I wanted to live. I have a feeling she knew about lunar living. I also received a miraculous healing that alleviated severe pain I had in my lower back for the previous two years. When I came back home, I was a changed woman. I changed on a cellular level. I could feel it. I also found out that I was pregnant. Baby was due in December. This was going to be the year. I was going for a promotion at work, leading a team. I was going for a promotion at work, leading a team but I didn't make it to the promotion. At seven months pregnant, I crashed and burned and quit with no notice. The stress of the work, the difficulty of the pregnancy, and the complete lack of alignment between who I had become and who I had to be at work. It was too much. The facade collapsed. I could not get that girl to show up anymore. I can see now that this was another powerful new moon activation. Somehow, I was working with the moon without even realizing it. My son was born just before Christmas in 2019. The demands of motherhood hit me really hard. It was nothing like I expected. I felt really guilty for not enjoying it, and I did my best to hide how unhappy I was, as it seemed that everyone around me Who is having babies at the same time was just thrilled to add to the mix in March 2020. COVID remember that shut down the man made world. There I was safer at home, no job in my high rise apartment with my husband and our baby. As I look back on it now, it was perfect timing. It was exactly what I needed. There was no pressure to do anything. Just be. Simplify. By the fall, as things let up a little bit with the pandemic, I started getting out again. I gave up completely on the idea of getting another job and decided that I was done working in that world. I would start a business when I was ready, but what would it take to be ready? When would it be time? I felt anxious. I thought back to the past life regression work, among the other modalities I've learned along the way. It didn't feel complete. Though I was deeply intrigued by the work, I wanted to know a lot more about hypnosis. I began an intensive program to become a certified hypnotherapist. I blazed through the basic certification and started in on the advanced certification process. Gaining that deep understanding of what happens in the subconscious mind during a hypnotic experience seems so vital to offering sessions that would really transform a client's life. Also, I wanted to complete it. For the sake of finishing something that I had started, because I had developed a nasty habit of, well, not finishing things. It didn't I decided to start attending the live classes instead of doing self study. The first class I attended, I connected deeply with my instructor, as she shared her story with postpartum depression and the guilt she carried because of it. She also shared how she healed. Even though she didn't know what I was going through, and honestly, neither did I until she shared her story, I felt seen and understood. The moment felt so aligned. Why had I shown up on that day? I was clearly in the right place at the right time. Later on in the class, we got onto the topic of career paths, purpose, life callings, as it related to hypnotherapy. And someone mentioned that they had had a soul contract reading to guide them, and that's how they found the hypnotherapy program. New to me, I googled soul contract readings. I bought a book. I read it cover to cover. I learned how to give readings. It was fascinating. Could it be the thing? Could it be my thing? It didn't feel right. I flipped through the book again and again, curious, until something caught my eye that I hadn't seen before. Living in the Right Place, page 200. It's one paragraph, not even a chapter, but it changed the trajectory of my life. In the book, Your sole contract decoded the author, Nicholas David Non writes one broad recommendation I would make, which applies no matter what numbers you have is to undertake an astro cartography reading. He goes on to say that even if you are working through all of your sole contract programs, if you are in the wrong geographic location, you are creating an uphill battle for yourself. I had to know more. Was this the answer? Was changing where I lived, the thing that would relieve all this resistance and struggle, the feeling of life being an uphill battle? It turns out that it was the answer, but not totally in the way that you're thinking. To Google, I went astro cartography. What is it? Who does it? I booked an astrocartography reading to get some answers on where I could go with my family. After exploring five different cities, I felt overwhelmed and annoyed. None of them were a fit. I was so unhappy where I was, and now I had all the cosmic reasons to back me up on why I felt that way, and yet we hadn't been able to uncover a location where we could go. Lots of astro talk and no full body yeses. At the end of the 90 minute reading, the astrologer asked me if I had a few minutes to talk with him about something he noticed in my chart. Obviously I said yes. With only us left on the call, he told me, I was in a balsamic progressed moon phase. I had no idea what he meant. He gently told me what he knew about the balsamic moon phase. It's a quiet time. It's an inward journey. It's time to do the inner work, to let go of what won't support life in the next cycle. Which is literally the opposite of everything I had been doing. No wonder nothing was working. No wonder it wouldn't come together or get off the ground. I could complete things, as in I could wrap things up or close a loop, but I couldn't start anything new. It wasn't time. I was stunned. At the time of the reading, I had barely entered this dark moon phase and still had over two years to go. How could I stand it? The light at the end of the tunnel was more than two years away. I had already been suffering for so long. Everything that I was saying I wanted, everything I was going after was a new beginning, and yet I was in a time of endings. Knew this, fresh start that, start a business, move to a new state. Begin a totally different lifestyle. And yet everything I tried, every direction I pushed, nothing worked. Nothing stuck. I had left my career behind. I could never go back, and I'd never want to. I was recovering from severe burnout. I was a new mom to a one year old who barely slept, or at least that's what it felt like. I was still holding it all together on the outside. On the inside, I felt like I was dying. I felt really hopeless. Every day was so painful. It took everything just to get out of bed. I remember standing over the stove, cooking dinner one evening and having the thought, Why is this so hard? It's just dinner. What did I want to be doing instead? I didn't get an answer. My eternal optimism and sunny view of life had gone dark. No one could really reach me and I wasn't reaching out to them. I was experiencing depression and intense anxiety. I tried talk therapy. It felt like it took forever just to uncover a single part of an issue. We never got to the root and I didn't heal. So I quit. Instead, I turned to the moon. And I began learning as much as I could about progressed lunar phases, specifically this balsamic moon that I was in. I read book after book. As it turns out, feeling like I was dying was actually a normal part of this phase, because in a way, feeling like I was dying was a normal part of this phase, because the dark moon phase is the death of the previous cycle. My life wasn't over, but a part of me was dying. Periods of depression, illness, grief, withdrawal, wanting to throw out everything you own. It's all part of the cycle. In other words, with the moon, there's a time and a space for everything. This gave me hope. I felt seen. I felt held. I knew that I could make it out. Because with the moon, the end of one cycle is followed immediately by the beginning of another. What was dying in me was a false self, who I'd been acting as the previous 30 years of my life. It wasn't the real me. It was time to let her go. A new moon was coming. My job during the remaining time of this darker phase was to surrender. Prepare myself for the next progress lunar cycle to begin. I recalled the card that I pulled years back and the intention I had set without really understanding what I was doing. I surrender at all, except this time I knew the answer to the questions I had asked before. Surrender to what? I'd surrender to the moon. To her cycles, her rhythm, her ancient wisdom. I cleared, I decluttered. I cleansed. I read about the moon's Magic and books cover to cover over and over again. Reading about each moon phase. Following the guidance I'd map out my life and my daily actions or inactions to match the energy that the moon would be emanating. The results were instantaneous. In less than a week, I began to feel better. I felt like what I was doing was actually having an impact on my life. Life was responding to my actions, which made it easier for me to engage in life again. I felt I was connected to something greater than me, yet also something that was tangible because I could just go outside at night and look at the moon. The more closely I followed, the more devoted I became in my alignment, the more guidance I received. The more I opened up to the moon, the more the moon opened up to me. I timed everything with the moon, when I would prep meals, which nights I would take a bath and what would go in it, when I would go shopping, when I would clean, when I would push myself to complete something, and when I would back off, when I would reach out and when I would retreat, I began declining social events that fell within the waning phase. I instead spent this time resting as much as possible, doing the inner work. I went deep into my emotions. I got really honest with myself about how I was feeling, even when it didn't make logical sense. As I connected deeper to the moon, the wisdom within me uncovered and revealed itself. Life began to rearrange itself around me as I stuck with the timing of the lunar phases. It began to hand me the resources and the wisdom to take each next step. All I had to do was stay in sync. Fast forward to June of 2024. I committed myself to address my physical health. I was a year into my progressed new moon phase and energy and motivation for the next chapter were coming in. I had admittedly, for all sorts of reasons, let myself go physically. The demands of motherhood now with two boys, remodeling a home, supporting my husband in his career, which required a lot of travel, not to mention all the spiritual transformation I was doing. It took the focus away from my physical well being, it was time to bring it back. During the prior waning gibbous moon, that's towards the end of the moon cycle, I let go verbally of all habits that supported excess weight on my body and drained my physical energy. I knew what some of them were. But I didn't know how I was going to release them. At the new moon, I set the intention to add in the habit of regular physical movement and I invited someone to enter my life who could support me on the nutritional aspect of weight loss. During the early waxing phase of the moon, I toured athletic clubs, explored options. I toured a club that I had been a member of before, when during my tour, I noticed a flyer on the wall for a full moon circle event. I was really surprised. What? Here? It didn't seem like a likely place for this to happen. I thought, even if I don't join I am going to that event. I joined that day. To be honest, I don't vibe so much with the full moon energy right now being in a new moon phase of my life. It feels like a lot. Something inside of me told me that I had to go, so I signed up. I invited some friends. No one could come. Admittedly, it was very last minute. I went alone. At the full moon circle, there were 12 of us plus the instructor, which made a group of 13. I thought I was there to make some new friends. Although the other women in the circle were lovely, I would soon find out that there was a much grander purpose for my being there. As the circle began, we introduced ourselves. We practiced a short moon salutation, which is a sequence of yoga postures to salute the moon. And after our asana practice, the teacher led us into a guided meditation. As I laid there, thoughts swirled around. I hadn't been meditating regularly for some time now. Oh well, I thought. It's still really nice to have a break from the kids for a night. One moment I was listening to the teacher guide us while observing this endless spiral of thoughts in my head and the next I was out. My presence And everything I was perceiving was now somewhere I had never been. It was dark all around me, yet I didn't struggle to see. I saw two hands, slender, dark hands, held out to me. I felt my hands go cool and light. I blinked. We were somewhere else. This feminine figure walked toward the center of the space. where there was a white flame. She took her hands and scooped into the flame. The white flame rested on her palms. She motioned me to step forward. I stepped forward and I held out my palms as she placed her hands gently over mine until the flame took to my hands. I stepped back to where I had been and held out my hands beside me. I realized that I was standing in a circle of women. I touched the hand next to me, on either side, until the flame took to their hands. And I watched as hands met hands, and every time the light transferred, the circle expanded. The circle expanded until it was so large, that all I could see was the expanding ring of light. When it was complete, we all stood in stillness for a moment. I looked to the guide. She was gone. I closed my eyes. I heard a voice like someone was whispering into a speaker. It was loud and I felt it through my whole body. It's time. I opened my eyes. I was back. I sat up quickly on my yoga mat. What just happened? I've had a meditation practice for over a decade. I practice yoga nidra. I've experienced many, many hypnosis sessions. I had never experienced anything as full and as vivid as this. And it was not a dream because I was not asleep. It's time. Time for what? I wondered back to my busy life. I went two weeks later in the next new moon. I met with a personal trainer who I ended up hiring. He also offered to coach me on a nutrition plan. We worked together for between two and three months. And I lost nearly 25 pounds of fat from my body. None of which has returned. I can see now that I called that in moon mapping at its finest. In October, 2024, I moved with my husband and our two boys to Los Angeles. I'm sure you can guess. I timed our relocation with the moon. Getting out of where I was, I will tell you, I have never been met with greater resistance, but the breakthrough on the other side has been incredible. Once I got off the plane and arrived in California, it became even easier for me to maintain lunar alignment. In fact, it practically happens on its own now because I'm just so in sync. Even my infradiant rhythm lines up with the lunar cycle with such precision, which further supports manifestation and easeful living. During my first full moon in California, I was at the beach by my house. As the moon rose in the sunset, I marveled in the beauty of the whole picture. Toes in the sand, listening to waves crashing. The full moon rising up between two palm trees. I flashed back for a moment to the June full moon circle earlier that year. The hands, the light, the whisper. It's time. I asked the moon again. Time for what? This time she answered. It's time for you to share what you know. It's time. Right now. I live in a place I have wanted to be for over two decades. I don't struggle or fight or fear life or the future. There is little to no tension or stress in my home. Life flows through me and the more I allow, the more I receive. I express gratitude throughout each day as a natural response to life. There's no effort in it. I didn't train myself to do it. Well, my husband says maybe the best part of my lunar living practice is that I've really toned down my type A personality. As I often refer to lunar living as the letting go and letting God for the recovering perfectionist control freak. I know with my whole heart that lunar living is the framework that allowed me to soften, to heal, and to come home to myself. It changed the way I saw myself and the way that I perceived life's events. It deepened me into my spirituality and gave me gifts, pearls of wisdom. As I looked to the moon to be my guide, I found my own rhythm. In each of her phases, I found meaning and reassurance that no matter what, I would be okay. No matter how big my dreams or how dark my secrets, the moon held the space. And though it's been a bumpy ride at times, because I'm operating counter culture against the mainstream, I am in alignment with something that is more powerful than any societal construct or culture, because it wasn't made by man. And while I have fallen off the path several times in this journey. I find my way back quickly and just as quickly the magic returns. Each time I come back, it's with more rigor and commitment than the time before. Right now I am in full alignment. I am building a thriving business driven by a mission to share what I know to help others live in this magic because it's time. I am guided, I am grateful, and I surrender it all. Thank you so much for spending your time with me today. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with a friend. Stay tuned this year for episodes to come on moon mapping, time collapsing, lunar activations, breaking down all those phases and more from my personal journey. I have so much to share and I cannot wait to spend this year with you. I'll see you here next week on Align and Flow Living.