What astrology taught me about my body's cycles
For years I treated my body's rhythms like a problem to solve. My cycle arrived when it wanted, my energy swung between manic weeks and bleary ones, and I kept trying to discipline myself into predictability. Looking back, I think I was looking for the wrong kind of map. Astrology, for all its imperfections, gave me something gentler: a language for the changes that were always happening beneath the surface.
I first started paying attention to the planets in my late twenties, somewhere between a breakup and a new job in a new city. The Moon, I learned, was not just a lamp in the sky but a symbol for the body's tides. My own chart showed a Moon in Scorpio, which felt uncomfortably accurate for someone who experiences her bleed as an emotional excavation. That was the week I stopped treating astrology as fortune-telling and started treating it as a mirror.
The night I pulled up my birth chart at a Brunswick café
My first proper astrology session happened in Melbourne, on a narrow table wedged between two friends at a coffee shop off Brunswick Street. One of them had downloaded an app that drew up a birth chart from your date, time, and place of birth, and she was reading us our placements like tarot cards. When she got to my Moon in Scorpio she paused, tilted her head, and said, "Yeah, that tracks." I felt seen in a way no fitness tracker or supplement ever made me feel.
What stayed with me from that evening was not the prediction of anything. It was the suggestion that my body had always been speaking, and that a chart could be a vocabulary for listening. I went home and bought a notebook. I started writing down the day my period started, the phase of the Moon, what I had eaten, how I had slept. It did not turn me into a mystic. It turned me into a witness to my own life.
Moon phases as a mirror for the menstrual cycle
The more I tracked, the more the lunar month and my own cycle started to rhyme. The New Moon would fall the same week as the first heavy day of my bleed. The Full Moon would arrive when I felt most porous and awake, sometimes unable to sleep. I know this is not true for everyone, and I know the science on lunar influence is genuinely thin. But as a practice, as a way of paying attention, it worked.
I built a small ritual around each phase. On the New Moon, when my body is shedding and quiet, I let myself cancel plans without inventing a reason. On the Waxing Moon, I cook something ambitious, often a curry with enough chilli to clear a Fitzroy share house. On the Full Moon I journal by hand. On the Waning Moon I clean the flat, mop the bathroom, take the bins out. None of this is mystical. It is just the pleasure of syncing small acts of self-tending with a rhythm larger than my own.
In a country where menstrual leave still has no federal guarantee, the simple act of paying attention felt quietly radical. I am lucky to live somewhere I can see a GP who bulk-bills through Medicare, but clinical care is only half the picture. The other half is the slow, private work of knowing yourself in time.
Living backwards through the seasons in Sydney
Most astrology books are written for people whose year begins in frost and ends in blossoms. In Australia, our seasons run the other way, and for years I felt half-translated by the advice I was reading. Spring equinox rituals that asked me to plant seeds in September landed in the middle of bushfire season in some years, or simply in the build-up to a humid Brisbane summer. I had to rebuild the wheel.
I started writing my own version, anchored to the Southern Hemisphere. The winter solstice in June is my body's deepest rest. I make my partner make dumplings. The summer solstice in December arrives when I am sunburnt and tired, and it is the moment I commit to booking a holiday somewhere cool. The autumn equinox in March is when I usually crave heavier food and earlier nights, regardless of what the calendar thinks is happening. Listening to the chart and to the country I live in turned out to be the same practice.
What a Saturn return did to my relationship with my own skin
Saturn takes about twenty-nine years to come back to the place it was when you were born. When mine hit, my skin changed, my sleep changed, my cycle changed, and so did my relationship to mirrors. I had spent most of my twenties trying to look like a smaller or smoother version of myself. My Saturn return, which I talk about more in my 2019 word, made me realise my body was not a project.
That is the gentlest way I can put it. The planets did not heal anything. What they offered was timing. Saturn's return gave me permission to grieve the body I had been sold, and to actually meet the one I live in. I started noticing that my skin is clearer in winter, angrier in summer, calmer after ocean swims at Bronte or Coogee. I started noticing that my cycle is shorter when I am stressed and longer when I travel. None of this is astonishing. All of it had been true for years. I just had not been listening.
Sharing the practice over flat whites and a podcast mic
I do most of my journaling alone, but I have learned that body acceptance is a team sport. On weekends I meet a small group of friends at a café near Central Station, or at one of those Brunswick Street places with mismatched cups, and we compare notes. Whose cycle is light, whose is heavy, who is in their Waning phase and wants company, who is in their Waxing phase and wants to be left alone. We do not worship the Moon. We just give one another permission to be where we are.
If you want to hear me talk through some of this with a guest who works in cycle-tracking and somatic therapy, the Coffee with Katiee podcast has an episode that goes deeper into how a birth chart can be a body-literacy tool. We talk about the houses, the Moon, and the difference between a practice and a belief system.
Phases I have come to recognise in my own cycle
- The few days before bleed begins, when I want to be alone, eat warm food, and avoid loud rooms.
- The first two days of bleed, when I feel slowed down and tender, and benefit from cancellation rather than pushing through.
- The middle of the follicular phase, when energy climbs and I want to walk further, swim harder, stay up later.
- The days around ovulation, when I feel confident, social, and easily moved by music and stories.
- The luteal phase, when sleep matters more than usual and my skin flares when I drink too much coffee after midday.
Ways I sync small acts with the lunar month
- Lighting a candle on the New Moon while I empty the bathroom bin and change the sheets.
- Buying flowers on the Waxing Moon, usually from the florist on Gertrude Street, because they last longer when I am paying attention.
- Booking a long walk on the Full Moon, ideally along the Yarra or out toward the bay.
- Slowing down on the Waning Moon by cooking one simple meal and reading instead of doomscrolling.
- Letting the whole cycle be unremarkable sometimes, because perfectionism is not the point.
The thing I keep coming back to is not astrology as a belief system. It is astrology as a vocabulary. Before I had it, the changes in my body felt like personal failures. With it, the changes feel like weather. Weather I can prepare for. Weather I can speak about honestly with a friend over coffee. Weather that does not ask me to be the same person every single day.
