Why we use a moon journal (Ep 6)

Every new moon and every full moon is in a different sign, and every sign has its own qualities, its own body parts, its own energy. And jumping on the computer and needing to look that up every time really detaches you from nature.

So when we come across a company that helped us with products that not only look beautiful, but were really convenient for us to have in our home and really usable for us as well, we were very, very excited. So this week I'm introducing you to a guest who has created moon inspired product that  can help you with every single thing that is moon related.

Check out their website here: https://moonphasestudios.co.uk/

If you would like our free moon download to get the list of the 12 astrological signs and how they impact your body parts and emotions, grab that here: https://holistichealthc.kartra.com/page/moondownload

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Transcript

 Welcome to the Holistic Health Sisters podcast with Wellness and Real Life Sisters, Hannah Carr and Sarah King from the Holistic Health Collective. In this podcast we're going to be sharing our passion for holistic health and spirituality and healing and hormones and plant medicines and seasonal living.

And our love of nature and our love of community to take a nice deep breath
and join us on a path of healing, of self discovery, self love, and stepping into the brilliance of who you really are. This is a podcast for the seekers out there. Those of you who know there's more to life than just surviving or going through the motions and you want more. More health, more wealth, more happiness, more love and compassion and connection, more trust, more surrender and more faith.

And you want that for others too so we can make this world a better place for us all. So go and grab a cup of ceremonial grey cacao. And join us as we explore what moves through us, that which is divinely led so we can all move from fear towards more faith. We want to thank you so much for being here with us.

We love and appreciate you today.

 Hey, it's Hannah here, and on this week's episode, I'm introducing a very special guest. So when Sarah and I started to work with the moon, there is a lot to remember. Every new moon and every full moon is in a different sign, and every sign has its own qualities, its own body parts, its own energy. And jumping on the computer and needing to look that up every time really detaches you from nature.

So when we come across a company that helped us with products that not only look beautiful, but were really convenient for us to have in our home and really usable for us as well, we were very, very excited. So this week I'm introducing you to a guest where you can browse their products that is going to help you with every single thing that is moon related.

Let's jump into the episode.

 Okay, welcome everyone. I've got Hayley here. Hi Hayley. Hayley Jones from Moon Phase Studios and I am a customer of Hayley's and Hayley's business and her products align so well with everything that we do here at Holistic Health Collective. I really wanted to get to know Hayley a little bit better. So literally as I'm finding out more about Hayley, we're doing it together and you're watching or listening to this at the same time.

So welcome Hayley. Hello, and thank you so much for having me. Ah, you're very welcome. Tell us a little bit about your business, just like a high level, for people that have never heard of it. What do Moon Phase Studios do, Hayley? Okay, as a very basic overview, we create moon calendars and moon journals, which completely follow the moon rather than being set up by the standard Gregorian calendar.

I always felt a little bit like when you tried to find moon calendars or diaries It was the normal Monday to Sunday format with a little piddly moon in the corner as an afterthought. Whereas we've structured ours to start at the beginning of each new moon cycle and work all the way through.

Brilliant. Yeah. And I came across you, I would say it was, I'm guessing now probably about four years ago, maybe. Yeah, does that sound about right? Yeah, that's right. We're a Covid business. You know how everyone's got like a bit of a Covid story. So that's as very much was a Covid story. So my husband and I were meant to be running a different business which was a giant TP hire firm and we borrowed all of this money and we'd invested in these giant teepees and we'd gone to wedding fairs and dragged our like toddler and our baby along and tried to shove them in the corner and got brides and grooms booked in for the following year to have their weddings and just clung on paying off the debt in order to do these big wedding events that was the business idea we had and you can't have you can't have weddings in covid so then that didn't and You can't get any help or money for a business that doesn't really exist yet.

So we were scuppered really. So then the moon calendars was something that I always did years before then, just when I had free time, when I was not a parent, when I used to have a leisure time and I used to paint those. and I would print them, just because obviously if everyone's listening, they are huge posters, A1 posters, the calendars, and they've got like a big circle in the middle and then every moon phase around the outer edge, and then each of the days of the year are shown in and they've got star signs and stuff, so they're quite illustrated, so they took me a bit of time to do, but during Covid I was able to happily knock one of those out whilst babies were sleeping and stuff and thought I've got to try and make some money somehow, like this is dire.

And yep, instead of printing the 200 odd that I used to print when I used to sell them on Etsy, I went for 2000 and then just panicked of how the hell am I going to sell these things. dabbled in Facebook ads, which is assumedly where you found me. So it obviously worked, which was good. Yeah.

So you took a huge leap of faith there then, wasn't it? I think this is all businesses. Is there anything that you want to do in your life that's different? Is it requires a leap of faith? And I just heard that leap of faith there from 200 to 2000. And then it's Work it out as you go along. You know what?

And I will say, and I know it might sound a little bit like it's a bit cheesy, a bit contrived, but I literally put all of my powerful energy into that wishing upon a new moon that this was gonna work, and I thought, I've gotta back it up, I've gotta make it happen, and every bit of the way, every, everything that didn't work, Every time I tried to set up an advert or link the pixel from a website to the thingy or get the prints delivered, I was like relentless with it.

Do you know what I mean? I was like, there, there is no money coming in. All we've got is bills to pay for this business that we can't do anything with. But I knew it was going to work in my head and I could imagine the problems were going to be so many orders that how was I going to fulfill them all?

How was I going to roll them? And I'd already worked that out. I was going to drop them off at friends houses and give them all the tubes and this, that and the other. And it did go that way. And then we ordered another 5, 000. So we ended up selling like 7, 000 in that first year. Wow.

That's incredible. Yeah, it was a real, it was a real magical story, really, that went the way that it did. And then we had to It's like the manifest and stuff, it's like you decided it, you had like certainty, so you had that, and it you were magnetising that towards you because you had that certainty, you'd already seen it.

Yeah, 100%, and I'm, and I do, I am aware, I don't want to sound too, No, it's alright, go for it. It's how I felt, it was like This is what I want to happen. I am going to write it down. I remember I've got like cards and stuff and I would have my little moments where I was like, I just need to make this work and it'll be okay.

And what are the practical steps that I need to happen in order to make that work? Then just kept on doing them and kept on doing them. The problem, the real problem came when COVID ended and we have to go back to work and we had to run weddings alongside Yeah we just, we transferred all of the bookings the following year.

So it was like, no, please don't take your deposits back. Get married in 2021. And then we thought maybe we could have a summer business and this could be the winter business. And we did that for a couple of years. And then ultimately we just looked at both things side by side and this was just it was growing naturally.

People loved it. It was, it didn't feel like I was trying to persuade someone to buy this product or come and do this with us. It was a bit of a no brainer. So after a couple of years we decided to sell that business, the TP business, and then properly invest in this. And now it's a full time family business.

My husband works with us. Got three other staff working for us as well. And so far, so good. It's really interesting to hear the whole, I'm going to say messiness behind the business because that is the truth of every single business, but you just don't hear it. You only see the glossy outside and think like, how easy it must have been.

But when you hear the story behind it, it's always, like I say, very messy. Yeah, you, and you probably do the same sort of thing in your business where you're, the message you're sending, which essentially I try to send a message of, I want people to live by the moon. I think the moon is a great, a great compass for, look, you need to reset, rest, switch off.

I think that there's too many messages for be successful and grow and keep going and be relentless. Whereas actually you do need to take a break from that. And I've definitely in those early years of running this business been like, you know what I'm going to, I'm going to switch off because essentially I need those moments.

Like I'm going to go do some yoga. I'm going to have bath. I'm having my. full moon moments, but there's other times in this business where I've got an email to send out that is all about that full moon. And for whatever the reasons I'm still doing it at whatever time of night the day before, but I can't, I've got to compartmentalize that in terms of the message you want to put across and also realizing where you fit within it.

But yeah, as time goes on, it gets a little bit easier. There's definitely. More moments where I can put stuff down and I've definitely got more freedom from my busy evenings and wishes. Yeah, that's what I want. Brilliant. Yeah. And you asked there a while back in the conversation, presumably I came to you for a Facebook ad.

So I run a lot of our business on Facebook. And it definitely was a Facebook ad, I remember. And I saw these, so we was already living by the moon. Sarah and I originally, you can go back to one of our first podcast episodes for our listeners, but we shared our moon story that we were just doing. It was just me and Sarah together, feeling all awkward, sharing our feelings on the moon.

When we eventually set up a holistic business because it had been so amazing for us and helping us in manifesting. And like you said there, Hayley taking pauses in life, which maybe we wasn't used to before. We brought it in as part of our business. We wanted to teach women to how to live by the cycles of the moon and run these online ceremonies for every new moon and every full moon to help people remember.

Yeah. To do things. And then I saw your Facebook ad of this huge poster, like you said, it was a massive poster and you had an offer on which I think you saved a little bit of money if you bought two. So I thought I've got to send one to Sarah. And so for a few years we had it behind us so we could always just look behind and then see what phase we were on very quickly.

I think you had some planting information on there as well, which we're semi interested in, but not quite got around to that bit yet. And we always had this intention, Sarah and I, that. It'd be really good to start a moon journal so people could just open it up and write their feelings down. And at some point in our business, we would have this this time, this magical time that would arise.

Oh, I can't wait for that magical time. Yeah. And we'd be able to create this product and it would be so good. And then you brought out your moon diary, which I've not even had to get to show you for this video because it's always here on my desk. It was right here. And you brought yours out and it's so beautiful with like foil, you've got the lovely foil colors on there and it was everything that we wanted to create.

And I was like why would we want to create it? You've just done it for us. Also, you do this is like your full time business or how we thought we were going to run our business and do all of this as well. It was like this no brainer that we buy yours and I'm on to the second one with you now.

And it is just something that we constantly referred to. I love in here, Hayley, do you know how you've got the little box where, what is the box actually for? You can tell everyone here, but it's like an empty box. So we call it a tracking box because this is the, it's a difficult thing when we made this journal, I've got my ideas of the things that are important to me when I'm observing the moon, but I don't know about everybody else's.

So it was trying to get that balance, but that tracking box in the corner. Yeah, I personally use it for my menstrual cycle. Me too. Right, it's very easy for me. I know there's apps and this and that and the other, but I can't be bothered with that. I use an app as well. Oh, do you? But then, my app doesn't really link it to the moon.

Ah, yes, exactly. I actually want to know so it's here, it will tell me, where is it? Here, it will tell me the moon phase, and then I can think where was I in my cycle? Exactly. Was there, and so it helps me bring those two things together. That's exactly what I use it for personally I think there's a lot of people use it for a whole host of things because the moon can be a trigger or, people are trying to find correlation that's their own, whether they sleep better or worse, whether they have more of an appetite, whether they have headaches, what their energy levels are like.

So it's not strictly like a menstrual tracker, but it could be, you put your own little doodle in there and put a number in there, a little message to yourself, but it's just something that's separate from the journaling area. Yeah. where you're hopefully just writing down whatever comes to you.

It's another bit where you can quickly keep referring back and as time goes on, you've got those moon cycles as they move on and go, you know what? I am very sweaty when I have my period with the full moon. I've really noticed that about myself. I think I might have to Embark on some tactics to to help with that.

Those sort of things. Practical things as well as the sort of emotional. I think that's the main thing is the moon helps you understand yourself at a deeper level by realising your own rhythms and patterns because you're syncing up and following the moon, right? Have you found that?

Absolutely. Yeah. Oh, 100%. And I love the reassurance that when I think the things in my life feel a bit big because the problems, you can bubble them up, can't you? Whereas I like feeling like one tiny little human in looking out on a huge planet and that we're in this solar system.

I find that a very comforting thing. And the reassurance of the patterns of the season's changing, we know the moon's coming around. It just gives you that little bit of reassurance that whatever it is will pass. Absolutely. And I would love to hear a little bit about your moon story. So how did you find out about?

Following the moon, and yeah, and tracking. So that was probably when I went travelling to Australia in my early twenties, and I moved around and went to a little village called Nimbin. Anyone who knows Nimbin will know straight away that it is the ultimate hippie town, where a few folk from Woodstock came from the sixties and set up there.

It was like a dead, empty town. So there's some quirky characters. Let me tell you. And it was just a real immersion into the alternative, I think before then I'd wanted to keep going to different cities and felt like that was the progression that I was going down. And then going there and being so surrounded by nature, for one, and seeing how great that was.

Seeing the stars at night, I never lived anywhere like that, where seeing the stars and seeing the moon was so powerful. And everybody there was really into it. So I just sucked all of that up, so yeah, it was definitely Australia back in the day that was the first trigger.

Yeah, and so Janay, you said years ago you were creating these, you said years before you were making it, and was it for yourself? Was you just creating it to use yourself? Yeah so randomly, there's a moon calendar very similar, I will say by an astrologer in Australia. And everyone used to follow those.

And it's got the same sort of circle on the outside with the moons, and then on the inside is a lot of literature. It's all his writings for his astrological prediction for the year ahead. And he didn't live too far away from where I was in Nimbin. And then when I came back, I had loads of free time.

I had a very cushty job. didn't have a boyfriend it was just felt like there was just so much time like I remember being bored anyway yeah that feels like a very long time ago so I would paint these things and then I painted them the center is my own imagination of the star signs going in the pagan wheel going in and I wrote to him and I said look I've absolutely have to credit you for the fact that I've done this formula based off your your, your structure of your moon calendar.

Is that okay? And he just said absolutely. I've gotten, this is the southern hemisphere anyway. It doesn't work. So we don't cross paths. He said I didn't invent the circle, so if you want to go for it sort of thing. Fine. And then actually, for a few years after that, we kept on sending each other's ones to each other, and we'd like, write little letters and stuff, and he does really well in Australia with his.

I haven't spoken to him for a while, actually. He reminded me I need to do that. So yeah so that started as like a passion hobby project. And then it's if seeing as I've made it for myself anyway, I would get copies done, and then plop them on Etsy and just wait to see what happened. But yeah it's very different operation to what it was then to, to now.

Yeah, it's really growing. So you've got your posters, which I think is a great reference point for someone just maybe to have in their bedroom and wake up and to be like, right, that's where we are. And then you've got your diary, which I normally keep that I keep it at my bedside table, but often I bring it down.

I like referring to it during the day. And I guess because I work at the moon a lot and we plan in advance and that kind of thing. It's Oh, what's happening? It's over for practical things. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. But you've got other products. So what else have you got? So we've got I mean I think really it's fair to say these two, those are the bread and butter, those are the thing that, keep it all going.

And then we do have other little ancillary products that go alongside it, we've got some sort of textile products, we've got a nice little velvet embroidered book sleeve that you can go along to sew. Keep your journal in there. We've got a couple of pens, little desk pads. So there are some of the little tidbits that we've been encouraged to do as the businesses grow, but they've been really fun as well.

That's, and they don't have the same pressure because it's, it doesn't have to contain so much information and it's not. A six month body of work. That's what I was going to ask. It takes six months to plan the diary. Yeah, about six months. And there's two of us that work on it. So there's our designer, Anna.

And we use the odd freelance artist to help us paddack, because it's so illustrated. Yeah, so yeah, and it's a big job. I think I originally naively thought why doesn't anyone do a diary that is structured by the moon? Why isn't that a thing? And I've now realized I know the answer and it's because it's hard to be difficult.

Yeah You have to move everything around. There's not the same way. There's no symmetry to it. There's no We've got our own method now in the way that we divide the chapters up. Yeah, but it's not easy by any stretch. You can't rinse and repeat it each year. It's starts from scratch each time.

I think that we need a big thank you then, because it's only because of creators. out there like you that we get to enjoy those kind of products so thank you for all your hard work and dedication so it makes it easy for us to just be able to pick something up and like delighted to invest in something so beautiful and so useful.

Oh that's great that literally makes my heart sing because that's the goal you know I don't want to be just you know making a business for the sake of it I want it to be that it's you know it spreads a bit of joy and people love it so that's lovely to hear. Yeah so I really recommend this for anyone who's new to Or curious, or already working with the moon, and you just want to make it like, It's quite annoying when you have to keep looking up on Google, and what is the phase, and Sometimes the information's wrong, or it's not right for your area, or the time, And I feel like there's a, because it's almost the thing that you're trying to do, Is you're trying to connect closer with nature, for one, Yeah.

Or find that sort of link, that's a bit more of a sort of spiritual link, Where it was going back to the internet, or an app, that, that kind of, doesn't help with that, does it? You can end up scrolling on Instagram and you're like, oh that wasn't what I was meant to be doing. So hopefully that information can all be there.

Exactly. And a little idea about perhaps getting closer to nature. I put mine in my backpack and I. So I went on a walk with a friend, we took some incense, and we took some cacao, and we sat in a field together, and I opened it, and I'd done one of the meditations, so I got out my phone, and I jammed it, because we've got some meditations in here, and then I played that out loud on my phone, so there was a little bit of tech there.

But we both sat there together in the field with the incense burning with our cacao, listening to our meditation and talking about like the moon journal at the same time. So brilliant. That's what I want. That's what I want. That's great to hear. I love the idea of that. That's amazing. And the thought that, we've sold quite a few of those journals.

There's going to, and those audio like hypnosis meditations, they're obviously all around the same period. So the thought that there's going to be so many people that are all doing it in around the same time. All in America and, that there's so many of us that are all listening to the same voice and connecting to that same space, looking at that same moon.

I love that. It's, that's a, that's real. It's a bit like the collective power of prayer, but you can do that through meditation as well. So we can actually make a difference to the world. by many people doing the same thing at the same time. And most of the time, people are thinking about fear, I'm scared about this, about the war, about this, and this is our collective thoughts.

So for us to redirect and actually be thinking about something positive and connecting to nature, and all doing that on a collective basis it just infuses with me with excitement of what we can do for the world. Oh, totally. Absolutely. It's, someone said to me, it's a bit like a religion for the non religious.

And I see that it's the, the universe, the planets, the world we live in is a little bit like a church for the people who want to have that and have that sort of, yeah, prayer like support. Yeah, don't necessarily go with all the other isms. They won't have it.

That's what spirituality isn't it? It is religion without the rules. Like you're still connecting to spirit or higher consciousness or mother nature or whatever you feel. That thing that bigger than you is. Yes. But without the rules of you're gonna go to hell. Yeah, you can't do this.

If you don't do this, you don't do that. Yeah. And I think that's why people who know that it really sings to them, it really does. It really strikes a chord. That's so beautiful. So to wrap up, I don't know if you've got a story to hand, but I would love to ask you Hayley. What has the moon helped you manifest?

You said there about the business story, is that the biggest and best thing that you can think about that you really put your intent into? I think so. I think it's the one that it feels like the most tangible and the most powerful. I think when I was really going for it, when I felt like I was in my overdraft and I borrowed some money off my auntie and I put half of it on Facebook ads and half of it on stock.

And I told, I think I said that it was to get me out of my overdraft and I just spent it all again. So in that moment of panicking about it, what I was really fixated on was that it was going to work to a degree that I was going to afford a dishwasher. Because in my mind, at that moment, with a baby and a toddler, I just felt like that was going to be the thing that I needed.

It was a small thing, I thought, just asking for a dishwasher, and it was like a tangible thing. So that was like what I did in terms of like My new moon meditations and the things I was manifesting. I didn't want to be too greedy, didn't want to be too ambitious. Light Britishness of just one dishwasher.

But really, I knew that meant we needed to knock a wall through and have a whole new kitchen because there's nowhere for a dishwasher. So I knew what I wanted, really, was a whole new, refurbed, nice kitchen. And we did that last year. And that's what, and then I feel like Got my bloody dishwasher! Do you know what I mean?

I didn't ask for a lot, what I wanted was a dishwasher, but I got it. So yeah, I definitely feel like it was, again, it was another thing that I'd really hoped for and manifested, but it did have a bit of a practical plan behind it. It knew that it needed X amount of things to happen within the business to get that dishwasher.

But yeah, I do thank the moon for that. That's amazing. And so do you think, I was speaking with my sister Sarah this morning, she's we limit ourselves. And so you, your limit was the dishwasher, which was really a new room. Of course, it couldn't, there was nowhere for it to physically go without it.

Yeah. But do you think now that will help push past like the limitations? Are you ready to go on to like bigger dreams that you think that you can? Do you? Yeah, I think I do and I've got like my own ambitions that are there but I feel maybe it's a bit of a, concern about the ego but the idea of really laying out exactly what my ambitions and goals are, that's for me and my journal.

Do you know what I mean? I feel like I can work on that privately. Exactly yeah. I wasn't asking you to share and I love that, yeah, you've got that element of yeah, that's just for me. So you have, but I have, but I feel even to my partner, I feel like I'm gonna be reserved to, in terms of but in my own in my own head, yeah, there's ambitions that we've got that I'm working on.

I love that. And I think also when you said, I wanted to say to you earlier, when you said about the Australian Moon calendar. Yeah, we need a UK version. So I'm glad that yeah. Yeah, exactly. It didn't work the southern hemisphere to the northern one didn't work. So yeah, we've got one now. So that's all good.

And for us in this business, we really want to support and champion other women in business. And I know your business is made up of both men and women. And we love that. But it's I guess the ideas were yours in the first place. And for us to support another woman who's we're just here with our families, with these small businesses, trying to like, make a difference.

It feels really exciting to support that as well. Oh, thank you. So what's your website so people can go and check you out or your socials? Where are you big? We are moonfacestudios. com, and I would say we're we're present on Instagram and Facebook trying to dip my toe into the murky world of TikTok.

But that keeps going further and further down the list of important jobs. But yeah, all the social places. We're on Pinterest now, which was something that took a very long time to get together, but that's quite nice. Cause we've got some great photography from all of our products and stuff. So that's lovely to see that people are finding us on there.

Wonderful. And so when is the best time for people to get a moon journal? I think you bring it out. It starts in December, doesn't it? Yeah, we try to do it starting at the last new moon of each year. So the last moon of 2024 was the last one going forward and then so and so they don't quite work with the start of the new year.

But the idea behind that was we wanted to cover all 13 moon cycles. Exactly. Naturally, people lean towards the idea of having a journal, a planner around that sort of Christmas, New Year time. So it had to fit in with that because we did toy with doing it. Do we launch it with the spring equinox?

Do we do it? So yeah so the we did a big sort of questionnaire and asked a load of people and they said yep we're more than happy with it being the last new moon of the year so they can start making their big plans for the year ahead. But we do a big pre order campaign, so if you did want one, A, we've just discounted the last few that we've got, so we do have some for this year and there's plenty of this year left.

Okay. But the next year's one, we start running our pre order campaign in June or July. where you get, yeah, it's really early. We get, a nice discount to honor the fact that it's a pre order and then you get it later in the year. And that as a business, it helps us out massively because it means we can predict how many we're going to sell and it helps us with and stuff.

So yeah, there's a big pre order launch in the summer, but yeah, we've still got them available on the website now. Amazing. Thank you for sharing all that today. Thank you for all your work in the world and for coming on and sharing all that information with us today as well. Oh no, thank you for having me.

It's been great. All right, see you! Okay, take care! Thanks, Hannah! Bye!

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