Body As Moon with Sasha Botanica & Diana Wassef
A four-month series that restores cyclical intelligence and supports us in reconnecting with our body’s rhythms at every phase of life. Working with the Moon as a guide and map, this series can help us to deepen our connection to this ancient rhythm.
About this series
Body as Moon is a four-month series that centers on the relationship between lunar cycles and women’s bodies, drawing from how these rhythms have been understood and practiced across time. For much of human history, the moon served as a primary way of tracking time, and the body was understood as a source of knowledge shaped by natural cycles. The roughly 29-day lunar cycle closely aligns with the menstrual cycle, offering a long-standing framework for understanding fertility, energy, creativity, and rest.
When the lunar cycle is viewed alongside the menstrual cycle, the full moon often aligns with ovulation and the dark moon with menstruation, reflecting natural shifts in energy and attention. Around ovulation, energy tends to move outward, supporting connection, communication, and creative exchange, while the movement toward menstruation supports inward attention, reflection, integration, and renewal.
Together, these phases form a complete cycle through which life unfolds over time. As this cyclical understanding became less visible in daily life, many people lost fluency with their internal timing and the body’s signals often went unrecognized. This series offers a way to rebuild awareness of rhythm as an internal reference point.
Session 1: March 15th
Session 2: April 12th
Session 3: May 17th
Session 4: June 14th
Session 1: The Dark Moon
Sculpting the Sacred
March 15th: 1pm-4pm (Location TBD)
This first gathering marks the opening of the Body as Moon series.
We will introduce the first phase of the menstrual cycle, often associated with the dark moon: a time of inwardness, release, and return to the root. While this phase is most visible through bleeding, it represents a universal energetic moment when life turns inward, when old layers are shed and when new cycles begin. Every body moves through this phase, regardless of whether one menstruates or not.
Participants are invited to sculpt their own goddess or yoni-inspired form for the altar: the first offering in a living altar practice that will unfold across the series. The sculpture you create is a devotional act, offering a way to enter into a relationship with the Great Mother as an ancestral, cyclical intelligence that lives within our body and the Earth.
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Working with clay as a primordial material, we shape a form that holds what is quiet, dark, and essential. Clay remembers pressure and responds to touch. It asks us to slow down and listen—making it an ideal medium for this first phase of the cycle.
Ancient Goddess traditions understood this dark phase not as a loss of capacity, but as a time of heightened sensitivity and inner attunement, when the body’s perceptual and intuitive capacities were more pronounced. In Mysteries of the Dark Moon, Demetra George describes menstruation as a natural call toward retreat, rest, and inward renewal, a need that modern culture rarely makes space for.
The sculpture you create in this gathering becomes a physical anchor for the dark phase and as a reminder that this is where the cycle begins.
Session 2: The Waxing Moon
April 12th: 1pm-4pm (Location TBD)
The second gathering of Body as Moon centers the phase of emergence, the moment when energy begins to move outward again after the stillness of descent.
After the inward descent of menstruation, life force begins to turn outward again. This phase marks the gradual return of vitality, curiosity, and responsiveness to the world. It is a time of renewal and reorientation, when clarity begins to re-emerge and new possibilities quietly take shape. The psyche shifts from reflection toward engagement, and the body prepares itself for growth, exploration, and future expression.
Our practice for this session is natural dyeing on silk. Plant dyeing mirrors the phase of emergence through a gradual return to outward engagement. The silk slowly takes on color through contact with plant material, heat, and movement. The dye does not appear all at once; it develops over time, reflecting the steady return of energy, clarity, and responsiveness after an inward season. The finished scarf becomes a tangible marker of renewal—an object shaped through patience and attention, carrying the imprint of a body reorienting itself toward growth and future expression.
Session 3: The Full Moon
Luminous Nectar - Floral Syrup Making
May 17th: 1pm-4pm (High Falls, NY)
The third gathering centers on the phase of ovulation, the turning point of outward expression, connection, and offering. Energetically, this is the crest of the cycle, when vitality rises to the surface and energy reaches its fullness, naturally seeking connection beyond the self. What has been forming within is now ready to be offered outward, whether through communication, creativity, or relationship.
Ovulation is often spoken about only in terms of fertility, but its deeper meaning is visibility. It is a phase of bloom, voice, magnetism, and creativity. Even for those who do not ovulate physically, this phase lives on as an energetic state: the impulse to reach outward, to collaborate, and to offer something of oneself to the world at its moment of ripeness. The psyche is more responsive, expressive, and attuned to others. This phase can also reflect post-menopause, when outward expression and visibility return, no longer shaped by fertility but rooted in the confidence of lived experience.
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During this session, we will gather blooming flowers from the land and bring them together in a shared act of arrangement and offering. Working collectively, we will create a flower mandala. Flowers carry the same intelligence as this phase of emergence—they open, turn outward, and respond to light and relationship. Alongside this, we will prepare a simple floral syrup to take home. This syrup becomes a tangible reminder of moments when the body feels ready to reach outward—toward connection, creativity, and engagement with life.
This third session explores how the ovulatory phase shapes communication, relationships, confidence, desire, and creative expression—and how to recognize and honor moments of bloom without forcing them to last.
Session 4: The Waning Moon
Yoni Steam Ceremony
June 14th: 1pm-4pm (Location TBD)
The final gathering of the Body as Moon series centers the luteal phase and the waning energies of the cycle—the time of descent and discernment. held through the luteal phase and menopause. This is the time of descent and discernment, a phase often misunderstood or erased, framed as loss rather than transformation. Here, we approach it as a threshold, a turning toward wisdom, clarity, and embodied truth.
After the outward reach of ovulation, energy begins to withdraw from the external world and return toward the inner landscape. Discernment sharpens, sensitivity increases, and attention is drawn to what is no longer aligned. This phase invites refinement and release, supporting the shedding of what no longer serves and the strengthening of boundaries guided by inner knowing rather than external expectation.
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While most visible in the luteal phase and menopause, this rhythm belongs to anyone who has felt the call to slow down, pull inward, and listen more closely to the body’s truth.
Our primary practice during this session will be a group yoni steam experience held outdoors in the garden. Each woman will have the opportunity to engage in her own whole body, pelvic steam session. Steaming is an ancestral practice used across cultures as a way of tending the pelvic space, encouraging warmth, circulation, and connection to the womb and pelvic center.
Participants will blend and take home their own yoni steam herbs, along with guidance for continuing the practice independently. Those who wish will also receive a discount toward purchasing their own yoni steam stool, offering a way to carry this practice forward beyond the series.
An understanding of the four phases of the lunar and menstrual cycle and how they shape energy, perception, creativity, and rest
Tools to recognize and work with your body’s rhythms as an internal reference point across different phases of life
Direct experience with ritual practices rooted in nature, including clay work, botanical dyeing, foraging, herbal preparations, and yoni steaming
Handcrafted devotional objects for your personal altar that mark each phase of the cycle
A deeper relationship with the Great Mother archetype and the cyclical patterns reflected in the body
Language and literacy to interpret bodily signals with greater clarity and trust
Shared time in women’s circle, offering reflection, witnessing, and collective remembrance
What you’ll take away:
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You can still participate fully. A regular cycle or physical bleeding is not required. You are welcome to track with the moon as an external reference while learning to listen to your body.
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Yes. These life stages are fully welcome. In perimenopause, sensitivity and inner awareness often increase. Menopause itself marks a deeper inward turning as bleeding ends. The early post-menopausal phase brings gradual reorientation and clarity, and later post-menopause reflects a return of outward expression and visibility, rooted in the confidence of lived experience.
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No experience is needed. All practices are guided and accessible.
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Each session can stand alone, but the series is designed to unfold as a whole for a deeper experience.
Frequently Asked Questions
About the Facilitators:
Sasha is an herbalist and artist living in the Hudson Valley whose work is rooted in the rhythms of nature and the ever-changing cycles of the seasons. By working with plants in their natural timing, her offerings reflect the unique gifts of the land—vibrant, potent, and attuned to seasonal energies. Diana is a Lebanese-Egyptian cycle educator living in the Hudson Valley, whose work centers on menstrual cycle awareness, natural fertility, and cyclical living as a path to deeper embodiment. Through her guidance, she supports women in reconnecting with their inner rhythms, and through Cremona Studios—her sustainable fashion label—she weaves the phases of the cycle into garments and stories that honor the wisdom carried in the body.