The Into the Woods Podcast

Venus retrograde isn’t here to wreck your relationships. It’s here to show you what’s ready to shift. 🌙

In this video, we’re talking about how Venus retrograde and the Libra new moon are working together right now, and what that means for your love life, friendships, self-worth, and the way you give and receive.

Whether you’re reflecting on an ex, rethinking a partnership, or rebuilding your relationship with yourself, this is your invitation to slow down, get honest, and choose what feels aligned. ✨

💫 Check out my website: divinefemininecollective.com

📲 Follow along on Instagram: @divinefemcollective

Save this one for the days you need a reminder that every ending makes room for something better.

The Autumn Equinox is here, and it's asking one question: what are you ready to harvest? 🍂In this episode of Into the Woods, Rachael Magowan of Divine Feminine Collective walks through the energy of Mabon, the Autumn Equinox, and the Harvest Full Moon in Aries. It's a season of balance, gratitude, and honest reflection on what you planted this year, what actually grew, and what you're ready to let go of before the darker months.If you're ready to stop guessing and start building a life designed around who you actually are, you're in the right place.✨ WORK WITH RACHAELExplore courses, 1:1 numerology sessions, and personalized reports:👉 https://divinefemininecollective.com🔢 Your Cosmic Blueprint: learn the numbers behind how you're designed to operate✨ The Art of Manifestation: grounded manifestation you can actually use in real life🌿 The Aligned Woman Experience: a private 3- or 6-month container with Rachael📜 Numerology Reports: Personality Profile, Yearly Forecast, Relationship Compatibility, and more🎧 Subscribe to Into the Woods for more episodes on manifestation, numerology, and living in rhythm with the seasons.📲 Follow along on Instagram: @divinefemcollective

Eclipse season is over. Some of you came out of it feeling empowered. Some of you came out feeling battered.

And now we're somewhere stranger: the void.

That's Kara's word for it, and it's the right one. That suspended place after the heightened energy passes, where you're standing in a dark room knowing the light is coming back but it isn't back yet. If the last week has felt oddly still, or oddly directionless, that's what you're standing in.

Recorded on the 9th, on the 9/9 portal, the day before everything shifts.

WHAT'S HAPPENING

The New Moon in Virgo lands on September 10, and it changes the energy completely. Virgo is the taskmaster. An earth sign, grounded, practical, analytical, reliable. It doesn't want your grand vision. It wants to know what you can actually do about it.

And it isn't arriving alone. On the same day: Uranus goes retrograde in Gemini, Venus moves into Scorpio, and Mercury moves into Libra.

Kara walks through what each of those does to you.

Uranus is the disruptor, and Virgo is the organiser, so the question becomes what needs disrupting and what already has been. Mercury in Libra brings communication toward balance and fairness. Venus in Scorpio takes the heart into deep water, which means relationships and feelings are heightened this month, not lightened.

THE NUMEROLOGY

This is a week 2, but not an ordinary one. It carries 11 energy, the psychic number. Intuition and sensitivity are both amplified, and the focus lands on relationships, communication and emotional awareness.

All of it inside a Universal 1 year, in the year of the Fire Horse. Last year you took stock and cleared out. This one is for fresh starts.

WHAT WE COVER

• The void, and why the space after an eclipse feels like nothing is happening
• The 9/9 portal and tying up loose ends
• New Moon in Virgo, and why small and practical beats big and dramatic
• Uranus retrograde in Gemini as the disruptor
• Mercury into Libra, Venus into Scorpio
• Week 2 with 11 energy, and heightened intuition
• Why new moons are the best time to manifest
• Discernment after eclipse season, and who's coming with you
• The retrogrades still to come, and why review time isn't something to fear
• Why Virgo season is the foundation for the Libra and Scorpio months ahead

THE RITUAL

Rachael and Kara close with something simple enough to actually do.

Write down three things you want to improve during this Virgo new moon.

Under each one, ask: what belief or way of thinking would I have to change for this habit to change?

Then choose one small action you can repeat consistently.

That last part is the whole thing. Virgo doesn't reward the overhaul. It rewards the thing you can still do on a bad day.

QUESTIONS TO SIT WITH

1. What can I physically take action on in my real life?
2. What pattern am I being asked to release, practically rather than spiritually?
3. Are the relationships I'm in supporting the person I'm becoming?

If this one helped, share it with someone who needs it, and let us know what's coming up for you.

Reach out if you need us. We're here.

Julia had a dream about Logan before she'd properly spoken to her.

They were in a forest, somewhere that felt like thousands of years ago, in a time of war. An old sick man lay in a bed between the trees. Logan took one of his legs, Julia took the other, and the sky exploded into fireflies. When Julia woke she simply knew two things: that they had healed him, and that they were meant to come together for something.

She was mortified. A mutual friend told Logan about it anyway. Logan walked straight over and asked her to explain.

That's how Flourish Ayurveda started.

Who they are

Logan trained at the Ayurvedic Institute in New Mexico, a two year programme covering diet, lifestyle, marmas and energy healing, after discovering Ayurveda during a yoga teacher training at nineteen. She's had her practice for thirteen years.

Julia came the long way round. She went to graduate school for nutrition science, worked in research, and kept hitting the same wall. People already knew what to eat. The information wasn't the missing piece. What she kept finding in the women she worked with was a lack of self worth and a lack of connection to self, which made every dietary change she recommended essentially inaccessible.

So she followed that thread instead.

What we cover

• Ayurveda as a five thousand year old system, and the five elements
• Why the goal isn't to heal anyone, but to help people reach their own capacity to heal
• What a consultation actually involves, and why it starts with ninety minutes of listening
• Vedic astrology and how it differs from the Western astrology most of us know
• Why your Vedic chart may not say what your Western chart does, and why that's not a contradiction
• Reading a chart for predispositions in the body, not just soul purpose
• Ayurvedic facial treatments, and why touch, rest and nervous system support matter as much as skin
• Why you can eat perfectly and still not absorb it if you're living in fight or flight
• The monthly moon circle, and why everyone sits on the floor in a circle
• How hard it is to make friends as an adult, and whether we should bring back simply asking

On Vedic astrology

Julia is clear that it isn't better or worse than Western astrology, just a different lens. Western work is largely sun sign focused, concerned with who you are in this lifetime. Vedic looks across lifetimes, at what your soul has carried in and what it came here to evolve into.

Some of us choose lives with a great deal of contrast. People ask why they would have chosen this. Julia's answer: it probably seemed like a good idea at the time, floating in oneness before you had a body and had to feel any of it.

Julia's seed moment

About ten years ago Julia had a near death experience involving internal bleeding. She calls it a seed moment, the point where the soul intervenes because you've drifted from what you came here for.

She made promises during it. That she'd leave the comfortable full time job. That she'd finally do this work with Logan, who had been asking her for years.

Afterwards she was frightened that the bleeding would start again without her noticing, so she kept asking Logan the same question: am I out of the woods yet? When can I feel safe in my body again?

The answer turned out not to be about time. It was about building that safety herself, through the practices, until she could go to sleep and trust she'd wake up.

She says she wouldn't change any of it.

If you feel lost in the woods

You're not alone, and the universe has your back.

Ask for help. Because the universe can't have your back in the way you need unless you actually ask.

Find them

Flourish Ayurveda, Eastern Avenue, Columbia Tusculum, Cincinnati

Monthly moon circle, free, usually the first Thursday of the month, 6 to 7pm
Vedic yoga with Logan, Wednesdays and Fridays at 10am
Consultations, Ayurvedic facial treatments and Vedic astrology readings by appointment

If this one resonated, share it with someone who's been looking for their people 🤍

If the last two weeks have felt like a lot, this episode explains why.

Leo season is over. Virgo season has started. We're sitting between two eclipses with Mercury moving into Virgo, which creates a very particular tension between wanting to know and needing to surrender. And in numerology, August is a Universal 9 month and this is also a Universal 9 week, which means two layers of completion energy stacked on top of each other.

Kara takes the astrology. Rachael takes the numerology.

The eclipse portal

The window opened right after Lion's Gate on August 12 and closes on the 28th. Kara's invitation is to look back across those two weeks and ask what came to the surface. Eclipses tend to bring back a theme rather than introduce a new one, and this one is specifically about breaking patterns.

Something came back around. A person, a situation, a way of being. The point isn't that it returned. The point is that you get to meet it differently this time.

Venus as evening star

Venus has shifted into her evening star phase, which is receiving energy rather than chasing energy. Aphrodite territory: love, beauty, harmony, peace. The question underneath it is where you need to stop pursuing and start allowing.

The blood moon in Pisces

The final eclipse of this cycle is a blood moon, and Kara reads those as bringing back old karmic material. It lands in Pisces, the last sign of the zodiac and the most emotional, which makes this less about doing something and more about whether you can genuinely surrender it.

Saturn is retrograde alongside all of this, which Kara affectionately calls daddy karma in the sky. In tarot terms, Venus is the Queen of Cups and Saturn is the King of Swords. One asks how you feel about it. The other asks whether you did what you said you would.

The numerology

Nine is completion. Endings, release, forgiveness, wisdom, making peace with what has run its course. And it's all happening inside a Universal 1 year, which is a year of beginnings.

So the clearing isn't the story. It's the preparation for one.

And there's good news at the end of it. September is a Universal 1 month, inside a Universal 1 year. New beginnings on both counts.

What we cover

Virgo season, Demeter energy, and why you suddenly feel more productive

The eclipse portal from August 12 to August 28, and what to look back on

Why eclipses revisit themes rather than deliver new ones

Venus as evening star, and receiving instead of chasing

The Pisces blood moon and past karma

Saturn retrograde as the accountability check

Why everyone is having vivid dreams right now

Universal 9 month, Universal 9 week, Universal 1 year

Why September opens something new

Two things worth sitting with

What pattern has come back around for you since August 12?

And when you find it, resist the urge to locate it in a person or a situation. It's usually something inside you that keeps operating inside that system.

On bravery

Kara's closing thought: the universe rewards bravery. When the pattern reappears and you respond from a braver place, vulnerable and confident at the same time, that's when things tend to move. A new opportunity. A shift in perspective. Anxiety finally letting go.

That's what we're hoping for you this eclipse season.

If this resonated, share it with someone who's been feeling the weight of it too. And let us know what's coming up for you 🤍

The Wayfinders series, with Rachael Magowan and Kara Sage

Rachael raised her hand at a workshop and said she'd like to stop peeing herself. Michelle said: we can fix that. Then fixed it, in about two sessions.

This one's a little different from the other Wayfinders episodes. Michelle isn't a spiritual healer. She's a pelvic floor physical therapist and the owner of Pillar Pelvic Health in Cincinnati, and she's the reason Rachael's health journey started at all. As Rachael puts it, the physical came first. Once her body stopped being a daily problem, everything else became possible.

Michelle has been a PT for seventeen years, eleven of them in pelvic health. She started in acute care and ICU trauma therapy, getting people moving again after everything had broken. What moved her into pelvic work was her own postpartum experience with her first baby: undiagnosed depression and anxiety, moving her body too much too soon, and a prolapse her OB told her to rest through and then surgically fix once she was done having children. She didn't accept that answer, and it changed the course of her career.

She opened Pillar in 2022. There are seven clinicians there now.

What we get into

Why pelvic health barely gets covered by insurance, and what that does to care

Leaving the hospital system to treat whole people instead of diagnosis codes

Big T and little t trauma, and why so many people cry on the table

Birth as a physical trauma, and how little support follows it

Perimenopause, and why so many women were told this is just how it is

Why lifting heavy three days a week meaningfully reduces perimenopause symptoms

What the research says about non-hormonal options for vaginal tissue changes after 38

Why Pillar never discharges patients, and treats maintenance as the model

Point of care ultrasound, and being the only practice in Cincinnati using it

Dry needling, cupping, taping, belt fitting, and everything else on the list

Why they see the whole gender spectrum, not just postpartum women

Weekly lunch and learns, and a monthly two-hour deep dive

How your shoulder affects your pelvic floor

On science and instinct

Michelle is analytical by nature and evidence-based by training, and she says so plainly. She's also become more open to the parts that don't show up in a study. She talks about an obstetrician she works with who picks up on things nobody else could have known, and about the numerology reading Rachael did for her whole team, where nearly everyone turned out to already be in the role they were built for.

Rachael's read on it: Michelle works on the spiritual plane too, just physically. You need a body that's steady enough to ground into before anything else can land.

Feeling lost in the woods?

Michelle's answer is simple. You talk about spirit guides all the time. You need a physical guide too.

The Wayfinders question

I know I'm finding my way when… I feel complete.

For Michelle that means treating patients, which is her passion without question, and also influencing the people around her to hold the same standard. Because when enough clinicians do, the whole field changes.

Find Michelle

Pillar Pelvic Health, Cincinnati, Ohio

Book an evaluation: 513-987-0601

pillarpelvichealth.com

📍 Cincinnati, Ohio

Their Instagram is worth a follow. Educational, entertaining, and completely unhinged in the best way.

If this one resonated, share it with someone who needs to hear that it's fixable 🤍

Women are handed two options for anger: suppress it, or be branded for expressing it. That's the whole menu.

This episode is about a third one.

Tiffany Graves is a clinical psychologist in Cincinnati and the owner of Broad Integrative Wellness, a practice built on the idea that distress doesn't live purely inside the individual. What we feel is shaped by our internal world and by the systems we live inside, which is where the patriarchy stops being an abstraction and starts being clinical information.

Casey Frazee Katz is an independently licensed therapist and the creator of Intentionally, where she does the breathwork, energy work and Reiki side of things.

Together they've built A Right to Rage, a six session series running this autumn. Rachael is joining the cohort.

Where it came from

Tiffany ran a book club on Rage Becomes Her last year and the response was overwhelming. Not a mild interest. An outpouring. It made something obvious: women needed somewhere to talk about this, together, out loud.

What makes the two of them good at co-leading it is that they sit at opposite ends of the same spectrum. Casey grew up Midwestern, where the instruction was to push it down, because good girls aren't angry. Tiffany was raised in the South, where open expression of emotion was acceptable, and noticed the shift immediately when she moved.

Neither position is wrong. Both are socialised. That's the point.

What we talk about

• Why anger is an adaptive survival emotion, not a defect
• The difference between the internal experience of anger and how you respond to it
• Suppression or aggression, and why those were never the only two choices
• What historical imagery around women's anger reveals, and why so much of it focuses on the mouth
• Loneliness and disconnection among women, partnered or not
• Why anger often has grief sitting underneath it
• Top-down and bottom-up approaches, and why the body has to be in the room
• Anger showing up physically when it has nowhere else to go
• Parts work, and treating anger as a protector that needs witnessing rather than managing
• Why patriarchy is not the same thing as men, and what allyship actually looks like
• Community after Covid, and the craving to physically be together

What the series actually is

Six sessions this autumn, every other week, deliberately paced so there's integration time between them. Most take place at Tiffany's office in Cincinnati. Two are field trips: a breathwork session at A New Way studio, and a closing session at Flourish Ayurveda with an Ayurvedic meal and a ritual unburdening ceremony.

Deliberately small, six to eight people, so everyone has room to speak.

To be clear about what it isn't: this is not an anger management group. It's not for people with an anger problem. It's for women living in the world as it currently is.

Details

Starts September 24

Early bird registration closes September 3

Final registration September 17

Register at hellointentionally.com/right-to-rage

There's an equity rate model, with a higher rate for anyone whose finances allow them to contribute toward the collective and a lower one for anyone who needs support from it. You can pay upfront or after each session. If cost is the barrier, reach out to them directly, because they've built flexibility in on purpose.

The timing

September is a Universal 1 month, in a Universal 1 year. New beginnings, in the year of the Fire Horse. Rachael's read on it: this is the right season to burn off what's been sitting there and walk into the next cycle without it.

If this is calling you, go and look. And if you know someone who needs it, send it to her 🤍

Ask Jenn Castillo Staats what she does and the answer depends on who's asking. Strip away the credentials, though, and she'll tell you plainly: she cultivates safe spaces and loves people for a living.

Jenn is the founder of Of The Essence, a wellness studio in Cincinnati. She's a professional practitioner of the intuitive arts, a crystal healer, an intuitive coach and educator, a Reiki master. She also spent almost twenty years as a social worker and therapist before any of that, and she retired at the height of that career because something in her knew it was time.

Jenn grew up mixed indigenous in a place that was mostly white and mostly comfortable, while her own family was neither. Her gifts showed up young, and at first they frightened her. She'd wake in the night in an old house full of activity, not yet understanding what was happening. She spent whole days alone in the woods, which she'll tell you was never really alone. She had her first reading from an elder at eleven or twelve.

What she wanted, for a long time, was to be normal. So she found a way to help people that looked acceptable from the outside, and she was good at it for two decades. All the while the other work carried on quietly in her personal life, referrals passing hand to hand the way they always have. Ninety-nine percent of her business still arrives that way.

The conversation goes into what it actually took to make the leap. Not the clean version. The years of her own healing that had to happen first, the people who told her long before she was ready, the fear she had to move through anyway.

She also speaks about her cancer diagnosis, and the thing it exposed in her that years of practice hadn't: how bad she was at receiving. A whole community showed up to care for her and she resisted it. Out of the middle of that came her course, Alchemizing Pain into Power.

What we talk about

• Growing up with gifts nobody around her had language for
• Assimilation, and wanting to be normal more than wanting to be seen
• Twenty years in social work, and why she left at the top
• Why she believes we should have many teachers, including plants, animals and the moon
• Practitioners doing their own work, and what happens when they don't
• Empowerment as the primary healing tool
• What an actual session looks like, start to finish
• Her clients: CEOs, priests, doctors, stay-at-home parents, people who are unhoused
• Starting where your hands are, and why the ripple counts as doing something
• Cancer, receiving, and where Alchemizing Pain into Power came from

On feeling helpless

People come to her overwhelmed by everything happening in the world, convinced that nothing they do matters. Her answer is to start where your hands can reach. Clean up your own side of the street. Look someone in the eye at the petrol station and mean it when you wish them a good day. The ripple is real, and it counts.

The Wayfinders question

Every guest finishes the same sentence: I know I'm finding my way when…

Jenn's answer comes back to authenticity. She knows she's on the right path when she can show up completely as herself, to herself first and then to everyone else. When she doesn't have to hide or make herself small.

She says if she could go back to the pivotal moments, she'd tell her younger self one thing. Just be who you are. That's enough.

Of The Essence, Cincinnati. Jenn works with clients around the world, travels to teach, and runs classes and in-person sessions.

If this one resonated, share it with someone who's looking for their way. And if you have a moment, a review genuinely helps others find this corner of the forest 🤍

Every August, social media fills up with talk of the Lion's Gate portal. Manifest your dreams. Raise your vibration. The portal is opening. But what does any of that actually mean, and what is it asking of you?

In this episode Rachael walks through the symbolism behind August 8th, and offers a gentler way to hold it.

The Lion's Gate brings a few things together at once. The sun is moving through Leo, the sign of courage, creativity and heart-centred living. The date itself, 8/8, carries the numerological weight of the number eight: abundance, balance, personal power, infinity. And some traditions connect this time of year with Sirius, long associated with wisdom and renewal.

It's worth saying plainly that this is a modern spiritual tradition rather than an astronomical event. That doesn't make it less useful. What it offers is an annual invitation to stop and ask a question most of us avoid: who am I becoming?

Leo isn't asking you to be louder. It's asking you to be more honest. The sun doesn't apologise for shining, doesn't compare itself to the moon, doesn't dim because someone nearby might be uncomfortable. It just does what it's for. So where have you been hiding? Where have you mistaken shrinking for humility?

Less a doorway opening somewhere in the cosmos, more a doorway opening in you.

What we cover:

• What the Lion's Gate portal is, and what it isn't
• Leo, the sun, and why authenticity matters more than volume
• The number 8 in numerology and the significance of 8/8
• Sirius and its place in the symbolism
• Why fear shows up loudest right before growth
• A simple two-letter ritual for August 8th
• Why transformation is usually quieter than we expect it to be

The two-letter ritual:

1. Find somewhere quiet. Light a candle. Breathe slowly. Hands over your heart.
2. Write two letters.
3. The first is to the version of you that you're ready to release. Thank her. Honour everything she helped you survive. Then let her go, kindly.
4. The second is to the version of you who's coming. Describe her life. How does she feel? How does she love? What boundaries has she learned to hold? What has finally come true?
5. Read the second one out loud. Not because saying words makes magic, but because hearing your own voice claim something changes how you hold it.
6. Then put it somewhere you'll find it again in a few months, and see what's shifted.

Sit with these:

1. What version of myself am I ready to leave behind?
2. What dream have I been postponing because I'm afraid?
3. What would courage look like today, not someday?
4. What lights me up from the inside?

Don't rush the answers. Sometimes the soul speaks quietly.

Take what resonates and leave the rest 🤍

If this one spoke to you, share it with someone who needs it, or leave a review. It genuinely helps others find their way here.

The Lion's Gate Portal opens on August 8th, and this episode is your full guide to working with one of the most potent energetic windows of the year.

In this episode of The Path Less Traveled, Rachael is joined once again by Kara Sage for a deep dive into the 8/8 portal: what it is, why the number 8 makes it so significant, and how to use this window to release fear, set intentions, and step into the most authentic version of yourself.

As a numerologist, Rachael breaks down why this date matters. The 8 is the number of abundance, balance, and power. It is the infinity sign. And this year, the portal arrives during a Numerology Week 4, all about building foundations for a stable, abundant future, inside a Universal 9 Month, the energy of releasing what no longer serves you. The timing could not be more aligned.

In this episode, we explore:

• What the Lion's Gate Portal actually is, its symbolic connection to the sun in Leo and the star Sirius, and why it is celebrated every year on August 8th
• The numerology of 8: abundance, balance, power, and the infinite cycle of giving and receiving
• Why abundance is not just financial. Sometimes it is drinking your coffee without screaming children, or doing the work that lights you up
• Kara's story of discovering the Lion's Gate during the summer of 2020, grounding barefoot on stones for days, downloading energy she could not yet name
• The star Regulus, the heart of the lion, and why this portal calls you back to heart-centered authenticity instead of ego
• How the Aquarius Full Moon, Lughnasadh, and the Lion's Gate weave together into one story of harvest, expansion, and becoming

A collective tarot reading for the 2026 Lion's Gate, featuring the Devil, the Lovers, the Moon, and the Eight of Pentacles, and the message they carry about moving from fear into love

The Year of the Fire Horse halfway point: what to reflect on, what to change, and which weeds to pull before the second half of the year

Reflection questions for the portal:

1. What am I ready to release?
2. Where am I being called to be braver?
3. What future am I ready to create?

This episode is for you if:

• You have been feeling the intensity of this season and want to work with it instead of against it.
• You are curious about the Lion's Gate but want it explained in a grounded, practical way.
• Or you are ready to release the fearful, looping thinking that has been keeping you from the abundance that is your birthright.

🎁 FREE 8/8 PORTAL WORKBOOK:

Rachael is releasing a free workbook to help you work with the energy of the Lion's Gate Portal. Head to divinefemininecollective.com/freebie and subscribe to the email list to receive it, or grab it directly on the website.

Topics covered in this episode: Lion's Gate Portal, 8/8 portal, Lions Gate 2026, numerology, number 8 meaning, abundance, manifestation, star Sirius, Leo season, Regulus, heart centered living, collective tarot reading, the Devil card, the Lovers card, the Moon card, Eight of Pentacles, Universal 9 Month, Year of the Fire Horse, releasing fear, setting intentions, portal ritual, spiritual growth, The Path Less Traveled, Kara Sage, Into the Woods podcast, Divine Feminine Collective

Connect with Rachael:

Instagram: @divinefemcollective

Website: divinefemininecollective.com

Free 8/8 portal workbook: divinefemininecollective.com/freebie

If this episode resonated with you, share it with someone who could use it, follow the show, and leave a review. And let us know in the comments or DMs: what are you bringing in through the 8/8 portal?

Into the Woods with Rachael Magowan, new episodes weekly.