My Top 10 Lessons of 2025

In the final days of 2025, I’m sharing ten lessons this year taught me — not as a highlight reel, but as a reflection on what actually shifted beneath the surface. 2025 has been a significant astrological year for me, marked by a second Saturn return and a fifth Jupiter return, and it’s been a year of recalibration: learning where my energy truly belongs, what deserves commitment, and what needed to be released. Each of these lessons played a role in shaping how the year unfolded, often in ways I only understood in hindsight.

Much of what I share — both here and in my work — comes from the belief that astrology is most powerful when it helps us make conscious, practical choices. If you’re interested in learning how to work with cycles like Saturn and Jupiter in your own life, or in developing astrology as a tool for growth, education, and ethical practice, you’ll find links throughout this series to my classes and consultations. These lessons aren’t abstract; they’re lived, tested, and offered in the spirit of helping others navigate their own turning points with greater clarity.

Lesson 10: You Don’t Need Me As Much As I Need Me

I turned my face to the sun, inhaled the saltiness of the sea and imagined how thought 2025 would turn out.

In the latter part of 2024, I did something very unglamorous but deeply necessary: I completely gutted my bedroom. Everything came out. The room was re-carpeted, repainted from ceiling to floor, and stripped back to its bare essentials. At the time, it was partly about my health — I’d been ill and had developed a chronic cough — but it was also about something more intuitive. As an astrologer, I knew that 2025 was going to be a significant year for me. A second Saturn return was approaching, and I didn’t want to meet it surrounded by clutter, unfinished business, or the residue of old chapters. Clearing my physical space became a way of preparing myself — quietly and deliberately — for whatever the year was going to ask of me.

I ended the year by the sea, a place I love, with a person I loved and a lot of ideas about how I thought I was going to make 2025 wok. Not everything worked out the way I thought they would–but they did turn out much better.

A Class of My Own

At the start of 2025, I took on a teaching role that I knew would be challenging: a Year 4/5 split class that was significantly over recommended numbers, with a very high proportion of students with additional needs. I had the experience, the training, and the instincts to do more for those children — but I also became increasingly aware of the boundaries around me. The support that should have been there simply wasn’t. I managed to “hang in there” for nearly 3 months (much longer than any other teacher) but I eventually realized there was no point.

What made this moment pivotal wasn’t the difficulty of the class itself, but the realisation that continuing under those conditions meant taking risks — not just to my health, but to my entire career. As an experienced, older teacher, I understood safeguarding, health and safety, and professional accountability in a way that some younger colleagues understandably did not. I found myself in a position where doing “the right thing” emotionally could have meant doing the wrong thing professionally. Worse, I was in danger of turning into something I had promised myself I would never be: I was quickly descending from Miss Honey straight to Miss Trunchbull. Even worse (if there’s a way of heading to hell in a hand basket any faster), I was starting not to care.

It’s OK to Walk Away

Walking away was not easy. Teachers are conditioned to feel that guilt — the sense that if we leave, we’re abandoning children who “need us.” But I reached a point of clarity: no one needs me so badly that I am required to destroy myself, or jeopardise everything I’ve built, in the absence of proper institutional support. What I was really confronting wasn’t a group of difficult children, but a deeply flawed system that leaves both pupils and teachers exposed.

That decision — to step back, to reassess, to stop giving unlimited energy to situations that could not change — became the foundation for everything that followed. After a difficult 2024 marked by illness and recovery, I had already begun resetting my life in small, practical ways: redecorating my bedroom, creating order, reclaiming space. This was the larger version of that same act. Once the groundwork was laid, 2025 opened up in ways I couldn’t have planned — including the unexpected, rapid arrival of “Zeus on the Loose” and the bigger public moments that came later in the year.

Looking back now, I can see that this wasn’t the year I pushed harder.

It was the year I chose where my effort truly belonged. Be sure to come back and check out lesson 9: Never throw the baby out with the bathwater