For seven years, I wrote weekly astrology forecasts which meant I always had a pulse on the astrological transits. Then I began to take a lot of time off — for travel, for health recovery, more travel — and I got to experience days, weeks go by where I was not super aware of what the transits were (besides some of the longer cycles I knew about and couldn’t unsee).
I really enjoyed the space. I enjoyed the way that I met the oracle in other ways, in my dreams, in synchronicities.
I felt a little unmoored sometimes. Sometimes wrapped up and immersed in pure, enjoyable, adventurous experiences — other times, more emotionally chaotic, because instead of meditating at depth on the week’s energies and channeling insight about them for others, I was just in the soup with less perspective than astrology normally offered me.
Significantly, my relationship with astrology & anxiety went through a new development. In the seven years I showed up to write about the transits most every week no matter what, I actually had a lot of mental discipline about not building anxious stories about particular transits. If I did, I’d find a way to transmute it and turn it into a gift to share with others.
While traveling however, being in total new environments and countries I’d never been to before, I let go of that discipline. I found more peace not knowing what was happening astrologically and just living. I was more prone to feeling irrational fear and rather than finding comfort through the oracle, consulting divination often just gave more more things to attach my anxiety to. I came to it sparingly.
That was something I’d seen other people turn away from astrology and divination over – if they used it in a toxic way or connected it to much to their anxiety, they’d just separate from it. Because my work was built on staying tapped in weekly, I never saw myself as having that option until I chose to take time off and until international travel upped the ante for my mind to spin out over.
My direct experiences in life led me to confront the nature of the fear itself, stripped of a lot of the things I normally attached my identity to (like my regular forecasting practice). I met my fear on plant medicine, as much as I didn’t originally want to even go there – and my relationship with fear changed forever. I feel like my inner world expanded to hold it, so that it turned into shadows here and there in a greater landscape that also holds my ecstasy. A kind of inner-compartmentalization I had built collapsed. I befriended fear.
Before my latest travel, I’d written a whole autobiographical novel that spanned some of the events of my 20’s (Hungry Ghosts of Paradise) that I published to Magic of the Spheres podcast, and once I’d written it down and published it, the memories faded (as though I’d transferred them to an external hard drive) and I didn’t care about the story as much (granted, it haunted me until I wrote the book). I wrote the book as a prayer to really move on, to become a new person, free of the immense burden I identified as having (a grief process I couldn’t quite move). I had a victory, my prayers were answered.
I kept emptying my reference points.
There was a certain ecstasy I found in all of these ego deaths and I felt the truth and pulse inside of that.
After enough time went by of being emptied and emptied and in this deep flow state with my experience, and inside of ever-changing environments, I found the desire to return to my astrology practice.
But it was harder – I expected my channel to just be on and hot like it was every week for seven years, but it wasn’t.
My friend reflected to me that maybe the planets left me alone because I tuned them out (and didn’t want to get anxious about transits).
My time off was also a celebration of working so diligently & with so much focus that I felt content about my work and career and yet, I was craving something else for my life that was outside of work, I wanted to open my heart to falling in love, I wanted a “bigger life”. I went for it, and collected more experiences than I could keep up to record. I often felt like I was living out parts of my chart I’d long known about, but was now purely living out the promise of it. Astrology was with me, but taking a huge backseat.
And then I came home, trying to reconcile all of this with my voice and my channel, and it’s messier than I would have preferred.
It has me approaching the planets as a new person, asking again to connect to them, getting to discover all over again what it’s like to hear them speak and to remember that relationship with them is a practice.
It’s also true that sometimes life, as an astrologer, asks me to take a huge step away from the map, to just go be on the terrain, and as I return, I remember this map has given me life over and over again. It is meant to be applied. It is meant sometimes, to live in its margins, and inspired, to come back and expand the map.
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