The Astrology Podcast

Transcript of Episode 201, titled:

Astrologers Dating Astrologers: Advantages and Pitfalls

With Chris Brennan and guests Tareck Ghoneim, Eugenia Krok, and Leisa Schaim

Episode originally released on April 21, 2019

Original episode URL:

https://theastrologypodcast.com/2019/04/21/astrologers-dating-astrologers-advantages-and-pitfalls/

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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com

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Transcribed by Andrea Johnson

Transcription released March 3rd, 2026

Copyright © 2026 TheAstrologyPodcast.com

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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hi, my name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. This is Episode 201, and today we’re gonna be talking about some of the advantages and some of the pitfalls of dating another astrologer. So joining me today is my partner, Leisa Schaim. And we are joined today by our first four-person podcast episode with Eugenia Krok and Tareck Ghoneim.

TARECK GHONEIM: Ghoneim, yeah. Got it.

CB: So thanks for joining me today, guys.

EUGENIA KROK: Yeah, it’s so exciting.

CB: So Eugenia, this is actually your second appearance on the podcast episode. We just realized that you joined me the last time, about one year ago, right?

EK: Yeah, right before I went to Egypt.

CB: Right. So that was literally right before—you two had started dating, what, a few months before that?

EK: Oh, no.

TG: It goes back a while now, doesn’t it, sweetie?

EK: Yeah.

TG: You know the dates?

EK: Oh, gosh. Well, because we met through the internet, through astrology, we met, technically, almost three years ago.

TG: In 2016.

CB: Okay.

EK: And I saw—well, we saw each other around the internet for a long time, even before that. Kind of like how people see each other in cafes.

CB: Right. And you, of course, do the Accessible Astrology Podcast, right?

EK: I do.

CB: Okay.

EK: Yeah.

CB: And what’s your URL, again?

EK: Yeah, accessibleastrology.com.

CB: Okay.

EK: Yeah.

CB: Perfect. And how long have you both been studying astrology?

EK: 10 years.

TG: About eight years. I’m a junior compared to you.

CB: About eight years?

TG: Eight years, yes.

CB: Okay, that’s not too much of a difference. That’s pretty good. Cuz one issue that can come up sometimes, that we’ll be talking about, is parity in terms of how long you’ve been studying.

EK: Right.

TG: Yeah, we’ve been quite aligned, haven’t we? Considering we’ve got the same charts.

EK: Yeah.

CB: Right. So that’s one of the funny things about you two, is you have almost the exact same degree of the ascendant, right?

EK: Yeah.

TG: Yeah.

EK: I’m 28°59’ Gemini. And you are 29.

TG: Yes.

EK: So we’re one minute different.

CB: Wow.

TG: So we are actually the same person.

CB: Right.

LEISA SCHAIM: That makes it easier.

TG: Yeah, luckily, as a male and female version.

CB: Yeah, I like that.

EK: Or unluckily sometimes.

TG: Yeah, it’s definitely where the chemistry is, isn’t it?

EK: Yeah.

CB: Yeah, and the Twins, and you have the same shirt. I like that, the similar shirt.

TG: I’ve got a thermal shirt at the moment, cuz I’m in Colorado to keep warm.

CB: Yeah. All right, so today we’re gonna be talking about—last weekend, Tareck, you gave a talk for the local astrology group, for the Denver Astrology Group, on the Jupiter-Saturn cycle, and we really enjoyed that, and we were sitting around afterwards. And I’ve recently just built a podcast studio, and we’ve just moved into this place, so I wanted to have another couple of astrologers over to experiment with doing a four-person episode. And I just got the idea—I was trying to think of what we all share in common, or what would be something we could all talk about, that we have had experience with. And it was unique, I realized, that we’re both couples that are astrologers, where we’re all astrologers, and there’s something unique about that. I know there’s a lot of people that are astrology enthusiasts or even professional astrologers who are in relationships or have a significant other that’s not an astrologer, necessarily. And so, it’s not a given that just because you’re an astrologer or an enthusiast or even a professional astrologer that you’re definitely gonna date another astrologer. And in addition to that, people sometimes, that don’t have that might idealize what that would be like, or if they’ve never had that, they might think it would be all great. But of course, as with anything, there’s gonna be some pros and some cons. So that’s a little bit of what I wanted to talk about today. Where else do we start with this broad topic?

LS: Let’s see. Well, I guess, you asked them, “How long have you been studying astrology?”

CB: Right.

LS: Yeah, so 15 years for me.

CB: Okay. And it’s been about 19 years for me, or 20 years.

LS: So not terribly different.

EK: Yeah.

LS: Yeah, you—a little bit longer.

CB: Similar lengths, I think. Yeah, and so, I’m trying to think of some of the other topics. So there’s that. Are you guys similar ages?

TG: I’m a bit older than you, aren’t I?

CB: Okay.

EK: I think it’s a similar age difference. Similar. I think we’re a bit more of a gap.

CB: Okay. And Leisa’s older than I am.

LS: Yeah.

CB: Although most people don’t know that, or think it’s the reverse.

LS: Right. Exactly. Actually people usually guess the reverse.

EK: I think that’s not that different with you and I.

TG: Yeah, we’ve had that, haven’t we?

EK: Yeah.

TG: You see, we look the same, the same age.

CB: Right.

TG: We kind of have this, “It doesn’t matter about the age, does it, really?” But I am older than you.

EK: Yeah.

TG: What? Eight years?

EK: I think it’s eight years, yeah.

CB: Okay. So where do we start in terms of our outlines? So there are a bunch of points. I’m trying to think if there’s any precursors that we need to lay down, though, first.

LS: That this isn’t a tell-all.

CB: Yeah, so we’re not going into everything.

TG: Disclaimer here.

CB: This is not exposé.

TG: Privacy policy.

CB: Right. That’s a good point.

LS: Yeah, so we’re talking about the larger issue, really. Not really just laying out our relationships bare, per se.

TG: Yeah, I think we’re all very brave for doing this right now—

EK: Actually, yeah.

TG: —coming on. Obviously, we met through astrology, didn’t we? In our story, it’s definitely a huge part of our relationship, isn’t it?

EK: Yeah, it’s the cornerstone. I mean, it’s the central focus of our relationship.

TG: Considering that I’m from England, first born, parents Egyptian. Likewise, Eugenia is a—

EK: Well, I’m a Polish immigrant.

TG: Yeah.

EK: But we come from incredibly, incredibly different backgrounds, and it’s astrology that miraculously brought us together. When I think about it, I think it’s a miracle, oftentimes, that two people with such insanely different, not just backgrounds—but maybe even what we thought would have been trajectories—somehow, we found each other cuz of the internet. And that deep love for astrology, we can come back to that all the time, right?

TG: So it’s definitely a huge part of our story.

CB: Right.

TG: There’s no way we would have met if it wasn’t for the internet and having a shared interest in astrology.

CB: Where did you guys meet?

TG: It was in a forum, wasn’t it?

EK: Yeah, we met originally—so I was an astrologer for Kaypacha. Do you know him?

CB: Yeah, he’s a big astrologer on YouTube.

EK: Yes, I was part of his ‘dream team’ for a while.

CB: Okay.

EK: And within his community—which he has an online community—we have forums and things like that, where we connect; and a Facebook group and things. And that’s where I saw Tareck around the internet, and I would always click on his picture.

TG: I was hungry for knowledge. I wasn’t expecting anything else.

CB: Right.

TG: And it just started to develop that way, didn’t it, where we started chatting over our mutual interest in astrology. And I absolutely had no idea that Eugenia would have thought anything of me.

EK: Yeah.

TG: But for some reason the dialogue turned into a meeting, didn’t it, on the eclipse in America.

EK: Yeah.

TG: That’s why I came over.

CB: Oh, on the Great American Eclipse?

EK: Mm-hmm.

TG: Yeah.

CB: So that was in the summer of, what, 2017?

TG: Yeah.

CB: Okay.

TG: Yeah.

CB: So that was almost two years ago now.

TG: Exactly. That was the first time we met. So it was all about astrology, if you think about it. How on earth would we have chosen to meet at that time if we didn’t have a shared interest?

CB: Right. Yeah, so astrology definitely brought you together. And then it’s something that you’re still able to share as a continued interest and a continued language. Astrology tends to be kind of an isolated study, where not a lot of people get that far into it, or go into it with that much depth. And then it’s hard, sometimes, except for online. You can meet other astrologers nowadays—over the past decade or two—with social media. But in terms of in-person meetings, sometimes you’ll find a local astrology group, if you’re lucky. That’s one of the reasons that a lot of astrologers end up going to conferences, is to meet and have that personal, in-person connection with other astrologers. And I always hear them reporting this thing about suddenly being able to speak the same language with somebody else as being a real core, almost primal need that astrologers have, that often isn’t fulfilled in some way. But then when you end up getting into a relationship with another astrologer, that’s one part of it that’s sort of fulfilling in some ways.

TG: Absolutely. I mean, there’s no doubt about it. So I’m a bit hot here.

EK: That’s okay. I know you are.

TG: It’s not just about astrology.

CB: Right.

TG: There’s just an overlap. But yeah, I mean, there’s no doubt about it. Our dialogue has been we’ve learned so much about astrology together by having that mutual interest and reflective kind of communication. Especially during transits.

EK: Right. Which I think we’ll talk more specifically about.

TG: Sure.

EK: Yeah, I know for myself, when I first learned astrology, I had two people I could consistently speak with about it, and that was it. So if we’re talking, this was seven years. And then I found you guys, which was like four or five years ago.

LS: Mm-hmm.

EK: And little by little, that started to shift. And then of course when I was part of the community, that was really helpful. But I felt like I was in a desert for seven years, especially in relationships. I would be with a boyfriend, and he would say something like, “This is a really bad day.” “Yeah, there’s an eclipse happening.” “Okay.” “No, like there’s an eclipse happening, and it’s happening on your Mars right now,” or whatever. and I’d have to try to educate the partner, and it was very exhausting for me. Because it’s one thing to try to say, “Hey, this is a transit affecting you right now,” it’s a whole other thing for them to believe that. And the relationships I had prior to Tareck, they did not believe in astrology, almost avidly, which I thought was kind of difficult. I mean, that’s difficult when you really believe in something and your partner doesn’t. And I don’t think that’s just astrology. That’s, yeah, I think any relationship. If someone believes in the right versus the left, they’re less likely to be in a relationship with each other, for example.

LS: Yeah, like any huge part of your own worldview. Different people prioritize different pieces of things, as to what’s most important to share in a relationship/

EK: Yeah.

LS: But worldview is often a huge one, whether that’s religion, politics, or astrology.

EK: Exactly.

LS: And you’re touching on something. There’s two different levels. There’s having a relationship with an astrologer versus someone who doesn’t know astrology, but then might be open to it versus someone who actively doesn’t value it or thinks that there’s nothing to it, which is a whole different thing.

EK: It is, yeah.

CB: And that might be worth asking. So have we all been in both situations in terms of being in a relationship, now, with an astrologer versus being in a relationship with somebody who isn’t an astrologer?

LS: Yeah.

EK: Yeah.

CB: We’ve all done both sides of that?

TG: I mean, I think when you’re an astrologer, and you’re really passionate about it, and you believe it and people believe in you, there’s a lot of value in our study; and there’s not the questions that sometimes happen often where people don’t believe it, “Why are you spending so much time doing that?” You might be in a situation like that with somebody who doesn’t study or doesn’t know astrology. Hopefully, they love you enough to value what you do, and they don’t judge you. But with an actual astrologer, working those things out with the same language, it’s the same; understanding of cycles and just the obviousness of how astrology works.

CB: Yeah. I mean, maybe we should touch on that first, since that was maybe where we all started, I’m sure. Cuz here we all initially started being in relationships with non-astrologers and then eventually we’re in our current relationships, and those have been a little bit more successful, partially, probably due to that. It’s tricky, though, because I know there’s listeners—there’s plenty of astrologers in the community. And I know a lot of astrologers I’ve met at conferences or close friends who got into astrology after they’ve been in a relationship for a long time, or after they were already married. And so, they’ve already formed this lifelong partnership and then they start studying this quasi-weird, quasi-occult topic. I mean, let’s be honest. Astrology is still kind of weird, even though we all use it, even though we know that it works. At least for me, it’s consistently surprising how well it works and that it should work at all. And if we’re realistic, I could see how if you’re somebody that is in a relationship, and then suddenly you start studying astrology, that could look really weird or could be hard for your partner if they don’t get as interested in it, or it doesn’t grab them the same way.

LS: Yeah. Yeah, I would definitely think so. I mean, luckily, since I started studying astrology, I never had the experience of being with someone who was actively like, “You shouldn’t be into that,” but I could see it easily coming up.

CB: Have either of you been in a relationship where it was like your partner was actively antagonistic towards astrology?

EK: Yes.

CB: Yeah? Okay.

TG: Yeah, I’ve been there, too.

CB: What was that like?

EK: Yeah, well, for me, I think I was in two more serious relationships in those seven years that I would consider significant. And those two—one of them thought I was just a good salesperson, and he said, “You’re just good at sales,” and that was tough. That was very, very bad.

CB: What does that mean, good at sales?

EK: I can convince someone to believe in something that’s not real. Like snake oil, yeah.

CB: So he was of the version—cuz a lot of skeptics make that argument, where they say that astrology is fake, and astrologers are just duping people. Or they think that astrologers themselves don’t believe it, and instead, they’re just trying to convince other people that it’s real, when it’s not. But in fact that’s one of the things that I always thought, that if a skeptic actually genuinely looked into astrology, and looked into the astrological community, or knew anything about it, they would realize really quickly that 99.9% of astrologers all think that astrology’s a valid, legitimate phenomenon. And they’re not actively trying to deceive anyone because they are, daily, incorporating it into their lives.

LS: Right.

TG: It’s a value thing, isn’t it? I think if you’re with a non-astrologer, or somebody that doesn’t value the amount of time you’re putting into it, and money as well, then they might see that as used better somewhere else. Straight away, you’re in a difficult position in the relationship straight away then, aren’t you? Because there’s a conflict of interest or respect of what you’re interested in, or what they see as what you should be, or judgment.

CB: Right.

LS: Yeah.

CB: And I was gonna ask Eugenia, the relationship you were in, were you already studying astrology when you got into it? Or did you get into it after?

EK: No, I was already, yeah, deep into client work.

CB: So they kind of knew going into it then, theoretically, or should have known. But maybe it was something where they thought you would get over it or something like that.

EK: Right. And I think he thought it was like this ‘cute, Colorado girl’ thing, right? He wasn’t from here. And he, I think, assumed it was just this a cute thing, really. And when we would get in arguments on, say, a Full Moon or something, I would mention it, and he didn’t have the space to listen. And then the relationship I had—the other one that was significant—he listened, but it didn’t land. And he was a very earth-bound human, and so, he felt very uncomfortable every time I encouraged him to think up, right? Cuz he was a mountain biker and a typical Colorado, “I’m in the mountains, and I hunt and I bike,” which is great, whatever. But every time I would encourage him to think beyond the earth, it really physically made him uncomfortable to even look up, literally, which I’ve actually found with a lot of people since I’ve become an astrologer. I’d say, “Why aren’t you interested?” “I can’t think of us not being on this planet. That we’re in space, floating.” Some people find that actually very nervous, and he was one of those people. So I would try, but it just wouldn’t land. So he was open to me loving it. But in terms of his reception of it, it was almost impossible. It just didn’t land with him. It got exhausting not being able to say, “Okay, well, this is an eclipse,” and just him being like, “I don’t know. I’m sorry. That just doesn’t make sense.”

CB: Right. And that actually connects with one of the questions we got on Twitter that is related to that. And this is from @AcademicAstro, where she said: “Slightly off-topic, but as a straight woman, how do I explain my level of interest in astrology to men I date? Most men I have dated have had harsh preconceptions about it. So in relationships, I end up downplaying my interest, but feel misunderstood in the process.” And I think that’s relevant, cuz it goes back to something we’ve also talked about in episodes not too long ago, about the apparent, at least, gender disparity, where there seems to be more women who are into astrology than men. And then sometimes in other fields—like in STEM fields—there’s more men, at least currently, at the present moment in time, into those. Or sometimes in the skeptic community, there’s more of a preponderance of men that are into skepticism. And I can imagine that that would be really hard if you were trying to date and astrology was your thing. And you’re just running into people who are, at the very least—or not best-case scenario, but let’s say moderately worst-case scenario—just actively disinterested or passively disinterested versus actively antagonistic towards it. That would be really, really tough.

EK: Well, and I would say to this individual, similar to what Tareck was just saying. This is something Danielle, my previous co-host of my podcast, used to say—or she still tells me this all the time. When values are clear, decisions are easy. And I think for me, I wouldn’t say I was out to find an astrologer necessarily, but I knew after those relationships that I loved this thing called astrology. And I also hate it. It’s like a relationship. Being with astrology as a profession, as a passion, it’s good and bad, right? There’s good days with astrology and bad days with astrology, like everything else. But I knew that this was such a core value to me that it would be advantageous to have a partner who understood this language. And so, in a way I was sort of looking, and I did. In these communities, I did spot Tareck and his face on Facebook.

TG: It wasn’t just the chart.

EK: It wasn’t.

CB: Right. You didn’t see the chart first.

EK: Yeah, I wasn’t like, “Resumes out for charts.”

CB: That is a sexy chart.

TG: You’ve seen it, Chris.

EK: Right.

CB: Yeah.

EK: No, I thought, “Oh, gosh, he’s very cute, and he likes astrology. This is crazy.”

TG: And also, think about it. The time that we’re living in right now, it’s not just the social media that exists, is it, though? So you see somebody, you like them, you might look on their Facebook/Instagram. There’s all these stories that now connect, which in some ways is connected to how we met online. I think a lot of young people these days would look at someone’s profile and suddenly there’s a whole story about them.

LS: Yeah.

CB: Sure.

TG: And yet, with astrology, it’s like you can sort of look at even deeper elements, can’t you?

CB: Yeah. I mean, if you see that chart. That’s the first thing every astrologer wants, whether you’re dating or not. Everyone wants to see—somebody they just met—their chart, cuz that gives you an additional level of insight. Or at least an additional angle of understanding who this person is that you just met, and perhaps even how they might be connected to your life in some way.

EK: And how to communicate with them.

LS: Right.

CB: Right.

LS: And that seems like that was the topic that came up a lot in the questions that people were sending in, as far as how much to balance looking at the chart versus interacting with the person and not equating the two.

CB: Right.

LS: Yeah.

CB: Yes, cuz that was also our personal story. We met, and at some point you gave me your data, and I saw that you had almost the same chart as my ex-girlfriend, who I had just got out of a very difficult relationship with. And that was very off-putting to me, I have to be honest, like initially.

LS: I remember.

CB: I was like, “She seems very nice, but now I’m extremely nervous about the chart.” And that was a good lesson for me—because then, surprise, surprise, 10 years later and we’re still together—that you can’t just make assumptions about people based on their chart, as completely, unconditional rejections or what have you. You’ve got to get to know the person, and you’ve gotta see how they’re actually living some of those placements. And that’s really gonna vary from person to person based on a whole host of conditions. But that might be a lesson that’s challenging or that some astrologers have to learn. Because part of learning astrology at first is learning what placements mean what and assuming there’s more of a one-to-one correspondence. But then at some point, when you get to more advanced levels, you have to realize there might be more flexibility, to some extent, than you might anticipate.

LS: Yeah, and that there’s variety. Even though the snapshot of the chart does show you some things about how the person might be or what kind of personality they have or what have you, but there’s still variety within each and every one of those placements. And so, then when you combine all of the placements—even if you share a few of them with an ex- or with someone else you’ve known—it’s still a totally different person.

TG: Absolutely.

LS: And, I mean, actually, we both had that. Because the relationship I had just gotten out of, we had almost the same placements and a few different things, yeah.

CB: It was like the same Sun and Moon or something bizarre.

LS: Same Sun and Moon within a degree. Same Venus almost. Same Mercury. So yeah, so that was kind of crazy that we both had that going on at the same time. But I was just less off-put because it was not a bad relationship I had gotten out of.

EK: Right.

CB: It was a lovely relationship.

LS: It was a fine relationship. “Your placements are lovely.”

CB: I was still having PTSD.

TG: It’s all conditioning, isn’t it? Past conditioning creates these perceptions that might be completely not the case with a new person that comes along.

LS: Yeah.

CB: Yeah. And to be fair, the charts obviously weren’t exactly the same. There were just major elements where we immediately, as astrologers, recognize similarities with those placements. But then the rest of the charts are just completely different. So it’s not like you’re dating an ‘astro’ twin necessarily.

LS: Right.

CB: But that in and of itself is interesting. As astrologers, you immediately will recognize some either similar placements with other people in your life and have that question about why is that placement repeating with this person, or sometimes your eye will immediately be drawn to the synastry you have with that person. You guys—that’s one of the greatest examples I can think of. Having almost the exact same ascendant degree is almost bizarre.

TG: Within minutes, or at least a half-an-hour, we’re having exactly the same experience. That’s the reality, isn’t it?

EK: Yeah. And the more we get to know each other, and our history and things of that nature—right, you can’t learn from a chart. It just takes time to learn these things.

CB: Right.

EK: We are recognizing, wow, our interaction with our families, same. The way we even handle money and things of that nature, really similar. The way we deal with our home, very similar. And then things will happen just by the events of our life, and it’s almost shocking how rhythmic. When we’re in England, Tareck ends up in the place he went to college. Here, we just ended up in the place I went to college kind of randomly. So somehow we’ve now both seen where we’ve spent our time at university.

TG: I mean, it’s a very simple thing in a relationship like this. If I do anything wrong, then I’m gonna feel that. And exactly the same with you, likewise positive. Cuz we worked out to always be positive, we wouldn’t be in a realistic relationship, though, would we? In the sense that the karma, you could say, of our experiences match so quickly now. That’s what I’m trying to say. I’m trying to say that dating an astrologer—I mean, it’s also Eugenia as well.

CB: Sure.

TG: It’s more than just an astrologer.

CB: Right.

TG: But the point I’m making is that we’ve become so sensitive to this kind of astrological information and incorporating it, and also, surrendering to our own insecurities within it, to become very mirror-like with each other. So dating an astrologer—a good astrologer—and also, being in love, definitely we can’t hide anything, can we?

EK: No.

CB: Yeah.

TG: That’s a consequence of this particular relationship, which is probably really good because transparency’s everything in relationships.

CB: Sure. Yeah, so that’s a good point, that knowing the astrology, knowing your partner’s chart and what the current transits are brings a greater level of transparency than you might be used to dealing with in a normal relationship. Cuz you’re really good at tracking my transits, even better than I do a lot of the time. Like you were just telling me I was in a peak period or something today, and I had no idea.

LS: Right.

CB: And sometimes you’ve made predictions about things that would eventually happen in my life, or you anticipated things pretty accurately. And that’s one of the cool parts of having an astrologer as a partner. It’s like you’ve got your own private astrologer.

TG: Whose got your back.

CB: Exactly. Or can pull out an ephemeris at a moment’s notice.

LS: Yeah, we were laughing in our last apartment. It was like, “Do we not have an ephemeris in this room? We need an ephemeris in every room, within grasp.”

CB: Yeah.

LS: Yeah, and I think that’s one of the best things about it. You can have that constant dialogue around it, and also, just become—I think you mentioned this earlier, too—a better astrologer because of that constant dialogue. Whereas, usually, you have other people in your life that you can talk astrology with, but maybe not as frequently.

TG: Yeah.

LS: Yeah. And I know that I have gotten better as an astrologer through that just constant back-and-forth.

TG: Yeah, getting really sensitive to the energies, and male/female energies. And then, again, communicating it, adapting it, and then recognizing how those energies look, how it’s affected us both, and then having the chance to communicate about it has definitely helped us, hasn’t it?

EK: Oh, God, yeah.

CB: I mean, that’s interesting with you two because using whole sign houses, a lot of your house transits would be the same. Like Jupiter going through Sagittarius is going through both of your 7th houses over the course of the past year.

EK: Yeah.

CB: But the degree-based forms of house division, hitting the specific degrees would be off a bit. I mean, the ascendant is the same, so that’s actually interesting. But the degree of your midheaven, I’m guessing, is in different signs.

EK: Different signs.

CB: Okay.

EK: You’re Aquarius. I’m Pisces.

CB: Yeah, so that offsets things a bit.

EK: But one of the things that’s also particularly interesting about our relationship is we have the same houses filled and the same houses empty as well. Both of us have almost nothing in the southern part of our chart. We only have Pluto, you have Uranus, I have Saturn, and that’s it for both of us. He has everything in the 7th and the 10th, and I have everything in the 7th and the 9th and the 10th. So it’s not just the house systems, it’s actually the way they’re filled as well. And when I first saw his chart—I saw his before he saw mine.

TG: She had one up on me.

CB: Okay.

EK: My initial reaction was almost dumbfounded.

CB: Right.

EK: I was speechless, actually. And of course my initial instinct was, “This could be the most profound connection because of what I’m seeing here,” and then I put it away. And we didn’t talk, actually, for at least six months after I initially saw it, for varying reasons. But it was so instant that I saw how similar we were more than anything. I thought that this could be either really, really phenomenal or just way too hard, right, because I’m constantly with myself.

CB: Right.

LS: And that’s a really unique layer on top of just you both being astrologers. Because most people who get into a relationship with another astrologer, that is already rare, and then they won’t usually have the same chart.

EK: Right.

LS: So that’s actually quite uncommon that you share all of that.

EK: Right.

LS: Yeah.

TG: Yeah. I mean, just to add to that, in terms of perception, before you actually get to know somebody, I think the most important thing about this conversation is that you need to get to know somebody.

LS: Right.

TG: I think it’s great that, let’s say, in Vedic astrology people ensure that they knew each other’s charts, from what I’ve heard, in terms of marriage and stuff, which I think is a worthwhile thing, considering that we’ve been through these ideas of looking at each other’s charts. But getting to know somebody, getting to feel what they feel like—obviously, we’ve had the difficulty of a trans-Atlantic relationship, which, at the end of the day, where we were born and then where we’re living and where we’re communicating is in different places.

EK: Yeah, we have Sagittarius in our 7th, with a combination of 12 planets and asteroids in our 7th in combination. Not from a composite chart, but if we were to add up all of them. So it actually also makes total sense.

TG: Yeah. And I think what I was trying to say is that we can make sense of things with the astrology. Sometimes we can overcompensate for things as well, or we can go that extra yard, cuz we know it’s gonna get better at certain times. All of that is advantageous in using astrology in relationships, for sure. But the actual, you could say, birds and the bees and the practicality of life, it’s doing that that is really gonna make a relationship work.

LS: Right. Yeah.

CB: Right.

LS: Yeah, definitely.

CB: And that was a topic that came up or a question that came up a lot. One of the great benefits, but also, disadvantages or drawbacks is when to incorporate astrology. Or when is astrology playing a healthy role in your relationships versus when is it something that you’re bringing at inappropriate times? Or when do you need to step back from the astrology and just be present and be human beings relating to each other?

LS: Yeah, that was kind of a component of a lot of different questions that came in. I mean, I feel like that was more of an issue for me earlier on in the relationship.

CB: In what sense?

LS: Just in the sense of that they were very separate things because we didn’t know each other well yet. And so, they were completely ‘this chart’ and then ‘this relationship’. And I feel like now—both just having been an astrologer for so much longer, as well as being in the relationship longer—it’s almost like it’s hard to say how much it comes in at different moments because it’s always kind of like a component of my brain, but it’s not something I’m explicitly thinking about like all of the time. And so, it’s hard to say when they’re separate and when they’re together because it’s just there.

CB: Right. But I know—especially once we moved in together—eventually worked out, over a period of years, ground rules for when it’s okay to, for example, invoke somebody’s birth chart, or “You’re having ‘X’ transit today,” versus “We just need to talk about what we need to process right now, and whatever relevant transit we’re having is not necessarily useful information or might be more of a distraction than dealing with the thing at hand.”

LS: Right. Yeah, I feel like it came up a lot more earlier. Yeah, I’m trying to think of where to go with that. I mean, I know that you were very against using birth chart placements in any sort of argument.

CB: Yeah. I mean, I always took the position from that aforementioned difficult relationship. I’ve seen negative applications of astrology where the person is using the birth chart almost as a weapon to attack or criticize, or say, “You are this way because of this placement, and you’ll never change,” or “I think this about this either placement or technique,” whatever that preconception is and that it’s bad or negative or whatever. And so, I’ve sort of worked it out that there’s probably a point in a relationship—especially if you’re having difficulties—where invoking the chart is not good. Cuz for two astrologers that already can be challenging enough, but for two astrologers, you could probably find a way to work that out and achieve balance. I could see it becoming really unbalanced if an astrologer was doing that to a non-astrologer and was invoking birth chart placements and saying, “You’re this way because of this.” That could be really not helpful and counterproductive.

LS: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, and I think we started bringing it up less later, I mean, because you didn’t want us to do that, but also, because we got to know each other longer. And so, it was almost like, again, they’re kind of melded. Like if we’re having a fight about being different from each other in a certain way, and that being annoying to one or both of us—the placements that are associated with that are implicit at this point and not things that we actually really have to talk about.

CB: Well, and one of the things that changed is our approaches to astrology were radically different at the beginning. And that’s a funny, whole other separate topic. I don’t know where you guys were, where you started. Were you pretty similar, or were you pretty different at the start?

EK: We’re still really different.

TG: Well, I wouldn’t say we’re really different. I’d say basically you are, classically now, whole sign.

EK: 100%. Not 100%.

TG: Which is great, cuz obviously there’s influence regarding that.

CB: Yeah, sorry about that.

TG: No, I’m open to it. That’s the whole point of learning from your partner, not just an astrologer. The idea of, let’s say, I learned from that Porphyry model—

EK: So did I.

TG: —and then I went to learn about whole sign. I remember the first time Eugenia proposed that to me. I thought, “She really is an Aquarius, isn’t she? She’s so rebellious.”

CB: Right.

TG: But what I loved about it was that it really made me question, again, astrology, which I thought was fantastic. And even astrologers who are far more experienced, let’s say, that have got more years on it than me—when I’ve said to them, “Are you using whole sign?” they go, “No.” So for me, actually, it made me think, first, “This is interesting because people who place so much value in this chart, when it’s always open to interpretation, bring a new system into it as well. And it could make people even more questioning—which I think is a great thing—of the validity of the interpretation.” But actually I do both. That’s what Eugenia’s given to me. It’s not that I’m all Porphyry, or I’m all whole sign, I actually use both. And can I explain what I gathered from that experience?

EK: Sure.

TG: Yeah?

EK: Yes, please.

CB: I love that we’re already getting into house division. That’s like one of the tensest debates sometimes in the astrological community, historically, for like 2,000 years now. And that was actually one of the questions. Somebody joked about—

LS: Can you have relationships across house system division?

CB: Which is a funny joke, but that actually comes up.

EK: It is challenging sometimes because I am so adamant that all of his stuff is in the 7th. But from a Porphyry perspective, it’s all in the 6th, cuz we’re at that last degree.

CB: Oh, right.

EK: So our charts are entirely different from one system to the next.

CB: Okay.

EK: So sometimes I am trying so much like, “No, no, no. Come on. Just see it.”

TG: No, but you have said, sweetheart, you have said that we’re both.

EK: And we are both. Don’t get me wrong. I still have a lot of resonance with Porphyry or some of those other systems, but I think it is a point of contention, actually, between us.

TG: Yeah, it’s a weird one. Cuz all my Sag—she’s very brave for going for that, aren’t you, sweetheart?

EK: Very, very.

TG: Going for a totally Sagittarius kind of chart, even though you’ve got quite a lot of Sagittarius as well, let’s be honest.

EK: Yeah.

TG: But anyway, it would be in the 6th house if it was Porphyry, but it’s in the 7th if it’s whole sign. And when you look at both, for example, if it’s whole sign, Uranus is in the 6th for me. So there is a need to be healthy, to look at the more deeper aspects of health and healing or whatever. So that would make sense to have Uranus in the 6th in Scorpio.

EK: Whereas prior, he thought it was cuz of all of this being his 6th.

CB: Right.

TG: Sagittarius stuff. Which I’ve got a loaded 6th house with Sagittarius stuff, or 7th.

EK: Right.

TG: So you say what you think about the Porphyry and whole sign thing as well. But just what I got from it is that she’s pretty cool in the sense that Eugenia is giving me an extra insight. And now whenever I look at charts for other people, for example, I look at both.

CB: Yeah. I mean, that’s a broader topic and a broader issue of just what happens if you don’t have the same approach to astrology, and house division is obviously one of the easiest areas where you could have that issue. But just because you’re dating another astrologer, that’s actually one of the ‘be careful what you wish for’ type things that is probably number one on the list. There’s people who probably are astrology enthusiasts, or they study astrology for a while or even for years, and maybe they have never been in a relationship with another astrologer. And then someday they meet that special person, and they fall in love, and they get together, and go off on this magical relationship. And then suddenly, they realize they radically disagree or have radically different systems, like technical approaches to astrology. Which to a normal person, if you were trying to explain this to a non-astrologer, they’d be like, “Yeah, so what? It’s just a minor difference.” But, no. Because astrologers pattern so much of, not just their worldview, but also, their view of themselves and their life and its significance in the lives of people around them around astrology, sometimes relatively minor, technical changes or shifts can cause radical changes in how they understand their lives. So people can be very, not just defensive in a negative sense, but that can make a real big difference. And sometimes that can be like little, minor things, like, “What orbs do you use?” “Like I use a 10° orb,” or “This guy uses a 6° orb,” or what have you, let’s say, if it’s a minor thing like that.

LS: Right.

CB: Versus a major thing, like a tropical astrologer versus a sidereal astrologer, or house division, like quadrant houses versus equal houses versus whole sign.

LS: Sign rulerships.

CB: Traditional rulers versus modern rulers. Or even imagine meeting another astrologer and you do Western astrologer and they do Vedic astrology. Or you get a modern astrologer and a traditional astrologer. I’ve heard hilarious anecdotes about—I guess I can’t say her name—a famous modern astrologer who dated a traditional astrologer and how they just constantly got into arguments about stuff like that; because that does, and can, really become a point of tension in the relationship if there’s major differences between your approaches.

LS: Right.

EK: I’d actually say we do have pretty different approaches, too. Because Tareck, I feel—correct me if I’m wrong—is much more abstract. He’s much more a ‘felt’ astrologer, which I absolutely admire. Cuz he really feels these transits in almost like a visceral way.

TG: Galactic Center kind of way.

EK: Yes, cuz he’s got a lot in the Galactic Center. And I’m much more measured and statistical. So I’ve been, over the course of 10 years, keeping statistics, and I’ve been measuring, actually, my clients against each other and their charts. So I have all these, for me, very clear data points that prove very clear indications of a multitude of things. And so, I’m very strategic. I’m very heady. I’m very logical because I come from a psychotherapy background, also, and I’m working with clients. I don’t use astrology in my life regularly at all. I rarely look at my own chart. I rarely look at transits. I’m the person who goes back after the event. Because, again, I’m more hesitant about where my brain will go if I see a certain transit coming, I don’t wanna spook myself out, right? In the past, when I started learning astrology, I would look ahead to some of these transits, and I’d always look for the scary bits, and I’d notice it was taking me out of the present moment. So I stopped doing that for myself, and I made a very strategic decision in my own life to use astrology as a tool for my clients, that I would use it as a psychotherapist in this way. Now I’m entirely an astrologer at this point. I’m not a psychotherapist any longer, technically. Like I don’t see people weekly or anything like that. And so, when I come out of work—because I see so many clients—I don’t really want to look at my chart. And I don’t want to look at his either. I rarely look at his chart as well. And I think that Tareck is working with it more. So he’s actually following transits, and he’s following these things. He’s almost embodying it and living it more than I am because I’m looking at it more as a physical tool to use with other people, to serve them and to help them. And I can’t do that for myself, so I don’t use it in that way for myself. And so, I think that can actually sometimes be difficult for me because I don’t want to look at my chart all the time, and I don’t want to talk about astrology all the time, actually. And I think Tareck is more prone to want to talk about it and look at it than I am. And sometimes just thinking about the challenges, I wanna turn it off, also, sometimes. I don’t want to think about astrology all the time. I really don’t. Sometimes I just wanna hang out and just—

TG: Do other things.

EK: Yeah.

CB: Right.

EK: And so, for me, my perspective is that it’s a tool amongst others. For example, our relationship—the chart’s helped to a point and then they just don’t work anymore, in terms of, “How can we get through this argument?” We can go to the chart up to a point and then we have to go deeper into “What is your attachment style from your youth?” as a psychotherapist. I wanna know more about the relationship with your family and how that’s affecting our relationship now. And for that you need lots of helpers, not just you two and an astrology chart. Sometimes you need assistance. Sometimes I buy seminars for us to listen to about how to communicate better to a man because I clearly don’t know how to do it very well.

TG: Or we go party instead.

EK: Or that. Or we’ll just turn it off entirely.

CB: Right.

EK: I find that it’s a part of my life, but it’s not my life.

CB: Sure. And I understand how you could feel that way, that you have different approaches in terms of how you apply it. But from a technical standpoint, it sounds like you guys probably started out much closer than you could have in the worst-case scenario. We’re not talking about a Chinese astrologer versus a Vedic astrologer. You guys met on the same forum for evolutionary astrology, right?

EK: Evolutionary astrology. Yeah, I was trained by an evolutionary astrologer.

TG: We were definitely part of this union, this cosmic kind of intervention—or however you want to describe it really because we’re living proof of that, if you see what I mean. We both actively, somehow—in the environments maybe that weren’t suited to astrology—learned about, but then also, did what everybody was doing (i.e, on the internet) and then connected. And then suddenly there was a shared conversation and then application as well. Which I think is why it’s really benefiting us, making us more authentic, and more—I’m right in saying this, aren’t I?

EK: Yeah, yeah.

TG: More kind of a deeper level of astrology. Cuz it’s good to study it and to learn certain things, but when you actually experience it and then actually live it, then you become, I guess, far more authentic and far more valuable and of service to others. Would that be right?

EK: Yeah. Well, and just a quick point on that. Before I met Tareck, I was very single, and I was never gonna date again and the whole thing. And one of my mentors is this guy named Dr. John Demartini. I don’t know if you know who he is, but he’s one of my dearest mentors. And he said to me, “Just do what you love doing, and there’s a good chance someone’s gonna show up who also loves that. Like you just have to show up in the world inspired. You don’t have to look for them, actually. If you shine your light, it’ll be met.” And at the time I wasn’t really certain about it, but I think there’s a truth. To anyone who’s out there, who is single, and who maybe is wondering if they should date an astrologer, or if they should be open to that, part of my thought process is if you are inspired by something—whether it be astrology or horses or baseball—there’s a good chance that you’re gonna naturally just gravitate towards someone—also because of your astrology chart—but what you love. You’ll tend to find that the person who you date is gonna magnify that, right? Cuz that’s where love comes from, these parts of our chart, that we just love these things. Like his Jupiter’s on my Mars and Venus, for example.

CB: Okay.

EK: So what I love is what he enjoys.

CB: Sure. I’m just thinking about scenarios where that might not be the case. Like at the start of our relationship, we had very different approaches.

LS: Yeah. I mean, you were already a traditional astrologer, and I had just basically learned modern, Western.

CB: Yeah, you did modern, Western astrology, and I had just gotten back from living at a translation project for ancient texts.

LS: Right.

CB: And was talking about all this crazy stuff, like zodiacal releasing and whole sign houses and stuff like that.

LS: Yeah.

CB: But then that was funny because it turned out there was some weird overlap there that we realized in retrospect early on. Cuz I started paying attention to your zodiacal releasing periods, and every time we would meet up, you would hit an Eros peak period.

LS: Right.

CB: And I was like, “Where is this going?”

LS: Right, right.

CB: Because it started turning into a relationship, despite me not expecting that, too, or not really looking for a relationship at the time.

LS: You definitely were not looking for a relationship at the time, very explicitly.

CB: Yeah.

LS: Yeah.

CB: But then I came back to Denver and started an astrology group, and you attended the first meetings, and then we started hanging out afterwards. And we went to UAC at the same time, which was in Denver that same month.

LS: Yeah, just a few weeks after we met.

CB: Right. So the United Astrology Conference. There was a conference of like 2,000 astrologers in our city. Yeah, and then you asked to borrow my jacket for some reason, which I thought was weird at the time. So later, I went home and asked Patrick a horary question, and I was like, “Will Leisa and I have a relationship?” And he looked at the chart and he was like, “Yeah, the significators are applying.”

LS: Right.

CB: Cuz if you ask to borrow somebody’s jacket, it’s getting pretty serious.

LS: He took that very seriously.

TG: Dropped that bomb on you.

CB: Yeah, yeah. It’s time to get the horary involved at that stage. So that’s one of the funny, though, anecdotes that sometimes happens; as astrologers, you can have things like a horary chart. Or you can be seeing somebody’s transits go crazy in the relationship sectors when you’ve just met somebody and realize that this might be something more significant than it seems just on first appearance.

LS: Right, right. I mean, you had the advantage of some of that being kind of more tested for you versus at the time, since I’d only known modern, Western astrology up to that point. I was like, “I’m just having crazy Uranus transits, and this might just be like a three-week fling or something.” I wasn’t really pinning anything on it lasting necessarily because that was what I was seeing astrologically.

CB: Yeah. I mean, neither of us were. But also, to go back to the topic of different approaches, we had radically different approaches and different lifestyles. And so, that in and of itself—like the fact that we were so different in our approaches astrologically—was one of the factors we were both marking against us, of this ever lasting.

LS: Right.

CB: I used traditional rulerships, and you used modern rulerships. I used whole sign houses, and you used—whatever you were using.

LS: Placidus.

CB: Placidus and Porphyry? Okay.

LS: Yeah, whatever.

CB: Whatever. You used Placidus. Yeah, and I was using zodiacal releasing and stuff. And you were very unimpressed with that technique, I think, at first.

LS: Annual profections I was unimpressed with at first.

CB: Okay. Yeah, well, cuz I read your chart at some point early on, before it was even romantic. And it wasn’t a consultation or anything—it was just an impromptu thing—and made some statements. And I probably mentioned this a bunch of times on the podcast already, but you were just incredibly unimpressed because a lot of the statements that I made, you were just like, “No, that’s wrong.” And then over the past 10 years, I’ve been vindicated because almost every single one of those statements has come true, but it didn’t happen until later in her life.

LS: Right. So to be fair, it was not correct yet.

TG: Patience.

CB: In a broader, four-dimensional view of time, everything’s happening at once, and technically, I was already correct.

LS: Right. But, I mean, I think it’s been interesting that I have then adopted a lot of those things for my own practice. Because it could seem on the face of it as though I just kind of did what you wanted, which isn’t true at all. Like I was very actually quite stubborn for a while.

CB: Well, that’s really valid. That’s a real question. Our approaches actually did end up gravitating towards each other, and you ended up following and developing an approach that’s very similar to my own in terms of both natal astrology and electional and using zodiacal releasing. And in some of those techniques, you’ve become, next to myself—I don’t know anybody else that can use zodiacal releasing as effectively. I don’t know anyone else in the world, besides maybe my friend Patrick Watson, who’s been studying it for about as long as I have. And so, you’ve become really good with all of those techniques, and our approaches are now very similar and have converged. But I wonder what it would have been like, and if it would have lasted as long if we just continued to have completely different approaches and never really saw eye-to-eye on some of those things.

LS: Right, right. And I think that’s part of what I was kind of getting at earlier with the dialogue, the constant dialogue. Because that didn’t come through me just going, “Okay, you’re right.” Like certainly, I’m pretty much the opposite. But it came through like actual constant dialogue about these things.

CB: Of learning more about the techniques than you had learned initially. Or learning to see how they were applied or something like that.

LS: Yeah, exactly. I mean, and learning to use them myself and then verifying them for myself rather than just taking someone else’s word, even if it’s someone I’m in a relationship with.

CB: Right.

LS: And conversely, there were, I mean, fewer things, I would say, but there were some things where I would kind of stick to my guns and be like, “No, I’m really seeing this as a thing,” and it was more of a modern thing. And you were like, “I don’t see that. Conceptually, why would that be true, traditionally?” I’m like, “I don’t know, but I keep seeing it, and this seems to be a real thing.”

CB: Right.

LS: And there were a few things like that, that I feel like you were influenced on as well over time.

CB: Yeah, definitely.

LS: Yeah.

TG: And that was it, then. It was sold and sealed.

CB: Right.

LS: Well, I mean, I think so much of it is how big of a part of your life is astrology, and how important is it for you as an individual, for any individual to share that with someone. And that’s gonna be different for everyone. And for you, that’s your whole life. It’s both your profession and your worldview, and it became mine as well.

CB: Yeah. I mean, I would have a really hard time, I think, being in a relationship with somebody that wasn’t an astrologer because I’ve dedicated my life to it, since I was really young. Since I was 14 or 15. And I just knew that that’s what I wanted to do with my life, and I wanted to singlemindedly throw everything I had at it. It would be hard, I think, to be in a relationship with somebody that couldn’t connect on that level, cuz they wouldn’t understand why I was spending so much time doing this or what have you. I could see other people—if astrology is more of a hobby, or if it’s something that you have a passing interest in or something like that, but it’s not your main thing, or it’s not even your profession necessarily—that might not be a deal-breaker for you.

LS: Right, right. Yeah, and for me, it was mostly the worldview thing, before it was a profession for me. I had been studying it some, but I wasn’t really practicing a lot by that point, but I had always been interested in things like that. And so, it didn’t necessarily have to be astrology, but I think I would always have a hard time being with anyone who wasn’t interested in things like this. So, for instance, I was in a religious studies grad program before I dropped out and just focused on astrology. I lived in Buddhist meditation centers. So it would always have to be something around this, I think, for me. Like I don’t think I could be in a relationship with someone who was actively antagonistic at all. At least open to it, if nothing else. But certainly, being able to share all of it has been great, but I think that’s probably not for everyone. Like that might be too much astrology for some people.

CB: Yeah. I mean, it depends on how much you want to leave astrology at the door. I mean, it sounds like, Eugenia, that that’s sort of something that’s important to you. Cuz you see so many clients, for example, and you’re spending so much time processing with people and going through their charts and talking about their life stories and stuff that sometimes you really do want to leave that at the door when you come home.

EK: Yeah. Yeah, I think Tareck spends a lot more time engaged in astrology, whether it’s reading or watching/listening/thinking, than I do. But I’m with you. I think at this point it would be almost impossible to be with someone who is not an astrologer. I’m kind of of the same thought processes as both of you. Because whether he’s spending more time with it or not, it doesn’t matter. I love that that’s what he’s doing with his time.

CB: Sure.

EK: So if he was watching football games, I could be down with it, I guess. But I’m much more—

TG: You love basketball.

EK: Okay, yeah. But I like that that’s where he’s spending his time. It seems like a good value of time to me. Whereas your relationship before, she didn’t see the value in him learning this information.

CB: Is this your first astrological relationship, Tareck?

TG: Yeah.

CB: Okay.

TG: This is the first relationship I’ve had with an astrologer for sure, yeah.

CB: Okay.

TG: The relationship before—an interest in astrology or holistic health, but not like an actual in-depth understanding. With Eugenia, when we met, I never expected Eugenia to have an interest in me. I just never expected that. When we were chatting, I just never expected the fact that it could develop into a relationship simply because I kind of looked up to her. Astrology came to me through—it comes to some people.

LS: Right.

TG: And they might not know that they have the ability in it until they’re around other people and start reading charts, for example, or they get validated because they’re so in tune with it. Maybe the reasons why I got into astrology, I was kind of like a bit of an outcast really, how it came to me. So the fact that I was maybe communicating very authentically with yourself, and you valued that, I never really thought that we’d enter into a relationship, if you see what I mean. So when we first started talking, we were talking more intellectually together.

CB: Right.

TG: And it became kind of like an intellectual debate on what’s right, what’s not, but yet, with a found respect through that. For note, it affected our relationship a little bit when I started saying stuff to you. Because of the nature of your style, you kind of just sat back and listened a bit. If you remember, we talked about this.

EK: Yeah.

TG: And for me, that was really putting me out of my depth completely. Cuz then it’s like I’ve gotta overcompensate now and say more than maybe I should’ve done. But Eugenie was obviously letting me maybe become more confident, so she was really encouraging me in a lot of ways. And then at the same time, when it came down to me doing that for you, suddenly you were like, “Oh, right. Yeah, he does know his stuff actually.”

EK: Well, that’s what I was gonna say. Yes, maybe I was letting you gain confidence, and that might have been it. But actually I thought what you said was interesting, right?

TG: Right.

EK: I think you’re a really interesting human, right?

TG: Okay.

EK: I like listening to you. I think your thoughts are really weird and bizarre and altering for my life, again, cuz his approach is so unintellectual. It’s so abstract. Individuals like maybe myself—and you two as well perhaps—I need to see to believe it. I’m one of these people, for sure. And he’s not. Well, no. Yeah, I can’t—

TG: We complement each other, in the fact that you’re more logical/analytical, and I’m a bit more creative/philosophical.

EK: Yeah.

CB: Sure.

TG: And that’s where the chemistry is in terms of our dynamic.

EK: Yeah, so I learn a lot. Like he tells me things that I’ve not heard from any other astrologer before. And because maybe you’ve come up with it originally, you don’t recognize that it’s actually really remarkably interesting. And so, I gave you the space to actually massage out those words, and then now I’ve been able to integrate them into my life and my practice, absolutely. I mean, now he’s taught me. I mean, we’ve taught each other equally at this point. I don’t think either of us would be considered more learned than the other at this point. And I don’t think originally that was the case either, actually.

TG: It totally illustrates the point of how we, as two astrologers, have been growing together in partnership.

CB: Exactly.

LS: Yeah.

TG: It really does that.

CB: And that’s a really crucial, broader topic that’s. Again, one of those things that people probably don’t anticipate when they get in a relationship with another astrologer is there being disparities. Like sometimes a learning disparity of one person’s been studying it longer than the other. There can be disparities if one person’s a professional astrologer and the other person’s not necessarily or has a different profession. We’ve already talked about the technical disparity. There can also be like even if they’re both professional astrologers, there can be disparities in terms of maybe one has gotten luckier, has been more successful in their career so far or the other one hasn’t yet. There’s all sorts of weird disparities that you can run into. And sometimes you can start off at very different places and then have to sort of meet somewhere in the middle over time, which in the long term kind of is fine and works out, as long as you’re in it for the long game. But in terms of the short term sometimes those disparities can be too difficult to get through and can sometimes lead to the end of the relationship if they’re not resolvable in a short timeframe.

LS: Yeah, I think so, too. I think we’ve had some of that, certainly, over time. Yeah, I mean, I’ve become a full-time, practicing astrologer compared to not in the beginning and things like that, whereas you were already pretty much doing this.

CB: I mean, I was on my way, but I still had a day job when we met. And then I called you one day, like a year into our relationship and said, “I’m quitting my day job to do astrology full-time.” And then that first year or two, we were both struggling financially, cuz I’m trying to make it as an astrologer.

LS: Yeah.

CB: And yeah, we joked in the last episode about how that summer we would go to the store and debate one of us buying the spaghetti noodles and one of us buying the sauce and that being a major discussion.

TG: Did you use electional astrology?

CB: No, that would have been a good idea, now that I think about it.

LS: But yeah, I mean, we were that broke at the beginning. So, I mean, obviously, both of us valued all of the astrology and that being a pursuit. Whereas I could see someone else maybe being like, “Yeah, I don’t wanna live my life this broke,” and pinning everything on that.

CB: Right.

LS: Cuz you told me that, right, when we were moving in together, that you were quitting your other job.

CB: Yeah, we’re like moving in, and I just happen to be quitting my job.

[crosstalk]

CB: Yeah, exactly. Just murmured that under my breath. Yeah, cuz I could see that. Cuz I’ve seen other astrologers that have a non-astrologer partner, and they want to quit their day job and pursue astrology full-time. And I can see how that would look weird from the partner’s perspective, or cause major tensions if you don’t necessarily believe in what they’re doing on a real, practical level, or even a philosophical level. That’s gonna make it harder to be supportive during the difficult times.

LS: Yeah. And also, just knowing that it might be a harder profession to make a full-time living in for a lot of people, like asking yourself, “Am I willing to do that in my partnership? Cuz this will impinge on my own life. What is possible for us financially?” and things like that.

CB: Yeah. Again, a surprise to skeptics, it’s not a career field that people get into because they want to make money.

LS: Right.

CB: They get into it because they actually believe that it’s a legitimate phenomenon, and they want to pursue it and spend as much time doing it and exploring it in a fashion that they can. And doing it professionally is one of the best ways to study astrology. Because then you’re literally working with people, one-on-one, with their charts, whether that’s a natal or electional or what have you. And that’s a large part of the reason why people pursue it as a career, cuz they can’t see themselves doing anything else.

LS: Right, right. Well, and it’s funny how well things have gone, eventually, I feel like, for your career. I remember actually like my dad saying something skeptical to you, when you first met my parents. He was like, “So that seems like one of those fields where you might not be able to,” I forget exactly how he phrased it. But basically, you’re not gonna get rich doing this. And you were like, “Yeah, maybe.” This was like really early on.

CB: I’ve successfully blocked that out of my memory.

LS: Yeah. And, I mean, he wasn’t mean about it, but he was just a little concerned for his daughter.

CB: Yeah.

LS: Like, “Are you gonna be able to make a living at this?”

CB: Right.

LS: Yeah. And that was very early on, in fact, in your making a living at it.

CB: I mean, that’s a whole facet of this I hadn’t even thought about. But that would be rough if your extended family was not okay with astrology, or was skeptical of something or not supportive. That would be difficult as well. I think we both lucked out in that our families have been relatively supportive of our careers as astrologers.

LS: Definitely.

TG: I think it’s a great point that you’re mentioning there, the lack of awareness of how you could have a career in astrology, for example, and as you say, especially if two astrologers together, in the same boat, are bringing up kids, let’s say. And then there’s all that pressure, parental, potentially, or even others. And that’s gonna have an impact potentially on people making decisions even, I suppose. That’s not necessarily to do with the astrologers themselves. That’s more what goes with relationships really, I suppose.

LS: Right. I mean, a lot of these things can be extended further into two people being in the same profession, any profession, for instance. Or just two people having slightly different values about anything in life and how important that is to each of those individuals and whether that’s a deal-breaker or not a deal-breaker. So, I mean, a lot of this of course goes beyond astrology.

TG: Sure, sure. But I think it’s a really interesting point in terms of career and supporting people in this career, in this profession, and having that shared interest and understanding why it’s a benefit and why the urgency to do or the need to do it.

CB: Right.

TG: I think if you were with another astrologer, or somebody who understands that, straight away you’re in a better position, aren’t you?

LS: Yeah. And it’s a weird field, it really is. I mean, it’s unusual. I feel like it’s either in the metaphysical field or in the quasi-spiritual field. And most people just, as a population, are not gonna be building their lives around that.

EK: Right.

TG: True.

LS: And so, it’s always gonna be a smaller pool if you’re wanting to have that same thing.

CB: Right. Well, and that’s why, though, sometimes when you find a relationship with another astrologer, and there’s something that brought you together—whether it’s a mutual attraction or circumstance or what have you—sometimes that can actually create an interesting pressure on the relationship itself. Because it’s so rare sometimes that you do connect with another astrologer that sometimes it can make you maybe even make greater concessions than you would otherwise just in order to keep the relationship because you know how rare it is, or how not common it is to even just find somebody you get along with on that level, who shares that same interest.

TG: True.

EK: So true.

TG: I think it’s important, if you have that responsibility as an astrologer, that you can look at a chart. And then if you try to make it fit, I suppose is the biggest problem with all interpretation. Trying to make things fit because you can see this could happen or that could happen, you start to see more than maybe just the obvious what needs to get sorted at the time. And that could be a real issue with two astrologers because they’re talking astrology rather than just basic living together. So it’s a blessing and it’s a curse. It can be, right?

LS: Right.

TG: If you don’t discern accordingly and recognize that life’s life with astrology, and yet, having astrology can be really helpful.

LS: Right.

CB: Yeah. And that’s the crucial balance that is probably the most important thing I think every astrologer couple has to learn. What is the balance between incorporating astrology versus not? Have you guys been—cuz you’ve been together about two years now?

EK: Yeah.

CB: Is that something that you’ve found that you’ve learned and grown more accustomed to? Or initially, was there a disparity early on in your relationship where you were doing more astrology than you are now?

TG: I think we were communicating, weren’t we, before we met, in relation to astrology. We were getting to know each other as well, weren’t we?

EK: Yeah.

CB: Right. Cuz you guys had the long-distance thing. Which is a whole element in and of itself of the idea that you have in your head of who somebody is and then the reality when you actually meet up in person and start spending an extended amount of time together. That’s a whole other layer.

EK: Cuz we talked regularly for at least six months.

TG: We were addicted to each other, let’s be honest.

EK: We still are a little bit.

TG: Yeah, let’s be honest. It was an online kind of fascination, which resulted in a lot of communication on the internet.

EK: Yeah, a lot.

TG: And it wasn’t just astrology. It was poetry. It was just basic chit-chat, wasn’t it?

EK: But it was also old school courting. That was the cool part.

TG: There was a romantic aspect to it.

EK: Before we even held hands, we knew a lot about each other, which I really appreciate. Actually I think that’s a really good way to get to know someone.

TG: And then we met, which was pretty intense and great.

CB: How did the timing work? Did you elect the timing at all? Cuz that’s something that I’ve seen, and I’ve done. But did you, I don’t know, did you pay attention to the timing at all?

EK: Yeah.

TG: We did, didn’t we? Cuz remember, when we first met, we were talking about the retrogrades and the eclipse and everything, but not so much electional.

EK: I was doing a little electional without letting him know.

CB: So you guys timed it to meet up under the Great American Eclipse in Leo.

EK: Right. But he flew in before that. And I had elected the day without him knowing, and the time.

CB: Okay.

EK: So I wanted him coming in on a Taurus rising. I can’t remember the details, but I did have that in mind. And even when he just flew here, it’s always in the back of my head. And of course life gets in the way and you just can’t do it sometimes, but it was always somewhere in my head for our meeting dates and times. But I gotta say it so far hasn’t mattered much just because the relationship can be much bigger than that at those moments of seeing each other for the first time, but a few weeks or months or however long it had been. But yeah, we have lived together, and we’ve spent a lot of time together, but we haven’t lived in one house together and paid the bills.

CB: I love this part. This is like the most Sag thing.

EK: Ever.

CB: You guys have just been traveling the country, or the world over the past year or something, right?

TG: Yeah. And those retrogrades—we really got to learn about those retrogrades last year in Venus.

EK: Yeah.

TG: And Mars, wasn’t that?

EK: Yeah.

TG: We really got to learn about that, how it affected us both. And I just wanted to say another thing about using astrology with the elections or anything like that. When it actually came to it, and we were actually in each other’s energy, then suddenly the astrology kind of goes out the window a little bit because you’re just facing each other’s personalities. That’s the real meat and potatoes. And it was lucky that we had the chance to get to know each other away from each other because that romantic, traditional aspect came into being. And then when there were certain transits that happened and put pressure on the relationship, we were aware of that to deal with it. But when it comes down to it, it still comes down to the birds and the bees, security, trust. And can you find those things in the chart? Well, we get indications, but spending time with somebody and actually being with that person is really key, isn’t it? It’s really obvious. But for us it wasn’t so easy for that to happen, was it? Just being in the same location, if you see what I mean.

CB: Right.

LS: Right.

EK: But it is true. It’s amazing, with all of our Sag, how it’s just made us more Sag. Honestly, it’s a bit nuts. I think we get into relationships with humans. And the great thing about relationship astrology is we can kind of see how we might trigger one another or exaggerate a certain personality trait.

CB: Yeah. I mean, how many of your assumptions going into the relationship about your synastry or how that was gonna work out—were there some that were notably correct, and you were like, “Oh, yeah, this worked out pretty much how I expected?” Versus were there ones where there was a bit of a curve ball or something you didn’t expect?

EK: I think it’s more curve ball than expected actually. I think some of the things we thought would be really positive are actually much more challenging.

TG: You see, I see that as interpretation, as how we look at a chart. Positive/negative. Challenge/ease. And I think those aspects that I thought about our chart—our synastry, our composite—were going to look one way, and then the reality was different. However, when we worked out why that was happening—Uranus aspects, basically.

EK: Yeah, we have some Uranus aspects.

TG: And then we realized that that could take it to a higher level or it could take it to a much more crisis level. So again, it comes down to that astrology is interpretation. It could be positive, negative, challenge, or difficulty.

CB: Sure. I mean, have you guys ever had any really rough transits, that coincided with a notable blowout or something like that?

TG: Oh, those eclipses at the start of the year.

CB: Okay.

TG: That was a challenge.

EK: The Mars retrograde—

TG: The retrograde.

EK: —when we were in Egypt. The Venus retrograde when we were traveling America, yeah. And because we have the same chart, it’s very potent, right?

CB: I mean, one of the questions is, does that help, though? Cuz I think one of the things that was surprising to me is that the answer is not always as much as you think it is. Like knowing the transits doesn’t always remove the issue or doesn’t mean you can solve the issue. The issue is just there, and the astrology happens to be reflecting it.

EK: Right.

CB: And you can both be like, “Well, that’s great. But now we still have to work out the issue.”

EK: I actually think that knowing the transits has saved our asses on many occasions. Because it helps us at least recognize that this is happening, this is for a reason. There’s a reason we’re triggering each other this way, or there’s a reason this is being activated in us right now, but it doesn’t help us actually deal with it, right?

CB: Right. It’s not like a magic wand.

EK: No.

LS: Like you still have to solve it. It’s more like you’re just identifying the problem.

EK: Exactly.

CB: Which is the same issue, honestly, that you run into with clients. Occasionally, you’ll have somebody that wants to be a client or comes to you as a client, who thinks that astrology is just like magic and it’s gonna solve all their problems. But oftentimes what you’re doing is sometimes describing them or telling them things about their life up till now, or about their present, that they already kind of know, just because the astrology’s just reflecting that.

EK: Right.

CB: That’s not necessarily inherently as magically useful as some people might assume.

EK: Right.

LS: Right. Yeah, it’s still something to be like, “Wow, this matches the energy of the moment in some way,” whether that’s just current transits in the world or current transits to each other’s charts or things like that. But yeah, you still have to do something about it.

TG: Exactly.

EK: And I work with psychotherapists all over the country, so I co-treat with clients. So when I see a client, I encourage them to seek further therapies based on my assessment of their chart, based on just the different psychological practices that exist. And one of my therapists I work with most frequently, she calls me ‘validation therapy’. So somebody’s going through a very difficult time, she says, “Go see Eugenia, and you will actually learn that there’s a reason this is happening.” And sometimes that’s all you need from astrology. “Oh, there’s a reason.” I mean, I’ve had clients come to me who have just lived through those experiences where you don’t even want to hear about it, cuz it’s so tragic to even know someone has had to go through these experiences. And they’ll come see me oftentimes through a therapist referral, and I’ll say, “Well, yeah, let’s take a real good look at this transit (or this progression),” or whatever it might be. “I promise you at some point you’re gonna recognize why this is happening, and you’ll somewhere find an ounce of gratitude for it, that the heavens above are guiding you. They’re for you or they’re with you.” So yeah, I think of it as ‘validation therapy astrology’ in a lot of ways. But yeah, it doesn’t actually give us—like it won’t come in and mediate a fight.

LS: Yeah, yeah. Well, and I know that we’ve talked about that issue, right?

CB: What part?

LS: Just if the astrology is correlating with a certain conflict or something like that. How much do you put it on the astrology of the moment versus like, “No, this is really a thing that I’m mad at you about?”

CB: Yeah, we have debates about that. If one of us is having a Mars transit and happens to be particularly irritable that day, and it sparks an argument, how much is the astrology just reflecting that you didn’t get enough sleep that night, and you’re more irritable, and that’s it, you just need to get through that period versus how much is it more causal? How much is it you’re having this transit and that’s part of, maybe not the only reason, but a contributing cause of irritability in some sense, so that we need to be more cognizant? We need to be actively more cognizant of the astrology because it’s somehow causing these things to happen versus it just correlating with it. And therefore, if it’s not a cause, then it’s not the primary thing we need to address.

LS: Yeah. Yeah, and I think there’s good arguments for both sides, and probably it’s different proportions in any different circumstance. Cuz sometimes it really is just like, no, either one of us or both of us is gonna be feeling a certain way more than usual in this moment because that’s the astrology of this moment. And that’s actually helped me a lot, I feel like and that’s kind of why I go to that side sometimes. Because, for instance, say there’s a transiting Moon square Saturn, just in the transits themselves, not to our charts or anything. If I didn’t know that astrologically, I would be like, “Why are you not connecting with me right now?” Like I would blame you more probably, or anyone. Since I know the astrology of any given moment—not really trying to obsess about it, but just because I usually do know what’s going on—then I am just like, “Okay, that’s what the moment is right now.” And I think that actually takes away from fights that could happen.

CB: Yeah. And I definitely agree with that, and I can see that. There’s a flip side. And sometimes I’ve seen it come up in other people’s relationships, sometimes blaming the transits for something rather than addressing the underlying actual issue. And that’s the danger that I worry about with a more causal approach to astrology. Sometimes it might lead you more to focus too much on the astrology rather than whatever the issue is at hand.

LS: Right. And I think you don’t actually have to work out the specific issue between you as individuals because you can put it off on the astrology.

CB: Right.

LS: Whether that’s in your charts or otherwise.

EK: That’s I think probably one of the most—like you’re on the edge with that one all the time. “Yeah, but in your chart.”

TG: Yeah, let’s say you try to make things fit, or you’re overcompensating by the knowledge that one may have rather than dealing with the issue, which is the opportunity in relationships to expand or not. I think all of that is the danger of dating an astrologer, in the sense that it can be very common-sensical. You’re in a relationship with somebody, something happens, and you just have a fight, or might do whatever to get over that, whatever that just happened. If you start intellectualizing it, there’s a real danger, cuz you’re gonna keep coming to that problem again and again.

EK: And also, when you know things are coming—like a Mars retrograde—it puts everything a bit more on edge than for couples who don’t know that’s happening right now, cuz you’re aware of a Venus retrograde right now or a Mercury retrograde or an eclipse. And so, that’s one of the reasons I try not to look at transits, which is impossible, cuz this is what I do for a living. I’m a big believer in co-creating our reality, right? And I don’t necessarily believe that we have free will. I kind of think based on what we’ve learned as astrologers and just watching people’s charts all day long, I think there’s a plan. Some magic, divine, godlike plan. I don’t know how. That’s the faith in astrology. Something put this together. And whatever put this together was a brilliant, brilliant architect of reality. But I also believe in our co-creation with the gods above, with our experience. Because I’m a big fan of neurology and neuroscience, I know how the brain works. And when we put ideas into the brain, our brain starts to believe it also. So, for example, one of the examples I use just with clients is when our parents say to a child, “You are ugly, you are ugly,” the brain starts to believe that, right? And it’s not true, right? We get to actually believe what we want. And so, when I look at transits, especially in the relationship, how much of it is me assuming we’re gonna have that challenge because of that transit? Like Tareck was saying, maybe people who don’t understand astrology have a tiff when Mars is on their Sun that day, and they just laugh through it and just make their way through it. Whereas an astrologer couple says, “You have Mars on your Sun right now. You’re really activating me, and I can feel your energy.” And I think that that is the constant walk of the blessing and the curse of understanding this information for our personal lives, and then, exponentially, with our partners who also understand astrology. How much do we place our energy towards trying to figure out what this is gonna look like versus just being in the moment?

CB: Right.

LS: Yeah, that’s definitely a core issue, I think.

EK: Core issue.

CB: Yeah. And the underlying issue there is the danger of creating the situation that you think you’re seeing in the astrology. Or the person, yeah, just accidentally creating something because they’re paying attention to the astrology too much, let’s say. I’m trying to think of the keyword for that.

LS: Self-fulfilling prophecy.

CB: Yeah, self-fulfilling prophecy, but instead doing it in your relationship.

EK: Right.

CB: And that’s something you definitely wanna avoid. And that’s sometimes a good reason not to look at the astrology, but instead to just do the relationship.

LS: Right. Well, I mean, I think also one of the things that if you’re in a relationship using astrology—whether it’s one of you or both of you—over a long enough period of time, you see that you can still actually be surprised by how things turn out, even if you can see all the symbolism and generally understand all the symbolism. And so, that’s, I think, been interesting to me over time, cuz I think I worried more with the astrology before, in earlier years. I can’t say I never worry about things now, but it’s just more like I’ve seen enough instances at this point—in either or both of our charts—where it’s like, “Oh, I thought that was gonna go a certain way, but it went slightly different than that.” After a period of time of seeing that, it’s like, okay, well, you don’t need to obsess about astrology.

TG: Yeah, I just wanted to say, as a bit of an example, when we were thinking about a significant day, I mean, we definitely should have come to you two, by the way. Just heads up there, everyone.

CB: That’s true.

TG: We made a big mistake there, but we were just trying our best to come up with a day. And then that turned into a bit of a nightmare for us.

EK: Oh, it really, really did.

CB: Disagreeing about electional dates, or transits, or when to do or initiate something.

EK: Super big commitments.

CB: That’s a great one.

EK: Really messed us up.

CB: We haven’t dealt with this yet, but I could imagine it would be a nightmare. And I’ve seen other astrological couples—although it wasn’t that bad in those instances, but I could see it being—picking a marriage date.

LS: Yeah, picking a wedding date for yourselves.

CB: Yeah, or an election, especially if you have different approaches. If you’re using different house systems or different rulerships or sidereal versus tropical, and then you’ve gotta try to pick a date, that would be rough.

LS: No, that would be obnoxious.

TG: Yeah.

LS: I’m glad that we don’t have different electional approaches.

TG: So going to a third party, for example, astrologer or whatever, is useful for any couple. You could try to work things out yourself, you could have a master’s, let’s say, in psychotherapy or whatever. I have a master’s in this, and we get together. We think we’ve got it all worked out, but emotions and all these sorts of things and different perspectives can really make one quite retarded really in terms of making obvious decisions.

EK: Yep.

TG: And we definitely came across that at one time, like a perception of Neptune in Pisces and Venus. Your perception from my perception was very different. And then what we ended up doing is learning about the differences of those, interpreting those symbols and those ideas. But then time goes by.

CB: Right.

TG: So that’s a danger with two astrologers. One might be more interested in the grounded aspects of astrology, like, say, Capricorn or Virgo. The other person might be a bit more romantic-orientated, a bit more interested in Pisces and Sag, if you see what I mean.

LS: Yeah, definitely. And not just in interpretations in general, but how your own chart even might color what you’re drawn to or how you interpret certain things in astrology.

EK: And then the conflicts of choosing a date, like such an important one, on those conflicts is very challenging.

CB: Right.

EK: And just as a side note, we were actually at my cousin’s wedding last fall, and they couldn’t have picked a better date, and they had no idea.

LS: Yeah, that happens.

EK: Venus at the midheaven. It was like perfection. No idea.

LS: Yeah, that happens sometimes without an intentional election.

TG: Love the universe synchronicity, just common sense, will provide the answers. And that’s sometimes where it becomes detrimental. It shouldn’t be.

CB: Sure.

TG: But emotions and perspectives, and also, conditioning from the past and experiences may skew a very obvious common sense decision.

EK: Yeah.

CB: Right.

LS: Sure.

CB: Yeah, that’s definitely big. I mean, that’s just an issue in general in terms of when to try to use astrology to control or manipulate the outcome of things or the future versus when to just let nature take its course. And that’s one of the core, hardest, probably longstanding debates in astrology in general, probably subtly, because that’s just tied back into the whole fate/freewill thing, but that’s a perfect other example of a manifestation of it.

LS: Yeah. Well, and you can see—I mean, this is kind of just a side note. But you can see in this entire meta discussion, this whole enterprise is not for everyone.

EK: No.

LS: And so, even talking about these things or worrying about these things, most people in their day-to-day life don’t wanna be contemplating fate and freewill about what they’re doing that day.

CB: Right.

LS: It takes a certain type of person to want to engage in those discussions that frequently.

CB: What are the greater ramifications of leaving the house at this time, or an hour/hour later today?

LS: Whereas I love that. But I recognize that not everyone loves that.

EK: Right, right. That’s that value system thing. It’s just right or wrong. Do you share the same values? And yeah, I totally agree. I think this is so interesting, this point that has been brought up. It’s this fine dance of, yeah, the integration of astrology. It’s a tricky thing. And it’s funny actually talking about it with you because we’re only talking to each other about it all the time. So this is bringing to light some kind of—cuz we’re so insular. Like I am lucky I have friends who speak this language, so I get other outlets for this, just for my own personal experience of astrology. But at the same time, now that we’re stepping back and looking at it, it’s kind of actually revealing to me, wow, this is a massive part of our life. Cuz you forget, “Oh, yeah, people don’t wanna believe this.”

CB: Things that you take for granted. And it’s only once you step outside of it, or start realizing how it could have gone a different, or how somebody else’s life is different that you realize what the uniqueness is of the situation you’re in.

LS: I think I actually had the realization again recently when we were doing some ‘whether to elect certain things’ setting up our new apartment. Like if either of us thought this was super weird, this would not work.

CB: Right. We were gonna do the showing for the apartment, and we were like, “If we could just delay it by 10 minutes, we could get this other rising sign.” And we were like, “Okay, you say that you have to go back to the house, and we will delay it by 10 minutes before walking in the door.”

LS: Right.

CB: And we’re both paying attention to the time as we walk in.

LS: Yeah, and I could just see someone who’s not involved in any of these things just being like, “You are a crazy person and we are not moving in together.”

CB: Yeah. So, I mean, that would be really tough. And I just keep coming back to that statement that that would be really tough because it’s all I can think of, but there’s a lot of people that find themselves in that. I’m trying to think of—cuz I don’t wanna paint too bleak of a scenario. This is something that Leisa and I talked about beforehand, as we were a little nervous about doing this, because presenting a certain perspective. Cuz both couples are astrologers dating other astrologers and being in long-term relationships, so we’re obviously very pro-that. And for each of us—especially since we’re professional astrologers—this is more of like an ideal scenario for us. But I know there’s sometimes people that listen to the podcast who are astrologers themselves, but their spouse isn’t, but they still play it in the car, and their spouse, for example, ends up hearing large parts of the podcast. So I do not want to—

EK: I’ve had kids come up to me and like, “Oh, my gosh, you’re so cool.” I’m like, “What?”

CB: Right.

EK: It’s in mom’s car.

CB: But I don’t wanna paint a bleak scenario and say that it’s not possible to have a stable, long-term relationship with an astrologer, or for that to be a good, permanent, supportive and great relationship if you aren’t both there. Cuz I do think it’s possible. I just think having some flexibility and some understand and some openness to trying to see where the other person is coming from and trying to be considerate of that, not just for the non-astrologer partner towards the astrologer doing all this crazy stuff, electional astrology, but also, for the astrologer towards their non-astrologer partner to try to be understanding of. Like astrologers sometimes fall into the—it’s not a trap, but it’s something we all do of just taking for granted that the way that your life is and what your belief system is is the same for everybody, instead of stepping outside of yourself and realizing that it could look a little bit weird or it could look different for somebody else. And especially if you have a partner that’s coming from that perspective, try to be understanding of that.

LS: I mean, I think there are pros, too. I think there are positive things about not being in an astrology relationship.

CB: Okay, sell me on being in a non-astrology relationship.

LS: I mean, I think one of the things is that very thing you just said, which you sometimes forget how any of this sounds to anyone else who’s not an astrologer, and you get too much into the shorthand.

CB: They might keep you grounded.

LS: Yeah, they could keep you grounded in the rest of the world.

CB: Right. I like that.

LS: Yeah.

CB: This is like top five reasons to not date an astrologer. That’s where we’re going with this.

LS: Yeah. I mean, yeah, so I think just keeping you kind of remembering what it’s like to talk about astrology with people who aren’t astrologers—so you don’t get too much in your shorthand—but I think, also, being reminded that there are other ways, other lenses through which to view the world. And astrology is not the only one true lens. And it is a very perceptive lens, but it’s certainly not the only one. And I’ve had that. I had a family member tell me that once, and she was like, “Yeah, that’s a good lens,” reminding that there are other lenses through which you can think about the world, and you don’t have to stick to just this one. So I think that’s actually really useful.

CB: Yeah, a lens or a tool.

LS: Yeah.

CB: And that there might be other tools for looking at the world. I mean, even now there are metaphysical tools like tarot. Like I could imagine an astrologer dating somebody that does tarot and the differences in their approaches to some extent not being necessarily the same.

LS: Yeah.

TG: That would work.

LS: Yeah, so I think, yeah, just keeping you connected to the rest of the world in a variety of ways is a big pro.

CB: Okay.

LS: Yeah.

CB: Come up with four more.

LS: Some other ones.

EK: I would say decision-making.

TG: Is this pro to being in an astrology relationship?

EK: To not being in one.

LS: To being in a relationship with someone who’s not an astrologer.

TG: Okay, decision-making.

CB: For the astrologer, the benefits of a ‘hardcore astrology believer’ being in a relationship with a non-astrologer.

EK: I think decisions. Like we just actually had an experience just a couple of days ago, and we were about to make a pretty big decision. And we were referencing, “Well, Mercury is at 29° of Pisces,” so this was like we either needed to make this decision or this decision. And somebody else, they would go with maybe more of their gut, right? I think that it can get so heady astrology that it takes it out of the gut. It takes it out of the ground. It takes it out of just the intuitive knowing or just listening to ourselves. And it is frustrating. Those are those moments, I think, actually that are the moments that I really dislike about being in a relationship with an astrologer. It’s like, “I don’t care if that Mercury’s at 29° of Pisces.” And actually I really don’t. He is more into this than I am. Okay, so I actually don’t care where Mercury is right now in making decisions. I just don’t.

CB: Unfortunately, we’re gonna be more on his side.

TG: Thanks, guys. You’re not just dating an astrologer, you’re dating an Egyptian astrologer.

CB: Right.

TG: That’s what it has to do with it.

EK: Well, it does a little, I mean, cuz you’re very spiritually-minded, and you’ve got very symbolistic ideas.

TG: It’s the case of how you interpret astrology. For you, it’s like if you’re not happy or you are happy, the astrology’s not as important, maybe. Is that what you mean?

CB: And I didn’t mean to cut you off or diminish what you were saying. Well, the point you were making is actually really good, that astrologers could be paralyzed by the astrology, if we both can’t find an electional date, and we need to do something important, and we put it off, or put off something. If we were dating a non-astrologer, they would be like, “We have to do this now.”

TG: “Let’s get on with this now.” Totally.

EK: Even the fact that we waited so long—like sometimes I think about how long we waited to meet for the first time, and I want to hit my head. We were like, “We have to be together at the Great American Solar Eclipse because it’s happening.”

TG: It is crazy, really.

EK: It’s like we should have met months before we did. And we were just sitting there waiting to meet each other. The ticket had been bought, so it wasn’t like we were gonna change it. We didn’t even come see it. We saw it from Colorado.

CB: What were you doing exactly?

TG: We were hanging out.

CB: Okay, yeah. You were seeing a movie or something during the eclipse.

EK: But there have been too many moments. Like this electional idea, we should have done something. We should have made a big decision two years ago.

TG: Common sense.

EK: Cuz common sense said, “Go do that. That’s obvious. Everything is laid out for you to go do that.” And I was like, “Oh, but there’s so much in Pisces right now.” That was me. We kick each other for those moments sometimes. Like why were we paying attention to that more than what we knew?

LS: Sure.

CB: So that is the struggle, and that will be a struggle. Let’s go back to the other side. So now we’re making astrologers sound neurotic. The other side of that, of course, is if you weren’t paying attention at all, and you just met up, or you did something important and decided to run off to Vegas and get married, and Mars and Venus and Pluto and 20 asteroids are all conjunct at the same degree on that day, from a generic perspective, let’s say, that would not be the ideal situation for a long-term partnership that you want to last for many years.

LS: Right.

CB: Or whatever that looks like, from whatever perspective we’re talking about.

EK: Right, and it is. It’s the chicken-or-the-egg conversation. It’s the deep philosophy of being an astrologer. Which if you’re drawn to astrology, you’re a deep philosopher. This is the nature of people drawn to this, especially as a profession. But yeah, it is. Well, if we had chosen that date, could we have worked through the challenges of those?

CB: Right.

EK: Or would it have completely destroyed us? And you’ll never know.

LS: Right. And were you supposed to get married at that certain time versus another, if you just went and did it? Was that part of the plan for it to be a difficult relationship, and you get something from that or whatever?

TG: Sure.

LS: But yeah, that’s a whole meta issue.

CB: I mean, sometimes that’s an issue in and of itself. When the relationship starts at the beginning, you see the charts and you see some of the difficulties, and you have to make the decision, should I do this? And am I willing to sign up for what that entails?

EK: Or should I even date this person?

LS: Yeah, exactly, from the synastry or composite or whatever, yeah.

EK: Absolutely.

CB: Which can go either way in terms of, no, that’s not a valid thing to do, that you should be open to whatever the relationship is and not let the astrology preclude some experiences versus the other side of the spectrum. Sometimes the astrology just says exactly what it is, and you knew ahead of time and walked into a disaster. And yeah, I’ve been on both sides of that, of walking into a relationship, knowing pretty well the astrology. Cuz sometimes one of the issues astrologers run into is seeing the astrology but wanting it to be other than it is.

LS: Right.

CB: So maybe seeing that the astrology is not really good, but in their heart at the time, really wishing that this could work out, and trying to make it work even if it’s not. Sometimes that can be something that astrologers run into, trying to ignore the astrology, but still somehow having it work out that way.

LS: Right. And similarly, I mean, seeing either through your disparate birth charts or seeing any timing coming up in either of your charts, thinking maybe this won’t last for very long. And so, is that a reason to not do it? Or is it just ‘go ahead’ knowing that? That’s like a kind of corollary issue, like just seeing any of those things upfront, in the beginning of a relationship.

CB: Right.

LS: Yeah.

EK: Well, and that kind of, I think, brings another point of why it would be advantageous to not be with an astrologer. When you’re looking at the other’s chart, I think at the end of the day, to me, the greatest power of astrology is learning our chart and learning to embody it, and embody ourselves and our own knowing. And when the other person is injecting ideas about who you are from their interpretation, you’re getting to know your chart more. And so, for example, say your partner, who doesn’t know about astrology, is having a Mars transit, and they’re very aggravated right now. I have an example of a gal, she kind of understands Uranus. Her husband—he’s ended his Uranus opposition. But she knew that it was a passing thing for him, and she could really embody what she was needing to learn from it on her own terms, from her own chart. Yes, he’s going through these things, but she can’t dialogue that with him. “So I’m just going to instead see why is he my partner? What is it that I’m needing to learn right now from him being in my life and my energy field?” And kind of take it into your own experience of, how can I be a better partner? How can I be a better human, just only having this information and my own guidance getting through life? This is my way to understand myself better, not to understand you better, necessarily. Or us better. This is about me becoming the best me I can be or something. I don’t know if that made any sense.

TG: Yeah, well, I think that’s the advantage, again, of having two astrologers.

EK: It’s the advantage, yeah.

TG: And if you’re an astrologer and the other person isn’t, let’s say, we’re looking at advantages of that at the moment, right? I think it takes a lot of responsibility for the astrologer, let’s say, if they met somebody, they looked at the chart, and it was like, “Wow, we’re really compatible. This is incredible.” If you start basing assumptions that they’re gonna suddenly come running to your door, they don’t know who you are. They haven’t even worked that out yet.

LS: Right.

TG: I think it might make the astrologer—in terms of the advantage of learning this—maybe more tolerant to that, or give them an advantage in the sense of I do the dance of love and relationship, but maybe I can be more empathetic, basically, to the other, in terms of our looking at the signs of whether it’s gonna work or not. I think that’s definitely an advantage. If you saw something that wasn’t compatible and then you start just testing the relationship—like you would do in any relationship, getting to know somebody—straight away it becomes obvious whether that’s compatible or not. Then maybe you can be less, or more discerning, should I say, before getting into something. I don’t know if that’s an advantage or not, or it’s just a responsibility of being an astrologer. But certainly I think if you walked into something knowing that this is gonna be difficult, cuz you’re an astrologer, you can be more discerning, can’t you, from the start. Is that what you mean?

CB: I mean, I think you can try. But, I mean, I tried that once. It was like an experiment where I was like, “This looks like a disaster.” This was like the last experiment I had in my freewill/modern astrologer phase of life. But I’m like, “No, I want to overcome this, and I will not be dominated by my stars.” And it was just like the worst possible relationship. It exceeded even my worst expectations in terms of how badly it could have gone. And it turned into a stalker situation, and I was getting harassed for years after the relationship was over. And it was all there in the chart ahead of time, but I really wanted to try it as an experiment of maybe I can overcome the negative indications, which were both in the synastry and the natal charts and the transits and everything else. But it was one of those situations where it was negotiable. Like sometimes there’s negotiable things where, yeah, truly, you can go into it, and you can negotiate things, and through hard work and dedication and perseverance it becomes a surmountable difficulty. But there are some things in life that it’s not a matter of being able to change that. It’s just something either you can accept and deal with, or something which is just a deal-breaker. And sometimes that’s the trickiest thing. You can’t always know for sure. With the astrological indications you can get pretty strong ideas, but you may not always know ahead of time what’s gonna be negotiable and what’s not.

TG: Yeah. I think—sorry.

LS: I was just gonna say because the chart is still not the person. So even though the symbols might be really strongly saying something or some kind of flavor of something, you still don’t know in the end, before you go through knowing that person, exactly how it will be.

TG: Absolutely. And then that’s where the common sense, just obvious feeling experience that isn’t necessarily related to the heady, more intellectual side, the actual obvious feeling of attraction or repulsion.

LS: Right, right.

EK: Yeah.

LS: It gives you clues, but it doesn’t give you the whole picture. And conversely, if you see a chart that looks really compatible with yours, it doesn’t mean you’re gonna be in a relationship.

TG: Exactly.

LS: So I’ve had the reverse. I had some weird circumstance very early on in my astrological realm, where someone realized they had the same placements by degree as like a bunch of my placements, and they were like, “Oh.” And I’m like, “No. Like there’s nothing going on here.” And it doesn’t mean that something will be going on just because you have that synastry.

TG: But I have to say it’s a fascinating point. Because I think that really is the test of someone who is in the moment using astrology as a gift, a tool, as something that is of advantage or a benefit for humanity rather than someone who is controlled and then lives their life. Because you can get duped in that sense.

LS: Right.

TG: You look at something that looks perfect, but then there’s loads of other factors that you forget about, like maybe that person is totally incompatible with you in an obvious sense, whether religiously, economically, age difference. But because you’ve looked at their chart, you think, “Wow, that is just so compatible for me because someone’s taught me that our Moons are in the same this,” or any of that kind of thing, that is a real test, I think, for an astrologer to be able to discern accordingly in that regard. Cuz otherwise they’re not living astrology. They are consumed by astrology, or it’s controlling them.

LS: Yeah.

TG: If that makes any sense.

LS: For sure, yeah. I mean, there’s a famous saying, ‘the map is not the territory’. And I think that speaks to this. And I did not make up that phrase. But yeah, I mean, astrology really speaks to that.

TG: It’s like you get involved in a relationship where you think it looks perfect and suddenly you’re in a sadomasochistic relationship.

CB: Yeah. And one of the issues that can come up also is you can have perfect synastry, but the transits could be off. And sometimes you run into the situation where this would be a great relationship 10 years from now, but one of you or both of you are not in the right place, at the right time. Or this would have been a great relationship 10 years earlier, but something about your transits at the time and where one or both of you are at the time just makes it so that it’s not right at that moment.

LS: Right.

TG: So how would you discern that, then?

CB: I mean, one of the things could be one of them is having heavy Uranus-Venus transits at the time. And so, their predisposition at the time might be for more short-term relationships, or they’re seeking more excitement rather than settling down into a long-term relationship. Or maybe it’s a Uranus transit that’s going through their 4th house so that they’re moving around a lot, and they’re not in a stable situation. Or it’s going through their 10th house, and they’re deciding to move abroad to pursue their career or something like that and not stay in their hometown for a long-term relationship. I mean, there’s a lot of scenarios like that where you could have great synastry, but it just could not be the right time. There’s other scenarios like zodiacal releasing stuff. Like the person’s major peak period for relationships may be 10 years later, and it’s not that moment for their most important relationship for whatever reason.

LS: Right.

CB: Yeah. Or it may just turn into a great friendship. That happens with synastry as well. You two date, but it doesn’t end up becoming a major, long-term romantic relationship, but instead, it turns into a platonic friendship or something like that.

LS: Yeah, cuz usually you have good synastry with people you’re friends with, too.

EK: Absolutely.

TG: And I think everything you just said there really highlights the difference between someone recognizing astrology for its benefits, in terms of that more methodical study of it. For example, we’ve all been there when we were starting off. My Sun isn’t compatible with your Sun.

CB: Right.

TG: And obviously anyone who studies astrology knows that there is just obviously so much more than Sun-sign astrology. But what you just said there, it’s like it makes it even deeper because somebody could look at a chart that is perfect, but then there’s all those other things to consider as well.

CB: Yeah, that there’s ultimately so many factors going on at any time, that there’s a lot that’s outside of your hands and sometimes that makes some things unknowable. And as a result of that, that ‘unknowableness’ should humble you rather than being arrogant about it and saying you know the future, or you know exactly how things are gonna work out in a strict sense. But you have to have some openness to things going different ways.

LS: Definitely.

EK: And I love that you brought up—when I saw Tareck’s chart, I didn’t see anything about our cultural differences or our religious background differences. I couldn’t have possibly predicted that. Cuz I looked at these points in the chart, I was like, “Oh, this is gonna be so cool.” I got excited. And I didn’t go too into it, but I got excited. And then, of course, the rubber hits the road, and actually there are these nuances that just cannot be found in an astrology chart. And there are challenges that, again, can’t be defined. You can’t know someone’s, necessarily, religious background looking at their chart, or their cultural background, or what country they’re from, or their ethnic background, and all of these different things. And those things are profoundly affected.

TG: And not just that. And I’m not sure if you can tell from an astrology chart—unless you can educate me here, guys—when you actually get together—

EK: Physically.

TG: —whether that’s gonna go bang or not, if you see what I mean.

CB: Yeah. Well, there’s a little bit of that that you can see, cuz there’s different types of relationships that are gonna have different strengths. So it’s like, do you have a lot of strong Venus and Mars aspects in your synastry? And so, is the physical element gonna be there, or is that gonna be your primary connection? Or do you have strong Mercury connections for communication and the way that you guys think or something like that? Or do you have strong Sun and Moon connections for just the emotional or underlying essence of your selves and some sort of connection between that? So there can be different levels in terms of that. And I think, yeah, sometimes you can see, “Well, maybe we’ll get on more in this area of the relationship, but we’ll have more difficulties or we won’t connect as well in this area.” But certainly, you’re right that when you actually get together, and you see how it actually works out in person, that can be a different level than just the abstract, like what the astrology says.

LS: Definitely. Yeah, it’s much more fleshed out rather than just a single symbol.

CB: Yeah.

LS: Yeah.

TG: Literally.

CB: Right.

LS: Literally.

CB: All right, that is the phrase of the episode.

TG: Yeah, it’s real, isn’t it? Unless it’s on a screen. There’s just these very, you could call it crude or obvious aspects to the birds and the bees or just relationship, or whatever kind of relationship it is. If you’re working for somebody and they’re not paying you enough, there’s these deal-breakers that happen in relationships, which the chart can think there’s lots of compatibility. But in the actual third-dimensional physical reality of doing life together, there might be subconscious thought patterns from the past that have nothing to do with astrology, which create issues related to actually getting on with life. Which you can see in the astrology to a certain extent. But again, it’s the actual communication, I think, that really is the key to a relationship, being able to communicate and being able to just get on. It’s just obvious really, isn’t it, when you think about it. We have this tool that we’re talking about now, which makes us see things a bit differently.

CB: Sure. Yeah, all right, so we’re getting towards the end of this. I’m just trying to browse through our outline. We received a bunch of great questions and comments on Twitter. So thanks to everybody who sent those in. Sorry if we didn’t get to all of them. I’m just trying to see if there are any other things that we wanted to touch on before we wrap it up. Anything?

LS: Yeah. I don’t know. Did we cover all of the questions that we highlighted earlier?

CB: Yeah, I think we honestly did.

LS: Okay.

CB: So Alicia Yusuf, who does The Water Trio Podcast with Kelly, she commented that: “The plus of dating another astrologer is knowing each other’s charts and the understanding and forbearance that can come with that. The minus is the same, but with assumptions and judgments that come into play.” So I think we’ve covered that pretty well in terms of that being some of the core struggles to some extent.

EK: Right.

TG: Did you wanna say something?

EK: I did, but it looks like you want to.

TG: No, no, you go first.

EK: Oh, thank you. One of the things I just wanted to quickly mention here, you talked about stealing each other’s transits.

CB: Yeah, yeah.

EK: And I think that’s a kind of interesting concept. When one partner’s going through one transit, and it’s so deeply affecting your life and things of that nature. It’s a little bit different for us, cuz we’re going through the exact same transits literally all the time. Personally, I wanna hear a bit more of what that looks like for you two.

CB: Okay. I can explain that one. I mean, this was your observation, but I’ll explain it generally. Well, Leisa was having a Jupiter transit once that was connected with her 7th house, and it was going exact, and she was waiting for some really amazing stuff to happen in her life. And then I just had this amazing month where I published a paper on how the four elements came to be assigned to the signs of the zodiac, and I gave the commencement speech at Kepler College, and I ended up on Fox News for some reason predicting that Hillary would run in 2016. And what’s weird is, thinking about that now—I never made this connection—I think I also launched the podcast within a month of that transit.

LS: That’s true.

CB: So I just was knocking it out of the park. And we realized what was happening, or Leisa realized much to her dismay that her 7th house Jupiter transit was manifesting in my life and amazing stuff happening to me. But then she was like, “But what about me?”

LS: You’re stealing my Jupiter transit. That was the catchphrase.

CB: She fondly referred to that as me ‘stealing her Jupiter transit.’

LS: Yeah. Anyway, that was kind of before I switched from purely modern, Western astrology. Because that would be like, “It’s my Jupiter transit” versus more traditional would be like, “Yeah, but it’s connected to your 7th house.”

CB: Yeah, that sometimes the other houses are literally the other people in your life and sometimes it doesn’t have anything to do with you. It’s just a transit can be showing something that’s happening in the life of somebody close to you.

LS: Right.

EK: Which brings up a really good point from the whole sign perspective or the Hellenistic perspective. So I’m with a super-Sag man. I have Sagittarius in my 7th, with Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune. And every man I have been with has been super-Sag. Maybe not by sign, but they all share the same characteristics, right? They’re all just the same kind of energy. I like foreigners and people who travel and love to see the world and things of that nature. And so, that’s a really good thing that you crossed over there. If you are not dating an astrologer, the person in your life is still going to mirror your chart. And you’ll know a lot about them from your own chart. Even if you never see your partner’s chart, you’ll probably have a good understanding of what they’ll be like based on your chart, from a Hellenistic perspective.

LS: Right.

CB: Yeah.

EK: Which I think is really interesting.

CB: And that’s one of the coolest things, I think, about dating another astrologer is being able to make some of those observations, and then immediately tell the person and share that. Cuz then you’re actually learning together, and you’re accelerating your learning in some way.

LS: Definitely.

TG: Well, that’s definitely happened with us. I just wanted to say an advantage to dating a non-astrologer is that certainly there’s no competitive aspect—

EK: Oh, that’s huge.

TG: —in relation to that career or just astrology or potential or anything like that, and as long as that person has a respect for what you’re doing. Cuz I think it becomes detrimental when that person is trying to control what you’re doing or sees it as negative. Then obviously then it’s gonna be a really difficult situation. Cuz obviously the practicing astrologer is gonna be compromised, or they’re gonna feel undervalued for what they’re doing. So that’s just straight away not gonna work, I would have thought. Unlikely, anyway. Unless it’s a test of integrity to keep going, to educate the other, so they can see it. Either way, it’s a challenging situation. But if somebody has respect for what you’re doing, and yet, they give you the space, likewise, they have their interests, and you give them the space—it could work really well then.

LS: Yeah, definitely.

EK: That’s a good point.

CB: Sure.

EK: The competition. The battling of the minds of the astrologers.

LS: Sure.

EK: That’s a huge point. That’s great.

CB: Yeah.

TG: In some ways, it’s easier, than it being two astrologers.

EK: Yeah.

CB: Sure. Yeah, cuz if you’re both in the same career field, then there’s some competition just naturally.

LS: Right.

CB: I’m reading through other questions. So Max Higley on Twitter (@MaxHigley) says: “I think a good point to touch on is how astrology can negatively impact relationships. In 2017, I dated this girl, and I constantly checked her birth chart, transits, progressions, lunar returns to a point where it became obsessive and almost invasive.” And that brings up a broader point I noticed. Cuz I noticed this hanging around older astrologers, when I got to know Rob Hand or Demetra George. I noticed a difference. Usually there’s a phase that newer astrologers go through in the first few years of their study, where they’re just studying astrology intensely, and they know everything about their own chart and everything that’s going on, and they’re checking it regularly. They know all their friends and family members’ charts. If they have a partner, they know what’s going on in their chart. And they’re just like tracking all of that obsessively, which is fine. And that’s a stage everyone goes through, and it’s a perfectly healthy, to some extent, stage to go through as a natural part of the process of learning astrology. But there is a point where at some point, I think that levels out a little bit, and sometimes you don’t always need to know constantly what’s going on, or be tracking it constantly or focusing obsessively on that. I know some of the older astrologers that I know, while they have a general idea of some of the stuff that’s going on, they don’t obsess about their own chart or the charts of people around them necessarily in the same way as a newer astrologer would. And obviously that’s gonna vary depending on the astrologer and from person-to-person. I’m sure there’s different levels of intensity. But I just know that there’s different phases in an astrologer’s career and that’s gonna be different being in a relationship with an astrologer, depending on where they’re at in terms of their phases of that.

TG: True.

LS: Yeah, I would agree with that. I mean, and then I know at certain points we had that discussion where you felt more like that was true, that most astrologers, after a while, I didn’t focus on it as much. And I was like, “I don’t think that’s true for everyone, though. That’s like one way you can go with it.” Because I was still looking at a lot of things more in detail. But I think the difference, though, I think it’s still true in general. And I think the difference is whether you switch to focusing on it as a learning tool, and as more of just a general part of your life with astrology versus obsessing in a more ego-driven fashion, or in a neurotic or worrying fashion.

CB: Right.

EK: Well, one of the things that you learn becoming a psychotherapist is don’t analyze the people in your life. Just don’t do it.

LS: Yeah, there’s that, too.

EK: Don’t do it.

LS: Right.

EK: I feel somewhat fortunate that I’ve never really dug into my family’s charts.

CB: Really?

EK: Nor his.

CB: Yeah, that’s gonna put you on as an outlier, though.

EK: Yeah, I am.

LS: Yeah, definitely.

EK: Well, and I was seeing clients.

CB: And that’s fine. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that. I’m just saying that’s not typical as part of astrology.

EK: Yeah. And one of the very first readings I gave was to a friend. I’ve slipped past that many times. Like for me, do not read your friends’ charts, period. That is a no-go, not-happening-for-me because the imbalance becomes so great between myself and the friend. Because I see all this stuff, and they don’t see it about me.

LS: Sure.

EK: And so, I’ve lost friends because of this. And so, for my family members, I think I inherently, because of my training, knew, don’t do it. And every once in a while, I will look, rarely. Oh, yeah, I realize seven years into it, oh, yeah, my Uranus is on my brother’s Moon. Everything I do makes him mad. Like I can’t say anything right to him, and I kind of recognize that about him. Like I kind of know my dad’s. I know my dad’s going through a nodal return right now, and so am I, but I don’t wanna look. I don’t wanna see where, what degree, how. I don’t wanna know. I just don’t. I want to be with my family as is. And also, again, between us, I’m less involved in our charts than he is. Cuz I want to just be with him. And because, again, I come from the psychotherapy background, I’m a lot more interested in his neurology and his patterns, and watching him with his family and his friends and seeing how he interacts, and “Oh, yeah, and that’s affecting our relationship and that.” So I think I just have such a unique training that has taught me don’t get people in your life involved in this stuff because it becomes not great sometimes.

CB: I mean, the curiosity, though, has never driven you to look at your parents’ charts?

EK: I’ve looked. I’ve peeked at them. I know their Sun/Moon/rising. I know very little.

TG: I think, to be honest, though, when you look at a chart, and then it’s a case, you start to form an opinion because it’s hard not to. So sometimes actions can be taken. Well, this is pretty obvious because if you’ve looked at someone’s chart—family included—it might come to the point where, “Well, I’m gonna be a little bit more tolerant now at this particular time,” or “I’m gonna maybe make a move just in case anything happens.” All those kinds of aspects of responsibility in astrology, you can’t really ignore.

CB: Yeah. Like with parents and family members, for example, that’s one of the weird inversions, though. And I think that’s why new students oftentimes—those are some of the first charts that they’ll look at because you already have an opinion. Like you’ve been living with these people for your entire life, like your, let’s say, mother and father and siblings, or aunts and uncles or whatever. You know them and you have already pretty formed opinions about who they are. Let’s say you’re 15- or 20- or 30-years-old at that point, and then you learn astrology. And then all of a sudden you could look at their chart and that gives you a slightly different perspective on that person. But it’s one of the unique instances where you’ve already formed opinions and then you get to look at it through the lens of astrology to see what that looks like versus with new relationships, it’s the opposite. And that’s where it becomes more problematic because there is more of a danger of forming an opinion about the person based on the chart before you get to know them.

EK: Sure.

CB: Yeah.

EK: Yeah. I mean, I know enough basics. I don’t know my dad’s rising sign because we don’t know it. Actually I did a family tree of Sun/Moon/rising for all the way back to great-grandparents, cuz we have times on a lot of people, and it was the same three basically repeat-repeats for my entire family lineage, but it stopped there for me.

CB: That’s really cool, though. Like doing that kind of research or seeing that must have informed something about your practice, just that that’s possible.

EK: But that’s actually a part of my data points I keep with family charts. And it’s just remarkable what repeats. It’s like DNA patterns and cosmic patterns are not different. They just aren’t.

LS: Yeah.

EK: And I don’t know how, who, or why, but we figured that out. Only in 1970, we figured out blood patterns are repeated. One day, somebody will be like, “Yeah, it repeats in the sky.” But regardless, I think for me because, again, of the psychoanalytical aspect of my training, I don’t wanna psychoanalyze my family, my friends. It’s kind of like a boundary thing for me more than a learning tool. Like my mom’s an Aquarius rising, Uranus conjunct her Sun, and Gemini in the 5th. I don’t need to look at anything more than that, cuz that basically says everything I need to know. I wanna leave it there with her. That’s enough for me to metabolize, right? So it’s a boundary thing. And I wanna be with them, present to them and the dynamics that we do have together, which are good and bad. I don’t know.

LS: Yeah. I mean, I think some of it is a boundary thing, and that can be applicable through any of these situations. I think probably it also lends itself to what type of astrology each astrologer is practicing. Because if you’re not really focusing on the psychological aspects as much, then I think it maybe feels less intrusive, personally.

EK: Absolutely.

LS: Potentially. I mean, you could still see things. You can see lots of things.

EK: Right.

CB: I don’t know why this brings it up, but it made me think of one of the ethical things. This is like a whole other tangent. But one of the ethical things that I think ISAR and NCGR adopted when they were developing their ethical codes like 20 or 30 years ago, in the late ‘90s—20 years ago—is they did incorporate some things from the psychological and psychoanalytic models that were standard. Like ethical things in terms of boundaries and what are appropriate versus what are not appropriate boundaries. And one of those is quite obvious—but sometimes people don’t think about it until it’s articulated—but don’t date clients. Or if you’ve seen somebody as a client—if you’re a professional astrologer and you’ve seen somebody as a client, there’s a window. I mean, one of them actually tries to specify it.

LS: Isn’t it like six months or something?

CB: Yeah, they try to say six months. If you’ve seen somebody as a client in the last six months, then you should not be dating them. And that’s partially obviously to protect clients and ensure that there’s no impropriety on the part of the astrologer, which makes sense. But I’ve seen instances where this raises and brings up kind of a tricky issue. Cuz ideally it’s designed for the situation where you have a professional astrologer and a non-astrologer client, which is the most delicate situation, cuz then there’s a huge power imbalance. But there can sometimes be instances where you have a professional astrologer and then you have other professional astrologers that sometimes go around just to do consultations to see how other astrologers practice.

LS: Right.

CB: And there, there’s less of a power differential and there’s more parity. And so, there becomes a question there of if those two professional astrologers end up dating at one point, was there some sort of ethical breach, just by virtue of the fact that at one point, one of them read the other’s chart and just issues like that.

EK: Yeah. So in psychotherapy, it’s gonna be a much more severe thing, cuz of the legalities and things of that nature. But one of the first things that we learn is if you do find yourself attracted to a client, tell them immediately and end it there. “I gotta say I’m attracted to you, and I don’t want to engage in a client-therapist relationship,” and then you can wait. I think it’s much longer to date. It might be a couple of years actually or something ridiculous like that. But because we talk about this in psychotherapy all the time, there’s gonna be some people who walk in your office that, if you’re single, you’re gonna find attractive, and they’re gonna be telling you their intimate details. So before you even start, you say, “I’m not your astrologer. I’m not your therapist. We can go forward as colleagues.” Or in the case of two astrologers, I mean, we were two astrologers who met, right? And even coming from the psychotherapeutic background that I came from, I had to think ethically about it. “Well, he’s in the community. I am an astrologer of the community. But he’s also an astrologer.” So I had to actually think about some of that on my end when we were starting to get to know each other. And I said to him immediately, “You’re my colleague. I will never be your astrologer. You need to know that right now.” And I didn’t tell him, “Cuz I think you’re super fly,” but at the time, when we were getting to know each other, I was very clear about that. “I’m not your teacher. I’m not your astrologer. You’re my colleague, and we will converse as such.”

LS: Yeah.

EK: And it’s a huge piece of the conversation. For me, that’s kind of what I’m trying to bring more into astrology. And we’ve talked about this before. I just know so many astrologers who have crossed boundaries on many, many different levels. And we talked about that with Adam the last time we were together.

CB: I mean, one of the things, though, I was quick to emphasize then, and I wanna bring up again now is I know that there are sometimes astrologers who’ve crossed boundaries. But for the most part, I feel like the vast, vast majority and their actions between clients and astrologers are pretty above board.

EK: Yeah. No, I totally agree. Again, cuz of my training, it affects me a bit differently because I came from such rigorous ethics. Like I hear these stories and unfortunately it gets magnified in my mind about things I’ve heard. But I agree. There’s plenty of this not happening. And as long as we’re having these conversations, that’s most important. Just to get people to think about, “Okay, well, when do you wanna bring your family’s chart?” Like I’ve made major mistakes. I hate to say it, but I’ve peeked at some of the charts of people in his life, and I shouldn’t have.

CB: Why? You think that was wrong?

EK: Well, now they have opinions on me, and it’s affected our relationship.

TG: I think it’s more, when we look at the situation, of trying to help and be of service as compared to being a client, where someone’s actually asked you to read their chart.

EK: And paid you.

TG: Paid you to read their chart. And then when you are offering opinions because you think you’re doing the right thing, or someone is going, “Oh, yeah, I’d like my chart read,” and you just do it, not in a consultation way.

CB: Right

LS: Right. Just casually.

TG: Yeah. Then it can become problematic because that person doesn’t necessarily value that exchange and that service. And then suddenly if one’s offered an opinion, and then it’s taken against them. They might have been offering value in the sense of, “This is your core issue right now. I’m sharing that with you.” But then suddenly, because it’s come along not in a professional way or a consultation and all that, it could be used against you.

EK: Yeah.

TG: I don’t think it’s as critical as we’re portraying it here, but you’ve gotta be careful when it comes to family and stuff like that when you’re offering opinions that are professional.

CB: Yeah. Or certainly, unsolicited opinions. That’s a big one that astrologers need to be careful about that—especially if you’re newer—can be not just a temptation. But I’ll see newer astrologers offering unsolicited opinions or unsolicited delineations. It’s funny, in a social context, like at a conference, walking up to somebody. And it’s like a funny thing with the podcast. I don’t even wanna mention this, cuz I don’t wanna open it up to having it happen 20 times, just for people to mess with me at NORWAC or something, but just because they know your chart, they can walk up and start talking to you about it, or making statements about your life based on it. I had somebody send me an email like that a few months ago, and I actually wrote a very impressive response, but it was a very curt response, just being like: “That was a very good delineation, however, I did not ask you for it. And in the future, when you’re interacting with other professional astrologers, they may react more strongly if you give an unsolicited delineation that they didn’t ask for. Regardless of how accurate or correct it is, it’s just something you don’t do.” And obviously that’s almost a whole other separate topic, but it almost kind of gets tied in here. Cuz it could come up between astrologers almost psychoanalyzing each other in a relationship, or an astrologer saying things to a non-astrologer in a relationship. And sometimes that’s not really appropriate, even if your intentions are good.

LS: Right.

TG: Absolutely.

EK: Well, and it’s true. When it’s family members or friends or people close to each other, it forms an opinion then of us about them, right, and how they’ll support the relationship. “Well, I remember when Eugenia said this one thing,” and they hang on to it. And the thing that’s so powerful about when we can give astrological information, it is grounded in something we can see. We’re not just intuiting this. We just aren’t. Some of it, sure. But it’s pretty clear, cuz we’ve seen it repeat so many times. So they don’t understand how you saw it, where it came from, but it lands in people deeper than a tarot reading. It just does from my experience. And so, when it lands in these people who are in a relationship with you that is friendship, family, or something in that closer circle, I’ve found it has had mostly negative impacts on me with other relationships that are intimate in my life. And at this point, like no. If I want to have lunch with you in the future, I’m not gonna read your chart, period. I will give you some maybe general, very general, loose interpretations, but I’m not going there. Because I’ve had such a negative, “But you told me this.” God, I can’t. I wanna have dinner with you. I wanna, “How’s your daughter?” I don’t wanna go there. Please, no, for me.

TG: Yeah, in terms of responsibility, in terms of suddenly the astrologer’s at the party or at the house, and she’s kind of entertaining or interesting, generally, everybody wants to get their chart read. And then obviously then it becomes a certain caution or a certain degree of responsibility connected to how you share that information with people close in the family.

LS: Yeah. I mean, I think what you seem to be getting at is you’re in a sort of an authority role when you’re speaking as an astrologer. And you’re trying to assert that you know something that you wouldn’t know otherwise, or you know it from at least a different angle than you wouldn’t know otherwise. And so, it’s like do you relate on the same level as just people connecting? And that can be with regard to dating situations, or it can be with regard to these other family or friends situations. Do you stay in that role of authority figure when you’re not on the clock? And that’s obviously an issue that comes up, I think, probably more earlier on because you’re constantly learning and you’re really excited about it. And so, you wanna talk about it all the time versus later, and especially if people make it their profession versus their hobby, which is, I think, a big distinction. Then there is a division between, “I’m on the clock and acting as an authority figure that you asked me to be,” versus “I’m offering unsolicited opinions about your life (or your personality or what have you).”

CB: Right.

LS: Yeah.

EK: Just really quickly, before I met Tareck, I was interested in this fellow. And he didn’t know anything about astrology, and I asked him for his birth time. And I think that’s actually what had him—

LS: Like pull back?

EK: And I pulled it up, and I looked at it. And I think I could feel even in him, “This is weird.”

CB: You asked somebody else?

EK: The guy I wanted to date.

CB: Okay.

EK: I was like, “Oh.” And he was like, “No. No, I don’t want you to look at me.” He was obliging me. He was like, “You’re an astrologer.” But then he could see pretty quickly from my reaction that I understood who he was, and there was no way that there was gonna be a relationship at that point, cuz right away it was imbalanced, right? We couldn’t come to this from equal playing fields. It was gonna take him longer to get to know me than for me to get to know him from that instance. And that’s kind of circling back to this whole conversation to date or to not date an astrologer. Regardless, the organic, getting to know a human, I think, is the most important piece with our partners, with our friends, even with our clients to an extent, right? “Okay, so I see all this stuff in your chart. How are you feeling today? What’s going on? How are you feeling today?” And that’s this thing we’re trying to learn in astrology.

TG: I liked what you mentioned about humility. I felt that was really a sage perspective really. We think we know a lot about somebody else and the chances are, having studied it for a long time, that there is a certain degree of precision. That’s what makes astrology different, maybe from other esoteric arts. But yeah, we don’t really know, and that’s where the humility comes in.

CB: Yeah. I mean, astrology—it’s not a crystal ball where you look into it and you see a movie of exactly what’s gonna happen in the future. It’s like you’re working with symbolism, and there’s a certain amount of, what is it?

LS: Interpretation?

CB: Interpretation. But also, not pliability, but things are a little bit flexible in terms of the interpretation of those placements. While sometimes you can feel pretty strongly and get a pretty good hit about what it’s gonna indicate—especially if there’s multiple factors all saying the same thing—there’s still a level where it’s not until it happens that you see it for sure play out. And up until that point, you’ve not exactly seen the future as if it’s a movie. You’ve seen this abstract thing, and you’re making an inference about what’s gonna happen. And as a result of that lack of omniscience you have to adopt some level of humility. Cuz if you don’t, if you go in the other direction—which there’s some small amount of astrologers that do—you’re really just kind of pretending, and you’re going too far about pretending as if you have these magical powers that you don’t necessarily possess. You can do a lot with astrology, and you can see way more than you should be able to see, and it can do things that are incredibly impressive. If it could only do 10% of what it can actually do, then it would still be amazing. But it actually goes way, way beyond that. But nonetheless, there’s still limitations to it and being cognizant of that. If you apply that to every area as an astrologer—relationships is just one of the areas where adopting some level of humility is useful.

EK: Well, and just a side note about the predictive piece, especially if you’re a parent.

CB: Oh, right.

EK: I’ve watched so many mothers just go way too dark, way too deep because they see the transits coming in their children’s charts. We don’t have children here. That’s a good conversation to have with astrologers who have children and what that’s about. But again, he has faith. Even if it is a hard transit coming, there’s a reason for it. There’s a growth point from it. There’s the humility that you don’t know what’s gonna happen to your child. You just don’t. And worrying about it is—

TG: I think the ambiguity, unknown, and humility—all these things makes it not the gospel and makes us not godlike. There’s an aspect of God within all of us, we could say. There’s an aspect of divinity in astrology. But at the end of the day we’re human, and that means we’re prone to mistakes. We all have different opinions, different conditions to make us see certain things differently. Some people are more learned. But then you go to a Socratian kind of aspect, we don’t know anything. So with all that in mind, why does the playfulness suddenly become too serious regarding looking at somebody? And why does that suddenly, rather than just the innocence of getting to know somebody, become so complicated in this sort of intellectual postulation? And all of that discredits the beauty of this gift that we’ve been given really. If we could approach it with a certain degree of unknown/humility/ambiguity, then it could become potentially a much more integrated thing rather than something that’s feared.

CB: Sure.

LS: Right. I think you said that really beautifully, thank you. But I think it’s because astrology is about knowing things, and people get into it because they wanna know things, that it becomes sort of a more deliberate thing that you have to remember that there’s still a piece of unknowing and that there still are. It doesn’t mean we know everything.

EK: And as much as he does use astrology and looks at it, he’s the one who’s been like, “Bring it here. Bring it here.” He has completely revolutionized my practice as an astrologer. And just my life as an astrologer is ‘bring it to your heart’. What is your heart feeling? I’m like, “Oh, right. I have one of those.”

TG: For me, I can’t believe that I’m here right now really. I mean, am I actually on a trip right now? Totally. But seriously, I think if people have a degree of, again, humility is the right word, if we look at Jupiter in Sagittarius right now. And also, if we look at the idea of sometimes we become our innocence to express without, say, a million books that we’ve read. Just an authentic perspective on things is valuable. But ultimately, if we become too controlled by something, anything—whether it’s astrology or anything—we’re really missing the innocence in the unknown of how it came to us in the first place. I mean, we didn’t know any of this until we studied it. We practiced it. We’ve become more experiential with it. So that’s great, cuz it’s a value service. That’s what astrology’s all about. But when we miss the innocence and the unknown, then we really make it far more serious and far more complicated than it needs to be, right?

CB: Yeah. I mean, I’m there with you intellectually, in theory, but in practice we’re pretty much looking at charts all the time.

TG: There’s a science to it.

CB: Yeah. I mean, it needs to be balanced. And I don’t know if this is relevant, but the way that Ptolemy in the 2nd century—I’m gonna invoke Ptolemy. The way that he defines benefic and malefic is actually really interesting. Cuz those sounds like such black and white and weird concepts in modern times, but the way that he actually defines that is really fascinating from a philosophical perspective. He says the malefics are often experienced as problematic because they tend to swing towards extremes, whereas the benefics are experienced as more subjectively positive because they tend towards moderation. And so, if you think of benefic and malefic in terms of going too far in one extreme or another versus adopting moderation, I mean, what we keep coming back to here is just, in all things, attempting to adopt moderation, especially when it comes to integrating astrology into relationships. And if you do that without going too far to one extreme or another, you’ll probably be able to find a balance that’s appropriate and acceptable and sustainable.

TG: Especially for the non-astrologer in the relationship.

EK: Yeah.

CB: Right.

TG: And then we don’t seem to be high and mighty. We can actually be more playful and fun. And then it becomes something that the majority of people, who are maybe not practicing astrology might have a certain degree of—what’s the word? Attraction to them.

CB: Sure.

TG: And then we’re bringing it back to a more, I guess, commercial point of view, if that’s the right way to say it.

CB: Right.

TG: Because if a non-astrologer is with an astrologer, an astrologer has all this understanding of, let’s say, predeterminism and they can work everything out from a scientific point of view, there’s not much play then, is there, in the unknown between two people. And sometimes that innocence, that unknown makes another dimension.

CB: Right.

LS: Just the experience itself of being together, I think we’ve been talking around both of those things most of this episode.

CB: Yeah.

LS: Yeah.

CB: So that being paramount. That being the most important thing.

EK: And just one—I know we’re wrapping up here. But will you describe the ankh, the Egyptian ankh? We see the ankh a lot, the symbolism a lot. But the way Tareck interprets it as an Egyptian, I think it’s a very powerful image that you relay when you’re describing it. It’s not the cross. It’s not this hard, linear thing. It’s this cross with the loop, the circular piece.

TG: Well, there’s many different interpretations.

EK: But I like yours.

TG: In terms of my playfulness, and also how it’s affected us in terms of grounding, it’s just that sort of idea of energy flow going through the heart and then to the third eye or to the brain and then coming back down and then grounding. Is that what you mean?

EK: Yeah, exactly. Like you have to do both. It’s the earth and the stars, right?

TG: If you look at it from this point of view up here, of the mind, third eye, whatever, consciousness, astrology—it’s heady. And if you look at the ground, which is just now so much in the mind, it’s just cultivation, eating and stuff—it’s that movement, that play when it goes into the heart space, which is quite relevant to relationships, I guess. If we’re communicating that sort of figure eight or ankhs of play and flow, then that’s how we’re using it as far as I’m concerned.

EK: Yeah.

TG: But people have taught those things and there’s far greater authority than that.

CB: No. Eugenia, I like this guy. If you could just stick around to just tell me about stuff like that all night, I would appreciate it, yeah.

EK: He’s a great counter-vortex in the vortex of astrology. And he knows so much about it, yet somehow he’s able to recognize, “Bring it here. Bring it here. Bring it here.”

CB: I mean, that’s way better than Leisa has to put up with me invoking Ptolemy statements every five sentences. All right, guys, I think we are at the end of this episode. We did it, and this was great. Thank you so much for joining me.

LS: Yeah, thanks for coming.

TG: The bravery of us all.

CB: Yeah, we did it. This was an experiment. This is the first, four-person episode of The Astrology Podcast. Definitely not the last. Eugenia, we can find out more information about you and your podcast at accessibleastrology.com.

EK: Yeah. And just Accessible Astrology Podcast. And on Instagram ‘Accessible Astrology’. I love Instagram. It’s my new thing.

CB: Yeah, you’re really good at it, too. I love your posts.

EK: This is my new favorite thing.

CB: Right. And Tareck, where can people find out more information about you?

TG: I’m a bit underground at the moment, so you have to dig deep to find me.

CB: Okay.

TG: I mean, I do have an email if you want to speak to me, I suppose. TareckG, which is T-A-R-E-C-K-G@gmail.com. But ultimately I’m enjoying not being in any kind of limelight at the moment, to be honest with you.

CB: Okay.

TG: I’m happy to talk to people. And if it’s being of service, then that’s the reason why I’m here right now. But yeah, I mean, I do intend to probably get myself out there. And doing the talk last week was a good idea, wasn’t it?

CB: Yeah, it was a good talk. You should do more of them. And you’ve made appearances on The Accessible Astrology Podcast, right?

EK: Yeah.

TG: Yeah, yeah. And she’s been well-received, and it’s been good, hasn’t it? We’ve enjoyed it.

EK: Yeah.

TG: But yeah, no, I do intend to be doing more in the very near future.

CB: Good.

TG: Shall I let you know?

CB: Awesome. Yeah, please let us know. Leisa, where can people find out more about you?

LS: Yeah, just LeisaSchaim.com. Look for the written—it’s not phonetic. Look for the printed version, or I could spell it.

CB: Yeah, I will put a link in the description below this video and on the description page for this episode on TheAstrologyPodcast.com. And as always, you can find me at TheAstrologyPodcast.com. So thanks to all of the patrons who supported the production of this episode and helped us create this awesome studio, which we’re finally getting some use out of. This is pretty exciting.

LS: Yeah.

TG: It’s awesome.

EK: Gorgeous.

CB: Yeah, so hopefully we’ll be back again. So you can find out more information, or sign up for the podcast at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/Subscribe. Otherwise, we’ll be back again for Episode 202 sometime next week. All right, thanks everyone for watching.

LS: Thank you.

TG: Thank you:

EK: Thank you.