The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 406, titled:
Astrology and Health, with Kira Sutherland
With Chris Brennan and guest Kira Sutherland
Episode originally released on June 24, 2023
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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 Mary Sharon
Transcription released July 27th, 2023
Copyright © 2023 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey, my name is Chris Brennan and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. In this episode, I’m going to be talking with Kira Sutherland about astrology and health. So hey, Kira, thanks for joining me today.
KIRA SUTHERLAND: Oh my gosh, thanks so much for having me, Chris.
CB: Yeah, we’ve been meaning to do this episode for a while and I’m really excited about this topic because it’s such a big topic that people ask me about so frequently, and I knew you would be a great person to talk to. I’ve touched on little adjacent issues like herbalism a couple of years ago and different things like that but this would be a great time to jump into this. So since this is your first time on the podcast, could you tell us a little bit about your background in health and in astrology?
KS: Sure. So, it gets a bit confusing. I’m American-born, but I’ve lived all my adult life in Australia so all my education is Australian. I’m an Australian naturopath, which is an undergraduate degree in naturopathy, not post-grad like it is in North America. So, undergrad degree. My post-grad qualifications are actually in sports nutrition, I have a whole other life besides astrology where I’m working with scientists. And when I was studying naturopathy, which is about 30 years ago now to admit my age, I fell in love with astrology at the same time. And for me, when I found medical astrology, it was the missing link that we weren’t being taught in naturopathy. You know, natural medicine people were finishing naturopathy and they were going off and doing traditional Chinese medicine or Ayurvedic medicine and I was like, “Come on, our medicine is as old as these other traditions, where is our system of elements and analysis to put things through and really systematically?” And when I found medical astrology and the history of it, I was like, “Okay. Well, this is our system, we just threw it out about 350, 400 years ago.” Medicine was like, ‘No more astrology with diagnosis.’ And so yeah, I kind of fell in love with it at the same time, and I was formally studying astrology. And then I’m a self-taught medical astrologer so I don’t break any traditional rules, but my medical astrology has definitely… The way I analyze comes from traditional rules. And then being a practitioner at the same time, you can’t separate that and just stick to the rules. Like I said, I’m not breaking any rules, but I look at it in a very holistic naturopathic kind of way. I guess that’s the best way to explain it. So, 29 years of clinical practice this year.
CB: Okay. Nice. That makes sense. So yeah, what are some of the ways that astrology relates to health, or why is this important? This is a pretty major dimension of life for many people, especially health tends to be something that people tend to take for granted until they don’t have it. And maybe that’s part of where things come in.
KS: Oh, gosh, yes. Yeah, most people are too busy to pay attention to their health. So that becomes… We can even divide it down by modes or elements for who has more focus on health or not. If you’re looking at the strength or weaknesses of a natal chart, you can also see the people that are going to have to focus on their health from an earlier age. Or if we’re talking about constitution, your general vitality, some of us are born with much better constitutions than others. And what I love about medical astrology is the ability to look at that and the ability to see who needs more support. I mean, we all should be focusing on health on a daily basis but you can also see the signs and the elemental basis for the people who will probably ignore their health because it’s so strong for years. And then when something does go wrong and the wheels fall off, then they kind of scramble because they don’t know how to take care of themselves so they haven’t had to have that focus. Yeah, we could talk forever about modern world and our health but back to astrology… Wow, ask me the question again, Chris.
CB: No, that’s a good point, though, that it’s like we know through astrology that different people based on different planets or let’s just say something simplistic like benefics and malefics in different areas of the chart, different people experience differing levels of, generally, let’s say hardship, or luck in different areas of life. And for some people, there might be a propensity where health is an area that they struggle with more, whereas for other people that might be an area where they just for whatever reason, that’s not a major issue for them or they just happen to be lucky in that area.
KS: Yes. Yes. And depending on planetary placement, benefics, malefics, and conversations all those planets are having with each other, there’s definitely people with much stronger constitutions in general. In naturopathy, we call it vitality. Your vital force. The way we think of it is you have… It’s like a little flame. Like, if we had a little pilot lighter of flame within us when we’re really healthy, our vital force or flame is huge. And then when we get sick or when we’re really stressed or a bunch of accidents happen, bad luck happens, your vital force gets smaller and weaker. If your vital force goes out, you’re obviously not alive anymore. But a lot of people are operating from a very weakened vital force situation due to transits, due to lifestyle, due to accidents and illness. And so naturopathy and also medical astrology is a great way to kind of analyze that. Where are the pressure points coming from? And how can we fortify those areas? Because you might have some really unfortunate placements in a natal chart and instead of kind of sitting under a rock and going, “I can’t do anything about that,” with natural medicine or naturopathy or medical astrology, there’s a great hint as to how to support those areas or support other areas of the chart to kind of take the pressure off that original area that’s causing a lot of trouble. So I love just even using natal astrology. You know, medical astrology has really two sides to it. There’s Horary or decumbature medical astrology where we’re looking at an actual illness timing or when you’re asking that question around an illness, and then there’s natal analysis. And both of them are so useful but I tend to heavily focus on natal analysis because I want to see what’s happening for that person and the gifts and the hindrances they were gifted at birth and how to support that.
CB: Right. So you focus a lot and you can learn a lot through the natal chart about the natal constitution of the person. And that was a heavy traditional concept, the notion that different people have different constitutions, and it seems like that’s something that a lot of different longer-term medical thinking in different areas of the world all seem to develop different versions of that notion of individuals having a constitution of some sort.
KS: Yes, yeah. So in traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, as well as Western– what we would say traditional medicine– we’re always looking at what is that constitutional strength or not? How vital is that person’s general energy and working off that? Yeah, that’s where I basically start when I’m doing readings with people and just looking at it overall. But again, people with really strong constitutions don’t tend to be that interested in medical astrology because they don’t need that help until 50 or 60 years old when the wheels start falling off and they’ve got no idea how to take care of themselves.
CB: Right. Yeah, I know somebody like that who just never gets sick. And if they ever do get a cold or something, it’s just over in a day and they’re done. And I always marvel at that compared to other people that get sick more easily or more frequently.
KS: Yeah. And look, I’ll admit I’m an average constitution. If people meet me, they’re like, “Oh, your energy’s high, you’re really vital.” But I have a really mid-level constitution due to a bunch of different planetary placements and whatnot and genetics, and it’s probably what drew me into doing natural medicine in the first place. But what I really want to make clear for people is if you have an average constitution or even a below-average constitution, it’s not the end of the world. Because we are the ones that actually learn how to take care of ourselves. We’re the ones that learn those little symptoms that pop up that we’re like, “Okay, something’s not quite right with my digestion,” or “I’m getting headaches.” The little symptoms that the body gives you. In traditional medicine, we would say those are the signposts. That’s the little yellow flag that the body’s giving you that there’s an adjustment that needs to happen. You’re not doing something right and you need to make an adjustment to get back to this equilibrium of health. And those of us with average constitutions learn to see those signals a lot quicker than people with a really strong constitution. Because we do. We all have that aunt or uncle that basically drinks to an alcoholic level, eats cream puffs and croissants all day. I have literally this uncle in my life, probably was a smoker for years and they’re still going in their mid-’80s. They probably do have some major stuff but they either ignored it or they don’t tell me about it at this point.
CB: Right. Yeah, I saw a cardiologist on Twitter today saying that she had a patient who was 99 years old and she always asked them how they live to be that long what the secret was, and this elderly lady said her secret is that she never skips dessert and she eats dessert every time. And it’s so funny there’s people like that where for whatever reason, they just persist. And that’s an area, health is not an area where they have issues or sometimes survive much longer than other people for almost quasi-bizarre reasons.
KS: Yes. Yeah. The oldest lady in the world was in France until recently, and she was drinking brandy every single day of her life, she smoked till she was like 84, and she still made it into the teens, like a hundred and teen something. But constitutions in general, and again I probably should do this as a research project in astrology, but I know in regular medicine, we are not as strong as we used to be. We have departed from really strong constitutions and we’re not birthing babies with nearly the strength of constitution we used to, because of our modern living. Because of chemicals we’re coming into contact with, because of different foods and plastics. I don’t want to go down all those theories but there is the idea that we are all going to need, you know, the younger generations are going to need to pay more attention because they’re not born with that hardy constitution where they… We’re coming into contact with hundreds of thousands of chemicals a day, whereas 100 years ago, they were coming into contact with 100 chemicals a day. Like statistically, sugar, if we want to talk benefics, sugar ruled by Venus, into the 1900s, in the US, we were eating two to four pounds of sugar a year. People are now eating over 100 pounds of sugar a year. So one of the things, to bring it back to astrology, one of the things I look at which is a little bit left of center is the fact that our benefics are, you know, our Venus and our Jupiter are amazing but they’re also where we overdo it in medical astrology. We have way too much access to Venus and Jupiter foods these days versus what used to be scarce. Caveman days, you couldn’t find sugar, you know? The only thing sweet was fruit that was in season two months a year or if you manage to steal a beehive. That was your sugar for the year. Whereas we have so much more going on now with benefic style foods, if you want me to call it that way, and overindulging that I actually see a lot of daily. Not your big health problems, your big health problems are still coming from your malefics and your Saturn and your Mars causing a bit of issues, but we are overdoing our Venus and Jupiter. It’s the way I kind of couch it for people.
CB: Yeah, that’s really interesting and just a realization that all the planets can lend something to this topic of health, especially when the function of that planet kind of goes awry or is led into excess. And it seems like that’s actually one of the traditional concepts I always thought was interesting, like medical concepts, the idea that it’s when things get out of balance or go to extreme or to excess that you start running into problems or running into health issues.
KS: Yes. In my opinion and a lot of astrologers’ opinions, every planet can cause issues. I’m seeing as much issue with Venus these days as I am with Mars. Yes, you’ve got a lot more accidents going on with Mars or infections, influenza, but Venus can get out of control with people in a really… Any planet can kind of get left unchecked and go into that excess. And the way I like to think about health is it’s this continuum, it’s this line of if we had really amazing health and then death or really bad health. It’s this beautiful continuum that we’re all sitting on. But every choice, sadly, every choice we make every day about how much we sleep, how much fluid we have, how much alcohol, what foods we’re having, every single choice moves us in one direction or another on that continuum. And we forget that. And it’s not about being perfect. I had a little bit of cheesecake last night out to dinner, let’s admit that. You know, cheesecake brings joy. Venus brings joy and there are… We get driven- I’m jumping topics here but we get driven to eat certain foods because they biochemically change how we feel in the body. And when we’re having sugars and carbohydrates, that is increasing our feel-good neurotransmitters, our chemicals in our body. So it’s one of the reasons we reach for things like that. We’re trying to soothe. Venus soothes a scratchy Mars and we just have access to it probably in a way we shouldn’t these days, if that makes… Did that make sense, Chris?
CB: Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense and is really important just going back to that idea that even though there’s a tendency to focus on benefics and malefics and that certainly being relevant, especially in establishing areas of let’s say hardship where certain malefics fall or greater challenges and difficulties that the benefics can also indicate health issues as well depending on how they’re situated in a chart.
KS: Absolutely. In medical astrology, it’s a little bit tricky because there is a crossover of rulerships. It’s not quite as distinct between signs and planets and houses and I know that freaks people out when they hear that, but there is a little bit of a crossover rulership. And you take something like the thyroid. The thyroid is this organ that sits right in the neck and it’s in charge of our metabolic rate, like how fast we’re burning up fuels, but it does a bunch of other things; how much energy we have, all kinds of stuff. And if the thyroid goes awry, all systems in the body start going awry. Traditionally, thyroid would be ruled by Mercury because Mercury is in charge of all hormones or messages that the body sends around. But the thyroid also gets ruled by Venus because of the rulership in the throat, because of where its placement is. And in looking at hundreds if not thousands of charts a year, I see Venus being the culprit of thyroid issues more often than I see– I’m always willing to find it in Mercury, but I see it with Venus a lot more than Mercury. And there we have a benefic that goes awry and causes a lot of trouble for a lot of people. Right?
CB: Right, that makes sense. So in terms of looking at things like constitution or health or things like that, I guess one of the access points is looking at the rising sign and the first house and the ruler of the first house, right?
KS: Yes. Oh, yes. Huge. The first house and Ascendant and its ruler are in charge of our physical body. It’s that meeting point where we meet the world, and that rules the physicality of the body. I mean, every planet depending on where it’s placed is going to impact that, but the way I describe it to clients is like… It’s like your shields. Like if we were all– I always talk about this– if we were all Viking warriors, this is our shield that we meet the world with to try to protect ourselves. And that Ascendant and the first house and any planets sitting within that first house are going to have massive impact on what we look like and also how our body’s functioning. And those planets sitting in that first become part of this orchestra that you have to operate with that Ascendant, and then the ruler of the Ascendant. Yeah, it’s the biggest key for sure. We also need to remember your adrenal glands, which are your stress. Your adrenals are what pump out cortisol and adrenaline and the stress hormones, and we are all living in a society that is stressed constantly, right? Unless somebody’s off living in the woods not talking to anybody. And the adrenals are a very first house… I mean, they’re Mars, but they’re very first house organ as well. So the minute we get stressed, we kind of get thrown back to our Ascendant, and our Ascendant and the ruler kind of goes into action to try to protect us. This is where living in today’s world, we’re having so much struggle with our constitutions and that Ascendant because we’re just constantly under attack on our physical body. Did that make sense?
CB: Yeah, for sure. It’s making me think about you mentioned earlier about vitality and in this concept of different periods of vitality as well, and it just made me think of how that was tied in with some of the ancient techniques for things like the attempts to determine things like length of life. Even though that’s not usually something astrologers do a lot today, it seems like some of those techniques seem to work more for determining periods in which a person’s vitality might be higher or lower. And oftentimes, they’re focused in that technique on the core triad of the Sun, the Moon, and the Ascendant, basically.
KS: Yeah, absolutely. Back in traditional medical astrology, they would call it the ‘high leg’. So if you’re reading old astrology, if your listeners are reading old astrology books and it keeps talking about the high leg, the high leg is some… There’s a lot of different ways to calculate it and they scare me to death, I’ve read all the styles of calculating it. But it’s to determine what your ruling planet is for your health, and it’s not always the ruler of the Ascendant. Sometimes it is. And for men, if we’re looking at male to female charts– because again, this is traditionally we’re talking about sex assignment at birth, we’re not talking about gender, I want to be clear on that when I’m using male and female words– for men, you are often trying to make it be the Sun is what you are hoping for. For female charts, you are hoping for it to be the Moon but you have to default to other planets. And it’s the way I explain it to students, because I do teach a technique how to find it, but then I basically say unless something is really going wrong, I don’t overly focus. I take note of what the high leg is. But I think we used high leg a lot more when we didn’t know someone’s… There’s a way to calculate it even if you don’t have a really accurate birth time, which was common for thousands of years, but also the way I joke about it which is terrible is when the child was, you know, child mortality was huge. It was like one in three kids did not make it. One in four kids didn’t make it to adulthood, you know? We didn’t have antibiotics, we didn’t have surgery, we didn’t have anesthetic, antiseptic. Life was precarious until the 1900s. We forget that antibiotics only came about between World War One and World War Two, right? An enormous amount of deaths in World War One were actually post-surgery deaths, they weren’t from actual battle wounds. And World War Two death rate goes down because of antibiotics. But with the high leg– sorry, I’m off on a train there– with the high leg, I kind of joked that you would calculate it to see how strong this person’s vitality is. But also, there was a way of looking at it for how long somebody’s actually going to live, sort of. And it was like, “Well, do you give this kid the good food? Or do you give it the really average food because it’s not going to make it?” Families had to make those decisions, which kid was more vital or not? And it sounds really cruel but life was a lot crueler in some ways. So yeah, I always think of the high leg as I like it, but it’s not… I think what we do with our natal chart probably has bigger impact in the long run.
CB: Yeah, for sure. I’m mainly just interested in just the notion that there’s these sectors in the chart that pertain to things like vitality, and that especially the luminaries and the Ascendant being connected with that in some way. And that, going back to our earlier discussions, is that there can be people that have a stronger initial vitality or constitution so they don’t have health issues very often, but that even with those people, there can still be certain times in the life that line up with certain timing techniques where maybe they do go through a period of lower vitality or health indicated by different transits or something like that.
KS: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. So, profected years are really interesting to look at as well in the years where you’re focusing on the first… If we go to houses: first house, physical body, sixth house is the house of illness traditionally, eighth house is always a little bit it’s considered much weaker health-wise. Again, if we’re looking at the Ascendant as that starting point, the sixth and the eighth house are at those hard angles or quincunx to the first so it’s considered not in sight of the first. It doesn’t have a lot of light and so it’s not considered a strong house. It’s considered an ill house healthwise. And then, of course, the 12th house. Transits to planets, progressions, I always find a really interesting thing. Especially looking at, not so much the Sun because that’s going to be forever and ever, but progressed Moon really depending on what house it’s transiting. And what sign? Is it a really compatible sign to a lot of their natal chart or is it a bit incongruent? I see that really weakening vitality for those few-year periods. And then yeah, transits in general. It’s obvious, but Mars is a little shit-stirrer when it comes to health and transits. And especially things like your Mars return. As much as Mars on the Ascendant, absolutely you got to watch that physical body, but Mars return is… That’s a doozy, I think, for a lot of people. And not many people are talking about that. Were you thinking of other things as well, Chris?
CB: Yeah. I was thinking of, you know, there’s the classic Saturn transit through the first house through the rising sign and just that observation that sometimes people get slower or you feel like you’re aging more rapidly sometimes during those periods and other related Saturn things, because the first house is the house that primarily relates to the body that you just feel some of that Saturn archetype much more vividly, especially in the body during those times.
KS: Oh, yes. Absolutely. Yeah. Saturn rules kind of chronic long-standing health things. Saturn is also in charge of the skin. I know people probably know this but I’ll review it. Skin, bones, skeleton. It’s not just knees, everyone kind of goes knees, it’s all your bones. But it’s also your ligaments and tendons, which is, you know? And again, Saturn is very drying and it crystallizes and pulls things in and it slows things down like you were talking about. So yes, Saturn through the first, much less energy. Often, something occurs where you do get slowed down, whether it’s… Fatigue is a big one for Saturn, you don’t feel as vital. Teeth problems are really common or having to spend a lot on your teeth at that time. But yeah, absolutely aging. Another common thing, Chris, is people have to change their diet with Saturn going through the first. Often, they end up on what I would consider a restrictive diet. It’s like all of a sudden a lot of their choices get taken away with what they should eat because of a health thing and they have to really simplify what they’re doing. And it does, it takes away the joy of eating in some ways.
CB: I had a friend that had Saturn in the first natally and I was always struck by… She struggled with anemia and she’d just be very cold. She’d always need to have the heat on and things like that, which I thought was so striking since Saturn traditionally was supposed to be like a cooling or a cold planet.
KS: Yes, absolutely. That’s really common. You may or may not be talking to someone currently that also has Saturn in the first. [chuckles]
CB: Okay. [chuckles]
KS: Yes, absolutely. I run around with little heating pads that go in the microwave constantly and I’m married to someone who has this really hot constitution, and we’re always– I’m in Australia right now where it’s heading into winter and we’re constantly in this battle over if the heater’s on or not. Yeah, absolutely.
CB: Yeah. And it’s like… Oh, go ahead.
KS: Oh, I’m just saying any planet in that first really puts an imprint, especially the malefics. But planets in the first are really going to imprint onto someone’s physical body and it will be much more obvious in them than planets from other places. That first house is just huge for your physical health. And if you don’t have anything there, which I can imagine people are asking, then by transit it’s a big experience. In some ways, I’m like, “Oh my gosh, that’s amazing. You don’t have to juggle these planets with your physical health.” But by transit, you really feel it more so than maybe other people that are always dealing with the first house planet.
CB: Right. At some point, you’ll go through a two to three-year Saturn transit through your first house, or for other people, there’ll be a Mars retrograde in your first house can be like an event in terms of health and physical body at some point.
KS: Oh, yeah. Mars hitting that Ascendant, you often have accidents and injuries. You see people throw out their back like an inflammatory… Mars is hot and dry. Heat, redness, swelling, and pain is the actual medical definition of inflammation. You can have swelling, you can have… It’s so, you know, injuring your back, colds and flus, classic viral time, be it what we’ve all just been through with COVID or I really see shingles and the chickenpox virus. So the whole herpes family of viruses often get triggered with Mars hitting that Ascendant. Or just accidents in general. Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Yeah, I knew somebody that the day Mars stationed in their rising sign recently when Mars went retrograde, they got in a car accident. And sometimes you just see accidents and little acute things like that with Mars.
KS: Oh, yeah. They can be little baby things. It doesn’t have to be a big bad injury or illness. But yeah, I definitely… And that’s that idea of do you cocoon yourself while it’s going on? Not really. You still need to go out, otherwise, you’re going to burn yourself on the iron at home or something. [chuckles] You can’t avoid what’s coming but it’s a great time to fortify, especially… You know, when I see a Mars coming to the first or retrograding in the first, you want to look at the inflammation state of the body. And a lot of people might not realize most chronic illness is considered a long-term inflammation state. Plus there’s the accidents, injuries, falls, bites, stings. Mars in traditional medical astrology was like knives, gunshots, falling off your horse, getting run over by a carriage. There’s all these great explanations from hundreds of years ago. It’s about what I would say to people, because just knowing, “Oh my god, doom, this is coming.” That’s not what it’s about. I like to say, “Use that Mars. Go and do stuff that’s healthy for your own Mars and for your first house. Fortify that first house.” Mars rules the adrenals, plus I consider the first house the adrenals. So support the adrenals with herbs. And again, please don’t ever take herbs unless you know it’s safe for you to take them. They can interact with other medications. All natural medicine can be dangerous if done in the wrong way. But herbs like schisandra, withania which is called ashwagandha in North America. There’s a ton of herbs to support how the adrenals actually function. And if you support your adrenals and your stress response, that will also in turn support your immune system. Because a lot of people don’t realize cortisol and stress hormones actually suppress our immune system. And so the immune and the adrenals are very interlinked. Yes, support your immune system as you see a Mars transit coming as well because its viruses and infections. That’s my favorite thing, is to go after the immune system, but also the adrenals, and like making sure you’re getting enough sleep because lack of sleep, suppression of the immune system, increase cortisol as well.
CB: So sometimes when you see a difficult transit coming up, you try to do things that will… You kind of anticipate some of the outcomes that could happen and then try to do things that might help to boost health in those areas or take additional precautions in those areas to offset things or prepare for that in a ‘forewarned is forearmed’ kind of approach.
KS: Exactly. That’s exactly how I work with natal and transit astrology when I’m doing medical astrology readings. People often come with a health problem already, so we dissect down in the natal chart what was that, or look at past transits why did that happen, or where it’s coming from. But yeah, absolutely. It’s about fortifying but, you know, forewarned is amazing. And again, you don’t go into… I label things regular astrology or medical astrology, right? Which is a big umbrella if I say regular. But a transit isn’t always going to be a physical ailment either, and people get really scared about some transits and be very cautious. You have to be very cautious of what you say to people too because you don’t want to say something really negative and then have them hold that in their head and what we think we can create, that’s the danger in medical astrology. People get really scared. The transit could be an emotional or a psychological or spiritual transit rather than an actual physical embodiment of that transit. So yes, you can predict, but I’m very cautious about what I verbally say around a prediction.
CB: Right, just in terms of being clear that astrology is archetypally predictive, and therefore there’s going to be a whole range or umbrella of possibilities on different levels. And while you’re trying to get some heads up about some possibilities, you don’t want to go too far in assuming it’s going to be a very specific manifestation of this specific thing.
KS: Yeah, whatever you think it’s going to be, it’s not. You know, in my opinion. I spend at least two or three consults a year, I spend 20 minutes convincing someone they’re not going to get cancer from a transit coming up that some other astrologer has accidentally said, “Oh, that transit could be cancer.” You cannot know that. There is no possibility that you could say that about a transit, and it’s negligent. Doing medical astrology, you have to be very careful. You’re talking about somebody’s physical and mental and emotional well-being. Again, I love the way you talk about that as archetypal energy. You just don’t know what it’s going to be. And it may manifest on multiple levels but yeah, you have to be so cautious with what you say to people.
CB: Sure. So sometimes you’re trying to boost certain things ahead of time. And other times are you trying to balance? Like, if you see a Mars thing, which is heating, are you going to try to offset that by doing cooling things? Or where does that come into play?
KS: Yeah, medical astrology loves using both what we call sympathy and antipathy style treatment– what you’re talking about there like Mars being hot and dry, whereas you have Venus that’s calming and soothing on to something. Or Jupiter to Saturn, we will often use those planets to antidote each other and we call that treating by antipathy or treating by opposites. I don’t always do it via planet, sometimes I do it by elements. So I’m looking at what element is kind of getting out of control and I’m using an opposite element, you know, hot and dry versus cold and wet. That’s a very traditional technique in medical astrology. So that’s treating by opposites, and that works incredibly well and our brain thinks that way really easily. Whereas in natural medicine, medical astrology, we also have the idea of treating by sympathy, where we’re actually giving something that is similar to what the issue is. And homeopathy– actually, I won’t go into a whole thing on homeopathy– but homeopathy treats by similar. So whatever the problem is manifesting as, we give something similar because it’s the idea that the energies match each other. And if we were talking about health like a pendulum and it swung up this way whereas this is regular health– the ailment swung you here– treating by antipathy is just shoving something back in the opposite direction. Whereas sympathy is almost stoking the fire of what you have to kind of swing it up and then it releases itself and swings back down. I hope that made sense. Like if somebody has a fever, they have a cold or a flu and they’ve got fever and hot and sweats, we will put them in a hot bath with Epsom salts and we will give them herbs that also make them sweat. We’ll give them herbs that are sometimes ruled by Mars to bring out more sweating because we know that viruses and bacterias can’t survive above a certain temperature.
Again, we wouldn’t do this with a little kid because fever regulation’s very dangerous, but in an adult, that’s not an outrageous fever. You actually stoke the fire of the fever herbally or with putting them in a hot bath and then shoving them under a bunch of covers in bed to kind of sweat it out. You stoke this fire to then bring relief. So we actually do both. And it’s hard to explain sometimes why you even pick, but am I going to go by opposites or similars? I have to admit sometimes I put together treatments, and then I look at… I put together treatments without using astrology just as a practitioner, and then I backtrack and I go, “Okay, was I working sympathetically or with antipathy?” And turns out I do both a lot.
CB: Yeah, that makes sense just in terms of sometimes you need to accelerate something or accelerate the process of doing something in order to get over or get through it.
KS: Yes. Yeah, and sometimes like I say to my clients, when a planet’s causing you trouble, be it your natal planet or transit, sometimes that area’s asking to be heard. You might have heard me say this prior, Chris, but it’s like the naughty kid in the back of the class. Part of your chart is acting out because it wants you to go focus on that area. And so it causes an ailment, probably by transit, but there’s an issue happening so you go and pay attention to it and give it some love or focus. And often I’ll work by similars then because again, you’re making it feel heard and seen, and that often releases that energy.
CB: Got it. Okay. Let’s see, we’ve talked about some Saturn ailments and we’ve talked about some Mars things because it can come up with Mars first house placements.
KS: Accidents. Yeah.
CB: Accidents, yeah. I mentioned the one friend that had Saturn in the first house and was anemic and had issues with cold or slow things or chronic things, and then I have another friend with Mars in the first house that would constantly bump into things and get small cuts and bruises and burns and things like that, which is always very funny how classic the manifestation of a placement can be.
KS: Medical astrology is so obvious, it’s almost like caricature ridiculous. Yes, absolutely. Sadly, I do a lot of sport every year when I’m having my Mars… Well, every two years when I’m having my Mars return. [laughs] And last year, I managed to tear a muscle the day before a Mars return. It was ridiculous. A really simple accident that, you know, I’ve done this thing repetitively thousands of times in my life and something went wrong and I tore one of my calf muscles. It is that obvious. Especially Mars-Saturn, they’re really obvious. Also to go back to your friend that has iron deficiency or anemia, Mars rules iron, for those of you who don’t. I’m sure everybody knows but I just wanted to remind everybody. I collect charts of people who… So the eighth house is considered your inherited ailments or genetics, DNA, and it’s also the house of surgery. So often by transit, people have Mars going through their eighth when they’ve ended up with emergency surgery and things like that. Mars also traditionally rules the surgeon’s knife. It’s iron, it’s cutting. But I collect charts of people that have the genetic disorder called hemochromatosis. Hemochromatosis is inherited, and it doesn’t always activate in people. But it’s when the gene turns itself on, you start absorbing more iron out of the foods you’re eating than you should. Now iron is really toxic to the body and we actually only absorb about, if you’re eating animal sources of iron, you only absorb about 20% to 22% of the iron you eat. If you’re eating only vegetable sources, you only absorb about 8% to 12%. Hemochromatosis activates and you start absorbing, I don’t even know the percentage, but it’s a lot higher. And it’s dangerous to have too much iron running around your blood, your body doesn’t want that so it dumps it into organs. And organs with too much iron start oxidizing. They literally start rusting, and it will go to the liver and the heart are really common places. It’s very dangerous if you don’t treat it. The treatment for it is literally to bleed people. It’s one of the… If you think of old bloodletting, it actually is the treatment. We extract blood out of people’s bodies until their iron stores drop because then the body is making more blood that doesn’t have iron in it yet. Sorry, that was a very long explanation. [laughs]
CB: That’s a funny bit of trivia. I didn’t know that that was the case but that makes sense in terms of how they treat that.
KS: Yeah. If they’re having iron-rich foods, you get them to have opposite things that are really high in tannins. This is where are you are going Mars against Saturn. You’re going with astringent foods or herbs to bind the iron, is actually the treatment as well. So get somebody to drink black tea or green tea, which the tannins will bind to the iron you won’t absorb as much. But with the majority of the charts that I’ve located, they have Mars in the eighth natally. Which is really interesting to look at and seems comical. I mean, not everybody with hemochromatosis is going to have that in their chart but it’s interesting to look at what’s going on with their Mars, be it in the eighth or aspecting the eighth in some way or chart ruler. Yeah. [crosstalk] Medical astrology is so obvious sometimes.
CB: Right. That’s a funny thing where sometimes astrologers can overthink it and think that things are going to be more complicated or more obscure than it is when sometimes the manifestation is just sitting staring right in front of you or it ends up being much more simple and straightforward than you almost even anticipate.
KS: Always. Not always, but often. And in studying medical astrology and reading, I think I’ve literally read every book that exists on medical astrology. There’s natal medical astrology, there’s looking at transits, progressions, or if people use solar arcs, there’s looking at profections, there’s looking at Horary decumbature charts. But then people will also… You can look at a Solar return chart for an imprint for the year, in Jyotish, they look at Moon cycles a lot. I’ve played with that a lot lately. But people will then go to midpoints, people will go to all kinds of really small aspects. And I get that and I’m not disagreeing with, you know, everybody does what works for them. But I often don’t have to go to those extra things to look at. To me 95% of the time when people show up healthwise, I can locate it within natal transits progressions and if I have to go to Horary, I will look at that. But I actually don’t even do decumbatures as often as a lot of other medical astrologers. It might be that I’m just lucky that I’ve also had a lot of medical education so I can get down to… It really depends how many layers you have. But yeah, I know other medical astrologers that are obsessed with midpoints. I might be doing myself a disservice and not looking at those enough, but to me, it often is just so obvious.
CB: Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. Let’s see, we’ve talked about the Ascendant and its ruler. We’ve talked a little bit about the sixth house and maybe that’s something we could focus on more is the sixth and the 12th. Or do you see a distinction, or what sort of distinction do you see between the two?
KS: The sixth and the 12? Yeah, sixth house traditionally house of illness, house of service. Some people will agree with this or not but the sixth house is a house of hard work, right? It’s not an easy house. And maybe this is me overlapping my naturopathy to it but I really see the sixth house as also the house where we can do the hard work for our physical body to try to prevent too much impact from that sixth house of illness. Some people don’t like that I say that, but I will be honest I use it that way. And I think it’s come about… I don’t really think I’m breaking any rules but it’s really come about that… It’s like we talked about earlier, health is frigging hard work. And it’s daily. It has to be a ritual or routine. And so, yes, I’m always going to look at the sixth for causing most of the big problems besides the first house, but I’m also going to look at the sixth to… If there’s going to be a problem, then I’m going to go there to fortify it. Right? I think we get so scared in medical astrology with, “Oh, the sixth house is where all this hard stuff’s going to happen.” And to me, well, then that’s calling you to do work there. It’s calling you to not run away from that area, you need to support it. So I do look at the cusp of the sixth, the ruler of the sixth, very important for health ailment triggers, planets, you know? Most of the clients showing up to see me have lovely, not lovely, but stelliums in the sixth. [laughs] And it’s why they ended up at a medical astrologer. Sixth house is considered where you have acute ailments, although I really think a better wording would be “It’s the health stuff you have to deal with every day.” And a lot of that becomes chronic long-term. Acute, medically, is considered happening right now. True acute is only a month long, but in other medical texts, they’ll give it a year. And after a year, it becomes chronic and then we dash over to the 12th house. So the 12th house which was traditionally hospitals, institutions, all of that, the 12th house really has become chronic ailments. Yeah, and things that are a bit hidden from us, right? Things that we can’t quite figure out. And that’s what a chronic ailment is, we can’t figure out how to fix it.
CB: Yeah, for sure. Those things that are persistent or things that can be obscure and hard to get a handle on or hard to figure out how to address.
KS: Yes, it’s elusive. You can start to address it and then it kind of shifts and changes into something else and so there’s this constant adjustment. This comes from Jansky, who was a medical astrologer who passed away in the ’80s. He talks about the hard work is in the sixth, the chronic to the 12th. But he very much talks about if you ignore your sixth house, if you ignore your ailments in the sixth, they’re going to land you in the 12th. Because if you don’t deal with it in the daily, you will end up with it chronic. And I love– I don’t love that idea because it’s bad health, but that sixth-12th is a real axis of ailments and things we really have to deal with. Again, by transit, if there’s nothing sitting there natally.
CB: Okay, that makes sense. With some of this, it also goes back towards tied into some of the classical ideas of assigning even something as simple as zodiac parts or signs to each of the parts of the body. Sometimes that can come into play in very literal ways, I think, right?
KS: Oh, absolutely. This is where we have this crossover, and everyone talks about, “Don’t do cookie-cutter astrology.” And, you know, sign is not planet, is not house. But in medical astrology, there is a great crossover. So a lot of first house issues are similar to Aries issues, are similar to Mars, you know, the traditional rulers. Yeah, literally, the 12th house is the immune system and it’s the feet. We also talk about the lymphatics. Your lymphatics, for those that don’t know, is kind of like your junk-collecting system but it’s part of your immune system. Yeah, things are so literal in medical astrology, it’s comical. Yeah. Did you have any example you were thinking about when you brought that up?
CB: Example of what?
KS: Oh, when you were talking about the literal body parts. You know, like head to the first house, throat to the second.
CB: Yeah, I’ve just seen occasionally if there’s a difficult placement and it’s in a specific sign of the body, sometimes having a specific injury that relates to that. Like, having a Mars in Pisces in let’s say the sixth house or something like that, having that get activated by a Mars transit and somebody’s injuring a foot or something like that, which seems… Yeah, it’s just very literal and very straightforward sometimes.
KS: Yeah, it’s almost so obvious you’re like, “This is…” It almost feels like a joke how literal it can be. But again, that’s medical astrology, and we can go back to the Egyptians placing body parts to signs and probably even further back than that, but I will leave the history to you. Yeah, it’s amazing. I may or may not have a lot of planets in the sign of Aries, and I have seven sets of stitches in my body, six of them are in my head.
CB: Oh, wow. Okay.
KS: Yeah, it’s that literal. Yeah. It just gives you those great hints as to where to support going back to that Ascendant, the Sun, and the Moon, you know? Incredible places to fortify. And one of the ways I love using medical astrology… Medical astrology was used a lot more for diagnosis if we go back in history because we didn’t have X-rays and MRIs and blood tests and all these things. Whereas in modern times, it can be used a lot more for how to support the body. And I think that’s a beautiful key to know where we can support someone rather than just go, “Oh, this is the problem.” Right? I love that we have that ability to help ourselves.
CB: Yeah, for sure. That diagnostic function, it’s like if it’s the 12th century and you don’t have an X-ray machine and you have this thing that can give you some insight into what’s going on through this interesting symbolic system, then it’s like yeah, you use that to diagnose and try to figure out what’s going on.
KS: Yeah, and one of the things I love about medical astrology is someone can show up with something like… We can also discern which system is creating a problem when it’s not so obvious, like we were talking about before, injuring your foot in Pisces and things like that. But people show up with allergies, right? Like food, let’s talk about food sensitivities. People are eating foods, not anaphylaxis, but just a food sensitivity. They’re not quite right when they eat that food. People show up a lot with food sensitivities, but there’s different ways to look at even if you can name the foods, what is the underlying system that’s going awry? Because the food sensitivity can be that your gut integrity, your gut lining is too loose. We call that leaky gut. And you’re absorbing too many bigger particles. Like, your digestive system isn’t working and big proteins are making it to your bloodstream. So then your body is… We know the gut is part of the problem but we know the immune system is seeing these big proteins as invaders and it’s going and attacking. And so we know it’s the immune system that’s really going awry. Whereas other times with allergies, and again you would see this more with… So say somebody with a Gemini or a Virgo watching Mercury or maybe the third house be involved in an issue, then I would consider the nervous system rather than the immune– I mean, the immune system is having a reaction but it might be that their nervous system is hypersensitive and overreacting or part of their lung’s respiratory system is part of the issue. So it’s beautiful when someone’s having a sensitivity. Or if you’re having [inaudible] That can be the immune system, or it can be the respiratory system, or it can be the nervous system. And medical astrology, by looking at the natal chart, you can kind of discern all the systems are involved but what is the big culprit system that I… What is the underlying problem? Because you can treat symptoms, but unless you get to the cause or the underlying issue, you’re not going to have complete remediation. So I love that medical astrology, and I know with these certain clients, I got to support your nervous system more than I have to support your immune system. I think that is one of the gifts of medical astrology and especially playing with body parts and houses for which systems are under stress. And modern medicine can’t really… There aren’t tests to show us that. Again, in naturopathy– sorry, I’m on a monologue here, Chris.
CB: That’s okay.
KS: In naturopathy we have this belief, we call it the septic foci theory. And this is not medical astrology but we have this idea that we are all born with one or two systems that are just weak. They’re our Achilles heel. But I love that in medical astrology, I can figure out your Achilles heel by your natal placements. I’m trying to overlap. Does that make sense?
CB: Yeah, for sure. And just that idea of trying to be a little bit more holistic, because there’s sometimes a tendency in modern medicine to focus on the symptoms and trying to address those and counteract that somehow without getting to the underlying cause.
KS: Yeah. Yeah, and that’s our biggest problem. If you have– in Australia, we say eczema but over in North America, you would say eczema, I think– if you have a red skin rash, you’re getting cortisone cream, which is, you know, that’s actually very Mars treatment for Mars, it’s suppressing this immune reaction. But in natural medicine and medical astrology, we have the belief that why are you getting the skin ailment in the first place? Are you coming into contact with something physically causing a rash? Are you ingesting something that’s causing the rash? Because that’s really common is food allergies with skin issues. But if you’re putting cortisone on it, yes, it temporarily goes away but you’re literally suppressing the signpost that the body’s like, “Hey, something’s…” Skin stuff is the body telling you something’s wrong on the inside. But if we just… And don’t get me wrong, if you have a bad cortisone rash and you need to go to some big funk– you’re going to the Oscars next week, put the cortisone on and feel better for the week. [chuckles] But don’t ignore the fact that your body, it’s the signpost I was talking about before, telling you to pay attention somewhere else. We also have the belief that if you’ve suppressed something in one area, it’s just going to go in and pop out in another area.
CB: Right. One of my most annoying life things about life is that sometimes we do things or we eat things or we take different things early in our life that later we find out that we were allergic to that or that that doesn’t do well with our system for some reason. [crosstalk] Yeah, but for some reason. Sometimes it takes many years and you sort of wish that you could have gotten back and had that knowledge earlier, but just the idea that sometimes you can be doing something that’s counterproductive and almost hindering yourself in some way or even harming yourself and not realizing it.
KS: Absolutely. Chris, yeah, I absolutely agree. Sometimes those are things that you thought were healthy, and they’re not.
CB: Yeah, it makes me think of the 12th house even and some of those traditional notions of self-undoing, which on a very core level symbolically is just doing things that are somehow undermining yourself perhaps unintentionally or without realizing it.
KS: Yeah, absolutely. And we could look at self-undoing, we could also look at addiction. I’m not just talking addiction like, “Oh, they’re addicted to heroin or cocaine or something like that,” we’re addicted… Some of our biggest addictions are food. And that can be some of our greatest undoing, is we think we’re doing the right thing and eating a certain diet, but in the end it’s absolutely depleting our constitution or causing bigger problems. There is no one diet for everybody. For some people, eating meat really works for them. Other people, it doesn’t. Other people, vegan, vegetarian, or paleo or whatever, you know? There is no one right diet. We now know that eating foods that we’re slightly sensitive to, not this overt allergy, actually triggers off opiate receptors and the cannabinoid receptors in our body, which keep us craving these foods that are not good for us. Right? That’s a real 12th house, it’s that self-undoing and addiction at the same time. Is that our fault? Biochemically our body is driving for us to have these little highs all the time through certain foods. It’s incredible. As a naturopath, nobody likes me for it, but I take a very large percentage of people off dairy food. Dairy food is yummy. You know, who doesn’t like ice cream, or chocolate, or cheese? People love that stuff. But for a lot of people, it’s a self-undoing food.
CB: Yeah, that’s really tricky. I like though how with this, that astrology can show us that each person is unique. It’s another way to just sort of confirm or emphasize what you’re saying in terms of that there’s not a one-size-fits-all for everybody in terms of health models, and you really have to recognize each individual person’s unique not just constitution, but unique strengths and sensitivities. And using astrology as a way of getting to the heart of that almost like a shortcut instead of, I kind of imagined for example with allergies, in order to do an allergy test, how you do the thing where sometimes they’ll put little bits of stuff on a person’s back and you’ll just go through all the different things somebody could be allergic to. That that’s a whole process instead of—
KS: That’s called a rast test, just so you know. Yeah, r-a-s-t, at least in Australia. And that’s one reaction of your immune system. Then looking at the foods as they react to your blood is a totally different part of the immune system. But yeah, it’s painful. Rast tests are horrible. I watched my daughter go through it. [laughs] I made my daughter do it and it was horrifying. They’re sitting there with 60 potential allergens causing these big welts on the body and they’re not allowed to touch it. It’s horrible. [laughs] That’s a Mars issue there. That’s a Mars way of looking at a reaction. Literally, they’re poking you with a pin and putting something in your skin.
CB: Right. Yeah. Well, but just with astrology, you might be able to– Not that you can sidestep that if you’re trying to figure out allergies, but as a broader metaphor using astrology to get to the heart of trying to figure out what areas a person might have certain problems with, as opposed to just empirically trying everything out and just seeing what a person reacts or doesn’t react to.
KS: Yeah, absolutely. It’s expensive to try everything out. Right? All those different styles of testing are hundreds and hundreds of dollars. And that it goes back to looking at what planets are under a lot of stress in the natal chart or in detriment or fall, you know, the poorly aspected. Also just looking at which, if we’re relating body parts to signs, which signs are under more stress? Like I said before, someone can come with food allergies but they have this incredibly air-dominated very Gemini chart. I know I need to go after their… Truly underneath, it’s their nervous system and respiratory system that I need to support. Whereas the Pisces shows up and I know it’s the immune system I need to go for. If an Aries shows up… It’s not that I’m not going to treat the other systems but an Aries shows up, I know I got to get after their stress response. They’re probably suppressing their immune system through their adrenals and their cortisol. So it is cheating. It’s completely shortcut cheating and that’s what I love about it. It’s magic. It’s literally magic.
CB: Yeah, and I think that’s basically every astrologer’s reaction and every astrologer’s motivation. Because all of us develop sometimes these different interest in astrology, but also there are other specializations and areas of specialization in the world. Whether it’s, for you, astrology and health and you’re able to use astrology like a shortcut or like a life hack or like a cheat code to figuring things out that you shouldn’t be able to know that easily or quickly otherwise. And there’s other people that use it for things like psychology and using it as a shortcut there, instead of doing years of therapy in order to figure out some of the things. Like, maybe getting an idea of some of those things ahead of time and then using that to kind of help triangulate not to the exclusion of doing the practical work that’s necessary, but just as an enhancement. Or astrologers that use that, like historians that use that to research history or other things. It was just making me think… Talking to you about this and how you use it makes me think of that, and how astrologers are always… That’s really what we’re doing oftentimes is using astrology as this tool to enhance or like a cheat code for whatever our other specializations are.
KS: Absolutely. And again, that’s the magic of it, the fact that there are so many different areas that we can do that with. We don’t have to be genius in all those areas, we can have our specialty. Someone was asking me the other day– I did what I call a regular astrology reading like a personality, you know, “let me read your natal chart.” Because I almost don’t do those anymore. I can, but I’m so focused on the medical. It’s beautiful to have your niche and become that– I’m not going to call myself an expert– to have that area that just lights you up. It is. It’s like a code that you can read the universe better, be it historically… That area of astrology is absolutely amazing and I love reading about it, but I’m not great at that side of it. Right? I have my thing but it’s just… I think astrology is such a gift. I was reading some crazy Time article, someone was talking about the increase in people turning to astrology at the moment, especially the younger generations, the Gen Z and Millennials, and why is it increasing so much. What’s happening with that? And it was exciting. It was like in the last four years it’s almost doubled the interest in astrology. And I just think it is, it’s this beautiful… It’s a different life hack to understand ourselves, be it historically, physically, medically, emotionally, psychologically, and just understanding the world symbolically. Isn’t that what we’re all trying to figure out anyway?
CB: Right, for sure. Yeah, and just that huge influx. Because it seems like there hadn’t been an influx of younger and newer people into astrology at that level since the 1960s, so it has been a really interesting phenomenon over the past five years or so.
KS: Oh, my god, it’s been crazy and so exciting. Yeah, I just think it gives us… Because we’re all here kind of trying to figure out what is the meaning of what we’re doing. What are we trying… Finding our passion. And again, I’m going way off of medical here, but finding your passion and what… Think about you, Chris, and what you’re passionate about in astrology. That gives you– I am going to take you back to medical– that enhances your vitality by finding those loves and finding those things that just light you up. And that is enhancing medically that rising sign, that Sun sign, that… I don’t know all your astrology. But those are the things, you know? Finding those things that light you up, is stress management. And so in some way we’re using astrology as this what has been a very five stressful years that helps, you know, it actually helps with our cortisol levels and support our system. I will bring up… I can bring anything back to health really, if you just give me long enough. [laughs]
CB: Right. I think one thing that came up there though is with all these different areas, even something like another one I didn’t mention was financial astrology, for example, is you also need to have training and be good at what you do just in that area outside of the astrology. That’s a really important component and that’s something that you’ve done is that you have a really extensive background in these other areas of health. That’s actually really crucial because otherwise, you’re not going to necessarily be able to apply the astrology as effectively in that context if you’re not good at both basically at the same time.
KS: Yes, yeah. Absolutely. And I’m not trying to dissuade anybody who does regular astrology from studying medical. And there are safe ways to apply basics of medical if you don’t have medical training. But yeah, absolutely. For me, you can find all the layers really quickly of what the body is trying to tell you because I’ve 30 plus years of studying or working in health professions and I don’t even know how many clients I’ve seen over the years. I lecture at university, I supervise students as they do their intern hours as well so I get to watch all these baby naturopaths and nutritionists as they see clients. So I get to just watch it. And I get to watch them all. Yeah, it’s just such a gift that I am always on that dealing with the body and physiology and learning all the latest. You know what’s fun, Chris, is I get to learn all the latest information medically and then I swear it’s just justifying the medical astrology again and again. All this medical information that’s just come out on the gut-brain axis like how our digestive system has this direct line with our vagus nerve straight up to the brain and this conversation that’s happening there. But also, we now know our digestive system, especially our small intestines which is Virgo or the sixth house, our digestive system holds 70% of our immune system. The immune system is Pisces in the 12th house. And so you have this beautiful awareness that what’s going on in the gut is massively impacting the immune system. And that’s that sixth-12th house opposition. It just justifies whoever figured out all the medical astrology. They were so spot on but they didn’t even know this stuff. That’s the stuff that blows me away. Or the vagus nerve, you know, that sixth house, Mercury traditional ruler of the sixth. Oh my god, it’s our digestive system talking to our brain and it’s like its, “Huh!” [gasps] It takes my breath away how awesome it is when science confirms what we already knew in medical astrology.
CB: Yeah, I think it just goes back to the extent that astrology figured out really something core about how the universe operates and functions in that it provides some actual legitimate insight into that as well as into how people’s lives go on a symbolic level, that it’s like that continues to be true throughout different eras and different civilizations and stuff. Because there’s something at a really core level about what they figured out with that system that speaks to the human experience of life and all the things involved in it.
KS: Oh, my god. If you sit back and look at it, you just go, “That is beautiful, how did they even figure that all out?” If you look back at the history, oh my god, more and more kudos to the people who analyzed this and figured it out the symbolism of the universe and the planets. I’m more in awe of it every day. And I’m in awe of the human body because it’s complicated and oh my god, how did that get put together? [laughs]
CB: For sure, yeah. And the evolution of humans and different things like that. There’s actually a lot of interesting stuff there. I did want to ask you about the outer planets, because we’ve talked a lot about the traditional planets and how the outer planets show up in health. For example, if somebody has outer planets connected to health or bodily sectors in the chart, how have you seen that manifest just in your experience?
KS: Yeah, I do use the outers. I do focus on more of the traditional planets, obviously, because that’s where medical astrology comes from. But you can’t dismiss the outers in health ailments. I see, especially by transit, they trigger off cascades of things we need to go look at. So, you know, Neptune and the immune system or Neptune being hard to figure out or hard to diagnose. Tradition… I shouldn’t use the word traditional. With Neptune in the sixth is a classic placement for not being able to figure out what is going on with someone’s ailments. If you ever meet anybody who’s like, “I hate modern medicine, no one can figure me out, they’re all stupid.” You meet these people at conferences that’ll be like, “I hate modern medicine.” I will almost guarantee they’ve got Neptune on an angle or more commonly Neptune in the sixth. Because it just kind of puts this filter you can’t see through. So yeah, Neptune… All the outers.
CB: Yeah, just nebulousness surrounding health issues. That’d be a good keyword for Neptune.
KS: Yeah, that’s such a great word. Yes. So yes, I do use all the outers, I especially look at them triggering off health issues or triggering off insight into why a health issue is already happening and maybe what to go do about it. Sometimes it’s more of an enlightenment. And half– not half– but getting to the heart of an ailment is sometimes understanding more about the ailment or the bigger picture of an ailment and what you need to learn from it. I’m not saying all ailments and health stuff, some of it’s just physical, but some of it has that bigger understanding of ourself that we need to go through. But yes, I definitely use the outers. Yeah.
CB: So even sometimes maybe a period where a person is going through a nebulous health issue and they’re not able to figure it out, maybe it would coincide with the Neptune transit. But then sometimes, I know with Neptune transits you get to the other side of the transit and then things become clearer, or something that was obscure, you eventually figure out. But it’s like while you’re in the midst of that, sometimes it can be really hard to put your finger on exactly what’s going on.
KS: Yes, that’s a great description of it. And sometimes that’s part of it. Sometimes there’s a surrender in not getting to know that you have to go through to get to the other side. And that’s not fun, I’ve been there. I have a history of chronic fatigue and trying to figure out what’s going to fix something, and sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s part of that surrender that you’re kind of in that Neptunian void where you can’t do anything about it, and then getting to that other side. Yeah, it’s not fun. And, you know, Uranus with sudden things happening or really erratic or unusual. The beauty with the outer planet transits is, again, they can be very– well, Neptune isn’t obvious, but you can see the energy happening around that ailment. Because a Neptune energy versus a Uranian energy is very different. Uranian energies can also be accidents and sudden things happening, you know? But things like Pluto, Pluto also in medical astrology, Pluto’s going deep. But it’s also about deep detox. And detox can be physical, it can be emotional, mental, spiritual, and it’s a lot of layers. If Pluto is involved, there’s a lot of layers involved. There’s a lot of, if we want to talk about skin shed, you know, transformation of shedding different layers of yourself, be they physically or emotionally. So just again, astrology gives you these great archetypes that you need to go down. And if you’re an astrologer working with medical and you don’t know the things to tell people about supplements or herbs, you know the emotional archetype, you know, the psychological archetype and you can facilitate a client that way. In natural medicine, we have a belief. We call it the holistic triad; mental, emotional, and physical. And we have these three layers to ourselves and three layers to our health. And when something goes wrong in the physical, often, the other two kind of go askew as well. They all kind of work together or go out of sync together. And the beauty is if you start working on one, so say you have a physical ailment that you just can’t get on top of, if you start supporting and you can figure out what planet is causing that, you can start to support that planet psychologically or emotionally. And it will hopefully pull back the physical. It’ll ease. Again, it’s like the planets getting heard. It’s the naughty boy, the naughty person, in the back of the class and you start to give it some attention and love even if it’s not on the physical plane. And it will hopefully help that because vitality that we talked about in constitutionally, it’s on all three of those levels. It’s not just physical. And this is where I think– and I’m by no means an expert in this area– but some of the astro-magic people are doing at the moment and petitioning and using prayer through astro– prayer is probably not the right word– but using a lot of that remediation. Again, it’s focusing on that other level that can hopefully pull the physical when we get stuck. Did that make sense? [chuckles]
CB: Yeah, for sure. And it just ties it back to when you mentioned mental, emotional, and physical and the connection between those two. It made me think. Again, and you mentioned vitality going back to the big three in the Sun, Moon, and rising, and maybe why those are so crucial not just partially as psychological or character indicators, but how sometimes our psychology and our character can be tied in with physical or health things as part of a bigger picture.
KS: Yeah, absolutely. And that’s those big three, absolutely. I often think of it, mind, body, emotional, mental, physical, and then you could add in spirit or spiritual. You also then have the four elements, you know? You have emotional with water and physical with Earth and air with mental, and then you could do spirit or vitality with fire. I use the elements a lot that way to kind of work with… And again, doing regular astrology if you don’t do a lot of medical, working with what stress is going on, or looking at your big three elementally and how they need to be expressed is such a simple… You know, foods very easily fall into the elements, herbs fall into the elements, activities fall into the elements, and it’s a really easy way to support those big three in the body elementally. Because you can go down this crazy rulership of herbs and planets, and there’s a lot of disagreement over those rulerships. And there’s a lot of similarity. I’m in the middle of doing this massive chart to try to look at who said what about where, and other people have done that as well. Sometimes people are like, “Oh, do you look at the timing of giving medicines? Do you look at hours of…” because there’s looking at planetary hours and when to give certain medicines and there’s all these rules about it. And you can go that deep, and at times I will, but often bring it back. Health is actually about doing something basic and we don’t always have to get down to that detail. The detail can help but I want people to remember how simplified it can be. The elements are so underrated, I reckon in medical astrology.
CB: Yeah, for sure, and just in general. How rich they are in terms of the range of meanings and things and how that underpins most of the other things in the chart is just those simple elemental qualities and characteristics.
KS: Yeah, and personality. If you go back in medicine, this is where we were doing the humors and the temperaments, and there’s a lot of great books on that and how to figure out what your temperament is depending on your astrological makeup. And again there’s disagreement on how to analyse temperament as there’s disagreement in every topic in astrology. [laughs] But I often bring it back to the elements rather than the temperaments, maybe because I’m an Aries and I like to keep it simple and I’m not smart or something. I’m not quite sure why I do this. But I think the elements are so obvious and easier to work with, even than dissecting down to temperament. Because I think the doctors that were using temperaments… You know, we didn’t understand as much about the body and I’m not disagreeing. I love what they’ve done and said, and like I said, there’s great books on it. But it’s a lot trickier to get your head around than the elements. And so I often teach when I teach medical astrology, I teach much more elemental use because it’s obvious in nature, the elements, more so than temperaments and humors.
CB: Yeah, I agree. I’m much more pro-element as well, versus focusing on the temperament. That’s something I tried to emphasize in the zodiac series that I just did, about what a fundamental access point that is for understanding the signs of the zodiac and just understanding people’s birth charts based on even just elemental predispositions. In like, what does a person have more of in a chart, or what does a person have less of in a chart and how does that affect things?
KS: Yeah, it’s like I remember that’s the first class. When I studied astrology, my teacher went- I think we did elements before we did signs. And I feel like elements get moved to the side because they’re so simple, yet they’re deep and they’re so telling. I teach whole long classes on the elements medically, because again, you can do all herbs, all foods, all activities, and it’s so easy to look at a chart and go, “Oh my gosh, you’re really dominant water and you’ve got no Earth.” I’m not talking about you, just in general. I don’t know your astrology. And it’s like, “Okay. Well, that’s easy. I can go after that. I know how to prescribe Earth things to try to balance that out.” And a lot of the times we’ve got already figured it out intuitively, and already some of our favorite pastimes help support are missing or depleted elements. Yeah? We’re also going to be a little bit addicted to our good elements that are high. [laughs]
CB: Yeah, or we import people into our lives that have that element that we’re lacking, and then they are the ones that get us to do those things that were otherwise sort of missing out on?
KS: It’s so true. I may or may not have married somebody who was my missing element. [laughs]
KS: Nice. That’s very cliché of you, but also romantic at the same time. That’s funny.
KS: It irritates me to know. And at times because it is my missing, I’m like, “What? What are we… Why do we have to do this?” But it’s good medicine for me.
CB: Yeah. Well, that’s really funny how I think the longer I’m in astrology, how sometimes there’s astrology 101 things that we learn first, and then we move on and we try to get into more complicated or advanced or complex techniques. But then sometimes the later you get in your career, how things come full circle and you end up somehow back where you started and realizing that sometimes the most basic things in astrology are actually some of the most compelling things that are the most useful once you’ve sort of seen everything.
KS: Oh, I love that idea, Chris. And they’re most powerful. They’re so powerful. It’s like I was talking about with planetary hours or when to give a certain medicine. There’s whole lists on when to pick certain herbs depending on its rulership and then when to process them. I don’t disagree. I may or may not be taking a spagyrics class, you know, alchemy and spagyrics just to get my head deeper into it. But it’s so detailed and when to give them medicine. I have trouble even getting my clients to take medicine, let alone telling them they’re only allowed to have it at 7:00 am and 2:00 pm when they’re at school pickup or something like that. I’m just excited if they take the medicine and do the dietary advice I’ve given them, let alone what hour they’re doing it. I’m not disagreeing with it because I do things that way, but that is so detailed. It just overwhelms people. I love that you’re going back to those basics, or that you’re talking about it that way because I love them. Every time I teach on the elements, I’m like, “This is so… If we just worked on our elements medically, we would get so far!” Your clients that don’t understand a lot of astrology are going to… It’s easy to explain the elements and it’s obvious. We see nature. The elements are in nature everywhere. Every ancient society and culture if you look at like, you know, I’m in Australia so the Aboriginal, or in India or China or… Oh my gosh, I gotta make sure… I’ve gone blank. First Nations people all figured out, everybody figured out the elements first. And I teach that when I teach medical astrology. We all have this lineup in traditional cultures of the elements and we all found the same ideas, because that’s studying the simplistic what’s in front of you. And sometimes health comes back to that.
CB: Yeah, for sure. You mentioned electional and it brings up a point sometimes I think about, which is sometimes I think when people get into astrology, there can be a tendency sometimes to focus on it too much to the detriment of other things. But it seems like most of the time, more experienced practitioners recommend to clients that it’s like, “You need to put front and center what you need to do first primarily, like medically or practically speaking. If you need to do something, then you need to just do it and not necessarily wait or put something off that’s important for astrological reasons, because sometimes that can be not good to do.” If that makes sense, or if you understand what I mean.
KS: Yeah, yeah. If I tell somebody they need to go off dairy, I don’t want them to wait for… I know that’s not what you’re talking about but I’m just thinking about the things that people don’t like to do. Yeah, if you don’t do it, you’re not going to get any result. And electional is a big part of medical and I’m going to admit that I don’t use it a lot. I’m so busy doing the groundwork with clients and getting them to do the basics. It depends on what we’re talking about with electional as well because I probably do use it more than I think, but I don’t… I don’t do predictive medical astrology. I think it’s an ethical issue for me. And maybe I don’t think I’m good enough at it, but I don’t actually think that’s it. Sometimes I have people show up and they’re like, “When am I going to get better? Astrologically, what is the timing of this illness?” And there are incredible ways to look at stuff like that, but I don’t think ethically it’s my place to tell somebody, “Oh, you’re not going to get better until this transit.” Or, “This transit is really dangerous. Once you get past this transit, you might be okay.” That’s setting up a negative thought pattern for that person and I don’t want to be responsible for that. And so when people call me for consults and they’re like, “I want to know when I’m going to get better,” how long is a piece of string, Chris? I don’t know if you’re going to do the groundwork to get better. So I’m not going to predict, because of a certain transit or alignment, that you will or will not get better. Because if I say you will get better, are you going to do any of the work to get better or are you just going to hope that transit is going to get you better? And I think ethically, it’s not my place to predict. I can’t go down that route. And I made that decision lately. I don’t know, how do you feel about that? What do you think?
CB: There’s a lot of really tricky and interesting ethical issues when it comes to prediction or it comes to health and things like that, and it’s tricky because sometimes it’s like the astrologer doesn’t have control over that, and sometimes there is a question about like, where I think every astrologer, their main directive is always kind of like to do no harm and to be helpful and not do anything that would be harmful or counterproductive, either literally, physically, or even psychologically or emotionally. And I think sometimes with timing, that can be really tricky because there’s things with timing that as astrologers, maybe we can kind of deal with or adapt to abstractly in terms of looking at timing techniques. But as a client, maybe there’s certain things that wouldn’t be helpful to know if it’s not an optimistic-looking outlook for the near future.
KS: Yeah, I can go back. My original astrology teacher has passed away. 18 years ago, she passed away.
CB: Who was that?
KS: Her name was Parampara Hughes, she was an Australian astrologer. Kelly Surtees’s original teacher, actually. And she was this amazing Gemini who got– I’m sure she’d be okay with me talking about it– she got lung cancer. And then we were watching Pluto come to her opposition, to her Sun, and it was like, “Mmh, what’s going on?” It’s literally as literal as that. Right? But can you predict she’s going to die at that opposition? No. But is there a chance? Yeah, absolutely, that’s a big transit Pluto opposite your Sun. But other people, you know, millions of people every year have Pluto opposite their Sun and they’re not dying of cancer. But you don’t know that she’s not going to have some plutonic cathartic form of treatment that’s going to completely change and she goes into remission, you just don’t… I don’t want to couch those words and I don’t want to… I get really nervous with… There are people that are amazing at predictive astrology and I will refer on, but I decided a good 10 years ago that ethically with my medical knowledge and then with astro-knowledge, I don’t do any form of… It’s probably not correct to say I don’t do predictive astrology, but I’m very very cautious ethically about it. I don’t want to be impeding somebody’s health or scaring the shit out of them or… Excuse me.
CB: Right. Because even something like that like a Pluto transit, going through chemotherapy is already such a hard, very, you know?
KS: That’s a Pluto experience.
CB: Yeah, that’s a Pluto experience in and of itself and that would fit the symbolism of that transit pretty sufficiently. So yeah, I understand then to say that somebody would or would not survive that. That’s kind of a little bit beyond the scope of what you can say safely or reliably, especially when that statement could be psychologically harmful or impactful.
KS: Oh, so damaging. Yeah. And I think that’s where not just medical, but all astrology we have to be so– and I know people teach this but I’m just reminding everybody– we have to be so cautious about how we explain things to our clients and focus on things, because we can scare the bejesus… I had it happen once. When I was a baby astrologer, I went and saw someone and they gave me so many negative things. [laughs] I knew enough astrology to walk out of there and go, “Okay, that’s their opinion, that’s one level of this.” And maybe I needed that experience as a practitioner to really teach me to be cautious, and I never thought about that until just now, but maybe that was the whole point of it. And yeah, I just think we need to be so cautious. So predictive, I get nervous when… I think people are amazing at it but yeah, I steer a little bit clear of that one.
CB: Sure. Yeah, so you want to be helpful and healing, ethical issues. There’s also sometimes people that get really lucky, it seems like meeting a doctor or a health practitioner that they jive with or have good synastry with, and it seems like there’s some element there that might be tied in with things like synastry, or I know in some traditions, even just having certain placements in your chart indicating that maybe it will be easier getting outside help for certain things or things like that. And I always thought that was interesting, at least just abstractly or philosophically if—
KS: It is.
CB: And it is true, okay. So that’s something you’ve seen?
KS: It is. I think it’s totally. I think it works that way. Like we talked about Neptune in the sixth making things nebulous, as you said. I’m now getting used to that word, but I’ll credit you, I promise. [laughs]
CB: Okay, I got a trademark on that word.
KS: Trademark on nebulous with Neptune in the sixth, I love that. In traditional medical, there’s a couple of things. A, we talk about the seventh house being the doctor. In decumbature, we look at the seventh as well as who we’re consulting. We look at what’s going on with that seventh house synastry there, but the bigger one that I have found more important, if you can access your practitioner’s chart or if you can somehow figure out– you don’t even need their whole chart, you just need to figure out how old they are. Because they say you do not want your practitioner’s Saturn to sit within your sixth house. Because they say if the Saturn is in, you know, so your doctor’s Saturn in your sixth house because you’re just going to have a restrictive influence on their health. It’s not going to work, it’s not going to flow. I’ve known that for years and I have worked around it sometimes with people where I will give them information, but I won’t give them medicines. I send them to other people. If I know my Saturn is in a client’s sixth, I’ll be like, “Okay, let’s go for some structure.” And we use some other words of Saturn and then I send them on to actually have medicines made because I don’t want to hand those over.
But I had this one experience where this student actually wanted to see me as a client and I just had this weird feel intuitively. She wanted to come for asthma treatment of all things. I was like, “Something’s just not sitting right. It doesn’t feel like I should be treating her and I don’t know why.” And I got a hold of her astrological chart and sure enough, my Saturn was in her sixth. So if she’s coming to me for breathing inability to begin with, and then my Saturn is sitting on that spot, that’s a nightmare for her. So I was like, “No, I need to…” You know, I straight off sent her on. So, there’s that. There’s other signatures. Even, let’s go back to the elements, Chris. I’ve had experiences where friends have all gone to a practitioner and raved about like, “Oh my god, he was so great. I learned so much,” and I’m like, “Oh, I’m going to go too.” This is even like going to psychics, right? And they’re like, “Oh, such a great read blah blah blah.” I trot off to the same practitioner and I’m ready for this amazing thing, and the person shows up, they get locked out of their car, and they show up 45 minutes late. And then they’re a bit flustered and then they tell me all this stuff that I’m like, “No, no,” there was no vibe between me and the practitioner. Communication was on levels apart. And my three best friends loved him. I put that down to the elements sometimes. It’s just that miscommunication between people. It’s probably the right information, but the way they said it and the way I ingested what they said was incorrect.
CB: Yeah, I think that’s so crucial and there’s something really important there just about, you know? Because everybody in our lives just in general without astrology, we have certain people that we get along with sometimes strikingly well, and there’s other people that maybe it just doesn’t click as well with. You can usually actually see that in astrology and that’s really the point of synastry, is it shows us why there are these mysterious connections that we have with some people and these mysterious ways in which certain relationships flow really well and others are more challenging, or always things that are at cross purposes even for reasons that aren’t the fault of any person but sometimes just the circumstances sort of put us against certain people. And that that’s also true in the context of relationships between a medical practitioner and a client is a really interesting additional facet of just that basic principle.
KS: Yeah, and it comes down to feeling heard, doesn’t it? The conversation with a practitioner. If you don’t feel heard, you’re not going to feel supported in what your health ailment is. I teach naturopathy at a university, so I’ve got these final year naturopathy nutrition students who don’t learn any medical astrology, but somehow sometimes they find out that that’s what I do and so I sneak in a little lecture for them. As long as they’re not going to tell the dean and get me in trouble. [chuckles] And one of the things I teach is the elements and communication. I talk about as simple as… And I know we as astrologers know the elements go so much further than Sun sign, but these are people that don’t know astrology and I’m talking about if your dominant air, and you’ve got a practitioner only using watery emotional language, that air sign is going to be incredibly uncomfortable with what the person has said. I actually do it in class, I actually physically get close to the air sign person sitting there and I start asking them how they feel. And you can see them squirming, you know? They have feelings, absolutely, but they want to think about how they feel before… They have to process it here before it feels. It’s my favorite counseling tool for practitioners. Again, it goes back to the basics in astrology when we’re talking to clients. If we just change our language elementally, they will understand what you’re telling them better. That’s free extra pluses for you as a practitioner, that they– not that I’m doing it for people to like me– but they will feel like they got much more worth out of the consult if you explain things in their language and they’re heard. It’s like going to a doctor that talks to you too medically and you got no idea what they’re saying. They need to take it down to your level of education. What a gift? What a gift that we all have, right?
CB: Yeah, I love that. So, the ability to understand and to see a person’s chart and understand how to best connect with them in a way that they’re going to be receptive to. And that being something that you can use to your advantage and in a way that’s going to help them more.
KS: Well, and in natural medicine, there’s these quotes from– I can’t even remember if this is Paracelsus or Isaac Newton or somebody like that– but there’s a quote about going and seeing a practitioner. I’m not going to get this quote, I’ll find the quote for you. But it’s about, you know, half of the medicines we give, and all of the conversation is about occupying the person while the body heals itself, right? And so there’s this whole thing about the body’s trying to get better by itself, but then if we can start a communication where the person is feeling heard and seen, they on an energetic level will feel better and hopefully part of that nature body will come up and, you know? We’re occupied being heard while the body’s trying to heal. Did that make sense? I have to find you the quote, I’m obviously not very good at quotes. [laughs]
CB: Yeah, for sure. There’s definitely something really important about the practitioner and meeting the person where they’re at, and also being a good medium for communicating that information seems really crucial.
KS: Yeah, you think about when we talk about how friendships are so crucial how when you go and meet one of those true friends, you just start feeling better on a different level. And if we talk about health and emotional, mental support, we know friendships are vital for longevity and happiness. There’s all this research on that. But again, going to your practitioner whether it’s an astrologer or a health practitioner, if you can have that deeper connection that they feel heard and understood– I literally teach this in naturopathy– that’s half the job done. Them just feeling in that… It’s why people go to counselors, you are in that space to be heard. But health practitioners and astrologers, that’s part of our… I think it’s part of our job. It isn’t just to tell somebody about themselves, it’s to make them… You know, it’s that enlightenment of understanding yourself that we love so much about astrology. And that’s what we’re actually doing, is just teaching people about themselves, isn’t it?
CB: That’s really interesting. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense and it makes me think of how astrology is traditionally ruled by Mercury or astrologers are said to be ruled by Mercury because of that role. And really, yeah, you are as an astrologer sitting down and trying to communicate something on a fundamental level about their life. And for a person to be truly understood on that level, that is one of the core experiences that’s so important about getting a consultation.
KS: Yeah and if you think about Mercury and Hermes, he’s one of the healing gods. If you go back traditionally, being heard is one of the biggest parts of healing, isn’t it?
CB: Right. Yeah, for sure. I think also there’s something about, also going back to the practitioner and the synastry thing between a patient and a practitioner, just something about the chance element of what their background was and what kind of things that they’ve seen, and what kind of things they have been able to treat based on seeing previous patients. There’s an element of chance there that’s not random but that might be another thing that ties in with the synastry in this really weird way, is just like if you have good synastry with somebody, maybe there’s somebody that can help you because they just happen to have had previous instances of seeing that exact thing. Versus if you have bad synastry, maybe they just haven’t seen that thing and they’re not able to connect what your issue is for no fault of any of their own or anything like that, but just as a matter of chance and the circumstances or the fate underlying the intersection of you.
KS: I love that. Oh, my god, I love that idea. I’ve never thought about it that way, but absolutely. Because you do, you get clients that come in that have been to five other practitioners and nobody’s figured it out. And you look at the medical astrology, or even if I’m not using medical, and they tell you and you’re like… I will have that databank of, “Oh, I’ve had this experience, I’ve heard these symptoms from somebody before.” I had this one client, as an example, who had super fit. I deal with a lot of athletes in naturopathy and he was doing Ironman Triathlon and endurance events, super fit, he was like 50. And then all of a sudden, he had this one bad event, something happened to his kidneys that went wrong but that didn’t make any sense. And then all of a sudden, his blood pressure was out of control. This is a fit, healthy, 50-year-old with no history of blood pressure issues, and all of a sudden four medications are not even controlling his blood pressure.
CB: Wow.
KS: That was not normal in itself, right? There was a Neptunian thing happening here, right? Nobody could figure it out and doctors are just upping the medication because it should work, but it wasn’t. I was just lucky enough to know that I had had a previous client– and again, this might be synastry– but I had this previous client who started to have blood pressure trouble, but had a bunch of other symptoms which pointed to gut parasites. Yeah, parasites are a huge issue for a lot of people. And lucky enough that within this guy’s chart, because I was doing medical, there were other issues around the bowel. He didn’t have any bowel symptoms, which is what you normally get with gut parasites, but he had other things pointing to those being weaker systems. And so between being able to see his medical and having that knowledge from a previous client, which hopefully probably was some random weird synastry, I was like, “I know this doesn’t make any sense because it’s blood pressure and that’s a totally different system, but I think we need to go get you tested for gut parasites.” Four parasites. Has to go through hardcore– you know, parasites sometimes get considered to be ruled by Pluto, if we’re going outers– and had to take a ton of very Plutonic cathartic style of treatment. Dealt with his parasites, no more blood pressure.
CB: Wow.
KS: Because he also didn’t have… There was no signatures for blood pressure in his chart. There was nothing to do with those rulerships of circulation and the heart. Again, it’s sheer luck. He could have gone to any other naturopath but I had that knowledge and then I had the astrology to go have a look at this system. It’s just a gift of the universe that they end up with you, I don’t know. Yeah, changed it. He went from four medications that made him feel terrible, to none. And fixing a problem permanently. Yeah.
CB: That must feel really fulfilling also as a practitioner, the instances where you are able to really help somebody or where something can help alleviate or kind of change a person’s life.
KS: I think that’s why we’re practitioners. You don’t kind of go, “Oh, my god, I want to be this hero.” Those are the times where you want to cry. You’re so excited for somebody. And it’s just sheer chance that you have the info, they’ve booked in with you and you’ve… It’s not that it’s me that fixes it, I’ve just somehow obtained that information to help facilitate it. I think that’s one of the most amazing experiences you get to have as a practitioner. Because you’re going to have a lot that aren’t like that, but the cathartic life-changing one, you’ll never forget those amazing stories with your clients. And you only get one every few years that’s like that but they also change you for the better.
CB: For sure, yeah.
KS: And I think astrologers get that too, right? You can give people insight into themselves. Surely, you’ve probably had emails over the years that someone’s like, “Oh, you told me this and then it ricocheted to this and this, and oh, my gosh, thank you.” And they come out of the blue, those emails. Right?
CB: Yeah, for sure. Many years later. That’s always really fulfilling.
KS: I have a little file on my computer where I save those emails. In case I’m having a bad day, I can go read those emails. I know that sounds… I’m never going to do anything with them. I don’t use them as testimonials or anything, they’re just… And sometimes they’re the patients that you thought went away and didn’t do anything, and it turns out you said enough that just facilitated them. I had a lady contact me recently after a medical reading two years prior and she’s like, “I lost 100 pounds after that reading because of the path you sent me on.” Now, she did absolutely all of the work, but I pointed out in medical astrology what was happening and what she could try. It was just the right info at the right time. What a gift that we can do that with people.
CB: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, and you build up also those case studies and that history in the back of your mind that you then draw on from that point forward. And some of those really striking examples always stand out and sometimes become useful in future instances where the same thing comes up again.
KS: Oh, yeah. When they show up again and you’re like, “Oh, my god, I know this! I’ve got this! Even though it’s abnormal, I think I know what this is.” And it’s just… Yeah, my little Aries gets really excited when that happens. But sadly, it’s not as frequently as you wish.
CB: For sure. All right. Well, we’ve covered so much. I’m actually really amazed at how many things we’ve touched on here. What do you have coming up? I know you’ve been very active and you teach and you do consultations and all sorts of things. What do you have coming up, or what are you working on right now?
KS: So I am… This has been really fun by the way, Chris, thanks for having me. What do I have coming up? I always have online classes happening, so…
CB: What’s your website?
KS: Oh, my website is astrologyofhealth.com, nice and simple. There’s always classes going on. I’m actually just starting a mentor group, but people need to have been through three levels of medical with me to do the mentor groups so that’s not very useful that I advertise that. [chuckles] I have lots of stuff that’s already pre-recorded courses, I’ve a few colleges I’ll lecture for coming up this year. But I guess my big thing– and conferences, always lecturing because conferences is so fun– my big thing is I’m in the middle of writing two different books. One of them is much smaller, and hoping to get that done by the end of this year. It’s on the houses, but having nothing to do with regular astrology. It’s just medical. Yeah, it’s literally just how I see the houses kind of… We’ll call it a booklet. How I see the houses implicated as the areas of the body and how in natal reading especially we need to look at that more. Because in medical astrology, it’s not been the traditional area of focus is the houses. It’s much more of the planets first and then the signs, and I think through all my years I’ve become this very house-focused astrologer. I’m not talking about house systems or anything to do with that, I’m literally just talking about medical. But I have also a kind of bigger medical astrology book probably a year away, but starting to work on it with somebody else because I can’t seem to get things done by myself. [laughs] So, it’s time. 30 years, it’s time for some books rather than some courses. That’s what I’m trying to work on, Chris. [chuckles]
CB: Nice. That’s a good Saturn cycle thing. I think that’s a propriate thing to complete a Saturn cycle with.
KS: Yes. Yes, it is. And I did. Yeah, from when I started versus now. Absolutely. Yes. I hadn’t thought about it that way. [chuckles] Which is obvious, but I didn’t think about it. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. Well, there’s a lot of things like that right now where I’m realizing there’s a lot of Saturn cycles being completed of different things and it’s just interesting seeing that, especially since Saturn just went into Pisces and seeing what that is for different people starting to get a preview of that and what that’s going to be for the next two or three years.
KS: Yeah, and that is really when I started studying. It was when Saturn went into Pisces last time. Yeah, that was my big… Yeah, I literally started naturopathy when Saturn went into Pisces last time.
CB: So it was partially like a Saturn… Was it a Saturn transit for you in a way? I forget, do you share? How many of your chart details?
KS: Yeah, I can share. Yes, I’m Pisces rising. So, yes, very obvious Saturn thing going on, obviously, but I hadn’t looked at it. Do we ever look at our own astrology? [chuckles]
CB: Yeah, sometimes. I think we all go through different phases of intensely looking at it versus not paying attention to it as much and it’s really interesting always seeing different astrologers at different phases in terms of their career.
KS: Oh, I love it. And I love talking to other… Yeah, I love having other people do reads because you just don’t… I can’t be bothered to look at my own or I’m too busy or whatever. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, books coming. Be patient, please. [chuckles] But yeah, over COVID, I created some bigger medical astrology courses for people that wanted to learn medical astrology, kind of the way I… Very naturopathic medical astrology, I would say. And I have two levels. I’ve two styles of how I teach. There’s medical astrology for astrologers, which is much more technical astrological but much more basic medical– not basic, I’m not dumbing it down, but I’m keeping it simple. And then I have classes that are called medical astrology for health practitioners. That’s more baby-style astrology, but deeper medically and with treatment. So, those are my two. Those are the two areas I’ve really kind of branched into.
CB: Awesome, that sounds amazing. Well, we’ll have to talk again when your book or books come out because that sounds like really interesting topics for follow-ups. Yeah, otherwise people can check out your website for more information about your work and your different offerings. I can put a link to that in the description below this video on YouTube as well as on the podcast website for this episode.
KS: You’re amazing, Chris. Thank you.
CB: Yeah, thanks so much for joining me for this today. This was great.
KS: This was awesome. It was awesome to finally get it together. Even though I had some technical issues. [laughs]
CB: You know, we all have days like that. But, yeah. Thanks, I guess, for joining me. Thanks, everyone for watching or listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast and we’ll see you again next time.
Special thanks to all the patrons that helped to support the production of this episode of the podcast through our page on patreon.com. In particular, a shoutout to the patrons on our Producers tier, including Thomas Miller, Catherine Conroy, Kristi Moe, Ariana Amour, Mandi Rae, Angelic Nambo, Issa Sabah, Jake Otero, Mimi Stargazer, and Jeanne Marie Kaplan. If you appreciate the work I’m doing here on the podcast and you’d like to find a way to support it, then please consider becoming a patron through our page on patreon.com. In exchange, you can get access to bonus content that’s only available to patrons of the podcast, such as early access to new episodes, the ability to attend the live recording of the monthly forecast episodes, our monthly Auspicious Elections Podcast or another exclusive podcast series called The Casual Astrology Podcast, or you can even get your name listed in the credits at the end of each episode. For more information visit patreon.com/astrologypodcast.
If you’re looking to get an astrological consultation, we have a list of recommended astrologers at theastrologypodcast.com/consultations. The astrologers on the list are friends of the podcast that have been featured in different episodes over the years, and they have different specialties such as natal astrology, electional astrology, synastry, rectification, or horary astrology. You can get a 10% discount when you book a consultation with one of the astrologers on our list by using the promo code ASTROLOGYPODCAST.
The astrology software that we use and recommend here on the podcast is called Solar Fire for Windows, which is available for the PC at Alabe.com. Use the promo code AP15 to get a 15% discount. For Mac users, we recommend a software program called Astro Gold for Mac OS, which is from the creators of Solar Fire for PC and it includes both modern and traditional techniques. You can find out more information at astrogold.io, and you can use the promo code ASTROPODCAST15 to get a 15% discount.
If you’d like to learn more about my approach to astrology, then I’d recommend checking out my book titled Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune where I go over the history, philosophy, and techniques of ancient astrology, taking people from beginner up through intermediate and advanced techniques for reading birth charts. You can get a print copy of the book through Amazon or other online retailers, or there’s an ebook version available through Google Books.
If you’re really looking to expand your studies of astrology then I would recommend my Hellenistic astrology course, which is an online course on ancient astrology where I take people through basic concepts up through intermediate and advanced techniques for reading birth charts. There’s over 100 hours of video lectures as well as guided readings of ancient texts, and by the time you finish the course, you will have a strong foundation on how to read birth charts as well as make predictions. You can find out more information at courses.theastrologyschool.com.
And finally, thanks to our sponsors, including The Mountain Astrologer Magazine, which is a quarterly astrology magazine which you can read in print or online at mountainastrologer.com.