The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 439, titled:
Unshaming the Signs of the Zodiac
With Chris Brennan and Britten LaRue
Episode originally released on March 9, 2024
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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 Teresa “Peri” Lardo
Transcription released March 29, 2024
Copyright © 2024 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey, my name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. Joining me today is astrologer Britten LaRue, and we’re gonna be talking about unshaming the signs of the zodiac, reconceptualizing the qualities that are sometimes viewed as negative, and radically accepting what we invalidate in each sign. So Britten is the author of the new book Living Astrology: How to Weave the Wisdom of All 12 Signs into Your Everyday Life, which just came out today, March 5th, 2024. So hey Britten – welcome to the show.
BRITTEN LARUE: Thank you so much for having me, Chris.
CB: Yeah. Congratulations on the release of your book; this is a big deal.
BL: It is. I’m so proud today.
CB: Yeah. So here’s the cover of the book, Living Astrology, and I’ll maybe splice that in as an overlay. So your book is great. I got a print copy; you sent me a copy. And we had a funny connection because I actually, a couple of years ago, was like, in a local store in Denver called Ritualcravt, and I was shopping for like, a birthday gift for a friend, and I saw these amazing astrology workbooks there, and I ended up picking up a few of them for a friend for their birthday and it turned out to be your workbooks that you have that were like a – not a precursor, but almost like a precursor to this book, right?
BL: Yes. I self-published those in 2020. It didn’t begin as a quarantine project; I was already doing it when we went into quarantine, and then it just became a passion project throughout that year – just furiously writing one a month, getting them out by the time it was the next sign’s season. So —
CB: Nice.
BL: — the publisher actually found —
CB: Here’s the Scoprio one.
BL: Yeah!
CB: Here’s a Scorpio one.
BL: Yeah, the publisher of this new book discovered the workbooks and reached out and said, “Would you like to work on a book project?” And I said, “Yes.”
CB: Nice.
BL: Here we are.
CB: Brilliant. And one of the things I love about your books – both the workbooks and the new book – is that it’s not just very insightful and sort of deep discussions about astrology and the archetypes, but also it’s very beautifully illustrated and you have a real knack for design and art. And you actually have a background in art, right?
BL: Yes, art history for two decades.
CB: Okay. That’ll do it —
BL: Yeah, one of my —
CB: — so that’s – that’s all you need to do if you wanna illustrate your astrology book well is just have two decades of art history behind you.
BL: One of my very first clients, it was like, destiny, is a designer here – Angela George – and she began to send me drawings in her journal, and she would write out the words that I said and then draw around the words that came through in the reading. And so I told her that I would love to create, like, pamphlets for each sign to help people understand the sign and she said, “Well, I know about book design; I could help you with that.” And so Angela’s also the designer on the book too.
CB: Nice. That’s amazing. All right. Brilliant. Well, I wanna get into our topic today, and this is a topic that you’ve been working on for a while, this concept of unshaming the signs of the zodiac as a project. What was the genesis of that, or what’s the core of that concept for you?
BL: Yeah, so I think the genesis relates to how I found astrology, which was really in a time of big change. I was at the beginning of divorce, feeling old identities leave me, and I turned to astrology wondering if it could help me find new ways of being in this world. Like, am I destined to kind of repeating the same patterns? Are there ways I could love myself more? Are there ways I could relate more skilfully with other humans in relationship? Are there ways I could feel more purposeful and meaningful in what, how I participate in my life? And I was a self-studIer at the beginning – an autodidact – before I sought formal training. And I just naturally turned to every sign as a teacher for how to be human, and I saw from the beginning the signs as like, ways of being a human, as opposed to a set of personality traits, which is how we often see it described as. And so I began to feel into ways to love myself through each sign, whether I had placements in that sign or not. And then I noticed as I became an astrologer and began practicing astrology that clients would come to me really most wanting support in trusting that new ways of being for them were possible, and if it would be possible to love themselves more. And I began to notice that just in conversation, I was helping clients to unshame – hold less shame around – the way they expressed that particular sign – say, their rising sign or something like this – like, and speaking to the core essence of what that sign wants to be when it’s expressed without shame. And it seemed like that was sort of what I was doing all along; it’s built into the workbooks. But I started becoming fascinated with shame as something we’re all carrying really like, a year and a half ago, and I just heard myself say one day, “What we need is like, an unshaming in astrology – like, unshaming the signs.” And I just said it, and it felt very exciting as a phrasing, and then I decided to take it on as a project to bring out in the world to see how it lands on other people with Aries last year, and I’ve just been talking about unshaming the signs for 12 months, and it’s been very fun to participate in community discourse this way. It brings in a lot of interaction.
CB: Yeah. Well, let’s talk about – because it’s such an interesting concept because at the core of it is just like, the concept of shame, and like, what is the concept of shame? I was just looking up like, a definition on Google, and it says, “a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior.” But in this context, it’s within the context of qualities that become associated in our culture with certain signs of the zodiac, each of the signs, which are sometimes viewed as negative and sometimes as things that are like, shortcomings or other things like that.
BL: Yes. Sometimes I think that shame isn’t even a feeling; it’s like, a set of lenses through which we see the world. I like to say that shame is spectacular, as in spectacles, as in a show or like, a screen. And it’s like, what we’re seeing is actually the expectation of a replay of an experience we had as children where we were either good or we were bad. Because shame, to me, essentially, sees the world through the lens of the binary “good” or “bad.” And so, when we’re moving from a shame place, we’re moving through the world trying to hold on to being seen as good, and we’re trying to avoid being seen as bad. And so it’s like, it begins to propel all decisions and all behavior is this self-protecting motivation to like, keep us from feeling that terrible feeling of being bad. And so ultimately, this feels like a limiting way of being because we’re not moving from a liberated set of truths about ourselves as much as we are to prevent the shaming of badness by somebody else, because it’s someone seeing us as bad that activates shame – it’s the witnessing component. This is what I found from working with shame a lot the last year and a half.
CB: Right. I’m looking up some like, synonyms, and there’s things like “humiliate,” “mortify,” “chagrin,” “embarrass,” and a lot of these are almost like, reactive social emotions that you have in the presence of somebody else.
BL: Yeah. Witnessing is part of what activated that contraction into shame at the beginning, meaning through the younger self, and then it’s to prevent that outer witnessing that we, like, behave in this life to prevent feeling shamed. But we also can be our own internal witness, where like, we become the witness inside ourselves that’s shaming ourselves, and that’s when we hear the inner critic and that’s when we hear the voice that’s like, “Who do you think you are? Da-da-da-da-dah. Like, why do you think you could really just do that?” That’s what – when we hear our own voice saying such mean things to ourselves, we’re replaying the shaming voice that we internalized as children, and then we’re just living like this. And so when people will come to me as their astrologer and they’re looking to activate new pathways that feel more exciting and liberating and flowing and free, if they’re wanting to feel like they can feel more empowered in this world, this just kept returning as the place to really unpack, because there’s often this voice, the shaming voice, that someone is hearing. So if I could help them unshame the Leo that they want to express freely, unshame the Capricorn that’s trying to do its thing for them! Then I’m able to support them in kind of uncoupling from that mean voice to help them feel more liberated.
CB: That’s brilliant. So yeah, so sometimes it’s an internal self-criticalness, but sometimes socially shaming is like, useful or necessary I guess because it enforces or is used to force either ethical or social laws or mores, but sometimes that can be misapplied and, you know, applied in bad ways that become self-limiting.
BL: Yes. Yes, if all we really know is that we’re trying to do something to avoid being bad, that doesn’t feel like being very self-trusting or empowered. I think that one of the things that I’ve learned from working with shame is that shame does a real number on self-trust. And so the more shame that we’ve known, the more we can feel cut off from trusting ourselves that we’re gonna move from a place of authority that is not meant to cause harm. And then we can trust our desires and trust what’s moving through us as made for goodness rather than not listen to what’s trying to move through us to make sure that we’re not being bad. It’s not very self-trusting when we’re operating from just trying to prevent badness. And so at the end of the day, I feel like this piece around growing self-trust is how you can learn to listen to your own truth and not make decisions in this world just based on “is it good or is it bad?”
CB: Okay. That makes sense. So, and I know one of your points is that shame is something – obviously, it’s something that comes up within the context of astrology because while astrology can be really good, I think especially in the sort of like, pop culture consciousness of astrology, there are like, qualities associated with each of the zodiac signs and sometimes there become negative qualities associated with certain signs. And so sometimes there’s a tension, then, as astrologers in terms of how we talk about astrology or how astrology is at least perceived in the public where sometimes some of this almost like, stereotypes can be like harmful in the sense that one of the things they can do is lead to feelings of like, shame.
BL: Yes. Yes, I think so. Like this accusation of like, “Ugh, I’ll never date a fill-in-the-blank sign,” or it’s like, “Ugh, it’s because of their da-da-dah.”
CB: Right.
BL: Because they’re a Gemini. This type of throwing that word at someone – throwing a sign at someone as proof of why, what? They suck at being in relationship? Like, the use of these really to me sacred words of astrology to shame someone is in how we can’t help ourselves but having been conditioned by shame, we use the words of astrology to participate in shame. And so one of the key things that I’ve learned from holding this project is that anything you would shame in someone else you’re probably shaming in yourself. There’s probably like, in that case, a Gemini part of you that you’re shaming or that you’re not listening to, or that you’re trying to control from flowering, giving you information about your desire, or else why would you need to shame someone else for it?
CB: Right. And it’s part of just a misguided like, weaponization of astrology that I think —
BL: Yes.
CB: — all astrologers tend to look down upon, but that I do think sometimes in the public by like, especially non-astrologers or people that are very surface level with the concept it’s something that does sometimes happen that’s really tricky, because it is essentially like, a misapplication of astrology in some sense.
BL: Yeah. I think so. Astrology feels, to me, like a wisdom tradition to support us humans in loving one another and in being here together. So when we use it as a way of separating us from one another, I feel it like, hurts my heart in a way. It feels sad that that’s the relationship with astrology that can come forward. And so we’re learning! We’re learning how to speak astrology for our time.
CB: In terms of shame, one of the points that you bring up is that astrologers even as a field have sometimes professional astrologers like a sense of shame surrounding the practice of the subject sometimes in the modern world where it’s not recognized as like, a legitimate discipline or phenomenon, so that it’s something also that astrologers have to get ahold of to some extent themselves in society.
BL: Yeah. I feel like this is not to allow the shaming of astrology by over-culture, which is – has really been since would you say the Enlightenment? It’s been a while. It’s not to… Make that a bigger deal than it needs to be as much as it feels to me wise to at least be aware of your relationship to the taboo nature of astrology if you practice astrology and you’re engaging with it because, I mean, I can say as someone coming from academia that if I was still in academia and doing this at the same time, I would have to feel, I would feel like I had to negotiate who am I going to let know that this is part of my life, and move through this process of slowly allowing myself to feel safe to be fully myself. And to be fully myself is to be someone madly in love with astrology and who thinks it’s so wonderful and so helpful for all of us, that I think it’s helpful to notice what one’s relationship is to the taboo quality of astrology too so that you can think about if you’re speaking it in a way that’s like, trying to convince someone that they should respect it. Trying to convince someone that they should take it seriously. Because whenever one is in a kind of like, convincing frequency, there’s – I actually think shame is present there, because as one works with shame in the body, you can feel yourself relaxing from a need to prove anything, because what’s the danger? You know? The danger of being judged for being into astrology is that maybe you are seen as someone who’s not serious. Maybe you’re seen as like, a pseudo-intellectual. Maybe you’re seen as an imposter. It’s that kind of like, “You don’t really believe that, do you?” energy that is out there in the world. And so I feel like sitting with those parts of myself that are afraid of being judged has been really helpful at detangling my relationship with astrology from a part of me that might need to like, prove something. Because at the heart of it, I don’t think there’s anything to prove. You either wanna explore this or you don’t. And I think that my favorite thing about astrology is actually that there is some piece of astrology that is reserved for mystery, which – because we can’t possibly really say we can be certain about every single thing with astrology, like how this is even possible that astrology is what it is. And in that space for mystery, we have uncertainty, which allows us to get away from the certainties of binary thinking, which is inherent to shame because shame is inherently about the binary good and bad that we, you know, have really taken on with monotheism. So yeah, I feel like if astrology is not separate for my life – and that’s how I see it – astrology is not separate from everything that I do in life, from running carpool to making coffee to meditating – that I can’t have certainty in my life, so why would I have certainty over really anything? And so astrology can really help us with unshaming, because it inherently embraces contradiction, paradox, mystery, and uncertainty, which are all really helpful tools to have in the business of unshaming and allowing ourselves to be paradoxical, mysterious human beings who are contradictory. Like, sometimes we can be like “good people” and sometimes do things that we deeply regret and we wish we hadn’t done. That doesn’t mean that we’re then “bad people.”
CB: That makes sense. Yeah. And that’s a good point, because only – you know, most polls only say that something like, 25, maybe like 30 percent tops on a good day of people around the world like, believe in astrology supposedly. Or I guess most of those polls are usually polling like, Western people in the United States. Versus the other, you know, two-thirds of the population that doesn’t believe that astrology is a legitimate thing, either for scientific reasons or for religious reasons, you had mentioned like, for example. You know, historically, something I’ve studied a lot was when astrology used to be very popular in the Roman Empire but then after the rise of Christianity, astrology was suppressed and became something that was not permissible anymore. So it’s like, that’s part of our cultural context going back over a thousand years now in terms of religious shame, you might say, and supresion. And then later, after the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment and other things like that, which some astrologers, you know, like Kepler or Copernicus actually contributed to and took part in, but part of the outcome of all of that was that astrology also lost scientific credibility and was kicked out of the universities and things like that two or three hundred years ago, so there’s also those issues of like, shame and other things surrounding the intellectual respectability of astrology relative to science and things like that. So that’s a really good point that those are sort of emotions that astrologers are familiar with due to the awkward position that they find themselves in society sometimes. But sometimes – and different astrologers go through different stages in their relationship with astrology, I think, where they feel more or less interested in engaging in debates to like, defend astrology. But at some point, like, every astrologer just has to come to a point of embracing and accepting in terms of that they found something that they think is legitimate and that that’s fine, letting it be what it is, rather than trying to convince other people that they need to take it seriously as well.
BL: Yeah. I really, I respect that some people have extremely entrenched like, beliefs and psychic structures in place that just makes them very rigid around letting astrology in. It’s just like, there’s this sense of a wall, of “I can’t get near that.” What they’re afraid of, that’s their business, you know? And just allowing that to not inhibit my own self-expression has been, I feel, like the path that I’ve been walking the last few years is just allowing everybody to be in their own story on their own path and not letting that impact what wants to move through me, that I wanna share with the world.
CB: Sure. Yeah. I like how you’ve taken that, though, in some of those reflections and then turned them into something by then recognizing how people may take some of the things that are said about the signs of the zodiac and some of that can be misapplied or used in a way that creates, you know, feelings of guilt or shame or badness, and finding ways to reconceptualize some of those things. So why don’t we transition into starting to talk about that now and set that up —
BL: Yes!
CB: — because I know we want to go through each of the signs and kind of talk about and demonstrate some of those qualities and how you take some of those things that sometimes certain signs might feel shamed for and sort of invert them in a way in order to not just reconceptualize, but put a different perspective on some of those qualities, I think, right?
BL: Yes, totally. And one of the things that I think there can be a lot of resistance to astrology is when the rhetoric is like, “Well, you’re an Aries, so you’re like this,” and then you might be like this. Ultimately, that feels, that can feel very cornering and like somebody is limiting you to who you can possibly be. And so I found that some of the language that we’ll be getting into here together as we move through the signs, I feel like the language of unshaming itself allows for a freedom that can give someone who might be resistant to astrology a sense of like, “Oh, I could get into this now that I’m understanding, I’m hearing it this way, because I don’t feel so cornered to assert that quality in me, you know, these three ways.” And so I’d love for that to come through here as well, because I feel like unshaming the signs – I hear from a lot of people who had been resistant to astrology and hear they feel like, they’re kind of like, getting at what can feel exciting for them about it.
CB: Okay. By understanding like, the full range of an archetype and then it’s not just one thing, but instead there’s a spectrum of different meanings for the signs, which can be relevant and can manifest in a person’s life in different ways?
BL: Yes. And plus, it’s one of my philosophies behind the project that it’s really helpful to release yourself from your core sign identifications with unshaming the signs, because if we’re just thinking about the signs as ways of being human, and we’re inviting one into like, the fullness of themselves, then to me it’s very helpful to see yourself as the whole zodiac, and to allow… Say you have no Virgo placements. Unshaming Virgo actually might end up being the one that most speaks to you, because Virgo is in your chart, and it was around you when you were born, and the story of Virgo shame could be one of the ones that’s most alive in your lived experience. And so this kind of release from, “Oh this is my sign, and oh I don’t need to listen to this because it’s not my sign;” unshaming the signs can be really liberating in the sense of like, your chart isn’t the center of what we’re talking about here.
CB: Okay. Yeah, and I like that also as a broader technical point that everybody has one of the 12 signs of the zodiac in their chart; it manifests in different ways in their life. Sometimes even when we don’t have placements in certain signs, we can import those signs into our life through other people who have those placements that kind of fill or make up for that gap. And then additionally, sometimes there can be ways in which certain signs are actually prominent in the chart but it’s through more subtle distinctions that people aren’t aware of or don’t notice. Like maybe if you don’t use like, the Lot of Fortune or Lot of Spirit, like, you might not know that it’s in one of those signs and therefore it’s more prominent for you, or there’s also other techniques, like the 12th parts, which is known as the dwadasamsas in Indian astrology where you divide the signs into 12, and then that can change the makeup of certain placements in a chart, so maybe that’s important as well, just that there can be ways that certain signs are important that you don’t even realize in your own life or chart, but nonetheless they’re there in a more significant way than you might think.
BL: That’s true. And plus, we all live through that time of the year of that sign and sort of like, what is up at that time of year can be reflected through the qualities of that sign. And then there’s transits through that sign that bring up those parts of your humaning, I like to say, into your awareness, and if you haven’t been paying attention to that sign, you may be not thinking as much about the whole range of yourself through that sign. Yeah.
CB: For sure. That’s a great point. As well as like, secondary progressions where planets might move into certain signs or even when I did the zodiac series a year or two ago, you know, we were often realizing that what certain signs meant or what some of their core archetype was was oftentimes defined by being a little bit different compared to the sign that was opposite to that or the other signs that were configured to it. So there’s like, a relationship between what one sign means based on its relationship to all the others and it’s sort of an integrated hole rather than something that’s isolated.
BL: Yeah, I think exactly. And that’s part of the like, if there’s a mechanics to unshaming the signs, I feel like it’s that that’s happening for our sense of wholeness in ourselves as humans is opening to every sign inside.
CB: That makes sense. All right. So let’s do this. Let’s start with the usual like, traditional first sign of the zodiac, which is Aries. I do have a little diagram, just my old diagram of the different signs of the zodiac, so the sign of Aries, ruled by Mars traditionally. So where do we start with Aries in terms of unshaming the signs?
BL: Yeah, so one of the things that I like to do as I reflect on this is something that, you know, we can participate in, listeners can play around with this on their own, is just feeling first into like, well how does Aries get shamed? You know? And so you could think about Aries acting impulsively, Aries like, firing something off before really thinking about it and then it was like, potentially harmful on the other person. Anger —
CB: Aries – Rick Levine in the Aries episode, he said his keyword was, it was like, “shoot, and then aim” or something like that was his phrase.
BL: And then aim!
CB: Or “ready, shoot, aim” – that was his phrase I think.
BL: Okay. That’s great. And so then with unshaming, I like to feel into… We can call them hot takes for unshaming. My way of approaching hot takes – well, first of all, when we say “hot take,” we’re already showing how Mars is present. Mars is part of a hot take, because there’s some heat around it. And for my part, what I’m interested in is the heat of truth – truth that’s being revealed and that’s like, creating this high sensation, like a hot sensation in the body, when you hear it. I really have no interest in hot takes that are like, attacking anyone or trying to take anybody down. I like hot takes that really reveal truth and like, what’s behind, like, what’s the Oz, you know, behind the curtain. It’s like, cultural programming that has us confused about the true essence of the thing, so. Let me just say, unshaming the signs is a hot takes kind of approach. As an Aries rising, I feel like that’s right on brand. And my desire is to reveal these truths to help one see that it’s like, it’s not you. It’s not that there’s something wrong with you, it’s just there’s cultural programming that has distorted your connection to yourself because of the shame lens around the binary in good and bad. And so then we get to like, well, what is the truth? What is the truth of Aries? And so the one I believe you had shared in your March episode is the audacity to build on a dream before you fully know what you’re doing.
CB: Yeah. I thought that was brilliant as a great way of inverting the, you know, “Aries are too impulsive” or “Aries think before acting” trope by framing it in that way as the audacity to build on a dream before you fully know what you’re doing, and how sometimes that’s necessary. Like, that’s actually a necessary function to sometimes dive head first into things without having it all planned out because sometimes that’s what’s necessary in order to get things going.
BL: Yeah. And this one is deeply influenced by my own chart invitation, which is being a very Piscean person who has a three degree of rising Ascendant, and —
CB: Can you share your chart, by the way?
BL: Yes, that’s great.
CB: Do you want me to – is it okay if I put it up?
BL: Sure.
CB: Okay. Here we go. So just so people watching the video version can visualize —
BL: Yeah.
CB: — this or for the audio people, you have three Aries rising and your Moon is in Capricorn. Your Sun, Mercury, and Venus are in Pisces. Your Mars is in Cancer. Jupiter in Gemini. Pluto and the North Node in Libra. Uranus in Scorpio, and Neptune in Sagittarius. Oh, and Saturn in Leo.
All right, so we’re back. We had a little interruption. So you were about to start talking about Aries versus Pisces?
BL: Yes. The way I’ve seen my chart from the begining with that particular invitation is that the Pisces part of me is like this old self who has these dreams for a new world that I’m passing off to the Aries part of me. So it’s like, 12 back to the one, that Aries is like, this baby version of human that doesn’t know failure, that doesn’t know what could go wrong, that doesn’t know all the reasons why things might not work out, and it doesn’t really need to like, have every check next to the box in order to get started with anything, and it’s really been how I’ve run my whole practice, whether it’s like, a teaching container or something. A framework I wanna offer my students is to just basically share it before I even know what it is. Like, it’s coming through. I’ve got enough information about something to start talking about it, and through the doing of the thing, it will start to tell me what it’s about and what it is. In fact, unshaming the signs is how – the same thing for unshaming the signs for me is I didn’t really understand what it meant; I just started doing it.
So the Aries part of you doesn’t really need to have the reasons why you’re doing it, all of them – it doesn’t need to have all the footnotes in, you know? It doesn’t need to have the full bibliography written and ready to go. It’s the part of you that learns while doing, and that takes a lot of audacity when other parts of you have known failure. And when the other parts of you are like, “Well, this could happen,” or “But what about that? Have you thought about that?” And then those kinds of questions will slow you down and then maybe you won’t even do the thing. And so —
CB: Yeah.
BL: — to me that Aries part of you, it’s about self-trust. You have to really trust yourself that what wants to come through is gonna be awesome. It’s coming from a dream part of you – the Pisces part of you, I like to think – and this is a very helpful part of us when we have other parts of us that are worried about bad consequences or consequences that we don’t like if we were to take a risk.
CB: Yeah. I really like that because I, as somebody that does like to like, plan and prepare things ahead of time and write very long outlines and things like that ahead of time for podcast episodes, other stuff like that, I’ve also seen over the years the detriment of over-planning and of trying to have everything worked out ahead of time, because sometimes everything can grind to a halt and I’ve seen some people actually not be able to even finish, you know, their most important work in life or never published anything because they never just take that step of diving in and starting to do it because the function of preparation ahead of time and trying to think things out ends up just making everything frozen in a sense so that it never has a chance to grow. So that makes a lot of sense.
Then, on the other hand, the other point you made about learning while doing is really crucial because sometimes there are many things in life that you can’t learn from, you can’t grow, until you start doing it. Like, I think like, a really obvious one that I’ve learned is like, starting a YouTube channel or starting a podcast – you can try to plan stuff out a lot ahead of time, but there’s many things that you won’t learn until you just dive in and do it, and you can make a mistake or do something wrong, but as long as you’re doing it, you’re learning something from it each time you do it. But if you don’t have that impulse to dive in or that, as you said, audacity almost to dive in without having everything planned out, then you may never get started.
BL: Yeah. And that’s where the shame piece comes in is there’s this felt rule that we’re supposed to already know or that we’re supposed to already have the answers or we’re supposed to already be an expert at something before we start talking about it. And if we would relax a little bit and give one another the generosity to be humans who are learning and who may “make mistakes” as they’re learning, then I think everyone would be more gracious with one another as we experiment and try things out. This word audacity’s actually become central to the whole unshaming the signs project, which I think is a Mars kind of word, because “audacity” is like… It takes audacity to fill in the blank. Who’s gonna give you permission to do it? Unshaming is a process of giving yourself permission to be the one that says, “It’s okay that I made that mistake.” That says, “It’s okay that that happened. And now what?” You know? And a lot of the time, we’re waiting around for culture, for another person, for who knows what, to annoint us as having permission, but this process of unshaming is a process of giving yourself permission, and that’s why audacity appears to be one of the key qualities one needs to go for it. So there’s a kind of a Mars… Like, if every planet could teach us something about unshaming, I feel like Mars is one of our teachers here to have the audacity to go for it.
CB: Yeah. The audacity to have radical self-acceptance, because self-acceptance itself takes some audacity to have.
BL: Yeah, it really does.
CB: Yeah. All right. I like that. What are some other core unshaming concepts for Aries?
BL: I think for me… One of the things that was really helpful about finding out I’m an Aries rising was it seemed like, if I’m really gonna go for this, like if I’m really gonna believe that my chart has something to help me to understand myself, then I’m gonna need to be able to be with some of these “uglier” emotions, these hotter, more seething emotions underneath the surface – I have Mars at the bottom of my chart in the 4th house -that I have smothered, that I have suppressed, that I have silenced because of conditioning to be agreeable, to be polite, to be pleasant, to not cause problems, because it’s like, not what a good girl does is to express anger at something.
And so for me, unshaming my Aries has meant allowing myself to come into contact with anger or with frustration. Some of these like, more seething kind of Mars kind of vibes underneath the surface as actually being so helpful in my life. Like, identifying that I’m frustrated is really helpful information, because it’s helping me see what I don’t want. It’s helping me see where something’s not sitting well with me, helping me see where it’s time for me to speak my voice here. A lot of the things I have rage over are really sacred things; they’re about what I don’t like seeing invalidated, what I don’t like seeing not protected in this world. But I was, I had been very numb to all of those feelings, whether you can call them sacred or not.
And so unshaming Aries, I think, is an invitation to give yourself permission to feel some of those hotter emotions, especially if you were taught that your fire is too much, that it’s too loud, it’s chaotic, it’s out of control, it hurts people. I think a lot of individuals, especially I will say female and femme-bodied humans, feel afraid to tap into those emotions, especially when they see themselves as like, healers or caregivers. It can be scary to tap into the heat of Aries, because it’s so powerful. Like, what will happen if I unleash that? So unshaming Aries is letting yourself be in contact with those feelings as inherently intelligent and supportive for who you want to be in this world.
CB: I love that. And one of the phrases you used is to not smother that with politeness, which I think is really key because you know, that can be sometimes the directness of Aries can sometimes come off to people as impolite or other related things like that. But sometimes that’s necessary in this world to like, live authentically, and that’s the audacity of Aries is the audacity to let people know what’s on your mind and to be genuine about that without cloaking it.
BL: Yeah. And I think a lot of the rhetoric of like, politeness is honestly been used as a tool to quiet people from being in touch with their power. And so unhooking from politeness as like, the compass for “am I a good person or a bad person” helps you also untangle from conditioning that has been disempowering.
CB: I like that also because when we think of politeness, I think of Libra, which is like, the opposite sign, and so maybe part of what we’re seeing there is the dynamic and the tension between those two signs and the potential when that balance gets out of whack for one sign to sort of smother or suppress the natural and even, you know, good qualities of another sign.
BL: Yeah, I think so.
CB: All right. Any other really core things about Aries that you wanted to mention before we move on? If you want to run through a few other real quick, we could, but —
BL: Sure.
CB: — or is that good? What do you feel?
BL: The other ones that I had written are kind of riffs on just what I’ve said, but like, discovering what turns me on and giving that to myself. I feel like there’s a real erotic intelligence to Aries that I think that we can often be afraid of when we’re – and I mean the erotic in terms of just aliveness, not just the sexual connotation of that word. And I feel like unshaming Aries in many ways is allowing yourself to notice when you feel like, turned on to do that thing or not turned on to do that thing. If you’re like, “I’m bored,” it’s like a flatline kind of feeling about something. That’s great information to be in touch with. That probably should be a “no” for you, you know? Like, when you’re dialed into Aries inside yourself in an unshamed way, your yes or no can come real quickly. It doesn’t have to be complicated. It’s just does this idea turn me on? Does this prospect turn me on or is this like, eh, I don’t really feel anything, so it’s probably for somebody else. And I feel like for folks who get really stuck in their head and like pros and cons, long lists, should I do this or not do this, that kind of quick information from Aries can help you be more efficient in your life.
CB: That’s brilliant; I really like that. That gets for sure to something that’s very core about that sign.
BL: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. Well, I know we could … There’s several other things we could go into about this sign, but I was thinking if we’re gonna go through all 12, maybe —
BL: Yes.
CB: — keep it at that. Okay.
BL: Yes.
CB: All right. So let’s move and let’s talk about unshaming Taurus.
BL: Yeah. So here I was feeling into – and I have a Taurus daughter, so I was like, feeling into her energy as I was writing these unshaming Taurus – but this idea of being stubborn, of course, is a big one. Being slow. And so one of the first ones that came forward for me is “Your pace is sacred.” That unshaming basically what I think of as the divinity of your body’s rhythms. This is a really important one, because most people living on our planet today have been deeply conditioned by a way of relating to time that we can call “urgent.” This idea of everything, like, is due now; we’re always about to be late. Like, it’s due already. We’re behind. Time is money. All of these ways that we’ve been taught to relate to time so that we’re just always hustling so hard, and we’re always just terrified of being late. This urgency is really hard on our bodies and hard on our nervous systems, and it privileges clock time and the like, demands of clock time over the rhythms of the body, which to me is very Taurus. Like, being connected to your own pacing for things and that having a kind of sensual intelligence that’s unique to you and to how you want to experience your reality. I personally tend to have a very fast pace; I’m an Aries rising. But I hear from so many people the trauma of being told to hurry up and they were never fast enough and they had to stop what they were doing to get out the door and someone’s yelling at them – “Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up!” So for me, this feels like a Venusian unshaming of like, sacred Venus wisdom around trusting your pace. Letting your pace be a sacred guide to you that your body is leading. You know, sometimes you’re gonna, you have an airplane to catch – this is true, right? There’s different forms of time. I think Saturnian time is one form of time – not the only way of measuring time. A Taurian form of time has its own rhythm that’s led by the body, so that to me is a big one.
CB: I think that’s brilliant, and it gets to something really core about that difference and the change we seen between Aries and Taurus where it’s like, the advice is Aries is that it’s okay to go fast, whereas when you get to Taurus, the advice is it’s okay to go slow, and that’s sort of the… In the zodiac series, we talked about the corrective quality that each sign has over the previous one, and I use that word “corrective,” but it’s not the best term. I’m still workshopping. Maybe there’s a better – maybe you could help me come up with a more, a better like, unshaming term than “corrective,” because that, now that I think about it, you know, brings in some feelings framing it in that way. But certainly time and that difference of the treatment of time between those two signs is one of the core distinctions between them.
BL: Yeah. I feel like in the sense of Aries dreaming of Taurus, it’s like whatever that was that you got off the ground, you got it going with the Aries, the Taurean part of you is now allowed to really root down into being with what’s here and taking your time with that in this like, more intuitive, haptic, like, spatial knowledge through whole body intelligence. And I feel like plant metaphors do really well here, you know? Like, the —
CB: Yeah.
BL: — unfurling that needs to, the ripening, like, these are not things that we can just scream at something to do faster. And when we internalize the “hurry up” voice on ourselves, we often then are unhappy with the results of our creative projects, but it’s often because we’ve so internalized how urgent we need to be that we weren’t able to let a thing ripen or unfurl really on its own intelligence, you know?
CB: Yeah, that’s really brilliant. It makes me think, it’s like in the northern hemisphere with Aries, during Aries season, it’s the beginning of spring and all of the plants sort of shoot out of the earth and like, start coming up, but once you get to Taurus season, they’re there and they reach the state of like, maturity and of growing and thriving in the place that they’ve already occupied in the world and sort of, you know, coming into full bloom with their leaves and flowers and everything else and that becomes one of the most beautiful seasons during Taurus season.
BL: Yeah. It is really beautiful the way for the northern hemisphere the world around us teaches us what the essence of the sign’s wisdom is.
CB: Yeah. I think that’s still very relevant for those things. Okay and yeah, so not shaming yourself based on the pace and the timing that comes naturally to you. That’s such an interesting concept in itself, like, not to dwell on it too much, but just that some of the core properties of each of the signs ultimately archetypally go back to how they treat time, and that’s really fascinating in and of itself to me that the core of something could be something as simple as the property of what the relationship of that sign to how they experience time and what their natural level of comfort is in experiencing different types of time.
BL: Yes. I’ve been playing with this teaching around like, time craft, been playfully calling it Time Techne, for each of the planets, and this Venusian time is this time that unfurls according to its own pleasures, really.
CB: Okay. And so what was the other one that we wanted to mention as well?
BL: Yes, so I can’t – I don’t know if you saw my question if cursing is allowed?
CB: Yeah, go nuts.
BL: I have this phrasing for unshaming Taurus, which is “if it’s not resonant, it’s not fucking resonant.” Which came through for me when I was doing a thing that most of us doing, which is I really felt a “no” on something, but parts of me really wanted it to be a “yes,” so I was trying to logic my way to resonance. But the fact – I just heard this part of me roar up of just like, “If it’s not resonant, it’s not fucking resonant!” Because you can’t, with the mind, make yourself resonate with something, you know? You just, you either trust the body’s information that it’s telling you it’s turning towards a thing, it’s telling you it’s unfolding to a thing. It’s telling you it’s expanding towards wanting more, or it’s just not. And as someone who grew up, you know, I grew up in a very elite education kind of background, I learned to just privilege my mind over everything, I was very neck-up about decisions, anything I’m doing, how I move through the world. On learning that my body may have really important information for me about resonance, like, resonating as in we’re in a frequency that feels good and we wanna be together, me and anything, that that is actually some of the most divine information that I could trust, and I don’t need to know why. That’s the thing about the logical mind, is it’s like, “But why am I not resonating? Why am I resonating?” And we often don’t even know why. And I think that’s very humbling for especially those of us who have like, strong mental lives, strong intellectual lives – it can be humbling to not actually have an answer for why something resonates, and it’s really because I think it’s aesthetic and not mental. Like, why we have aesthetic preferences for this kind of artist or another kind of artist – you can try to explain it, but it’s really beyond explanation I think.
CB: Yeah. That’s so good. The subjectiveness of taste —
BL: Yes!
CB: — seems like what it’s getting to there, where – and it’s so important for Taurus, because Taurus has very clearly defined likes and dislikes, and this sometimes comes out the most clearly in a very tangible level in like, simple things like food or having a certain taste for like, really liking its favorite food versus like, super not liking like, other foods, and having almost a strong aversion to certain things. And what you’re getting at here that’s so important is that it doesn’t matter, you know, why it resonates or not – it just doesn’t. And once that’s been established, sometimes it’s okay just to be confident in that, in knowing what you like or what you don’t like, and that being authentic to you.
BL: Yeah. The right to have – again, it’s this permission, like the audacity to have preferences, and that your preferences are an important part of who you are. And like, learning this with my Tarusu daughter, you know, I could feel myself like, it’s so interesting that she’s not trying to please me when she’s saying she doesn’t wanna eat that. She just doesn’t wanna eat it. You know, like, “Why aren’t you trying to make me happy?” says the mother. And witnessing how that’s actually her asserting the core of who she is is through her preferences, which in fact are quite sensual. And there’s no explaining why, you know, you should like this kind of fruit; you just either like or you don’t.
CB: For sure. And that goes with like, lots of different things in life and while some people could shame that as being, you’re being like, stubborn or you’re being not open to different things or that you should try different things and have a broad palate, let’s say, or something like that, which may be, let’s say, in like a Sagittarian sense, like having a broad palate for like, many different things might be something that’s vaunted as like, a good quality. On the other side of that with Taurus, there’s something to be really valued about having really specific tastes and like, knowing what you like and knowing what you don’t like and being comfortable with that and embracing it.
BL: Yeah, and it’s not a personal attack on someone else if you don’t take to their aesthetic or you don’t resonate with their aesthetic. It’s just personal taste isn’t an invalidation of somebody else’s taste; it’s just part of your unique self-expression while you’re here in this life. I think that the fear of “hurting someone’s feelings” – that goes back to like, shame behavior when you’re trying to not be a bad person. But for example, if you are, if anything about your career has to do with your preferences, you’re actually being hired, you’re being paid to have these preferences, and they’re an important part of who you are, but even if you aren’t being paid for them, it’s the pleasure of experiencing yourself as a person of preferences that is one of the cool things about being alive.
CB: Yeah. I love that. And it brings that back to that point of that shame behavior is tied often into a social component about what other people or other signs think versus like, what do you think and what do you care about and what’s important to you and what’s ultimately resonant with you versus what’s not.
BL: Yeah. And if you think about Taurus as related to values, it’s like, the fact that we don’t share the same list of values is not an invalidation of one another. It’s just the fact of it is just what is, and we can celebrate one another for being clear about what our values are. Because if you’re not clear about the values, and you’re not clear, because the instinct is to focus on pleasing someone else to keep yourself safe as seen as a good person, then you’re actually not clear at all in your doings in this world because you’re not expressing yourself as someone who’s clearly connected to their values. Which moves through the throat, really,which we also connect with Taurus in medical astrology as far as I know.
CB: Right. Yeah, that’s a good point. All right. Any other final points about Taurus before we move on?
BL: I think that’s great.
CB: Okay. Awesome. All right. Well, let’s move on to the next sign then, which is Gemini.
BL: Gemini. This was a really fun one. Yeah, one of the things that most came through with Gemini is the way we shame Gemini as distracted or distractable, as just being someone who kind of flakes and go off to this other interest and flits around. And so it became something to contemplate – it was a contemplation then for me of like, how to unshame distraction. And I really feel like the inherent intelligence to me of distraction is our curiosity – like, the impulse of our curiosity is like, leading us to another flower, basically, where we’re going to be delighted. It’s the anticipation of being delighted by all experience. So it’s actually a very alive thing to me, the thing that moves us to the next… Like, a busy bee of late spring, over to the next nectar. But I think that because of our culture is so disciplining of attention and so disciplining of focus, we got this as children in school. We learned early that like, looking out the window is bad – it’s like, what a bad student does. Talking to the friend next to you is not being a good student; it’s being a bad student. And so you get shamed for Gemini type stuff really young through school especially, because there’s like, a particular look to have of someone who’s like, being a good student or someone who’s being good at being focused, which is what we’ve been taught how to do.
And so I feel like unshaming distraction is an unlearning of some of the kind of disciplinary aspects of education, and I feel that when we’re allowing ourselves to be distracted, and if you trust yourself that my distraction is gonna take me to this next cool thing that I really wanna learn about, I find that from an unshamed place, distraction almost always leads me to like, at a really amazing TikTok video that just blew my mind open on something, or it takes me to a conversation with someone where somebody mentions something that’s like, exactly what I needed for this next thing that I care about. And so distraction from an unshamed place is very magical because it brings in the synchronicities that were wanting to be attuned to. And so what I like to think about is that Gemini’s not all of you. You have, I have other parts of me that are gonna go be very focused, and they’re gonna go put long hours of attention on something. And in between, I can be distracted by whatever I want to be distracted by when I trust that it’s not in itself bad; it’s taking me to this next really fun thing.
CB: I love that so much. That’s really good. I think about that in terms of books lately. Like, I’ve been reading a lot of books on ancient philosophy, but sometimes jumping around to different books even though that’s very different than my usual Scorpio wanting to dig in deep and get to the bottom of a singular thing and sort of go as far as you can in that. Gemini is a different energy of like, jumping around and reading a little bit of lots of different things, and getting a taste for like, lots of different things, and also having a quickness or … I’m trying to think of a better word than like, a “shallowness,” because shallowness is often the one, is the keyword that gets shamed. But there’s something to be said for, you know, dipping your toe or having a sip of something like, experiencing its essence and then moving on to the next thing that catches your eye that you’d also like to have a taste from. There’s something about that, that energy and that quality, that is very valuable.
BL: Yeah, I think so. And I think it’s interesting that you – I was – without using the word “Capricorn,” I was referencing Capricorn to, when I was speaking of when you can focus for long periods, and then you brought in Scorpio. And I found that the inconjunct signs often have a really interesting teaching for any given sign that you’re talking about to … Like, we think of the polarity as the balancing, but often inconjunct signs have some really fun things that they’re teaching one another, sort of in an unexpected way, because we don’t really think about inconjunct relationships as much. But —
CB: Totally.
BL: — yeah, I feel like taking those shallow dips is, there isn’t anything inherently wrong with having a stack of 12 books and you’ve only read the introduction in each. Like, why do we need to finish these books? It’s that there’s a story about completion being like, the hallowed thing. Like, completion being the sign of success or completion being the sign of achievement. What if abandoning the project is the most loving thing you can do for yourself? Because your boredom in finishing it is actually teaching you something about where your curiosity actually is, and it’s not in finishing this project. And so allowing yourself to leave that project abandoned, unshamed, I think is super liberating, because I just know so many of us are holding shame for the half-finished projects that we have around the house. And I think that unshaming Gemini is teaching us that we were dabbling with it. What if we weren’t ever really meant to go all the way? That the partialness of the project was like, the sip of the nectar that was what we were looking for, and there’s nothing wrong with saying, “I don’t know that I wanna do this anymore.”
CB: Definitely. I love that. I mean, sometimes you only need to read like, a chapter in a book, and that chapter is sufficient even though maybe ideally you would have liked to have mastered that entire book – maybe that’s not the most important thing for you at that time. And sometimes even just – I’m surprised sometimes opening up a book and sometimes like, the page that you come to being like, the page that I needed to read, which I know is like, bibliomancy and sounds a little bit out there, but I’ve had things like that at different points that have given me the information that I needed that I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise very quickly through sort of like, flitting through things like you might say. And I know that’s like, getting off of on a whole sidetrack, but there’s something about the energy there that you’re describing that reminds me of that. But more broadly, it’s just, it’s okay sometimes to dip into things and then to move on, and to do the things, because that goes back to we were talking about Aries and Taurus and the things that make them feel alive in some sense. And sometimes what that goes back to with Gemini is just the feeling of aliveness you get by pursuing and moving onto the lots of different things that interest you. Like you were saying, the bee that like, moves from flower to flower, and maybe they haven’t finished gathering all the pollen from one flower, but they see another flower that like, looks really interesting to them and maybe they wanna just go and see what that flower is like for a little bit and then move on after that.
BL: Yeah, I think so. And I think that when we’re thinking about the shame of novelty or the shame of distraction, the shame of dabbling or flirting, I think that what’s underneath some of that is like, there might be something really powerful to look at if we’re unhappy or unsatisfied with the current commitment we have and shaming our desire to go look at something else. Like, if you’re studying something in graduate school, and you’ve like, committed to a discipline, and now you’re like, flirting a little bit with this other discipline, it can feel really scary to let yourself do that, and I think underneath the fear of it is a fear that maybe you aren’t as committed as you thought you were to the disciple that you had previously committed to, and so that curiosity can either just be fun, or maybe it’s actually revealing an important thing for you, which is that your desire is to move onto this other thing. When we have this idea that like, once you’ve made a commitment, you have to stay with it, that is very limiting. It’s a limiting perspective about like, what a good adult is, and I think that unshaming the dabbling impulse is supportive for aliveness, like you were talking about.
CB: Yeah.
BL: It’s like part of the engine of reality is change, is like, this old choice is not what I want anymore. I wanna move on. I wanna have change. That supports the fact of all reality, which is change is the only sure thing, actually.
CB: Yeah. And what you said, it also makes me think of like, dating, the concept of dating, and that sometimes people are at a point in their life where they just want to date or date around and not have a major, singular, long-term commitment but sometimes that in and of itself is shamed compared to just like, having a singular long-term relationship as being the ideal in some sense. But in terms of there being a place for different things and different attitudes or stances that people have towards things either at different points in their life or in terms of their personality, and Gemini would be more like, the dating version of let’s say relationships as the signs of the zodiac as a whole, and underlying that, I think you picked up the keyword which goes across everything, which is a notion of commitment and there being a somewhat noncommittal energy perhaps due to the fact that Mercury is like, the fastest of the visible planets and so therefore it’s the one that’s constantly making different aspects to different planets, that it’s making conjunctions the most frequently as well as the other aspects to different planets so that it constantly has this energy of like, going into something, making the connection, and then moving onto the next thing, whereas most of the other planets have a much more slower relationship when it comes to relationships with each other.
BL: Yeah, I love that piece about it. Yeah. I feel like what is being revealed about this, with unshaming Gemini, is that what actually can feel stronger in our commitments when we’re not making commitments from a place of “I’m supposed to make commitments,” but rather from knowing that we are people who give ourselves choice, and we give ourselves opportunities to change, and this is a place where we wanna commit.
CB: Yes. That’s so good. Choice and freedom and underlying that choice and freedom and wanting to have choice and freedom, and that maybe once you have that, or even once you have the illusion of that even having some feeling of comfort that that’s what feels the most comfortable to you with that sort of energy rather than being tied down to any one thing or let’s say instead of tied down to bring it back to our time analogy, rather than being stuck in any one place, it’s like Gemini’s interest is like, the present perhaps, maybe we might say, because it really is focused not on, you know, thinking things out of a singular thing in the future, but instead of what has caught your eye in the present. What has caught either your attention in terms of your intellectual interest or other interests in this moment that’s here right now in front of us.
BL: Yeah. I love that. And just interpersonally, when we shame someone for liberating themselves to be someone who can make their own choices and to hear the choices that are calling to them is, if we’re shaming them I feel like there is a place underneath this where we fear being abandoned by like, that Gemini kind of spirit in somebody else. And so, like, underneath the fear of giving the people in our life the liberation to be, to access their Gemini fully, and then doing that to our – shaming that in ourselves too – underneath it is really just a fear, I think, of being abandoned. And that’s where we can love ourselves is love ourselves like, through the – it is a scary thing, this business of being alive, and this business of life being made of change. It comes from the present moment, which we can’t foresee. It is a scary thing. But part of being in the fullness of reality is letting that kind of risk, letting that chaos be there, and trusting that like, we know ourselves and we know the other person, and if we’re meant to stay together, we will.
CB: That’s brilliant. And so that leads, actually, into one of the second points I think that we’re gonna talk about with Gemini that, I guess, we’ve already touched on a little bit but is worth stating here, right?
BL: Yeah, so your desire for novelty is not evidence of disloyalty; it is a commitment to being part of the engine of reality. And I think it’s one of the scariest things to allow, say the person you’re in relationship with, whether that’s a romantic partnership or any kind of partnership, allowing the other person to be fully in this part of themselves that is facing life which is full of choices. There’s so many other people that the person you’re in partner with could be with! You know, there’s a lot of choices out there. There’s a lot of paths that one could be walking. And this is not – I’m not advocating for cheating here as much as the spirit, like, allowing oneself to be in the spirit of freedom, however that looks inside of your relationships, and not see … Oh, my earbud just dropped out. And not seeing someone’s desire to go learn about this or… Hold on, something just popped up. Okay. If we immediately move to block someone’s curiosity to engage with the world in the ways that they’re being called to as potentially being disloyal to who they said they used to be, then we’re not allowing them to be inside of what I see as the engine of reality, which is all about allowing ourselves to grow and change and evolve.
CB: That’s amazing. And that also goes back to the freedom component when it comes to Gemini, of the feeling of freeness and of being able to make choices about different things versus the feeling of being restricted, and maybe that’s something that Gemini would struggle with the most is if it feels restricted in that way or held down versus if it doesn’t.
BL: Yes. Because what if what that human who’s deeply alive in their choices, what if what they wanna choose again and again is you? You know? But they’re not doing it because there’s a shaming of disloyalty present, and there’s like, a control thing that’s happening that’s rooted in fear, but rather a perpetual coming back to one another that’s rooted in aliveness.
CB: Yeah. And there’s a much greater authenticity to that versus something that only arises out of shame or guilt or some sort of enforcement that’s being imposed that would be much more authentic to what Gemini is and having the freedom to do that.
BL: Yes.
CB: Yeah. All right. That’s really good. Anything else about Gemini before we move on?
BL: I think that’s great.
CB: So let’s continue on into the zodiac sign of Cancer. Where do we start with Cancer?
BL: So I have to begin with a very basic one, which is you’re allowed to be a person with feelings.
CB: That is quite a hot take.
BL: I mean, this is the one, just like… Shaming crybabies, you know? Shaming people who feel is the Cancer critique. In all seriousness, I think this is just so important because I do think that we live in a culture that is sort of immature when it comes to emotional wisdom that we’re not in a culture where emotional wisdom, emotional resilience, is something that is revered as a thing to pass on and a thing to grow in one another, and I feel like from early in childhood, we’re taught to not reveal how we feel, that we’re supposed to discipline our feelings, that we’re not supposed to let people see where we have a heart that could be broken, where there’s a part of us that feels sad.
And so I think that because there’s so much shame around having feelings at all as like, a sign of personal weakness, that we are like, babies at understanding the wisdom of Cancer, because I think Cancer is inherently about the wisdom of our feelings and the wisdom of the tides of our feelings and how they come forward to tell us something about what we’re needing right now. And one of the things I said for unshaming Cancer is the audacity to be tidal – like, be someone who’s in a mood and then is in another mood. And the shaming around moodiness is something that I think is attached to our fear of what moods bring into a space, and so if we could just like, detach from our feeling realm and dissociate from our feeling realm to separate from the reality of feelings, then somehow we can be more dependable, we could more consistent, we could more knowable and therefore like, less chaotic feeling to the people around us. So it’s almost like, we’re supposed to do everyone a favor around us by disciplining our feelings and thus, we don’t really have a lot of, we don’t have an intimate relationship with our feelings in our culture in order for us to learn what are feelings are telling us about our needs. And so, what ends up then happening I think as people in relationship is we have these feelings, but we don’t really know how to talk about them. We don’t really know how to saw what our needs are. We feel like, embarrassed that we have needs. We feel like we have to apologize for having needs. And we haven’t learned how to nourish our own needs and put our own needs, make our own needs very important to us. And so then we have the shame of Cancer being needy and taking care of other people’s needs.
There’s so much shame in the Cancer space, I feel. And I feel like because we – there’s so much that we as people can learn to give one another the generosity to be learning about their feelings that it becomes easier to many of us to caretake other people’s feelings than it is to meet our own and hear what they’re trying to tell us. So one of the things that came forward in the Unshaming Cancer workshop I did was this idea that our triggers are love letters. We’re so afraid of being triggered; we’re so afraid of being activated. We’re so afraid of being drawn into the tides of the spiral of feelings. Like, oh my gosh, what is this? So like, it’s a mystery realm! It’s water! But what if our triggers are actually love letters helping us see where we want to be, we want to experience care? And we can begin by not shaming ourselves for having triggers, not shaming ourselves for being activated, allowing ourselves to just take some space to listen and hear what they wanna talk to us about so that we can then come back to the people in our lives feeling restored from having listened to our feelings and given them some respect, and also not put our needs on someone before we’re really sure, “Is it someone else that I need, or is it that what’s needed is for me to just be with myself right now?” So those are some of the things that have come forward with that one.
CB: Yeah. That’s really good. So the audacity to be carried away by our moods or the audacity to embrace the authenticity of how we’re feeling emotionally and not, like, hide or suppress that necessarily even though I think maybe socially often times we’re told we need to suppress that, or that we need to like, get ahold of our emotions or that we need to, you know, act a certain way in public in terms of things or even in relation to other people, even if we’re not feeling up for that. Last summer, I had a funny – out of reflection, I was wondering about it was like, Harrison Ford was doing press tour for like the latest Indiana Jones movie, and in so many interviews, he has like, a Cancer stellium and he just comes up as like, kind of grumpy I think, and I had this like, reflection of like, why is Harrison Ford always so grumpy? And I was looking at his chart, and he just has this big Cancer stellium, and what you were saying just made me think of that as well as what my reaction was to that, of like, what am I expecting for him to do to be more like, superficial or something, if he’s like, doing an interview and to not actually express what he’s thinking or what his attitude is towards doing those things? And so it’s interesting for me to reflect then what those, that like, level of shaming that goes on if people don’t authentically sort of express their moods, or you know, if they suppress that.
BL: Yeah. Right. It’s like, is it that my feelings are a problem, or is this that they make you uncomfortable because you’re not sure how to respond as a good person in the face of my feelings? Yeah, I feel like this is a really widespread thing. And there’s even a thing in our culture around like, that a feeling person is somehow untrustworthy or like, you never know, they might get carried away or something like this. And I think it’s this demand for consistency that I think is actually very limiting when we diemand consistency from one another, because it’s like, again, we’re doing it to make the other person comfortable in the face of the fact of our humanness, because we are humans who have feelings.
CB: I like that. So it’s like, we’ve moved from Gemini and talking about almost like, intellectual or social fluidity to Cancer andt talking about emotional fluidity.
BL: Yeah. And you know, we can see this in things that we’ve been conditioned to do, like, hand a Kleenex to someone who’s crying. And we learn that it’s the polite thing to do. So again, this idea of politeness, this part of “good person” shame culture. We think it’s the right thing to do, but what we’re actually saying is that we have awareness of the other person crying, and in showing the person who’s crying, “Here’s a tissue – I’m aware of you crying,” we’re snapping them out of the being in their feelings that they are to remind them that they’re being looked at. And the fact that they’re being looked at is supposed to initiate a process of them getting themselves together, basically, by cleaning their face off. It’s actually in that sense quite unkind to hand someone a Kleenex, but I didn’t know this until I started really reflecting on it even at mid-life, that that’s what I might be saying to someone when I hand them a Kleenex.
CB: Yeah. That’s a really good insight. What are some of the other themes and topics that come up with Cancer?
BL: Yes. So when I think about care – you know, Cancer and care and caregiving – I feel like this is a real hot zone for what I see as the false couplings in shame. What I mean by “false coupling” is the areas in which we couple a word with “good” and couple another word with “bad.” And so where we see this the most is we couple “selfishness” with badness and “selflessness” with goodness. Like, we’ve just decided that this is true, that being selfish is a bad thing. And you’re just – we’re heavily conditioned with this one, so it can be really confronting to suddenly be like, wait a minute, that might just be a construct. Like, it might not actually be inherently true. And so then one of the things that we couple then with Cancer is that caring for other people all the time is a selfless thing, which means it’s a good thing, and so then we equate not caring for someone – like, not dropping what you’re doing to care for someone – as being selfish and therefore bad.
What I found then is that when we take these couplings very seriously, it can feel like your whole life is about caretaking other people so that you can preserve being seen as a good person because you’re so selfless, and then what ends up happening is resentments start to get built up, we start to be exhausted because we actually cannot care for people constantly and not ever listen to the feelings that we have in our own bodies about our own needs. So this leads me to then the audacity to name and know the limits that you have for caring and giving care. I feel like one of the things, one of the ways that I read my Mars in Cancer, because that’s my Mars placement, is like, this feeling in me that’s like, “I’m gonna care, but I’m gonna care the way I want to!” Like, “I’m not gonna care because you’re telling me that’s what I have to do right now.” Like, “I’m gonna be the mother the way I wanna mother. I’m gonna protect the way I wanna protect. I’m not gonna go through these motions because you’re telling me that I’m supposed to do that to be good at caring.” There’s like, real like, “grr” that I feel about it. Like, a ferociousness that I feel when it comes to this topic because – and maybe part of it is being as I am in a woman’s body and having the mantle “mother” on me biologically, as I have two daughters – like, moving through learning how to be the mother that I wanna be has meant really just letting go of the rules around what a good mother is and what a good caregiver is. And then if you take that further into the field of wellness or healing that astrology overlaps with, like how to have boundaries and how to give care and how to be a compassionate space holder, but the way that – and give myself the right to have limits on that care and boundaries on that care, which include things like having prices or include things like, you know, these are the conditions of the space that I’m holding, as opposed to, like, a cultural assumption that you’re just supposed to give and give and give and give and give, because that’s what good people do. What do you think about that?
CB: I’m really liking that. It’s raising some interesting thoughts in me on both points of like, it’s okay to have emotions and caregiving. One of the things that comes up that’s I think relevant here because Cancer’s one of the signs that most often I feel like in generic, pop culture astrology sometimes for some reason like, male Cancers get shamed for more, and I think it may have something to do culturally with like, questions about that we might reflect on, which is like, who is allowed to have emotions and who’s allowed to care? And it makes me think of like, you know, some of the stats in society, like that only something like 13 percent of nurses are males. And, you know, I’m using the term “male” broadly. What is the opposite of the term “femme?” Because, I mean, you used “femme” earlier as like, a broader term for that, but I’m trying to think of… Because I don’t know the like, “butch” is not the, you know, universal necessarily like, opposite for that, but if there’s a better term to use. But it’s just interesting thinking about the gender breakdown when it comes to that and just ideas of care and emotions and the expression of that.
BL: Oh my gosh, I love that so much. Just who’s allowed to care, give care, how is care allowed to be expressed differently by different bodies?
CB: Right.
BL: Yeah. This is something that didn’t really come forward for me, I didn’t really pick up on this when I did Cancer, so I’m like, deeply loving you bringing this in. We can talk about it when we get there, but it was really with Sagittarius that I really realized if really – oh wait, this sign is shamed differently, you know, depending on the body you’re in. And really, we can say this for all of them.
CB: Yeah, for sure. Which, I think, has to do often or largely with like, cultural expectations or cultural norms and things like that, but then it’s interesting how the archetype of the zodiac sign and some of the qualities that come with it can get shamed just differently depending on the body that you happen to find yourself in, which is interesting then to think about and reflect on as well in terms of the broader questions about shame surrounding the zodiac and the different archetypes.
BL: Absolutely. So important. Thank you.
CB: Yeah. So all right. Is there anything else when it comes to Cancer that we wanted to mention?
BL: You know, I think that something that can roll up on the tides of emotions is shame. Like, one of the feelings or the experiences we most brace against, you know, we’re like, hardening around is like, I just don’t wanna feel that feeling of being a bad person, you know? And so I think practicing being a person with feelings and giving yourself permission to be a person with feelings naturally will allow one to become someone who gets more practice at being with yourself when feelings like shame roll in, because we have such avoidance around it that – because we don’t wanna feel the feeling. But if you’re practicing feeling feelings, then it’s not such a scary thing when it shows up. Because it will show up, because we’re humans. Like, we can’t hide the fact that part of our genius is we have feelings.
CB: Yeah. That brings up a point what you’re saying that was making me think about also – and I don’t know if you already maybe mentioned this, but just expectations of caregiving, of you know, what happens if a person’s in a position where they’re almost like, being forced to be a caregiver and don’t want to be necessarily and where you draw the boundaries with that, as well as a related thing, which is this idea that I’ve heard about a lot over the past few years of like, emotional labor and that sometimes the demands that sometimes people place on you that are treated as like, emotional labor and whether you’re consenting to that or not. And it seems like those are sort of like adjacent issues to some of the things we’ve been talking about.
BL: Yeah. I love it. One of the consequences of shame is this feeling like you don’t have the permission to have boundaries. So one of the things that grows with the practice of unshaming is more rootedness in your right to be a person with boundaries. And one of the things that, just has really come through recently as I’ve been doing this month after month, is the truth that I’m the only one that can caretake my wounded inner children. Like, I can go to someone to help me hold them or give me tools and practices to help me with my inner children, but no one else is responsible for caretaking the wounded parts of me. And like so, I am not responsible for somebody else’s inner children, even my own children’s inner children. I can support someone in learning how to love them and to hold them and listen to their inner children and take responsibility for them, but I personally cannot be responsible for them. So it’s like, this whole process with unshaming Cancer helps us fortify our boundaries knowing that we are the ones – what are responsible for, and what are we not responsible for? What do we give consent to and not give consent to, as regards the wounded parts of us from our past self?
CB: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. All right, I think that might be good for Cancer. Shall we move onto Leo?
BL: Yes.
CB: All right.
BL: Yeah, so Leo’s where we really big time then get into this coupling of selfishness with badness. So one of the things I say is only from a shame perspective are we conditioned to see sharing and celebrating the self as problematic. You know, when I think about it from a Sun perspective – Sun s-u-n, right? For Leo – I just feel like from a Sun, solar perspective, how in the world could celebrating yourself, expressing yourself,t resting yourself as important be a “bad thing?” Like, in its essence, it’s deeply untrue. Like, so many things that we call “selfish” – it’s really a fear of being labeled as selfish, because what we’re actually talking about – like sharing our gifts with the world, letting people see us express ourselves, like creatively expressing in the world, like sharing that abundant solar light outwards so people can feel it, like wanting to experience yourself participating in life like that? This is what we’re here to be doing, to me. And so, like, this Leo shaming as like, narcissistic, as self-centered, I think comes from a place where we’re all deeply uncomfortable with seeing people who are celebrating themselves.
CB: Yeah. So it’s the core thing is like, unshaming and embracing our natural desire to shine.
BL: Yeah. And I think that where we get really mixed up here with this one is that the conditioning that we’ve received around what makes us good gets tied up to this idea of a potential self. Like, when I think back to my younger self, I feel like I was told about my potential and I was told that what you’re supposed to do here is to like, “unlock your potential,” and that if I could just figure out how to get to my potential self, then I was succeeding at being this thing called an adult person. And then through my 20s, it was sort of like, any minute now! Any minute now I’m gonna figure out how to – I’m gonna be proud of myself when I get to that potential self. Because pride – Leo, right? Pride exists when we reach that destination – potential. Like, “Ah, I’ve reached my potential.” And I feel like, ultimately, this concept of potential is really harming us, because it’s reserving our self-love – self-love to me is Leo – is reserving our self-love for a future self that currently isn’t here now. It’s for the potential self. The potential self is the one that we’ll be proud of. So we’re like, hustling and hustling and hustling, exhausting ourselves, trying to figure out how to “unlock our potential,” like as if, you know, if we could just get the hacks we’ll figure it out. When actually, I feel like from an unshamed perspective, it’s already right here – the capacity to love yourself is already here, that there is no future potential, because participation, which is what Leo does, participation by being and emanating – it can only exist in the present moment. And so unshaming allows us to clear this distortion that you need to somehow figure out how to get over there to this future self where your potential is. Like, quit potential self and love yourself now, I think is at the heart of Leo unshaming is tied to letting go of this future self that was supposed to save you and make you lovable.
CB: I really like —
BL: Like, where does love exist for you now?
CB: Right. I really like that, and the – instead of putting off embracing oneself until you reach some future idealized state, because then the problem with that is that sometimes maybe you get there and if you haven’t developed the internal sense of self-love and acceptance then even once you get to the idealized goal perhaps, you may find yourself still not fully being happy or content because you haven’t embraced the thing that’s actually important.
BL: Yeah. And like, my funny anecdote on this is that for me, coming from academia, the potential self was gonna be Britten LaRue, the celebrated author that everyone can see has all these great ideas that are worth listening to. Like, Britten LaRue, the people are talking about, who works really hard and creates these beautiful works of – with the written word. And I just completely quit on my potential when I moved onto this mystical path and this astrology path, and just let it go. Just let it go and grieve – that path is not gonna be the path. What if I could love myself now and start being that person today? And then the irony is, of course, today I am a published author now. I didn’t even go look for it; they reached out to me. And I have so much pride, and also I would love myself whether this book was coming out or not because I’ve found the way through presence to be with what is beautiful and lovable and worth being proud for in myself that only I could give myself. No publisher could give that to me. And I feel like this is like, me living my Saturn as someone with Saturn in Leo, is getting to this authority place of pride coming from the present moment. And that does mean celebrating yourself. So that means confront this idea that celebrating yourself is like, there’s something bad about that. I think we should – I would love to live in a world where we’re all just walking around celebrating each other and celebrating the Sun in everyone that we meet.
CB: Right. I’m trying to like, put that into a short like, aphorism. I’m trying to come up with it, but it’s something like, paradoxically the attainment of the idealized future self that’s worthy of embrace only comes about as a result of embracing the present, the past self that already exists or something like that. Just maybe just a different way of stating what I already stated and what you already stated earlier, but I like that, especially in the case of your story because what you described as like, your future idealized thing that you felt like you had to give up you’ve now manifested, not accidentally, but by focusing on something else that wasn’t that by digging in deep and finding the thing that was most authentic to you and then the thing that you had wanted previously ended up coming about, you know, as a result anyways, even though that stopped being like, your primary focus. It’s like the… Yeah. Something like that. I’m having a hard time articulating it.
BL: Yeah. I think that maybe like, the manifestation of whether an unshamed version of potential may not be that far away from the version of potential that we’re holding out for once we get properly validated. That it comes through the self-validation, and the self focus where I feel like is, that’s the Leo piece is letting yourself be this bright light that shines for whoever wants to experience it.
CB: That’s it right there; I think that’s it. It’s the validation of the self is the thing that actually brings about true validation externally because like, the most genuine form of that Leo energy is the person that just does not give a fuck because they’re content with what they are and what their light is and how they shine, and if other people want to like, bask in the rays of that or gain something from it, then that’s great, but even if other people don’t, the true Leo who’s comfortable in themself, like they’re comfortable in just settling into that and being who they are and being that center of their own little solar system that just rotates and spins and thinks sort of only unto itself, and that there’s something beautiful about that even though other people sometimes might shame it as being selfcentered or self-focused, but what it actually is, truly is just the fullest embracement of the self possible.
BL: Yeah. I think so. Yeah, I … Yeah, one thing I had written down was the cultural conflation of goodness with selflessness is outrageously harmful. The Sun does not understand why we would ever uplift the idea of being selfless – selfless, like not the self. When you think about it, it’s like, whoa, I can’t believe I just fully accepted this, like my younger self, but we receive what we’ve been taught, you know? And this is a big one to unlearn. But I feel like this relates to the Sun having a bit of a malefic quality, because it can be uncomfortable if you don’t love yourself, if you’re not proud of yourself. If you’re in kind of a torture cycle of shame and trying to wrack your brain to figure out how to unlock your potential or there’ll be a day when you’re lovable and you’re validated. When you’re witnessing someone in their full Leo expression, it may feel – it may like, hurt almost to receive those Sun rays, those solar rays, the warmth of that fire, because it’s bringing up for you what you’re longing for and don’t feel is attainable or close to you right now. So —
CB: Yeah.
BL: — part of you that can feel that in someone else, it might make you wanna diminish and like, make it small enough that you’re digestible or make it small enough that you don’t activate someone’s shame. And then here we are in this cycle of everyone doing that, and then I think that ultimately cumulatively it’s harmful for individuals and as a collective.
CB: Yeah. There’s almost like, implicit… Yeah, feeling of jealousy in that externally of other people maybe when they see that of like, why can’t I embrace myself as well as that person does in some level, or live as authentically as that person does, even if it might appear … Not goofy, but something from the outside like, extravagant, or… I think you have a word in there somewhere in the Leo section that I’m not finding for that, but there was like, a term for that I think that you had.
BL: I have, “the fact that some may burn in the brightness of your direct Sun is not your fault. The Sun has malefic qualities; it is difficult to be a solar being when we are terrified of taking up space and being seen.” I don’t know if it was in there, but I feel like so many people come into my reading space or my classroom space saying things like, “I’m tired of playing small,” or “I want to take up more – I want to trust that it’s safe for me to take up space.” And this, to me, feels like an unshaming Leo piece, because it feels painful to take up that space broadly and radiantly and regally, which just – these are all Leo words, you know? Just sitting inside of yourself, if you feel like your doing that will like, activate a pain story in someone else.
CB: Yeah.
BL: So it’s like, so does that mean we just don’t do it? You know?
CB: Right. Yeah. And to suppress that light basically or to hold it back. So I liked what you said also earlier about selflessness, because societally, you know, one of the highest aspirations sometimes is you’re supposed to give up the self and be selfless, and that societally we almost value selflessness sometimes over selfishness. So the shame component is like, very much built into that so that sometimes people have a hard time embracing that because it seems the opposite of like, a core, almost like ethical value.
BL: Yeah. And something I’ve shared that’s an interesting one here, because I think some of this thinking does come from like, a certain streak of Christian rhetoric is that when you say, as we’ve been told Jesus said, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” when you really break that down, it says just to me that Jesus meant that you should love yourself a whole lot, because the degree that you love yourself is going to be the degree to which you can love your neighbor. So if you love yourself a whole lot, then you can love your neighbor a whole lot. And what I found from being with this is the limits we place on how much we love ourselves are going to be the limits that we can feel love for other people. So thus, it’s not selfish.
CB: Yeah, that’s really good. I’m glad you mentioned the Christian component, because that’s part of where that cultural idea comes from and they’re at the core of that, at some point, like, whatever the original teachings of Jesus were, there was some kind of Piscean component there that seemed very much about selflessness and, you know, giving things up, and it’s interesting then that we’re coming back to another discussion, like you mentioned earlier, of those inconjunct signs that have that aversion to each other because they don’t share any of the same zodiacal qualities where, you know, it’s like, Leo is a fixed sign and Pisces is a mutable sign. Leo’s a fire sign, and Pisces is a water sign. Leo is a diurnal sign, and Pisces is a nocturnal sign. And so they, you know, don’t have points of relating to each other, but therein we see some of the basic qualities or societal things that come up that they represent that can be authentically good, but that sometimes they end up shaming each other for.
BL: Yeah. I love that. Yeah. I feel like I live that inconjunct in the sense that the sign where I have my Saturn is ruled by my Sun in Jupiter – in Pisces, and so there’s kind of like, this piece of there around the growing, the work of practicing self-love helps me to exude more love broadly in my Piscean expression.
CB: That makes sense. And then also, a little bit with the societal stuff, we get a little bit of that tension with the opposition from Aquarius as well, where Leo tends to center the self versus Aquarius tends to center the other. Or maybe a better way to put that is like, the outsider oftentimes is like, kind of what Aquarius is.
BL: Yeah. And in that sense, the polarity I feel like, reveals that they’re parts of the same whole. The part of you that’s in is deeply connected to the part of us that’s outside, and what can they respect from one another, in one another?
CB: Yeah. And there’s some kind of balance between like, with those two in that polarity of like, the desire to be cool versus like, the desire to be okay being weird. And I reflect on that and I try to figure that out, but there’s something there about that dynamic between those two, because then it becomes reciprocal, and that was one of the things I think we talked about in the Aquarius episode last year was then sometimes Aquarius does something that’s like, out of the ordinary that puts them on the outside, which looks weird at first and looks not appropriate societally, but then eventually it sort of like, catches on and then that becomes the cool thing, that becomes the centralized Leo thing that everyone starts revolving around, and it just becomes this back and forth between those two.
BL: Yeah. I have this thing that came forward with both those signs, was something along the lines of like, in order to be anything, you have to first be cringey at it.
CB: Right.
BL: And this idea, both Leo and Aquarius, when they make a different move, could be called “trying to get attention.” Like, the Leo is trying to get attention at performing some new role or whatever it is that they’re – the role they’re playing, to take the actor kind of archetype of Leo, and then with Aquarius, it’s like, as you maybe deviate in some way from a norm, you could be accused of trying to get attention for it. But in this sense, to me, in both cases, we have to allow authenticity to be emergent and authenticity not be our loyalty to consistency, because when authenticity is emergent, we’re gonna allow ourselves to try on a new thing, and maybe the first time you show people like, your new thing it’s kind of cringey because it’s like, what are they doing? And you feel sort of like, am I acting this role well? Like, am I doing an okay job at this? But from an unshamed perspective, you’re just allowing yourself to play out your emergent authenticity.
CB: I love that. All right. Good. I think that’s good for Leo, yeah?
BL: Yep!
CB: All right, let’s move on to talking about unshaming Virgo.
BL: Yeah. First of all, one of the things that came up with this one is I was feeling into like, is there any right way that we allow Virgo to be? Like, we either shame ourselves for not being Virgo enough – like when you hear people who feel like they’re disorganized, like, they’re imprecise, you know, they can’t stay with like, a system that works for them, or they’re shaming themselves for being “too Virgo,” meaning like, that they’re hyper critical, that they have analysis paralysis, that like, they can’t move forward because they’re so afraid of not doing it well enough. And so when I was first approaching this particular sign, I was noticing that it feels like one of those signs that like, there’s no degree of Virgo that we all feel comfortable with. And I think that this has to do with our discomfort for the fact that Virgo has been cast as this role of standing for our relationship to perfectionism in our culture. But I put, “Virgo is a zone for shame to thrive, because our relentless obsession with perfection is good, and imperfection is bad. This is a false coupling of the sign with toxic purity culture. Virgo isn’t about being perfect; it’s about turning toward alignment, turning toward wholeness, turning toward healing in a mutable way.” I think – I don’t know if the, does this resonate?
CB: Yeah. I’m thinking about Virgo just being hyper aware of the details and the small things, but in doing so, being aware of the cracks or the errors in things sometimes as well, which then can bring a critical component which Virgo shares to some extent also with Capricorn, I think.
BL: Yeah. I feel like because we have such an intense purity culture in the sense of like, whoa, it’s no longer whole, it’s broken – it’s either whole or it’s broken. You know, it’s either perfect or it’s not perfect. That that’s like, deeply ingrained in us, I think, that we often – we shame, we feel this Virgo shame in ourselves that’s really an importation of this conditioning that doesn’t actually even feel as true to the mutability of Virgo, because it feels to me like, as a mutable sign, it’s like, bending around towards what it’s facing as opposed to a destination. It’s moving towards like, what would feel the most appropriate and the most preserving of life. And it’s just because of this importation of toxic purity culture that it can feel so hard to not get it right. Because this idea of “right/wrong” is shame culture rhetoric, as if it’s right, or it’s wrong. Whenever we’re in a binary that’s so black and white, to me, this is shame rhetoric, because it’s seeing the world through the eyes of a child that sees things simply, like, black and white, that you learn it’s good to get in line, it’s bad to get out of line, when the teacher says we’re going to, you know, go outdoors or something like this, right? Like, learning to see everything as good/bad in this like, black and white way is what the child learns. And so when we fear imperfect, what we’re remembering is the shame of the child’s perspective of the world as like, if it’s imperfect, it’s bad. And that’s where the shame gets activated, is when it activates the younger self’s view of the world.
CB: One of the things that makes me think about is I don’t know if this is in line with what you were thinking, but that it’s okay to strive for mastery and perfection, because I feel like that is sometimes something that Virgo strives for compared to other signs, but sometimes might be shamed for compared to other signs, like let’s say, I don’t know, like, Gemini or something that maybe has that more jumping around from different things, whereas Virgo has a little bit more staying power as an earth sign in order to want to see there be fewer imperfections in something.
BL: Yeah. And I feel like what’s really helpful and seemed to resonate with my community on this one too is really feeling into what it means to be the end of summer before autumn and thinking about, like, the inherent self-preserving capacity of Virgo in terms of actual preparations for autumn and winter, and like, what is it gonna take to feel like we’ve done enough to prepare?
CB: It’s okay to be a prepper.
BL: But like, there’s always gonna be a question mark on that, because how do you really know you’ve done enough? Like, you don’t know until winter’s over and you’re still alive or you’re not, you know? Like, there’s an aspect to the wisdom of Virgo where there’s a question mark on “Have I done enough?” that is inherently about the preservation of life, and that is really, really beautiful and necessary for us humans.
CB: Yeah, for sure, definitely. And appreciated by the other – well, it may not be appreciated by the humans at the time, the like, preparing is done, it’s like, when it’s in the middle of winter and everyone is then is like, super happy that the Virgo, like, stored away all the food and everything is like, organized and easily accessible and that somebody had like, thought ahead of those things – like, then it’s appreciated quite a bit.
BL: Yeah, and I think part of unshaming Virgo then can also be related to the way our present time self relates to the future self. And what I’ve learned is that we’ll project onto the future the shame that we have in the present. We’ll project onto the future the fear of failure that we see as part of who we are in the present moment, and so there can be this… Unshaming the Virgo part of you has a lot to do, I think, with loving who you are now and trusting that you are preparing the way for what your future self will most appreciate from you. And like, clearing out the debris and the distortions of shame there allows you to believe in yourself as a person who is setting up your future self for what they’re gonna love to have from you.
CB: Yeah, for sure. All right, and then you had another one here about Virgo as well, right?
BL: Yes. The audacity to be picky as fuck. I have found it to be true that when I pretend I am not fussy, I end up causing harm. Somewhere along the way, maybe you got shamed for being difficult, and I feel like this is a little bit of a different fussiness, right, than the Taurus fussiness. It’s more of like, a preference for details being cared for, like the preservation, the life-preserving tendency as it shows up to the details of your life and how you revere life by caring for said details, you know, for caring for these details.
And so, I have noticed in myself that I tend to want to hide from other people how fussy I am about details because, you know, maybe I’ll come across as difficult or unloving or like I’m hurting someone’s feelings if I want them to go back and relook at things if they’re helping me for example. Like, as a businesswoman who’s learning to have people who support me, this has been a whole learning process because I’m very Piscean, but I like, very privately have these, you know, Virgo preferences, this Virgo fussiness about me. And handing over that fussiness to people who help me has been a scary thing, like they’re gonna – someone will think that I’m judging them. Someone will think that I don’t think that they’re good at details, that I’m being hard on them. And so then if I pretend like I don’t care, like, it’s no big deal, I’m actually not being a clear person, and I’m not really letting someone support me. Because part of supporting me, if someone wants to be in that relationship with me, is going to be allowing me to be fussy about what I care about and being able to take my suggestions or take my “can you go back and edit?” as part of being in devotion to my business and devotion to what I really care about in this life. So I think unshaming Virgo can have to do with trusting that, like, your details for you – whatever that looks like – those edges of like, knife-sharpening, is how you bring your service in the world, and let people into those to support you in letting that just be part of who you are. That’s been something I’ve been learning about especially the last couple of years.
CB: Yeah, that’s amazing. And you know, part of the shame with Virgo, I think, is that societally, others or let’s say most people don’t care about the details or don’t sweat the small things as much. You know, we even have that phrase, which is like, a shaming phrase of like, “don’t sweat the small stuff.” And, you know, that’s tricky for Virgo, because Virgo focuses on and is almost like, archetypally like a microscope that can see all the small things, and like an editor, for example, like, you know, as somebody that just recently published a book, like I’m sure you have grown an appreciation for editors and the work that they play in being able to see like, those little words. Because once you’ve been writing a book for a long enough time, you just cannot see it. Like, it just becomes, all the words flow together because you know what’s in your head of what the page is supposed to be, but sometimes it takes that other external person who has a good eye to like, catch that there’s like a punctuation missing or that there’s a word that’s mispelled or something like that. And I think that’s interesting because Virgo in seeing those small things, they often also end up playing an invisible role that’s behind the scenes, which makes me think of how Mercury is the planet that gets close to the Sun and goes under the beams of the Sun so that it can’t be seen the most often astronomically out of any of the planets. And then indeed, Virgo then often plays that support role that’s behind the scenes and that’s kind of the transition from Leo to Virgo is being okay playing the support role and embracing it that you don’t necessarily need to be the center of attention of everything in order to be valuable and do good work and be, you know, a human being who’s successful.
BL: I love that. Thank you.
CB: Yeah. All right. Is there anything else we should say about Virgo? I mean, yr point here was just it’s okay – the audacity to be picky – and even though pickiness is sometimes said to be like, a negative quality, you know, there’s a value to pickiness as well.
BL: Yes. In the writing process, I really like that side of it too. Like, when I’m first writing, I really like to be in this expansive space of letting all kinds of things come through. But then, coming through it and like, fine-tuning and just tinkering and tinkering and tinkering at sections or a sentence, I feel like theres’s something really pleasurable about that, and I feel like it’s helping us hone at that really unique … We’ve eliminated all other options, and this is precisely what must be said, kind of practice, that I find really special.
CB: Yeah, for sure. It’s reminding me – in my introduction to my book, I thanked my partner, Leisa Schaim, and her Virgo Moon, because she caught so many typos in my book. She just has this like, super human ability to like, see typos and then that becomes largely behind the scenes work because everyone reads the final product, so they see the – they benefit from the results of that, but again, they don’t actually see how much behind the scenes work then went in from that support role, and there’s something core about that with Virgo that I think is really important that’s almost like, the gift and the curse, except it’s not a curse at all. It’s a valuable part of the workings of the universe and like, how everything works by having people that can play that role.
BL: Yeah. And what it makes me think of, too, of thinking of yourself as Virgo, no matter if you have placements there or not, how to be that behind the scenes support to yourself, even. Like, what can you bring to your life in like this behind the scenes, service kind of way that is actually crucial to the unfolding of what’s being externalized and visible?
CB: Yeah, for sure. All right. Any other points about Virgo?
BL: I feel good.
CB: All right. Let’s talk about unshaming Libra.
BL: Yes. So one of the popular ones was maybe you’re indecisive, or maybe their urgency is not your problem. Maybe you’re indecisive, or maybe your pace is sacred. Libra invites us into profound congruence; acting must be balanced with listening. Maybe the question is, “Is it indecision, or are you shaming the option you desire? Is it indecision, or does your truth feel dangerous?” So the first part of that, I feel like is just unshaming taking your time, which relates to the other Venus sign of Taurus. Unshaming the process of not being urgent as you listen and find a sense of congruence and agrement inside of yourself that compels you to now act or make a choice. But then, someone might be like, “No, but Britten, I just really can’t decide, or I really can’t act, and it’s very frustrating.” And that’s when I wonder is if what’s going on is that one of the things you’re weighing out has to be, is some kind of desire or truth piece that you’re thwarting or silencing or not looking at because some part of you shames that desire. Because what often happens in the shame world is there is something called “competing desires,” where you have one desire that’s like, socially acceptable, like helping people. And then you could have another desire that’s not as socially acceptable, like I wanna charge and make lots of money. Right? Like, those two in shame world can often be seen as mutually exclusive things – they’re competing with one another. And so what we humans will do is we will just kind of like, we, all we know is we feel like we’re stuck. We’re stuck, and we are trying to figure out why, and often what it is is like,t here’s a real desire there that’s just not being allowed to be seen, and as long as it’s not being seen, there may be some part of us that just doesn’t feel good about acting yet.
CB: Right. That makes sense. And seeing – part of what you’re saying is like, unshaming seeing both sides and even going back and forth between those and like, choosing one thing, but then maybe stepping back and choosing the other and then maybe going back and forth, which is the very definition of indecision, like you said, but it’s interesting to think about that as a process of alternating between two seemingly opposite things in that way combining both.
BL: Yeah. I feel like the scales do, in their design, set up a binary, and so when we put shame on the scales so that there’s a bad decision or a good decision, which is the good decision? Like, we just wanna know. I just wanna be a good person; I don’t wanna be a bad person. And but I feel like, as long as shame is present, we’ll see these as competing as potential, when what I wonder is like, why is this in competition? Like, couldn’t it also be possible that you could have a wildly helpful business that also makes the kind of money that sustains you and supports your desires, which end up helping people even more? And so when we unhook the binary from the scales, I feel like I wonder if sometimes these decisions also might move through, especially if you’re worried that the other person – like Libra, like counterpoint awareness – if you’re worried about what the other person thinks about you, and that’s what’s sitting on one side of the scales is your fear around being shamed balanced with what you might want. Now you’ve – the scales are all about the binary of shame rather than two, you know, choices that don’t have to be in competition with each other.
CB: Right. So it’s … Basically, it’s okay to have both. It’s not always an either/or, and sometimes it’s a “yes, and,” if you know that phrase. I don’t know if that’s the right, like, application of it here, but it seems possibly relevant.
BL: Yeah. I think that allowing ourselves to be more messy and contradictory can help clear some indecision because if we’re looking for our decisions to be like, really clean-cut, like, “I can do what I want, and no one will be mad at me!” It may be really hard to get to that place! And then maybe you’ll do nothing, you know? So I feel like Libra is messy because it’s post-equinox – autumn’s just coming in, the leaves are changing colors, everything’s changing all around us, disequilibrium is everywhere, and that the wisdom of Libra is supporting us into like, messiness just being part of the conflicts we move through as humans.
CB: Yeah, I mean, autumn – I was reflecting last year during Libra season – is also just like, one of the most beautiful parts —
BL: Yeah.
CB: — of the year, and I think —
BL: Yeah.
CB: — that’s what’s interesting about those two Venus-ruled signs is like, you have Taurus, which is when everything hits its peak beauty in terms of the beauty of youth and the vibrancy of that, whereas there was something about autumn that is like, the beauty and vibrancy of maturity or even of old age that’s beautiful when all of the leaves are changing and everything is just like, at peak vibrance in that sense.
BL: Yeah. It is so beautiful. And that leads me to one of my other faves, which is, “If you shame those who insist on beauty, then you will shame beauty in yourself.” If anesthetics refers to numbness, then aesthetics refers to aliveness, and like, thinking about the shaming of surface or shaming of cosmetics or the shaming of like, the cute popular girl as the Libra archetype. That this broad shaming of beauty is not life-affirming or life-loving, because beauty is deeply part of that sign and that season of the sign. Yeah, I mean, beauty is such a fraught topic, you know? And so much of that is not our fault; it’s from the conditioning of culture that says, “This is what’s beautiful, and this is what’s not beautiful.” And the desire to want to be able to look at ourselves in the mirror and see beauty is something that we long for. And then, but at the same time, then culture will shame you for being someone who likes to look in the mirror. Like you’re some kind of evil stepmother with mirror, mirror on the wall. And like, calling a vanity a vanity and then coupling vanity with badness because it’s selfishness. There’s this kind of fraught situation in our culture, which I do think can be experienced by different bodies differently, whereby it can feel like, well, what? You wanted me to focus on my beauty, and then now you’re shaming me for caring about my beauty? Like, how does one do anything right around here? Like, how can I be a good person? And that’s what then it just like, loops us back to the shame piece. But what I found to be true is this search for beauty in oneself and in the mirror can be deeply congruent with a desire to see beauty everywhere and they’re deeply connected. This longing to seek beauty in all things, in all experiences, feels very Libran.
CB: That’s really good. Yeah, I think that’s really important because we culturally have a – sometimes there’s a shaming of aesthetics as being shallow somehow, that you’re supposed to look past appearances to more, you know, “substantial” or “important” things, or to like, not judge a book by its cover because there might be important information in it, et cetera, because we don’t want societally there to be the negative parts of that where something is devalued if it doesn’t have some subjective sense of like, aesthetic appeal, but then yeah. Then as a result of that, it can go too far and can end up like, shaming those whose perception of the world, or who have a more developed sense of aesthetics and a perception for and an ability to sort of see and recognize beauty and symmetry in the world in terms of trying to think of what beauty even is. I was rereading the introduction, Robin Waterfield’s introduction to the Timaeus the other day where Plato talks about the planets, and one of the things the translator pointed out was that Venus has the most symmetrical and almost perfectly circular orbit, whereas the other inner planet, Mercury, it has this wildly elliptical orbit so that … I thought that was really interesting that the planet that we associate the most with beauty and symmetry is the planet that has astronomically the most almost like, perfectly symmetrical and beautiful orbit essentially as well.
BL: Yeah. And it makes me think about like, the word “agreement,” as agreement can speak to both like, a formal agreement, like aesthetically, the form of a thing, like the way it coheres is like its agreement. But also like, negotiation and peacemaking and conflict and how Libra speaks to these parts of human experience. And something that came through in the Libra workshop was this idea like, what if disagreement is not invalidation? And I feel like, in our culture, I tend to find that Venusian things are more invalidated and the Libran desire for peace and for moving through conflict towards agreement is one that is fraught for us in our culture, that we don’t have a lot of comfort with conflict, and we don’t have a lot of comfort with trusting in the process of moving through conflict towards repair, such that we see anyone disagreeing with us anywhere as someone invalidating us. And I feel like Libra’s actually, from an unshamed place of like, being comfortable with how one moves through agreement and disagreement, is able to see that someone disagreeing with you is not like, shaming you and saying that you’re not worthy, saying that you’re a terrible person. That if we could agree with that disagreement is not invalidation, I think we would be more comfortable sharing our voices out in the world, because we’re in a world right now with cancel culture, where it’s like, someone doesn’t agree with you, they’re gonna take you down. So these are some of the ways that I feel like unshaming Libra could be really supportive to us so that we can trust in the messiness of pathways for peace and pathways through, “Okay, so we don’t agree – then what?”
CB: Right. And also, you mentioning like, it makes me think of like, social graces, and since we had talked about Aries and some of the things to embrace, you know, the other side of that spectrum is the value of like, politeness and niceness and sort of social … The facility with that that Libra has, which can be a good thing in some instances.
BL: Yeah, I mean, I think if niceness becomes the name of the game, then there’s probably a lack of coherence at least on one side, because someone’s privileging coming across as a good person before naming what their truth is in this situation.
CB: Maybe, or maybe they’re valuing social coherence or I can’t think of the word for coherence, but it’s like, social… Having a good relationship with somebody. Like, let’s say you run into a neighbor all of the time. You could be, maybe you’re going somewhere and you don’t have to time to like, talk to this person and so you just like, gruffly are like, “Hello,” and you keep walking, versus – or maybe you don’t feel like being, let’s say nice to that person, versus maybe Libra valuing social harmony between people and therefore doing things in order to promote that more than somebody else, which could be devalued as a weak or shallow form of not saying what you really mean or something like that. But perhaps from a social standpoint there’s something important about that desire to, for things to be harmonious between individuals rather than being inharmonious or discordant.
BL: Yeah, I see that. Yeah. Thank you.
CB: Last thing I wanted to mention here just that you made me think of is Venus – I’ve read some speculation that the glyph for Venus in like, Greco-Roman astrology may have originally been meant to represent a mirror. So that sort of ties in with our previous theme. I don’t know if that’s correct and I think it’s somewhat of a speculation, but it might be correct.
BL: Wow. I love that.
CB: Yeah. All right. Anything else about Libra before we move on?
BL: I think that’s good.
CB: All right. Cool. Let’s move on to unshaming Scorpio.
BL: Yes, unshaming Scorpio. So one of the first ones I led with in Scorpio season was, “Maybe your obsession is a problem, or maybe your capacity to be endlessly fascinated by something is a threat to standardized respectability.” Over-culture wants us to be only moderately, politely into things, lest we shock one another with the horror of our deep interest. And I feel like one of the things that is often thrown at Scorpio is this idea of them being obsessive, so that started to feel into like, what’s so bad about obsessions? And I feel like being really, really, really into things is sometimes considered like, out of decorum in polite culture. And that part of how we know who we are and can express who we are can come through honoring what we’re sort of endlessly fascinated by and want to go down, down, down, down, down into like, where is the very bottom of this thing? I wanna get all the way to it.
CB: What that makes me think of is I think I came up with it – it’s okay to be passionate about something. And then you can break that down even further and say, “It’s okay to be passionate.” And all of a sudden, we’ve connected like, a bunch of the Scorpio archetypes together.
BL: Yeah. To be passionate. Unshaming being passionate. And I think that probably at the root of it or fear of it is like, the chaos of being in your emotional world again. Like, it brings us back to other water signs of the chaos of it not being fully logical and thus maybe not being fully controllable and thus not being fully like, what a grown up does. Because I think a lot of shame is about preparing us to be adults in our world, and so we carry that sense of like, grown ups don’t get that passionate because they have to fill in the blank.
CB: Right. And to be like, with Cancer, swept up in your emotions about something, but what if in this instance because it’s a fixed water sign, what if your emotions are not transient or passing? What if they are abiding emotions that you’re being driven by that stick with you and that therefore cause you to stick with something for much longer than someone else might because you’re so passionate about it?
BL: That really resonates. Yeah and it’s like, the language of those passions is the language of your truth at some deep, core level, and to me, there’s a kind of erotic aspect to that, because it comes through these really bodily feelings, like down low, where we have our sense of our deepest pleasures but also our deepest pains. And that like, revealed into a room can feel like, out of decorum or like, not what respectable culture talks about is the depth of those deeper feelings.
CB: I like that; that’s really good. And another aspect of the Scorpio archetype that you brought up is the darker end of things, or like, the perception of that.
BL: Yes, the audacity to be macabre. Is that how you say it? Macabre? Maca-ber?
CB: I think that might be, but you’re – I have never – I don’t know if I’ve ever tried to pronounce it before. I always thought it was like, maca-brie, but I’m probably then way mispronouncing that, so —
BL: I’m a chronic mispronouncer —
CB: No, you’re blowing my mind right now if it is macabre, so I’ve learned something new today.
BL: Okay, super. I took French, so I add the like, “bre” you know, at the end, but that’s maybe just me just flaunting my Francophone background. Only in a culture terrified of death would we make someone feel selfish for ruminating on the fact that things end. We cannot separate ourselves from the gruesome and the creepy because these two belong to life. And you know, when I wrote on that, I was also thinking about from my own life just that my dad died when I was a teenager, and I just thought about death all the time, but I didn’t feel like I was allowed to talk about it. Like, I didn’t – like, I – everyone scurried out of the room when I would walk in a room because I was the scary person that reminded everyone that your parent can die. And I feel very strongly that this is not helpful to us as a collective that we can’t talk about how sometimes we’re thinking a lot about death, and we’re thinking about what happens when we die, and we’re wondering, you know, what happens to our family members and our loved ones when they leave this world, and we’re wondering like, what will people think about us or say about us after we’ve gone. And we have these thoughts and then we’re told, like, “Ew. Ew! Don’t talk about that!” Or like, “ugh! Don’t be so morose! Don’t be so macabre!” and it’s like, I feel like it’s a deep thing to get close to this part of human experience because then we can come back to it and feel back into our aliveness, and this is like, the Taurus-Scorpio axis is like, how can we really appreciate the budding aliveness of like, ripe fruit, if we’re also terrified of the rotting fruit? And so, you know, we often like, shame Scorpio as like, they wear all black and why do they have to, you know, fill in the blank. Why do they have to be like that? Or getting all this attention because they’re wearing black? And it’s like the audacity to not mask the fact that death is a part of reality. And maybe that feels like truth. Maybe that feels way more authentic than this pretense that this isn’t all going to end.
CB: Yeah. For sure. I mean, societally, people are very uncomfortable talking about death and loss and pain and things in that area, and it becomes things that people would just rather not talk about or would rather overlook or especially if a person has never suffered like, a major death or loss, they don’t know how to interface as well with that side of life, versus those, you know, of us – like, I also lost my father when I was five, so – that are more familiar with those things have more of a familiarity or a comfort like, knowing what that’s like and knowing the possibilities of things that can happen and of the full range of human experience. But sometimes that’s really important because sometimes those people can put those things to good use as, you know, for example, like, grief counselors or other people like that that actually specialize in like, knowing how to talk to people and to help people that are in those situations.
BL: Yes, so much yes. And yeah, I think there’s this sense with the Scorpio part of us where you feel punished for just speaking what is just honest, like, it’s just the truth. Like, I’m not trying to hurt your feelings about the fact that death is a part of life. Like, it just is. And there can be this sense with Scorpio where it’s like, is it that I’m too honest actually? Like, am I really too much? Or do you just not have the capacity to be with what I’m saying? Like, why am I taking this on as my shame that I’m this like, sad, morose, too-truthful person, when I’m just speaking what is actually true to me about being a human?
CB: Yeah, and it’s the same issue that we ran into with like, Aries, where they can be shamed for being like, brusk or using, you know, let’s say foul language or abrasive language or being… I’m trying to think of like, the other keywords we were talking about, but there’s like, a similar thing there, and it’s coming partially from Mars. And the, you know, having the audacity to be really genuinely honest about something even if it’s uncomfortable or even if other people don’t like the way it sounds, and it reminds me how in just a couple episodes ago, Demetra and I did the myth episode on how the planets came to be assigned to the Greek gods and how they were patterning them after the Mesopotamian gods. And when we got to Mars, it was actually really interesting because with Mars, they picked the Greek god Ares, which is the god of war, which fit one aspect of the earlier Mesopotamian deity who dealt with war, but there was another aspect of that deity in Mesopotamia, which is that it was also the god of the underworld. And that part of the planetary myth didn’t necessarily get passed on, because they picked Ares, the god of war in the Greek pantheon, and so we sort of lost out on some of that meaning in the transmission, which otherwise would have been assigned to Pluto. Like, Pluto would’ve been the alternative for that name that they could have picked, but I feel like we see some of that coming through here with Scorpio, the other sign that Mars rules besides Aries.
BL: Yeah. Ooh, I love that history piece. Thank you.
CB: Yeah.
BL: Yeah, I had asked, “Is my directness a problem, or is that you feel threatened by the clarity of my edges?” This – and I have a daughter with five planets in Scorpio, so she teaches me so much about Scorpio. She is just so direct! And she’s been judged her whole life for people misreading it as being rude, and it’s like, it doesn’t process for her, because she’s just saying like, “Oh, I don’t like that.” It’s not personal. It’s just directness. And wouldn’t it be great if we could all just be direct with one another and not have to pretend because we’re afraid that somebody doesn’t like the way our edges are poking at them?
CB: Yeah. So embracing the ability to be direct and piercing and to get to the bottom of things.
BL: Yeah. It’s a beautiful and important human skill.
CB: It’s good. All right. I think I like that; that’s good for Scorpio, yeah?
BL: Great.
CB: Let’s move onto talking about unshaming Sagittarius.
BL: Yes. So I led with the audacity to be shameless, which is playful. Because I feel like Sag has this kind of, “You’re so shameless” energy about it. Only in a culture of shame would we be resentful of someone who isn’t paralyzed by the threat of consequences. Sag’s shamelessness has intelligence to break you free from the decay of decorum. Unshame shamelessness because what feels good is also wisdom. And yeah, I feel like for this one it’s like, there’s this sense with Sagittarius of like, how dare you. How dare you be so free? How dare you not contort to the like, the rules the way the rest of us are? I think that there can be this sense of like, resentment with Sagittarius that Sagittarius isn’t kowtowing more, isn’t bending more to like, the rules of discipline and the disciplinary nature of shame. So then, so I felt into that, like, what can that be teaching us? Like, what is Sag actually teaching through blowing that off? Because whatever we’re shaming in someone else is actually revealing something about what we want in many ways. Like, oh, maybe what it is is that we want to feel more free to just express our fire, go where it goes, follow the fire wherever it’s leading us. Change direction, follow our different passions, shamelessly, and what is inherent to that that is actually really beautiful that is supporting us in why we’re even here.
CB: Yeah. That’s just like – it’s very similar to Leo in that way in terms of the two fire signs and having a sort of shameless quality and others maybe then developing a jealousy over how free they are to be themselves. And it’s interesting that freedom is part of the component there, like, the freedom to be who you are authentically and to be okay with that.
BL: Yeah. And I think this comes through the element of fire. You know, I think that fire is probably the element … We could argue about it, but I feel like fire is an element that many feel most scared of in themselves or the most like, limited in terms of how they let it move through them. And I think that there’s like, the intelligence of Sagittarius as being what we need right before the winter solstice, and being what is pulling us out of Scorpio. Being this like, expansive energy that we ride and we let it move through us like, more like song than like, regular talking. It’s a really essential part of who we are that tells us what our spirit most craves in this life. And so to me, in its inherent intelligence, it like, needs to run its course and get really big, because it’s like, this fire that’s keeping us alive in the dark, the darkest time of the year, and so when we’re closing in on the Sagittarian part of us, we’re actually like, closing in on what gives us hope and what gives life meaning. What our spirit is wanting to ride. And to me, the intelligence is that Sagittarius is what we’re handing to Capricorn that Capricorn like, builds a life around, is like, what is the fire that’s worthy of Capricorn’s building nature. It’s from our clarity around the Sagittarian part of us, but if we shame that Sagittarian energy from expanding, expanding, and growing and going and singing and following where it wants to go, then we’re sort of, we’re not getting crucial information about what our spirit wants to experience in this life.
CB: For sure. And coming off of Scorpio, like we had talked about Scorpio and embracing sometimes the darker side of life, with Sagittarius, we go into this different phase of embracing our – and unshaming our – optimism. That it’s like, okay to be optimistic, even like, wildly or blindly optimistic about the future, because sometimes that’s the part of ourselves where just having an unbridled optimism will actually carry you through and see you through to success in something that you might not have otherwise if you didn’t have that optimism. And maybe in that way, it’s kind of similar to Aries, charging in head first into something and acting and doing something before they fully planned it out, but that being necessary to follow that spark of inspiration.
BL: Yeah. I think something that is worthy of teasing with Sagittarius is this distinction between conviction and certainty, just like Aries isn’t certain – it’s not running on certainty. That’s not what’s motivating it. It doesn’t know. It’s just going for it anyway. I think we think about Sagittarius as having conviction, and sometimes as a part of us can allow that conviction to harden into dogma, but I feel like as a mutable sign, what it wants to be is having conviction to the beauty of the story, whether the beauty of the story is tied to your spiritual beliefs, to your cosmology, to like, an abstract concept that you find like, beautiful to behold, and allowing your conviction that the story will hold without certainty to carry you through. That your love for the story itself is what’s holding you and is leading you places that’s like, your spirit is leading you places and you don’t even know where you’re going. You’re just following the story. And I find that inherently really – it feels true in my body as a really inherently supportive thing about Sagittarius. And so it’s like, how dare you just have conviction that this is gonna catch you when you fall? Or that this dream that you’re following is going to cohere into something that isn’t gonna kill you, you know? And it’s inherent to Sagittarius to truth the myth, to trust the heroic journey, to trust in, like, where it’s being called, that the story itself is taking you wherever you need to go, and that’s all you need to know in any given moment. You’ll just be surprised as you keep getting there, because there is no getting to the horizon. Like, you’re just only going with the story.
CB: Totally. That’s like unshaming the ability to manifest through optimism but also it reminds me I was like, rewatching the Harry Potter movies recently, and in what is it? Like, the third one? Like, he takes a luck potion – liquid luck – and then he just, like, goes out and he doesn’t know where he’s going or why he’s going this direction, but he just has this feeling like he needs to go out in this direction to meet Hagrid or something like that. And then through that, he just falls into a whole series of successful things and accomplishing exactly what he wanted and needed to accomplish even though he didn’t really have a plan for why he was gonna go out on this specific route that seems unlikely to yield in success, but he just had this like, feeling and that ended up being it. I mean, that’s something I think, yeah. Luck might be a good keyword for Sagittarius. And it’s something I think that other people can feel jealousy or want to shame, because that doesn’t always work for everybody. Like, that was one of the big issues in like, the mid-2000s with like, I don’t know, The Secret and stuff like that when that was really popular. I don’t know if you remember where, you know, maybe some people are more successful at like, broadly speaking, let’s say manifesting things than others. But sometimes, you know, because that doesn’t work for certain people but maybe there are some people where that approach to or orientation towards life fuels something in them that leads to success more than others and through embracing that, they actually tap into something that’s core to who they are.
BL: Yeah, I really love that. I feel like, with Sagittarius, I like to think about how you never know what’s next in the story, and like, what may feel like a hardship or a loss may be creating a way for you to get this other opportunity or meet this other person. And then something that might appear as like, lucky, or like, “Look at them! They have such good fortune.” Like, fortune follows them. Well, maybe in five years, because this thing unfolded for them, it led to this other thing that was very hard for them. You know, maybe the person they fell in love with dies of cancer. You know? And now they’re dealing with the loss of this great love. And so I feel like there’s an aspect to Sagittarius that is not just actually about trusting in good fortune as trusting that fortune is taking you places and building a story of your life for you no matter what it might feel like, good/bad, in a given moment. That I think —
CB: That’s great.
BL: — it’s a real gift to carry that, I think. That trust.
CB: Yeah, like trusting in the plan. Or that there is a plan or something like that.
BL: And maybe that’s where, maybe destiny can be rolled into a sign. Like, Sagittarius, like, obviously destiny, people are free to believe in destiny or not believe in destiny, but I feel like there’s a Sagittarian part of us that would like to trust that a pattern is cohering that’s working and collaborating with forces seen and unseen. That like, we have personal will that’s following the passion, following the story, and there’s like, a kind of fortune, fates, like, you know, like, that’s a part of astrology, you know? There’s an aspect of fortune being at play here, and just trusting that it has an intelligence that’s not trying to torture us.
CB: I think that’s really interesting, because there really – to think that there is like, a plan or a grand scheme for things, that there’s some sort of intelligent, you know, design or intelligence of the universe, I mean, that is a very optimistic position to take in and of itself, so maybe that’s why it ties in with Sag, because you know, that is a very optimistic almost like, philosophy of life as opposed to let’s say a more pessimistic one, which is just like, there is no plan. None of it’s meaningful, et cetera. That actually helps me understand Sag a little bit better, I think, in understanding that as well as how that can be important and valuable and the need to unshame that rather than view it as a sort of blind optimism or a naive one.
BL: Yeah. It is in fact quite brave, I think.
CB: Right. Yeah. All right. Is there anything else you wanted to mention about Sag?
BL: Well, I love this one that comes from the idea of Sagittarius telling tale tales and like, inflating stories. Unshame taking up space in your own story! Bring me your tall tales, the ones where you take up so much space. I have found it to be true that when I resist amplifying myself overtly, I will do it in the shadow realm. The urge to minimize one’s story is a consequence of deep shame for existing. Astrology transmutes the shame of existing because it asks us to stretch ourselves as big as the sky. Yeah, I feel like, something that – a piece in this too is this idea that like, taking up space in your story is somehow like, bringing in this personal bias that is going to like, throw your story out of alignment or like, maybe it’s not true anymore. It’s something that I learned, you know, in academia and art history is a form of history and learning about how all history is biased. Like, all history is subjective, and it’s all partial. It’s all from the position of the person telling the story, and even like, academic writing that seems extremely objective and seemed very data-based, it’s still telling a biased story by what it’s not saying and what it’s omitting from the story. And so it seems really helpful to unshame Sag for inflating itself in stories or sharing its bias in the story by naming that there is no unbiased narration. Like, owning that your narration is biased because it’s your story, it’s your way of seeing the world, allows you to not be pretending that you have an objective point of view or that you don’t have a bias, because we can’t help but have biases. So it’s like, allowing that to just be there for Sagittarius lets you then go ahead and be tall. Speak with hyperbole. Those are the more fun stories. And like, we love the tales that have these big heroes, you know? It’s just – but know that it’s a biased narrative, and like, own it and lean into it and have fun with it. So yeah.
CB: Maybe that also connects with like, the importance of storytelling and myth and the sense of connecting us with a greater sense of meaning and purpose, but that there’s like, there’s something really important about storytelling and myths, even aside from the bias issue, that’s important in the myth-making of like, how we bring meaning to our lives.
BL: Yeah. I think that there’s a way of shaming connecting yourself to astrology, like, who do you think you are, speaking about the Chiron that moves through yourself? Like, who do you think you are that you’re like Chiron? But that’s what astrology feels like it’s here to help us see is that we can stretch ourselves to feeling inside of ourselves the way, say, something like a Chiron archetype is actually alive in the way that our stories have unfolded and it’s very supportive to us. That’s one of the most supportive things about astrology, to me.
CB: For sure. One last thing – I don’t know if this has come up at all for you, but I sometimes may be embracing Sagittarius or unshaming Sagittarius as being a little goofy sometimes. I feel like there’s a connection sometimes there with like, Leo a little bit, but like, the jokester or like, the comedian, which I know is often more of a Mercury thing in some sense. But there’s something about Sagittarius that has like, the confidence to be like, a little bit goofy and to like, embrace that.
BL: Yeah, maybe it’s like, the broadness generally opens all the types within yourself, including that goofy goofster, you know? And you’re just letting yourself take up space is really what it feels like. And that’s one of the things that you might be like, “Oh, they’re so loud. Oh, the Sagittarius, ugh, their laugh.” You know?
CB: Right.
BL: But it’s that part of that broadness that I think is inherent to what’s needed in the season.
CB: Yeah.
BL: And I did want to get back to this, the fact that I do think Sagittarius is shamed differently depending on bodies, and something that came through in Sagittarian season for this was the idea of “Vagitarius,” which was very popular. And this idea of the – what is Sagittarius for like, a female-identifying body? When a lot of what we talk about with Sagittarius feels very like, Zeus, you know, sort of like, freewheeling man in this world, and what does it look like to talk about this kind of wildness, the wildness of the Sagittarian, as it moves through a body that doesn’t identify as a man or masculine? And we’ve had a lot of fun speaking about like, the keepers of like, the hearthfire in winter, telling the stories that – or maybe sort of like, more of like a women’s communal work, or thinking about the bow as being just as valuable to Sagittarius as the arrow. And there’s something here that is – I don’t have all the answers. For me, it was like, a total Aries move to be like, “But what about Vagitarius?” I don’t know what – I don’t have answers, but I’m bringing it in because it just came through, and it feels fun and supportive to think about how that archetype may shift when, for different people.
CB: Yeah, totally. That ties in really nicely with that early discussion about like, the flip side with like, Cancer masculine types.
BL: Yeah, and that’s another inconjunct. Because I think a lot of it is like, how can be the Sagittarian energy of having your backpack ready to go, you’re just gonna take off, if you’re responsible for caretaking small humans and you need to stay home because you’re supposed to be doing this selfless work? What does it look like to talk about that kind of freedom that doesn’t look like an archetype that would shame someone for abandoning their responsibilities, caretaking-wise? So that’s part of, I think, some of the juiciness that conversations can have around that topic.
CB: Yeah, totally. To wrap up this section, one of the things I was writing down, I was trying to condense it like, something about unshaming letting your unbridled optimism and joy uplift other people somehow as being like —
BL: Yeah.
CB: — a core thing.
BL: Because it’s infectious. It’s —
CB: Right.
BL: We pick up on it. It is supportive, and it’s not your fault if someone doesn’t want that right now. That doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with your expression of it, you know?
CB: Right. For sure. All right. Let’s move on to unshaming Capricorn.
BL: Yeah, so, this was a hot one for me, because A) I have a Capricorn Moon in my 10th house, so I feel very deeply connected to this archetype for my work in the world. And also I think it’s a deeply shamed sign and deeply misunderstood. So —
CB: Which – could I mention like, you’re getting some nice transits today where the Moon today is at like, 13 Capricorn, where your Moon is, as we’re recording this today. And Jupiter’s at about 12, almost 13, trining your 10th house Moon as your book is coming out.
BL: I love it.
CB: Yeah.
BL: Yeah. Was it destiny? Yeah, it’s, that feels… There’s a ripening in the air in my life; that’s very true. Yeah, so, one of the things I led with was, “My ambition is my service,” because I was thinking about the shaming of Capricorn as like, just ambitious, money-focused, career-focused like, capitalists who are destroying our world or something. And just like, what? It’s actually so not Capricorn to me. So I said, what if we expand the term “ambition” to mean the sincere and ardent commitment to showing up for what matters to you? For staying connected to your channel as long as necessary to complete the task of your heart? Shaming my ambition leads to lack of congruence, because then I’m simply not being honest about who I am. Yeah, I feel like this is a case of coupling, right? The coupling of “ambition” with badness or the coupling of “ambitious” with selfishness is not helpful, because whatever that energy is that is ambition, that we feel in the Capricorn part of us, that’s like, gonna keep going and has a focus and is like, constricting everything towards like, what really matters to you – this focused devotion is then what you can give the world with that Capricorn part of you. And so, it feels to me like I wouldn’t show up to my service if I wasn’t deeply supported by a Capricorn part of myself that is ambitious about the path that I’m on, which to me means deeply committed. Fully turned towards it, fully. What happens then? And I do think ambition is shamed differently for different bodies too. And I think the shame on this one often is rooted in the sense of shaming someone for their ambition because you wish that they would give you that kind of – them that kind of attention. They wish that I would do something else with that focus, is what it feels like to me. But to me, it’s like, this service, this vision, is what I’m here to work for, you know? And that’s that ambition.
CB: Yeah, and being dedicated to one’s priorities and goals or maybe having a very specific and well-defined set of priorities and goals that may or may not align with other people’s.
BL: Right. Yeah, I like a lot of adaptability in my career, let’s say, in my life. I do; I’m a very mutable person. But when my Capricorn part of myself like, sees a pathway towards something that I want to create, something that I wanna build a world around, say like, a class – whatever that is, that focusing energy with the Capricorn constellates into place and it’s… There’s like, no question for me on whether I’m gonna walk that. I just am. I’m gonna go, and I’m gonna show up to it as long as it needs me. Once it dissolves, then I may never do it again. It’s like, over to me. But the Capricorn part of me is the part of me that shows up for what matters.
CB: That makes sense. So showing up for what matters and unshaming having the audacity to pursue one’s goals and priorities even if they don’t align with others. What are —
BL: Yeah, especially if – sorry.
CB: Go ahead.
BL: I was just gonna say like, there’s an aspect to this that we can invite the people around us to support us in serving these goals. We can give our loved ones the opportunity to celebrate and support our commitment to what matters to us. I think that when there’s shame, there can be this fear that people in your life don’t actually support you, and the people in your life don’t actually want you to have this. And so, we might like, doggedly double down on like, a myopic focus, which then may not actually be well-received the people in our lives because it’s like, move out of the way. But I think that when we can soften into trusting that support is available for us, this is where I feel like Venus and Saturn together are just so lovely when we trust that support is available from our community, our ecosystem, then we can really show up to what we care about without feeling shamed, like we’re supposed to put our attention somewhere else to make people happy.
CB: That makes sense. And you also said that there’s an important like, respect component to Capricorn as well, right?
BL: Yeah. This one is a, this is a zesty thing, because I’m leading with not here to respect everyone, not here for everyone’s respect. So there’s an important request for nuance here, because in this telling, in this framework, of course respecting the inherent dignity and the right to humanness and the right to live of all beings, but I think that Capricorn is a part of us that has what we can call “high standards,” that has like, or at least has standards of what we – that we respect. Like, it’s a feeling inside of like, “I respect that person’s standards. I respect the choices that they’re making. I respect how they show up to this life.” And there can be a sense with Capricorn, like, that part is … People are gonna think that I judge them, so there’s a fear of respecting that, but I think that respect in this way is a kind of malefic form of relating. Because it’s a boundaried form of relating. It’s saying, “If I’m searching for someone to collaborate with me, I would love to work with someone…” It’s a part of you that’s gonna be boundaried around “that’s not gonna be just anyone.” I’m gonna want to respect the person that I’m collaborating with, deeply. And I don’t really respect all people when it comes to this particular project or this particular thing that I wanna do, and trusting that like, that doesn’t make me a bad person to feel connected with your standards. I feel like the intelligence of respect is rooted in the constraint of like, waiting to know that you respect someone. Holding back that sense of like, I don’t have to just willy-nilly respect everyone; I can wait and feel like the proof, the evidence, of like, whoa, I just really respect this person. So I said, “If I shame myself for withholding respect, there’s a shadow desire in myself to be respected by everyone. When you unshame the exclusivity of respect, you release yourself from performing for everyone’s respect.” And I think there’s a real liberation there. It’s because when you realize that we aren’t here to like, deeply respect all people – for the situation. Again, not like, their whole humanity. Then it allows you to also not be here for everyone, and then that’s a liberation. Because when you realize that you’re not here for everyone, there’s so much more that you can do with your life, because you’re not trying to figure out how to please and be respectable to every single person on the planet.
CB: I like that; that’s really good. So it’s like, embracing having standards or even high standards and a highly developed sense of discernment.
BL: And that too being part of like, the beauty of your work in the world. The beauty of what you’re building with that earth part of you. Its intelligence comes from these constraints that may read as exclusive – which is why it’s malefic, because Capricorn has a malefic energy given that Saturn is the ruler and the exalted planet is also malefic. So it’s got this like, double malefic aspect to it, Capricorn does.
CB: Yeah. It has this criticalness and an ability, fundamentally, to say “No,” because that’s what Saturn is really good at, is rejecting or saying “no” to something, and that’s part of what having discernment is is saying, seeing the faults in something and being able to say “no” to certain things or to reject certain things.
BL: Yes. Yeah. And then that links to then self-respect. I shared, “I found it to be true that my self-respect grows in proportion to the degree that I’m willing to be malefic. I respect myself when I experience the malefics moving through me, because it means I’m taking the risk to show you who I am no matter how you respond to me. It means I trust that I cannot be abandoned because I will not abandon myself.”
CB: That’s really good.
BL: And yeah, that’s a really huge one for me because as a Pisces Sun, I also have an ability to want to be accepting and bringing in of everyone. But to honor my full self, which is a Capricorn Moon, I also have to honor where there are situations where there are scenarios where I am extremely discerning. Like, who I pick as my romantic partner. Who I let in as a teaching collaborator. Like, that is deep, deep, deep discernment, which will feel in its nature exclusive because it is. Like, it’s exclusive to pick a single person out of the gazillions of people that exist in this world.
CB: Yeah, and to reject all else outside of that —
BL: Yeah.
CB: — one thing that you picked.
BL: Yeah.
CB: For sure. Good. All right. Anything else about Capricorn?
BL: I think one of the things that was very, that also was really helpful thinking about Capricorn for the community that was around this one this year was this idea that Capricorn’s love for rules, and its love for structure and ritual and constriction, is actually part of how it enjoys life. And like, if you think about games, like if there’s a basketball game, right? Like, there are clear rules, you know? There’s only five people per team; there’s two baskets; here are the lines. You can’t run and not be dribbling while you carry the ball. Like, there are very clear rules, and then once these rules are set, it’s like, let’s play. Let’s have a really fun time. And sometimes Capricorn is shamed as so dry and so like, cold, which I don’t actually think to be the heart of Capricorn in many ways because it’s kind of this like, horny, stinky goat energy, this like, Pan, devil energy of like, really actually loving play within the constriction of rules and rituals that have been consensually agreed upon by all parties.
CB: Yeah, that makes me think of Mars having its exaltation there and just to excel within the context of the constraints of the system that is in place, of the structure that’s in place that you’re operating within.
BL: Yeah, I have to stop you because I just saw that my GarageBand was bouncing, and it looks like it just stopped as a call had just come in that I declined. I didn’t realize that that was open. So I apologize, but it was just as you started speaking just then.
CB: Okay. I think —
BL: I think I —
CB: — it’ll be okay. Let’s go ahead and either …
BL: So should I save it?
CB: Yeah, go ahead and —
BL: As we did before?
CB: I think we’ll have to, just in order to make sure that we don’t accidentally override this file.
BL: Yes. Okay. Okay and then… Now I’m gonna export song to disc, .wav… Ugh, I’m sorry.
CB: It’s okay. I have done —
BL: That was my daughter. Hold on —
CB: Okay.
BL: — let me just text her.
CB: Sure. I have done 400 episodes, so I’ve seen all manner of different ways this can go, and I have learned just to roll with it.
BL: Okay. I am just closing my text box now. I just sent her the message to … Not call. I have one – my oldest one is driving now, so that’s a wild thing.
CB: Yeah. That’s a whole new world.
BL: It is a whole new world. She’s a junior in high school; she’s the Scorpio. Okay so we’re almost halfway through the saving process. How you doing?
CB: I’m hanging in there. It would’ve been… I would’ve been okay; I just shouldn’t have done the – I did like, a four-and-a-half hour one on Sunday, so it’s a little bit much —
BL: Yes.
CB: — back-to-back —
BL: Yes.
CB: — but this is worth it. It’s really good. It’s gonna come out great, and yeah. We’re almost there.
BL: Okay. Do you remember what we were just talking about?
CB: Like, did we – no, I’m blanking at. Did we start Aquarius or do we need to…
BL: I think I was just finishing that point about rules and structure being like, lots of fun for Capricorn. Here, I’m turning on my light in case… It’s starting to get dark here. Let’s see.
CB: Sure.
BL: That okay? I’ll start darkening pretty soon.
CB: Yeah. Let me sit down, let me see. Yeah, I think that’s good.
BL: Okay.
CB: So you were finishing up a point about Capricorn; is that what you said?
BL: Yes, and rules and structure, and you were making a point. We hadn’t moved to Aquarius yet.
CB: Oh, we hadn’t. Okay. Right. I just said something about like, Mars in Capricorn and to excel within the context of the constraints that you’re operating in.
BL: Yes.
CB: Okay.
BL: I think you may need to say that again, just because I’m not sure exactly where it cut…
CB: Okay.
BL: It’s just about done… Okay, so I guess I go to “New” again.
CB: Yeah. So now create a new one.
BL: Gonna turn off the tick-tocky thing.
CB: Oh yeah.
BL: Okay so I’ll press record now.
CB: Okay.
BL: Now it’s off. Good. Okay. And we’re back.
CB: All right. So we had a little interruption, but just to restart where we were – so I said something about it makes me think of Mars in Capricorn, Mars being exalted in Capricorn, and the principle of excelling within the context of the constraints that you’re operating within, whether that’s like, a game or a business or whatever it is once you’ve established those rules that you were talking about earlier.
BL: Yes, exactly. I think that Capricorn can come off as rigid when the inherent beauty of what those like, angles are giving us is a knowing about where the constraint needs to be in order for you to then enjoy doing what you wanna be doing.
CB: Right, by establishing the boundaries and then playing within the context of those boundaries.
BL: Yes.
CB: All right. Cool. Is there anything else about Capricorn before we move on?
BL: That’s great.
CB: All right, cool. Well, let’s move on to talking about unshaming Aquarius.
BL: Yes. So one of the things that I had shared is that your deviation is your liberation, as in, the space where you deviate off of what is expected of you, what is being put on you, what is being shown as required, this will or this move to get away from that is liberatory in its essence. To discover if a deviation feels authentic to me, I must first be willing to be cringey at deviating, which plays off what we were talking about before with Leo and Aquarius. We shame deviations from someone’s previous norm as inauthentic as if there’s such a thing as a self that does not change. Yeah, I think that these refusals to be standardized are really an important part of us. There’s this sense inside of us, this Aquarian side, that being put in a box is sort of like the death of us in some way. And this sense of being called into deviating from the standard is not designed to be a personal attack; I think this comes through a lot where like, the Aquarius part of us will feel shamed for not just going along with things. For not just playing along with “this is the way things are. This is the paradigm that’s accepted. Why are you trying to get us to deviate from this?” As if, like, the Aquarian part of us is trying to be difficult or like, trying to create problems, when it’s actually this ability to see a malfunction or this ability to recognize where standardization is unloving that’s supporting the collective, that’s supporting the group in quitting standardizations that are harming us, is what it feels to me.
CB: Yeah. So embracing, unshaming, embracing not conforming. Embracing also being an outsider. It’s like it’s opposite to Leo, where you have the Sun and like, everybody tends to, you know, revolve around the Sun, and the Sun being the center of what society is deeming as currently acceptable. But Aquarius often being opposite to that ends up standing outside of the center of where most people are sort of focused at the time. But there’s also this time component of, it’s ruled by Saturn, but as a diurnal sign, it always has this forward-looking component to it, which is part of the thing that sets it apart. So maybe part of it like, embracing not being part of the current contemporary in-crowd because your eyes and your orientation is set to the future, to a place that people may catch up to eventually.
BL: Yes. We might call this outsiderness “weird,” right? Like, this is a word that we grow up with and we hear this word “weird,” and it’s like, we’ll do anything to not be called weird, because weird is bad. This is like, a message that I internalized. And what I’ve come to see as I’ve really begun to embrace the Aquarian in myself is that I actually feel really comfortable when weirdness is present openly in someone else, because like, when I don’t sense someone’s weirdness, so to speak, then I’m wondering if they’re performing how well that they can play to the standards, like, how well they’re playing to cultural belonging in a way that they’re gonna then want me to validate for them, so I’m gonna be in this game of like, “Oh, let’s just both interact to perform our mutual belonging.” And so, I feel like when our weirdness is more forward, we can trust that we’re talking with someone who has, is moving from this like, unique frequency that they feel for themselves, so they’re expressing that authenticity of that as opposed to the performance of belonging that I don’t really wanna participate as much in anymore.
CB: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It brings in this component or this keyword of like, “alienation,” you know, part of the fear or the shame surrounding Aquarius and being on the outside of the, being on the periphery of things can be a fear of alienation where you then get to all sorts of other related keywords like isolation, detachment, estrangement and other things that become – “distance” is another one – that all seem like related components, but it comes back to that core fear of being shamed for that.
BL: Yeah, and full transparency, this really came forward for me in the process of promoting Unshaming Aquarius that of all the signs, unless you just full-on embrace your Aquarian nature, like if it’s a full-blown, like, “This is just who I am!” You know? And there are a lot of individuals who love being Aquarian and talk about how much they love being Aquarian. But it’s almost like, everyone else is like, “Oh, I don’t know that I wanna go there,” because I think inherently there’s this fear of being the outsider. Like, there’s a deep, rooted fear of being cast out, of being away from the safety of community, of being ostracized, like, who’s gonna be there for me if I go outside that line? Where will I find community and family then? And so there’s this kind of huge leap to move through if you desire to unshame the Aquarian part of you whereby you release yourself from participating in motivations and behaviors and dynamics just to keep yourself safe inside the group and see what happens when you being speaking from your unique weirdness, your kind of more alien self, just seeing like, will anybody resonate with me outside of that line? And what I found to be truth is that connection is actually so much more meaningful then, because when you feel safe to be yourself, and then you find other people who are resonating with that frequency of your Aquarian, the connection feels deeply liberating because you feel so seen in the wholeness rather than people only seeing the part of you that you’re allowing in order to stay safe within the tribe, you know?
CB: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Sometimes it’s nice to run into like, a fellow weirdo in the wild and there’s something deeply that feels very good about that that’s connecting even if it’s few and far between to be able to have that genuineness of connection rather than to suppress that simply for the sake of being closer to the in-crowd or closer to the core of where most people are.
BL: Yeah. I think that there’s a kind of sense that my deviation or my weirdness is going to make people uncomfortable. It’s going to be disagreeable to certain people. And it’s sort of like this process of deciding what’s more important to me – being seen as comfortable all the time? Or allowing people to be uncomfortable by me – I can’t control it either way. All I can control is how much of myself I’m gonna show, and what I’m gonna let people see. And at some point, the discomfort of constricting around letting people see that like, I’m a freaky mystic became bigger than the potential discomfort of someone being uncomfortable by me being a person who’s really into astrology, for example.
CB: Right. Yeah, that makes sense. And this connects us with another concept we were gonna mention, which is the sort of aloofness that’s sometimes said to be associated with Aquarius.
BL: Yes. “Maybe you’re aloof, or maybe you don’t find it loving to pretend you feel like engaging when you don’t. Are you detached, or are you honoring someone’s sovereignty by not attaching to them in the name of friendliness? Unshaming my Aquarius has meant giving myself permission to be seen as cold when I know myself to be warmly inside my own frequency. What if it’s prosocial, not antisocial, to say no to interactions that don’t resonate with your current frequency? I value you, as in I will not ask you to dilute yourself in order to match me.”
This piece around matching is really important, because we – the culture that we’ve been raised in, from my perspective, teaches us that friendship and belonging comes through significations of matching. Like, “Oh, me too! Well, my…” da-da-da-da-dah! And like, you reflect back to each other how you match, and like, this is what bonding is. Bonding is we show how well we match, because like, “I’m like this, and you’re like this.” And I feel like unshaming my Aquarius has been allowing myself to just stay inside of myself and let someone not match with me. And maybe what I don’t feel like on my end is I don’t maybe feel like chatting. Maybe I feel like – call it antisocial – maybe I just feel like being quiet and I don’t want to pretend like I wanna be chatty right now. And so there’s like, an aspect there of having the courage or the audacity to be seen as cold when you don’t feel cold; you just feel like you’re being honest. And I think that that has been, that’s been a really important thing for me.
CB: Yeah, for sure. Or sometimes the warmness that Aquarius gives is different from the warmness that like, other signs give and maybe is more intellectual in some sense, but can still be warm in its own way even though it’s different than what we typically think of as warmness or supportiveness when it comes to the signs.
BL: Yeah, oh I like that too. Like, what is your definition of “warmth?” And again, like, we create these standards. We create these signatures of “this is good, and this is not good.” Or “this is normal, and this is weird.” And unshaming our Aquarius is really about the audacity, I think, to notice when we are in a paradigm like, say, a shame structure of false couplings, that is actually not helpful to us being here together.
CB: Yeah, that makes sense. All right. Are there any other major points we wanted to mention about Aquarius?
BL: I think that’s good.
CB: All right. Awesome.
BL: Oh my goodness.
CB: We are finally here. We are at your home sign, which … It was just your – I don’t know if I mentioned this at the beginning, it was just your birthday yesterday as a Pisces. So happy birthday and happy solar return.
BL: Thank you, thank you.
CB: All right. Let’s talk about unshaming Pisces.
BL: Yeah, so I led with “it’s not zoning out; it’s tuning in. If you shame someone for being ‘in their own world,’ then you will shame yourself for wanting a break from this one, leading to unconsciously escapist behaviors that might lead to more shame. Unshaming Pisces means giving one another more spaciousness with timing, expectations, and checking resentments when someone doesn’t find what’s meaningful to you as meaningful to them. The Pisces part of you understands already that it’s not personal. Everyone is living in their own dream.”
This really comes from a lifetime of everybody telling me to snap out of it, like, all the time. Just making fun of me for having like, a “deer in the headlights” expression on. Like, “Yoohoo! Earth to Britten! Where’d ya go?” And I just – through learning about Pisces, astrology only came into my life in late 2017. It just opened up this whole doorway into understanding so much about myself, which is a part of myself that has traditionally been unseen. I mean, it’s a 12th house part of me, you know? And so, the truth is, like, I do love being in my own world. It’s very difficult for me to hold my attention on something that doesn’t feel deeply meaningful to me, and I just start to stop paying attention. Mercury in Pisces! And I can sense sometimes that someone feels sad that they’re sensing me – like, Britten’s left the chat. Where’d she go? It’s a very compelling place, my imagination, my thought world is my favorite place to be. And so I feel like being able to see it as like, it’s not like I’m not anywhere. I am somewhere. I’m tuning into this whole realm that I love to be in so much.
And I found it to be true that we live in a culture that shames dreaming and shames the Piscean as a waste of time. We see the Piscean as unproductive, because we’re a culture that values like, actions towards productivity. Actions that are “useful.” And so how is “zoning out” productive? And what I think is harmful here is that I think we’re a culture that struggles with imagination, that wishes it had more space to dream, that doesn’t even have self-trust in one’s own dreaming capacities because it’s not really a realm that one is tapping into very much because we were told it was a waste of time. And we’re here to be dreamers. We’re dreaming new realities, is how I see it now. And we know it means something to us, because it’s meaningful, these places that we go. And so when someone’s kind of tuning out, to me, it’s like, it’s not personal. It’s not a place to be like, “Oh, Britten must not care what I’m saying. She must think my ideas are stupid or something.” It’s like, it’s not personal. It’s just that we’re all – if we’re all connected to our dream, then we will let each other be in our dreamspaces, and that requires more spaciousness from one to the other. Like letting each other respond to emails on our own timing. Like, letting us have more space for this kind of floating and dreaming and letting things noodle. Letting things kind of move around in a non-linear way, and giving everyone space for that, is I think what I long for in a world that doesn’t shame the Piscean.
CB: Yeah, you mentioned – a lot of what you’re bringing up is bringing up this concept of – I think is really important with Pisces, which is like, timelessness.
BL: Yes.
CB: And unshaming – you mentioned giving one another more spaciousness with timing expectations and checking resentments, and I think that’s important with Pisces because Pisces could sometimes like the negative sense can be accused of being flaky, of like, you know, not being on time, not getting back to people, you know, coming in and out of conversations or things like that and I think it’s because there’s this like, timelessness quality to Pisces underlying it that is probably at the core of that so that its conception of time and doing is not as like, strict and linear and needing to do things in an orderly fashion than maybe some of the other signs.
BL: Yes, exactly. I like to think about Pisces as both the magical child and like, the old wizard inside of us. And so it’s not as much a part of us that we think of as like, good at adulting, whatever it is that we in our culture say adulting is. Like, the Pisces part of us is just not super inspired by these constructs of being a grownup or like, being an adult, because adults are supposed to do time this particular way. And I like to think about it like, Pisces already lived through Saturnian time, through Capricorn and Aquarius. It knows about that time; it’s like, I see you, I appreciate you, and also there’s other forms of time. There’s other forms of time that are available to us. So it’s like we can accuse the Pisces parts of people as “terrible with time,” but I also feel like it’s the Pisces part of us that can like, go visit past lives and go see the future and like, actually bounce around in different forms of time and timelessness. So it’s like, which form of time is Pisces terrible at? Like, it actually is very amazing with time. Like, quite skilled at certain types of time, just not the time that industry maybe values as like, a good way of relating to time if you’re an adult doing things.
CB: Yeah. So just unshaming having a more fluid conceptualization of time and having the flexibility to embrace that and embrace going with the flow.
BL: Yes, I think so. I think that would be really supportive if we lived in a world that allowed … We spoke about like, a Taurean kind of time, like the body’s time, and a Mercury type of time, and I feel like Piscean time is also a relevant time and also a valuable time. And I actually find it to be deeply “productive” in the sense of like, for my work as a creative human, as an intuitive and mystical person, I create intentional windows of time where I like to go into the Piscean realm of my imagination and play there and what I hear, or what I see or what I know in these spaces then in another type of time in another part of my day, I might then be able to speak those things into my work. I might be able to – I can then offer what I see in my imaginative realms out in the world and ask, you know, does this resonate with anyone? This is what’s coming through me right now. All of my work is connected to the Piscean realm, but then I turn to other forms of time to actually execute things according to human adult timelines, like manuscript deadlines, you know? We can play with time through these different frequencies.
CB: Yeah. And there’s just something tremendously creative when you tap into that like, dream state and that state where we go to dream, where that’s one of the few places that most people can experience that like, timelessness of Pisces, like that place that you submerge yourself into where there is no time and it goes back and forth in different ways and you have different experiences that are outside of time in some sense.
BL: Yeah. Exactly. And to the shaming that it’s like, not real, or that it’s not reality, or like, that idea, that dream you have is delusional is the accusation to the Pisces part of us. It’s like, if we’re using the word “delusional” as meaning it doesn’t exist in reality, it’s like, well, this is precisely my point. Because I’m interested in bringing something to – from my imaginative realm that doesn’t currently exist here, and I – who is going to validate this delusional dream except for me? And so unshaming our Pisces has a lot to do with validating and valuing our dreams.
CB: Yeah. For sure.
BL: Nobody else is going to, and you know, if we don’t do it ourselves.
CB: Yeah. We had a talk about this on, I think, the last forecast episode and talking about Saturn in Pisces and the value of like, world building and some past times in history where Saturn has been in Pisces and there have been these works of fiction that were created where they just created these elaborate, alternative realities and world which people then – fans of those works – would go to and like, immerse themselves in. And it’s something that’s completely made up that didn’t exist in some, you know, more tangible, practical sense, and yet there’s something real about it once constructed that is interesting and like, useful and helpful and is part of the inspiration of life and imagination and creativity.
BL: Yes. Exactly. Yeah I – there’s like, a naivete that we accuse the Pisces of. It’s a form of invalidation and belittling to treat the Pisces in one another as childish, as opposed to holding a childlike sense of wonder in approaching their creativity and their imagination. And I feel like these narratives about me, that I was a baby, that I was a child, that I couldn’t take care of myself, had really intense consequences on the first half of my adulthood. And it took me validating myself to show myself that I can live in this world, that I can follow my dreams, it’s just – but it’s gonna have to be me that leads the way and creating evidence that I can hold to my childlike wonder in the face of harsher realities and that it’s important that I do this.
CB: I like that. Having the audacity to unshame your imagination. That’s good.
BL: Yeah.
CB: All right. And then there’s another side of Pisces as well, right?
BL: Yes. The audacity to live with an open heart. You know, it came to the final day of promo for the Unshaming Pisces workshop, and it was sort of this moment of like, but what is the bottom line? The audacity to live with an open heart. When we shame someone for being openhearted, we will shame ourselves for being open hearted. And to me, this is all about fear, not strength. It’s not strong to be closed hearted. It’s strong to be openhearted. There is no path where we get to curate which feelings we allow. Like, my younger self just like, maybe if I shut myself down to feeling, I won’t have to feel the feelings that are hard. And living with an open heart, to me, means trusting that our heart is taking us places and that we are here for ourselves, we can trust ourselves. No matter what kinds of feelings and experiences come forward, we will be there. When we drop the good/bad binary from the feeling experience, all feelings become music for guiding the way. We can have this idea that like, that’s a good feeling, and that’s a bad feeling. And we can block our hearts from one another and trusting in one another because we’re afraid that somehow together bad feelings will come up. And I feel like trusting in the openhearted capacity of Pisces to just hold all of it, the expansiveness of all feeling, in the frequency of love is truly its superpower, but it will mean trusting that you can’t select which feelings you want and which you don’t want. I mean, and this comes from my own experience of losing my dad, of just like, it being so hard to feel it that I just was like, well, maybe I can just shut down feelings and I can shut down my heart and not listen to my heart. But that, I found to be true, is just not what I’m here to do. I’m here to be led by my heart that’s giving all the compass tools that I need to navigate this world, and I can go through grief. I can go through loss. I can go through whatever suffering might come forward, trusting that my heart will alchemize all of that into more love ultimately. Because this is part of being human.
CB: Yeah. When you wrote that – the audacity to live with an open heart – it also made me think about the piece of Pisces where it’s incredibly empathetic, and how empathy is typically undervalued in our society, I feel like, whereas sometimes it can be viewed as like, naive or … I looked up “naive” and it was coming up with synonyms like “innocent,” “unworldly,” “childlike,” and so that empathy and having empathy for others is treated as a weakness sometimes when in fact it’s actually a strength and something that should be embraced.
BL: Yes. I think that… This was one that I was hearing from people that they were like, weeping reading these words. It’s a very scary sign to just fully let yourself go into, because I think living with that kind of innocent, open heart has gotta be one of the things that we’re most terrified of doing. And I wouldn’t be doing what I do if I didn’t actually believe that this is actually the pathway for us to live here together, given that we do live in a world where we don’t often show one another an open-hearted way. There’s so much evidence that that is a fantasy. There is so much evidence that it’s a fantasy that we could all be open-hearted in loving one another. But it’s like, what delusional dream do you wanna believe in? The delusion that it’s possible or the delusion that it’s not possible? From a Piscean perspective, you choose the reality that you’re dreaming into being, and you’re the only one that can validate it in the face of evidence that the world is not this way. So it’s a pretty radical path, I think, and a scary one. So it does take a whole lot of audacity.
CB: Yeah. And also what you’re saying in terms of wouldn’t do it also, I think, unless you believed that it was helpful for people, and there I think we kind of bring in the Virgo-Pisces axis where Virgo tends to be helpful on an individual level to like, one on one, versus Pisces tends to strive towards those things that are helpful for lots of people in a bigger picture sense.
BL: Yeah. And I think they both – in both of them, there’s a kind of unseen quality of like, unseen service. So there’s an aspect to showing up in your Pisces that some will see what you’re doing and some won’t be able to see it and just going ahead and doing it anyway.
CB: Right. Doing it because it’s like, the right thing to do versus doing because of like, system of rewards or something like that.
BL: Yeah.
CB: Brilliant. All right. Any other major points you wanted to mention about Pisces?
BL: I feel good.
CB: All right.
BL: Pretty amazed that we moved through them all!
CB: We did. We did it. This was big. This was bigger than I thought it was gonna be, but it was also way better than I even anticipated and expected. So thank you so much for going through and doing this. This was actually just a small – you had written down like, five to six major points that we could’ve talked about for each of the signs from your workshops that you’ve done on this, but we actually just narrowed it down to just like, basically two qualities. So this is something that you spent, you’ve done entire workshops on, and is that something that’s available on your website or can people access the longer teachings at this point, or are you gonna turn that into something?
BL: Yeah. It’s in that liminal, dissolving space of being what it was, which I fully saw as a research and development project for a year. And you can still invest in all of the two-hour workshops and many, many, many people love them as replays, apparently. I hear they go really well as replays. There’s something very Piscean about the asynchronous experience that I like to teach to that as a possibility because I myself love learning asynchronously. My dream for this right now is for it to find a book form, so preparing for this I feel like prepared my proposal. But yeah, so yeah, if anyone’s interested in exploring this, my instagram has all these tiles to play around and check out. And then you can get the link to the workshops, but also just stay tuned for what it wants to be next, because it will – it’s becoming something different right now.
CB: Nice. And your website is BrittenLaRue.com, right? And people can find out more —
BL: Just my name.
CB: — right. Okay. I’ll put a link to that in the description below this video on YouTube as well as on the podcast website. Do you offer other consultations or other things as well in connection with your work?
BL: I haven’t been doing one-on-one readings, because I am just such a busy teacher. Teaching is my path, and so I’m always teaching whether it’s a short workshop or like, a long-term year container, I offer all kinds of teaching courses for both people interested in astrology just as a human who want to see how it’ll help them be a human, but also people who want to learn astrology, like learn charts, and then also I like working – I’m a mentor to what you can call like, emergent astrologers or emerging mystics, and I like supporting those who are called into this path to help them build the inner resources and the outer resources to make this a sustainable gig in your life, whether you want it as a part-time job or a full-time job. I love supporting those who are coming into this the way I wish I had support when I was growing as an astrologer, because there’s just not as much institutional support like you would have for other professions.
CB: Right, yeah. That’s really crucial. I’m glad you’re doing that work to help people with that, because I know a lot of people are looking for that. And also in terms of just learning astrology, of course, you know, your book is now out. It’s gonna be —
BL: Yeah.
CB: — available, I’m sure, in fine bookstores everywhere, and you’re gonna be doing some like, talks on it and other stuff as the book’s like, rolled out, right?
BL: Yes. If folks are just on my newsletter or following me on instagram, I’m gonna be sharing all kinds of ways that I’m gonna support readers in engaging with the book, because it’s really meant to be worked with chapter by chapter, sign by sign, as the Sun moves. So working with the Aries chapter when you’re in Aries season, for example.
CB: Sure. Maybe tell me about the book really quickly. So the title is Living Astrology: How We Weave the Wisdom of All 12 Signs Into Your Everyday Life, and it’s very much structured around the signs of the zodiac.
BL: Yes. So the introduction is an introduction to my particular framing, and I’m really proud of it. It’s a beautiful piece of writing, I’ll go ahead and say. And in it, I introduce the idea of charts versus chartless astrology. This idea that we’ve shared about here, just kind of letting your chart kind of sit down over here for a minute while you open yourself into all of the 12 signs. And so the idea of the book is kind of a wheel of the year approach to the zodiac, whereby each chapter is full of information, but it’s really not like, teaching you astrology. It’s really about learning to engage with astrology in your everyday human experience, so it’s full of questions and prompts and rituals and tarot spreads and creative exercises and practices for you to engage with your own knowing – not as much for me to like, tell you about Leo, for example. And so, the way I like to think of it is it’s like building a home for astrology inside of your body, so it’s not so much about getting astrology right or wrong as a language or a wisdom tradition, because we’re not doing techniques in this book. We’re not doing delineation in this book, so it kind of relaxes the fear that someone might have that like, they won’t get it or they’ll be too heady for them or too much information. It’s really not about information. This book is really about you exploring you through each sign and how does this help you in the process of just being a human like, trying to have relationships, trying to be creative, working through grief, working through whatever you’re going there. There’s a sign for that, is the way I like to think about it. There’s a sign for you for whatever you’re going through in your life. So if you want to skip around, that’s awesome too. But it’s designed so that you move through it in like, a slow form with the Sun and can come back to it each year.
CB: Nice. Well, that’s gonna be perfect since the Sun’ll be entering into Aries soon and so maybe everybody could like, do a whole like, zodiac walk together over the next 12 months.
BL: Yes. I feel like it will be really great for like, book clubs and groups where it’s not so much like “Who’s the Aries in the group?” It’s really just, “What came up for you when you were reading about Aries?” Like it doesn’t need to be the authority of the Aries person to be the one to talk about it. Everyone can validate their own Aries experience, so to speak.
CB: Right. For sure. And then you also have your workbooks, which I think you have information about on your website, but you have one for like, each of the signs, and they’re these great little workbooks for each sign, which also make for good gifts, as I said earlier, especially if you get somebody like, their Sun, Moon, and rising sign books. It’s kind of a nice way to really give an accessible introduction to and way of starting to work with the signs.
BL: Yeah, they make great gifts. The idea, of course, is that you have all of them for yourself, but they’re beautiful to behold and to move through. And I think one of my gifts as a writer is I feel – and I hear this again and again – that my writing style is accessible while still potent and supportive. So it’s like, it’s not “above” anyone who comes to it, but it can still go deep, which is what I think is probably my – it felt like a weakness in academia that I was like, so accessible. Because in academia, your writing is supposed to be like, hard to understand, you know? But in my writing life as an astrologer, I feel like it’s something I’m very proud of.
CB: Yeah. Well, I really – I think that comes through in the introduction to the new book, and I really like it for that reason, for the directness and the clarity and the approachableness of it while still being actually very accurate and deep and profound. So yeah. Congratulations with the release of the book.
BL: Thank you!
CB: I look forward to seeing how it goes. Thank you so much for doing this with me today. This was a lot, but it was a lot of fun and I feel like this is one of the most interesting and insightful like, zodiac discussions that I’ve had on the podcast so far, so thanks for doing it with me.
BL: Oh, thank you so much, Chris. I had so much fun. This means so much to me. Thank you.
CB: Awesome. All right. Well, thanks everyone for watching or listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast, and we’ll see you again next time.
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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 patrons: Kristi Moe, Ariana Amour, Mandi Rae, Angelic Nambo, Issa Sabah, Jake Otero, Jeanne Marie Kaplan, Melissa DeLano, and Sonny Bazbaz.
If you’re looking for a reliable astrologer to get an astrological consultation with, then we have a new list of astrologers on the podcast website that we recommend for readings. Most of the astrologers specialize in birth chart readings, although some also offer synastry, rectification, electional astrology, horary questions and more. Find out more information at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/Consultations.
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.
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 a hundred 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 in 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, and the Northwest Astrological Conference, which is happening both in person and online, May 23-27, 2024. You can find out more information at norwac.net.