The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 478, titled:
Experiential Astrology and Astrodrama
With Chris Brennan and Jason Holley
Episode originally released on February 15, 2025
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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 27th, 2025
Copyright © 2025 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 Jason Holley, and we’re gonna be talking about experiential astrology, which is a dynamic approach that moves simply beyond thinking about astrology to trying to embody its symbols through creative and interactive methods, including making a chart come alive through acting it out in a group setting.
So hey, Jason – thanks for joining me today.
JASON HOLLEY: Hi, Chris. Great to be here.
CB: Yeah. I am excited about this topic; I’ve been wanting to talk about this topic for a while because I know this is a major, this is a significant form of astrology that really developed in the 1970s forward as a more recent development, but it’s something that I know was very popular for a period of time and that, yeah, I wanted to find somebody to help walk me through what it’s all about and to sort of introduce it to my listeners. So since this is your first time on the podcast, welcome, and yeah, thanks for joining me.
JH: Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you.
CB: All right. So experiential astrology – can we start by defining what it is? Did you feel like my definition was okay, or how would you define what we’re talking about?
JH: Yeah, I think that’s a good working definition. You know, I think the biggest thing I would say about it is that it’s about engaging the chart or the horoscope or astrology broadly through means that are not just conceptual or using language or concepts and descriptions, but are actually involving all of our other intelligences. So, you know, if there’s the sort of cognitive mental intelligence that’s the language and mind, you know, that mostly is how I think people learn about astrology, think about astrology, and so on. And in experiential mode of astrology, you’re engaging all the different sort of organs of perception and consciousness. So you’re giving yourself a chance to experience astrology not just through ideas about it, but through your own body. Like, in a somatic way. Or through your senses, through image, through aesthetics, through how you move, how you express, create, relate. It’s like, all these different ways of knowing, different ways of experiencing that are not as linear. You know, they kind of go new places, different places. And you’re looking – again, it’s sort of a full consciousness approach, you know, that gives astrology all new ways, gives the astrological symbols lots of ways to become known is maybe a way I would say it.
CB: I like that. Yeah, because, I mean, astrology otherwise is a pretty intellectual topic. It always has been in terms of looking at like, numbers. In some instances, like, you know, if people are using like, ephemerides, you’re literally looking at like, a page of just numbers or you’re looking at charts, like two-dimensional charts. But there are lots of other senses, you know, besides that that we don’t use oftentimes for astrology in the world that could be useful as ways to connect with a chart in different ways.
JH: Yeah, for sure. And really, arguably, it’s a return to the modes of consciousness that would have ever had an astrology or astrological way of experiencing life, meaning, you know, when people were considerably more connected to the natural cycles, more connected to the night sky, more embodied, more available to that and maybe less oriented towards abstraction and that kind of thing. Of course, astrology came up in that way. But it’s a little bit of a return to an embodied, embedded way that would experience this very directly. And so you know, it’s opening us up to an entire different way of experiencing symbolism that isn’t limited to what language can convey or you know, limited to what we can think about. And like you said with what you just said about, you know, the math and the kind of the sort of person who feels like they can even do this – it gets a bit limited because of the way if it just presented as ephemerides and geometries and so on, then this is a mode of astrology, this is a way of astrology that works with all kinds of other ways of knowing and all kinds of different intelligences that maybe don’t operate that way. Like, we all know, like, when we were at conferences in astrology, my feeling is often there are many, many, many people in the room who are just as deep in astrological knowing as I am. I’m not up there because I necessarily know other things; it’s because I have a way of sharing it with language and I can work with that world. But often, I feel some people in the audience often have it way more of an embodied or intuitive or various ways of understanding things. But it’s just not necessarily, you know, linearized. And so part of this is that it makes astrology accessible – I mean, that’s one of the big benefits of working this way is that it really allows people to step into astrology, be their own astrologer in the moment.
CB: That makes sense. Yeah, and externalizing something versus like, internalizing or just having your brain. But sometimes different ways of trying to learn something – like, I think everybody has that experience even just growing up in like, elementary school or something like that that there’s different ways of learning things that can be more engaging for your subject matter, and maybe accessing some of those can be helpful sometimes. Because like, what are some of the other senses that we have besides just like, using our brain or using language? We also have things like touch and other senses like that.
JH: Yeah, exactly. I mean, even just, you know, one of the things we’re really talking about with this is for instance, one of the ways that will probably be relatable to people watching the show – you know, when you are sitting with someone and you have a spontaneous feeling in your body, like a sensation of some kind, and one way would be, you know, don’t pay attention to that – stay with the numbers, you know? Stay with the delineation. But in this mode of thinking, actually you would wonder about what is that sensation? What’s being communicated through that sensation in your body? What are you seeing? Or you notice something in the room that you didn’t notice before. You see something. So we’re making ourselves available to all sorts of different data, I guess you could say, that will allow us to go places that our minds can’t really map because they aren’t even symbolized yet. You can’t really speak to it until it occurs, because it hasn’t yet been put into language. It’s come in in a different way. And often the things that really – often the stuff that people maybe, I don’t know about “need” to hear, but maybe they’re there to hear, let’s say it that way. The things they are to hear often have to kind of come in through these other ways, because it’s not yet in shared understanding. So it kind of comes in in the backdoor, so to speak. Because I would say that all astrologers are doing experiential astrology. You know, like, not consciously, not on purpose necessarily. But all of us are inside our own subjective experience when we’re giving readings, when we’re sitting with people, when we’re writing. You know, you and I talking – you know, we’re always inside that, and many parts of our experience are making decisions for us even if we think that all we’re doing is just following the rule or following a technique. You’re still drawn to certain things. You’re still, you know, forgot this thing, whatever it might be. There’s never a moment where your experience isn’t guiding, so in a way, what we’re doing with experiential astrology is sort of saying, okay, technique and delineation gives you the orienting to where you are in time and space. And it’s the beginning of the astrological moment, you know, rather than the end of the astrological moment. It’s the beginning. You know, it gets you on the lay of the land. Now you’re on the land; what happens next? What do you feel? What do you relate to? What seems important because something comes up? And I think a lot of astrologers who imagine that the technique they’re using is why they get such great results, I have a feeling it’s often more about that they have been living on this land of astrology for a very long time; it’s sort of they feel it in their bones. They feel it in their body. Somebody starts speaking, they might not make the conscious thing of like, oh, because that tone of voice now I’m drawn to look at Venus. But I think it goes on constantly for people. And so what we’re doing in experiential astrology is actually saying let’s do that consciously. Let’s open that whole field up consciously. Like, let’s have this be not just a technical discussion but a phenomenological discussion where it’s like, arising, like, a shared co-discovery of meaning, you know, versus a “I am delineating to you as if objective.” Because that’s automatically not quite true, right?
CB: Yeah. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate that more than I didn’t appreciate as much when I was younger. I went to an optometrist, actually, yesterday, and he hit me with – I just turned 40, and he hit me with “at your age,” such-and-such starts happening. And I was like, “Wow.” I was not anticipating that. But one positive thing about being at my advanced age is I have racked up a lot of experience of experiencing what different transits are like so that I have like, a feeling in my body of like, what a Mars opposite Mars transit is like, or it’s like, I have a feeling in my body of like, what my Saturn return was like and the feeling that that invokes from like, living through that time period as well as seeing all of my friends or seeing other people live through that that hits on a core level that, despite how much my younger 20-year-old like, hot shit astrologer self would have hated to hear this, that the older you get, like, you really do – there’s something about the passage of time and the experience of astrology when it happens or as it’s happening that you can’t replicate and that is missing from your sort of knowledge banks until you experience some of those transits. Because astrology, while you can do it theoretically and you can learn so much, there is a different side to experiencing something rather than just thinking about it or knowing it abstractly.
JH: Yeah. I’m right there with you, having also received many of those “at your age” things!
CB: Nice.
JH: But you know, one of the metaphors – and for me, a metaphor is one of the most helpful experiential astrology ways, right? Because people like Hailman and others say that, you know, soul communicates through image or through metaphor. One that is often there for me is thinking of us as astrologers as sort of like, you know, stewards of this landscape of astrology, this land or this dreamscape of astrology. Like, we hang out there. We have an active relationship with it. We tend it; we cultivate it. We’re in a kind of constant relation. And that when you are meeting with people, you’re kind of like, walking on that land with them, and you develop a familiarly. Like, you could say that predictive work often comes from just like, I’ve lived here; I know that animal comes and drinks from this water at this time of day. It’s kind of how it works. And you are working from that set of familiar associations, which again, the technical pieces immediately help to orient like, okay, I’m on this version of the land in this situation. But it’s not just your ability to read the map; it’s your experience walking the territory. Like, that is equally or more helpful in really cocreating meaning, and I would say divination, revelation – you know, these are big words, but I think that that is how that happens. There is a way that we have, you know, what we’ve learned from the books, from the techniques and all that, but it’s often the turn towards the subjective that brings it to life. Right? That sort of animates it for both you and the other person.
CB: For sure. So let’s talk a little bit about the history of experiential astrology just to give us like, a foundation for everything. So what was the like, time frame for the development of this? It was in the like, 1970s?
JH: Yeah. I mean, that’s at least what I know about. Again, I think one thing I wanted to say as we started was just that there are so many people doing versions of experiential astrology. And I think they are mostly not at a well-known level. Right? There are therapists who use it. There are, you know, people who use plant medicine with astrology, and there’s many different people out there doing it, so. But in terms of having a kind of naming for it and people really getting into it, I think it’s the ‘70s and ‘80s where we really see this kind of emergence of people doing that. It certainly is a kind of a natural outgrowth of humanistic types of astrology or, you know, psychology astrology. But for sure it’s not limited to that, but that’s a lot of what was going on at the time. And —
CB: Right. And also, even just that generation of astrologers, especially like, the Pluto in Leo generation that were like, the Baby Boomers that were born in the 1940s that came into their own in like, the 1960s and ‘70s that was like, the hippie generation, it seems like that was both the period in which there was a real push towards a more psychological astrology but also experimenting with a bunch of different like, modalities and different things to sort of like, push the limits of what you could do with astrology.
JH: Yeah. And just the whole notion of self-expression, you know? That was a really big thing, you know, really open it up, get it out there. And then by the ‘80s, that starts to be also about recognizing trauma, recognizing difficult things and wanting to go into that in a deeper way, and catharsis as a kind of an ideal kind of peaks, right? This is also the time where you have all these, you know, talk shows coming out where people are really putting their experience out into the world. And that isn’t really the only way to think about experiential astrology that it always has been kind of out and in a group, but that is, you know, one of the major ways. And it was I think then especially, you know, one of the things that was going on is that there was an experiential track at the UACs sometimes. Definitely in like, 1998. And actually, Barbara Shermer in her Astrology Alive books mentions that it was something was almost always there in one way or another.
And then in terms of, you know, some astrologers that people would know who – again, people don’t really always become known around this. They become known for their texts or for their other contributions. But often how they’ve arrived at those is through experiential methods. So one person whom i, you know, is Melanie Reinhart who is pretty well known for her work on Chiron. And you know, she was someone who – and worked with Howard Sasportas, right – and they did experiential work. You know, things like astrodrama. Melanie still does artmaking processes with people. You know, so they were involved. Jeff Jar and Rick Levine both did lots of that – and Rick still does, you know, lots of what we probably would call in the astrodrama category, the kind of enactment that you were describing. The kind of get up and just play the planet, you know, become the planet. And you know, Brian Clark who’s in Australia, the Chiron Center, which was sort of very focused on psychological astrology – they did a lot of work with like, astrodrama, with roleplay. You know, and so this is something going on all over. And then one that comes to mind very meaningfully right now because he’s recently passed is Michael Lutin, who wasn’t necessarily doing astrodrama in that same way, but was doing dramatic astrology, you know? Creating performances, you know, seemingly spontaneous performances and inspired by theater, inspired by actually in his case I know it’s also inspired by relational psychotherapeutic orientation. And so you —
CB: Right.
JH: — have a lot of people, you know, who were and are involved in this. Another would be Patricia Walsh, who’s an evolutionary astrologer and has a program on this, as well as people who are not necessarily in the same astrological orbits, but you know, there are some very significant online communities – one called Embodied Astrology, for instance, which is out there – where they regularly do somatic awareness processes with astrology and so on.
So there’s quite a – you know, it’s a very wildly diverse alive way. And Barbara Shermer’s book was called Astrology Alive, and she would also say and connects this back, you know, that yes, our modern mode of it since the ‘70s, but then of course this is in many ways if you really track back, you know, Marsilio Ficino would be seen as an experiential astrologer with a sort of dialoguing or the engagement. Or you could follow us back to, you know, situations like an Eleusis in Greece where, you know, there were initiatory rites where they mythodrama and sort of dramatize these experiences together. So it’s really a very long lineage in that sense. But there is definitely a modern reimagining that I think is what I would say is called “experiential astrology” at this point.
CB: Sure. So let’s talk about one of the core pieces of it, because I wanna center it initially around that to define something that people might not be familiar with at all, and then we can go outside of that or talk about the other pieces of it. But one of the ways I’m primarily familiar with experiential astrology at this point is at astrology conferences, sometimes people that do experiential astrology, I’ve seen them – one of the things is astrodrama and the version of it that I’m familiar with is like, a group of people will stand around in a circle and then different people,t hey’ll recreate somebody’s birth chart and having somebody stand in the center of the chart and then different people will stand in different places and will act out and represent each of the planets. And then they will talk and sometimes they’ll talk to each other, or they’ll talk to the person, and there will be this whole process of sort of like, acting out the birth chart, and that’s something that I think from the 1970s and ‘80s and ‘90s forward started becoming a thing that would sometimes happen at conferences. I think there was a video from the first UAC that I re-released on my YouTube channel that the documentary filmmakers allowed me to re-release from I think 1986, and I’m pretty sure at one point in that, you see Barbara Shermer or somebody leading like, an experiential astrology circle of that sort. So is that a good description of astrodrama, or how does astrodrama go?
JH: Yeah. Well, I think – yeah, that is a good description. And actually, Barbara would have called that “the living horoscope,” that specific exercise. Because that’s one of many ways you could do astrodrama, but that’s a very specific mode where you just literally gather people around and have them be the planets and, as you said, they interact. In a sense, though, astrodrama is sourced from a lot of different places. And there are, you know, many different modes that you could, you know, think from. So what I mean by that is that so when they call it “astrodrama,” they’re usually sourcing from “psychodrama” – something that was developed by Jacob Moreno who was a contemporary of Freud – and the thing he said, back to Freud, was you know, who did psychoanalysis and Moreno called his method “psychodrama,” right? And so he said to Freud, you know, “You encourage people to analyze their dreams; I encourage them to live their dreams.” You know, to enact them. Like, psychodrama means soul in action. So astrodrama, I think, is very much inspired particularly from that method. And so the kind of thing you described is possible where the whole chart is involved, but also it’s very much just a matter of – I think it’s actually often more potent and a deeper dive when you just take one or two things and place them in interaction. You know, like when you take a really key aspect from someone’s horoscope, or you just progress a planet and have, you know, you sort of define a part of the ground as – let’s say it’s a progressing planet from Pisces to Aries. Like, you define part of the ground as Pisces and then another part as Aries, and they just walk and notice what happens as they do that. Or you know, so there’s so many different ways you can move into this. You can – you also use props. You can have people dress up in different ways. I sometimes have essential oils that are associated with the planets, and people use those to kind of induce that – they follow that. So it can get – there’s so many different ways that you can do it. And you can do it with one person; you don’t have to be in a group, right? You could set up two chairs and have somebody go over there and be their Saturn, and then move to the other chair and be the Moon, and you know, do a dialogue back and forth that way. And so it doesn’t have to be the larger – I actually think we’ll get into it in terms of what makes this effective or less effective, but when there’s all kinds of people doing all kinds of things, it often is more of an excitability factor and playful. But the capacity for depth is frequently – you know, it’s a little bit like if you tell someone in a consultation every single thing you can see, that’s usually a less meaningful consultation than if you chose some of the most important things and stay there. So it’s very similar here. Like, if you pack it with everything, the capacity to drop in and really, you know, go somewhere that you didn’t already know is not as much there. And that’s what these methods can do, right? They can let you go places that you weren’t already gonna go. Like, that’s probably a really important thing is like, you know, when you do have those two people and the planets, they are gonna end up saying things that nobody expected to hear from that planet or from that place. So yeah, so just to say, astrodrama can be sourced with psychodrama methods, but also things like people might know family constellation work, right, where – so in that kind of work, it’s a different mode. Like, psychodrama is about sourcing something from somebody’s experience and making it everybody’s experience. So taking your horoscope and turning it into, for this hour, we are all in your horoscope, right? It’s sort of doing that. But we’re informed by you.
But you know, in constellation ways of working with groups, you don’t really even need to know anything. You just tell people to step in, and you know, assume that everything they’re going to do is the planets. So someone doesn’t need any astrology knowledge to do it. You just say, you know, to a person who dosn’t know astrology, “You’re gonna come in at this angle – Mercury in Aries,” and they don’t know what that means, but you’re trusting that there’s a field that has constellated, and they will go there.
So like, in family constellation, that happens where people don’t tell you their life story, right, and then you play their father in a family constellation. You just step in, and then we trust whatever you do is the communication about the father. So that’s a little bit of a different method, but it’s still in the same category, right? Where it is relying on the symbolic field is probably the best language I can say. That you’re entering the living field, the living symbolic field.
CB: Okay. Let’s back up a little bit, because I wanna expand on the just like, chart process more, because that’s always something I was curious about in terms of what are the instructions? Let’s just say for the purpose of this, because I know it’s more complex; there’s different things that you could do. But let’s say they are recreating a person’s birth chart in a large group standing around a circle, and you have let’s say most of the main planets. What are the instructions, and how would the process of that go? Like, what would be a like, very basic version of that of how that would go?
JH: I think that there’s gonna be a little bit of an initial educational moment to explain to the people what they’re doing, that the objective is not “think about what a Mercury in Aries would say.” I mean, they don’t think about what they’re gonna say anyway! But you know what I mean. “Think about what X would do” – you’re not trying to do that. You’re not trying to just replicate, you know, the things you’ve learned. It’s more like, feel yourself as – I don’t know why Mercury in Aries is the one, but – feel yourself as Mercury in Aries. Like, what does that feel like in your body? How do you think – what would be the posture that Mercury in Aries might have, right? What are you noticing differently? You know, your perception will change when you’re in a role. Certain things will become, you know, kind of like when we shift roles in regular consciousness, you know? When we’re upset, we see things that we didn’t see before. When you’re afraid, you hear more vividly. So in a similar way, so we’d help them into the role, and that takes a minute. Like, to help them drop out of what they think it’s supposed to be and into the living field of it.
Then in that —
CB: So it’s not just a passive thing of the person in the center who’s having their chart being read learning things about their chart, but the people involved are also having a sort of experience as well.
JH: Absolutely, thanks for saying that. Because that’s exactly it. It’s very educational, right? I have learned a lot of my astrology through role-taking, you know, because you get inside of the thing and you learn about it in ways that as you were saying it sort of creates a body signature in a way. Like, you’re like, oh, that’s what this is. Oh, that’s what’s going on right now. So it’s an amazing educational method. So whether, you know, we can use it with people just as you said exploring their charts, but it is really powerful education. And it’s also education in psychic flexibility, meaning you begin to be able to consciously shift in and out of planets and consciously shift. You know, you develop a reflexive capacity when you do enough of this work that when you’re sitting with people in consultation you just naturally role-reverse with a planet in their chart. You just almost become that Saturn for a minute just to feel like, what is that like to be, you know, receiving that ray from Jupiter? Or whatever it is. It’s like, you kind of just find yourself in there.
So yeah, people are really being encouraged to really feel into the role. Then in the version that you described, what I would probably usually do is begin by letting the planets sort of introduce themselves. You know, say a little bit, like, something – just a little. And you know, all these like, you know, the Jupiter won’t obey that or something! You have to break the container, but you know, in general, you’re gonna kind of elicit a little bit of their experience. And they might – in the way you were describing that one, they would maybe speak to the person whose horoscope it is. But to me where it becomes most interesting is when we have them speaking to each other eventually. But initially, there’d be some introduction.
Again, I don’t – that method where they’re all together, it’s not something I honestly use much because I think it’s just a highly complex – which is good if everybody can really hang there. So what I would prefer in an enactment with that is just, you know, the Saturn and the Moon, and really make it an in-depth conversation there. Like, one of my favorite things to do when somebody takes the role of Saturn, we’ll start there or wherever we start. But let’s say we started with Saturn. And we kind of interview Saturn a little bit. You know, what’s it like to be here? What are you most concerned with? What are you most trying to get accomplished around here? You know, et cetera. And they might be bending up because again they’re gonna let their body do it. So I might say, “I notice you’re kind of hunched over.” And I might even say things the person isn’t doing on purpose. Like, invariably, even – this is where it’s fun with people who don’t know astrology, too, because invariably, they all come in and do things that they don’t think they’re acting. But it’ll be the archetype. So like, one that comes to mind vividly of a woman who didn’t know anything about astrology coming in, and she was to be Jupiter in Pisces. And we weren’t even to her yet, and she just was like, floating away in the room, you know? Like, she just like, you know, it felt like, oh, she’s in role! She’s like, wanting to get a different view, and she’s kind of like, trancing out a little bit. And that was great! It was like, okay, you’re in the role.
So then though, the interesting thing is once you have one of them in, bring the other in, and you can immediately ask the first planet, you know, what was that like when the Moon stepped in? What did you feel? Now that you’re feeling your aspectual relation to this Moon – let’s say it’s an opposition – but you know, what is that like for you? You know, “I feel too seen,” or “I feel like that person’s so needy; I don’t wanna deal with all their needs. I wish they’d just get over it,” you know? Whatever it is. And it’ll come pretty quickly once somebody’s kind of in there. And you know, then all sorts of information starts to arise. So you have to work with – if you’re the director, you are spending some time really making sure people have dropped in. You know, because the tricks of these methods, any time we go to the subjective, right, is that you’re bringing whatever you’re bringing. So you know, in other words, what if you’re not speaking from their Saturn but you’re actually just speaking from, you know, the day you had yesterday or something? The thing that —
CB: Right.
JH: — you know, like, the risk of giving primacy to the subjective is that it can be hard to discern, “Are we in the astrology or are we somewhere else?” And that is definitely a limitation of this. But it’s something you can work with. But it’s like, you know, it can depart, and so you’re trying to really feel that, and it’s very much the felt sense that we were talking about before, you know, where you can just feel the coherence of the role. It’s cohering or it isn’t. But you do kind of have to check that. And then once you have, they all move into spontaneous interaction often, and then say things that are kind of unbelievable in terms of like, so the Moon suddenly says out of nowhere, “You know, this reminds me of my mother” in role. And then, you know, the person whose horoscope it is is watching this, and is like, “Oh my gosh, that’s exactly what happened; she always criticized me.” You know, whatever it might be. This is an amazing thing that happens kind of consistently.
CB: Yeah. I mean, I can imagine in some instances that might be kind of like, intense or that the person having their chart acted out might in some instances have kind of like, an intense reaction to that.
JH: Oh yeah. I mean, it’s again – and I think we’ll probably get into this, but you know, we really do have to know what are the boundaries of the work, what are people ready for, what’s the warm-up? Because this is, again, the beauty of experiential work is that it is gonna break us out of a dryer, you know, “this and this and that.” It’s gonna break us into some implicit material, material that has not yet been explicated. It’s gonna surface things. It’s often a way that dissociated material will come in, meaning material that’s sort of out of awareness from the person – especially if somebody else is playing your planets, right? They are gonna not have the same character organization that you do that keeps that quiet. And they’re gonna say something that you’re like, that you don’t even authorize yourself to say or think. So it really can go to these types of places, but there are ways to slow things down. Slow is one of – anyway, maybe we’ll come to that, but in this Saturn-Moon thing that we were talking about, you can also have the person move into the role of the planet. Right? I can – what’s called role reversal – I can move the actor out of the Moon and put that person in the Moon. “Now you’re going to be the Moon.” And so that they can actually experience it from there.
CB: Okay.
JH: I don’t – yeah.
CB: So one of the things you said is that your – so there is somebody there like yourself who’s acting as like, a director of this entire thing so that it’s being guided by like, a central figure?
JH: Yeah, that’s right. I think that’s very, very important to have someone charged with that role. And frankly in group process, it’s almost always good to have two people – one who is directing and one who’s just kind of watching everybody and, you know, being available for support and that kind of thing. Again, you know, in my characteristic way, we’ve gone straight to a painful Saturn opposition. You know, so they don’t always have to go to, you know, intense dark places. But it —
CB: Sure.
JH: — you know, that’s not. And it’s not psychotherapy, right? That’s not what we’re doing. We’re doing experiential astrology, and that is a different thing.
CB: Yeah. Like I imagine, you know, like, somebody has like, a very nice like, Venus-Jupiter trine in their chart, and like, those two planets being in a trine really like, vibing and like, getting along very well and acting that out.
JH: Yeah. I mean, that’s often something that is a really good idea is to begin processes like this with what we would call “resourcing.” You know? Like, things that kind of help you remember your resourcedness, help you know your resilience, your capacities, your playfulness. Whatever that might be. But what I will say is that these methods might surface something else going on in that trine, you know, that is not necessarily all good and all that. You know, as we know – at least from my perspective – you know, the way the trine operates could be in service of some things and not in service of others, and that might be shown by this.
One of the things I was gonna say, too, is that what I really love about this process is that very much like the old astrology texts, we are treating the planets sort of as beings. We’re giving them subjectivity. We’re not calling them psychological functions. You know? We’re not using all that language that psychology overlays on it. And we’re also not assuming that they are all about you and that it’s all your psyche. I mean, I think some people are assuming that in this work, but that’s not really – I mean, that’s one of the most attractive things for me when Hellenistic material came and the way the planets are being described, “I have an agenda,” you know? Not first person, but you know, there was a clear multiplicity, multi-being-ness, and that this is the hour of your birth; this is the forces around you or that are there – they’re not all you necessarily. That’s not how we have to look at it.
So when we do —
CB: Right.
JH: — this —
CB: They’re being personified in some way, and that —
JH: Yeah!
CB: — kind of goes back. There’s almost this legalistic language that Hellenistic astrology I think may have interpreted from earlier Mesopotamian tradition of like, the planets are all like, standing around like, having a conversation about this person’s destiny before they’re born or when they’re born and talking about what their fate will be or something like that. And I can’t think of a better way to like, picture that sort of process than have people actually act it out.
JH: Yeah. I mean, and really to experience the multiplicity of the self. Like, one of the most powerful things about the – as a therapist, and I don’t do therapy for a while, but as someone who did for 18 years, the power of astrology in my work that was most important is that the minute you look at a horoscope, right, you are looking at multiplicity. Like, it immediately announces that the person whose sky this is is many things, and it has many things affecting them. Like, it’s multiplicity. And I think nowadays there’s more of an understanding of the multiplicity of the psyche; people do parts work and, you know, inner child and internal family systems, all these approaches to the psyche. So this is immediately, you know, setting up that thing. You know, when we say, when we feel ourselves arguing with ourselves, one way to look at that is one planet is wanting this, and another wants that. And that’s the conversation you’re in. So with astrodrama in particular, you can extrovert that conversation. You know, you can – and then the other part of this is that it also means you can move to creative reimaginings, right? It means that you can sort of show the situation. And then also it means that other responses might come, you know, or preferences, or you know, one of the things I really like about it is that in astrology, for me at least, there are no prescriptions in the sky. There’s no thing you’re supposed to do – different astrologers would feel differently, but I don’t want people to balance something or to go to this node or whatever. All the prescriptive things. I think what experiential astrology does is lay out the experience. And then however, things do emerge, right? Like information emerges; predictive information emerges. And the next thing to do kind of happens. Like, so it’s like you become your own oracle in this process. You don’t need the Oracle to say, “Here’s what to do” or “Here’s what’s going to be.” It actually emerges spontaneously in the field. And you’re allowing it to take its own shape rather than – you know, the director is not really a director. They’re really a facilitator. Like, they’re making it easy for things to, you know, to have a home here. You know, to express, to share.
CB: Right. It’s like you’re creating not a blank slate, but you’re creating a place – I wanna say not a petri dish, but a place where something can like, grow and develop like a garden that you’re trying to like, nurture. But then some things are gonna grow that are gonna be like, unexpected or that you may not have anticipated or planned out. It’s not like a fully planned out thing, which on the one hand for me seems like it could be kind of scary sometimes as a facilitator, because like, you don’t know how this is gonna go, but —
JH: Yeah.
CB: — I often find… Like, when I first started doing astrology lectures, I would plan everything out ahead of time to the T, and I would avoid doing too much audience interaction just because you never know how that’s gonna go, and it could go wildly badly. But then over the years of facilitating like, workshops and stuff, I’ve really come to appreciate the magic that can happen of the spontaneity of especially like, talking to people about their charts or having people share their chart experiences. Some truly magical things can come out of that that you wouldn’t anticipate. And I’m sure similarly here when you do this, while maybe occasionally you have one that doesn’t go as well as you would have hoped, that yeah, that for the most part, the magic field that that creates can sometimes spontaneously have some pretty beautiful outcomes.
JH: Yeah. I think that’s generally that’s what happens. But no question – you saw me, like, I had an almost physical response when you’re like, “Yeah, sometimes it doesn’t go,” because you as a practitioner now become more vulnerable. You know, there’s an invulnerability to sitting behind our notes and just saying, “This, this, this, this.” Like, we are not part of the field – or we are, of course, but we feel separate. And you know, we can make our pronouncements, right? And when you’re doing this work, I always teach in my practitioner programs and stuff, I say to people, “Your very first job is availability to the field.” You know, your very first job is you need to be affected by things. Like, you have to turn on your full system if you want the client to turn on their full system. So you have to be feeling what you’re feeling, your emotions, your sensations, your stray thoughts, your anger or whatever is around. Doesn’t mean you’re gonna enact it, but you really have to kind of have it all turned and activated. And it is likely to go somewhere – I mean, I hope it will go somewhere I don’t predict. I really smiled when you said that, because that’s I think if you do this work, you wanna have a sort of thrill about that. Like, I always – my psychodrama trainer, because I do psychodrama as well, like, she used to always say, you know, in every good psychodrama, as the director, there’s always a – if it’s gonna be good, there’s gonna be what she called an “oh shit” moment. Like, a moment when you’re like, what do I do with – like, something emerges, right? And it’s like, what’s this? And so that – developing a tolerance for not knowing. You know, developing a tolerance for suffering, like, to hang out with something that’s hard rather than try to fix it and resolve it – those are some of the disciplines are really about – and I know this language is overused now, but like, they’re really about space-holding. They’re really about holding the field. Staying with – hold on a minute – slow down – see what is next to emerge. And so you know, comfort with uncertainty is one of the hardest ones with astrologers, because a lot of people got into astrology because they wanted more certainty about life. They wanted to know what’s happening and what’s going to happen. So it kind of can go against that orientation that a lot of us might have that are even attracted to astrology, because it says, “Don’t try to figure it out. Don’t try to make anything happen. Just stay with, be available, help it, and mediate it. Give it levels of mediation.” Mediation is one of the biggest, you know, I always think of Mercury, of course, is the ruler of astrology. And also I think of Mercury as the great mediator – the translator, the one who moves between. And so one of the frameworks that I use a lot in my work is when it comes to archetypes or planets, signs, whatever it might be, that one way to think about archetypal energy is like electricity. So I know when you plug your lamp in to the wall, right here in the US it’s 110, other places 220 – whatever it might be – but about over at the power plant, right, their electricity is at like, 880 or even whatever the double of that is. 1,760. And so what they have to do is they have to step that energy down, right? They’re called transformers that step the energy down so that by the time it meets your wall, it’s something that your device can metabolize. It can use it for creative action. So archetypal process is quite similar. You know, if you amplify – sometimes we do need to amplify – like, but if you amplify to like, 880, right, you’re in probably something like psychosis where the archetype is just totally in charge. It’s almost like a kind of possession situation. And of course, people – that’s going on in the world all the time. You know, when you’re totally owned, you’re totally possessed by a planet or it makes me think of how they’re called Graha, you know, in the Vedic way – like, it grabs you, you know? You’re just owned. And so in those situations, a lot of times people come to us for a consultation because life has gotten at that level. Or maybe 440. Like, they’re doing things and they’re like, why am I doing this? You know? Or things are going on in your life. And what a reading does actually often is it steps that down to like, the 110 where you can actually talk about it, symbolize it, give it a name, give it a shape, have a sense of its time and place. And because what usually people do at 440 or 880 is just go to zero. They’re just like, “I have to shut this down.” But then they lose the play space, right? They lose – whatever was trying to happen there isn’t allowed to happen. So a lot of what we’re doing is stepping down when it’s overwhelming and stepping up when it’s not being heard or recognized. You know, if everything’s always at 110, you know, meaning you’re just kind of using language and not really feeling much, then that’s when we need the amplification. And experiential astrology is usually are gonna be methods of amplifications, right, where you can kind of let the archetype come in a little bit more and remove your regular mode of consciousness so that it can speak a little bit more. But we don’t want to just sort of, you know, open it up into full-on things. People need – so a lot of the skill that is involved is just mediation, which I think is an inherently mercurial, you know, stepping down and up the energies. If you think in myth, you know, what does Mercury do? You know, it moves between the upper and middle and the lower. It brings the messages and translates them, right, into things we can metabolize. Like, in Greek stories, if you see the god directly, that’s not a good thing. As a rule, that’s like, that leads to destruction. So the god has to be stepped down, and you could say the same with the planets. Like, because we’re looking for degrees of mediation. And there’s different thresholds – in a different moment, it might be the right thing to really amp it up. But generally what I would say to people is go really slow and subtle with this type of work. It’s very powerful; it doesn’t have to be big and dramatic and screaming and dancing and you know. It can be very, very subtle. Small movements. One line. One sentence, you know, from the planet. And then if you sense that more wants to happen, you can kind of open it up a little. I hope that makes sense. Like, that mediation thing for me is the key, actually. It creates this secured, symbolizing field. Like, you need a secure field for this work.
CB: Yeah. I think that makes sense, and that role of you as the director to modulate things in terms of the energy and the intensity. And I like that you’re using some of those analogies, because it’s very evocative of the chart we ended up using today through kind of just a sort of sequence of chance, of not super far planned in advance, but we ended up with this chart today for starting where we’re doing this experiential discussion on the Full Moon in Leo that just occurred that was square Uranus. And I just like that you’re using some of those analogies about like, the energy or electricity and having to like, modulate that within the dynamic of a, you know, of an astrodrama, of acting these things out.
So I’m trying to think if there’s anything else we should expand on. You mentioned doing progressions, but so this is something where you can also do like, a person’s transits at the time as well?
JH: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, in a lot of different ways you could do that. But it’s easy enough, right, if you’re speaking about the enactment part. And meaning you could bring a planet in, and then you can have someone else be the transit and literally walk by or even station and retrograde back and do three or five hits if it’s an outer planet, right?
CB: Right.
JH: And feel those sequentially. And both people – a lot of it is like, just – again, this doesn’t have to get really big. It could just be one’s gonna stand there, and one’s gonna walk back and forth. And maybe they’ll say a few words of what it feels like as they approach, right? What does it feel like —
CB: Right.
JH: — when they’re right there? And you can really slow it down, and just that will often open up some things, right? Even just that. And it doesn’t —
CB: Yeah.
JH: — have to be – go ahead, yeah.
CB: I love that so much just because I’m thinking about like, this Venus retrograde that’s happening right now that I’ve been spending a lot of time researching, and it’s like, you have Venus pass Saturn this first time and literally you could just have somebody saying, “Hey, Saturn,” when Venus and Saturn have their little initial discussion and they think it’s over and Venus like, keeps moving. But then, you know, Venus does a u-turn and comes back and then has that second connection with Saturn where they reconnect, and then eventually there’ll be a third one after the direct station as well. And something as simple as acting that out could really help people understand the astronomy much more for one, but also some of the dynamic field of like, what’s going on as it’s part of an ongoing process rather than just seeing it as a single like, hit of a transit or something like that.
JH: Absolutely. Yes. And by the way, this where genuinely predictive things emerge. Right? This is where someone’s like, they’re not trying to predict. They’re not thinking about what would happen. They’re just reporting what is going on. You know, they’re just saying it. But those things, you know, the person – sometimes it’s good to have a second person, not just the person whose horoscope it is, but also a second person who’s writing some notes or something so that they can just really be in it, the other one. But you know, to sort of phrases that are there, and then you know, as all astrologers do, the kinds of notes that I get have to do with these processes, but it’s things like you wouldn’t believe how this came out that way, you know – somebody trips when they’re doing it, right? Accidentally. Like, they’re walking in the transit, and they fall over or something, and then someone says, you know, “The day it happened, I fell over.” I mean, it can be quite literal, you know? Of course, it’s also symbolic always. But it’s very… You know, and then it’s not just enactments with the body. You know, many, many other methods possible here, right, where people make art, right? Or do writing exercises where they write as the planet. Like, you can have people – I do a lot of the writing stuff because part of my major… Part of my work in astrology has been mythology. That’s just been the language of it, one of the languages that really speaks to me. And so a lot of times, we’ll take the planetary – I’ll tell a story that is told by the Greeks or the Romans about a planet just as a start. Even storytelling itself can be experiential astrology; it all depends, right? Like, the difference between talking and storytelling is that storytelling invokes an experience. It’s not just describing; you’re invoking something. And so then – and this is a very different use of language – and so people sort of start to feel the story.t hey start to see, you know, this is happening. And then you invite them to be the character, and describe more of what they were going through than what say the myth tells you, you know? Or you give them an opportunity to kind of expand on it. And then connect that with the figure in the chart or the transiting figure that’s coming by.
So, you know, writing is a way. Art-making is a thing I do a lot of, and I have a couple of images – I don’t know if we can share them, but – I mean, I know I can, but if we have time – but image-making and working with images is a really, really alive way to. Because when you create imagery, invariably, things are there that you didn’t intend to create, and those are often the information, right? Like, there’s what you did that you knew you were doing, but there’s always other things that – especially if other people see it – that links in connections that come out. So you know, these methods are, you know, there’s just many different things. And even just following your body is enough. You know, a sensation that is arising or something like that. But yeah, you can also you can definitely… You know, you could do something with profections, right? You could do something where you have this experience where you, you know, let’s say that you’ve got the Taurus house as the profection house with Venus, and then you have the Taurus year coming or the Mercury year coming. You could have the person standing in there and then sort of like a baton handoff, you know, from one to the other. Like, okay. You know, or put a spotlight or something on, you know, like, change the spotlight onto the other person. Or give them some sort of a physical thing that says, you know, I’m the one you should pay attention to. And ask them how does it feel? Like, you know, what’s the focus like? You know, there’s – again, all of these can be brought to life, and once you’ve been doing this for a while, you come up with your own little tricks and things you like to do in that as the so-called director. You know, different people wanna focus in different ways. I use a lot of – well, not these days, but dance is another really potent mode where you have music and then you can say to people, like, after the music starts and you have the move – and even a person who doesn’t dance, that’s something important actually. With all experiential methods, they can always be brought to whatever is within a person’s comfortable range of expression, and also even within the range of their physical abilities. Like, so no matter what is happening, like, no matter what’s being invited, you can help a person find their place with it. Like, so like, if people don’t like to dance, right, which is very much, you know, that’s not rare. I can have them just do like, this with their hands or something. You know, they can just do that. Like, we can always work within the role repertoire that the person has available. Of course we always wanna invite a little stretch, but – because stretch will get you past what you already always do – but we don’t want you to rubberband out. You know, like, because that doesn’t go well.
CB: Right. I mean, how would you deal with a person like myself that’s more Saturnian? I’m a little bit more of a square, a little bit more inhibited when it comes to like, maybe acting things out in person. Like, how – is that something I would be able to work around, or how does that work? Like, do you have to be like, a super dramatic person to participate in this?
JH: No, and so this is really a meaningful thing for a couple of reasons, right? So if we are doing psychodrama in a group, a person – you can do it one of two ways, right, you can have people volunteer for roles. You know, like, “I’ll be Saturn!” You know? But you can also have the protagonist, the person whose horoscope it is, you can have them pick someone. So you know, generally, there’s going to be what we call “tele,” like a felt sense of like – I mean, I think people would pick you for Saturn sometimes, right?
CB: Right.
JH: That seems likely to me. So you know, so then your way of being is already correct. Like, there’s a little bit of an assumption in this that that’s gonna be just right no matter how you play it, whether you’re big with it, whether you’re not. And then on some of these other methods where, you know, there’s – like, you don’t have to be an extrovert and be out in the center. There’s always a way to meet – maybe you’re not gonna take roles if you’re really profoundly introverted. But you can still be sort of checking in with body, or we can put you in a more observational – a planet that seems, you know, that maybe is in a more observational mode. You know, there’s always a way. And then with movement or with dance or that kind of thing again, everything can be very subtle and lowkey. It doesn’t have to be, you know, doing it all over. But what I do like to do is – and I do a lot of it online now, you know, with people all over the world in little like, small groups. I have like, 14-person groups usually. And so what I will do is like, play some music and the nice thing online is that people don’t have to have others watching them move, and that gives a lot of people a little more freedom. But and then they’ll be moving, and then I’ll say, “What planet do you think is dancing right now? Who is moving you?” So we don’t even set it up in advance. And most people will feel like, “Oh, I’m kind of like, doing this thing; I’m in this Neptunian way,” or “I’m like, really staccato and I’m in Mars.” And then I might ask them, for instance, to amplify that. Make it a little more Mars. Or if it’s Saturn and you’re barely moving, get even more, you know, frozen. And we’ll just sort of play with it that way.
And then if you’re in a group situation in person, it can be very fun to just tell people to become a planet, and then eventually have them pair to dance and they’re essentially transiting each other. And they don’t even tell each other maybe at the moment which planet they each are. Like, they just kind of do their thing. Or maybe they do – again, all of these have different learning values. Like, to not know and just be in it really has a lot of discovery in it when you talk about it later, because nobody’s conditioned by anything, you know, what they’re thinking. But maybe sometimes it’s good to know. So you know, you can do it in a lot of different ways. You can have people – one of the best ways to teach diurnal motion as the foundation of the houses is to have people move around and feel what it’s like to be a planet who just peaked up over the Ascendant after 12 hours hidden. You know, after 12 hours underground, you’ve just come up, and no wonder the 12th house is a hard place to live! Like, you’ve come up; you’re saturated with – I mean, this might not be what how it would unfold. Everybody would do their own, but you know, you’ve been under there, and you’re just coming up and you’re sort of faced with visibility. You know, you’re faced with this, and what do you do? Like, you’ve been in the other world. And so and then do you feel the excitement of the climb through the 11th house? Can you feel Jupiter, you know, urging you on? This is how I’ve taught like, the planetary joys is like, go be Jupiter in the 11th and see if it feels pretty gosh darn natural to be in the climb, to be ascending to Olympus so to speak. What do you feel when you cross the Gate of Hades? That’s my favorite place! What do you feel when you go from nine to eight that way, right? Like, what – you know, there’s that – a lot of time, people will feel something drop – a pit in their stomach. And by the way, they might not feel these things. They might feel something else. But what I have always found is that if we hang out with whatever they’re saying, even if it doesn’t seem initially – if it initially seems like that would never happen. Like, a lot of times in early process, people who know a lot of astrology come into groups like this and they – it’s hard for them, because somebody – I remember like, someone being upset like, because a Mercury was way too emotional or something. And they’re like, “That would never happen; that’s not what Mercury is.” And you really have to hang out and be patient. It will almost always reveal its home, meaning it will almost always curve back in and you’ll see it. But you’ll now actually have a more complex view of the archetype. It does not leave the field. And if we as the person present senses that it’s departing the field, then we are gonna help kind of either A, find out how it’s still in the field that we don’t yet see, or really help course correct a little bit to offer that. But you know, that’s always a thing, and the other thing is these things can take us to new significations for planets, and not new like radically different, but new images. Images that we haven’t had before or notions. And it will evolve our understanding of the archetype. I really do think this is a research method; it’s a heuristic research method, phenomenological research method.
CB: Yeah, I really like what you were saying about acting out the joys or the diurnal rotation and then just seeing what that looks like and how there could be things that would arise spontaneously as part of that process that you might not think of otherwise, but just by purely putting it in a different sort of relational dynamic between people in different spots geometrically how that would evoke something for you that you might not have realized otherwise. Or like, acting out the Thema Mundi or the domiciles or the exaltations or what have you might evoke different things.
JH: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think this is an amazing pedagogical tool. Like, this is a way – and it anchors the knowledge in you so it’s not just conceptual. Like, it really does give you what I would call a kind of planetary empathy, or a really strong sense of psychogeography, you know, with the houses and like what is this place in the sky, you know? What is this place, what does it feel like when you’re there? As a planet, what does it feel like to be, you know, like, particularly when you get into the succedent house and you just feel the force of the engine, you know, starting to drive you to the next angle. It’s like, people feel that – I don’t have to tell them that’s what’s going to happen. Their body feels it. Like, there’s a push that they can feel. Or the wandering of the cadent after the angle, you know? These – it’s a remarkable testament to the potency of our tradition, right, that it actually seems to be – and again, when they’re seeming to veer out, that’s usually that we’re about to learn something that we haven’t quite known. And we’ll still see how it’s inside the significations. Like, you know, it’s kind of an amazing process in that way. Like, that’s where the education I think is for the whole room. Because one of the things you have to be open to as the person facilitating work like this is that initially that is kind of the so-called, you know, “oh shit” moment I mentioned in my training. You know, where I’m like, “Whoa – why are you so happy,” you know, with Mars hurling rays at you while you’re in the 6th house? What’s so great about this? But when you hang with it and it starts to, you know, show itself, there’s a way that you find it. And it actually means too that you’re often seeing different layers of the archetypal expression in the person’s life. Like, you’re seeing it at one level, this is how it feels, but at another level, this is a deeper dynamic. You know, and it’s quite multidimensional, which would be something a lot… One of the things these methods do is that they operate with really powerful psychic authority because the client sources them. Right? Like, you’re not just saying this, this, this, this. You are inviting them in, and they bring it. They bring the images. They bring the – and if it’s sourced from your own psyche, it has a very different psychic – A, it empowers the person, and you’re not just the wise person who knows things and they’re the idiot who came and asked. But instead, you’re both the Oracle, right? One of my favorite conceptions in psychotherapy land, you know, there was this guy Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig who wrote about the healer-patient archetype, like the dyad, and you know, the patient comes in with the problem and the healer, you know, gives the solution. And he was saying how what probably you need to do is you want to be the patient-healer and the healer-patient; you want both people to play both roles. And I think that way with the Oracle and the Querent – that people get stuck in the astrologer is the Oracle and the Querent is the one with the questions. But my way of thinking about it would be that you want to – you, the astrologer, should be asking a lot of good questions. You’re also the querent. And the client, you know, can also be their own Oracle. Or another even way to say it would be that b oth of you are querents and the horoscope is the Oracle. You know? Like, and you’re gonna engage that experientially. That’s the way that it breaks this model that you are the one who has all the knowledge and you have to – and it also creates enormous performance expectations for the astrologer. Like, you’re supposed to know everything. And it actually admits, like, we do not know anything, except we know how to orient ourself in place and time. We know very well; we’ve been doing it over and over again. We’ve got multiple ways to orient. We’re like, okay, I know where and when we are; now though, what the meaning or the divination or the whatever is gonna emerge at the point of encounter with the symbol, symbolism.
CB: That makes sense. So one last point I wanted to mention or ask about, actually, before we moved on was the application – could you also apply this dynamic to like, synastry? Like, acting out the synastry between two people?
JH: Yeah, for sure. And I have.
CB: Okay.
JH: And actually, that’s a very good one, because if you have them take the roles in each other’s charts, then you’re developing empathy for one another, right? Like, you are seeing the world through my eyes. Like, you know how that thing I do always gets on your nerves, then we sort of realize, oh, that’s, you know, your – I don’t know, some Virgo planet that’s criticizing or whatever it might be. But it’s like that thing, and we find it, and then we get in there. And again, you could do that at various levels of astrological fluency. People don’t have to know a lot to kind of get in there. You might not even call it Mars in Virgo or whatever; you might just call it the person who’s nagging you. You know, like the part that’s nagging and you go over there.
In therapeutic modes of astrology, you know, the naming of the astrology is always possibly not using astrology language. It’s always possible to use other language, probably preferable often. But you, the person watching, kind of still know what you’re watching, and you’re offering things at different points. So I think role reversal into planets is a really powerful way to remind yourself of the complexity of your partner. You know, to remind yourself of how much they’re dealing with internally, right? We’ve all got sort of situations of fate that are, you know, engaging us. And you’re kind of getting inside that, which is in some ways what people seem to need the most. That’s the beauty of this, too, in groups, is that the profundity of having what you’re going through witnessed and even co-experienced, right? And again, that’s the gift of the astrology even in a one-on-one consultation where you’re working with things like this is that there’s a deeper felt sense of resonance that takes. Like, “You really get me,” and that feeling of getting gotten, which is like, massively missing in most people’s lives on an ongoing basis. Like, the capacity to be able – oops, excuse me – the capacity to feel attuned to, and the experience of attunement. So I often feel like as astrologers, we give that from a human-to-human, but we’re also helping people feel attuned to by the sky, by the living, by the world that we’re embedded in. It’s very embedding.
CB: That makes sense. All right. So let’s see. I wanted to – since we have about an hour left, because I know we have time limits today, I wanna make sure we hit any other major points that you wanna talk about. To circle around back to where we started, I just wanted to clarify – is Barbara Shermer’s book Astrology Alive, would you say that’s —
JH: Yeah.
CB: — like, foundational texts for experiential astrology?
JH: I think it’s almost the only text that I really know of that takes that on as a “this is what this is,” and then gives like, she’s got a million suggestions for ways people can do this. There’s suggestion after suggestion, meaning take a walk as each planet, you know? Walk as Mars. And she gives you lots of music suggestion, like, a playlist so to speak. I don’t think she would have called – playlists for, you know, different planets. And people again, people already do these things. But there’s a lot in there. Yeah, I could say that’s kind of the one that I know about as far as a text, yeah.
CB: Okay. And she was an astrologer – I know she was really big in organizing conferences and big in astrological organizations in the 1980s and ‘90s. I think she was involved in helping to organize the first UAC in 1986 from what I saw from that documentary. But she sadly, she passed away from cancer relatively young, I think in the 2000s or so; I’m not sure exactly.
JH: Yeah, that’s what I think too. Yeah.
CB: Okay. And then you had mentioned other names as well of just people that have done work on this, like Jeff Jar and Rick Levine. Melane Reinhart. You had also mentioned Patricia Walsh. So and you finally also mentioned Michael Lutin, and Michael Lutin was interesting because he famously organized these big plays at UAC which were often astrologically themed, sometimes about like, what was going on in terms of like, the current transits and stuff like that. Like I wanna say the 2008 UAC play that I attended I think had to do with like, Pluto in Capricorn, which was like, just going into Capricorn at that time. So that’s a whole other side of experiential astrology to a certain extent is like, plays and drama and different things that may not be the astrodrama thing that we’re talking about in terms of living out a person’s chart, but may be incorporating astrology into art and into theatre or into other things like that.
JH: Yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, performance and music, you know, being inspired in that way. Again, storytelling and writing is really powerful for that. People also do things like, you know, integrate like, body movement practices like tai chi. And Steven Sprung, who’s someone I know here, has a long, long relationship with tai chi, and now also does movements that are sort of inspired by the signs of the zodiac, right? And that’s a way to sort of feel into it in a different way. So there’s, yeah, you know, exactly. These creative modalities being paired with astrological ways of seeing and knowing, it evolves that modality as well as the astrology, both. Like, you know, you’ve got different ways of accessing, and it’s just a juicier, you know, sort of experience of astrology that really begins to be just a way that you’re moving around. As many of us, we’re always seeing the signatures of planets; we’re always, you know, in this type of astrology, you take a minute and amplify that. And you work very consciously with the subjective experience of the astrology. You know, you sort of say that’s a crucial ingredient rather than saying that’s an ingredient we need to get out of the way so we can get to the objective thing. We’re actually saying no; actually, the subjectivity is actually where the material will most disclose meaning is in your lived experience, what your body is feeling, what your emotions, your sensations. Not just your thinking.
CB: Right. So it’s almost like you’re trying to create a field where you can almost like, force or elicit a subjective experience of the symbols and of the planetary meanings.
JH: Yeah, you said that beautifully. Yeah, exactly. Creating a field would be the language that I most prefer is that you’re really – and in a way, what you’re really doing is just supporting an already existing – and you’re setting in place some things. It’s a little bit like, you know, one way to think about it is with ritual or ceremony, which also would be modes of this, right? It kind of goes back to a very long history with theurgy and magic and those pieces. This is very much related to that. But you know, there’s this whole thing that, you know, you create – for the purposes of whatever you’re doing, you bound it off from the ordinary world. Right? You draw the circle for a particular ceremony, right, or you set the lines on the court for a particular sport. For something where we’re gonna enter that thing, and as a special space where things happen, and so – a sandbox, you know, like, you put it this way. One of the good stories of experiential astrology here in Santa Fe, you know, Tom Brady seemed like everybody’s astrologer. Like, when I first started doing astrology, I would constantly be – you know, people are like, you know, “Are you gonna be as good as Tom? Tom really understood me; I don’t know about you!” And what he did – he did most of his readings with sand tray figures. So he would have a sand tray, and these different, you know, figurines, and he would place them in the tray and sort of set them up and show the person, “Here’s what’s going on.” Or he would bring a transit in with another one, right, and you can do that in a really, you know, you can do it, you can decide who’s who. I think he had some specific images they always used for particular planets, but you don’t have to do that. And it sort of stays with people. But you know, the beginning of it is to sort of draw the thing. And even the chart itself, the horoscope itself sort of has this circle. Like, okay, we’re in a special space where we’re saying these symbols mean this. Or the same way when you go onto a volleyball court. You know, you’re playing with your friends, but while you’re in there, you’re gonna be opponents. And the game only works if you really both commit to the game. So it’s very similar with all these methods. You’re creating a field by sort of just setting it apart. And then you’re saying, “Everything that happens in here is this thing.” Like, in other words, everything that happens in here is the volleyball thing. Or in astrology, right, or in experiential astrology, we say – or I say – that, you know, once we’ve set the field, everything should be interpreted as symbolic revelation. So every occurrence that occurs, like, no matter what, even if it’s something that seems like it’s not part of anything – everything can be read through the symbolic language.
You know, one of the things that another form of experiential astrology, right, is going to sacred sites associated with astrology. You know, and I – Gray Crawford and I just took a group to Greece in September. And one of the things that I kept saying to the participants after a few days when suddenly everybody’s saying, oh, there’s the god – you know, someone loses their luggage and they immediately put it to Hermes and the luggage ends up back to the hotel before we even do. It’s the day that Mercury stationed. You know, it’s that kind of moment. And we begin to interpret everything, and then we had the bus driver – or the local tour guide, Maria, who was with us, at the end of the trip, she said, you know, I’ve never been with a group like this before. Like, nobody ever got mad at me. Every time something went wrong, they just said, “It’s the gods!” You know. In other words, you are in a seemingly hallucinatory – we would have sounded kind of insane to anybody but the people on the bus. It would be like, what are you talking about? You know, like, you’re attributing all this – it would seem like attribution. But for the purposes of that ceremony of being on that tour for 14 days, and moving around and telling stories, information is revealed. Symbols disclose themselves. You’re in your own reverie with it. And so this is very similar. Like, the setting apart, and the sort of having agreed roles – here’s how we’re going to do it. Here’s what the roles are. Having clear containing processes; having ways to amplify and bring, you know, raise up and bring down. All of that is tending that field that you named. You know, like, it’s like – and the better your capacity to tend the field. And the beautiful – oh, this is important too – the power of astrology in this is really interesting because I find, and as a therapist I felt this, and as a group – group work is really everything I do now. And so as a group dynamicist, the beautiful thing is that astrology in and of itself coheres a field rapidly. Right? Like, it is a coherent field. We’ve been doing this for thousands of years. Like, the field is very coherent already. Astrodrama can actually do more powerful things than just normal old psychodrama or whatever, because it’s got – the field’s been held for a long time. These stories have been told for a long time. So there’s a really deep thing, you know, that you’re bringing in that kind of holds the work. So it’s not just that you, the facilitator, are holding the work; you’re held by this incredible field of story and myth and tradition that is, you know, very reliable, and you can really count on it. You can really trust it to operate. You just have to kind of help people get out of the way and let it speak. Which to me is a reading, a consultation is the same. Like, you’re just really creating the space and languages for the symbol to speak, you know, to disclose itself, which is harder than it sounds.
CB: Right. It reminds me of there’s this really elaborate almost like, ceremonial form of horary astrology in India called ashtamangala prasnam, and the whole process of like, reading the horary chart there’s like, this build up to it. And that day, I think that day or maybe that week, the astrologer will pay attention to any like, signs or omens that happen in their vicinity even on the way to where they’ll read the horary chart publicly. Like, if a group of schoolchildren like, crosses in front of their path, that will be a symbol or like, a sign of something, and just paying attention to what’s happening in your environment as being part of the universe itself as like, a living entity like, speaking to you about what’s happening in that moment through symbolism in some way. And it just reminds me a little bit of that.
JH: Yeah. You know, I think that’s exactly it. It’s like, you’re letting, you’re making yourself available to hear the symbolic universe communicating in so many different languages, not just through the mental. You know, you’re giving yourself permission. I just was sitting with somebody for a consultation yesterday, and one of the really amazing things that happened – you know, we were in the beginning, kind of just starting to share and talk a little bit. And eventually, I noticed behind her there’s this painting that was sort of like a flame kind of going across the canvas a little bit. But I had this immediate association; somehow the shape of the flame, you know, it just reminded me of the John Singer Sargent painting of Chiron and Achilles. Like, somehow it looked like the front of a horse and the torso of a man coming up. It looked just like that shape, and I actually pulled that image up, you know, to see. And you know, the funny thing about it is it’s not like it objectively resembles that, but it did to me, and it did to this person in the moment. And that actually took us to this Jupiter-Neptune conjunction that she has in Sag, you know, for early ‘70s, and then the Chiron in Aries. And that led us to the focus on this – there was a grand trine between those and then I think the Leo Ascendant and so it led to that place. And that became the most significant revelatory part of the reading from my perspective was when we got there. But I didn’t go in planning like that I’m gonna talk about that, you know? There were, I got a whole bunch of things that are all available to be gone to. But in the moment, that’s how the symbol came, right, was through my subjective association with that painting, like, which would seem to be whatever. But yet in that moment – and I’m not even sure I would normally have seen that image in there, but somehow that’s what presented. And I think this is always happening. Like, for me, the best experiential work sources first from the encounter with the field spontaneously. Meaning we don’t just jump right into “Now we’re gonna do this chart,” but much more we see what is arising already. You know, you’re sort of listening experientially, and you’re sort of listening and feeling for when who’s trying to appear here. Because that’s usually the one you need is the one who comes in a way that isn’t already symbolized, isn’t already on the piece of paper. Often that is the creature in the ecosystem. You know, I always think about the chart as an ecosystem, you know, of animals. And like, zodiac means “circle of animals.” It’s like, these creatures are all there, and we never know – I don’t feel I know – before a reading which ones really need to do the talking here. Which ones have the information that will be most meaningful. There are millions of techniques you could do to try to decide that. But I’m led by the moment. And I think experiential process has to be led by the moment. But with reference, you’re always gonna be going back to the technical. You’re always gonna be, you know, so in other words, you’re on the earth and you’re looking at the sky, and then you’re on the earth, and you’re looking at the sky. That’s kind of how I see it. You’re in this weaving. Because in that example I gave, the image comes and then takes us into the trine; it takes us into that experience. And then we open that up a little bit symbolically, and name that some, and then we’re back to something from life experience and then – so there’s a weaving going on, right, between the technique, between the astrology official material and the lived experience. And you’re kind of doing this constant reweaving. And when I say “on earth,” you know, I always feel with astrology before – when I first came into astrology, all the modern astrologers used to say, you know, Uranus is the ruler – some people still would say that Uranus is the ruler of astrology. And you know, Uranus was half of an archetypal pair, right? Uranus is the sky, and Gaia was the earth. And then there’s a whole story about what Uranus did, right? Uranus sort of declared himself independent. He was born from the earth but kind of declared himself independent of the earth, and then raped the earth and then stopped letting the earth’s children incarnate. Right? They couldn’t come up above the surface; he sort of pushed them back in and not allow it. And I’ve always seen this as, and it’s the beginning of the Greek cosmology essentially; there’s a little bit of a primordial situation with Eros and Nyx and others, but this is really the first sort of characterizations. And I’ve always felt that that’s the Greeks showing us what their main dilemma was, which was that the languaging mind and its concepts and its ideas, which did in fact arise from being sensate creatures, earthly creatures, declared itself separate. Like, kind of disembeds itself. And then, you know, dominates things. And so in a similar way, this can happen with astrology where it could just like, detach and be in this sort of mental world of abstraction and concepts and forget that to weave the relationship, that we’re in relationship with earth, and “earth” meaning our bodies. You know, the earth literally, but also our senses. Because you can also do this by the way with nature. You know, you can go out into and see the archetypes in that way. But the point being that there’s this weaving that’s going on, so when you’re doing experiential work, there might be times where you’re fully – there’s no astrology language being used. You’re just fully in some sort of process, emotion or image-making, whatever it might be. But always we’re going to be returning to the sky and getting the context and then weaving back and forth, right? It’s – and they each can deepen each other. The lived experience can deepen your sense of the astrology, and the astrology can take you more into the lived experience. Because this is the antidote to the way that sometimes astrology takes people out of their experience. You know, as soon as something happens in life, they name the astrology of it, and it actually kind of shuts it down. Like, oh, this is just that. Like, and it doesn’t open up to more learning and understanding; it actually can go, you know, close things. But if we’re doing this kind of ongoing back and forth conversation, I think that’s what we’re facilitating, you know, in this.
CB: Yeah. One of the things you keep – I keep thinking and hearing you talk about this more and going back to something you said earlier, but just how this incorporates movement, and that like, movement is actually a really core concept underlying most astrology is some form of movement, that it’s not just time but also movement. And that maybe one of the downsides of contemporary astrology, of how astrology developed over the past 2,000 years once we started using ephemerises to calculate planets and to calculate like, a static birth chart is that the birth chart itself just looks like it’s a two-dimensional thing that doesn’t move. But in reality, what you’re looking at is like, a snapshot in time of how the planets were moving both in terms of the diurnal rotation and the daily rising and culminating and setting of the planets as well as the motion of the planets through the signs of the zodiac along the ecliptic, and that this really reconnects with a core thing that would have been much more evident in ancient astrology where they’re going out and actually like, witnessing the planets and seeing them move every day and every night is just that core concept of motion.
JH: Yeah. I love that you’re naming that. Just the way you said that. And it again also reminds me of the sort of mercurial archetypal which I think has so much to do with movement and with loosening. You know, there’s a loosening in this work where, yeah, you are unstiffening things, and you are reminding the dynamism that’s going on in the sky, right? And the dynamism that’s going on in life on earth that the sky reflects. So I think you’re right. That movement piece – and again, in this work, you know, there’s literally moving around. And movement can be really, really slow, as we know, you know, from the sky. But it’s like, that’s actually one of the things I always say about Mercury and myth. You know, unlike most of the other gods, Mercury doesn’t really come with agenda, like, a consistent kind of injunction, right? Like, Venus consistently draws you into your passions, right? Mars consistently wants you to fight; Athena wants you to be strategic, et cetera. But Mercury just shows up and seems – when Mercury shows up on the scene in mythology, and I find in astrology, the commitment of Mercury is just to movement, right? It’s just to like, the next things happening. Let the story play. He shows up a lot in myth when things are cycling and sort of stuck; that’s often when Mercury just appears and kind of gets things moving again. And I often think that’s what astrology is able to do is like, again, we don’t have to come with a particular injunction to the client. Like, do this, do that. We are often just helping the system kind of lubricate a little and move and be seen, felt, experienced. It’s a very different energy, and it can be quite subtle. I think that’s a really important piece too that this work is not always dramatic and over the top, and of course that’s great and it’s often a lot of fun. There’s a playful quality. But really, this can be as subtle as just when you’re in a session with somebody, and they say something in a certain tone and you can hear a planet speaking, you can just say to them, you know, “Could you just say more in that same tone of voice? I just am curious to hear more from that.” And you might hear it, and you might start to feel it, and what would someone who speaks in that tone say about your situation with your lawyer? And they might – and then you would then be able to say, “Well, that, I think you’re speaking from Mars in Sagittarius, and you are really the truth-teller in this moment.” And that is what is about to be transited or whatever the thing might be. It’s like, these are mini moments, right, of experience. So we don’t have to create this big ceremony called experiential – make it a big production. Like, that is of course at its full glory, I guess, but I hope for people to become more experiential in regular astrological practice of all kinds. Like, I am encouraging people to slow down with the information transmission of astrology. Like, you know, here’s this, here’s that, here’s this. Slow down, and actually drop into the experience a little more. And let it lead. Like, don’t let your delineation lead. Let the material – or at least for five minutes, you know? Like, take a pause, and really see what happens when you just, again, what have I done there when I say to that person? What I’ve done is I’ve created a little mini field to your language. Like, and I’ve said, you know, hey Mars – you wanna talk some more for a minute? You know, like, and again, they don’t have to know any astrology because they’re already doing it. I sensed that Mars was in the room, and I’m just sort of giving them a little more time to bring some more Mars. And then I can name the astrology and then we’re kind of in it and out of it. But they’re gonna walk away remembering talking that way, right? Again, it has a bodily signature that develops. And so then when the transit comes that we’ve talked about or something has shifted, that is available somatically as a register that they can be working with, tracking, following, in whatever ways they do. So the mini moments I think are in the end, they are probably the most crucial. And again, they’re quite subtle. Like, it’s – and it will probably redirect your reading when that happens. Like, because it’s polyvocal, right? You’ve become – oh, and that’s the thing, you’ve begun to rather than just talk about the astrology, you’re talking to it. Right? Rather than talking about Mars, you’re listening and talking as Mars or to Mars. So you’re in a living relationship, and that’s where it goes back to like, the notion of earlier ways of experiencing reality. And not just earlier – I think people still can experience reality this way – but where we understand ourselves to be in a constant conversation with all of life. And so in this moment, we’re doing that instead of pulling away to the Archimedean point and imagining that we have some sort of claim to being outside the system and able to make observations about it, it’s saying actually being inside the system is the perfect way to make meaning together. It lets you bring all of you to the experience. Like, and it gives the symbol exactly the right place to speak from. You know, it’s also how you end up with radically creative ways of seeing different planets and different situations. Like, when you have people from different backgrounds – you have women versus men – or not versus like against, but like, you know, you’re getting perspectives from different people’s bodies, life histories, memories, identities that are gonna have totally different refractions like a prism. They’re gonna reflect the archetype in totally different ways based on their own early experiences or whatever. We’re all positioned somewhere, but that’s the beauty; it means we each can bring the archetype from our own what we’ve got available to talk from, you know. Our own experiences, our own memories. Memories are really powerful. Like, a lot of times you share a memory in a reading. Like, you know, when you see Venus somewhere and you’re like, oh, I remember seeing this somewhere else, and I know I might share that. I remember this person who had this – you know, and that’s very subjective. Why that one now, you know? But it’s a way in. All these valuing these moments that are the result of you being local.
CB: Yeah. I mean, I think one of the greatest things also is – and aside from bringing in the subjective component and reconnecting astrologers with that rather than it just being an objective numbers-based discipline, there’s also so this element of like, fun and playfulness, which I think is probably one of the greatest things that the Pluto in Leo generation, this being like, a product of that generation that I can see that this tries to like, re-import into astrology is this sense of like, fun and playfulness which might also have a side effect of making astrology more accessible to people where having some element of that might speak to them more from an educational or understanding standpoint.
JH: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I mean, you know, the shortest distance between two brains is laughter. I mean, two people laughing together move into resonance just like that. And then you can say something. I think – I mean, I am a person who likes to lecture in a kind of performative style, and part of it is that, that I wanna be loosened up together and in a playful mode together. And then you can deliver stuff – something can come which is fairly – but you’ve got a field of play and resonance, and we’re just having a good time. That exactly – which is in and of itself just nice. But it also, thinking pedagogically or thinking in terms of receptivity to information or receptivity to divination, a relaxed state where you’re not trying to, where you don’t have your, you know, what is this – brow furrowed. You know, you’re not like, figuring it out. You’re kind of just relaxing and playing around. That is often the way – you know, the flow states they would talk about, right? Like where it just kind of naturally will come. And yeah, so it does – it limbers people up. Not everybody. Kind of like what you said earlier. Like, experiential work can sometimes make people feel on the spot, and they become more, they feel more closed down and more stuck. So that’s again where we really have to read the room. A very useful concept in this is the notion of warm-up that we really need to understand everybody’s got a different warm-up, and probably every planet in your horoscope has a different warm-up. Right? Like, my Uranus-Mercury conjunction is always ready to – you know, like, let’s do it! Get in there! No matter what. But you know, my Mars retrograde in Taurus is considerably slower to do much of anything.
So we’ve all got multiple warm-up process, and then in a group, you’ve got that many things times the number of members in the group, so you’re trying to sort of feel what is already warmed up, and then to gently warm things up. So it really – there’s just ways to meet people, you know, where they are, and to as you said make it fun. To have a good time. People love doing some warm-ups are things like, you know, you have people in a room. Okay, all the fire Mercuries in one corner; all the waters in one – you know, and then you just spontaneously say, you know, “I want everybody to do a skit of,” you know, “what it’s like to be this placement.” Like, each group has to do a skit within two minute – you don’t give them time to get too, you know. And people come out and sometimes they do things that are, you know, whatever, but it’s very fun first of all. It’s super fun. And people immediately create resonances in the group. You’re developing relations in the group right from the beginning. And everybody kind of puts themselves into it a little bit, and people can find ways to do it, right? You could go off in the corner and say that, you know, there are a million things you can do. So those are often really good warm-ups just to kind of get the play body playful, right? And occasionally, those can be profound. I mean, it all depends. But they’re almost always, you know, and they’re pretty memorable, actually. So usually when I do retreats, like, weeklong retreats or stuff like their workshops, I’ll start with some of things like that that just help us kind of limber up and you know, connect in different ways. And then you’ve established that this is play time. Like, you know, and play has very… Play to me means something more than just, you know, ha-ha. Like, play’s kind of what we do as astrologers, meaning we go into this sort of sandbox of the chart, and we make figures and we played in there many times and we do different things. You know, it’s a special set apart world where we can experience and see things that we don’t always experience and see.
And the beauty of this, too, is that – I mean, psychodrama was formed by watching children play. That was actually how Moreno developed his methods. He saw children play, and he – the observation, one of the major observations was some children were very good at play in the sense that they could move from role to role to role to role, like, in different scenarios. But other children like, always had to be the villain or always had to be the winner. You know, they were what he called “role locked.” And the point of psychodrama was actually to develop role flexibility, spontaneity – the ability to have the most adequate response to each moment. Which I think is an interesting statement for astrology – like, the most adequate response to each moment. Like, and by “adequate,” the word that could be unpacked, but you know, the notion that you have all your possibilities available for how to respond. Like, the more you’ve been inside in and out of these different roles and really cultivated relationships with these different parts of self or parts of the universe or both – I think they’re always both. The more you’ve developed those relationships, the more you have to call on when life brings whatever it brings. Right? You start to become co-conscious. Like, in psychological terms, if you were thinking about parts of people, usually what would be most helpful for most people psychologically is to have all the different parts of themselves be able to connect and talk to each other. That is usually the – like, that’s a useful thing no matter what specific treatment you’re trying to attain. Getting things talking, which usually maybe do not. I’m pointing here because the neurobiology part is talked about in this way, you know, kind of literal, physical way. But it’s a similar thing with these types of processes get things connecting that don’t always connect. And therefore, in any given situation, the possibility is there of accessing the place that would have the most helpful response or that would be most, you know, beneficial, meaningful, whatever language we use for good things. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. So the value of play. I mean, I think that’s a great thing here in terms of our Full Moon in Leo —
JH: Yeah.
CB: — sort of episode that we’re doing here, the value of fun and play. The way to make things more accessible. What are some of the like, in terms of ensuring the quality of the discipline or the method or some of the limits or challenges that you might encounter? I know we have touched upon this a little bit, but I can imagine sometimes – like, I remember I did a – I went to – what was it, it was a little like, conference once, and it was a smaller, it was like, an OPA conference, and like, at the end we were all supposed to like, delineate somebody’s chart publicly. And we did, but the person got up afterwards and like, didn’t really say anything and didn’t really confirm or anything, and then the event just ended. And we were all a little bit bewildered. But it turned out later that several of us had like, touched on something that was really sensitive in the person’s chart that they just didn’t wanna go into publicly, and so we realized the kind of shortcomings of that format, or at least potential issues with trying to do things as just like, a demonstration of an astrologer’s proficiency or something like that. That there’s other things that can come into play. What are some of the limitations or the challenges or other things?
I imagine with this, one of the limitations would be – especially if you were acting out the chart, if you had multiple people, you know, the individual people acting it out may have different levels of proficiency or understanding or even like, in terms of like, bedside manner, some people may be better or potentially not as good at saying certain things that might be appropriate or inappropriate about a person’s like, placements or charts.
JH: Yeah. Well, yes. And I think that actually is interesting the way you said that, because I think one of the hardest things to do is to get people to stay in role. Especially if they know a lot of astrology, they often wanna begin to make observations on the chart, but if we’re in this process, that’s not what we’re doing, right? You’re going into one area and being that thing. Like, you’re not really meta-reflecting, at least not at this point. But the thing that comes to mind I think is a useful way to think about all these modes of experiential work that we’ve been naming is they used to make a little curve – you know, I think it was called a Hollander curve – I can’t quite remember. But it basically has three parts. It’s got a warm-up, you know, an action, and an integration. Those are sort of the three stages of experiential processes. Like, there’s a warming up – and so one of the biggest mistakes people make is to not really tend to the warm-up. And really kind of, you know, help the group to – and sometimes people warm up very fast, right? Sometimes, you know, we’re gonna do this conference, and by day three, the workshop – when people come into workshops, they’re already gonna be warmed up because they’ve been in workshops for two days at that point. So the warm-up is you don’t have to think as much about it, because it’s probably gonna, you know, people are hot! You know, they’re already in it in some ways.
So but often, that’s not the case, so you really have to see about warm-up, and like, with that person, how warmed up are they really to receive information in a public setting? You know, it’s a fairly fishbowl situation. So you know, there is that part of the warm-up. Also, really important for people is that you yourself as the practitioner need to check your warm-up. What are you actually ready for? You know, what are you not ready for? It’s okay to not wanna go certain places. It’s okay to not open up certain things; that’s not a – it is a limitation, but you get to have limitations. You know, we don’t have to go everywhere that you could go.
So there’s the warm-up part. Then the action is, you know, whatever we do. And then this other third part is the integration, and it occurs to me, like, with what you were describing, like, the event ended, and it ended. But like, there’s an integration that we would work in with this kind of work. Like, meaning so after all the action has happened – you know, whatever we’ve done, people have made art or talked about it or somebody shared a dream and we’ve enacted the dream – whatever the different methods and modes are, once the action part is over, there’s a definite part of time where it’s really about sharing. It’s really about integrating it, bringing it into language. Often that’s when a lot of the astrology reflections can then happen, right? Then we do take that larger view and we talk about the chart as a dynamic system. We make observations. We talk about whatever we learned for ourselves. Anybody in a role shares what it was like to be in a role, how the role – what they learned for themselves in the role. Because usually a role comes to just the right person. Like, it’s just the moment when someone needs to practice their Saturn, you know? Like, who needs to do it. Or you know, they will be experiencing the frustrations that they experience in something else, and this will give them an answer. We always say in these group processes when one person’s working, we’re all working. Like, everybody’s getting stuff out of it at a personal level and at an educational level.
So then with the integration time is a time to do all of those things. And again, if we’ve – one way to think about this work also is that, you know, I do a lot with sort of psychological imaginings of sect. And what I have often talked about is night consciousness, day consciousness. And sort of building from Rob Hand’s notion that the Pythagorean table has some connection to the distinction of night and day, of the opposites. And so you know, you could say that a lot of astrology with its emphasis on technique and functionality has a day orientation. Like, you’re illuminating; you’re making things clear. You are, you know, thinking about – it’s rational. There’s a rationality in it. And that a lot of what we’re consulting in experiential work is the irrational or I might be better to say the non-rational, or even the trans-rational. We’re visiting a wilder kind of place that does not work linearly. Right? That doesn’t work that way. It works in lunar, Martian, Venusian ways, which are as a rule I would offer not very linear and can actually very much take things away. You know, you get gripped by your passions or you get gripped by, you know, love or whatever the thing is or your needs. And so we’re visiting that place, and we’re giving a lot of space to it, and it’s always dangerous to do that. Like, dangerous meaning to the structures of life that we’ve set up or the way we know ourselves, or the way we know astrology. It’s like, so when we’ve been in that action part of the curve, we’ve been in night, in a sense. Right? We’ve gone into something a little more all over. And now we’re returning, and we need that transitional return. And not like we’re always in day; it’s not that simple. But the basic idea being that we’re – it’s important to kind of return to normal life. You know, come out of role. Have a chance to really integrate it, to use language, you know? To restore regular being in the world. And integration is very overlooked in our, in western culture entirely, really. Like, the need to not just go to the next thing, but to actually integrate the thing you’ve been in. That’s one of the big errors I see when people do experiential work with groups is they don’t build in the integration; they let the action go til like, minute 59 out of an hour, and then they’re left with all this activation in the room. And as you were just observing, like, with – and I’m not sure that an integration period would have helped that person or not, but like, that experience where everybody’s kind of left in woe, you know, and so I really am a person who favors, again, smaller action components. They’re vital and alive, but they’re smaller. And a lot of time on either side to, you know, really integrate it. It’s a twilight mode. You know, to again come to Mercury – you know, our god of twilight who is both night and day – Mercury is about weaving. To my mind, it’s about weaving the worlds. Weaving the day and the night, and not just all night, all in, all activation, all, you know. I made a reference to the secured symbolizing field; it’s a notion of a person named William Goodhart who – Jungian guy, just a stray article, but I’ve always found it very helpful. He talks about for this – he’s speaking for Jungian psychotherapy with dreams. By the way, we didn’t really speak, but dreams are a massive way into experiential work – dream work. One of my favorite questions that I almost always ask now at consultations is whether people have had a dream in the last few days, because again, the dream gives you a rich source of their inner experience, their own images, their own, you know, that then you’ll see the chart immediately. You’ll see it reflected. And then that’ll, you know, create that. But in this notion from Goodhart with the secured symbolizing field, that there are – he has this notion of three different fields that can kind of predominate in encounters of this kind where we’re working with symbolism. One is the so-called persona restoring field, which is where it’s kind of flat and arid and dry. Like, it’s just information, and there’s not a lot – the person’s kind of flat often. They don’t give you much; they’re kind of not necessarily shut down, but doesn’t seem like anything’s allowed to go anywhere. You know, and we’ve all sat with that in astrology in consultations. Sounds like even that person you mentioned was a little bit in that mode where it’s really like, are you feeling anything? You know, that kind of thing. And then there is the complex discharging field; that’s the second field. And that field is when there’s like, a possession by the – you know, like, there’s just like, too much. It’s muchness of whatever it is. Like, lots of feelings or lots of, you know, overwhelm or whatever the thing be – triggered, flooded, those types of words. And that the secured symbolizing field is where you’re somewhere in the in-between; this is that Mercury twilight, like, Mercury twinkling at the end, you know, right after the Sun’s down or before it’s up. Like, a little moment where you have access to the complexes, to both fields. Like, you have the access to like, the place that keeps things functioning, keeps the ships running, keeps every, you know, has the vision for where it needs to go. To me, these are Jupiter-Saturn-Sun type of things. Has all of that going on, and also has access to all this erotic, juicy – and by “erotic” I mean sexual but not just sexual; you know, like, life force – has access to all of that, and is weaving them together. And that’s – I want the director to stay in twilight modes of consciousness, to always be attending to the day realities of people, of functionality. Also the realities of our astrological technique and orientation. You asked about how to keep it, or how to ensure the quality; one of the biggest things is I think it’s really important to be very grounded and deep in whatever mode of astrological practice is yours. Like, the technical proficiency and really, really, like, feeling like you – again, we’re back to that land metaphor – you know this place. You’ve been around. Not like you – not in an omniscient way, but you are familiar. It’s really familiarity. But that’s built, as you said, over time and experience. It’s not merely you’ve learned all the official things.
So that saturation in that field is very important, and then the other side of it – it’s also very important for people to have a fairly developed notion of whatever their method is. Like, so that’s your astrological technique, then there’s your experiential method. What is that, and how does that work? And we wanna see people who can really bring both of those together. And both of them take some time. It doesn’t mean people shouldn’t have a good time and just go ahead and do some role play; I think they should. I mean, I think you should go for it, you know? Like, in a reading, particularly in a one-on-one thing where it’s, you know, the stakes are lower, people aren’t watching and getting upset. You’re just in a little moment of free-for-all. But the trick is you also have to be at the other end of it. You really need to do some experiential astrology, and it’s a little bit like how they say, you know, you shouldn’t be a therapist and never have gone to therapy. You know? Only studied the techniques. You need to be a patient. So if you’re gonna do this with querents or clients, then you need to also have been – you need to do it. You know? To be in the encounter. And therefore to, you know, you’ll develop that habit of vulnerability and openness to whatever might come. But I’ve kind of gone all over, sorry.
CB: It was good. What are some of the like, things you’ve learned or like, challenges that have arose that were like, learning lessons for you or even like, failures that you’ve grown from in the process of doing this?
JH: I would say for sure the error that I made the most when I was earlier in doing this was that the part about warm-up and the importance of really making sure everybody’s warming up. We’re not all gonna warm up exactly the same, but the meaning would be too fast to something fairly, you know, significant. Or too fast to – you can probably hear that I’ve been sounding this cautionary note a bit as we’re talking, because a lot of times, the people attracted to do this type of work with others have a sort of intensity. We have a sort of like, “Let’s get in there,” you know? Like, I wanna do it now! You know, there’s a passion for it, which is beautiful, but it’s so important to really be in an attuned relationship with what is the field ready for, what do you have the resources to actually explore? The resources in yourself – what does that person have the resources for? So I think that’s one of the probably the biggest thing. I mean, I kind of spoke to it when we’re speaking about warm-up and integration, because to me those are the —
CB: Right.
JH: You know, those two parts – which I always think, you know, I did that little curve. I don’t have a drawing of it, but hopefully people can see me and just – it’s not that special of a notion, but I like about it is I always think of it in astrology of like, the metaphor I often use when teaching that to practitioners is like, it’s kind of like our, you know, synodic cycles or particularly the lunar cycle or the lunation cycle. You know, it’s like, you have a New Moon, and then you’re waxing, waxing, waxing to fullness – you know, and that would be the action zone perhaps – and then you’re waning back to the New Moon. And that could be seen the warm-up, action, integration. And we know very well that – I feel I know very well that – that the culture doesn’t like to wane. It likes to wax. Increase. Go further, go faster. So we’ve gotta really attend to that waning part of the cycle, right? And again, it can be hard to… First of all, it can be hard to lift people’s foot off the brake and actually let the thing move a little. You know, let the experiential process move. It can also be challenging to put the brake on, right? So you really ideally in this work, it helps to do it a little bit together for a while. You know, like, that’s why I like doing these online groups for 10 or 12 weeks, and you begin to let – the group begins to have that habit of how to engage. So this is powerful, because the thing about this work is you are teaching many things, including one of the most important for me in living an astrological life is the ability to pendulate and to move in and out of archetypal realities, in and out of relationships with different gods. Which is, I think, a life skill of how to do that. How do I step in and out of that. And it’s a disciple, right? There’s something one is learning. And you’re also developing relationships over time with all these different planets and different signs and houses where you are, you know, you’re reweaving your experience ongoingly. So it’s a kind of ongoing practice, and again it can be done in the smallest little moments; I think that’s really the other thing is people think it has to get big in order to be real. It has to be, you know, it has to be a Michael Lutin production or Cecil B. DeMille, you know, psychodrama as they used to say. And those are amazing, of course, but actually, you know, most of this is gonna happen like most of life – at a relatively, you know, somewhere in between. And yet those will be very alive. So it doesn’t have to be – I think that’s one of the things – and that’s maybe part of why I’m trying to emphasize too that it’s not just the astrodrama and the movement which often has a – but it is this work with art and image and dream, you know, and writing and sensation and just movement. It doesn’t have to be playing a planet. All of those are there.
The other thing to answer your question about limitations or, you know, is that I do think it’s always the case, right, when we are working with others with astrology that our stuff is gonna affect what we do. In fact, that’s actually impossible not to happen. But of course, there are thresholds here. You know, your own material to dominate the – you know, like, somebody has a belief that something about what I wanna talk about in the reading is wrong, and then they don’t realize that they’re telling me “no” – they use astrological justification, but actually it’s just their stuff about that topic. So that happens all the time in readings, but and so in this mode of work, the astrologer’s own material can easily become more potent because you yourself are in the experience. You’re again in Mercury mode; you know, you are in and out. You’re in nighttime immersion and you’re also in daytime observation. Like, and so you can get pulled in all the way, right? You can, you’ll find yourself drawn in. The question is can you use that in the moment? Like, so I might – this happens to me in readings, right, where I have an available emotional body, so I’ll use that Saturn-Moon example again. Like, you know, someone has Saturn square the Moon, and I find myself starting to feel judgmental of them. You know, it just – and I’m like, great, this person is really needy and like, I don’t – get over it! And that’s not my – I was gonna say it’s not my normal thing, but I have Saturn rising; it might be my normal thing! But you know, there’s that energy that’s starting to constellate. So if I’m not careful, if I don’t know that about that, I might just start to give off that vibe of like, you know, you’re kind of annoying. You know, that might just start to happen. But if I notice that I’m being drawn that way – like, if I feel the pull to judge, I will probably be able to see in the sky, and I will consider that that’s the one we need to talk about because it came in through my body. Like, it came in in the relational field. Like, I got constellated into the aspect. Because I think one important way to see our charts is that they’re always, to me they’re always intrapsychic and they’re always intrapersonal. And so, you know, if you’re in your Moon, you’re gonna attract Saturns. Like, that’s just probably what’s gonna happen. But if I can notice that I’m being drawn into a role, and again my experience with this stuff is part of what lets me notice that my – I’m so used to noticing those states, and I’m like, oh wow, I’m getting really Saturn here, you know? And then I can pull out, and I have options about how to do it, then. I can name it; I rarely would name that I feel judgmental in a one-time session. I might do that if I know the person a little more. But I can certainly name the aspect, or I could say, you know, “Do you find people often judge you?” You’ll find your way in. But you begin to be able to talk about that Saturn-Moon. So there’s an availability to the field, you know, that’s going on, that this work trains us to do; we just naturally are tracking our own responses. But the problem in this work and the limitation, back to that, is that if you’re not tracking yourself, if you don’t have that habit of self reflexively asking what makes me want to do the thing I’m about to do as the director – if you don’t have that question regularly in your mind, like, what’s leading me here? Then you will probably start acting out, and you’ll be a character in the drama and not know it. So – and I’ve done it. And I think everybody’s done it. But it’s a ongoing habit of reflexive, you know, asking, “What am I inside of?” Which to me is the question of astrology, it’s the question that astrology exists for. What am I inside of? What cycle, what myth, what story? So it’s not a new question for us; it’s the question we’re always answering. Like, what am I inside of? What story am I in? What template, what planetary agenda or cycle? But it’s a —
CB: Right.
JH: — question that we have to ask a lot as experiential astrologers because we’ll get drawn in. It’s natural.
CB: Yeah. I saw some discussion forum recently where somebody had a consultation that they didn’t think went well because they felt like the astrologer’s subjective experience or opinions, that they were inserting those into the consultation and the person thought that astrology should be more objective or something, and it was making me reflect on that there is a subjective component to astrology and you can’t actually remove that. No matter how objective an astrologer is trying to be, some of their personal experiences and background and likes and dislikes and all sorts of other things are gonna go into the reading in some form or another. But it sounds like one of the things that you’re aiming for here with experiential astrology is to find a balance between those subjective and objective realms, sort of like the day and night distinction that you were talking about earlier.
JH: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think that really what it’s saying is that the subjective will always be present, therefore consider it an active area to consciously make use of. You know, in psychotherapy, we talk about the use of one’s self – the therapist – the use of self in the process. Like, that your reactions, your thoughts and so on – they’re gonna be there regardless, but can they be actually informative about the encounter? Can they assist you? You know, and it’s very much – I mean, again, I don’t know that we’ll have time to go there, but I think I had mentioned to you when I think about work like Geoffrey Cornelius work, or the work that some have done with hermeneutics and astrology, and this whole question of how does the symbol reveal itself, you know, and how does the subjective – it is actually in some ways of seeing, it’s the subjective that actually makes that crucial turn towards the possibility of revelation. Like, what you bring if you bring it – and I guess I should just say I would distinguish this from what that person experienced where the astrologer’s just spouting opinions. That’s not what I mean. I mean just the really what you’re experiencing is useful and meaningful, rather than you need to detach from yourself and just do – you know, “do astrology” – you know, delineate. Because even your delineation is still subjective; it’s what you remembered to calculate, you know? It’s what you’ve learned. It never escapes. It’s what I wanna say to astrologers, too, it’s like, it was really interesting for me because so many people for instance with Geoffrey Cornelius have said a feeling of profound impact from what he shared with us. And yet, what we teach about is mostly still just the technical side of things; we don’t as much teach about what is symbolic process and how do we engage the subjective skillfully in the process of astrological consultation or sharing of astrology in whatever, you know, modality? And that’s, I think, what a rigorous approach to experiential astrology is specifically asking that question – how do we engage the subjective in support of meaningful astrology? How do we work with it? How do we attune the consciousness of the practitioner, how do we assist the receptivity of the querent or the client? That question remains, I feel, relatively underexplored in astrological ways of, you know, it’s just not what people talk about. They talk about other things which are also important things. But I have a deep desire to have more conversation about that question, and again, these experiential methods are specifically located at that part of the – if you feel that objective and subjective coming together is what happens in the experience of astrology, if that is something someone feels, then we need to really become more rigorous about how do we work with the subjective. And because otherwise, it will come out the way it did in that person’s experience where somebody just sort of goes off and, you know, is totally caught in their own material but doesn’t even know it, and presents it as if it’s astrology. It shows no self reflexivity. I think when you work experientially, you develop a habit of asking about your contents, all of your contents, your opinions, your feelings, your – and then it also asks like, what is the most effective way that – you know, I use that word “divination” more as coming from Cornelius than maybe people would popularly use that word. But to understand, you know, what makes that available, what makes that possible. And so I guess what I would say is like, I’m kind of now speaking of there are experiential astrology techniques, but there’s also like, an experiential astrology theory of the case, or an experiential astrology way of seeing astrology that isn’t all just about the techniques we do like roleplay or dream work or, you know, art. But it’s also just a lens that really, really seeks to track full consciousness engagement of both astrologer and client, or querent or group, or whoever – student. And that’s the – and there is good thinking on that. There is thinking on that. But it’s not – anyway, that’s part of the conversation that I wanna help us have more of. And I do think there’s still so much to come forward from. You know, I was reading your transcript of your interview with Geoffrey Cornelius, and you know that whole question of subjective/objective, and the way that nobody really has the answer about you know, in the sense of… At some level, there’s an impasse between those notions of astrology. Like, more causal, scientific, like, you know, explanations and more of this divination or of the moment. But that’s still a really – I was reading your stuff and I was like, that is the conversation I am excited that, you know, at least sometimes some people are in. It’s —
CB: Yeah.
JH: — undertheorized I think.
CB: Yeah, he was really trying to assert that they’re… I mean, he took it to maybe an extreme that not everyone agrees about or I’m not sure that I was fully on board with that almost at one point saying that there was perhaps no objective astrology, that there is this subjective component. But that’s the part maybe without taking it to the full extreme that I think I agree with and was reflecting on over the past week was that there’s always a subjective component when you have an astrologer involved to doing astrology, and it’s important to be conscious of that because no astrologer can completely divorce their astrological knowledge and wisdom from their subjective experience of things. And so sometimes it’s better maybe to just be more conscious of that and to lean into it sometimes when that’s appropriate, because there’s a profound wisdom there when you can draw from that subjective side of things and balance that with the more objective or external side of things.
JH: Yeah, I feel that. And back to our lunation today, right, with Aquarius-Leo, like, that that all-in quality of fire and particularly the Leo participation – you know, get in there – and then that capacity for detachment or discernment or systemic, you know, like putting things into a larger framework. There’s some sort of dialectic that’s always going on there, and I wouldn’t wanna discard either from – and I think it’s just in my own experience it feels like that getting in there is really what I like to do. You know, it’s what I’m able to do; it’s my contribution in a way, like, to go for it on the subjective end. And it does develop some powerful skills as a person sitting with clients in astrology in the sense of feeling like you can, you know, go places that the person needs to go. And it’s a different set of skills, right? You know, there’s the set of skills that’s about delineation and really understanding the technique and not just understanding the technique, but understanding its historical origins and understanding the natural sciences that part of it. So there’s so much there. And then there’s a similar level of methodological process that can be brought to this other thing – rigor, I guess I would say – that is, when those are married together, I think those are when those kinds of remarkable experiences happen.
CB: For sure. And I like your thing about creating a container for everything and using the lunation cycle as kind of an analogy for the process of like, warming people up and then having the experience itself at sort of like, the Full Moon, or acting things out in an astrodrama context, but then also having like, a cool down phase in the waning side of the lunation where you’re reflecting and like, taking everything in and starting to process everything I guess. So that’s something you’re actually going to create a container for this year, because you’re actually gonna be having a conference for this type of astrology in October, right?
JH: Yeah, that was a beautiful way of framing that; I love it!
CB: Thank you. Thank you; I am great at transitions at this point.
JH: Guess you have, right?
CB: Tell me about the conference. Let me know what’s going on with that.
JH: Yeah. Wll, you can see I am starting to smile already when you start to name it, partly because of how you did, but also – so yes. There is a, it’s called the Living Astrologies Conference. It’s gonna be October two to five here in Santa Fe, and it will be a beautiful time of year in Santa Fe. It’s all golden cottonwoods and golden aspen. And it will be, yeah, four days and the heart of it – it’s an entirely experiential astrology event, meaning there will be no lectures. There will be no powerpoints. There will be projection for, you know, the occasional charts and also images. But I do think one of the things is being allowed to get away from some of those things for the participants and the people facilitating.
So the structure of the conference is essentially that each day, there’ll be small workshops, meaning 25 max, probably more like 15 to 20 in each workshop. And that’ll go for like, five or six hours. And there’ll be four days of those. So that’s sort of the spine of the conference in a sense. So people get a really good chance to go into a particular topic and do some stuff.
Then the other layer of the conference will be some large group processes, so one evening for instance will be playback theater, which is a form of psychodrama where you have a troupe of actors – just five people who just play particular things – and so people will use the current sky that day. We’ll also use people’s horoscopes. There’ll be some live music that is archetypally inspired musicians. Then there’s another night that we’ll be doing sort of free dance with planetary prompts, kind of something I alluded to here where you are – it’s not a structured kind of dance like “move like this and move like that” – it’s you move as you will, but then you’re invited, like, what are you noticing? And then you’re invited like, okay, let’s move as your Mars, and you know, and so on and transit people. So there’ll be some large settings like that as well.
It’s also, you know, the words I’ve been using for this conference are embodied – you know, so really being in the body’s ways of knowing. You know, somatic sensuous, the felt sense. Expressive. Kinesthetic. Movement. It will also be relational, and by relational, I mean as we were saying before, it’s not about talking about astrology and talking about Mars; it’s relating to Mars. You know, it’s not – again, the talking about will also happen, of course, but we’ll really be relating to. And then it’s also – again, there’s an embedding part that we didn’t, you know, speak of as much. But there’s so much about this is about being on the earth and located in here. So for instance, in this conference, we’ll be visiting, we’ll start on the land and we’ll start at the Santa Fe River, you know, which is why there is a town here. And to me, that’s kind of what we’re doing with astrology is like, why do we have astrology? We have astrology because people were in touch with how they felt and what they were experiencing when a particular thing moved; they were tracking these things. And so we’re kind of going back to the fountainhead, the river – right? – of lived experience around which a whole beautiful city of technique, you know, has emerged. And Santa Fe’s all in for this; there’s all sorts of extra things we’re doing. We have private tours at International Folk Art Museum, which is an amazing place, and a lot of different parts to this. And Santa Fe has a really, you know, a strong relationship with consciousness oriented astrology. You know, Dane Rudhyar spent time here. Stephen Arroyo, right? Erin Sullivan. Alan Oken. You know, quite a few people who were consciousness oriented astrologers, whatever we take that to mean, have been here, and also experiential stuff has happened here. There was – Barbara Shermer has a great description of this huge tent that was erected right in the center of town right near our plaza. It was a massive tent, and then they had little compartments, and they did what you described. You know, they would run somebody’s chart and then put people into each of the rooms, and the person would go around. So the planets weren’t interacting with each other unless they were in the same house. But you would go around and meet the people in your different houses of your charts. I don’t think we’re gonna be able to construct quite that, but you know, the workshops are many different kinds – oh, go ahead. Sorry.
CB: I wonder what year that was. That’s interesting. I wonder if there’s any like, planetary repetition that’s happening now with you doing the conference there now versus whatever that event was that she organized.
JH: I’ve been trying to find out. I don’t think it’s in her book, the date. But people here – Tom Brady who I mentioned, you know, people know of this, but I haven’t figured that out. I wanna say ‘78, but I – which is an interesting year, right, from the Pluto-Venus-Mars moment there where they were all together. So there were three of those Venus-Mars conjunctions in like, ‘78-ish. And Pluto hanging out there too in Libra. And so I wanna say it’s then, but I really don’t know.
But yeah, it’s gonna be a great event, and people, you know, the workshops are – the facilitators people would know some of the names. Many people who have been on the podcast, like Aerin Fogel, Diana Rose Harper – and there’s a lot of different methods that are offered, so yeah. And I think the beauty is the small workshops, you know? Like, so you really can go somewhere. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So not on Zoom. So you’re actually in person for —
JH: No Zoom!
CB: That’s wild at this point from the past five years ever since the, you know, the pandemic and just there used to be so many more conferences and in-person events. You know, people are almost not used to what that’s like to actually meet up in person with a group of astrologers as a whole experience in and of itself. And this is your first time doing a conference like this; it’s called the Living Astrology Conference, right?
JH: Yeah, Living Astrologies – we put it in the plural, which doesn’t do well for, you know, search engines or whatever, but it is making a point, right – two points being made by that. You know, one of which is that this kind of work works with all forms of astrology, right? All modes of astrological practice can be engaged experientially, and indeed, we will have facilitators coming from many different backgrounds. The requirement for their workshops is that whatever they’re doing can be – people can orient to it fairly, you know, to the subset of practice fairly quickly. Like, for instance, this is an unusual conference in that you’ll register for particular workshops when you register, so some will fill quickly. You know, it just depends. But we will also – people will be sending out material beforehand so that you get the kind of educational piece ahead of time, of like, you know, what is diurnal motion and if that’s – Aerin’s actually doing something on moving, following the diurnal motion and doing it with the body. And so there’ll be some sort of orienting material ahead of time so that the time can be spent in the experience mostly and not in —
CB: Nice.
JH: — not lecture or you know, didactic. And so I think experience levels will vary about who’s there, but I mean, look – I’ve been doing this, I was born into an astrologically fluent family. I’ve been in practice for 35 years. I still learn from every single one of these events. Like, you just can’t not if you’re open.
CB: What’s your background and how were you born into an astrologically fluent family?
JH: Oh, well, I am from Appalachia from West Virginia, and basically was born into a functional matriarchy. Like, my mother, her mother, her mother, her mother. And we all were in the same house for a while when I was really little. And so all of them spoke astrology. You know, my chart was done when I was born. My grandmother, my mother’s mother, was probably the most proficient. And my great-great grandmother was a tea leaf reader, and people would come to her from all over where we were to get their cups read, and they all spoke astrology. We were oddly also Christian fundamentalists, so that was a weird little thing! But yeah, I was in it, and then when I was – right at my Jupiter return, there was a whole little cabinet in the basement of my grandparents’ house that had all these esoteric texts. You know, Alice Bailey, a lot of – Dane Rudhyar was in there. A lot of theosophy stuff. And at my Jupiter return, I found all those – I wasn’t supposed to open that cabinet, but you know, I found all of those, and so I started, I kind of jumped in the deep end. And yeah, it was funny thinking about meeting with you; I was thinking, oh yeah, how would I orient to my – like, how would I say who I am? And I —
CB: Right —
JH: — and I thought about —
CB: — which I should have done at the beginning; I’m doing this at like, the very last like, five minutes of this interview, which I apologize for.
JH: No, no, it’s okay!
CB: I meant to ask you what I’d ask people usually ahead of time what their level of comfort is talking about their chart placements. Some people prefer to keep their chart secret; other people are very open. Where are you at with that?
JH: I’m open. I don’t usually have my whole chart out there, but I can share placements for sure, yeah.
CB: Sure. Do you share even like, I don’t know, your Sun, Moon, rising or anything like that?
JH: Yeah, sure. Yeah. No, I’m a Libra Sun, Scorpio Moon, Cancer rising. And I have Saturn, you know, rising right smack on the Ascendant. But probably most notable in my – or one of the more notable things in my chart is I have a Sun-Pluto conjunction right at the bottom of the chart. You know, square the Ascendant. So part of what makes me feel like, oh wow, we’re doing a thing that lots of people see into my house – like, aah! But yeah. No, astrology’s been with me the whole time. I think it’s a little bit of why I am a little refractory to the notion that the technical knowledge will get you there, because like, if I think of my mother and my grandmother – like, they didn’t know anything like what we do. None of them were practicing astrologers. My grandmother was close, but they knew it in their bones, you know? Like, when my mother would say something connected to that – like, there’s a way that your whole body just like, knows what it is. And so I think it has really, it’s part of why I have this commitment to a lived experience because it was more like folk astrology, right? More like, you know, hanging out with it. I live in a place where you get a feeling in your knee, and there’s a storm coming. You know, it’s that kind of, it’s a little bit more embedded in that way. So but you know, I started doing consultations for my friends’ mothers when I was like, 15. And I created this astrological board game that was sort of a Trivial Pursuit thing where you have to collect things for the different elements and started to teach astrology. So it’s been a lifelong passion and practice. But what I do love about this type of work, experientially especially – I mean, I love learning new technique when new things come – I kind of, I wanna see it all. But I also love this because you just get endless new images of the archetypes. Endless new recognitions and also fun, as you said, yeah.
CB: I love that. What’s your Jupiter sign that was that transit, that Jupiter return?
JH: Oh yeah, Jupiter is in Aquarius! It’s actually being transited by Pluto this year. Jupiter two degrees of Aquarius.
CB: Nice.
JH: Yeah.
CB: That’s incredible.
JH: Trine my Sun-Pluto, yeah.
CB: So it’s like, that was your original unlocking in some ways of some of that for you early on, and now —
JH: Yeah.
CB: — that same placement’s getting amplified and you’re hosting this big conference for the first time.
JH: I feel it. Can I share – I have to share this story. Like, my grandmother – my mother’s mother, the one I mentioned – she’s a Moon-Uranus conjunction in Aries. So – just to give you the feel – and so about, I don’t know, 20 years ago or I don’t know. Oh, it was 2008 when Pluto was headed into Capricorn. I did my first kind of radio show thing here; we have a show in Santa Fe called Moonwise which has been going on for like, 35 years – a public radio astrology show. And I was on it, and I sent her a CD or maybe even a cassette. I don’t know what it was, but I sent her a copy of the show, and in the show I said what I told you. You know, I talked about discovering those books, and they didn’t know that! They had never known that I found those, you know? But then my grandmother shared with me – we have the same degree rising in Cancer – and what she shared with me was that when she was 12, I think it was a bit more of an estimate for her, but when she was 12, there was this astrologer, Mr. Phillips – kind of the local town eccentric, you know, who did everybody’s chart. He’s the one who did mine when I was born. So this astrologer, Mr. Phillips, this would be like, the – yeah, like, early ‘40s, late ‘30s, so he would, like, she would be walking coming back home from school. And tell, you know, be late, and what she would do, she would detour to Mr. Phillips’ house, and she would knock on the door and he would make her wait on the porch until he put on his three-piece suit and set out his table. And then invite her in and he would give her astrology tuition. So she did the same thing I did of this sort of like, secret deep dive into astrology at the same age, which we only realized, you know, 20 years ago when she heard me reveal this. So yeah.
CB: Wow.
JH: One of my favorite stories.
CB: I love that. So you have this whole like, family lineage with these different forms of like, divination. And that’s really unique, because most astrologers just like, discover it at some point on their own, and sometimes their family even has like, issues with it or something like that or is not supportive. But to have that background coming through your mother’s line is really fascinating, really interesting.
JH: Yeah. It’s very, and it’s a wildness to it, you know? Where they were and what was going on. There’s a, yeah, wilder quality. There’s a very strong Uranus-Moon thing going through the – not, I don’t particularly have that, but all of the women that I mentioned, they’ve got various Uranus-Moon combos, which I feel has a lot of connection to it, yeah.
CB: Beautiful. I love that. All right. Well, so conference – what’s the URL for the conference?
JH: Oh, it’s LivingAstrologies – again that’s in the plural – LivingAstrologies.net.
CB: Okay. I’ll put a link to that in the description page for this episode and below the YouTube video for those watching the video version. You’re also speaking at NORWAC this year, right?
JH: Yeah, I have a couple of talks, and I’m also doing a workshop. It will be somewhat experiential. I mean, it’s always a different animal when you’re doing it virtually and in-person at the same time; that’s limited, but yeah, it has a bit more on the mental health side of things, which still remains important to me.
CB: What’s the —
JH: And I’m doing like, a – oh, sorry.
CB: What’s the title of the workshop?
JH: I don’t think I’m remembering the title just —
CB: Okay.
JH: — offhand, to be —
CB: Topic?
JH: — oh I think it’s “Rewilding the Psyche.” Yeah, no, it’s about actually working – sorry, now I’m remembering! It’s about working with different parts of the chart. Like, creating space for different animals in the psyche to come forward. I use this ecosystemic metaphor quite a bit for the psyche, for the human psyche, that we – most of us have a situation that’s quite similar to the one we have in the world where one species has decided that it is above the others and is kind of running things. And I find that with the horoscope, that’s frequently the case; certain planets are kind of empowered and identified with and kind of running things. And how do others get to also be part of this? Because it seems like they’re all in there; they’re all part of the ecosystem, so it’s really creating habitat for them.
And then I’m doing a talk on underworlds and the notion of the underworld relative to Pluto. That’s there. And then I’m doing one on relocation astrology using the relocated chart, which I do a lot with but never have taught on, so I’m excited to bring that. It’s a psychological mode of talking about it; it’s not about, like, you know, choosing where to live. It’s actually more about where do you live and how do you use the locational chart to live there? Because most people don’t choose where to live, anyway; they get displaced or they go because they have always lived there or whatever. So it’s more of, it’s what I hope astrology is all about. It’s like, how do we reweave ourself in relation with our world? That’s my entire interest in astrology. So —
CB: Nice.
JH: Anyway.
CB: I love that! So sorry, I know you’re running out of time, so the last thing is just you have – do consultations and your other offerings are available on your website. What’s your URL?
JH: It’s JasonHolley.net, and the Holley has an ‘e’ in it – H O L L E Y. And yeah, I do constellations, and I also do these experiential classes I alluded to. So these are where we have multiple sections but small groups, like 12 to 14. So for instance, I have one coming up on the earth signs; I’ve done the elements a round or so. So the kind of thing we do is we’ll meet weekly for like, two hours, two and a half hours each time on Zoom. So I share a lot of – I’ve done a lot of work with the mythology of the signs, so I share a lot of my work. I share a lot of other work on the myths and the stories. But then the way we spend our time together is experiential process, so for example, you know, we wanna look at the evolution of the Capricorn myth where it moved from being the goat-fish to the goat. And then we’ll do that with our bodies; we’ll imagine moving as a goat, and then you get your fishtail back, and then the tail is, you know, amputated, which is what happened historically with the archetype and which you can also see microcosmically replicated in Capricorn people where they’ve amputated their tail. They’re just all, you know, climb. And so we’ll do things like that that engage the full body in it. People make art and bring the art, which Zoom is great for art because you can put it up and everybody can look close, you know? Whereas in a in-person group, it’s actually harder. Psychodrama – or I’m sorry, astrodrama. Anyway, the point being I have these different classes that run like that online, and then I have a couple of retreats coming up later in France and I guess maybe one here. Oh, and then something in the UK. Yeah. So there’s stuff! It’s all on my site, yeah.
CB: Brilliant. Well, people can check that on your website, which is JasonHolley.net.
JH: Yeah.
CB: I could talk to you all day, but I know you have an appointment in like, 10 minutes, so I wanna —
JH: Yeah!
CB: — respect your time and cut it off. But thank you so much for joining me to this; it’s been really amazing. And I’m glad we did this discussion, this episode.
JH: Oh, thank you so much. It really does feel good, yeah. Thank you.
CB: Cool. All right. Well, thanks everyone for watching or listening to the episode of The Astrology Podcast, and we’ll see you again next time!
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