The Astrology Podcast

Transcript of Episode 195, titled:

March 2019 Astrology Forecast: Mercury Retro in Pisces

With Chris Brennan and guests Austin Coppock and Kelly Surtees

Episode originally released on February 28, 2019

Original episode URL:

https://theastrologypodcast.com/2019/02/28/march-2019-astrology-forecast-mercury-retro-in-pisces/

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

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Transcribed by Andrea Johnson

Transcription released February 14th, 2026

Copyright © 2026 TheAstrologyPodcast.com

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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hi, my name is Chris Brennan, and this is The Astrology Podcast. This episode was recorded on Tuesday, February 26, 2019, starting at 12:10 PM in Denver, Colorado, and this is the 195th episode of the show. In this episode, I’m gonna be talking with Kelly Surtees and Austin Coppock about the astrological forecast for March of 2019. For more information about how to subscribe to the podcast and help support the production of future episodes by becoming a patron, please visit TheAstrologyPodcast.com/subscribe. Hey, guys. Thanks for joining me today.

AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey, Chris.

KELLY SURTEES: Hello.

CB: Hey. So welcome back. It’s been a month somehow, and it’s time to talk about the forecast for March, where I think we’ve got a little bit going on astrologically, right?

KS: Well, some very clear signatures that may lead to a lack of clarity.

CB: Yeah, there are some signatures, and we’ll get into that. We’ve got like a Mercury retrograde coming up, we’ve got Uranus going into Taurus, and a few other fun little things coming up this month. So for those that are just watching the video version, there’ll be some timestamps in the description. We’re gonna start out by sort of catching up with what we’ve been up to over the past month, talk about some of the podcast topics that have come up over the past few weeks and do a bit of a recap, and other astrological news for the first hour or so. And then eventually we’ll jump into the forecast for March later on, probably like halfway into the episode. So if you want to skip our pre-forecast chat, then just look for the timestamps below this video on YouTube, but then you can jump forward.

AC: So it’s literally a pre-ramble rather than a preamble.

CB: Right. This is the pre-ramble.

KS: That is so true, yeah.

CB: The warm-up to the forecast. We need to get primed and sort of build up to talking about the forecast by first looking at the past and kind of like reflecting on what we’ve been doing for the past few weeks, and then we can move forward.

KS: Well, I mean, we’re all waiting with bated breath, Chris, for the update on Lobstergate.

CB: Lobstergate is probably—again, as with last month—the most pressing topic that we need to touch on first. #Lobstergate. So last month, unfortunately, there was a bit of a bombshell that was dropped pretty early on in the process of Lobstergate unfolding over the course of February. So for those that didn’t listen to that episode, just to catch you up, part of it was talking about how one of my biggest pet peeves. In ancient astrology, you know, each of the zodiac signs were symbolized by an animal totem, or occasionally, like an inanimate object, for some reason, with Libra. But Cancer means ‘crab’, and crab has always traditionally been the animal totem associated with the sign of Cancer. But for some reason a lobster is occasionally substituted by different artists for Cancer, as if that’s somehow equivalent or the same, when, you know, they’re very different crustaceans.

KS: Do you want to make a confession now?

CB: I don’t know. Well, is there anything else? How do you guys feel about this, now that you’ve had a month to sit with it? Have you guys any new thoughts?

KS: I mean, we might have talked about this last time, or I might have seen it on Twitter. One of the reasons that, you know, the lobster and the crab are not the same is they move in different directions. You know, lobsters have a little bit more of a forward motion, whereas crabs are very sideways. So there are some symbolic inaccuracies here, in addition to just being plain wrong.

CB: Yeah, that was, Austin, I think, the point you made originally.

KS: Yeah, I’m like I feel like we did talk about this.

AC: And I would add to that, one of the things that I use when I’m teaching Cancer is the fact that this is not true of all crabs, but there are a great number of crabs that are amphibious, you know, meaning they do water some of the time, and they do land the other times. There are a few just-land crabs and sea crabs, but for the most part, they are the amphibious crustacean. Whereas, you know, praise the sweet lord Jesus, lobsters do not walk on land because that would be horrifying. But there’s something about, you know, being essentially aquatic, and yet, being armored up enough to do the dry, harsh land—you know, which the crab, many crabs are—that speaks to the essence of the Cancer archetype.

CB: Right. So I wanted to clarify. I don’t actually really care about this. Like I just thought it was kind of funny, and it’s always funny to me when I see the lobster substituted for the crab. It’s pretty low, down on my list of priorities of major things I’m railing against or like actually obsessed about on any regular basis, but it’s something that’s something to be aware of. I did learn over the course of this month that part of the reason, evidently—as several people pointed out to me—that this may have happened is that in some languages, the word for use crab is somehow interchangeable and can also mean ‘lobster’. So there may be partially a linguistic issue in some languages, where there’s overlap between the word used, and therefore, there may have been some merging or overlap in some of the later artistic traditions for that reason. Or there could be some specific linguistic reason for it. Although certainly, sometimes, it’s just like an accident. Like on stock photo sites, oftentimes, it’s just some artist who’s illustrating it, and they may not have any background in astrology or realize that, you know, it needs to be a crab rather than a lobster or what have you.

AC: Are crabs universally distributed? There might be places where they just have crayfish in their rivers and no crabs. Like, you know, I don’t know, I remember growing up in Wisconsin. We had a creek in the backyard. And there were crayfish in the rivers, but I don’t remember ever seeing a crab.

KS: Well, I think they’re a saltwater creature.

AC: There are freshwater crabs.

KS: Oh, there are freshwater crabs, too? Okay.

AC: I believe so.

KS: Okay. So we all get a massive education.

CB: I’m learning more about crabs.

KS: I’m looking forward to comments.

AC: I mean, I’m just saying, if you’ve never seen a crab, you know, you’re like, “Oh, it’s the crusty thing that lives in the water.” You’re like, “Great, I know about those.”

KS: Yeah, this is brilliant.

CB: Right. And of course the funniest thing that happened actually in this entire Lobstergate saga was one—actually two or three people at this point have pointed out to me that at the very end of every podcast episode on YouTube, the generic astrology image that I use of the zodiac at the end, of course it has a lobster in the place of Cancer. Cuz of course if I’m gonna be complaining about that, I will inevitably end up being guilty of it as well.

KS: Of course, we all are.

AC: You’re part of the problem, Chris.

CB: Yeah, I’m part of the problem.

AC: That’s an important step in unwinding like these really big issues that are a part of our time.

CB: Yeah. Well, apparently, I am part of the problem. And so, I come to you all with a heavy heart and would like to apologize for that.

KS: For perpetuating this problem.

CB: I have no excuse. So you all can stop sending me lobsters. I appreciate the probably hundreds of lobsters that I’ve received through various DMs and emails and other formats at this point. But I think that will bring to a close Lobstergate, unless there’s any other unforeseen developments over the course of the next few weeks.

KS: I love it.

CB: All right, so that is Lobstergate. Other stuff going on this month. So this was a really big month on the podcast, where I got to do a bunch of topics that I’d been meaning to do forever. And somehow I was able to get them all in one month, with like three of what I consider to be not just really important episodes, but ones that went really well in terms of what I was shooting for versus how it actually turned out. Cuz sometimes there’s episodes where I have a good idea of what I want to do, but it doesn’t quite materialize as well as I would have liked. But I was pretty happy with the execution of all three episodes this month. And the topics were zodiacal releasing, dashas, and then astrology and reincarnation. So at the top of the month, I finally did the zodiacal releasing episode and finally publicly did an extensive treatment of that technique for everybody to learn, which I think exposed a lot of people to the technique for the first time. And it was interesting seeing a lot of people’s reactions, over the past few weeks, to learning that technique and starting to apply it to their charts for the first time. So do guys remember when that happened for you? I guess, Austin, it was at that first Project Hindsight conclave, right?

AC: Yeah. So the summer of 2006.

CB: Okay.

AC: And that was really interesting for me because I’d just changed L1 periods for Fortune, and I had changed L1 periods for Spirit about four years ago, at that time. And that shift on the L1 for Spirit happened during like the last three months of me being in college. I was trying to finish two senior theses for two degrees, and I didn’t care at all. Suddenly, I was like, “Fuck this. I just want to be an astrologer.” And, you know, as far as a person’s focus and meaning changing and what you want to do with your life, I’d been in a Taurus period since I was 15. And so, I was, you know, coming up on 23, and I was like, “You know, I don’t care about this anymore at all. I just want to write about astrology.” And I would write bad astrology articles instead of working on my senior projects. You know, I didn’t learn the technique that mapped that huge change in orientation until about four years later. And I was like, “Oh, well, that makes sense.”

CB: Yeah.

KS: That’s huge.

CB: What’s really brilliant about it, once you learn it—and you go back and look at your past chronology, and you see those important turning points lining up with the technique—it can sometimes be really startling. Or at least that was my experience. And from what I’ve seen, a lot of other people have that experience as well.

AC: Yeah, I’m doing my first loosening of the bond, you know, on the highest level.

KS: I’m looking for something, but I’m still listening.

AC: All right. More or less right now.

CB: You’re in a L2 loosing of the bond right now?

AC: Just about, yeah. I need to recalculate it to make sure that the number’s right. But it’s within the next month.

CB: Wow. That’s huge. I mean, people only get like probably one or two, or maybe three of those tops in a lifetime.

AC: Yeah. And what’s funny about it is there’s sort of a double-down because speaking of dashas, in my Vimshottari dasha, I’m like less than a year from changing out of a period that I’ve been in since my mid-20’s. So I’ve been changing Level 1 and loosening on Level 1 according to both of those techniques over this year.

CB: Wow. So that’s pretty big.

AC: It’s confusing.

CB: Well, sometimes, that transition, it’s always like a major transition in terms of the person’s career and life direction, but sometimes it’s not anticipated. Sometimes it’s something that comes out of nowhere in terms of pushing the person and taking them in a different direction than they were headed up to that point. So that’s really interesting for you, and I’ll be curious to see how that turns out.

AC: Yeah.

CB: I mean, sometimes it’s just pushing you to the very top of your chosen career field. So that could be the other thing.

KS: 12 months from now, you’re going into a loosening of the bond, Austin?

AC: No. Within the next month or so.

KS: Okay.

AC: And I’m switching out my Level 1 dasha—which I’ve been in for 16 years—this year as well.

KS: Okay.

AC: And I’ll be going into, what is it? A 19-year Saturn period.

KS: Wow. Yeah, this is really interesting. This is a technique that I’m still trying—I mean, I understand it, and I’m sort of starting to watch it in my chart, and I realized the other day I need to watch it in someone else’s chart. Like I can’t believe I haven’t done it for my husband yet, but that’s what I’ll be doing. I think the first time I learned about this technique was actually in the foyer at New Orleans UAC, when we were all chatting, like probably six or seven years ago. 2012—was that UAC in New Orleans?

AC: Yeah.

CB: That was seven years ago.

KS: And I remember you guys were like, “And this and that and that. And then it’s gonna happen in your early 40’s, and it’s really, really good.” And I’m like, “Okay, that sounds great. Good, I’ll take it.” And, I haven’t, you know, still, six years later, done a lot more with it, but I’d like to understand more. The episodes you’ve put out this past month, Chris, I feel like they’re gonna just be really rich for people to chew on and kind of really sink their teeth into for quite sometime to come.

CB: Yeah. And that was the point, to lay a foundation that would be really important and influential for a lot of people. And it’s already having some really interesting echoes or is cascading in this interesting way. Because, for one, I wanted to thank again Petr from Astro-Seek. I don’t know if you guys have used this website a lot, but he’s really killing it lately with integrating traditional and other interesting stuff into this website, so that it’s not just accurate calculations. But it does zodiacal releasing now. It can calculate your lots really accurately. He just integrated a lot calculation for the Lot of Eros. He also really quickly integrated a thing for calculating your dashas, so that we can release that in concert with the Freedom Cole interview on the Vimshottari dasha system. Cuz I was doing research, and I found that there actually wasn’t a good, simple and aesthetically-appealing, free dasha calculator out there. I sort of just assumed there would be like hundreds of them, because there’s so many websites on Indian astrology. But when I was looking, like none of them were that great.

AC: They’re mostly a pain.

CB: Yeah.

AC: They’re there, but they’re not as accessible or user-friendly as they could be, certainly.

CB: Right. So I talked to Petr, and he set it up within the course of a few days. So you can go to Astro-Seek and calculate all that stuff now, which is really cool. There’s another calculator at ZodiacalReleasing.net for zodiacal releasing. And he’s been integrating some interpretive principles that I use for the technique, like the culmination periods, the peak periods, and other things like that. And it’s really nice to be able to access it now on mobile devices. And then I just got word the other day that Astro.com, Astro-Dienst, is finally integrating zodiacal releasing, and they’re in the process of finalizing it now. So hopefully, at some point in the next few weeks, that’ll be live, and people can then, you know, use what is everyone’s favorite chart calculation website to calculate the technique there, which will probably just further promote and expand the technique and open up research into it more widely.

AC: Yeah, it’s definitely rich in terms of potential research. And it’s not just rich, it kind of requires research in a way that some techniques don’t. In my experience, it takes longer. The ‘getting to know you’ period with zodiacal releasing is probably longer than any other technique that I use. You know, and it happens, you know, that rapport. It develops, but it’s front-loaded with difficulty.

CB: Yeah. Well, it takes some while to learn the technique, and it works differently and gives you a different perspective on your life than I think people are used to. And sometimes that catches people off guard and they almost think that it’s not working. Or they’ll say that it’s not working, cuz it’s not presenting things exactly as they expect it. It’s providing this different perspective, and often—

AC: It’s—oh, go ahead. Sorry.

CB: Oftentimes people just need somebody to sit down with them and go through it, and they start to understand how it is working and how it does apply to their life. But unfortunately, it’s like I can’t do that with everybody. So I hope people will push through that in order to work with the technique and apply it to other charts and see how it works and eventually start to get a sense for it. But it does have that kind of filter sometimes.

AC: Okay, so, Chris, one, agree entirely. I think one of the things that contributes to there being a longer ‘getting to know you’ period is you have to learn to see the life from the angle that zodiacal releasing maps the life. And it’s a different angle than almost any other technique.

KS: Yeah.

AC: Also, I just rechecked my zodiacal releasing, and the loosening of the bond happens on the day of my birthday this year.

CB: Wow.

KS: See, this is what’s funny to me, Austin, because I have the same this year. I have a loosening of the bond that started on my birthday; so, like now. And yours is in a couple of weeks.

AC: About a week.

KS: Yeah, which is very interesting.

CB: I’m pulling up both of your charts right now, cuz I’m really surprised.

KS: And I would like to just put the disclaimer out of I could be making a massive error. But I was reading over notes—

CB: I believe you.

KS: One of the things I think is different with a technique like zodiacal releasing—it is a planetary period-style of system similar to the dashas and things like that. But a lot of modern astrology does not have timing techniques that are period- or length-of-time-based, like that chapter orientation, and I think that’s part of the challenge. In addition, I totally agree with what you’re saying, Austin, where, first of all, you’re reorienting the chart to a part, which is a massive change for a lot of people with more of a modern mindset; that it’s not about the ascendant or the chart, as you look at it with the ascendant in a certain place. You’re almost like spinning it based on the lots.

AC: Yeah, yeah. I think, yeah, the view from the lots is different than the view from the planets, absolutely.

KS: Correct. Yeah.

CB: Wow. Yeah, you’re going into a Level 2 loosing of the bond. It’s the first one you’ve ever had in your entire life, Austin. And realistically speaking, you’re not gonna have another one until like 2038.

AC: Yeah.

CB: That’s great. That’s bizarre, but that’s great.

AC: On the same day that Mercury stations direct and Uranus goes into—

KS: Taurus.

AC: —Taurus. And there’s a New Moon, yeah, basically on top of my Sun.

CB: Wow. Great.

AC: So we’ll see if I grow fangs and fur and my limbs drop off, and I become something else entirely.

KS: That’s not gonna happen. But I think you’ll start publishing again.

AC: Yeah, but it’s gotta be more than that, cuz I’ve published.

KS: I know you’ve done that before.

AC: That’s not an amazing change of direction.

KS: Well, it’s not a change of direction. But if you published a book that was more successful or more popular than what you had published in the past?

AC: Well, of course, cuz I’ve been building since then.

KS: Yeah.

AC: When I see changes in Spirit—

KS: Yeah, what do you think it’s gonna be?

AC: I see differences in priority. It’s priority in what you’re aiming at, direction, etc., etc. And I have suspicions about what that might be, but I think I kind of have to get there.

KS: Yeah, I like it.

CB: And, Kelly, we’ve always had that issue with your chart—where you were born so close to sunrise—not knowing whether to treat it as a day chart or a night chart. And that ends up affecting the lots.

KS: Yeah.

CB: But I’m just pulling yours up now. And if we treat it—

KS: And then you have to push one of the lots forward, cuz they’re both in the same sign anyway.

CB: And does that happen, whether it’s a day or night chart? It does—

KS: Yeah, it does.

CB: —whether it’s a day or night chart.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Okay, so no matter what, you’re starting from Aries. If that’s true, yeah, you just started a loosing of the bond on Level 2.

KS: That’s what I thought.

CB: It started February—wait. No, it’s starting tomorrow, February 27, 2019.

KS: Yeah.

CB: That’s bizarre.

KS: It’s my birthday. And that’s why Austin and I are absolute twinsies, because I’m quite sure that’s not a standard ‘turning 40’ thing.

CB: Wow.

KS: And we were both born in such different parts of the world. And, you know, it’s a bit weird, but fantastic.

CB: That’s bizarre, but I’m jealous. That’s amazing, and that’s really good news. And also, happy birthday. So tomorrow is technically your birthday. When is your solar return?

KS: Today, on recording day, yeah.

CB: Today.

KS: My solar return happened a few hours ago, yeah.

CB: Wow. All right, well, happy birthday.

KS: It’s like you guys are my best birthday present.

CB: Yeah, this is a rare and unique forecast episode then.

KS: And this month we’ll have Austin’s birthday. Although he has temporarily vanished in true dark horse style, but he’ll return.

CB: So that’s bizarre. So you’re both having a loosing of the bond.

KS: Like when Austin said that, I was like, “Am I misreading? Cuz how can we both be having a Level 2 loosening of the bond?” And it is interesting for him, where he’s like, “Well, I’ve already done books.” I’m like, “Okay, cool.”

CB: This is your book.

KS: For me, I know it’s books. But I know for him, I’m curious to see what it’s gonna be.

CB: Well, Austin—you know, he did the magic book, he did the decans book. But it’s almost time for the third book, I would think.

AC: I have several of them half-planned.

KS: Yes. See, there are gonna be more books from you.

AC: Yeah, but I’m just saying that’s not—

KS: That’s not the change of direction, for sure.

AC: Right. And, you know, sometimes with loosening of the bond stuff, loosening from Spirit, and just, you know, tracking the Spirit’s schedule, sometimes I see it looking different on the surface, but the real difference is in what the person is trying to do, what’s meaningful to them, how they’re defining their life.

KS: Yeah.

AC: And, you know, if somebody’s a writer, they may continue writing. You know, they’re not necessarily going to become a bricklayer, but the trajectory and meaning of their writing changes.

KS: Yes.

AC: They start aiming to accomplish something different by means of writing, or by means of painting or whatever. You know, it’s been a swirl of internal—I don’t know how to say it—reconfiguration, which has not really been that pleasant, leading up to this. And I can feel it starting to make sense, but, you know, I’ll have to see what coagulates. You know, I think by the end of March—for a variety of reasons—you know, there will be order out of chaos.

KS: Yes. But we’re all swimming through the puddle of chaos until then.

CB: Yeah, it’s not gonna be until the end of both of your loosing of the bond—once it’s over—then you’ll see how your trajectory has been altered. But oftentimes it’s not until you get to the end of that that it becomes fully clear.

AC: Right. And as you pointed out, there’s the loosening of the bond itself, right? Which, for me, is on March 5. But then that whole—

CB: It begins March 5.

AC: My loosening of the bond occurs on March 5?

CB: The period begins March 5.

KS: So how long does it take?

AC: Well, right—and, Chris, we’re leading to the same thing—but it’s that whole period that follows, which, for me, is a Sag period. So that’s the whole year following where we’ll see that.

CB: So you’re both going into a Sag period.

KS: I have a Sag period, too. Austin, we’re massive twinsies.

AC: I know.

KS: We can’t escape each other.

CB: Right. So it’s 12 months for both of you. So that’s really fascinating. So we’re gonna have to check in one year from now. This will be a great empirical test case for what the loosing of the bond is like in two astrologers’ lives over the course of the next year.

KS: It’s gonna be really fun to see how it does shift, and what changes we each go through. Yeah, it’ll be fun.

CB: Get your secondary progressions book out. That would be my main thing, Kelly.

KS: I’ll do that. Austin, you have to still figure out what, but you say you have ideas of what yours is gonna be.

AC: I’ve got a couple that I’ve been percolating for a couple of years. So we’ll see. Kind of want to do a mansions book. I kind of want to do—Chris, I’ve been talking with you, on and off, about this for a long time. You know, there are these combinations that you see, especially in Hellenistic texts, that now that I’ve done some serious Jyotish read to me as yogas that were meant to be memorized by students rather than taken as just an example of Firmicus riffing. And so, I’ve been putting together a project around that, you know, using some of the general categories through which planetary combinations are handled in Jyotish to kind of think about, you know, these combinations in Firmicus or Dorotheus or whatever, and so, there’s that. But there are also like three or four other projects.

CB: Well, whatever it is—

KS: I look forward to you getting them out.

AC: Yeah, me, too. And so—okay, no, go on.

CB: So the last thing I did want to mention, there were some errors in Astro-Seek’s calculations initially. And also, a bug was discovered in Solar Fire where when Spirit and Fortune were in the same sign, you were supposed to move Spirit forward one sign, but it was also moving Fortune forward one sign, which you’re not supposed to do. So I think they’re gonna issue a patch for that soon. But everybody who’s learned zodiacal releasing in the past month—especially if you were born near a New Moon or a Full Moon, so that your lots are in the same signs—you should pay attention and do the calculations manually. Or at least set the releasing from the correct signs just to make sure that you’re getting the right periods. Cuz I’m a little nervous that some people may have learned the technique initially, but then generated periods for the wrong signs or something. So everybody should go back and just double-check that you got your zodiacal releasing periods correct—if you started learning the technique recently—especially if you were born close to a New Moon or a Full Moon. All right, so that’s zodiacal releasing. That’s a huge topic. There’s a lot of other stuff there.

KS: A whole episode on it. You and Leisa released that, right?

CB: Yeah. Well, it was only four-hours-long. So it’s like, you know, we didn’t—

AC: Scratch that surface?

CB: Yeah.

KS: I mean, I know that you probably could have done 24 hours, but four hours is still a lot of material for people to sink their teeth into.

CB: Right.

KS: Like people are not gonna leave that episode hungry. I mean, they may want more, but they’re gonna have a lot to play around with.

CB: Yeah. Well, there’s always the 18-hour zodiacal releasing lecture that comes with my course. Like there were a few comments that were like, “Oh, this is a four-hour-long video. I’m not gonna watch that.” But it’s the most complicated technique that I teach, and I usually introduce people to it in workshops, that’s like a day-long workshop. Or sometimes like a few-day-long workshop in terms of first learning the technique. So four hours, it seems like, is actually a pretty reasonable little introduction to one of the most complex and powerful timing techniques out there. So cut me some slack on the four hours, people.

KS: But you did good.

CB: So zodiacal releasing. The second topic was the Vimshottari dasha system with Freedom Cole. And, Austin, I have to thank you for connecting me with Freedom. Cuz even though I had met him before at UAC in 2012, you’d really been promoting his book, and you’d been telling me how amazing he is. And this was my first time really working with him, and that was great. And I’m really glad that I was able to do that episode with him because it was a really good introduction to one of those techniques that really gets people interested and hooks people into Vedic astrology. And that’s part of the purpose of that episode.

AC: Awesome. Well, I’ve been trying to match-make y’all for a long time, so I’m really glad it happened. And yeah, Freedom, I mean, talk about somebody who just knows their shit like inside and out, with textual references, with practical references. You know, that was the reason I studied with Freedom; he just kept impressing me. I was like, “Well, if I’m gonna do Vedic, I’m gonna study with Freedom.”

KS: Do it with the best.

CB: Right. And I did want to admonish the audience a little bit. Cuz I’ve noticed that the numbers on that episode are not as high as some other episodes, and I think it’s partly the title, that I said, “The Vimshottari Dasha System in Vedic Astrology.” And I’m sure there’s like a significant portion of my audience, it seems like, that saw the term ‘Vedic Astrology’ and then possibly didn’t watch it or didn’t listen to it. I really have to urge everybody to go and listen to that episode. Cuz part of the reason I did it is because that’s one of the more interesting techniques. If you learn it, and if you are exposed to it, then that’s gonna give you some appreciation of why other people have gotten interested in Vedic astrology; and it’s because of techniques like that, that are actually really cool, and have something insightful to teach you. Even if you don’t adopt Vedic astrology, there are things that you can learn from studying that technique that are applicable in Western astrology, like, you know, when using zodiacal releasing or some of the Western time-lord systems like that. So I’d really encourage people, yeah, to watch that episode, if you haven’t already.

AC: I think I—go ahead, Kelly.

KS: Go, Austin. Sorry.

AC: Somebody just got a bingo there.

CB: Yeah, that was a bingo.

KS: Bingo. I have dipped my toes in a little to the Indian or Vedic system. Not as much as you have, Austin. But the little bit I have done has really just helped deepen and enrich my thinking even about astrology from a Western perspective. It just adds a bit more in there. Even if you don’t pick up that model, you don’t have to change your whole framework. It’s just good to know a little bit from that perspective. The reason that episode with Freeman is so good is that there’s a timing system in there that’s relatively easy. Once you have the printout, you can just start thinking about longer periods of your life through the lens of certain planets, and that may actually give you more insight to those periods in your life.

AC: Yeah. Now that I’ve been trained on it a little bit, and I’ve gotten used to looking at it, I love it. You know, I don’t necessarily discuss it with every client, cuz it’s not always relevant, you know, as part of the conversation. But, you know, I look at both ZR and the dashas—and the Vimshottari dasha system—as a background for what’s happening every time. It’s really useful. Also, the Vimshottari dasha, at least at this point, feels not simple, but easy to use.

KS: It’s accessible.

AC: It’s like, “Okay, so you’re in a period ruled by this planet. What’s the natal condition of that planet?” And that’s modified by the second level. And there are very clear rules governing, you know, what that looks like. You know, and if you have those two planets in a configuration with each other—let’s say you’ve got a Jupiter-Moon conjunction, which indicates a lot of success in a particular area. Then when you’re in a Moon period, and then the sub-period’s Jupiter, it activates that combination and you get the result that’s promised. It’s a very clean way of looking at what is promised by the natal chart and when it is delivered that’s found a very comfortable place in my arsenal.

CB: Yeah, definitely. And just being exposed to that. Cuz people have to understand that part of what I’m doing is I’m taking some of the best and some of the coolest pieces of different forms of astrology and different approaches to astrology, and I’m presenting them to the audience. And that’s kind of what I did at Kepler and that was why going to Kepler was so beneficial for me. Because they literally forced me to study some of the other forms of astrology that I had no interest in studying, but it did ultimately end up enriching me, causing me to go down a different path than I would have gone otherwise. And that’s kind of what I’m trying to do in paying that forward or passing that onto my audience. But the only drawback is because this is not a school—it’s a podcast—you guys can pick and choose what episodes you want to watch. But sometimes there can be a downside to that if you avoid watching episodes that you don’t think are gonna be interesting. Cuz this one was definitely an exception, where this month I would recommend listening to every episode.

AC: Well, and I want to compliment you on your arrangement of the podcast. I think doing a big ZR and a big Vimshottari dasha podcast next to each other, and juxtaposing those systems, is nice conceptually and aesthetically.

CB: Yeah. Well, and it was very deliberate. I went out of my way to do that and there’s just so many different reasons for that. Cuz it’s literally exposing two of the most powerful timing techniques from the oldest traditions of astrology that are around and showing you the parallels between them, as well as some of the differences. But really they’re both like the best and two of the most compelling reasons to study some of the older forms of astrology—and try to bring some of that wisdom forward into the present time—are those two episodes. So anyway, check it out. Let’s see, so the third topic I did was I had this amazing discussion with Steven Forrest. I’ve been trying to get Steven on the show for a few years now, but it just didn’t line up, just because scheduling is hard, because he, you know, of course is famously booked out like three years ahead of time for consultations. He quipped that his strategy for dealing with that in the future, when I asked, was just eventually to die at some point, and that’s gonna be his strategy for, you know, getting his schedule down or under control eventually.

KS: He has a phenomenal level of staying power or endurance or productive capacity. He’s been going at that level for a really long time.

CB: Yes, he’s a cliché Sun in Capricorn.

AC: Yeah, he’s also got that grindy Saturn in Virgo, Kelly.

KS: Oh, he does. Oh, he’s in the middle. Okay, Austin and I will follow along in his footsteps. Just give us time.

AC: I actually shut down consultations—booking new consultations this month—because I could see that terrible fate awaiting me. The waiting list is too long. And so, you know, I found myself catching up on consultations that were booked in May, in January. And I was like, “Okay, we just need to shut this down for a little bit.”

KS: So when you say ‘shut it down’, have you taken that page off your website? Or have you put a ‘not taking’—

AC: Yeah, exactly.

KS: If someone went to your website, would they see a note there that says ‘don’t buy this now’ kind of thing?

AC: Yeah, I believe we have. You know, when consultations open back up, you know, you can be on a list and be alerted. But we’re shutting it down for right now.

KS: Yeah.

AC: I’m trying to ‘Marie Kondo’ a variety of things. Because, you know, the last year was a blessing in terms of success, but the structure was not ready to handle that. And I got really behind and felt guilty and anxious all the time. I was like, “I need to clear this out. I need to get breathing room. I need to feel good about getting back to people on time, etc., etc.”

KS: Yeah. I mean, these are the problems of success, right? They’re great problems to have. But it is a thing that as you do start to hit some of those professional achievements, you have to think about restructuring, or how am I gonna put systems in place that’ll help manage this, because one person can only do so much.

AC: Yeah, absolutely. And Kait—you know, Kait’s helped me a lot over the years.

KS: She’s had an explosion of success of her own.

AC: Yeah, Kait’s super successful and busy at the same time, too. Which, again, that’s a wonderful thing, Sphere + Sundry. But there’s just been, you know, less time, energy, you know, work hours, and, anyway, more to do. So yeah, I shut it down.

KS: Well, yeah. But you’re right. Like Steven has somehow managed to hold in his head that ‘he has a client booked two years from now’ kind of thing.

CB: Yeah. Well, one of the things that’s funny though is we didn’t get into this as much as we could have, but he has also gone out of his way not to raise his prices too far above what he feels like is appropriate. He’s charging like 3-something for consultations, which is still a lot. But given his stature in the community and how far out he’s booked, obviously he could charge a lot more—especially since some of those are in-person consultations—but he doesn’t. And that’s like another interesting facet of the whole, you know, issue or debate or tension that sometimes we’ve talked about in the past about what to charge for astrological consultations or what’s appropriate and things like that.

KS: Yeah. I mean, it’s a tricky one because from a pure business perspective, your waitlist or your client list, you know, if you’re booking three or six months in advance, every business strategist out there would say, “Raise your prices.” And sometimes that thins things out a bit, so you might bring it back to like a one- or a two-month waitlist. Sometimes it doesn’t, though. It just, you know, feeds this phenomenal sense of demand. But I totally appreciate the heart, if you like, of where Steven’s coming from. Because there is a price point that then, you know, you become inaccessible to certain parts of society.

CB: Right.

KS: And that’s a fine line I think for anyone who’s offering any type of healing service. You’re always juggling that sense of what you could charge versus what you’d like to charge just to keep things accessible.

AC: Yeah, absolutely.

KS: Yeah.

CB: And so, our topic actually in that episode was reincarnation and astrology, which was an interesting discussion topic for me because of my own personal journey in getting into astrology through reincarnational, like New Age literature, but then being surprised. I didn’t think that astrology seemed like it was able to tell with much specificity that much about past lives. And eventually that stopping or ceasing to be the philosophical backdrop that I looked at in astrology, instead, I just focused entirely on astrology and natal charts talking about this life. And that’s sort of all I care about at this point, philosophically. How’s that gone for you guys? Did you have any background in that, or any beliefs, or anything related to that?

AC: Yeah.

CB: That’s like a small question to ask.

AC: Right.

KS: Tiny question.

AC: I’ll try to keep it reasonable in length. So I didn’t come into astrology from that perspective. You know, as I said, my first real astrology books were the Noel Tyl books, which were very present. You know, there might have been some New Age-y stuff in the background, but it was pretty much like, Here are charts. Here are rulerships. Here are signs. Here are aspects. Here are houses. This is how you do this.” And I was very much like, “Does this work as advertised?” And the more I learned and the better I got with it, I was like, “Oh, yeah, this is amazing. This totally works.” I would say that I have long had a sort of loose belief in reincarnation in the sense that of the various alternatives, it seemed to be much more likely than the other ideas. You know, reality doesn’t seem to waste things. Everything gets reused. And mind things and consciousness things, you know, it seemed like they would not be the exception to that. Obviously, since I’ve been studying Vedic astrology more closely, that’s built in. And I really enjoy the, how shall we say, the specificity and sophistication with which reincarnation is dealt with. I think there’s a lot of value in not hearing it secondhand from a 19th century Theosophist who read some not-so-well-translated Indian material, but instead, going to an Indian tradition. And I don’t know if we can say that India—or that reincarnation was ‘invented’ in India, cuz we see some of that in Eastern Mediterranean societies and beliefs and all that. We can say that that’s in Plato. But regardless of whether it was ‘invented’ in India, a great deal of thought and intention and rigor has been brought to dealing with it, I think probably more than anywhere else, and you see that in Vedic astrology. You know, there’s not just karma. There are a lot of different grades of karma. And there are specific divisional charts for looking at something that’s much more specifically past life versus all the stuff you got going on in this life, which is not necessarily past life. I’ve really come to appreciate it when seeing through a finer lens. And I’ve also explored—not recently, but, you know, over the last however many years—some of the literature, the testable case for reincarnation. And there’s a strong empirical case for it as well. And if it’s not reincarnation—basically, there’s an excellent case for it. And so, that’s kind of where I’m at. And some of my personal experiences suggest to me that that is indeed the case. Although I would not say I understand how the whole thing works. I am—like you said though, Chris—very careful, especially in client consultations, about going too past life karma as the source of a problem or, you know, as being the solution to what’s happening because you’re in a Mars profection, and you’re kind of cranky, right? It’s like we don’t need to go there. So I respect that it’s there, but I do try to maintain a firm boundary. Firm, but permeable boundary between this life and others. And that is my not-short answer to your question.

CB: Okay. That was the short version.

KS: It’s quite succinct, relatively speaking, for such a big topic.

CB: What about you, Kelly? You don’t strike me as the reincarnational astrologer type.

KS: Look, I don’t want to offend anyone, because I never do. But yeah, I think there was a lot of light and fluffy stuff that I felt when I was first looking at the topic of reincarnation within the context of astrology early in my career that was a little bit insubstantial for me, then I read ‘The Myth of Er’ at the end of Plato’s Republic. So a little bit like you, Austin, I didn’t really want to read, you know, some person who might have had a vision 50 years ago and had this idea about reincarnation. I did want a little bit of an older source. And yeah, once I read ‘The Myth of Er’ in Plato’s Republic—which is this beautiful story about a soul incarnating, you know, choosing its lot in life, going across the Desert of Forgetfulness and drinking from the River of Unremembering, you know, and then speaking to the Three Fates, and then confirming on the spindles where the planets would be, and then incarnating—that, to me, spoke a little bit more. I was like, “Okay, these ideas are older than what I had maybe initially thought. Obviously, they’re not modern things.” Because, you know, when I was a teenager and in my early 20’s, I didn’t have that historical background, so that definitely gave me an appreciation for the concepts. And I do hold that awareness, like I totally am on board with that. But I did find that when I went into my practice, the real meaty stuff is happening in this lifetime. So a lot of my work is very much—it’s not to say that it’s not deep or it’s not rich or it’s not spiritual, but it’s very much about, well, how are we going to move forward from this place now, given this is where you are? And I know that, obviously, our dear friend Mark Jones does a lot with the nodes and a lot of past life-type work, and obviously, Steven has a huge model that he works with, and there’s definitely some really useful things. Like I think from memory, Steven had an article years ago in The Mountain Astrologer where he talked about, you know, the ruling planets of the nodes being so critical in things like that. And I do think there’s some use in drawing those in, but I might frame it in a different way to the way that he might go about it, or that Mark might go about it.

CB: Sure, yeah. And ultimately that was the most important thing about that episode, just looking at and exploring the different philosophical approaches that astrologers have when they approach astrology. And there are modern astrologers where reincarnation and past lives are an overt and important, both philosophical, as well as technical principle that’s been integrated into their astrology. And then there’s other modern astrologers where that’s just not the case and that’s not either a philosophical or a technical principle that they’re integrating at all. But it’s interesting to just explore those different philosophies and to view them on their own terms, to understand the breadth and diversity within the astrological community when it comes to this whole thing that we do.

KS: Yeah. And I think Austin, you know, is onto something, not that it’s just him, but there’s so much connected to fate and reincarnation—and even concepts of things like karma—that come out of the Indian traditions. And I think in some ways you need to study that to get that piece. You know, we’re trying to import some of that stuff into our Western framework. I don’t know, I feel like Austin’s approach of like, “Let’s just go back to the source material here and understand the different layers to it,” that’s probably a really good approach, if that’s a topic that you really want to go deeper in.

AC: Yeah. Well, and that’s sort of what we’ve been doing in a lot of ways for the last 20 years or so, right? Like, okay, you know, this 19th century book on astrology is interesting. Oh, it’s referencing this 15th century book, which is referencing this 12th century book. Let’s just see.

KS: We followed the bread crumbs.

AC: Yeah, like let’s just follow it back. And I think that’s especially true with concepts like karma and reincarnation because those were largely imported into the English-speaking world during the period that England colonized India. And they were imported through, you know, a decidedly distorted, racist framework. And so, that’s not a clean channel. And so, you know, that’s part of colonial history. And then, you know, you get this thing where you have Westerners sort of seeing something that people in another part of the world are doing and saying like, “Oh, yeah, that’s a good idea. I can do it better. I don’t need to study your stuff.” And I think if you’re going to work that way, you should study the source material. You know, where did that idea come from? How was it developed? And it’s extremely well-developed. And it’s extremely sophisticated—a lot of the Indian material—in a way that I don’t see being discussed in the West.

CB: Yeah. Well, and that’s one of the funny things to me when I look at Indian astrological literature, or older astrological texts. It’s often just like not focused in any overt or explicit way on past lives. It’s focused on the present life, things that are gonna happen in the present life, and there’s like an underlying assumption in some broad sense that that has to do with past actions that somehow may have influenced the future or the present. But for the most part, I mean, at least to me, in what I’ve studied of Indian astrology and even Western astrology, it’s very much just very practical and focused on the details of this life. For all intents and purposes, most astrologers, that’s usually their orientation as well, in terms of clients and what’s going on in their lives right now, what are their concerns coming up, and just different strategies for managing that or coping with that in different ways.

AC: Yeah. And I think that there is an assumption that, yeah, some of what’s going on now is a result of past stuff, but like we don’t need to get crazy about that.

CB: Right.

AC: It’s just, yeah, sure, of course. But, you know, if you’re gonna start a business, let’s find out the best time to do that business. Or you want to get married, or, you know, you’ve been feeling down.

CB: So that brought up though an interesting point, when I was talking with Steven, which is this question of, it’s interesting, now that you have an astrology where it’s much more overtly trying to integrate broader philosophical and spiritual or religious overtones into the astrology more overtly, if there were traditions—ancient traditions that tried to do that as well. Cuz for the most part, what we see in the textual transmission is just practical, rule books for making interpretive statements about one’s life or one’s future, and you don’t get a lot of that broader philosophical stuff in those technical textbooks. So there’s some interesting questions about to what extent that existed. Or, you know, in the Platonic, were there Platonic astrologers that had beliefs in reincarnation or whatever, that they overtly integrated somehow into their astrology? Or was it actually just very practically-oriented, like the textbooks seem to indicate? We don’t really know.

AC: So one additional point on karma. Cuz I was reminded of—literally, I think it was like week one in Freedom’s class—we went over four kinds of karma. And I’m not even gonna try to pronounce the Sanskrit, cuz my Sanskrit’s not good enough—it’s embarrassing—but one is all of the karma that’s ever been generated by your soul through all lives. The next level is what portion of that is relevant in this life, cuz it’s not all relevant in this life. The next is the karma being done. Like literally, what are you generating with your actions right now? Like what are the results of doing a podcast, right? And then the fourth category is what’s coming up or approaching most likely based on your orientation and what you’re drawn to. You know, that was like, I think, week one or two. It was like, okay, so there are at least four meaningful categories and then those have three levels of intensity. And those three levels of intensity hooks in really easily to your ‘rule of 3’, Chris. Cuz there’s the karma that is like wrapped up tight and, you know, good luck changing it. Then there’s that which is written in sand, where all you gotta do is kind of move it. And then there’s the, you know, clay or the half-dried clay which takes some doing.

CB: Right.

KS: That’s a beautiful way of describing the layers.

AC: Yeah. You know, and I was like, “Oh, this is so nice.” I love nuance and clarity and sophistication. You so need that when you’re dealing with something as big as the concept of karma.

KS: And vast.

CB: Yeah, the malleability of one’s fate. Another interesting point in the Indian tradition, I remembered when I was going over the Indian stuff again—or reviewing some of it as I’m starting to read of that again this past month—is that one of the significations sometimes associated with the 10th house in Indian astrology was karma, to the extent that the parallel word in Greek is praxis. And the Greek astrologers associated praxis with the 10th house, and praxis means ‘action’, or literally ‘what one does’. So the 10th house became the house of actions, but also, the house of what one does, which then eventually led it to become the house that has to do with one’s occupation or one’s profession in some sense. That which you accomplish in life, or the actions that you take. And so, there’s a weird, interesting parallel there with the concept of karma being associated with the 10th in the Indian tradition as well, and that idea of it being actions or the actions that you take, as well as the results of those actions.

AC: Right. And it’s really important to remember that karma can just as much refer to the present and the future as the past. When you say ‘karma’, you know, there’s this connotation where if I say, “Oh, well, that’s your karma,” it means, “Oh, well, that must have come from a distant time.” It’s like, no, no, you’re generating karma right now.

CB: Right.

AC: The word means ‘action’.

CB: Yeah. So an important point, an important parallel. And another important instance of why studying the traditions in parallel can sometimes be really useful and interesting and enlightening, and can help, even if you’re not an Indian or a Vedic astrologer. Sometimes studying Vedic astrology can teach you things about Western astrology and give you different insights into it that you didn’t know before. So those were the main topics I covered on the podcast this month. It was a big month on the podcast. There was one little minor episode that somehow didn’t fit into that sequence as neatly as I would have liked, so I didn’t release it as a main podcast episode, but I just threw it up on YouTube. And that was what we lovingly called ‘the drunk astrology podcast’ that I did with my friend Cam White and Kayla Marie, who are two local, Denver astrologers here, of the Pluto in Sagittarius generation or persuasion. So we’ve talked recently, Austin, about this new wave of astrologers coming into the community over the course of the past few years, that are in the late Pluto in Scorpio or early Pluto in Sagittarius generation. And you’ve really seen that as well, as like a wave of people?

AC: Oh, yeah. I think the average age of the consultations probably dropped by eight years for me this year.

CB: Okay.

AC: Like I’ve read for so many people in their 20’s this year.

CB: Yeah.

AC: You know, it’s not that I didn’t read for people in their 20’s, but there was this relatively, kind of even distribution from late 20’s to 60’s.

KS: Average age?

AC: Yeah, as the young people have gotten really interested in astrology—

KS: We’re like middle-aged now.

AC: Oh, yeah. I mean, 40 used to be old.

KS: Yeah, it is old when you’re 27.

AC: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s a universe away. But yeah, no, I’ve seen that just in the demographics of who I’m reading for. Cuz a lot of people are like, “Oh, dude, I’m gonna have my Saturn return,” cuz people know about a Saturn return now. So I’m getting, you know, people booking in their mid-20’s much more than I ever did before.

CB: Yeah. Same for you, Kelly?

KS: Yeah, totally. I was like, “I don’t want to miss the ‘drunk episode’, ‘the drunk astrology’ episode debrief.” But yeah, no, I’m the same. I’m noticing there are like more and more clients with birth dates in the ‘90s, basically, yeah.

CB: Yeah.

KS: Younger than my younger sister. I’m like, “Oh, my God, I’m getting old,” but it’s great. And I actually watched that episode. Maybe I just saw it on YouTube. Because I met Cam at the SOTA conference last year.

CB: Oh, yeah, I heard that you guys ran the party together.

KS: We ran the bar. We basically got everyone drunk. So I was really excited to see him doing more alcohol pushing with his astrology. So, yeah.

CB: Yeah, and I should clarify. Cuz I think there were some people that read the title and then were just outraged and didn’t watch it. We weren’t like wasted. We just had a few drinks and then had a casual conversation.

KS: It was really like astrology over wine, basically. Were you guys drinking wine? I couldn’t tell from the glasses.

CB: No, it was like rum and Coke or something like that.

KS: Okay.

CB: Austin, you would have liked that. And I think we’ve all, at conferences, had a few drinks. Like everybody seemed to love the episode. So I almost wished I had released it as an audio version, even though we didn’t get into anything terribly deep, and that’s one of the reasons I didn’t. And because I already met my quota for episodes this month, I just threw it up on YouTube. But there was a very small, small percentage of people that seemed to be outraged about the idea of drinking and talking about astrology or something. And somebody said that it was tarnishing the entire profession of astrology or something, or not representing it well. And it made me wonder if any of those people had ever gone to an astrological conference, where, you know, sitting in a bar and having a few drinks with friends and talking astrology is a good part of what we do.

AC: It’s near mandatory.

CB: Right.

KS: Yeah, I’m speechless at this. I mean, I think we said this in the pre-show chat, I wouldn’t have a drink and do a reading. No way. I don’t even drink 24 hours before I do a consult. Like, you know, if I have a consult, whatever, I don’t drink during the week usually because I do consults during the week. But just to have a chat with some friends—I don’t know, that seems a little extreme to me. It’s totally okay in the context of just discussion. I mean, I’m thinking about that last night at UAC, where there was lots of juicy conversation, but there were also a lot of drinks.

CB: Yeah. Well, it just brings up a thing that happens sometimes, where people sometimes take it too seriously and don’t allow themselves or don’t think that you should have any fun with astrology because it’s serious business, and they want it to be respectable in the world or something like that. Which is funny, cuz that’s obviously something I agree with and I sympathize with, you know, from that perspective, and I’m certainly doing that myself. But it’s like sometimes you also have to relax and have fun with astrology. And that’s almost like a whole separate conversation of the casual or the playful side of being an astrologer and still being a human being, yeah, as like a topic unto itself.

AC: Yeah, which I think it’s important to crack the false image of the all-knowing prophet with the crystal ball.

KS: And the purity.

AC: You know, it’s like, no, this is a thing that people can do. It’s a thing you can learn. It’s, you know, complicated and difficult, and some people are more inclined to it than others. But this is actually a human thing. Astrologers aren’t, you know, some other. You know, they’re human beings. And I think that with astrology being an outsider profession for the last several decades especially, you get this sort of distorted, romanticized/demonized image of the astrologer, where they’re either a godlike being or a charlatan. And neither of those is true. I mean, I guess there are charlatans out there. And who knows? Maybe there are a few godlike beings. But, you know, all the astrologers I’ve met and know are human beings who have studied and cultivated themselves.

CB: Yeah. We’re not sitting on a mountaintop monastery somewhere, constantly. We’re all just like normal human beings that are doing normal social things that we all do. And especially, yeah, just getting together and talking with other astrologers and having casual conversations is part of the fun of meeting up with other astrologers, and that’s part of the reason that we go to conferences and things like that.

AC: Yeah. I mean, some of us are pretty weird.

KS: Speak for yourself.

AC: Oh, I am.

KS: No, I know. I mean, look, some of us are very weird, but I think we own that weirdness and we’re totally okay with it.

CB: Yeah. Anyway, so that episode is available on The Astrology Podcast YouTube page, which is actually titled The Astrology School. You can find it through just linking to wherever it is. I’m sure there’s plenty of links to the YouTube page on TheAstrologyPodcast.com website. So there’s that. I think I released the audio of that as a Casual Astrology Podcast episode, which is available to patrons of The Astrology Podcast on the $10 tier. I also released a zodiacal releasing workshop that I did with Leisa, where we sat with an audience, and we just took charts from an audience at a local Denver astrology group and did their zodiacal releasing periods. And actually relevant to both of you, there were three interesting examples, where we had three loosings of the bond in different charts. And in each chart, the topic associated with the house it was jumping to actually ended up being relevant in describing part of the nature of the transition that occurred in the person’s life at that time. So like one person, it was a loosing of the bond, and it jumped to the 9th house, and they had a religious conversion that ended up altering their career and life direction. Another person, I think it jumped to the 4th house, and it was something about their home and living situation that changed. Again, the technique is so complicated, and there’s so many different pieces of it, that we’re still learning and researching different facets of it. And there’s still plenty of work to do in terms of that. Yeah, so we’re still learning new things about it. Anyway, that was something that I released to patrons as well on The Casual Astrology Podcast. And I’ll be interested to see in your charts if that becomes relevant over the course of the next 12 months, as you go through your loosing of the bond.

KS: Yeah, that’s really exciting to hear, Chris, that the house was really significant.

AC: I’m not as excited about that.

CB: Right.

KS: Why, Austin?

CB: It’s jumping to his 6th house.

AC: The 6th house is not the most full of riches.

CB: I mean, it is one of that triad of 2nd-6th-10th house, so it could still be tied into your work stuff. Like I was thinking when you were talking about your consultations and stuff and putting that on hold, if it wasn’t reorienting the process of doing some of that and how you structure your entire ‘consulting and teaching and everything else’ business over the course of the next 12 months, as you adjust to where you’re at, at this stage in your career.

AC: Yeah, that’s definitely part of it. But I just don’t have to be excited about it.

KS: No, you don’t have to be excited about it. I mean, it is 6th house. You know, there are better houses to be excited about, I guess.

CB: Yeah. Well, I’m excited about both of your transitions.

KS: Well, we’ll be checking in every month. Don’t you worry.

CB: Right.

KS: You’ll be hearing from us. People are gonna be sick of us by the end of it.

CB: Definitely. All right. And speaking about transition points—

KS: Is that a smooth segue?

CB: That might be. It’s time to segue—since we’ve been talking about an-hour-and-eight-minutes—to transition into talking about our main topic for this episode, which is the forecast for March of 2019. Shall we jump into it?

KS: Let’s do it.

CB: All right. So let me see if I can throw up, for the video viewers, the calendar for this month that just shows some of the major ingresses that are taking place over the course of March. So here it is. So this is just showing when planets move into different signs.

KS: It’s so pretty, the background colors, honestly. It’s really pretty.

CB: This is from this year’s 2019 Planetary Alignments Calendar. The background was designed by Jack Cusumano, and the foreground and everything else by Paula Belluomini. So I put that on Amazon last month. I actually ran out. I need to restock that. But hopefully, there’ll be more posters available soon. But yeah, we’ve got lunations this month. We’ve got Mercury retrograde in Pisces taking up a large part of the month. We’ve got Uranus moving into Taurus. It’s actually a pretty active, pretty dynamic month, it seems like.

KS: There’s a lot shifting. I mean, when I was recording my March videos for my membership, for my subscribers, there’s things happening on different levels. You know, we have the meta-level of Uranus moving into Taurus, for instance, which is obviously a huge event that is gonna shape the next eight years. And then, you know, we have more medium-level stuff, where we do have a Mercury retrograde. It’s not as though we never have Mercury retrogrades. Every three months, we get one. This one’s got a little bit of a unique flavor because it’s in Pisces. It’s with Neptune so much. And then, you know, at the end of the month, Venus and Mars just changing signs. So there was some really big stuff and then some of our month-on-month stuff, just as a summary point. I thought the lunations this month were both really interesting, a little bit striking, in the sense that, you know, New Moon with Neptune and then a Full Moon right on the equinox, 0° Libra.

CB: Yeah. While we’re at it, why don’t I throw up the animated chart, so we can look at the specific alignments this month.

KS: And I think just to pick up on something Austin said—which may have been before we actually put the recording on, which seems to be always when we have our most fun chats.

CB: I know. We always talk like way too much right before this, and we get all of our good points in and then we forget.

KS: We forget what they were. And you could kind of see it on that diagram you are holding, Chris, there are a couple of really big days this month where a bunch of stuff happens. And then we have these quieter weeks, almost, where there isn’t as much happening.

CB: Right.

KS: There’s, you know, two or three 48-hour periods where everything happens at once. One at the start of the month and one towards the end of the month. Yeah, I don’t know. Austin, do you want to start with March? Some thoughts?

AC: Yeah.

CB: Do you have a lovely analogy for us this month, Austin?

KS: What are we kicking or swimming in this month?

CB: In the tradition of meat grinder—I’m trying to think of the others.

KS: I think people are still in therapy about that. So I feel like I’m gonna have to counteract if there is another ‘meat grinder’ mention.

AC: We’ll see.

KS: No comment. I love it.

AC: I’m happy with that one. There’s also the ‘Lament Configuration’.

KS: Oh, my lord.

CB: That was another one.

AC: I have a less-threatening metaphor for this month.

KS: Okay.

AC: So I’ve been thinking about it, you know, there’s this epochal shift of Uranus into Taurus. But in terms of raw action, you know, Mars is kind of just bulldozing in Taurus.

KS: Chugging along.

AC: You know, at the beginning of the month, Venus is done with that dramatic run through the second half of Capricorn. I like Venus in Aquarius. I own one.

KS: You’re partial to her?

AC: Yeah. But it’s not initiating a lot of action, right? It’s not really super-configured to anything. The focus really is on Mercury’s retrograde and Uranus’ ingress into Taurus. And so, again, Uranus’ ingress into Taurus, you know, confirms an almost decade-long shift. And there will be short-term things, where that green lightning is gonna strike and you’re gonna see things from a different angle, and it’ll be like, “Oh.” Again, with Uranus’ ingress, there’s just perspective change. There’s almost always a political or ecological correspondence with Uranus ingresses. I would be shocked if there wasn’t an earth-based thing that celebrated rather vociferously Uranus’ ingress into Taurus, but, you know, it’s an ingress with a lot of implications. And Mercury stations retrograde within about 36 hours, I think, of Uranus’ ingress. Mercury’s retrograde proceeds that. And so, it feels like, how do I put this? I was talking with Gordon, Gordon White, the other day about the Mercury retrograde, and he was feeling the shadow. And he was like, “It feels like a Philip K Dick plot twist.” Do you guys know Philip K Dick?

KS: No.

CB: A famous science fiction writer.

AC: Yeah. And one of his signatures is that it’s not that there’s a plot twist, it’s that the entire perspective on reality changes. Like, “Oh, we’ve been living in a simulation.” Or, “Oh, this isn’t actually the real world.” It’s the same kind of twist you sort of get in The Matrix, where it’s like, “Oh, that’s not the real world,” except usually with Philip K Dick, there’s not a reveal where, “Oh, this is the fake world, and this is the real world.” There’s usually, “Which of these is actually real?” And so, we have the two fish there almost as competing realities. Pisces is Jupiter’s terrain. Jupiter’s very strong right now. Whenever we’re talking about Jupiter, we’re talking about worldview. We’re talking about your story for reality, your framework or paradigm. And this Mercury retrograde being in Pisces, configured to Jupiter—which is in a strong position, you know, being all up on top of Neptune—is gonna have a lot of like trying to figure out the relationship between different realities, or between different stories about reality. It’s very paradigm-shifting. You know, for some people that might be obvious and ‘forefronted’. For some, you know, if it’s in the 6th house, it might be like, “What do I need to do to get healthy? I thought I was being healthy by doing this, but I’m still sick. And then there’s this other perspective on this.” You know, so it could be smaller like that. Or if it’s in the 4th, it could be about the story you’ve been telling yourself about your family forever. But it’s, you know, multiple realities and ambivalence between the two or three or whatever and kind of grinding out or coagulating a more accurate story or paradigm or way of looking at that area of life.

KS: Yeah, one thing I keep thinking about—which you touched on there, Austin—is the strength of Jupiter in Sag. Not that it is neutralizing the Mercury in Pisces, cuz I do think there is gonna be sort of that puddle and messiness and ‘blurredness’. But my take on this is like the Mercury in Pisces retro—as hectic or chaotic or as confusing as it might be—it is somehow speaking to or serving or trying to help Jupiter on his way. You know, there’s some sort of reason or purpose. Or it’s part of a larger story, even if, you know, the paperwork right now is a hot mess kind of thing.

AC: Yeah, I think it’s gonna be a total hot mess as far as surface Mercury considerations. You know, as far as paperwork and travel and getting emails back on time and, you know, technology—all of the classic surface Mercury stuff, like a total mess. But I think there’s gonna be a lot of deeper philosophical, paradigmatic stuff and life story stuff that this is gonna be really good for rethinking and reframing.

CB: Yeah, I meant to mention to guys last month—and I spaced it out in the forecast—that I noticed when the Jupiter-Neptune square first went exact several weeks ago that there was some theme that came up, that was really strong. Like themes of truth and justice, triumphing over lies and deception being a really strong theme that I saw in the news for a few days during that time period. And I realize that that was one of the ongoing themes that I think is gonna come up at different points this year, especially as we get the other two exact squares between Jupiter and Neptune. But it’s one of the themes that’ll probably carry through as an ongoing theme on different levels, just with that broad square that’s still in effect for the entirety of the year, with Jupiter in the superior position, earlier in zodiacal order, overcoming Neptune, as well as those other Pisces planets.

AC: That makes sense.

KS: Yeah, there is this sort of constant dance between the Sag and the Pisces parts of our charts. Like those two houses—whatever the story, you know, you can put a story together based on the topics of those houses in your chart; you know, the Pisces house and the Sag house. They’re constantly bouncing off each other this year. You know, Jupiter-Neptune square’s a part of it this month, with the planets moving through Pisces and squaring Jupiter. I mean, the Sun’s gonna do it this month, I should say. Mercury’s gonna do it for the second time. When we get into April, we’ll have Venus in Pisces linking to the Jupiter in Sag. So there is this undertone or this riff where we’re constantly looking to adjust or rework the way that your Pisces part of your life connects with your Sag part of your life.

CB: Yeah, definitely.

AC: I can see that.

CB: So I’m just animating the chart and moving it forward to that. So Mercury, of course, early in the month, stations retrograde at 29 Pisces. And I’m just looking at that direct station, where it stations direct at 16 Pisces conjunct Neptune.

KS: It’s like a hot mess.

CB: Right. That’s so close. But you mentioned Venus in Pisces. Which is interesting, cuz Venus—

KS: She’s part of the cleanup crew.

CB: Yeah, she moves into Pisces. Almost simultaneously ingresses from tropical Aquarius into Pisces right around the same time, at the end of March, when Mercury’s stationing direct.

KS: Yeah, I think, technically, Venus moves in on the 26th, and Mercury stations direct the 28th. But Mercury will be in station for a couple of days before it actually, you know, switches from retro to direct. Obviously, we’re gonna have a lot of confusion, but, for me, Venus coming into Pisces at the end of the month is like the light at the end of the tunnel or the silver lining. The paperwork eventually gets straightened out, or the mess and the muddle finally gets untangled, and there’s some sort of sweetness or little boost that we get as Venus kind of comes into the territory that Mercury has just, you know, poured a big glass of water over. I don’t know if you guys had thought about, you know, what it’s like to have Venus come into the sign right after Mercury was retro there.

CB: Yeah. I mean, I like that idea of cleanup. Because even that first conjunction, already a lot of people were reporting starting to see some of the anticipatory or like opening sequence of events of the Mercury retrograde much more intensely compared to other ones, because, normally, we sometimes get issues with miscommunications being a Mercury retrograde theme. But then that miscommunication—or sometimes miscommunication, like deception—is a Mercury-Neptune theme in and of itself. So when you combine the two of those, it’s almost intensifying that theme and making it more certain and more likely in some sense. But I’m curious if Mercury stationing direct conjunct Neptune is helping to clarify the problems that were created at the opening of the retrograde and at the first conjunction with Neptune, or if we’re still gonna be dealing with some issues at that point. Just cuz Mercury-Neptune itself is inherently kind of—I don’t know. Deceptive is part of the term, but there’s another term for that, maybe, that’s a little bit more neutral. What’s the more neutral term for deceptive?

KS: I mean, dazed and confused is what I keep coming back to. I don’t know that it’s always intentionally deceptive, but it overlooks things or misses things such that it may not be presenting the fullness of what’s going on, but only a piece or a facet of it.

CB: Yeah, the glamorous side or the idealistic and the beautiful side of things, and maybe not necessarily emphasizing the less-than-idealistic side of things.

AC: Yeah. Well, you know, that’s all true. You know, Neptune does some other things. So there’s the falsely-positive glamour, in an enchantment sense, side of Neptune in Pisces.

CB: Glamour, yeah, that’s good.

KS: Yeah, glamour’s a great word.

AC: Yeah, in the sorcerer sense.

CB: Right.

AC: But there’s also the getting caught up in an equally-false nightmare version, which is sort of an anti-glamour. You know, with Neptune, Neptune helps you get caught up in a story or a myth. You know, a tale, a fairy tale.

KS: Fairy tale.

AC: You know, if we actually look at fairy tales, most of them are pretty nightmarish. You know, I’ve had Neptune on my Sun for a year-and-a-half. And, you know, I was just saying to Kait the other night my experiences, just reflecting on that, cuz it’s just about to be done. My experiences have been both sort of fairy tale ‘good’, and also, totally nightmarish, but beyond the bounds of what feels normal in both directions, if that makes sense. You know, Neptune is dreams. Well, some dreams you can fly. You know, you can fly, and you have amazing experiences, and you talk to gods. And then in other dreams, you are stuffed down inside your worst fears and worst moments, and they’re depicted in 3D entertainment format, where you’re caught in your own horror movie. Like Neptune is the realm of dreams, and it contains, I think, both of those. And I would say that with Mercury coming back to Neptune, maybe it’s helping clarify the reality tunnel or the story or the dream. Or maybe it’s just finding the right one. Cuz, you know, there’s always some story running in the background; there’s always some narrative. It might just be—like I said earlier—like getting a better framework, getting a better story; a more accurate story that fits the facts that maps to what’s happening. You know, that can be a myth of self, right? Like, who am I? What’s my story? Or, what is my life? Or it can be much more specific. If it’s in the 6th house, what’s the story of my health, right? What’s the story of what’s healthy for me? If it’s in the 7, what’s the story of partnership? You know, when you get into people’s heads far enough, you find that they have stories about different parts of their life and about their life as a whole.

CB: Yeah, narratives, stories, sometimes fairy tales. Sometimes they’re a romanticized version of what they think that part of their life is like, which may or may not have as much connection to reality as they think that it does.

AC: Yeah. I would say, one, I think that the stories are the ways that we get a functional frame of reference to work on things. Like, you know, there’s the story that everyone is born and they grow up and then they get old and they die. Like that’s a story, but it’s a story that maps to the facts as far as I’ve encountered them. So, one, I just want to make sure that when I say ‘story’, I’m not using that pejoratively or to mean fiction. It’s just our best possible understanding of how those sequences run. And I’m not gonna toss that story. I think the birth-life-death thing is pretty solid. You know, we have the way that we made sense of what happened to us, let’s say, in relationships up to 25-years-old. And then that story kind of stuck, and we didn’t realize it but we’ve been interpreting relationships through sequencing that story without meaning to for the last five years or 10 years. And you need to shed stories from time to time and go back to the drawing board, look at the facts as they are, and come up with a new story that actually fits all of the facts, internally and externally. Or at least fits better than the one that you’ve been inside of.

KS: Yeah, so it’s almost questioning or exploring whether a story that you’ve told yourself or you’ve been attached to is still relevant based on, you know, the current present, or the facts as you know it, or the new awareness that you have brought through.

AC: Yeah, yeah. A little story audit with this Mercury retrograde.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Sometimes you need a story, and that story plays a really important role—the story that we tell ourselves—in motivating us or allowing us to get through certain parts of our life, or to motivate us and inspire us in ways that wouldn’t happen otherwise if we were purely paying attention to the cold, hard details and facts in a non-romanticized version of our life. And that might be an important theme going on here, especially with this New Moon, and just looking at this New Moon taking place towards the beginning of the month at 15 Pisces, pretty closely conjunct Neptune at 16 Pisces, right as Mercury is stationing retrograde at 29 Pisces, and thinking about that as a sort of theme as well.

AC: Yeah. Well, because facts don’t tell you who you are.

KS: No.

AC: Facts don’t tell you what’s meaningful. You know, they need to be taken into account, but we always have to go beyond the facts. And people who are pretending that they’re only sticking to the facts, that’s their story. “I’m a person that only sticks to the facts. That’s my story.” “I don’t believe in stories,” right? Okay, well, you just came with a fiction about yourself.

CB: Right, right.

AC: I mean, it’s a true fiction, if that’s what you do. But it’s still a story that structures your identity, and it structures, to a certain degree, the events in your life and the way that you interpret them.

KS: Yeah. I mean, it seems to me what we’re kind of discussing here or touching on is the idea that, you know, we’re inferring what’s between the facts or the data. And this is very much, I guess, ‘Pisces or Neptune land’, if you like, where we’re looking at the nuances or the feelings or the sensory stuff that may not be factor or piece data, but is helping to give context or give a framework to the facts as you understand them. So we are in that kind of ethereal, almost liminal space, especially at this lunation that you’ve put up here, Chris, where the Sun and Moon are both conjoined with Neptune. You know, it’s like a real strong Neptune pulse coming out, energetically.

CB: Yeah. Austin, you mentioning Neptune transiting your Sun reminds me of when I was first getting into astrology. That was part of the transit I was going through, Neptune squaring my Sun. And like I was saying earlier, when we were talking about reincarnation, my interest in astrology was going through a really heavy, New Age-y-type phase, where I was interested in all of that weird, sort of in-between stuff that was kind of nebulous and sort of quasi-spiritual and everything else; and that’s the encouragement that led me into astrology. And eventually I came out of that transit and found myself questioning some of the things that I believed in when I was going through that transit. But eventually what I was left with was astrology still seemed to be this legitimate thing that seemed to work and be tangible in some ways. And so, I continued to pursue that even as some of the other things sort of fell away from my interest and visibility. But the point of that is just the importance sometimes of having those things that inspire you and draw you in and lead you in a certain direction in your life. And even if they’re, you know, flirting with that border of truth and lies—and ultimately end up going one way or another—sometimes even just that motivating factor can take you through different parts of your life, even if in retrospect it ends up being much different or looking much different than you thought it did at the time.

AC: Yeah, yeah. Again, not all stories are fictions, but there is such a thing as a ‘useful’ fiction at a certain time of life. I would also say that there are aspects of life and awareness and reality that are relevant to a human being, but are simply not knowable or ‘catchable’ with our ‘intellective’ faculties. And so, the best you can do is get a story that maps to them, because you can’t have the total knowledge that you can have over certain physical aspects of life for that area. Like throwing a bunch of flour on top of an invisible creature. You still can’t see it, but you can at least map the shape of it.

CB: Right. Definitely.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Have you ever had any major Neptune transits, Kelly?

KS: Have I ever? Well, a few years ago.

CB: Right.

KS: A few years ago, Neptune went over my ascendant, my Sun, my Moon, opposed my Saturn. It was a really good few years. I mean, I got married at that time.

CB: Okay.

KS: And I did have an adjustment around what being married meant, in terms of, you know, identity. Who am I if I’m now this wife person? What does that mean for who I am? What kind of wife do I want to be? It was really weird. I had to go to therapy about it for a little while, cuz I wasn’t expecting to struggle that much. You know, before my partner and I got married, we already had a house, we were already raising his kids. Like we already had ticked a lot of big-relationship boxes, but it was tricky. There was some confusion. I definitely had some of the lower energy that’s very typical of the Neptune transits.

CB: Like fatigue?

KS: Yeah, just being tired or a bit more rundown.

AC: Or drinking.

KS: Lethargic. I probably was drinking. And I find, for me, it’s actually usually eating. Like overeating is something, you know, having ascendant and Moon in Pisces. When I’m deciding I’m eating, like don’t get between me and the food. Kirah, you know, the naturopath medical astrologer that I’ve worked with for years, she told me that a long time ago. Like, “One of your issues is just gonna be you consume too much food because you have no boundaries when it comes to eating.” So that’s a thing. Yeah, no, I’m sure there was probably drinking. But the biggest thing that comes to my mind about being stuck in the Neptune fog is you can’t rely on data points. It’s literally like your eyes are closed and you have to move forward regardless. And you have to draw on other senses. You have to trust your instinct, almost like your ‘Spidey’ senses rather than your rational brain. And I think that’s really uncomfortable for most of us, but that’s a huge part of what March is asking from us, basically.

AC: Yeah.

KS: There’s no data. You cannot make this decision on data points. Does it feel good? Does it not feel good? It’s a much harder place to operate from. Although I think it’s more primal and more raw, we don’t always go there, basically.

AC: Yeah, I want to add to that. So if Neptune in Pisces points towards the ocean and thinking in oceanic, you know, aquatic landscapes, how do sea creatures figure out what’s going on, right?

KS: Sonar.

AC: Yeah, they use sonar. They use echolocation. You know, a lot of sea creatures—sharks, for example—can pick up on the electromagnetic signatures of animals very far away. You know, sharks literally have electromagnetically-sensitive lines of sensors on their body, and they’ll pick up on the freakout of a creature that’s dying or thrashing from half a mile away. And so, you have that literally energetic sense. Or you’re mapping things, like you said, with sonar, where you’re bounding waves off them and you can tell there’s a shape over there. But that’s not the same as seeing, right?

KS: It’s not the same at having the detail or the color.

AC: Right. You know, sonar is, in a sense, a 3D way of throwing flour on the Invisible Man.

KS: It’s exactly what you’re saying, Austin. Yeah, you don’t know what color eyes they have or what cloak they’re wearing, but you know there’s something there. And dealing with the ‘something’s there’ that you can only kind of sense, I just think that’s March.

AC: Yeah, I agree. And just to come back to what I was saying initially, why is all this like, “Oh, what’s going on?”—why is this in some sense necessary now? Well, it’s because we have Uranus’ shift.

KS: Yeah.

AC: It’s changing a lot. Suddenly, the ground is shifting.

KS: Yes.

AC: What does this mean? Who am I in this era? What’s going on? I need to change the story, cuz the planets are literally about to change the story for the next seven years.

CB: Yeah, and that’s a really important point. Cuz we’ve emphasized that so much in the past, and we did in the yearly forecast, and there have been different points where we did in some of the monthly forecasts. But this is a huge shift, Uranus leaving Aries and completing its decade-long transit and moving into Taurus. And that almost ties back into the topics from earlier this month—with the other episodes on the time-lord and the dasha systems—which is that with those systems, it’s really clear when one period starts and one period ends. And that’s sometimes literally like a chapter of your life opening and another chapter of your life closing. And we’re not usually used to thinking of transits working that way, as Western astrologers. Like we tend to look at them more as like exact hits and as like specific, sometimes discreet events that occur in coordination or in concert with a transit going exact at some specific moment in time. The exception to that though is ingresses and looking at transits from the perspective of the ingress opening up a period of time, and then when it leaves that sign, it closing a period of time. And nowhere is that more important than with outer planet transits, as they depart from one part of our chart—especially one whole sign house—and ingress into another. So this month is gonna be closing a lot of chapters and opening a lot of chapters in different people’s lives, depending on where that planet is moving in your chart.

AC: Yeah. And I would add to that that the outer planets—like Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto—function almost like chapters for the world’s story.

KS: Yeah.

AC: Like the world’s story distinctly changes when you look at the history of those. You know, Uranus’ move into Aries back at the beginning of the decade was like Fukushima, Arab Spring. Like everything got set in motion. And, you know, where we are now is in large part a result of Uranus in Aries and its configuration with Pluto in Capricorn. And so, you know, the Uranus in Taurus is a legitimate new chapter.

KS: It is. And I think one aspect that really caught my eye this month, that might help open up the Uranus in Taurus story is later in the month, when Venus—the ruler of Uranus in Taurus—moves into Pisces and does make a direct aspect to Uranus in Taurus. Just a little sextile. It happens the 27th of March. I’m not necessarily saying it’s gonna be a game-changer aspect, but I think it’s just gonna start to reveal some of the topics or the themes about Uranus in Taurus in maybe a relatively pleasant or, I don’t know. Like Venus in Pisces—I’m just so excited about that full stop. But she is gonna just pull out a little bit of a—tell us, Austin.

AC: Oh, yeah, I would agree. I would say that that Venus reintroduces the Uranus in Taurus themes in as polite a manner as possible.

KS: Polite, that’s a great word. Yeah, it’s like, “I don’t want to smash you in the face with it, but here is a beautiful expression of this type of thing.”

AC: And maybe, also, “Here’s the good part.”

KS: Yeah, that’s good.

AC: “Stay tuned, but here’s the good part.”

KS: There’ll be other parts, but it’s like a gentle introduction warming you up, basically.

AC: Yeah. And I like what you said, that it would reveal. I think that it’s important with Uranus especially—when we’re looking at Uranus on a personal level and trying to be like, “Oh, what’s this gonna mean?”—to have our eyes peeled and be paying attention and be willing to change our interpretation constantly as more data and thoughts come in. Uranus does not like it when you’re like, “Oh, it’s just gonna be this. And I’ve got this figured out ahead of time.” Uranus is like, “No, you don’t. No, you don’t.”

CB: Especially moving into a fixed sign like Taurus. Especially if that’s an angle, and that’s a more fixed or stable part of your life that you used to or desire to have some stability in. Having Uranus move in there really would question and shake up what you think are established themes or trends in that area of your life.

AC: Mm-hmm. And stories, in this case.

KS: Yeah. I mean, I think that’s a good point, Chris. Anyone with a fixed sign rising will have Uranus move into one of those more active houses in their chart. And that can be a little bit more strong in terms of that Uranus pulse, and changing your stories, as Austin was saying, whether you like it or not.

CB: Yeah, so what is the story that you have? Or what is the structure you have built up in that area of your life, that’s represented by Taurus in your chart and the house that coincides with Taurus? And how flexible are you to that area of your life changing in the not-too-distant future?

KS: Yes.

AC: That’s a good way to put it.

CB: All right. I think in the fitting of Mercury going retrograde in Pisces this month—we are not going through this chronological in the least as usual.

AC: To be fair, it’s sort of like this all starts at the beginning of the month and then it changes in the last couple of days.

KS: Like the 20th, around the equinox.

AC: We’re basically just getting the same version. You know, we’re getting kind of the same thing almost all month. We get the introduction of it at the very beginning and then it changes when the month is almost over. So it kind of is one big soup.

KS: It really is. Like from that March 5th-6th period, it’s like that stuff happens and then we’re just sitting with that until the equinox, when we get a little bit more activity.

CB: Right. Good point. So one thing we could mention—it’s like we have the Mercury retrograde, which happens at the beginning of the month, and we have Mercury stationing direct later in the month. But at some point, we are gonna have the Sun-Mercury conjunction halfway through that cycle.

KS: The 14th, yeah.

CB: Right. What do you guys think about that?

KS: Well, I think it’s going to be one of those cazimi little moments where it’s like you get a clear feeling, but you may still have trouble articulating, expressing, or bringing it outwards. I don’t think it fixes everything. What about you, Austin?

AC: I think it’s the moment of figuring out how to bring coherence to what was likely confusing and fragmented. You know, if you look at that cazimi—that Mercury-Sun conjunction—you’ll note that it’s also almost perfectly square Jupiter.

KS: Yeah.

AC: And so, in this case, we like that there’s a square there, cuz it gives both planets a relationship to their ruler who’s a benefic, who’s in a happy, strong place. You know, one of Jupiter’s greatest gifts is coherence, where the pieces all fit together and make a larger picture that images something sensible or comprehensible.

KS: It makes sense, yeah. So you think this is the time when people get a sense of everything coming together, and then what they’re doing after that is working to put that vision into place?

AC: Yeah, I would say that’s where you get the plot to the news story. You’re like, “Oh, okay.” Getting the plot isn’t knowing the whole story, but that’s the thread or the rope that you can follow.

KS: Yeah.

AC: And things get more clear once you have that beam on it.

KS: Yeah, that’s a really great point, cuz I do think there is some insight that comes out there. I think there’s still work to be done after, but I like how you differentiate it there. That it’s like you get the big picture, and you’ve still gotta color in the detail or the nuance, but at least you’ve got a sense of why, if we like. There’s a beautiful Jupiter in Sag. Like this is the meaning or this is the purpose. This is the big picture of what everything has been going on for.

AC: Yeah. You know, why do my thoughts keep swirling around this one topic?

KS: Yeah.

AC: You know, it’s literally getting to the bottom of it. That’s what that inferior conjunction is.

KS: Yeah, getting to the bottom of it. I like it. And is there anything else in that middle week of March that you had your eye on, or is that primarily it? And did you skip ahead to the equinox after?

AC: Oh, me. I thought you meant Chris.

KS: Yeah. Yeah, Chris is like doing a vanishing act.

AC: Oh, okay. So yeah, I mean, it’s interesting. You know, earth is fairly well-represented this month with the pileup in Cap and Mars in Taurus. And so, you know, Mars is in a trine with Taurus. Sorry. Good lord.

KS: So Mercury in Pisces.

AC: Yeah. Mars in Taurus is in a trine with Saturn in Capricorn and then Pluto. You know, like that’s very much like, “Yeah, that’s cool about stories and myths.”

KS: “But I’ve just gotta get this stuff done.”

AC: Right. Yeah, you need to get this work done. And, you know, with Mars-Saturn configurations, it’s always about that grind to a certain degree, especially when their trine. The trine, especially in earth signs, it’s like, okay, you know you need to churn this out. You know you need to get this done. You know you need to work through this. I was thinking about—I think it was the first day Mars entered Taurus. I had this moment where I was feeling the transition from Mars in Aries conjunct Uranus, which is hyperbolically kinetic and fiery and lit up. And then it went into Taurus, and I think it was the first Tuesday after that. And I had this idea of, you know the Bible quote about ‘swords being melted down into plowshares’?

KS: Mm-hmm.

AC: Right? I was like, “No, it’s swords being melted down into shovels.”

KS: Yeah.

AC: Like the shovel is the Mars in Taurus sword to dig yourself out of whatever, or to lay the ground for something. Also, when I think of Mars in Taurus, I also think of bulldozers. I think bulldozers and shovels.

KS: It is, honestly, like the bull charging, you know. A bull can take a while to get going. If you’ve ever watched a bull in a paddock, they are very large, quite magnificent creatures. But once they get going, you just have to get out of the way. Cuz it’s like a steam train, nothing is gonna stop it.

AC: Yeah, you know, the whole idea of a bulldozer or a plow. A bulldozer basically is a combination of the ox and the plow in a mechanical format.

KS: Yeah.

AC: The whole point is that it displaces matter.

KS: Yes.

AC: It displaces substance as it moves. And that’s what Taurus is. It’s substance. And so, it’s making substantial progress against the resistance of matter, of piled up stuff. And I’ve noticed that the Saturn-Pluto-South Node pileup in Capricorn is pointing towards the big pileups in people’s lives. And with Mars in Taurus being configured to that, there’s the plowing the landfill of stuff that didn’t get done or needs to get done.

CB: It’s interesting how that’s one of the signatures pretty much for the month of March pretty nicely and neatly, because we have Mars going through the second half of Taurus pretty much all month. And then at the very, very end of the month—on the final day of March, like the 30th or 31st—Mars departs from Taurus and moves into Gemini. But it’s weird having Mars going through Taurus, and then it sort of making way for Uranus moving into that sign early in the month at the same time. But it just seems like there’s a lot of shakeup or displacement of something—like you were saying, Austin—from the Taurus part of our chart during the course of March.

AC: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s interesting. Go on, sorry. That caused some things in my brain that I can’t articulate.

CB: Just the idea of displacement. You know, we’ve been going through some of this already this month, in February, as Mars went into Taurus right after the Mars-Uranus conjunction. So around February 14, Mars went into Taurus. So we’ve already gotten a little bit of this, where Mars is sort of shaking up the Taurus part of the chart. But then that theme continues into the entirety of March. And then Uranus joins the party, and not completes something, but fully initiates something that Mars had started as it moved through that sign during the second half of February.

KS: Yeah, that’s a nice point. That Mars is like the gentle displacement, the small-scale bulldozer. And maybe the Uranus coming in is larger, more explosive. Now we’re bringing the explosives in to really get this moving.

AC: Ooh, yeah. Mining with dynamite.

KS: Correct. Cuz, yeah, Mars does make the trine to Saturn, I think, around the 14th of March and then the trine to Pluto around the 20th. So, I don’t know. To me, I did see that as if you’ve got a particular project or a mission or a goal, there is a bit of staying power or a stick-to-it kind of energy. I mean, Mars in Taurus is a bit of a never-say-die kind of vibe.

AC: Sometimes, say, cupcake, though.

KS: Mars in Taurus? Well, it needs a lot of cupcakes to get started. But once it’s going, it usually sticks with it. Do you not think?

AC: You know, it really depends. Mars is debilitated in Taurus, or it’s in its detriment in Taurus for a reason. You know, if you work that Mars in Taurus, you can get that bulldozer. But you can also get the sleepy bull that doesn’t do the dynamic charging but once every three weeks. You know, problems with laziness or pleasure-seeking instead of accomplishment-seeking—because it’s in a Venus-ruled sign—are consistently on the spectrum of things that Mars in Taurus brings out. But I do think that if you lean into it, and try the bulldozer and shovel rather than a cupcake—or at least the bulldozer/cupcake ratio appropriate—it’s workable. Cuz the thing is Mars in Taurus is one of these situations where Mars is taken as a triplicity ruler of Taurus, so it has some power and dignity there. It has some power and dignity in all of the earth signs. But it’s also in its detriment and both of those things are true at the same time.

KS: Yeah. I mean, I’m just thinking what life has been like since Mars went into Taurus. It’s definitely been really steady. Like it’s almost an increase in output for me and just really consistently. The idea of the marathon, not the sprint, of like, “We need to do this today, but we’re gonna back up tomorrow and the next day.” It’s sort of correlated for me with coming home from being away and picking back up with a lot of things that had been neglected in that timeframe.

CB: Yeah.

KS: The comments on Mars in Taurus are hilarious.

CB: And also, just taking us back—we’ve also gotta remember back to last year in May, when Uranus first went into Taurus, in that few-month period where we had some of our first glimpses of what that nearly decade-long transit is gonna be about. Think back to some of the themes that may have started to come into our lives at that point as a preview, basically, of Uranus in Taurus coming up for the next decade.

AC: Yeah.

KS: Totally. Yeah, I mean, it was mid-May 2018. I think Uranus was in Taurus until November last year. So it can definitely pay to reflect back on that timeframe.

CB: Yeah, it looks like March 14-March 15, 2018 forward.

AC: May.

CB: Or, yeah, May, sorry. There we go. All right. And that actually brings us to the next lunation. So we talked a lot about the New Moon that’s taking place in Pisces conjunct Neptune. But the second lunation this month is that Full Moon in Libra that takes place just after the Sun moves into Aries.

AC: Yeah, that’s interesting. It’s an equinoctial Full Moon. Both the Sun and Moon are at 0. And I was thinking about that from a mundane astrology perspective. You know, the moment that the Sun ingresses into Aries is a very important moment for looking at, whatever, the destiny of nations. But if we looked at that, the Moon would still be in Virgo. But just from a slightly ‘omenier’ perspective, it’s like, well, there’s a Full Moon on the day of the equinox. Like that feels like it matters, even if the moment of ingress doesn’t contain that Full Moon.

CB: Yeah.

KS: I agree.

CB: Well, it’s different. It’s like two, almost opposite themes. Like the ingress is usually a beginning or the start of a cycle of the Sun moving into Aries and sort of the beginning of what’s traditionally been considered the astrological new year. But then a Full Moon is usually more interpreted as a culmination of events, where the Moon reaches its brightest and its peak fullness, and there’s a bringing to completion of something.

AC: Well, I would say bringing to a climax rather than a completion. And that makes sense that this astrological new year is going to start ramped up with the Moon almost climaxed. You know, there are a lot of big stories in the world. You know, if we look at what people are talking about right now, it’s mostly stuff that’s been building and building and building. Like, what’s gonna happen with Brexit? What’s gonna happen with Trump? What’s gonna happen with this? You know, it’s already at 11.

CB: Right.

KS: Yeah.

AC: So it makes sense that we would get a Moon that’s ‘climaxy’.

CB: So the keyword is ‘the beginning of the climax’?

AC: Yeah.

KS: Yeah. I mean, I always notice, too, there’s more either dramatic emotional news events or even more dramatic weather events when we get a Full Moon right near the equinox. So it does have a feeling of high drama.

AC: Oh, I mean, do we have any doubt that this year is gonna be high drama? You know, we did the yearly together.

KS: That’s true.

AC: It’s not a chill year, where the world just sits back, relaxes, and has a doughnut, or a kale shake.

KS: A kale shake. Oh, my God. No, we’ve got to stick with the cupcakes.

AC: This is real history, you know.

KS: Yeah.

AC: We’ll look back 5-10 years from now and be like, “Wow, those were crazy times.”

CB: But what’s interesting is this is the final piece. Uranus moving into Taurus is the final outer planet piece that has to move into place to set up all of that stuff that’s gonna happen a few months from now, this summer, which is the period we were so focused on in the yearly forecast, that seemed so tense. Or so intense. But it’s like over the past few months, the nodes have changed signs, and we’ve started to get the eclipses in Capricorn and Cancer already. So we had that back in January, and that’s set up the eclipses for later this year. We’ve had, obviously, Jupiter change signs. We’ve had the Saturn-Pluto conjunction inching closer and closer. And now, with Uranus moving into Taurus, that’s like the final outer planet thing that’s really lining up a lot of that stuff that we’re anticipating for later this year.

AC: Yeah, true, true. Also, I would point out that Uranus’ ingress into Taurus gives us the outer planet setup that we’re gonna have until 2025.

KS: Yeah.

AC: It’s gonna be Uranus in Taurus, Pluto in Capricorn, and Neptune in Pisces until we’re halfway through the next decade. Like this is the deal.

KS: Yeah.

CB: That’s kind of interesting. Of course, the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction that we’re anticipating is that really big opening of, on the one hand, a 20-year cycle, since those take place every 20 years; the last one was around 2000. But also, the opening of a new sequence of conjunctions in air signs for the next 200 years or something like that also takes place in a fixed sign, which is gonna be square to Uranus in Taurus. So that might be connected in there a little bit as well, in terms of more emphasis on major outer planet stuff going on in fixed signs.

AC: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, I think it’s pretty clear that the future we’re stumbling into, full of confusion and anxiety, is here to stay.

KS: Yeah. That’s a really great point, Austin. Once Uranus gets into Taurus, we now have our outer planet setup. I know we talked a lot about when Jupiter moved into Sag, how that was like, “Actually, 2019’s kind of started,” cuz that’s a big theme for next year when we were talking about it last year. But this now feels like, okay, this is the next era, if you like, with Uranus coming into Taurus.

CB: Right.

AC: And as Chris said, it also sets up the rest of the year. It sets up more in the rest of the year, but it does set up the rest of the year.

KS: It does, yeah. In some ways, March is like another January in that regard, where it’s like we’ve got something different coming in that now we’re gonna be dancing with.

AC: Yeah, I’m much more into March than I was January. You know, introducing the Saturn-Pluto-South Node conjunction versus introducing Uranus in Taurus. Uranus can be a lot of fun. Sometimes it sucks, but there are a lot of good shakeups that Uranus brings.

KS: Yes.

AC: You know, I’ll take March over January.

KS: I’m with you on that. Yeah, like I know that Mercury retrograde is getting a lot of press, and it is a thing. But the larger meta-cycles that are going on in March—I think it’s worth it if it’s a bit confusing at the beginning for how they’re gonna help us move forward.

AC: Yeah, yeah, I’m into it. And it’s like, okay, so we’ve done eight years of Uranus in Aries now.

KS: Yeah, I’m happy not to have Uranus in a Mars sign.

AC: Yeah. You know, let’s do this part now.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Another point that’s relevant, so we’re having that lunation, that Full Moon in Libra. But this is actually the first of two Full Moons that are gonna take place in Libra in March and April. So we’re getting one at 0° of Libra in March, and then a month later, on April 19, we get a second Full Moon, also in Libra, at 29° of that sign. So we get the unique double-Full Moon in the same zodiacal sign over the course of the month.

KS: Very cool.

AC: We need to get that Double-Rainbow Guy to say, “Double-Full Moon.”

KS: Double-Full Moon.

AC: “Double-Full Moon in Libra.”

KS: Double, double. So yeah, that’s the equinox and the Full Moon in Libra.

AC: And so, let’s go back to that, cuz there’s some kind of fun stuff about that, if we look at the rulers. So we’ve got the Sun in Mars-ruled Aries and then we have the Moon in Venus-ruled Libra. And if we look at the rulers, they’re in exact square with each other.

CB: Right. Like at the exact same time.

KS: Yes, the Venus-Mars square.

CB: So Venus is at 23 Aquarius and Mars is at 24 Taurus. And they’re very close to the minute as well, right around the time that the Moon is at 0 Libra and the Sun is at 0 Aries, forming the exact Full Moon.

AC: Yeah. And so, we can say a variety of things about this. But I think one that’s very simple is that what I see with the Venus-Mars squares—which occur routinely—is that they’re relationship-equilibriation points. Like if you are in a relationship—regardless of where those planets are, or which houses they’re visiting—the Venus-Mars stuff, usually I see people having to check in and have a conversation with their partner, if they have a partner. It’s like, “Okay, so we’re doing it this way and let’s make a few adjustments.” You know, it’s a very relational Full Moon in and of itself, and with the rulers squared, even more so. And, you know, for people who aren’t in partnerships, there’s also re-equilibriating how you’re approaching partnership, changing the priority of that if you’re single. Going from like, “Yeah, I’m out on the town” to “I’m gonna lay low” or “I’ve been laying low. I think I wanna get out there.” You know, these relational transits speak to how we are approaching relationships in our life, not just if we have a partner.

KS: Yes. Yeah, I agree. I think it’s more broad than just romantic relationships. And Venus is actually involved in two aspects here: the square to Mars, of course, rulers of the luminaries, but she is also in a very tight sextile to Jupiter. And so, I don’t think it takes away the Venus-Mars, but that Venus-Jupiter sextile—there’s some sort of hopeful encounter or breakthrough or an adjustment that locks something that is a little bit hard to access perhaps. So she’s kind of got two different things going on here, I guess.

AC: Yeah, I would say that Venus wins when Venus and Mars disagree in this particular situation.

KS: Configuration, yeah.

AC: Because we have Mars in a Venus-ruled sign, and Venus has got a perfect aspect to a strong benefic. And so, you know, as far as the way that that rearrangement will look, it’ll probably look like a rearrangement towards the Venusian rather than a rearrangement towards the martial.

KS: Yes.

CB: All right. Venus is also in the superior position. And then it looks like in the minutes, when you get down to it, Venus squares Mars first and completes that. But then Jupiter is just slightly later at 23°42’ Sag. So Venus then immediately moves to the sextile with Jupiter.

KS: Yeah.

AC: Right.

KS: Yeah, it’s a quick transition from a disagreement to some good news or something positive.

CB: Right. A disagreement or a separation that’s necessary or constructive in order to move onto success or growth later.

KS: Yeah.

AC: Or with Venus being in a more victorious position here, being able to patch up a disagreement or move beyond a rift.

CB: Right. So the unifying theme of Venus dominating over the separating theme of Mars.

AC: Right. Still having to deal with the separating because Mars is right there.

CB: Right. The question of separation arises, but ultimately, the Venusian tendency wins out.

AC: Yeah.

KS: Totally.

AC: Yeah, that’ll be the direction of it. And that won’t be possible for all people, in all situations, but it’ll push in that direction.

CB: Sure. All right, so we’re getting towards the end of this. Are there some other major themes that we meant to touch on, that we have not gotten to yet, in terms of the middle or later part of the month? Oh, election, thank you. Kristin Gore just reminded me from the audience. We have an audience of patrons who are joining us today for the live recording of this episode, which I am suddenly extremely thankful of, because I would otherwise completely forget the election for this month. Let me see if I can pull it up. All right, so Leisa Schaim and I spent a while—actually it was a lot of fun, a few months ago—where we sat down to, for the first time, pick out a group of electional charts for the entire year ahead, where we picked out the best chart we could find for each month. Then we sold that in a yearly electional report, which is still available on the podcast website. But the best chart we could find for this month—of course there’s no way to escape the Mercury retrograde. It’s like that’s happening. It’s happening all month. Neptune’s very prominent, as we’ve said. There’s no way to get around that. So sometimes it’s like you have questions—when stuff like that happens—of how much to try to avoid it or downplay it versus how much just to lean into it. And this is a little bit of a lean-into-it because it does make that Mercury retrograde prominent, and it’s still relatively early in the first half of that cycle. But the electional chart we came up with for this month, it’s set for March 13, 2019, at about 7:20 AM. In other words, set the ascendant in your location at about 23° of Pisces, which should be just after or right about sunrise. So the way to use this electional chart is basically just set the chart for your location, for your city, and then adjust the time until the ascendant is just below the Sun, so that the Sun will have just risen the morning of the election. So the purpose of this electional chart is to get Pisces rising, so that Jupiter is ruling the ascendant. And it’s located up in Sagittarius in the tenth whole sign house. Again, it’s one of those things we’ve talked about a few times already this year—and that you’ve said, Austin—which is just when in doubt, try to focus on Jupiter in Sagittarius most of this year, and try and squeeze as much out of that transit as you can.

AC: Yeah.

CB: Yeah, so that’s what we’re doing here, Pisces rising. Jupiter in Sagittarius in the tenth whole sign house. It’s a good 10th house election, or at least it’s focused more on 10th house matters pertaining to career, reputation, overall direction, and so on and so forth. The Moon is in Gemini, transiting through the fourth whole sign house at 11° of Gemini, and it’s applying to a trine with Venus, which is at 14° of Aquarius in the 12th house, which is not great. Although that trine from the Moon in an angular house is helping Venus out a little bit. Retrograde Mercury is conjunct the ascendant at 25° of Pisces. So it’s not a great chart for communication-type matters with Mercury retrograde in Pisces. And that’s kind of emphasized a little bit more with Mars transiting through the 3rd house in a day chart, which may reemphasize some potential issues in terms of communication. But overall, it’s still a good growth-oriented Jupiter election-type chart by making Jupiter the ruler of the ascendant. And this is actually one of the last Jupiter elections that you can get before Jupiter goes retrograde here in about a month. So we’re getting pretty close to Jupiter stationing retrograde, which is then gonna take up a sizable chunk of the next several months. So this is getting towards the end of when you can still do Jupiter elections before it goes retrograde, and then it adds that additional complication to electional charts from that point forward.

AC: Yeah, yeah, Jupiter is in Sag until November, but we are not that far out from the retrograde phase. And retrograde Jupiter in Sag is not a pile of flaming garbage. I mean, I imagine y’all still probably end up using it, and I’ll end up using it. It’s just not quite as primo.

CB: Yeah, definitely. So that’s one of the reasons we wanted to take advantage of it here, even though it puts us in the middle of the Mercury retrograde. But as with all Mercury retrogrades, you can’t just stop doing anything for three weeks. You gotta still do stuff, and you still gotta initiate things and make actions. So you’ve just gotta try to mitigate that by doing them at the most optimal times that you can, and that’s part of the purpose of using this electional chart. So that’s the election for the month. We have three other electional charts that we’re gonna go over on The Auspicious Elections Podcast, which Leisa and I are gonna record probably today or tomorrow and then release to patrons who are on the $5 tier. So you can find out more information about that at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/Subscribe, etc. All right.

KS: I love it. That’s great.

CB: All right, so that’s the electional chart for the month. That is also pretty much the forecast.

KS: Thanks to Kristin for our reminder.

CB: Yeah, thank you. You saved me on that, Kristin. So thanks for that reminder. Are we missing or overlooking any major things, in terms of the forecast this month?

AC: Well, things change in the last couple of days of the month. You know, we get Venus into Pisces. But mostly, we should deal with that in April. And then we get Mars. I believe on the last day of the month, Mars moves into Gemini, and that’s really more of an April topic. I think what’s important to remember for this month is that everything changes at the end. Whatever Mars is like is not what April’s going to be like.

KS: Yeah.

AC: April’s gonna be much zippier.

KS: Yes, ‘zippier’ is a great word for April. So if you feel like you’re stuck in the slime or the sluggishness of a lot of the Pisces puddle energy in March, it will be different by the time we get to April.

AC: Yeah, it’ll feel like somebody hit fast-forward.

KS: Yeah, there’ll be no more stubborn bulls or bulldozers in April.

CB: All right, brilliant. Well, I think that brings us to the end of this forecast episode then. Thanks, guys. That was a lot of fun. It’s always good catching up with you two each month.

AC: Yeah, always.

KS: Totally. Thank you for having me/us.

AC: Yeah. So, Kelly, what do you have going on this month?

CB: Yeah, we forgot at the beginning of the episode. We just jumped into talking about Lobstergate and other pressing matters, that we didn’t even talk about what you guys are working on.

KS: Oh, yeah, working on stuff. So I have actually got my next online class, which is loosely titled, ‘What Should I Do With My Life?: AKA Looking at Life Direction In the Chart’. That’s gonna start in the last week of March. So as late in the Pisces puddle as we could push it. But the sign-up info for that is on the website now. And other than that, I’m just starting to prep for NORWAC. A post-conference workshop coming up there, a big speech to give with one of the keynotes. So that is gonna be here before we know it. What about you guys?

CB: We have to plan whatever we’re doing for the podcast event that we’re suddenly now doing at the beginning of the conference.

KS: Yeah, I love how we just throw in extra stuff. Oh, I know what else. On the topic of throwing in extra stuff, I have just been chatting with some of the crew down in New York. And I will be in New York the weekend before NORWAC, May 18, to teach a workshop on progressions, I think. So I’ll have some details about that in the weeks to come, if you’re in New York. But otherwise, yeah, NORWAC and our podcast. It’s gonna be amazing.

CB: Podcast event, pre-conference event happening, what is it? Thursday or something like that?

KS: Thursday night.

CB: I heard that NORWAC is actually almost sold out. This was a few weeks ago they announced that they were down to a hundred tickets left, and then it was just gonna be booked up. And that was a while ago. So I don’t even know where they’re at now. But if you haven’t gotten your ticket yet, I would recommend getting it pretty soon. I know the hotel itself is already booked up. So people will have to find a roommate, or there’s other hotels that are really close that are being used for overflow.

KS: Yeah. What do you have on, Austin, this month? Other than birthday celebrations.

AC: Yeah. So at the very end of the month, I need to pick the exact days, but hopefully it’ll be announced by the time this podcast is out. I’m beginning my year one and year two classes. So it’s gonna basically be the rest of the year. Year one is we’re gonna build from the beginning and do signs, planets, aspects, houses, dignity, fixed stars, synodic cycles, and chart synthesis. And if you’re comfortable with those things, then you can join year two, or if you graduated from my year one. We’re gonna do timing techniques, remediation, introductory planetary magic, electional. And so, both of those are big, year-long classes, and we’re gonna get started end of March/early April. And I’ll have that up on my website in the next couple of days.

KS: Love it.

CB: Awesome.

KS: That sounds great.

CB: Sounds great. So that’s AustinCoppock.com. Kelly’s website of course is KellysAstrology.com.

KS: Yes, thank you. What about you, Chris?

CB: I did want to mention—I just remembered—scholarships have been announced, and there’s a bunch of scholarships available for conferences right now. So I know NORWAC has a general scholarship, and they have a diversity scholarship as well. So you can find out more information about that on their website, norwac.net. AFAN, I think, has announced scholarships are available, both to attend conferences, but also, educational scholarships for other things, right?

KS: Yes. Yeah, all their scholarships are now open for application.

CB: Okay. And what’s their website? It’s like afan.org?

KS: Dot-org. Yeah, afan.org.

CB: Okay.

KS: And norwac.net, I think, for the NORWAC ones.

CB: Yeah. And the other big conference this year is the NCGR conference in Baltimore in August/September. They’ve also announced that they have some scholarships that are available to NCGR members, so look into that. And I’ve been meaning to mention I’m speaking at the Astrological Association Conference in the UK for the first time in June. And I’m doing a day-long workshop on time-lord techniques, zodiacal releasing and annual profections, and that’s starting to fill up as well. So if people are in the area, they should definitely look into that and check that out, cuz I’m excited about giving those workshops.

KS: Excellent.

CB: But I think that’s it in terms of events for me. I’m adding a bunch of stuff to my zodiacal releasing course. Like I said, Leisa and I did that workshop here in Denver, where we went through people’s charts. And I recently added that to my zodiacal releasing class, as well as my Hellenistic astrology course. And I’ve just been adding a bunch of new content to that course recently, and that’s the main thing that I’m focused on. So people can sign up for that anytime that they want, because it’s a study-at-your-own-pace course, just so you can adapt it to your own schedule. So you can find out more information about that at TheAstrologySchool.com. And I think that’s it, guys.

KS: Wow. We survived.

CB: All right. Yes, we made it through our very brief, two-hour-and-twenty-minute episode. Thanks to all the patrons. There’s like 40 patrons here that are joining us.

KS: Thank you, guys.

CB: That’s been a lot of fun. And it’s also been helpful hearing some of those comments and seeing some of the discussions. And thanks just in general. I meant to give a shoutout and a thanks to all patrons who have been supporting the podcast. This was a big month for the podcast. Like I said, I’d been putting off talking about zodiacal releasing for a long time because that’s one of the core techniques that I teach in my course. And it’s only through having the support of the patrons and what’s that become through the support they give through Patreon that I’m able to do some of those things, and host some of those discussions here, like with Steven Forrest and Freedom Cole and everybody else. So thanks everybody for supporting that work. I think it’s making a difference in the community and helping us to talk about not just important issues, but also, interesting techniques. Yeah, so thanks for the help on that. All right, that’s it. Thanks, guys, for joining me today. And I guess we’ll be back again next month to talk about the forecast for April in a few weeks, yeah?

KS: Yeah.

AC: Yeah.

KS: We will, at the end of the Pisces puddle, we’ll reconvene.

AC: Well, actually, Chris, sorry. I also have to thank my patrons.

CB: Okay.

AC: I can’t let you go being gracious. Thank you so much to my patrons who support my absurd, literary tendencies and need to take four times as long as I should to write things. Thank you all for being patient with me and giving me the time and space I need to do what, at least, I think is the best work possible. Let’s see, what else am I doing this month? There’s something I forgot. Oh, well, I’m also busy electing things for Sphere + Sundry, but I can’t tell you what.

KS: Yes, very exciting.

CB: Various magical, occult things?

AC: Yes, goodies.

CB: Concoctions? All right, awesome. Well, this has been fun. Thanks a lot for joining me today, guys. Thanks to all the patrons and everybody for listening. This has been Episode 195, I think, of The Astrology Podcast. So we’re gonna hit Episode 200 here pretty soon.

AC: Do we get to be 200?

CB: I mean, we might be able to do it. I wanted to actually pitch you guys an idea, and you’ll have to let me know what you think about this maybe later. But we’ve done planets, we’ve done signs. I’m starting to feel like it’s time to do houses. And I was gonna ask you guys if you have any interest in doing houses. All right, save that. Think about that.

KS: Yeah, it’s just scheduling. It’s just gonna be the time. I mean, you know I’ll do whatever you guys like, I’m happy. But we’ll have to get Austin’s opinion.

AC: Yeah. I mean, I’ll do it. I can’t tell you when I’ll do it at this moment. But yeah, let’s do it.

CB: All right.

KS: Let’s make it a 2019 project, so we’ve got no pressure to get it done quickly.

CB: That sounds good. Well, one way or another, Episode 200 is coming up. So we’ll see if we can make that coincide and do something together. Yeah, so we’ll be back again next month. That’s it for the podcast for February. So we’ll see you again in March. So thanks everybody for listening, and we’ll see you next time.

KS: Bye.

AC: Bye.