At 44, I went into surgical onset menopause due to a cancer diagnosis. That was my turning point. Or at least the most significant one I’d had up to that point in my life.

At first, the changes were intense. Hot flashes you could see happening in real time as my body temperature went up 10 degrees in 3 seconds, night sweats that soaked the sheets, and light sensitivity that made restful sleep a constant challenge.

But more significantly, it was the loss of who I was before the surgery. The loss of my youth and innocence that it took from me. I remember coming home from the hospital the day I got the news and sitting in my living room bawling my eyes out. Was I scared? Sure. But the thing that really shook me wasn’t fear. It was being confronted with the reality that I was now going to be a crone.

In my mind, I had just gone from being a woman in her prime with my whole life ahead of me, and now, in an instant, I was facing old age. That’s what made me cry the most. The loss of my youth and who I knew myself to be, because I knew she would now be forever gone.

Sometimes our turning points arrive in a crash. Other times, they show up not as a warning or an alarm, but something else entirely.

More like a call.

The thing that once we see it, or hear it, we can’t unsee it, unhear it. When a turning point arrives like this, it’s less about being frightened and more about being confronted with a truth. It names something we didn’t have the language for before it arrives.

It says: This is the moment.

This is what all the previous moments were building toward. It’s time.

The Call

The call describes a specific kind of awakening. Not the gentle stirring of hope returning. Not the sudden shock of something collapsing. The call is something more final than either of those things. It’s more like the complete version of one’s Self being summoned. Not the partial, defended, still-becoming version. The complete one.

It says: This is where I am now.

The call comes from something larger than our small self. It’s a moment not produced by our own effort but as a culmination of the full arc of our life’s journey. Astrologically, it coincides with Saturn moving over our midheaven. It arrives only when the journey before us is one we are now ready to live. It wouldn’t have been possible before now, even if we had wanted it.

The awakening that arises with a call is comprehensive. It summons the full Self — not the version of ourselves we’ve been until now, the one who stayed small for others, hid their brilliance, was afraid to shine fully.

For some, this completeness is the most frightening part.

To be fully seen by oneself and others without the protective editing that ordinary life previously entailed, that is what a call demands. The shadow of the call is the fear of what that exposure asks:

What am I afraid will happen if I’m fully seen for who I am?

This is a valid inquiry and worth sitting with. Because the real journey we are meant to live cannot begin until we trust that what we already carry within us is enough. That we need to let go, disrobe, and come out from hiding in plain sight. To let the world know who we really are.

The call signals that the game is up. Our time of hiding is over. Our true Self, buried in old identities, in finished chapters, in the accumulated weight of who we were told to be, is now summoned to step forward.

And the irreversible changes that the call demands are precisely what make a new life possible. Our bodies know it, even when our minds are still trying to explain it away.

That’s what this week felt like for me.

I began writing this Substack eight months ago with only the vague idea that I was supposed to be doing something different with my life than working in the studio. I felt called to leave, but I didn’t know where I was headed, why, or what for.

It may have seemed to others that things happened quickly and without effort this week. That’s not true. And at times, it’s easy even for me to forget how long the process has actually taken, how hard the journey has been at different points. (It’s been far longer than just the past 8 months!) So before I tell you what’s changed, I want to take a moment to remember how far I’ve come and to give you the context for what this work will be about moving forward.

For the first time in what has felt like an incredibly long time, I feel like I’ve managed to free myself and swim to shore. To make landfall, as they say, when you’ve been at sea.

The call I described above, the one that arrived this week, didn’t come as a crash. It came as clarity. A settling. The sense that everything I’d been circling finally had a center.

That’s what a call feels like when it arrives in a quieter season.

Locate Where You Are

The body can only share what it knows when it is actually inhabited. Many of us spend our days disconnected from our bodies, living through our minds instead. We try to figure things out, believing the “how” is up to us, rather than feeling into the knowing that always exists in the body.

Knowing where we are is how we begin. But we can’t know where we are if we aren’t present, and the present moment can only ever happen when we’re in our body. So we start there.

Practice for the week: Give yourself five minutes each day to land fully in your body. Then ask: what’s my next step?

Getting into your body, being fully present, asking for guidance, that’s only the first part. The second part is paying attention to the answer you receive and trusting it. Even if it comes as a feeling, a memory, or words that sound like someone else speaking in your mind.

Practice means doing this over and over until you trust what you receive, and you know on a deep gut level that it’s the correct answer for you.

Reflection for the week: What if my body has all my answers?

What this place is becoming

If you’ve had your own turning point, I’d love to hear it in the comments. The more we name our experience, the easier it becomes to locate ourselves in it. And location matters if you want to move in a new direction.

That’s what this publication is now, more clearly than it’s ever been: a place to locate yourself. Body, sky, and the middle of life. Navigational tools for women in midlife who are somewhere in their own crossing and need a map more than they need more advice.

Writing this into clarity over eight months has asked something real of me. Having readers while I did that, both free and paid, those who came early and those who arrived recently, has been specific and strange (truly) and genuinely meaningful. I don’t take it lightly that you’ve been here while I was still figuring out where here was.

Some of you may leave now that the direction is clearer. That makes sense, and I’m grateful for the time you spent. For those who stay, you’ll know without hesitation whether this is the right place for you.

I think you already do.

June is a turning point month as we approach the Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere and the Winter Solstice in the Southern Hemisphere. For that reason, I wanted us to start by taking the time to fully land in our bodies exactly where we are right now in our lives. Each month, we’ll build on the practices from the previous month. However, you can always return to any of the previous practices when you feel called.

This month, we’ll be working with a Deep Rest exercise that is simple and requires little by way of skills, mobility, or props. We’ll then follow up with a writing exercise to help us excavate what wants to be brought into our awareness.

Read more

Before diving in today, I wanted to give you a heads up that I’ll be hosting our first OPEN STUDIO Zoom Social next month as a new addition to the paid subscriber library. You’ll find more details at the bottom of today’s post. I hope you’ll join us. It would be great to see your smiling face in the flesh/on camera!

What does the energy of Sagittarius feel like?

You may have heard a lot about this Full Moon in Sagittarius already. If you’re on social media these days, it’s hard not to. There are so many folks talking about the astrology of this moment in time. It’s certainly having a heyday. And I’m all for it, even if I don’t always like or agree with what’s being said by others. As a Sag myself, I do believe that there is value in what astrology has to offer us. It also has its limits, in my opinion.

If you want to hear more about my thoughts on that, you can check out the short video below, that I shot from Jon’s mini truck while I was waiting for the fuel pump to prime. It’s rough and unedited, and it’s the best way I can illustrate what the energy of Sagitarius feels like. This is who I am. This is who you get when you talk to me. We could be talking about pretty much anything, and I’ll find a way to ramble on, dazzling you with my word soup about the things that, from the surface, look totally unrelated, but I’ll find a way to connect them somehow, at least in my own mind.

I started by talking about how people often assume that others have their shit figured out. My father always said, “Don’t make an ass - out of - u - and me.” Then I migrated into the value/use of astrology as a tool and language to help us navigate our life’s journey. You may find it helpful, or entertaining, or you may decide you couldn’t care less what I have to say. Either way, it’s approximately 7 minutes of a good old Siobhan rant if you’re interested.

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What’s being illuminated right now?

I can tell you what’s been coming up for me in my own life. I’ve been sitting with the ideas of freedom, limits, labels, and beliefs. All of which are connected to Sag either by nature or as enemies. Sag’s ruling planet, Jupiter, governs expansion, so by its very nature, Sag is always looking to expand, to grow, to learn, and explore. Sag’s often learn best by doing and then sharing what they’ve learned with others. I’m a great example of this practice because I have a high school education, and most everything I’ve done in life, I've found a way to get paid to learn how to do it. This also makes Sag a bit of a rule breaker. So wherever it falls in our chart, is a place where we generally don’t like being confined. Hence, the enemy issue of labels and limits I spoke of earlier.

Personally, the idea that labels limit who we are, who we believe we can be, or even how others perceive us has been showing up a lot this past week. I had a great conversation with my friend and colleague Kate Lowe about this recently, as we both find ourselves in the second half of our lives and feel that none of what we’ve done in the past seems to fit anymore. Like a dress that’s too tight, and you just want to rip it off. I’ve shared the full hour-long conversation in the paid members’ library, where we dive into how to listen to the Soul. Here’s a short clip from the start if you’d like to meet Kate and hear more about limits and labels. It’s short, less than 2 minutes.

How do our beliefs create freedom or limits in our lives?

This is something that has gotten a lot of attention in the past decade as neuroscience has grown, and the whole field of how we create our reality has expanded. I’m personally deeply fascinated by how our beliefs shape our experience and reality. Less so from the scientific side and much more so from the practice side, the lived experience of what I’ve found to be true for myself. The idea of freedom is closely related to this for me as well.

I see freedom as the active expression of our beliefs in how we create the life we want. Capitalism creates constant pressure, making us feel like we need to be productive or always strategising how to make our lives work. It’s exhausting, the whole trying to figure life out thing, and it’s very much a function of the ego, not the voice of the Soul that operates that way. The key difference between these two ways of being is our belief in which reality is actually true. Truth is another Sag theme.

I feel I’ve always been trying to create the conditions to experience as much freedom as possible in my life. That, and the fact that I am a Sagittarius, has me thinking a lot about freedom with this Sag Full Moon. I believe that freedom is at the heart of what we all want, but how we define it is completely personal. That’s where the journey lies, and no sign captures the quest, the journey, the pilgrimage better than Sag.

As a Sag, I feel that my entire life is the journey. It’s why, for me, every chapter or season of my life is like a temporary spot to rest, fuel up, learn new skills, make new contacts, and then head off on the next leg of the adventure. Where I am now is the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere in my entire life, but it still feels like a stop along the way. The journey is forever unfolding. That is, if we remain open to the adventure that life has to offer us.

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Art isn’t in the tools, materials, or equipment you use. It’s in the way you see the world. - Rick Rubin

Looking for ways to go deeper?

Introducing our new OPEN STUDIO Zoom Social!

Of all the places I’ve lived and all the things I’ve done throughout my life, the things I miss most always come back to the communities I was a part of when I was there. Whether that was village life on Wolfe Island, being part of a community of artists with the Caravan or at the studio here in Tennessee, the daily greeting of yoga students at my studio in Key West, or the weekly meetups in Toronto I had with my business besties. It was the people and our shared interests that kept me coming back.

More and more, we’re spread out across the globe, separated from the people and places that once made us feel at home, which is why I decided to create a new addition to our paid subscriber benefits.

My goal in creating a monthly OPEN STUDIO Zoom Social is to bring all of those people, places, and parts of myself together in one place to be shared with those who helped shape who I am today. If you know what I’m talking about, then I hope you’ll join us. Learn more here.

Subscribe now

New Ways To Work 1:1

If you’ve been wishing you could just have me take a quick look at your chart, now you can! I’ve put together two different ways for us to work together, depending on where you’re at and what you need support with.

The Map + Meaning Session is for focused attention on a specific issue or situation. We’ll use your chart to better understand the terrain you’re moving through, the patterns asking for your attention, and the next honest step your life may already be pointing toward.

This is not a traditional chart reading. We’ll begin with the chart because it gives us a place to start, but the work is about meaning: where you are now, what is asking to be seen, and how to move forward with more trust in what you know.

A Map + Meaning Session is a 1:1 astrology-informed meaning-making session intended for clarity, pattern recognition, and identifying your next honest step. This is an entry session and generally the best first step for most new clients. It is for people who are curious, ready, or standing at a threshold and wanting to understand what is moving in their chart and life.

If you feel like you’ve got a handle on the current transits happening in your life and you’re facing bigger challenges, questions that need answers, a Threshold Intensive is likely a better fit to support you.

A Threshold Intensive is for those moments when you know something is moving and you need a clear, grounded, soul-level conversation to help you meet it. These sessions are designed to meet you in the moments of your life that hold more weight, more urgency, more complexity or emotional charge, and therefore they also hold greater consequences than what we might address in a Map & Meaning Session.

You can learn more about both sessions, including the structure, content, and cost, by clicking on the link/image below.

If you’re not afraid of commitment, you can become a free or paid subscriber above and have me landing in your inbox most weeks.

Last year, when my mother died, something changed. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there was a felt sense that I had moved on in some way in my life. That a new chapter I didn’t even know was coming had begun to unfold before me. At first, the unravelling began slowly. I found myself feeling irritable and grumpy at work. A place where I was normally at ease and enjoyed myself immensely had started to become a noose around my neck. Not the place itself, the people, or even the work, but the need to be somewhere at a certain time felt like it was eating up the hours of my life.

Eventually, one of my colleagues noticed my less than stellar attitude and asked how I was doing. In talking with her, I found myself putting words to what I’d been feeling but had been avoiding. Sometimes what feels comfortable in our lives is mistaken for permanence, and in that moment, I was confronted with the reality that deep down, I knew it was time to move on, but I’d been avoiding seeing it, speaking it, and accepting it.

Like most things in life, once you see what you couldn’t see before, you can’t unsee it. So now that I knew what the irritability and grumpiness were really about, I also had to do something about it. Initially, I went through a period of what felt like a sort of high in which new worlds of opportunties became available to me as I started dreaming about what I’d do with my life if I stopped working at the studio. Coincidentally, this coincided with Uranus moving into Gemini for its first brief transit from July to November. (You might want to reflect on that period yourself to recall whether a similar shift in perception became available to you then.)

During that period, which felt almost like a high, I stopped feeling grumpy and actually thought I might stay on at the studio. It felt like somehow the need for change may not actually be necessary after all. But then Uranus moved back into Taurus for its final stint, and I found myself once again feeling antsy and irritable. During those final months when Uranus was wrapping things up in Taurus for the next 84 years, I found myself squirming a lot. I started this Substack back in September as my initial steps towards moving away from studio work and towards work more like what I used to do. I was still unclear what shape or form that work would take, but it felt like the right move, so I started, not knowing what would come of it.

Your intuition is the echo of the cosmos whispering through you. - Alan Watts

By the time Uranus was set to re-enter Gemini at the end of April, I was quite sure that my days at the studio were over, yet I still had no idea what I was going to do. I didn’t even really understand why I was leaving. I had spent the past year grieving a loss I was bringing on myself. I didn’t want to say goodbye to the connection, community, and camaraderie that daily life at the studio had given me. And yet, I felt something in me just wouldn’t rest. My body was telling me it was time to move on. It just wasn’t telling me what I was moving on to

This is how life works. It’s like a ship’s wheel turning, and it’s up to us to read the weather, to adjust our sails, and have faith that we’ll make it to the shore of the new ground our Soul is yearning for. Sometimes, we don’t listen, though. Instead, we carry on doing what we’ve always done and tell ourselves that this too shall pass. And it will, it always does.

But what might we have missed by ignoring what we know deep down is a call to grow in new ways?

Recently, a former client of mine popped up in my feed again. It’s been several years since we last worked together, and I was happy to see that her work is prospering in all the ways that she had hoped it would. It was clear that she had found her voice and was no longer afraid to use it. That’s what grief does. It changes the terrain that we move through and demands that we adjust our sails. She lost her brother quite unexpectedly last year, and then a week later, her 14-year-old daughter, who had been diagnosed with cancer at age 3 passed away. The result was that she no longer had anything to lose in saying what she really wanted to say. She no longer cared what other people thought of her. It didn’t matter anymore whether she succeeded or failed; she just knew that she had to be fully and unapologetically herself. No more hiding. No more performing. No more pretending to be what she’s not. No more playing small to avoid causing controversy.

This is the kind of energy that we’re moving through this year, and beyond. These stories, hers and my own, are not anomalies. More people than you realise are experiencing this sort of change in their lives right now. You may even find yourself in a similar situation. Perhaps you’re in a different stage of transformation, or maybe you’re just becoming aware of the need for change. Either way, know that the whole planet is undergoing this shift, not just you.

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My Life Is My Practice

Lately, I’ve been trying to figure out how to tell someone what I do now. This is challenging because so much of what I do, and have done throughout my life, has defied categorisation. In the past, labels like yoga teacher, astrologer, boatbuilder, artist, or baker might have worked, but today they all feel too small. While those titles may not be accurate now, if I’m not actually doing that work anymore, those roles all still live inside me.

So right now, I’m deconstructing that. And I’m loving the process. I’m loving being able to rethink everything I thought I wanted or thought I was supposed to want. It’s liberating (there’s Uranus again!) to give myself permission to make shit up and do it. No rule book. No limits on what I can create. No need to explain what I’m doing other than to say, I want to. This excites me, it brings me joy, and that’s all that matters.

For the past 4 years, working in a small ceramic studio made telling people what I did for a living easy. I could even hand them something tangible to show them how I spent my days. This gave me a huge amount of credibility in the eyes of those who need labels to understand the world we live in. But it came nowhere near describing who I actually am, or who I know myself to be.

While those labels may be convenient, they’re extremely limiting. And when we allow ourselves to be defined by them, whether by conscious choice to create a sense of safety and belonging or unconsciously, we tend to forget that who we are in one moment is not who we will always be. In my opinion, we can and should reinvent ourselves regularly.

Recently, I’ve done some travelling, and while away, I was struck by a few things as I visited old friends in new habitats. One spoke with remorse for a life that no longer existed. Lamenting the loss of friendships that they failed to nurture over time, and the lack of real connections in their present life. They seem sadly unhappy about the life they’re living now, like they were stuck inside of it, without the capacity to make different choices. If you find yourself feeling this way, please know that this is never true.

I wondered at first if these were simply signs of the current state of our world. I can only imagine how people all around the globe must be struggling with a huge amount of depression and a sense of hopelessness, given the uncertainty we face politically, economically, and environmentally. But it was more than that. It was the loss of connection, with a community not only of people who are there to support you when you need it, but also to reflect back to you who you are now and also who you’ve been in the past.

We’ve all lived through seasons of our lives in which we’ve lost sight of ourselves. I myself worked a job in a bank for god’s sake, which is nothing like me. I cried every day at that desk job, having to sit there and be yelled at by some person on the phone about a trade I’d failed to settle on time. For some people, this would have been a dream job, or if not that, at least a very manageable, safe job, one they could coast on until retirement, when they would start living the life they really wanted.

But me, I’ve never been able to do that. I used to judge myself for that, but now, as I near the end of my fifth decade, I’ve come to see that this is actually one of my superpowers.

When I was younger, people would try to discourage me from making the decisions that they thought were unrealistic. They told me horror stories about what went wrong for them and warned that the same thing would happen to me if I continued on my reckless and naive path. But now, more than 30 years later, the stories of my mishaps and shortsighted adventures are what make me who I am. Had I not made the mistakes I did, I wouldn’t have these stories to tell today.

And those mistakes, they taught me more than any traditional education ever could.

Seeing Ourselves Clearly, First

You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you. James Baldwin

As I navigate this transitional period in my life, I’ve been revisiting who I am, what I do, and why it matters to me. If you’ve ever had to write a bio for a website or describe your services to a stranger, then you know what I’m talking about. This is hard work, putting into words the vastness of who we know ourselves to be and shrinking it down to make it manageable and understandable for others.

Sometimes, the things I remember about myself as I’m going through the process of this work are hilariously funny, and I wonder to myself, “How could I have possibly forgotten that chapter of my life?” But we do. We all do. And we all need people in our lives to remind us of the totality of who we are because it’s so damn easy to think that the moment of your life right now is all there will ever be. But it’s so not true.

So if you’re really NOT loving what your life looks or feels like right now, do yourself and me a favour and find an old friend and ask them to remind you of who you really are. While I was away, my oldest and dearest friend Audrey, whom I’ve known since I was 17, was surprised by my love and appetite (pun intended) for cooking.

This was a bit of a surprise to me, since I feel like food - the making of it, the eating of it, the shopping for it, the talking about it - all of it, feels so central to who I am. And I imagine that anyone in my present-day life would agree.

But over the years, we’ve seen less and less of each other. Living in different countries, dealing with family loss, illness, and just the practicalities of living have meant our visits have been shorter and often less intimate. There wasn’t an occasion for me to cook for us, that is, until now.

And while she may have been surprised by this version of who I am now, we shared hours and hours reminiscing about the times of our youth, our adventures, the lost family and freinds we both knew and loved and now miss, all of which, while no longer as strong an element in my present life, they were parts of me that very much make up who I am today.

And this is true for all of us. It’s never too late to reach out to an old friend, to invite a neighbour over for a porch hang, or send a handwritten note in the mail to say hello. I think that most of us are just waiting for someone else to do the inviting. Especially as we get older, our world tends to get smaller. It doesn’t have to be that way, though. You can decide today to build bridges rather than fences.

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Change, Transformation, and Alignment All Require Work That Isn’t Easy

The seas of my life have changed, and I’m now in a period of growth and expansion. Which means I need to be willing to endure the challenges that expansion will require. To use another sailing analogy, if you’ve ever been at sea in rough weather and had to get on deck to reef the sail, then you know it can be a daunting task. And pretty much all change is like that. We’re going to have to do things we don’t like or are afraid of to make the new life we dream of a reality.

Most of us can think of at least one thing in our lives that we’d like to change, but when push comes to shove, we often stall, make excuses, or worse, we fight for our limitations and argue about why we can’t have what we say we want. This is essentially a distraction, a delay tactic designed by the ego to keep us on the same trajectory because it equates sameness with safety.

The Soul, on the other hand, craves newness. It wants us to experience the full breadth and depth of who we are during our short time in these physical bodies on this tiny spinning planet in a vast Universe.

We tend to think of getting into alignment or transformation as happening magically without costing us anything that we already have. Like one day we’re experiencing life in a particular way, and then suddenly things fall into place and poof! we’re transformed.

But that is so not the case. Or at least it hasn’t been in my experience. If anything, my experience has been that there is usually a good long while of struggle before any real, lasting change takes place. This is where astrology can be extremely useful as a map to help us anticipate what changes might be coming and how best to prepare ourselves to navigate them. (See notes at the bottom of today’s post for more on that later.)

What I’d like to leave you with today is the invitation to reflect on something in your life that you’d like to change. It could be physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual. Whatever it is, ask yourself the following questions:

1. What is it that I really want?

2. What is it that’s stopping me from having it?

3. Am I being honest with myself?

That last question is the stumper because if you really sit with your answer, you’ll be forced to acknowledge the truth. A truth that perhaps, until now, you’ve been unwilling to face or accept. This is where the work happens.

Because if you really want something, you’ll find a way to make it happen. You always have, and you always will. It may not come together the way that you think it’s supposed to. And it most certainly will require something of you that you’ve not been willing to do until now. But if you really want it, this is the moment when you’ll finally stop lying to yourself about why you haven’t decisively moved towards what it is you really want. Until now, you’ve probably said things like…

I can’t because I don’t have the money
I can’t because I’ll lose my job
I can’t because I’m too old
I can’t because I’ll lose my pension
I can’t because my family will disown me
I can’t because there’s no one to help me

The list is endless when we’re in the stage of denying ourselves the transformation that we not only want but which is actually essential to our humanity. We were not born to stay the same. Like trees and flowers, we’re meant to grow and bloom. We are meant to share our gifts freely with the world, gather new skills and experiences from our journey, and share those too. We’re meant to live creatively, to be endlessly growing, learning, failing, and starting over again, just like the moon waxes and wanes each month.

What Does This Have To Do With Astrology?

The planets are constantly moving. From the moment you take your first breath until the day you die, they’re moving. And they’re a mirror for us, reminding us that we, too, are cyclic beings. Throughout our lives, we orbit certain people, places, and things.

Who we are expands and contracts, at times we shine, and then we hide, we consolidate, and we communicate.

This is what the stars and planets have to teach us. That we are ever-evolving beings, coming round to learn and re-learn who we are and who we can be over and over again.

I read something today by Ceri Hand, who is a coach and mentor for artists. She said, “Will the real you please stand up?” This was followed by the statement that most artists are making work for an imaginary audience of critics in their heads. Not for themselves.

We could easily say the same thing about our lives, whether we consider ourselves to be artists or not. Just who exactly are we living our lives for?

She closed with the idea that nobody really knows what we’re capable of, not even ourselves. And this is so true.

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Offerings

Introducing our new OPEN STUDIO Zoom Social!

Of all the places I’ve lived and all the things I’ve done throughout my life, the things I miss most always come back to the communities I was a part of when I was there. Whether that was village life on Wolfe Island, being part of a community of artists with the Caravan or at the studio here in Tennessee, the daily greeting of yoga students at my studio in Key West, or the weekly meetups in Toronto I had with my business besties. It was the people and our shared interests that kept me coming back.

More and more, we’re spread out across the globe, separated from the people and places that once made us feel at home, which is why I decided to create a new addition to our paid subscriber benefits.

My goal in creating a monthly OPEN STUDIO Zoom Social is to bring all of those people, places, and parts of myself together in one place to be shared with those who helped shape who I am today. If you know what I’m talking about, then I hope you’ll join us. Learn more here.

New Ways To Work 1:1

If you’ve been wishing you could just have me take a quick look at your chart, now you can!

I’ve put together two different ways for us to work together, depending on where you’re at and what you need support with. The Map + Meaning Session is for focused attention on a specific issue or situation. We’ll use your chart to better understand the terrain you’re moving through, the patterns asking for your attention, and the next honest step your life may already be pointing toward.

This is not a traditional chart reading. We’ll begin with the chart because it gives us a place to start, but the work is about meaning: where you are now, what is asking to be seen, and how to move forward with more trust in what you know.

A Map + Meaning Session is a 1:1 astrology-informed meaning-making session intended for clarity, pattern recognition, and identifying your next honest step.

This is an entry session and generally the best first step for most new clients.

It is for people who are curious, ready, or standing at a threshold and wanting to understand what is moving in their chart and life.

If you feel like you’ve got a handle on the current transits happening in your life or you’re facing bigger challenges, questions that need answers, The Threshold Intensive is what I’ve created to support you.

The Threshold Intensive is for those moments when you know something is moving and you need a clear, grounded, soul-level conversation to help you meet it.

These sessions are designed to meet you in the moments of your life that hold more weight, more urgency, more complexity or emotional charge and which hold greater consequence in this moment than what we might address in a Map & Meaning Session.

You can learn more about both sessions, including the structure, content, and cost, by clicking on the link/image below.

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Before we dive into this week’s post, I wanted to put a call out for questions from you all. My friend and colleague, Kate Lowe and I are doing a video Q&A next week, and we’re gathering questions in advance from our clients and community. The topic for the first video is “How to Listen To The Soul.” We decided on this topic because we both feel this is the first place where we get tripped up as humans. We’ve been conditioned to listen to our ego, and either don’t know how the voice of our Soul communicates with us, have difficulty discerning our ego from our Soul, or we forget that we can choose to listen to it over our ego.

The more specific your questions, the better we’ll be able to help you answer them. You can send your questions to me directly by responding to this email or by leaving a comment below. Once the video has been recorded, I’ll share clips here with you. The full-length video will be available in the resources library for paid subscribers.

Thanks in advance for your questions. The more information I have about who you are and the challenges you’re facing in your life, the easier it is for me to make the work useful for you. Commenting and asking questions are always welcome because everyone learns, myself included, when one person is brave enough to speak up.

New Moon in Taurus at 26°

This New Moon is asking us to connect what dominates our mind and thoughts with what’s actually happening in our Taurus-ruled body. For most of us, we’re either hanging out in our heads or living in our bodies. One realm often feels more natural and comfortable for many of us, so much so that we may avoid the other altogether. This New Moon wants us to begin a dialogue between the mind and body to find out what’s really going on, for what the mind says and what the body tells us are not always the same thing.

My approach to astrology differs from some astrologers in that, when I engage with the planets, what I’m really doing is allowing myself to be guided, to be led. I see the planets as Star Beings who, like all of our spiritual guides, are here to support us and help us find our way in life so we don’t forget who we really are.

Each of us is a Soul that has taken up residence temporarily in a physical body. You can think of this a bit like squatting; we don’t own the body we’re housed in, we’re just borrowing it for a finite amount of time. During that time, we often forget our true nature; our Soul is who we really are. As a result, we start to view ourselves and life through the lens of our small self or ego. But our ego doesn’t know that we are actually a Soul, so it feels under threat pretty much all the time and is therefore constantly on guard, trying to keep us safe. In today’s uncertain world, our egos are overly vigilant. Our Soul, however, knows that we are always safe, for who we are is eternal. Our body, while it may well be in danger at times, is not who we really are.

I think of our ego a bit like a scared little kid who is afraid of monsters in the closet. Even when you show them that there’s no monster in the closet, they don’t always believe you. Sometimes they need you to stay with them and help them find ways to soothe themselves. This soothing is what regulates our nervous system and allows us to feel safe so we can try new things, take measured risks, change who we’ve been in the past and experience something new in our lives.

However, soothing our nervous system is not the only goal here. And this New Moon is reminding us that we also need to be willing to feel the things that our bodies have been holding on to for us. The things we’ve been avoiding, resisting, and trying to push away in the hopes that if we just soothed ourselves enough, eventually we’d feel safe to make the changes we really want to experience in life.

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What soothing looks like to Taurus

Venus is the ruler of both Taurus and Libra. In Taurus, it’s the lover of all things sensual in the earthy domain of the 2nd house. In Libra and its natural rulership of the airy 7th house, it’s more intellectual or relational; it’s interested in justice, fairness, and cooperation. What Taurus seeks is a sense of self-worth through creating tangible demonstrations of what it loves and values most. A fine wine, an expensive suit, a spa day, a comfortable home, a lush garden, and a large cushion in one’s savings account are all expressions of how the energy of Taurus lives in us and through us.

Taurus, more than most signs, knows something about comfort. It also rules our physical bodies. So when we experience even the slightest discomfort, our ego tends to reach for what it believes will bring us back to our previous level of comfort as a way to avoid feeling what’s happening in the body that it labels as different, and therefore scary, like the monster in the closet.

But our bodies are like beacons. They’re sending us signals all the time, just like our guides are. And they want us to pay attention. They want us to be partners with them, trusting that the information they’re sending us is real, useful, and valid. In fact, it's through our bodies that our intuition speaks loudest to us. And our intuition is the voice of our Soul, speaking directly to us, using our body as the instrument.

So pain, dis-comfort, dis-ease, these are all forms of information that most of us dis-regard.

But what if we started paying attention to what our bodies are trying to tell us?

What if we asked ourselves what we’ve traded to maintain comfort?

And by doing so, identify what we have sacrificed in return for that comfort?

Maybe it’s the job that pays just enough, so we stop asking what it’s costing us. Things that we used to love and value, things that no paycheck can replace and yet we silently allowed them to fall by the wayside.

And where are we investing in things that no longer match what we value?

Maybe it's a friendship that feels unequal in support. Or a home that makes us feel like someone we no longer recognise. Or a wardrobe that reflects the job we do, but not the person we know ourselves to be. Maybe it’s our body, and when we look in the mirror, we wonder who the person is that’s staring back at us.

When does clinging and hoarding stop being about stability and become a need to constantly accumulate to avoid the discomfort that arises when we stop?

Much of what Taurus wants is to maintain level ground, to be steady, to be a rock. But it also wants us to be present to who we really are, what we actually love and value, and to claim the self-worth that comes with knowing the answer to those questions.

Waking up

This New Moon invites us to dive deeply into our unexamined motivations.

Where are we using comfort to hide who we really are and what we actually love?

Who might we become if we were willing to feel what we’ve been too afraid to feel until now?

What might be possible if we gave up the fear of the monsters in the closet and decided to trust ourselves, trust our Soul, implicitly?

Self-trust doesn't require the absence of doubt. But it does demand that we move forward and take action despite feeling uncertain, maybe even afraid. And with that fear, there will most likely be dis-comfort in the body. This Taurus Moon is reminding us that we’ll have a really hard time doing that if our nervous system is constantly telling us that we’re not safe.

With Taurus as our guide, we’re invited to go beyond the surface level of the chatter in our heads and explore what our bodies have been trying to tell us.

How often have we ignored the pain, dismissed the uneasy feeling, accepted the diagnosis, or taken the prescription without ever asking what the message was?

I’m certainly not advocating for pretending disease doesn’t exist. What I am saying is, can it really hurt to ask a different set of questions, for once? And sit quietly long enough to hear the answers your Soul has been trying to tell you, that you’ve ignored.

We live in a cooperative universe that is always supporting us. However, you have to decide to believe in that reality before you can leverage the power of the unseen world to support you. What we spend most of our lives doing is believing that our personal action is the only way to create what we desire.

The truth is, the unseen world is limitless. Our Soul is limitless. Waking up to that truth doesn’t happen suddenly; it unfolds slowly over time, the way Taurus likes to move. One risk taken after another slowly builds enough belief that we begin to trust ourselves, and in doing so, we decide that life isn’t what we thought it was. Waking up is the opposite of always holding our breath and waiting for the other shoe to drop. It’s the long, slow exhale. The ahhh, of releasing everything we’ve been trying to carry on our own that was never meant for us to begin with. I once heard it described as,

“The moment we stop seeking and become the seeing itself.”

Doesn’t that sound easier than trying to figure everything out on your own?

For this New Moon, I invite you to go outside. Find a place in nature where you can sit quietly and observe your surroundings. Choose a spot to rest and reflect, and ask what your environment is reflecting to you. Trust that nature is communicating with you, guiding you, supporting you, at all times. When you take the time to listen, you may find that you feel far more supported, at ease, safe, and more comfortable than all the indulgences your ego convinced you to use to keep the monsters at bay.

Hello from the road!

I’m currently still on the west coast of Canada, enjoying sea air and cooler weather. Then I’m heading to Winnipeg in a few days to visit another old friend. In between doing fun things like whale watching and qi gong on the dock, I wanted to share a few quick thoughts with you on Pluto’s retrograde in Aquarius, which began on May 6th.

Pluto was discovered in 1930 and was considered to be the 9th planet from the Sun in our solar system. However, it was classified as a dwarf planet in 2006, though there is nothing dwarf like about Pluto’s power and impact in my opinion. Pluto is a baller. It holds real power, and whatever it touches, it transforms entirely. Pluto’s uniqueness lies in its orbit, which is extremely slow and irregular. These two things tell us quite a lot about its impact on our lives. For one, its effect on us is subtle in pacing but thorough in depth. It takes its time to make its way through our charts, moving through all 12 signs in 248 years. It also moves in shorter and longer stays, depending on which sign it’s in. Symbolically, this hints at certain signs requiring more time than others to do the level of deep work that Pluto demands.

Pluto first entered Aquarius, the sign it is in now, in March of 2023. However, due to its retrograde cycle, it wasn’t until November 19th, 2024, that it landed there fully and completed its transit through Capricorn. It will now remain in the sign of Aquarius until 2044, with a roughly 163-day retrograde period each year. This means that Pluto spends almost half of every year moving backwards instead of forward. That’s where we are now, about to turn around and travel back through what we’ve already done, experienced, learned, witnessed, and believed, so we can determine whether what we move forward with actually serves our deepest transformation.

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One step forward, two steps back

Retrogrades are basically planetary do-overs. They give us the chance to go back and change what doesn’t feel quite right before we move on. Some of the ways this happens are through a process of:

• re-thinking what we’ve done

• re-visiting how far we’ve come

• re-imagining where we might go

• re-building what supports us

• re-committing to what matters most to us

• re-investing in our relationships

• re-examining our motives and means

• re-evaluating our skills and resources

• re-considering how we might act in the future

I quite enjoy retrograde periods because I’m reflective by nature. For me, this process feels normal, ordinary even. Those who know me well know that I am always thinking deeply about life and asking myself what I can learn from my experiences. For some, though, this process can be quite uncomfortable and feels unnatural.

When we resist the natural flow of a planet’s energy in our lives, this process of reflection can become more painfully instructive than it needs to be. For that reason, I suggest you proactively spend time reflecting on what Pluto’s retrograde in Aquarius from now until October is offering you the opportunity to get clear on.

Ask: What area of my life is asking me to pause and reflect? Then allow your intution to guide you but most importantly, you need to actually make the time to pause. You’ve got 162 days to do this.

When we approach a retrograde period through a one-step-forward, two-steps-back lens, we gain the opportunity to learn something about ourselves and how we choose to live our lives.

This is where our real power lies.

Identifying how we can actively choose to move with the energy of a planet’s cycle, rather than resist it, is what I hope to impart through these posts.

The Basics

Pluto is considered the planet of death because it governs all forms of transformation, reminding us that for anything to be transformed, something must die before anything new can take its place. Pluto’s placement far out in our solar system indicates that what must die is often something hidden, hard to find, and out of sight. It requires us to dig deep into our subconscious understanding of who we are to unearth a power we already possess but have been unaware of. The myth of Innana and Erishkigal is an apt metaphor for the shadow work that Pluto demands of us all.

Pluto is also the planet of wealth, revealing that when we dare to face our inner demons, we come back from our descent into the underworld with a wealth of riches. Through claiming our inner riches, we can transform them into outer wealth. Pluto shows us how to face our shadow and do the work necessary to claim our inner wealth rather than avoid our fears of what lies hidden within.

Through this process, real power is attained. Beyond our willingness to confront our true motivations, Pluto wants to teach us about power - both our own and that of others - so we can employ the right use of that power. To do this, we must move through many stages of power struggles, going from power-over to power-less, personally and collectively.

In the sign of Aquarius, Pluto is teaching us about our collective power struggles. It’s showing us where the real power lies. It’s calling for the death of the old ways of balancing and sharing power to create a total transformation in how our collective power is wielded. Currently, power is equated with wealth.

But what if Pluto is asking us to re-evaluate who actually holds the power? This is what we’re doing together for the next 18 years. And each year we’ll spend half of that time re-flecting on the progress we’re making.

Pluto in the natal chart and by transit

As Pluto moves through the houses of our natal chart, we see how this applies to us personally. Combined with our natal placement of Pluto in our chart, we can synthesise the meaning of this transit for us and what is required to attain the powerful gifts and wealth of riches, inner and outer, that Pluto has to offer us.

Note: Pluto by transit will likely move through more than one house, so more than one area of your life may be impacted during its stay in Aquarius.

Where Pluto sits in our natal chart shows us where we have the potential to hold real power in our lives, to dive into the deepest parts of ourselves and our lives, to investigate what’s really going on, to attain significant levels of wealth - both inner and outer.

As an example, in my own chart, Pluto sits in the 2nd house in the sign of Virgo.

The 2nd house reveals what we do to make money, our values, and our self-worth.

Virgo is a sign of discernment and wants to expend only the necessary energy to get the job done. Efficiency is its guiding star, and systems are its best friend.

Pluto asks that we dig deep and be willing to let things die or fall away so that what’s real and honest can be centred and our inner/outer riches made tangible.

I see this through my deep, penetrating investigation (Pluto) into my values and how I demonstrate them in the ways I earn a living (2nd house). I’ve spent my adult life learning what I value most, often by first doing things that didn’t align with my values. I am continuously adjusting what I do and how I do it to make my work more congruent with my personal values. (Virgo)

This has also been at the heart of the work I’ve done with clients, which is how I’ve earned a living and created wealth in my life. Most of my clients have found themselves at some point in a conundrum where they were earning good money, but they didn’t feel good about what they were doing or how it was done. My role has been to help them uncover what they value most and then support them in creating and executing strategies that allow them to demonstrate their values in their work, thereby creating wealth that is congruent with their deepest sense of self-worth.

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What Pluto does in transit is another thing altogether. Because it moves so slowly, its greatest impact is on the collective, rather than the individual level. That is, unless it happens to make contact with a personal planet in your chart. With a tight orb, planets that are sitting between 2-7° Aquarius will be impacted most strongly during this year’s retrograde. Planets in the same degrees in the fixed signs of Taurus, Leo, and Scorpio will also feel the intensity of this retrograde more acutely. And those with planets in the same degrees in Gemini, Libra, Sag, and Aries will feel supported by the retrograde.

As the ruler of death in the chart, Pluto’s transit through Aquarius is teaching us lessons on a collective level about how we navigate death as a culture. Clearly, we have a lot to learn in that area. Death is still a very taboo subject in Western society. The majority of people fear death and therefore do not plan for the one eventuality that we can never avoid. Which seems strange to me given we spend so much time planning for our education, having a family, building a career, and our retirement. We’re seeing changes in this thinking on a collective level, though, with countries now passing legislation to allow for medical suicide. In Canada, this is called MAID, or medical assistance in dying.

Pluto’s transit through Aquarius can teach us how to care for each other in communal settings, how to extract the gifts and wisdom hidden within loss, including large-scale loss similar to what we experienced during COVID, and how to navigate the death of the current systems that have supported us collectively.

As Pluto forms an opposition to Jupiter in Leo this summer, we’ll be standing at the opposite side of the conjunction that began at the start of 2020. Oppositions give us the chance to see things from the other side, the other person’s perspective, or in this case, Leo/Aquarius represents the ruler vs. the people. The collective noise is getting louder every day with ‘the people’ taking a stand for their rights and demanding that the billionaires pay their dues. One scan of the day’s headlines reveals how this is playing out in multiple ways simultaneously across the globe.

Looking for meaning on a personal level

To wrap this up, I’ll leave you with what I'm noticing myself and how I see this playing out on a larger scale in real time. Based on my natal placement of Pluto in Virgo in the 2nd house, I am personally most successful, both monetarily and in terms of my own self-worth, when I use my gifts of penetrating insight and discernment to help myself and others to align their values with how they earn a living. This is the natal interpretation of my Pluto placement.

By transit, Pluto is moving through the early degrees of Aquarius in my 6th house, which is another work house. The 6th house shows us the best systems, structures, and daily routines that support the work we do and how to maintain optimal health. We’ve been seeing signs of change in how we work in the world ever since Pluto transited Capricorn and COVID made it possible for millions of people to work from home. This began an era in which corporations had to examine what they were asking of employees. And now with Pluto in Aquarius, those same employees are pushing back even more. With the average gas price per gallon in the US ($4.54) now costing more than half the national hourly minimum wage($7.25), we’re certain to see massive changes in how we work over the coming 18 years of this transit.

I’ve also seen a noticeable increase in coaches in the online space calling out the industries they’ve been a part of for unethical practices. In the wellness space, they’ve been focused on the manipulation and predatory practices of mostly male spiritual teachers. While in the business coaching space, they’re calling out capitalism and the ways that we’ve been trained to believe we always need more, while at the same time depending on the underpaid labor of those in the support services, like the healing arts.

What are you seeing that looks/feels different? I‘d love to hear in the comments.

To reflect more deeply on Pluto’s retrograde over the next 5+ months as it moves through Aquarius, you’ll first need a copy of your chart. You can get one free here without providing your email address. Or, you can get a free one here if you’d like to store your chart as well as the charts of friends/family. Note: Without an accurate birthtime, you will not be able to determine your house positions. If you’re serious about learning what your chart can teach you, I suggest you access your accurate birthtime from the hospital where you were born.

I’m travelling this week and next, so I’m keeping things short and sweet. I hope this Full Moon finds you well.

As I write this, I’m sitting in the living room at the home of my oldest and dearest friend, on the west coast of Canada. The snow-capped Olympic mountain range is shrouded in dense fog this morning as I look out over the water, hoping to catch sight of the seals in the cove or maybe a whale further out. The arbutus trees leaning over the water with their bare bark limbs look almost human in the way they contort themselves to reach for the light. The seagulls perch on the dock, eating crab they’ve poached fresh from the salty water just minutes before. Everything about this land/seascape speaks of connection and relationship.

I’ve just finished reading Flynn Berry’s novel Trust Her, the sequel to Northern Spy. The books revolve around the relationship between two sisters in Ireland and their family history with the IRA. Tessa, the older of the two, believes she has a deep, honest intimacy with her younger sister, Marian, only to discover they may not have been as close as she thought. The entanglements of their bond seemed fitting to reflect on at this Full Moon in Scorpio, as it depicted a very accurate telling of what intimacy entails.

More than any other sign, Scorpio desires to be in relationship with life, others, and themselves deeply. Whether that’s emotional, physical, or financial depends on where it falls in our charts and the aspects it makes to the other signs and planets. Regardless, this Full Moon will highlight where we’ve been holding out (power over through withholding) or holding on (powerless through needing to possess) to a desire to connect deeply in some way. It may also reveal to us where we need to let go because we’ve been holding on to something that is no longer viable, real, or sustainable.

As a fixed water sign, the energy this moon carries reminds us of all that we retain emotionally. When we engage in intimacy of any kind, an energy of that connection stays with us. We retain the energetic imprint of every exchange in some way, either large or small. Some relationship exchanges leave us feeling uplifted, expansive, and more alive. Others seem to drain us of our lifeblood, vitality, and vigour. Knowing what we retain from the emotional, financial, and physical relationships in our lives is something worth reflecting on now, for hidden beneath the surface of what we say or even think we want is often a need or desire for power.

Scorpio is ruled by the planet Pluto, which in turn governs all things related to power - how we wield it, who has it, how we go about getting it, managing it, and/or sharing it. Pluto’s other notable gift is its ability to transform all that it comes in contact with at the deepest level. When we put these two things together, we see that one of the primary vehicles for that process of transformation is the use of power in our lives.

When we feel powerless, whether we realize it or not, we tend to seek power through others in the form of money, sex, or emotional depth. As a fixed sign, Scoprio wants to hold on to the power it has and that power is often expressed through having power over some/thing or some/one. Power over can look like holding the purse strings and manipulating others to do what we desire in exchange for our resources. It can be stringing someone along sexually, making them believe we’re interested in something more than we actually are in a relationship, in order to continue holding the upper hand. And it can be using one’s emotional depth and insight to delve into the personal lives of others as a means to wield power over them by knowing them better than they know themselves.

Water, in its fixed function, wants to hold tight to what it possesses. Emotionally, this can be a time of realising that we need to let go of something and, at the same time, being confronted with just how tightly we’ve been holding onto it. What we’ve been holding onto could be a dream, or a version of ourselves, a relationship, a job, a home, that we imagined could be something more than it is, only to know see clearly that it’s never going to be what we want. It’s never going to give us what we desire. On a collective level, many of us now see that the world we once knew or dreamed of no longer exists.

What have you been holding onto that now needs to be released?
Where are you feeling power/less or power/ful?
How are you ‘waking up’ to the ways that you wield your power in your relationships and the world?

Urauns spent time in the sign of Gemini last year from July to November before retrograding back into Taurus for one last hoorah. This Saturday, April 25th, the planet of innovation will move into Gemini once again, where it will remain for the next 7 years. If you’re anything like me, then you probably have a journal that you can go back to and see what was happening in your life during that period last year. If you do, it’ll be worth it to do so now to prepare for what comes next.

What I can say about my own experience of this energy is that I know for sure these posts, all my work and writing, in fact, will change in some significant way. I know this because Gemini rules writing, communication, and networks. And because I saw the shift in my journals last year. Until now, I’ve been telling you what I see coming without always demonstrating it. Now, the demonstration begins in earnest.

Rather than me writing from my mind what I think needs to be said, I’ll now be writing from the voice of my higher self. Why? Because this is the shift that we’re all moving through on the planet right now, though some of us are more aware of it than others. The work I’m being guided to do now is less about telling you what’s coming down the pike and more about how to navigate what you’re already experiencing, though you may not have realized that you are.

That’s the point. By identifying the process of awakening that’s happening, you’ll be able to locate yourself within the larger arc of experience and thus find your way forward. Bear in mind that what I’m sharing with you is my own experience of awakening, and what you experience may look like something altogether different. Within those differences, though, there will be some common ground, of that I’m certain. It’s the similarities that I hope will provide some measure of support or structure for you.

The most important thing to be understood right now is that everything is changing. And change at its core is simply the transformation of energy from one state to another.

For that reason, I ask that you take a moment to reflect on your life and consider what has changed or transformed in you or in your life since last July. There may have been an awakening, followed by a turnabout or slowdown from November until now. That’s okay.

Then ask yourself: Have I been a willing participant in that transformation, or have I been resisting change?

Resistance to change can show up in many ways. The most common sign of resistance that I’ve seen in myself has been trying to use the old ways of working through problems to find a new way forward. What I mean by that is relying on my mind to find the answer, the solution, the strategy to get to the next step on my journey. This has been particularly noticeable in my work, which is still taking shape in its new form, so my nervous system has been less settled than usual.

With all the Aries energy we’ve had this month, I’ve felt overloaded in my mind, like the energy literally moved into my head and got stuck there. This is notable because Aries rules the head on the physical plane. So unlike Gemini, which rules the mind, this is energy actually moving in the physical body and getting stuck. The result, of course, is much like you might imagine. I’ve been trying to move forward with my head first, rather than listening to the messages my body is giving me and allowing my intuition to guide me. I’ve been resisting the very things I know to be true due to falling into old patterns of fear triggered by my body being ungrounded. If this sounds familiar, you can use the Clearing & Grounding Meditation in the paid subscribers’ library for support.

If any of this lands for you, and you’re not a paid subscriber, then my suggestion is to do some physical activity to ground that energy back down into your body. I’ve been doing lifting heavy in my workouts every other day to help with this, along with regular breaks for deep breathing throughout the day. My preferred breathing practice is simple. Breathe in deeply through the mouth, followed by a long, slow exhale through the mouth.

But, you do you. If there’s another breathing practice you find helpful, use it. All conscious breathwork is soothing for the nervous system and will reconnect you with your body, pulling excess energy down from the mind/head. If you combine your breathwork with movement, as in a yoga practice, I suggest you aim for an equal length breathing in and out through the nose only.

Now that you’ve got an idea of what just one of the symptoms of awakening may look like for you, let’s talk about what I mean when I say awakening.

I really don’t like that word to describe what I experience because I think too many of us have bad associations with it. Like, awakening somehow means you’re leaving your body, or you’re spiritually superior to other lowly humans. Or, maybe that’s just my interpretation. The reason I’m going to use the word "awakening" moving forward is that it accurately describes what I feel is happening.

The intense energy right now being channelled through the planets in the sign of Aries speaks to a major theme or awakening energy that can be embodied in the Aries' key words, I AM. Aries, the first sign of the zodiac, marks the moment at birth when our consciousness moves into our physical bodies. In that second when we take our very first inhalation, our consciousness animates our physical body and expresses our I AMness in the world. In that same moment, our consciousness then perceives itself as separate from all that is. In essence, we forget our own Divinity. Hence, we have lived in a world that needed to believe the Divine resided somewhere ‘out there’, possessed by greater beings than us, mere mortals.

Fill in the blank with whatever deity or God/Goddess you want. This excessive abundance of Aries energy signals that we no longer need a conduit to connect with the Divine. It’s showing us that we are Divine in our own right, and therefore, we possess untold power and authority that until now, we’ve believed others to have possession of, but not us. We have a direct connection to Source, God/Goddess, and we are being called to use it.

In this way, awakening to our power, our true nature, our source energy is actually the most accurate way to describe what’s going on right now. Whether we choose to rename that experience to suit our lived experience is up to each of us individually. For our shared purposes, though, I hope this explaination helps to clarify what I’m talking about while also dispelling any weird ideas you might have about what awakening actually is.

To help you place yourself in your own experience of awakening, I’ll share some of the experiences I identify as signs of awakening and invite you to reflect on your own experience. If any of this sounds familiar, you can be sure that you, too, are on a path of awakening. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but a small sampling to help you pin down what’s going on.

You’ll notice that sometimes awakening looks quite ordinary. So much so that it’s easy for us to dismiss it as “normal”, like everyone is experiencing it. It’s true, the entire planet is waking up, but we’re all at different stages of awakening, with some of us completely unaware that it’s happening. With Uranus transiting Gemini for the next 7 years, we are all about to get a consciousness tune-up.

1. To begin with, I will say that from an early age, I had experiences that, in hindsight, were telltale signs of awakening that I just never paid much attention to. For starters, there were the invisible friends, aka guides. We’ve all had them, I believe, but we don’t always remember them, a bit like not remembering your dreams. In my case, a different language made up of gibberish was used to communicate with them. To this day, my uncle Mick still reminds me of how my sister and I played as kids using the names from our made-up language.

2. Then there was the time when I started attending an all-girls Catholic school at age 14, after never having attended church. The nun who taught my grade 9 religion class assigned a project around the 7 days of creation, which was something I had never heard of before. I very innocently asked who this God guy was and why they thought he created all these things. I was then branded a heretic and never allowed in her class again. You know something’s off when an argument doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. I really had no idea what they were talking about and wanted only to understand. The fact that I was shut down and shunned was enough to make me hellbent on believing something other than what they were preaching. I firmly believe that we all have direct access to the Divine.

3. In my early 20s, sailing across the Gulf of Mexico somewhere outside of Tampa, in the middle of the night, while I was on watch, there was a loud bang. The captain and deckhand came scurrying up from down below with sheer panic on their faces. I was the least experienced person on board and had no idea what was happening. The captain had just been on a delivery down in Central America, where the boat ran aground, so he was freaking out that the same might happen again.
   To this day, I’m not sure what actually happened, but we did not run aground. While everyone was panicking, trying to figure out what had happened, time seemed to slow down for me. It was like time stood still for I don’t know how long, and in that time, something changed in me. I remember thinking I didn’t want to die being eaten by a shark in the middle of the night under the stars and moon.
   For several weeks following that night, I had what I can only call a spiritual awakening. I feel foolish even saying the words, but there’s really no other way to describe it. It’s like I was suddenly living my old life but with a completely new consciousness. Nothing triggered me during those weeks. I felt only love for all life and was driven by a deep desire to help others in any way I could.

4. Eventually, that euphoric spiritual high faded, but it returned periodically throughout my life, most often when I was in a period of transition. Like the transition somehow precipitated the shift in my consciousness, allowing me to be more open, trusting, and available to the unseen guidance all around me.
   »This is a key factor, I think, for many of us. So be mindful now of the changes happening in your life, as you are likely being guided in a new direction for a reason.«
   In my experience, change usually starts with a feeling, like something just doesn’t fit anymore. I become aware of it, but don’t always know what to do with it, in part because I usually don’t know where I’m being led, which makes my ego nervous. I’ve learned, though, that if I can focus on the feeling of knowing something wants to change, even if I don’t know what or why, and remain calm and open, eventually the way forward will be revealed to me.
   This may sound obvious, like ‘isn’t that how everyone lives?’ Well, no, it’s not. So if it sounds familiar, pay attention to that and reflect on how this has played out in your life in the past. One example of what this has looked like for me is how I came to live on Wolfe Island, rent-free for a year. I had never even heard of the island before, and my only contact was a guy whose flyer I saw on a bulletin board. You can read all about that in detail here.

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These are just a few examples to help you start thinking about your own life through the lens of the awakening that’s happening on the planet right now. 7 years from now, our understanding of ourselves and how we communicate with the unseen forces animating the Universe will have radically changed. No, I’m not talking about aliens and UFOs. What I am talking about, though, is how we are being silently guided every step of our lives.

When you reflect on your life and how you ended up where you are today, there were a series of choices you made along the way. Some were practical, while others were likely based more on instinct. You didn’t know why you felt called to make the changes you did, but you followed your instinct, and here you are now.

When my husband Jon and I reconnected, I didn’t know that’s where things were headed. He came to visit, and when I dropped him off at the airport, he walked away, and I was suddenly overcome with the deepest grief and sadness I’d ever felt. Out of nowhere, I was completely overcome with emotion, and I knew that those feelings, though totally unexpected, were something I needed to pay attention to. They were a message, and my body was telling me not to let him go.

It’s this sort of unseen support that I’m talking about. We all experience this - a lot more than we realize. We just don’t usually acknowledge it. Or when we do, we ignore it. This is how we resist being guided and supported. This is how our intuition and our guides are speaking to us, telling us which way to go. It just looks and feels different from how we’re used to navigating the world with our minds, guided only by logic and reason.

You may find yourself thinking that you have had this sort of experience before, but you’re certainly not going to put much stock in it. Because to do so would be placing yourself outside the known confines of what’s accepted and expected in our modern world. This is what I was talking about in last week’s post when I said we may be forced to choose between the community, tribe, or family that has made us feel like we belong, and standing on our own.

Uranus is the planet of disruption, sometimes referred to as the “awakener”. While it’s in Gemini, we can all expect to experience disturbances in how we think and communicate - with ourselves, others and the world around us.

It wants us to WAKE UP to who we really are.

What does awakening look like for you?
How is resistance showing up in your life?
What happened last July through November that’s resurfacing now?

Use the comments to share your experiences of the intense energy of these times.

Stepping outside of the safety of known boundaries

Recently, my sister and I were texting and recalling a moment in our mother’s life when she stepped outside of the safety of her known boundaries, abandoning her sense of belonging in order to move towards something only she could name. Only she knew the answer to.

At the age of 29, going through her first Saturn return, my mother left her husband and 3 children to be with another man whom she had fallen in love with. The year was 1972, and both of my parents were Catholic. As you might imagine, this move did not go over well with either of their families. Divorce was still something fairly new in Canada in the early 70’s, and a woman leaving her children was very much shunned.

Despite the risks and realities of being rejected by her family, community, and peers, she followed her heart and did it anyway. It was an act of courage that defined how I viewed my mum throughout her life. It was simple, humble even, and yet cataclysmic at the same time. It altered the course of all our lives and brought my younger sister into the world.

And, it was the best lesson she ever taught me. Sure, she always told me that she just wanted me to be happy. Lots of parents say that. What she did differently, though, is she actually lived it. She demonstrated what it meant to live the life that makes you happy and not to settle for anything less.

When I look at what’s happening in the sky right now, this is the energy that I see permeating this week as Jupiter in Cancer squares off against a lineup of seven planets in Aries.

Bear in mind that this is my interpretation of what I see, sense, and feel. Ultimately, you have to decide for yourself what this moment means for you.

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Where am I being called to stand on my own?

Building on last week’s post and the growing Aries energy we’re experiencing, this question is essential because Aries is all about the Self, the individual, the I AM energy of our life. Which means only we know the answer to that question.

This energy is about you and you alone. There is no we, no us, no them. Just you.

New moons = new beginnings, but of what?

The beginning that’s taking place right now comes from within. It will eventually find expression in the external world, but its roots come from you and your right to take up space, to be seen, to have something worthy of contributing, and to be fearless in your pursuit of acting on it. To reach for and take hold of the life that is yours and yours alone.

Aries doesn’t wait for someone else to validate their need to act. Aries energy is instinctive, impulsive, and decisive. And all of us are receiving a turbocharged dose of it at the moment.

Neptune, Mercury, Mars and Saturn are covering the territory between 2° and 7° while Chiron, the Sun and Moon are stacked up at 27° and 28° of Aries. Jupiter is sitting at 17° Cancer, forming a square that sits right between these two charged points that are taking up space wherever Aries sits in your chart. (If you haven’t already pulled up your chart to see where this pile up is happening, I strongly suggest you do so now.)

This square creates tension, a crisis between our need to expand the ways that we nurture the family, group, or that which gives us a sense of belonging, versus our need to stand out, stand up, and stand on our own outside of the safety of the group. Outside of the safety of our known sense of belonging.

We are standing at a crossroads

Aries asks us to shift our identity from being defined by the community(Aquarius), family(Cancer) or partners(Libra) to being self-defined. The fear that arises when we step out of the known boundaries of what has previously defined safety for us is often not only emotional; it can also be a biological response, as we anticipate the loss of protection, belonging, and identity that the group/others have provided for us.

Our nervous systems are doing double time right now, working to keep us safe. Do what you can to support yourself and get regulated when you notice yourself slipping back into old habits and fears. The grounding meditation in our paid subscriber library is a great tool for this. It’s simple, fast, and effective.

The choices we make now as we stand at this crossroads will result in a non-negotiable shift in the direction of our lives.

Think…

• What decision do I need to make that I’ve been avoiding or putting off?

• Where am I being called to act on something new? And alternatively, where is something dying, coming to an end, or closing out in my life? What might it be making room for?

This is not a casual choice, but one with deep, lasting, and significant implications for our identity and the connection we’ve benefited from through our broader sense of belonging.

If you’re not feeling this energy in your own life, you need look no further than the world stage to see it playing out. While we may have thought that what’s happening ‘out there’ doesn’t impact us personally, we’re all learning this hard lesson together right now.

Digging deeper to find your answers

Big energy like this demands big changes in who we’re being. If you don’t know how or where this energy is impacting you + your chart, you can get your chart here for free. (An exact birth time is essential for accuracy.) I encourage you to familiarise yourself with your chart. By doing so, you’ll be better prepared for the many changes coming in the weeks, months, and years ahead. At the bottom of today’s post, I’ve shared additional resources to support you.

Aries energy wants to be the boss, the person in charge, the leader. We’re being asked to take control of some situation, relationship, or issue in our lives. To reclaim our personal energy from the places where it has slowly, or not so slowly, been draining away from us.

Ask yourself;

• Where am I afraid to take charge and lead?

• In what area of my life have I felt unseen or overlooked?

• What would I initiate in my life if I were no longer afraid to act?

• Where is my energy being leveraged to benefit other people’s dreams and visions, not my own?

• What lie am I telling myself about my life?

The beauty of our relationship to the planets is that they provide a roadmap for us. Not a map that says this is the only way, so get it right, or you're screwed, but a map that shows us both our strengths and our Achilles heels. The areas of our lives where we need to work and the energy available to us to support growing and transforming who we’ve been into who we’re capable of becoming.

The stars remind us that we already have all our own answers. But we need to practice giving ourselves the time to turn our attention inward so we can find them.

I hope that you actually make the time to reflect on the questions I’ve offered here today. Maybe you’ll even sit down and do some journaling around them or pull a few cards to dig deeper. I can promise that if you sit with them long enough, your answers will surface.

I’d love to hear what you discover.

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Resources to support you during this time of transition ~

First and foremost, remember that you can always reclaim what you may have forgotten or what has become fragmented.

Everything is energy. When it is stagnant or stuck, energy becomes distorted, creating a ripple effect that moves through your body and is then reflected in your life. Energy needs to flow to be sustainable and support the expansion and birthing of new possibilities.

Your nervous system is the regulator of that energy. It is constantly feeding you information about how safe or fearful your body feels. To move beyond the boundaries of your current life, identity, limitations - be they physical, financial, mental or emotional - your nervous system needs to be regulated before you can expand.

Relearning safety in the body can come in many forms: Yin and restorative yoga, walking in nature, gardening, somatic work, Qigong, breathing practices, and grounding exercises, to name a few.

Talking things out can help, but only you can teach your body to feel safe.

Everything I offer is meant to empower your sovereignty, not create dependency. The most immediate and affordable resource I can offer you to support that work is our paid subscribers’ library.

• Paid subscribers receive access to a library of tools and resources, including deep dives, mini workshops, and meditations to support your practice of self-knowing and sovereign autonomy. ($16/month or $77/yr)
  
  This is a community-based work in progress. Everything added is in response to our paid subscribers’ needs, so be sure to let me know what you want support with, and I’ll do my best to provide options.
  
  

• In response to the intensity of this moment, I decided to introduce a Founders tier, called The 7 Sisters. Founding members have access to the paid subscriber library PLUS a 1:1 session with me. ($333/yr, a savings of more than 50% off my regular session rate)
  
  These sessions help you zero in on an issue, challenge, decision, or belief that is preventing you from taking the next step in your journey with confidence and clarity. They serve to empower you to find your own answers by creating a container together, where we can activate what needs to surface so you can move forward on your terms.

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Chart Readings ~

I no longer read charts as a standalone offering. If you’re looking to have your chart read, reach out and let me know what you’re looking for support with, and I’ll make some recommendations.

If you have your chart, write in the comments what house Aries sits in. You can share your Sun, Moon, and rising signs as well, and together we can get to know one another.

Remember that only YOU know what’s true for you. I’ll share my insights in the comments, but you remain the ultimate authority.

I wanted to thank everyone who reached out and responded to the questions I asked in last week’s post. Your input is essential, so if you’ve been pondering how to respond but haven’t done so yet, take your time, but know that I’d still love to hear from you.

We are moving through highly accelerated times in which everything is changing very fast. This month in particular, things are really speeding up, and when Uranus enters Gemini on the 25th, where it will travel for the next 7 years, one area that will be heavily impacted is how we communicate and share information. At the same time, we have a record number of planets now in the sign of Aries, which are calling us to step into our sovereignty.

Collectively, we’re changing the way that we relate to the experts who have, in the past, been positioned as authorities, and we’re now being asked to take responsibility for being our own authority. In other words, to look for our answers within, first, before outsourcing the problem to an external authority to solve it for us.

What I want you to know is that this shift has already happened within you, though you may not realize it.

Together, we’ll experience directly today how that shift in thinking, communicating, and sharing information is already present within us. Then I’ll provide the context that will demonstrate why this shift is so important, so you can continue to cultivate it on your own moving forward.

To begin with, here’s what the astrology of this moment is saying.

Mars moves into its home sign of Aries today, bringing with it a clarity that will come fast and be felt viscerally, not just mentally. Whatever you’ve been sitting with, waiting for an opening to act on, this is the moment when things lift, and you can begin.

It doesn’t mean whatever you want will suddenly materialise. It simply means the energy is there, and you can now move with it.

Like a match being lit, Aries is the spark that starts the fire. Mars is the energy that makes us get up and move. Anything in your life that you ever felt the desire to act on or move towards, that was the energy of Mars in motion.

Now, take note.

When I use an image to describe what’s happening astrologically, your mind immediately understands not only the image but also the meaning and its implications. For this reason, astrology is called a symbolic language. It’s why we use signs and symbols as the astrological alphabet.

An image conveys not only the meaning of a particular moment in time, but it also has the capacity to encompass all past experiences and future possibilities.

When I tuned into the energy of this week, the image that came to mind immediately was of a rider on horseback holding steady, waiting for the moment when it was time to run. I could feel that heightened sense of time, like a runner in the starting block waiting for the gun to start the race.

There was heat coming off the horse’s body. I could hear snorting, feel every muscle twitch, and smell the horses’ breath rising into the air. Raw power — waiting, restless, ready to be set free. That is the energy of Mars in Aries.

Now, take a moment to pause.

Just for a minute, see if you can bring an image to mind of what this energy feels like for you. You may or may not be sitting on a horse. Go with whatever image shows up for you. Try to capture as many details as you can about how this energy feels for you in this moment.

Use all of your senses to explore the image that arises. Notice the temperature and any smells or sounds that are present. If there’s a taste associated with the image, name it. What does the image convey to you through touch, light, and color?

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Why what you just did matters more than you know

I’m no tech expert, and this is not an exhaustive list, but I believe the gift that AI has to offer us is in its ability to strip away the old hierarchical structure of top-down power, gatekeeping knowledge, and the expert as ultimate authority. AI has given us the ability to do more in less time, with fewer skills, and far less manpower than ever before. For entrepreneurs, this is a game-changer. For those in corporate roles, it means job losses.

AI’s gift is the democratization of knowledge.

Anyone can be an expert on anything with AI. We no longer have to wait to be told that we know enough, to be credentialed, or to drown in student debt trying to acquire what the system tells us we need to belong. We can now ask a question and get access to everything that we used to have to pay an expert for.

However, some of us will simply replace the old guard with the new.

Rather than turning to our own inner authority, we may continue to look outside for our answers, allowing AI to be the new guru, leader, or expert. Additionally, AI is currently dependent on an external system, namely a power source. And it requires a lot of resources to fuel that power, resources which are rapidly diminishing.

While AI can do many things, the one thing it can’t do is exist on its own in isolation, independent of the systems, resources, and structures it relies on.

When Uranus moves into Gemini on April 25th, the planet of disruption will be focused on revamping all things related to information, communication, and movement.

Things will move even faster than they already are.

The way that we communicate and how we source information will accelerate. Resiliency lies in our ability to adapt to changing terrain. This is where our intuition comes in. From July of this year to May of 2028, Uranus in Gemini will form a trine with Pluto in Aquarius five times. There is a lot of speculation about how this combination of energy will transform technology, information systems, and social media.

What I’m more interested in and what I want us to look at together is how it will expand our intuitive abilities and enhance our perceptual understanding of ourselves and the Universe we live in. By owning the knowledge we have access to within, we claim our sovereignty and break free of the old model in which someone must always be the victim so someone else can be the hero that saves them.

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Our intuition is the key to claiming our inner authority

The energy of this moment is palpable if you allow yourself to tune into it. Taking just a few moments to sit with what’s going on in your body will tell you more than anything I could ever tell you. We’re being invited to claim our inner authority by turning our awareness, focus, and attention inward. We’re being called to tap into the vast resources that lie within us, rather than turning outward for answers.

As Uranus makes its journey through Gemini, its job will be to reinvent how we communicate and share information. As an air sign, Gemini is the ultimate messenger, so we can expect to be on the receiving end of new messages and information. ie, perceiving in new ways that are more intuitive than rational. How we receive that information will be unique to each of us. What we can expect is new acceptance or common ground around these avenues of communication, however they show up for each of us.

The recent rise in mainstream interest in astrology is a good example of this. When Uranus made a brief journey into Gemini last year, astrology seemed to benefit from it. Why? Because astrology is a symbolic language built on pattern recognition. It communicates in a way wholely diferent than what we are accustomed to, but it is a language nonetheless and one that anyone can now learn, more easily than ever before, with the help of modern tools like AI.

I’m not advocating for that, I’m simply stating that anyone can learn a whole lot more now than ever before with the click of a few buttons. I go into more detail about that and the downside of people sharing information detached from a lived experience of it in this video, if you want to know more.

Intuition is the real key to this era of information and communication upgrades that we’re undergoing.

So let’s talk about intuition for a minute, what it is, how it works, and why you’re already using it more than you may realise.

Astrology is just one of many tools that allow us to access our intuitive knowing. It’s a doorway, an entry point, just like tarot cards or our dreams are. When I go into detail, drawing your attention to all your senses by creating an image of a specific moment in time — last week on a roller coaster, this week on horseback — you instinctively conjure the image up in your own mind. You feel, taste, smell, and hear what I’m saying, and by doing so, you’re accessing your intuition to create a reality that exists inside of you, not outside.

That’s the key.

You created it. It lives inside of you, not outside. You are the authority on what’s going on inside your mind, your feelings, your body. No one can tell you otherwise because only you know what’s truly going on inside.

When I think about intuition, I think of it as unseen support.

It speaks to us in the form of feelings that come on suddenly, out of the blue, that we can’t explain, but our gut knows we need to act on them. These may be feelings that warn us of danger, overwhelm us to get our attention, or bring us such calm that we know we are right where we need to be.

If we’re trained at paying attention to how our intuition speaks to us, then these feelings will be obvious and unmistakable. If we’re not, they’ll be subtle and easy to miss.

Making a regular practice of turning our attention inward by cultivating a relationship with our inner world and how it speaks to us is essential.

We can do that by:

• studying our astrological chart

• living our lives aligned with the cycles of the planets and seasons

• using tarot and oracle cards to strengthen our understanding of symbolic language

• exploring the meaning in our dreams, both nighttime and active dreaming states

• and paying attention to all the myriad ways that we are always being led, being guided through signs and synchronicities in our daily lives.

I use the term spiritual support team, to describe how we’re being led at all times.

This team of support is made up of guides and angels, ancestors and loved ones who have passed, our higher Self, our soul, our spirit. This guidance comes from nature in the form of a bird, a cloud passing by, or the ocean raging. It comes from the stars and galaxies yet to be explored. It emanates from the past and reaches back to us from the future. Its scope is boundless, and it is always there for us.

There’s just one condition. We have to ask for support.

Human beings have free will, which means that we get to choose how we move through life. We don’t necessarily get a say in all the conditions of our lives, but we do get 100% authourity over how we choose to respond to those conditions. That’s our free will in action.

Our free will allows us to ask for help from unseen forms of support.

Asking may come in the form of a prayer, enacting a ritual, pulling cards, or simply asking for guidance inwardly, then waiting and observing what shows up.

It takes practice to shift our relationship to information and communication from the outwardly visible forms we’re collectively accustomed to, but we have more support now than ever before to do just that.

Being Our Own Authority

We are not here to follow someone else’s map; we’re here to create our own.

In the late 90’s, I lived as a sabbatical resident at the Kripalu Centre. It was a pivotal time for the community. The guru had been ousted, and a team of long-time residents had the task of trying to steady the ship and keep things moving forward while dealing with their collective trauma of being betrayed by the man they had devoted their livelihoods to.

I always found it interesting that I landed there when I did. Not when the guru was in power and not when it had become what it is today, but that in-between time. I’ve never been inclined to put people on pedestals, and I’m wary of anyone who claims to be enlightened.

Many years ago, someone once referred to me as being self-actualised. I immediately pushed back, saying that no, I was not self-actualised. And in fact, anyone who thinks they are probably isn’t.

To me, self-actualisation is a process just like life is a process. There is no ultimate end where one becomes enlightened. The old world may have presented us with some final destination at which point all our pain and suffering would go away, but the new world knows better. There is only our free will and how we choose to respond to what happens.

Everything is for our growth, and we are always being guided and supported — if we’re willing to ask for help. No one is coming to save us because we don’t need saving from anything external. We need to take ownership of the power we already possess and start living it.

Who to Trust Moving Forward

This might leave you, as it has me, wondering how we move forward and who to trust if the age of subject matter experts is gone. I don’t have your answer, but I can tell you where I’ve landed myself and what feels true for me in this moment.

What I trust is my own lived experience, which has been rooted in practice, not performance. The truths that land most honestly for me have not been inherited from someone else but discovered for myself and embodied in my daily life.

I’m not interested in quick fixes or someone else's system that will give me the answer they needed. I’m interested in sitting with the things that challenge me to stretch and grow in new ways. I want the practices that will ground me and provide the stability needed to let my dreams and ideas mature with time, not fade out after an initial success or acceptance.

I don’t just read to consume. I build, apply, and share what I’ve learned, not because I think I know more than others but because I believe it’s my responsibility to help others out when I can and that I’ve been given a gift that allows me to do that with ease and joy.

When we take ownership of our gifts, including our intuition and access to our spiritual support team, we are far better able to judge who to trust and who to avoid, because it starts with trusting ourselves.

Trusting that we already know more than we give ourselves credit for. Trusting that the mistakes we make along the way are far better teachers than anything anyone else could come up with.

And the best indicator of all is whether or not we feel safe. If our nervous system gets activated in the presence of someone, that’s our body relaying information to us. It’s saying, pay attention. Not all activation is bad per se, but we’ve grown accustomed to being driven by fear, so when our nervous system reports fear, we think we need to act to survive.

Mars in Aries is very susceptible to this, so give yourself permission to go slow. When in doubt, do nothing. Just breathe and relax, remembering that this too shall pass.

To learn more about this month’s energy and the experiences that have led to the current iteration of my work, you might find this post helpful.

Good morning,

I woke up this morning with a bit of a bee in my bonnet and decided to hop on my soapbox. If you’re interested in my thoughts on astrology’s application and its current rise in popularity, do tune in.

And if you’re not, or if two emails in a matter of days is too much, too soon for you, I totally understand. I do believe there is a settings function where you can remain subscribed and not receive emails, if you’d prefer that. Or, you can follow instead of subscribe to avoid having me jump into your inbox. Don’t ask me to explain how. I’m still figuring the platform out myself.

If any of this strikes a chord or hits a note for you and you’d like to gab about it, hit me up in the comments and let’s get a convo going.

Until soon,
Siobhan

Yesterday, I was chatting with my dear friend Kim, who lives in Spain. I found myself trying to describe what the energy feels like right now.

In my mind, I saw the image of a roller coaster.

And then, as if it were happening in real time, I felt the tug in my gut of the cars being slowly pulled to the top of the first drop.

I could hear the cogs pulling the train of cars up the steep incline.

I felt the knowing, the deep anticipation of what’s about to happen next, when the energy suddenly shifts as the roller coaster tips over the apex and goes crashing down the other side with such momentum that it feels like your stomach is in your mouth.

We all know that feeling. It’s both exciting and terrifying in equal measure.

That’s exactly what this moment feels like to me.

What does it feel like for you? Drop your thoughts in the comments.

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That feeling that any minute now, something is going to change is what I’ve been sitting with for the past few days. I could feel my anxiety growing, feeling like I was going to miss the energy, the opportunity, the window for whatever this next chapter of my life holds.

As I reflected more on the anxiety and whether or not it was being driven by a sense of urgency, real or imagined, I discovered that it was less a feeling like I needed to act now before the energy passes, and more a feeling that I need to act in the right way. The way that feels most authentic for me and who I am at this moment in time, in this crazy world that we’re living in today.

What that looks like in practical terms is that for the past week, I’ve been struggling to get this post out. I’ve been publishing every Sunday for the past 6 months, except for one or two weeks when it was more timely to post on a specific date due to the subject matter. I know this likely matters more to me than it does to whoever is reading my Substack. Thus far, most readers don’t care what I publish or when. All of my paid subscribers are family, friends, or former students and clients who want to support me. And I love that they want to do that.

~If there is something in particular that you, as a reader, would like, either from a free or paid subscription, please let me know in the comments below or drop me a message.~

It doesn’t change the fact, though, that I need to know what I expect of myself. I need to know what I can agree to deliver. I need to know what I expect to receive in exchange. And I need to know who it is that’s agreeing to be in this relationship with me. These things are all essential for any service-based business to be effective, but they are particularly important to me on a personal level.

It frustrates me when I make a schedule for myself and then fail to stick to it. It’s not like me. I crave routine, structure, and a plan. My Venus in Capricorn needs to know at all times what the expectations are so I can choose to accept them, negotiate them, or deny them altogether. In my 6th house, this means my work routine, as well as diet and exercise, are directly impacted by this need.

For the past year, I’ve been slowly shifting gears in my work life. I’ve been cutting back on my time at the studio since last summer, and in the fall of 2025, I started my Substack. This week marks my first full week of no longer having a job that requires me to leave the house. I still don’t know what my new work life teaching and consulting will look like. It’s a work in progress, as it always is, and has been. I’ve always built in real time, with an audience, since before virtual audiences were a thing. People always ask what I’m going to do next, like having a plan in today’s world assures one’s safety and success.

The answer is, I don’t know.

What I do know is that I have been doing some version of this work for over 30 years now. And like a writer whose work you discover and fall in love with, there may be one book or poem that stands out and catches your attention, but that one piece doesn’t represent the whole of who they are as an artist or what they’ve created.

The same is true for all of us.

The only plan I have is to use the skills, knowledge and experience I’ve acquired in my 57 years to be of service in a world that is sorely in need of help from us all. To that end, I’d like to know how I can be of service to you. You can drop me a message or leave a comment to let me know.

My story

For those who may not have known me for very long, this next bit is to help you place the work and me in a broader context.

I first began my work in the mid 90’s, studying charts and teaching yoga. Back then, how we did that was far more limited in scope. By 2008, I had taught yoga and read charts in 2 countries, 2 states, 2 provinces, multiple cities and small towns. I had led classes and workshops in every conceivable setting, from studios to church basements, universities to community centres, and private homes to retreat centres. I had built a student base across roughly 2,000 miles.

While the technology grew, and with it the possibility to stay connected to communities through virtual classes, it took me until 2014 to get my work fully online. And when I did, it didn’t look like what I thought it would or what it had been in the past.

There were a few obstacles along the way, namely, I was a luddite when it came to tech stuff, which slowed me down considerably. At the same time, the online space was changing rapidly in dramatic ways, which meant needing to learn new operating systems regularly. Which, I loathed. Still do.

And then there was the cancer diagnosis, which left me unable to do the physical work that I had previously earned a living doing. Not being able to use my body to earn a living changed everything for me. It meant I needed to find a way to monetise the other skills, knowledge, and experiences I had acquired but never really placed much value on.

As it turned out, having moved around all the time became one of my greatest assets because I got to see the industry from so many different vantage points. And working in a variety of settings meant that I had learned how to negotiate, what to expect in exchange for my services, and what to call bullshit on. Remember that thing about expectations I mentioned earlier, it came in real handy.

So what appeared to be an obstacle, in the end, actually opened up a whole new path for me by helping other yoga teachers, healers, and artists to get their work online. The astrology of that time really supported me personally, and I went from literally being in a hospital bed to running a successful online business in 6 months. Some of that success was also due to an inflection point in the online space that I just happened to hit at the right moment.

But despite my early success, this iteration of my work faced a different set of obstacles. In part due to my rapid success and also my naivety about how the world of predatory sales works, I found myself feeling at odds with the energy of the online space, and it’s insatible need to always be earning more and growing bigger, faster.

As someone with a Cancer moon in the 11th house, I’ve always excelled at building commuity but I need a community I can actually talk to. People I can relate to and dive deep with. I’d much rather have 2 or 3 close friends who know me intimately, and I know them, than dozens who are strangers.

So I found myself feeling the need to pivot what I was doing so I could find a way to do it that actually reflected who I am and what I value. Gradually, my work shifted away from helping other women to get their businesses online to working with women who already had a business, some brick and mortar, some virtual. This group of women were feeling the same way I was. They were looking for ways to deliver their work that felt congruent with who they really were, not the persona that they had created to succeed.

Today, that might sound like a given, but 12 years ago, it was hard to stand your ground, and the pressure to perform in the online space was real. My work took on a decidedly meaning-based focus with an emphasis on helping women identify what mattered most to them so they could create a life and business that accurately reflected that.

Then COVID happened, and I found myself spiralling into depression. Eventually, I shut my online work down completely and decided to get my hands dirty doing physical work again, this time by working as a production potter making dinnerware in a local ceramic studio.

My moon in Cancer was in bliss when I landed the job at the studio. I had finally found my people since relocating to East TN from Toronto to be with my now husband. The studio had a small, intimate staff, which was just what I needed after being in the vast and superficial online world. I made plates and fired kilns, feeding my need for something tactile, grounded, and physical. The steadiness of the work routine and the daily diet and exercise routines I built around it served me well.

Until it didn’t.

Which brings us to this moment and why I’m here writing this story to tell you who I am, where I’ve been, and what I’ve done.

In every one of those places, a version of my work existed that now provides the backbone, the structure, and the lifeblood of what I’m creating today in this new format. Each time I moved, I carried with me what I had learned from the students and clients I left behind. Some of them are still here with me now, and to each of you, I am truly grateful for your steadfast interest. It really is humbling to know that anyone cares that much about me and my journey to have stuck it out this long. Thank you for being here with me, still. I so appreciate you.

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Now it’s your turn.

I want to hear from you, specifically, I want to know:

• How are you doing at this crazy moment in time? Drop me a message or post a comment to let me know.

• How can I be of service to you now? Post this in the comments, please, so I can get an idea of what things I might be able to help with, and we can see if there is any overlap with other readers.

• What would you like to receive as a free subscriber? As a paid subscriber? Go for it, nothing is off the table! Ask for what you really want; the worst that can happen is that you won’t get it.

• Are you interested in reading only, or are you looking for a community? If you’re interested in being a part of a community, let me know what you would like that community to offer you, be focused on, etc.

And lastly, if you know of anyone that you think might beneift form this post or my work in general, I’d appreciate it if you share it with them.

Doors close today for the Spring Session of Seasonal Mentoring. To learn more about my client work and how I can support you during the coming season, read to the bottom of today’s post.

Hello from East Tennessee on this gorgeous, sunny first day of spring! I wish everything really were sunny and bright. Sadly, it’s not.

While the world is currently experiencing what history books may refer to as WWIII, you might find yourself, as I do myself, wondering how to navigate these utterly horrific and unsettling times. I don’t have an answer for you or for me. I’m doing my best to stay afloat, as I’m sure you are too.

What I do have, though, is the certain knowing that this too shall pass. Knowing this, the question then becomes,

How do I navigate the terrain between now and when things get better?

If there’s one thing I do know about life, it’s that everything has its own cycle or season.

We can all trust this. When the whole world appears to be falling apart, knowing this can bring us true comfort. But then what?, you may be asking yourself. Without knowing your specific circumstances, I can’t give you that answer. However, I can share a quick glimpse of my own experience to shed light on your journey.

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In 2021, at the Spring Equinox, I shut down my online work and took what essentially has been a five-year sabbatical. During that time, I’ve gardened, painted and worked in a small ceramic studio making functional pottery. In other words, I worked with my hands and got out of my head. Why? There are a lot of reasons why, but if I had to give you a reason from an astrological cycle-based perspective, it’s because Uranus was transiting through the sign of Taurus in my 10th house.

Uranus, the planet of disruption and renovation. Taurus, the sign of the earth, food, and art. And the 10th house, how the world sees us. When Uranus moved into Taurus in 2018, I began painting for the first time in decades. Slowly, I felt myself being pulled towards something very different from what I had been doing. The pandemic hit, and eventually, I let my old life go so that a new life could be born. Not an uncommon story for many post-pandemic.

Like the Sun, Uranus moves through its own cycle, changing signs every 7 years. When it moves from one sign to the next, as it will on April 25th, we inevitably undergo a shift in the area of our lives that it’s passing through. Last year, it dipped into Gemini as it retrograded, so you likely already have a sense of what type of change you’re being called to make in your life and where it’s taking place.

For me, Uranus is still travelling through my 10th house, so it makes sense that last year, when it was retrograde in Gemini, I began my Substack. And this year, as it moves into Gemini for the next 7 years, I’m winding down my studio work to focus on my online work once again. Gemini rules the internet and all forms of communication, in my 10th house of how we’re seen by others and Uranus, once again, is shaking things up.

I may not have all the pieces figured out yet about where I’m headed. What I do know is the feeling that it’s time and that spring is the season to act. And the same is true for you.

You already know what the change is that you need to make. The truth is, we always know. But we don’t always listen.

How often have you ignored what your inner knowing was telling you?

Most of us don’t spend much time thinking about this when it’s actually happening. That’s part of why we tend to ignore our inner knowing. In hindsight, though, how often have you heard yourself say the words, “I knew I should have…… “ But, you didn’t.

So ask yourself now,

How often have I felt something, but I couldn’t quite articulate how I knew it, so I chose to ignore it?

It could be that you felt something was coming to an end, or that something wasn’t sitting quite right with you, but again, you chose to ignore it rather than act on what you were feeling.

You may have even found yourself talking about it with others, and then still continued to ignore it. Until you couldn’t anymore, that is. Until your intuition spoke so loudly and the outer circumstances of your life became so glaringly obvious that you could no longer ignore the feeling you’d had, perhaps for months or even years.

Why do we do this? Why do we ignore or even actively suppress the unseen support that we’re being given all the time?

There are plenty of reasons, for which each person will have their own. On the surface, the reasons may all sound rational. But are they really?

When we tell ourselves that taking time off to hit pause in our lives will result in the whole world coming to a standstill, despite rationally knowing that it won’t. What are we really doing?

When our gut is telling us we really just need some time, time to sit, time to rest, time to daydream, time to regroup, and we know in our hearts that what we really need is more than just a day or two. And still, we minimise those needs with stories of how it’s not possible to give myself what I actually need and want.

We make up all kinds of excuses to avoid knowing what our gut has been trying to tell us for months. Sometimes our rational minds push so hard for us to ignore what our bodies are trying to tell us that we end up literally making ourselves sick as a way to avoid making the decision that we know we need to make.

We stay in the relationship too long.

We avoid looking for a new job despite knowing the one we’re currently in is quietly killing us.

We repeat day after day that we really need to start exercising because our body keeps giving us signals that clearly tell us that’s what we need.

And then we ignore those messages in favour of doing what we’ve grown accustomed to doing, believing that we have all the time in the world to make changes.

«News Flash»

Change happens in cycles, whether we choose to recognise that truth and live by it, or not.

If we do choose to recognise that change is predictable and inevitable, then we have an advantage because the cycle of the seasons and planets provides us with a built-in system that shows us exactly what needs to change and when.

Every one of us has an inner knowing or intuitive sense that guides us at all times.

You are never without guidance.

However, what you may be experiencing is:

• A feeling of being disconnected from your inner knowing + the cycle of life

• A false belief that you can’t trust your inner knowing + the cycle of life

• A lack of clarity on how to take action using your inner knowing + the cycle of life

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Today, on the Spring Equinox, the energy is primed for you to begin something new.

Ask yourself,

What have I been waiting to begin?

What project, idea, or dream has been calling for me to breathe new life into it?

Where is my energy and attention asking to be channelled?

Now is the time to act.

And remember: Action does not equate to activity. Rest can be an action!

You don’t need to know the whole picture or every step in the process. You just need to know what matters most to you right now, in this moment, and to be willing to trust that taking action will lead to the next step revealing itself.

My sabbatical was not planned out to the very last detail. In fact, it wasn’t planned at all. It happened because I followed what I was feeling and acted on it when the timing was right. I took one step without knowing what was next, and then the next when it appeared.

Spring is the season of action and change. Whatever you’ve been dreaming of can now be put in motion and supported.

Sending bright blessings to you for the next leg of your journey. If you’re feeling stuck and would like some support, do reach out. Details below.

….

The Spring Session of Seasonal Mentoring closes today.

If you’ve been looking for support aligning your life & work with the cycle of the seasons, planets, and elements, our work together from the Spring Equinox to the Summer Solstice will focus on creating the clarity needed to take the first step, identifying what that first step needs to be, and knowing why it matters that you act now, rather than wait.

DM to learn more

…

The summer session of Seasonal Mentoring will open on June 1st.

Doors close March 20th » Enrol now for the spring session of Seasonal Mentoring

I felt a shift in the energy this past week. Maybe you felt it too. The Aquarius Solar Eclipse in February and the Virgo Lunar Eclipse two weeks ago packed a real punch for me. With Jupiter having turned direct, the new moon in Pisces coming up on the 18th and Mercury going direct just two days after the new moon, it feels like we’re in for a reprieve of sorts. At least, that’s what I’m hoping for.

Eclipses work in cycles, and as you know, I’m big on cycles. How they hold us, shape us, and offer us a way to view ourselves and our lives within a larger context provides me with endless hours of reflection. They provide us with the opportunity to look back 6 months to see where we’re at and also to think ahead 6 months, giving us time to consider where we want to be and what we want to be doing then.

During eclipse season, I always like to go back through my journals to see what I was thinking and writing about at the previous cycle. Inevitably, whatever I was focused on at the time of the previous cycle will once again surface in my life. That is, if it hasn’t been a theme in my life already for the entire 6 months. Which it quite often has. In that case, I’m usually ready to take action on the issue in a bigger way and with more clarity.

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Which brings me to today’s topic.

There’s a lot of energy this year with both Saturn and Neptune now in Aries. Energy that brings us more clarity than the past two years, when they were both in Pisces. Whenever a planet leaves a sign and enters a new one, we’re asked to finish up old business. Especially in the case of slower moving planets like Saturn and Neptune. And when they cross that threshold at the same time, the energy of one thing ending and something new beginning is amplified.

This new moon in Pisces is at 29°, where both Saturn and Neptune just crossed, triggering that energy once again. And later this year, another slow moving planet, Uranus, will end a 7 year stay in Taurus and move into Gemini. While Jupiter, which takes only one year in each sign, will move from its sign of exaltation in Cancer into the Sun’s home sign of Leo. Each of these planets’ movements reinforces the theme of something needing to come to a close.

All of these endings and new beginnings translate into big energy happening for us all. Energy that’s asking us to tie up loose ends, to finish what needs to be done, and to move on so we can make room for new growth. With the Spring Equinox this week, you should really be feeling it now, if you haven’t been already.

Tying up loose ends, finishing up old business, leaving behind what no longer works for us is often work we avoid because let’s face it, it can be unpleasant. Unpleasant may not even cover it. Difficult might be a better word to describe what actually feels like confrontation at times. Either because we have to face those we’re in relationship with or because we have to confront something in ourselves that we’ve been avoiding.

Whether we feel ready or not, this year is asking us to face our demons, both personally and collectively, and to acknowledge who we’ve been so we can make room in our lives (and the world) to become the person(people) we actually want to be. We’re being called to decide to end one way of being, so a new way can be made known.

To do that, we need to do 3 things first:

1. We need to name the pattern, habit, identity or issue that we’ve been invested in keeping alive, but which is now no longer helpful. In fact, it’s now actively harming us, and we need to move on. There’s no short cuts to this process and we can’t fall back on scapegoating others. We have to let our self deception surface and take responsiblity for our role in whatever has been holding us back.

2. Then we need to identify the payoff for investing in it. What purpose did it serve? How did it allow us to become who we are today? Who, if anyone, benefited from it besides us? The Virgo eclipse two weeks ago illuminated the pattern for us in some way, revealing things that until now, we’ve been unwilling to see clearly. Patterns of self-sacrfice, being of service to others but not ourselves, excessive self-criticism, perfectionism, and over analysing everything to death may have come up.

3. And lastly, we need to determine the price it has cost us. What did it take from us? Who or what was sacrificed as a result of it? This could be a choice, a career path, a voice of our own, freedom, or anything else that we gave away willinging to avoid what the pattern has kept hidden.

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Now would be a great time to do some journaling with those questions, so when the next eclipse season rolls around in August, you’ll have a record of what you were moving through and why it mattered.

Need help making a decision?
If you’re feeling overwhelmed and think you might benefit from support so you can make the decision rather than waiting to feel ready to take the next step, start the new business, or begin the next chapter in your life, enrollment for the spring session of Seasonal Mentoring closes on March 20th.

The Process
Seasonal Mentoring clients are required to do a single 1:1 session before we begin, as a way for us both to get to know one another and to determine whether or not you actually need ongoing support. When we’re overwhelmed, clarity can be illusive and we have a tendency to think that we need to move mountains to get things back on track. When in fact, many issues can be addressed in a single 45-minute session by simplyfying and subtracting something from your already busy mind and very full life, rather than adding anything more to it. If I feel that’s the case, then I’ll tell you that.

And, at other times, a season of support can be extremely beneficial to help you move through the process of growth and change. Even then, we’ll only meet once every two weeks for an hour to chat with a focus on removing what’s not essential so you can spend more of your time, energy, and attention on the things that actually bring you joy, make you feel seen, and nourish who you really are.

My goal in working with clients is simple: To help you remember who you are, what you love, and what you value most so you can live a life that reflects those things.

I only work with 3 clients each season. Should the spring session of Seasonal Mentoring fill up before you get a chance to secure a spot, enrolment for the summer session will open on June 1st.

If you need support before then, you can schedule a 1:1 session here.

To learn more about Seasonal Mentoring, follow the link below.

Seasonal Mentoring is now open for enrolment until March 20th. (3 spots are available.)

In 1996, I hated my job working for a bank in Toronto. I knew I was unhappy, but didn’t know what I wanted to do instead. So I quit my job at the end of March and scheduled a drive away to Florida. That’s when you get paid to fly to FL and drive someone else’s car back to Canada for them. I had them fly me down early so I could spend 6 weeks at a friend’s place re-grouping, hoping for clarity on what my next steps would be.

When I got home, the only thing I knew for sure was that I needed to get out of the city. I wanted to be in the woods somewhere, but I didn’t own a car, and I needed to find a job. Instead, I got a travel brochure for Ontario and began looking up towns with resorts that I thought might offer housing with a job. I didn’t try to figure out what would happen any further than the next step.

The last place listed in the brochure was a place called Wolfe Island that I had never heard of. I remember thinking to myself, “Why have I never heard of this cool place called Wolfe Island?” There was one place listed, a hotel, so I called them and asked if they offered housing for the summer to their staff. They laughed out loud at me on the phone. And if you’d ever been to Wolfe Island in the late 90’s, you’d know why. I laugh at myself now thinking about it.

The next day, I was at MEC in the city and stopped to look at the bulletin board on my way out, where I saw a sign for wilderness first aid courses. The address listed was on Wolfe Island! I thought that can’t be a cioincidence so I took the number down and called the guy. Not because I was that interested in the course, though I was curious, but because I figured he must know something about this mysterious Wolfe Island that was suddenly like a vortex in my life, drawing me in.

Sure enough, the guy was a chatty kathy and he told me everything I needed to know about Wofle Island, and more. At the end of the call, he then said his family would be away for the month of August, and if I wanted to come check out the island, I could house sit for them. The next day, I borrowed my flatmate’s car and drove out to the island. I spent the entire day driving the whole of the island to get a feel for it. 3 houses in particular stood out to me. Over the course of the next 2 years, I ended up living in all of them.

As the sun was setting, I left the island to head back to the city. I realised finding work on the island would likely be hard, so I thought I should look for work on the mainland. Before getting on the highway, I stopped and knocked on the door of a B&B in town and asked if they needed help. They did, and she needed me to start that weekend. Over the course of the next 8 weeks, I lived in the hostel two blocks from the B&B and then a student sublet on the main strip for $200.

One day I saw an ad for a boat shop on the island and called to see if they needed help, thinking that if I worked on boats, I’d always be near the water. The guy who owned the shop really needed help, but he couldn’t pay me until all the spring launch work was done. I was now scheduled to house sit for August and didn’t need the cash, so I agreed. I began working on the island, travelling by ferry to the shop each day and working weekends in town at the B&B.

Come August, I moved onto the farm to house sit, and the owners gave me an old VW Jetta in exchange for cleaning out one of the outbuildings for them. While I was there, another couple that owned a B&B on the island asked if I could house sit for them in September, which I agreed to do. October rolled around, and work at the boat shop was slowing down. Rather than paying me for the work I had been doing, we agreed that I would move into the house on the island where the boat shop was and live rent-free.

The guy from the boat shop also hooked me up with a job on a boat in town. I now had a paid job as a boat builder and free rent for the winter. The following spring, that job paid me to go to Maryland to help out another boatbuilder. While I was there, I got to crew on an antique wooden sailboat in the spring regatta on Chesapeake Bay.

When I tell this story, it always sounds a bit fantastical. And honestly, it is. At parties on Wolfe Island, people would often ask how you ended up living on the island. And whenever it came to me, everyone would always draw a blank as if I had somehow appeared there magically. And in a way, I guess I did.

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I can’t tell you how many times I’ve felt the need for some kind of change in the spring only to have recreated my life entirely by fall, as is illustrated by my story of how I came to live on Wolfe Island.

I love spring! I love how charged with energy it is, how much clarity it brings after the darkness of winter, and the immense hope it carries for new possibilities. For all these reasons, it is often a time of emotional and spiritual breakthroughs, those aha moments when something finally lands for you. This year in particular, with an excess of planets in fire signs, that palpable sense of possibility is even more heightened.

As humans, though, we have a bad habit of compartmentalising things rather than viewing life holistically. One rule, if we needed to have rules to follow, when it comes to living your life cyclically, is this: Nothing in the Universe exists in isolation.

That includes you.

So when the energy outside in nature is moving upward and outward, reaching towards the light for sustenance to support new growth and changing form, so are you.

Which leads me to ask you, where in your life is change showing up?

Do you know?
Do you have a sense of what might be calling for change, even if it’s just a feeling, not a clear idea?
Or are you drawing a complete blank?

Depending on how you answer each of those questions, the support I can offer in navigating the process of change will vary.

My aim today is to help you find some clarity if you’re not feeling the energy of change quite yet in your life. And if you are, then maybe I can help you to identify what your next step needs to be so you can keep the momentum going.

The Process of Change Is Often Predictable

When you live your life cyclically by the planets, elements, and seasons, change becomes much easier to navigate because you begin to recognise where you are in the process at any given time.

• In the process of change, we move from not knowing that change is needed or wanted » to knowing that it is, but still not knowing the what or why. This can be likened to that foggy time between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox. The closer we get to the Spring Equinox, this year on March 20th, the more we sense the energy of change emerging in our lives.

• Then, we move on to not knowing what the exact change is that we’re going to make » followed by not knowing how to create it. The territory between not knowing and knowing is usually that lightbulb moment when we suddenly get it, and what was once just a feeling or inkling turns into clarity and knowing. It’s the part after that, the how to make change manifest where the inside work begins.

• Eventually, we arrive at not being able to un-know what we know, at which point, taking action becomes inevitable. This is the point of momentum when we stop asking ourselves how and begin to explore the unseen support that is guiding us at all times.

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Understanding that there is a fairly predictable path that change follows, we can place ourselves within the stages of the process to figure out what our next step needs to be.

The beginning of change starts as a blank slate

You may be reading this and thinking to yourself that nothing is changing in your life right now, so this doesn’t apply to you. Yet, one look at what’s going on in the world at large tells us a very different story. Clearly, the world as a whole is undergoing a huge transformation on every level. When we say the old systems are dying and falling apart, what we are really saying is we are dying and falling apart (read: changing) because systems are made up of people like you and me.

So, while you may not be aware of any visible change in your personal life, we are all being called to change as the world itself changes. Maybe not today or even tomorrow, but change will happen. It can’t NOT happen, for change is the one inevitable thing we can rely on in life. Once we accept this fact, we can move on to the next part of the process, which is identifying where change is happening for us personally.

NOTE: If you feel resistance to accepting that change is afoot somewhere in your life, make a mental note of that now. Not being able to see how change is showing up in your life is not the same as resisting change, so you’ll want a record of this to compare to later.

What parts of yourself, your identity, or your life are ready to fall away?

Quite often, we sense change long before we’re actually ready to act on it. There is no big imminent change on the horizon; we just sense or feel that something is off. We can’t often explain what it is; we just feel a general lack of contentment with our lives, but don’t know why.

This part of the process of change can be really scary and uncomfortable because we tend to question everything in our lives, wondering what needs to change.

Is this the right relationship for me? Do I need to change careers?
Am I feeling supported in the ways I want to be? Do my community and country provide me with what I need to feel safe?

When we find ourselves asking these kinds of questions, it’s usually a pretty good sign that some type of departure is likely inevitable, but our psyche needs time to process this. On an energetic level, though, we’ve already disconnected. The rest of us just needs more time to catch up.

Seeking support or finding a sounding board can be really helpful at this point in the process of change, so that we don’t stay too long where we energtically have already decided we need to move on. This can save many relationships from turning bad fast and never fully recovering.

As an example, let’s say that you notice a vague sense of needing some sort of change concerning your work. This then prompts you to begin asking questions like: What am I contributing to the world? Why am I doing what I’m doing? How did I get here? Is this enough for me?

When change rears its head in the area of our work life, whether we work for ourselves or for someone else, this is sometimes because we feel an inner call to align our deepest values with our work. Something might feel off, but we don’t yet know exactly what it is.

To figure that out, we need to identify what our values are before we can determine how to apply them to our work. The what, why, and how of the change process are deeply entwined and can take much longer than we’d likely prefer to unravel.

It’s helpful at this point to remember that while spring carries the energy of change and we may well feel restless for it, everything has its own season. More often than not, the change that we initiate in the spring doesn’t bear fruit until the Summer Solstice or Fall Equinox, or perhaps even the following year.

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Unravelling the what, why, and how of change

Ultimately, change is an inside job whether we like it or not. Many of the women I’ve worked with hired me initially to help them monetise their skills, knowledge, and experience. The strategic part of this work is quite straightforward; they could implement it, and off to the races they’d go. But the inner work, which it almost always demanded, meant they needed to dive deep into all the things that remained hidden from view, before they could make their desired change real in the outer world.

What most people don’t understand about the process of change is just how much inner work is required to make the outer work visible.

We can use tools like tarot or astrology to help guide us, to illuminate what we have difficulty seeing, but sometimes we remain blind to our own telling of the story we’re living, and we need someone else’s eyes to see what we’re unable to see clearly ourselves. This is where a good sounding board in the form of a friend, therapist, or mentor can be useful. Not because we’re not capable enough to figure shit out on our own, but because everyone has their own experiences to draw on.

Two people can read the same book and come away with two completely different understandings of what was said based on the totality of their lived experiences. This doesn’t diminish our experience in any way; it adds to it by giving us a perspective that we may never have come to on our own.

Accept that change is hard, and then decide to make it easier on yourself by finding someone that you can talk to about the process as you’re moving through it. Then you’ll also have someone to celebrate with you on the other side when you’re done, who really knows everything you had to go through to get there.

Seek out sources of support, seen and unseen

One of the biggest shifts we’re experiencing right now on the planet is becoming aware of who we really are as spiritual beings. We’re more aware than ever before that we have access to our intuition and are supported fully by our ancestors, guides, and angels. When we open ourselves up to accessing the support and guidance they have to share with us, infinite possibilities become available to us.

So, ask yourself: Do I really want to change? Am I really ready to let go of my old self, my old life and identity to allow a new one to take shape?

If the answer is yes, I guarantee that you have more support than you probably realise, ready and eager to help you. All you have to do is ask for it.

This is where things get fun, but also sometimes where we get stuck because we forget who we really are. Every human being is born with what I call a spiritual support team. Your SST is made up of your ancestors, guides, angels, and higher Self. There’s much more to it than that, but for our purpose, what I want to remind you of is that they cannot, will not, support you if you don’t ask for their help first.

Back in 1996, when I was trying to figure out how to go from working at the bank in the city to living somewhere in the woods with no job, vehichle or resources to support me, I didn’t know what I do now about my own SST. What I did was not overthink it, and instead, I allowed myself to be guided.

If you’re reading this, then you may already know all this and don’t need me to tell you. What I want to draw your attention to is whether or not you’re actually using the support you already have. Sometimes it’s just a matter of forgetting that we have to be the one to initiate that process by asking for help from the unseen realm.

And othertimes, we are asking for guidance, but we’re not actually following through on the support we’re receiving.

We may even be telling ourselves that we’re not getting any help, despite the fact that we’re asking for it, and we wonder why.

If that’s the case, then you need to ask yourself how open you really are to the support that your SST has to offer you. How guidable are you, really? If you are, then you know there are certain things that you can hand over to your SST for support, and you trust that you will be led. Your job is to sit back and wait for the signs, to pay attention, and to act when they appear.

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Putting it into practice

Ask:
What do I feel isn’t working?
What am I acting as a willing participant in that I don’t feel engaged with anymore, but I won’t let go of because I don’t know what’s next?

Your guides need you to let go so they can show you the way forward.

Again, ask yourself:
What do I know right now?

The relationship needs to end, I need to move, this source of income no longer feels aligned, my diet isn’t supporting me, and it needs to change, my home doesn’t feel like it’s energetically aligned with who I am now, and I want it to reflect who I feel I’ve become….

Once you’re able to get clear on what’s true for you in this moment, then you can ask for help from your guides. When you do, you need to pay attention to how they respond to you. Remember, you have to allow yourself to be led. How your SST communicates with you is not always going to be clear, but the more you do it, the easier it will be for you to understand what they have to say and how they’re saying it.

What you might expect to experience when you ask for support from your guides:

You notice something surfaces into your awareness, perhaps something unexpected, and your attention is now focused on it.
You decide to lean in rather than ignore it.
You explore what it might mean, you invite deeper understanding, you follow your feelings, knowing it portends an important shift without needing to know how you know or where following it will lead you.
You trust that you are being guided, and that is enough.
You leap into unknown territory because you are open to learning or experiencing something new, and you are ready to outgrow old habits and ways of being.
You follow a sense of play rather than the ordered and measured stability and routine of your daily life.
You allow the possibility for something new to unfold simply because you’re curious about what might happen, what might change if you allowed it to.

I want to close by asking you this: If you could begin something new right now, anything - without needing to know how or all the details - what do you dream of doing?

Let us know in the comments!

For paid subscribers, I’ve created a video that walks you through each of the steps I took that led me to live on Wolfe Island and how I was guided in unseen ways throughout that process to illustrate what this might look like for you. You can watch the video here.
If you’re not already a paid subscriber and you’d like to join us, each month, there is a Q&A thread posted where you can Ask Me Anything or just pick my brain. Come join us!

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Seasonal Mentoring is now open for enrolment until March 20th (3 spots are available)

Your journey, your answers - my guidance and support.

Our best guidance does not come from authority figures who tell us what to do. It comes from our own inner wisdom. The answers that come from within will always hold more power and truth than anything we learn from others because our bodies hold the memory of our knowing. We don’t have to know how we know something because our bodies remember what that knowing feels like. From a spiritual perspective, our feelings are how our intuition and guides communicate with us.

The transitional times of spring and fall are often when clients seek my support the most, for they coincide with big shifts happening in their lives. What makes the difference between continuing on their own and investing in support is more often than not an instigating factor of some type: a divorce, marriage, birth or death, job loss, identity crisis, starting a new business, or a move aborad etc

During times of change and upheaval, decisions calculated solely from the mind and rational logic tend to favour forward progress along a linear trajectory. Will this advance my career? How does this increase my status or security? Can I be assured of earning more money?

In contrast, when we use our intuition and ask our guides for support, they always point us in the direction of what’s interesting, where our excitement and joy lie, and what we’re passionate about. Navigating change in this way elicits a sense of knowing it’s important for us to move forward without needing to know why or even how we know, because we’re more curious about where it might lead us than what might go wrong.

If you’re moving through a period of change in your life and you’re considering investing in support, I invite you to ask yourself this one question first.

Ask » Are you living the life that you actually want?

Or are you living the life you thought you were supposed to want, the one you wanted a decade ago, or the life you were told to live?

You get to decide, that’s the beauty of living your life as the spiritual being that you are. You get to decide what kind of life you want to live, and your guides will support you in creating it.

Follow the link below to learn more about Seasonal Mentoring->

A quick note: Enrolment for the Spring Session of Seasonal Mentoring is now open. For more information and how to apply, scroll to the bottom.

Apologies for being a bit tardy with this week’s post, the energy of this eclipse and Mercury Retrograde have thrown me for a bit of a loop. As a Sag, this eclipse is squaring my Sun/Mercury conjunction. (Hard aspect = hard times, generally) I have to say, if this is how I’m feeling, middle degree Virgos, Pisces, + Geminis must really be getting hit hard. I thought I would share how this is showing up for me as a real-life example of what to look for in your own life. I’ve also found a fabulous astrologer who has done an extremely thorough breakdown of this energy, including supporting practices that I’ll share with you as well.

If you know anything about astrology, you probably know that Virgo is the sign that gets picked on the most. Yes, they can be hypercritical, but the outward expression of that is nothing compared to the intensity of criticism they direct at themselves. And honestly, that discerning eye is very useful. Sometimes it just needs to be reminded to direct itself towards things rather than people.

Bear in mind that we all have Virgo in our charts somewhere, so each of us will experience this energy differently depending on which houses the eclipse is lighting up (Virgo + Pisces), where Mercury is retrograding (Pisces), and if we have any planets or chart angles near those points. To start with, Lunar Eclipses happen when the moon is full, which means there is an opposition of energy happening. In this case, the overly analytical mind of Virgo is having a standoff with the overly emotional Pisces. The eclipse then magnifies that opposition, turning the energy up a few notches and illuminating patterns, behaviours, identities, and beliefs we’ve carried for a long time, which are ready to be released once and for all.

If you have ever tried to quit smoking, drinking, binge eating, gambling, or any other thing you may have done to suppress, avoid, or deny your feelings, then you know that before you quit, things tend to take a sharp turn for the worse. This is why we usually need to hit rock bottom before things change. Whatever strategy we employed as children to make us feel safe, to protect our vulnerabilities, and numb ourselves to the overwhelming feelings we had about the world around us, at some point, that strategy no longer works. But those patterns are very deeply ingrained, and they are not going to go away overnight just because we want them to.

For a Virgo, that might have been always being the good girl and helping everyone out, to the detriment of their own needs. For a Pisces, that may have been stuffing down their feelings with food and later alcohol to numb themselves to the overwhelm. As we get older, what once supported us, even saved us, becomes a prison of our own making that we can spend years, even lifetimes, trying to free ourselves from. Eclipses tend to trigger these sorts of lifelong patterns and help us by accelerating the clearing of these old energies so we can grow in new, healthier ways that allow our highest expression to be seen and shared with the world.

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What this looks like for me may or may not help you see what it looks like for you

For the past several weeks, I’ve been eating sugar as if I’ll never get the chance to eat ever again. While I’m aware of what I’m doing in the moment and I know that I don’t like how sugar makes me feel, I’ve found myself eating way too much of it anyway. This is the sort of thing an eclipse will bring up, especially when it’s a lunar eclipse on the Virgo/Pisces axis, because Virgo rules discernment and Pisces rules addictions. So we tend to see-saw between the two polarities, going from one extreme to the next. One minute criticising ourselves for not showing enough restraint or control, and the next, saying ‘fuck it’, and going all in despite knowing it’s not actually what we want. IYKYK

Where this gets really interesting is that when we’re acting out behaviours like this that feel somewhat compulsive, they are most certainly being triggered by some much deeper underlying issue, usually, unprocessed emotions. Last year, my mother passed away, which sparked a very Virgo-like change in my daily routine, exercise and diet. Virgo rules our health and the daily rituals and routines we participate in. My initial response to my mother’s passing was to harness the clarity, discipline, and critical eye of Virgo to improve my health as a way of avoiding the feelings I had about her own health and eventual death. I was very clear that I did not want to die the way she did. Read: unprocessed grief.

Now remember, this is an opposition, so the energy shifts back and forth until we find our balance. Not all at once, but gradually, I began to loosen my grip on my routine. After 9 months of adhering to a very supportive structure and feeling good about the results I was experiencing and how I was feeling, I could feel a change coming on. Except the change wasn’t internal this time, it was external. This is something to be aware of. Whenever we are doing deep internal work, there is almost always a corresponding shift that happens in our outer lives. This is why they tell you not to make any big changes in your first year of recovery. Note: Around the same time that my routine began slipping, I also experienced an unexpected surge of grief, despite thinking I was done with crying and feeling sad.

So while I was aware of feelings surfacing that reflected a need for outer change, there was also a corresponding fear of the very change I was craving. Not to mention all the chaos and instability in the world at large and the chronic unprocessed grief that so many of us are feeling. This internal conflict, the desire for change and the fear of what that change might mean caused me to seek out a way to soothe myself.

Enter sugar cravings.

Now, sugar may not sound like the worst thing in the world to be addicted to, but when taken in the context of struggling with my weight throughout my entire life and my response to my mother’s passing, it shines a light on a pattern that runs much deeper and is far more significant, which was established when I was just a child.

When I look at all of this through the lens of Chinese Medicine, yet another layer is revealed. Spring is the season of Liver Chi. Fear is the emotion associated with it. Wood, which is my weakest element personally, rules the liver. When liver chi is healthy, it is stable and flexible; it has roots but can bend. This reflects a capacity to make change without disturbing our inner equilibrium. Which, clearly, is not happening in my case.

Liver chi is responsible for balancing our emotions, which requires a lot of energy when we are clearing anything old or processing a lot of emotions, which we all are right now. Craving sugar feeds the liver, giving it energy, while also burdening the organ and making it work harder.

Liver imbalances can show up as an excess of anger, chronic frustration, and rage or a noticeable absence of those feelings. Especially with all the fire we have this year, impatience will be high for many of us - even more so if you’re experiencing imbalanced liver chi, which I would guess, almost all of us are.

There is always a reciprocal relationship between your inner and outer worlds.

For many of us, we are going through a deep process of clearing, which is an initiation of sorts — one thing is ending, so something new can be born. Bear this in mind when you notice any signs of resistance coming up, for our liver chi governs all forms of resistance. Remember, what you resist, persists. So it’s best to use your resistance like a weather vane telling you what needs to be let go of so you can create new life in that space.

Consider what is changing or transforming in your inner life. And ask yourself, how is that being mirrored in my outer life? Your focus may have only been on one aspect of this relationship. Perhaps overly focused on the inner journey or how to navigate the outer journey.

Reflecting this week on old habits and patterns that have been resurfacing, you may find yourself feeling like you’re being pulled under the surf by them. That feeling that this is a losing battle and you’ll never overcome them, transform them, or be free of them. There’s an emotional heaviness right now that’s for sure, and many of us are feeling it in our bodies. If you’ve been feeling sluggish with little energy for movement or exercise, know that this feeds into a cycle of craving heavy, dense foods that then reinforce that energetic depletion. Be compassionate with yourself and know that this too shall pass.

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What can we do?

• Especially under the energy of this eclipse and Mercury retrograding through Pisces, turning our attention away from our mental frustrations and irritations and turning it towards our feelings will be immensely helpful. If you can, give yourself some dedicated time alone just to feel what you’re feeling. Do it outside in nature if you can, and allow the earth to absorb what you can no longer hold. This is key, for so much of what we’ve carried is not even our own. I’ve been learning this repeatedly since my mother’s passing.

• The wood element is what allows us to turn our intentions into tangible results, so don’t push yourself to make any big changes right now. If you’re not feeling clear on your next steps, pause and trust that when the answer is ready to present itself to you, you’ll know.

• Spend time in nature, surround yourself with plants, work in the garden, and wear the colour green.

• If you’re experiencing anger, frustration, or irriation allow yourself to feel it + then release it.

• Do a spring cleanse to support your liver, and while you’re at it, give your house a good spring cleaning too.

• Do gentle exercise to stretch the muscles and tendons of the body, which are ruled by the liver. Yin yoga is excellent for this, with a focus on lateral stretches and compression on the inner and outer hips and thighs. Poses like swan, firelog, dragonfly, and shoelace are all great.

And remember, whatever coping strategies you developed and relied on to survive your early years, you chose them because they worked for you then. (You may actually have inherited them.) They made it possible for you to be here now. So they aren’t going to go away without a fight. Expect there to be resistance despite you really, really wanting to change, to let go, to release what no longer works for you. But rather than resigning in defeat, have faith that things are moving in the direction that you wish them to, for there would not be this much resistance if they weren’t.

For paid subscribers, the March Q&A thread is now posted, so feel free to pick my brain about any of this - or anything else. I look forward to hearing your questions! I’ll do my best to answer them all. And if you’re not already a paid subscriber and you’d like to join us, we’d love to have you!

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As I said earlier, I came across this extremely in-depth post that I thought some of you might like to dive into. It is very long, like it will take you all week to get through long, but there are some fabulous tools, practices, and resources offered, so it’s well worth the work if you’re feeling in need of support.

Soul Healing Astrology

The Astrology for March 2nd – 8th, 2026: Release, Reset, Begin—A Week of Lunar Release, Mercury’s Cazimi & Venus’s New Desire

Hey Soul Seekers…

Read more

3 months ago · 48 likes · 6 comments · Soul Healing Astrology

And lastly, Spring Session for Seasonal Mentoring is now open for enrolment.

What does that mean? It means, if you’re looking for 1:1 support to help you move through a stage, or a season of growth and change in your life, and you think you might want to work with me, now is the time.

How it works

After decades of doing this kind of work, there are a few things I’ve learned along the way that make the work infinitely more successful both for myself and my clients.

The most essential thing is that both parties need to feel like they’re a good fit. You can’t do deep soul-level work with someone you don’t feel safe and comfortable with. And you can’t know how you’ll feel about someone just from reading their words on a page. For this reason, I have all of my seasonal mentoring clients do a single session with me first.

Why? Because single sessions provide us both with a chance to meet, dive in, and feel out whether we think we can do good work together for an entire season. (12 weeks) The barrier to entry is also much lower for a single session, while still being high enough that it’ll make you think seriously about whether you’re ready to show up and do the work required to get the results you want. If, after that session, we both decide to move forward, the cost of your single session will be applied to your seasonal mentoring investment.

Instead of a written application, on which you can lie to yourself and me - no shame, I’ve done it too - you can think of this as a bit like a working interview, where we both get the opportunity to decide if we’re a good fit to move forward together. I need to get a feel for you as much as you need to get a feel for me, and this is the best way I know how to do that. If you hear yourself saying YES in your mind, you can book your single session here.

The only other thing I’ll say at this point is that there is a big difference between learning something, be that about yourself or life in general, and putting into practice what is that you’re learning. Working together through a season of your life gives you the hands-on practice that’s required for any real, lasting change to take place.

I’m not here to give you the answers; I’m here to call you out or in when your old patterns surface, to be a witness to your transformation so you finally feel seen, and to hold the container of the new Self and life you’re creating.

If you’re not sure that you’re ready for that, you can ask yourself:

Do I have the container in my life to hold the version of myself that I’m creating?

And do I feel capable and supported enough in my life to actually put this into practice, not just for the time being, but to sustain that practice for years to come?

To learn more about Seasonal Mentoring, click below.

Recently, I watched the film The Lost Bus about the 2018 Camp Fire in Butte County, California, which is considered the worst wildfire in the state’s history. The fire burned for 17 days, with 52,000 people evacuated, and 85 people losing their lives. Over 153,000 acres burned, resulting in billions of dollars in damage. Fire investigators determined that the Pacific Gas & Electric company was at fault for the Camp Fire (and others) and was held responsible. P&G paid a settlement of 13.5 billion and pleaded guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter.

As I watched the film, I couldn’t help but think about the energy of this year and beyond, with the excess of fire we’ll be experiencing. While our calendars marked the end of 2025 seven weeks ago, the energy didn’t really begin to shift until this past week, when we had big astrological changes that I’ve already gone into in more detail. If you missed that post, you can read it here.

Beyond the actual movement of the planets and their symbolism, the one thing I’m always looking for myself, and hoping to communicate, is how natural cycles provide us with a mirror. The Camp Fire was a striking example of that. Everything happening outside is a reflection of what’s going on inside of us as individuals. We each experience that in varying ways and degrees, depending on any number of factors. Today, I want to invite you to explore what that looks like for you now that Saturn and Neptune are both fully in the fire element.

The transits of Saturn and Neptune into the fire element, along with Pluto, which is already in the air sign of Aquarius, and Uranus, which will move into the air sign of Gemini on April 25th, mean that the outermost planets will all be in the masculine (Yang) elements from 2026 to 2028. This is a big shift from 2025, when they resided primarily in the feminine (Yin) elements of earth and water. (Except for their retrogrades, which highlighted what we might expect to see and experience this year.)

You’ve probably seen, heard, or read something about the Chinese Year of the Fire Horse beyond what I briefly mentioned last week, which adds another layer to the excess of the masculine element of fire that dominates the energy in 2026. Viewed through the lens of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), this takes on a much deeper significance. For many years, I taught Yin yoga with a focus on nourishing the meridian system of the body. It taught me a lot about myself, my students, and the role that the cycles of the seasons play in our health. This is the primary reason that I work with clients in a seasonal mentoring capacity. Each season holds a unique quality of energy in the same way that each year or planet transiting a sign does. Those qualities both inform the challenges we might be facing while also providing the methods to ameliorate the dis/ease associated with those challenges.

One thing I love about TCM is how multilayered it is. It really looks at the body as its own ecosystem, nestled within the larger ecosystems of our environment, the world as a whole, and the Universe itself. In TCM, when there is an excess of fire energy, water energy responds by trying to cool the fire to keep it from running out of control. Think of it like dousing flames to put out a fire. Except that the fire we’re experiencing in 2026 is being fueled by the air element, making it all the more uncontrollable.

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This is where what happened with the Camp Fire really hit me.

Multiple factors at play made the fire fierce, widespread and hard to control. One was the fact that they had been experiencing a severe drought, leaving the ground dry. In other words, depletion of the water element. Another factor was the high winds that pushed the fire rapidly across multiple towns. There’s the air element, which in Chinese Medicine is most closely linked to metal. It was actually metal that started the fire when a ring on one of the P&G towers, worn down by high winds and constant rubbing, broke, dropping one of the electrified lines, which then hit the tower and caused sparks to fall on the dry ground below.

This cascading series of events that contributed to the Camp Fire mirrors how the imbalance of elements within our own bodies can get out of control quickly, creating negative impacts on our health. In TCM, when the water element has to work overtime to regulate an excess of the fire element, it eventually leads to water element depletion. As in the case of the Camp Fire, they were already in a drought. This too mirrors our personal experience, as many people, women in particular, are chronically deficient in the water element, making them more susceptible to the issues associated with an excess of fire energy.

When we are depleted of the water element in our bodies, some of the ways that might show up are fatigue, stiff joints, low back pain, and fear. Out in the world, it can look more like the constant wreck of a news cycle that keeps us in fear. Let’s take this back to our bodies, though, so we can see how we respond to the world through the lens of the elemental energies at play, in us and around us.

Since the advent of artificial light, our internal rhythms, body clock, and sleep cycles have been changed completely. Add to this the industrialisation of the world and the constant need for humans to work like machines, 24/7, and you end up with a culture that is deeply disconnected from who they really are - a living, breathing part of the ecosystem we call Nature. What we see happening now - and what will continue to happen in the extreme this year and next - is that our personal internal imbalances are being magnified in the collective field.

Without a nourished water element foundation to support the excess of fire energy this year, our internal fire element will become ungrounded, causing the fire energy within us to move uncontrolled through the body, creating symptoms like heat, inflammation, heart palpitations, and anger. At the same time, if our Yin/water element is not already depleted, it will certainly be put under significant strain this year. Water that needs to work overtime to cool down an excess of internal fire often expresses itself as someone who overgives, so this is something to be mindful of.

When our Yang/fire element is excessive, and our Yin/water element is depleted, the natural regeneration cycle between fire and water is no longer functional, leaving us lacking in mental clarity and physical energy. When we lack the water to restrain fire, that relationship becomes transactional, driven by either consumption or extraction. Which looks a lot like the world we live in right now.

Going deeper - How to create safety when the world feels, and quite often is, unsafe

First, we need to define what safety actually is. Safety is not the absence of a threat, but rather the presence of our connection to ourselves. When we look at the organs of the body governed by the fire and water elements, we can see how our sense of safety is tied to the relationship between Yin/water and Yang/fire. The presence and balance of these energies dictate whether we live or die. When they cease to operate or are completely divorced from one another, life ends.

The fire element rules the Heart and Small Intestines, while the water element rules the Kidneys and Urinary Bladder. Associated with each organ pairing are a series of mental, emotional, and energetic qualities, along with the physical functions they provide. Additionally, the wood element, which rules the Liver and Gall Bladder and the spring season that we’re headed into, is crucial in feeding energy to the Heart and Small Intestine.

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As you read through these brief descriptions, take note of anything that stands out.

Heart/Small Intestine: Element is fire; fire transforms wood. It rules the emotions of love/hate and joy. The heart houses the Shen (spirit/mind), controlling consciousness, mental activity, and emotional well-being. It processes sensory information, enables rational thought, and maintains appropriate emotional responses. The small intestine specifically is responsible for the discernment of everything we digest, including food, thoughts, emotions and experiences.

Kidney/Urinary Bladder: Element is water; water controls fire. The emotions associated with it are fear/wisdom, our deepest emotional depths and courage. It stores Essence (Jing) and is considered the 'Root of Life' and the source of all Yin and Yang in the body. Kidney deficiency can manifest as a lack of willpower, poor concentration, or a feeling of being easily discouraged. When balanced, we possess patience and a deep, quiet strength.

Liver/Gall Bladder: Element is wood; wood feeds fire. It governs the emotions of anger/compassion, including resentment, frustration and irritability. It plays a crucial role in emotional regulation and digestive support. When we suppress emotions like anger or frustration, the Liver’s function becomes obstructed. This Liver Qi stagnation then produces heat in the body, adding more fuel to the fire of the Heart and Small Intestines.

Fire naturally rises, as you see when watching a flame flicker. This rising function mobilises our energy, rather than creating it. The Small Intestine, which is paired with the Heart and ruled by the fire element, acts as a filter in our physical bodies and provides the ability for us to discern what fuel (wood) our hearts need for us to mobilise our energy in support of the things that hold meaning for us.

With an excess of fire energy in the collective field, our individual constitutions must be balanced and well nourished so we can discern with clarity how our heart energy meets the energy of the world.

Reflection

• What are you allowing deeper into your personal energy field?

• What are you choosing to let go of?

• What are you putting boundaries on, using discernment to determine how or when you engage with it?

If there is a gift that the Yang fire excess this year has to offer us, it is not the energy to create something new, to be visible, or to take charge of something that matters to us. Even though our Aries energy may really want to do all of those things, Saturn in Aries is demanding restraint and discipline. Read this post for more on that.

It’s knowing WHICH things to do and WHY they matter to us. Which will then dictate HOW they need to be done and WHEN. (This is at the heart of the work I do with my clients.)

Our capacity for discernment is getting severely road tested. Will we watch the news? If so, how much, and from what source? Add to this the false sense of urgency created by unrooted fire, and the need for us to nourish the Yin water and earth elements in our bodies and lives becomes clear.

One look at the news these days and most of us will feel an immediate sense of urgency to do something - anything! For some of us, that feeling is more pronounced than for others. Noting how strongly you identify with this feeling will help you to see what needs balancing in your own body. You may also recognise the feeling of fear that arises when you watch the news. Again, observing how strong this feeling is, what triggers it, and how you process it are all extremely valuable things to be aware of right now, throughout this year and next.

Things to lean on this year

1. Predictable routines help to build safety by teaching the body and, therefore, our nervous system, that we can be relied on to take care of it. Less effort and more nourishment on the deepest levels. Weekly potlucks & porch hangs with an intimate group of friends and neighbours are great for this!

2. Rather than adding more to your list of things to do or healing protocols, ask what you can release or subtract.

3. Remember that sustainable change happens slowly and subtly. Don’t stop what you’re doing because you don’t see dramatic changes immediately. Whatever you choose to do, work with it for a season, commit, follow through and be present to things improving a little bit each day. Again, this is why I work with mentoring clients for a season, because change takes time. If you’re looking for support, Spring enrollment opens March 1st. You can learn more about Seasonal Mentoring here.

4. Try your best to eat + sleep at regular times and get into bed no later than 11 pm.

5. Fire energy can be moved out of the head and down into the body through consistent, daily, gentle practices like yoga, walking, swimming, and Qigong. Yin yoga in particular will be a great support this year and next. Whatever you choose to do, be realistic about what you can actually sustain. Less is more now. Do what you can, and stick with it consistently.

6. Allow the actions you take to arise from the alignment your discernment creates, rather than efforting or trying to grasp a feeling of ease. Pause first, then act.

When things in life feel wrong, or if you get that gut feeling that you are on the wrong path, you probably are. Stop, drop in, and listen before you act. Life is always moving where it needs to go. Humans interfere with that natural flow when they are disconnected from their true nature. This year can be the year that we all choose to reconnect to who we really are. Wouldn’t that be something?

Seasonal mentoring opens March 1st - Click here to learn more about what you can expect and why you might consider investing in personalised support this spring.