Midlife Transits

In the fall of 2011, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I found the astrology of the diagnosis to be quite fascinating. Sometimes astrology can be downright eerie. Here’s what happened.

The diagnosis at first was puzzling for me in an astrological sense (not to mention shocking in a real life sense). It occurred as Pluto was making a final station on my natal Saturn. I knew Pluto on Saturn can be a hairy transit, but I hadn’t felt any noticeable effects in the year and a half or so it had been active. Now, just as the transit was ending, I get some very bad news. I understood that the combination of Pluto and Saturn could symbolize cancer, but breast cancer?

I didn’t have any family history of breast cancer. I didn’t have any symptoms, couldn’t feel a lump. I just went in for a routine mammogram, one that I had put off for a year. In fact, I only went in for it because the persistent lady from Kaiser Permanente (my health care provider) happened to catch me on the phone in a vulnerable moment right before a phone conference. I wanted to get off the line so I agreed to go in for a mammogram at the next available time.

Breast cancer was not on my list of worries. In my mind, breasts and disorders of the breast are associated with the moon, the sign of Cancer, and the 4th house. That’s the way I learned astrology, right or wrong. Nothing was impacting any of these areas of my chart. My natal Saturn is not in Cancer. There was a very minor progression, that if generously interpreted might point to the moon, but it was a real stretch to find anything impacting any of the traditional factors associated with breast cancer.

It wasn’t until later, when I more fully understood the type of breast cancer that I was diagnosed with, that I found the symbolism. My type of breast cancer is very very rare. It is called metaplastic breast cancer. It turns out that what metaplastic cancer means is that, for unknown reasons, normal breast cells are transformed into skin cells and bone cells. One woman with this type of cancer actually had a bit of bone jut through her breast!

Pluto is the planet of transformation, literally. Saturn and Capricorn (the sign of my natal Saturn) are symbols of, you guessed it, skin and bone. I was dumbfounded when I realized that. During the transit, silently and unbeknownst to me, Pluto was transforming cells previously healthy cells into skin cells and bone cells that shouldn’t have been there.

When I calculated the doubling rate for my tumor, the time when the tumor must have taken hold was eerily close to the beginning of the transit, a little more than a year and a half earlier. (My cancer was growing pretty aggressively, by the way.)

The final station and ending of that transit marked the ending of the growth stage for that tumor. As is typical when a potentially difficult transit hits its final station, something bad ended. In this case, it was a tumor.

I was blown away when I realized that. I wasn’t exactly glad I had cancer, but I was grateful to the cosmos for bringing it to an end on schedule and to the cosmic planning that went into that persistent lady from Kaiser calling me at exactly the right time to persuade me to come in.

Sometimes astrology is just amazing.

If you were born between late October 1953 early October 1956, your second Saturn return has most likely started. There are some exceptions for people born between January and May 1956, but for the rest of you born within this time range, your second Saturn return has begun. What does this mean?

First, it means that the planet Saturn was in the sign of Scorpio when you were born. Second, it means that the planet Saturn has returned to the sign of Scorpio right now. Third, it means that this is the second time that Saturn has returned to this sign since you were born (hence, second Saturn return). That’s the technical stuff.

Now for what it means for your life. Let’s start by looking at some of the things that the planet Saturn means in your life in general.

Saturn has a number of very important jobs. The one we’ll look at in this series relates to his magic danger assessing abilities. Okay, they’re not actually magic abilities, paranoid danger-assessing abilities might be a better phrase.

One of Saturn’s jobs is to urge you to be careful. He looks ahead to the future with apprehension, identifies potential elements that might be dangerous or harmful, and tries to scare the heck out of you so that you will avoid those potentially dangerous or harmful things.

When Saturn returns to the sign he was in when you were born, one of the things he does is think about your future and what sort of things you ought to be prudent about now so that you can avoid danger and harm. In other words, he updates his fear list.

When you have your first Saturn return at around age 30 or so, Saturn realizes (and so do you) that you have survived your youth, which means that you’re probably not going to be dying any time soon.

You’d think this would be good news and in a way it is, but if short-term survival of the dangers of childhood and youth is no longer at the top of Saturn’s worry list, then something else has to be. The worries and fears of adulthood kick in, and most people start acutely feeling them as they hit age 29 or so.

Now that Saturn no longer worries about you being beaten up by the school bully or anyone else bigger than you, he starts worrying about things like having an adult future in which you don’t accomplish anything. He worries about your life having meaning, your career, whether or not you ought to have children, and then once you have them, he worries about them. He worries about pollution and global warming and world issues and participating in society as an adult.

When you hit your second Saturn return, Saturn realizes that you have survived, gracefully or not, the major worries on his adult worry list. He needs to update his worries. And now he realizes that in fact you might die sometime soon. So he starts worrying about death. He starts worrying about the vulnerabilities of old age. About your bones and skin cancer and your bank balance for retirement. He looks at your future and he tries to scare you into having a successful third age, post raising children and establishing a career or an adult role.

Next we’ll look at how having Saturn in the sign of Scorpio affects the second Saturn return.

You can find Part I here.

The sign Saturn is in when you’re born gives Saturn his particular personality as a worrier. Some people worry about whether they’re unique and interesting; other people really don’t care. Some people worry about their privacy; it never occurs to others to do so. And so on.

One of the things Saturn in Scorpio tends to worry about is control. Self-control and control over other people. Saturn in Scorpio looks at control as a crucial adult survival strategy. He exerts effort toward warning you that it is very important to control your destiny rather than react to it. Depending on your circumstances and environment, he may decide that the only way to control your destiny is to be the boss of others, to wear a cloak of authority or power, to hide your potential weaknesses behind status or title. Or he may be terrified of any situation in which it appears that others might control you. He may fear authority and the law and other people’s power.

As a person with Saturn in Scorpio, you may love his emphasis on power and control, but it’s a bit more likely that you’ll not be that fond of it. Saturn can be quite the frustrating planet. He can make you feel that no matter how hard you try (and you may try very very hard) that you can’t quite achieve enough or get enough of what he wants for you. You may be consciously or unconsciously driven by his fears of being manipulated or his fear that you will not be able to manipulate others enough to keep yourself safe.

As you go through the second Saturn return, and as Saturn updates his worry list, you may experience some nice effects. Saturn may realize that he was perhaps a bit, a teensy-weensy bit, over-paranoid about some of the dangers he identified earlier. He may realize that things get screwed up, that you screw things up and other people screw things up and the world doesn’t end. You can handle the occasional error and if other people (other people terrify Saturn in Scorpio) make mistakes, it won’t kill you. That’s a good thing.

But it would be misleading to say that the second Saturn return is a 2 ½ year period of happy rosy realizations that you have outgrown certain fears and that certain risks and dangers no longer apply to you. Because when Saturn updates his worry list, he confronts new realities. And one of the realities he most often confronts is that people do die. That loss does occur. Careers do go down the tubes or end. Success doesn’t necessarily last forever. That you can outstay your welcome in a certain role. That it is necessary to move on sometimes.

Saturn is a paradoxical planet. Once he realizes that you are, in fact, going to die one day, he starts having you put a lot less effort into not dying. He starts caring less about survival and more about living. He shifts from fearing death to appreciating life. He starts caring more about how you live through things than about how you avoid them.

That sounds great and in fact it really is. The second Saturn return brings really great gifts. The catch is that you actually have to practice confronting death, understanding mortality, shedding outgrown fears, and living through loss or failure or setbacks or reversals in a more conscious, thoughtful, even grateful way. That’s not as easy as rolling off a log. It takes awhile to get the hang of it and almost no one signs up for that kind of practice willingly. Life just confronts you with the necessity of doing so.

Next: How Saturn in Scorpio deals with the second Saturn return.

You can find Part I here. You can find Part II here.

As a person with Saturn in Scorpio, the ways in which you will confront Saturn’s fears about control will vary. It’d be reasonable to be prepared, to the extent that it is possible to be prepared, to confront fears about managing your money or your business and career affairs. Your sense of your proper role may change. Practical concerns, especially financial ones, will most likely be important. Illness or danger to loved ones are real possibilities. Your ability to manage things or your ability to direct and regulate your own life and the lives of others may be upended.

You’ll learn to deal with all the potential ramifications because you’ll have to. Saturn won’t let you fail. He’ll let you worry and fret and stew, but he won’t let you fail.

There’s one more element to the story. And that’s your contribution to society. Every Saturn generation has a contribution. Yours is kind of important right now.

It has to do with politics and government and the economic realities of the times. The interests of Saturn in Scorpio coincide with the issues on the world’s agenda these days. Things like the role of government in the economy, debt, taxes, reform of government, the power of political parties. These are exactly the kinds of things Saturn in Scorpio in your chart has been thinking about for a long time, even if you aren’t aware of it.

Saturn in Scorpio is a natural politician. He understands the realities of how power is actually used, overtly and covertly, and he understands how people and politicians and societies are driven by self-interest. He understands the paranoia about the economy, because he’s always been paranoid about your own personal economy. He understands the relationship between money and freedom, about the desire of people to control their own destinies. He knows all about the dangers of debt and taxation both. He realizes that if people don’t control themselves; other people will control them.

You may hate politics. You may be bored with politics. You may know nothing about politics. Or you may be an avid follower of national and international affairs, with a subscription to 6 newspapers and 23 opinion blogs. Saturn in Scorpio won’t care either way.

He just knows you have a responsibility these days to put your experience to good use. You need to care enough about government to vote, express your opinion, speak up, ponder the needs of your country, hold politicians to account and let other people know what and how you think. You’ve reached the age where you’re old enough and responsible enough and wise enough (how did that happen?) that you need to let the fools trying to run the country know what you know—which is how things really work and what’s important. Right now, you are part of an important constituency.

This public participation as a valuable member of a self-governing society may be your favorite part of Saturn’s to-do list or your least favorite. But it is part of the to-do list for you Saturn in Scorpio folks. Let the people with Saturn in other signs be clueless. We need you to let us know what the score really is.

What is Numerology?

I felt like digging through the archives and pulling out this interview with CJ Wright (aka Auntie Moon) on the subject of combining astrology with numerology. I greatly enjoyed talking with CJ. I hope you enjoy the podcast.

Click on the link above to hear the interview.

It’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to post articles on a regular basis. I’ve been writing an astrology book. It’s only taken me 5 years to get around to it, but it’s finally been written! (Thank you, Pluto.)

Now that I have a breather from that, I thought I’d post something in honor of Saturn in Libra, the planet trying to teach us all something about relationships. What follows is a planetary cheat sheet for relationships.

Here’s how to use it. Get out your chart and get out the chart of the person you’re interested in. That could be the chart of a love interest, best friend, spouse, child, boss, co-worker, etc. If you don’t know the birth time of the other person, use noon. You will need the day and date of birth. The place where the person was born is helpful too.

What you’re going to be looking for is the degree numbers in your chart that are close to or the same as the degree numbers in the other person’s chart. For example, I’m looking at my chart and a former boyfriend’s chart. I note that I have sun at 23 degrees of my zodiac sign and he has Neptune at 23 degrees of Libra. He has his sun at 14 degrees of his zodiac sign; I have Uranus at 13 degrees in its sign.

His Venus is at 1 degree; my Pluto is at 3 degrees. His Jupiter is at 12 degrees; my Venus is at 15 degrees. And so on, just looking for the aspects that are close in terms of degrees. Use an orb of maybe 5 degrees for this exercise.

For the moment, we’re not looking to see if the aspects are supposedly favorable (sextile, trine) or unfavorable (square, opposition). We’re not looking for what houses they fall into. We’re just looking for the planets that are activated by these aspects. (Don’t include planets that are one sign away from each other though, such as Aquarius and Pisces).

In my experience, here’s what the planets activated by aspect seem to correlate with in relationships:

Pluto: a powerful attraction or repulsion. Continuing feelings that don’t fade with time. ‘Karmic’ or important relationship with a purpose. Problems with outside circumstances.

Neptune: a romantic attraction. Tendency toward deception or a private inner life. Neptune person idealizing the other person. Infatuation, sometimes followed by disillusionment.

Uranus: instant attraction. On again, off again relationships. Emotional and mental stimulation. A need for space within the relationship.

Saturn: long-lasting relationship. An ability to solve problems in the relationship. Obstacles within the relationship. A practical ability to be able to coordinate the logistics of the relationship and get things done together.

Jupiter: compatibility. A point of easy contact and agreement between the two people. Shared sense of humor. An ability to get along regarding superficial issues.

Mars: sexual attraction. Ability to do things together. A point of friction that keeps the relationship interesting. Willingness to pursue a relationship.

Venus: a love connection. The ability to relax together. The feeling of being cared for. Physical attraction.

Mercury: the ability to communicate. Whether you find each other interesting. Understanding how the other person thinks. The ability to socialize with other people as a couple.

Moon: love. Emotional connection. Strong feelings for one another. Empathy.

Sun: compatibility. Ability to understand each other. Equality within the relationship. Long-lasting relationships.

This is a very superficial analysis and only the beginning of exploring the relationship through astrology (sometimes known as the study of synastry). But especially in the beginning of a relationship, it can be helpful to get a quick idea of what factors in each other’s charts are being activated. And let’s face it–inquiring minds want to know!

Here is a short video I did on the practical benefits of astrology, what you can expect from a reading, and how astrology contributes to wellness.

As a professional astrologer, I encounter a fair number of people who are trying to figure out what they want to be when they grow up. This is one of those common life dilemmas, and it doesn’t matter if you’re 56, or 63 and retired, or much, much younger. I thought I’d share a few observations on astrology and career choice based on my observation. So here are 5 Things To Know About Choosing the ‘Right’ Career.

1. Your intuition is probably right. I’m frequently amazed at the ingenious ways that people manage to choose occupations that are ‘astrologically correct.’ People find jobs doing all kinds of things I’ve never heard of, it turns out. And there are many ways to use your chart’s energy. If you have a strong intuition about the kind of career you’d like, listen to it. The chances are that you have an inner sense of what will make your chart (and you) happiest.

2. Your intuition is probably right. Yes, I’m saying it again. Often people want a consultation when they are doing work they know is not right. But they have a desire, an aspiration to do something else. They’re just pretty terrified that they’ll never get the chance to do it, that it’s a pipe dream, that they will suffer terrible humiliation if they ever reveal their secret ambitions. This happens all the time. Almost every time, the chart indicates that the secret and embarrassing aspiration is perfectly appropriate astrologically. Yes, the person has the right motivations and talents to be a nurse. Yes, the person has the intellectual ability to get a teaching degree. Yes, the person has the right kind of caring and patience to be a youth counselor. At least, the astrological chart indicates the person does. Just as I am amazed at how resourceful people are in finding the ‘right’ kind of work, I am equally amazed at the normal human terror so many of us have of sharing our gifts. Sometimes I think there must be a vast nationwide conspiracy convincing people that they are not going to be allowed to do what they like and are good at.

3. Timing’s important. The aspiration may be exquisitely valid, astrologically speaking, but the timing may be terrible–again, astrologically speaking. Sometimes a woman with two kids, no husband, inadequate health insurance, and a whole lot of bills is not realistically going to be able to pursue that degree in education right now. It doesn’t mean that she won’t be able to later. But there are steps that will need to be taken first. When I do consultations, my first priority is to try to hear the person’s own intuitive sense of how their chart works for them. My second priority is to validate people when they need validation and encouragement to be themselves. But my third priority is to give people a realistic sense of timing. If a person wanted to be a doctor, it would not serve her to expect to make the decision and then start practicing medicine the next day. It takes a long time to acquire the necessary education and credentials. Charts are often constructed with their own ‘long-term’ processes. Sometimes it takes a lot of life experience and maturing to be an effective entrepreneur or youth counselor or even artist. When a chart says ‘not right now,’ to a dream, it does not mean ‘never, you arrogant fool.’ It means ‘not right now.’ Part of my job is giving a person a sense of when ‘yes, right now’ can be expected to occur, when opportunities will open up.

4. Confusion works. Many, many people start down a career path and end up dissatisfied at some point. And with the dissatisfaction comes confusion. Confusion is a good thing. It is not a pleasant thing; I personally hate it. I would abolish it from the astrological lexicon if I could, but I can’t and thank goodness. Confusion is incredibly effective, and often a signal that a major career upgrade/breakthrough is in the offing. Confusion and stuckness are two of mankind’s greatest friends, which kinda makes you wonder why we need enemies. If you come to me for a career consultation, you will probably want me to make the confusion vanish instantly. And I won’t. But I can tell you how long the confusion needs to last, how to make the confusion productive, and I can help you understand why the confusion is so valuable. Basically, it means your chart is working on something big, and you’ll gain from cooperating. You just need to know how.

5. Honesty works, too. Honesty is often painful for us humans, and strangely it is often acutely painful when it comes to what we want out of work. I don’t know how or why so many of us seem to end up in environments that tell us that we ought to value things that we don’t, but somehow we do. A woman with a chart that wants to make money and be a powerful business owner somehow is raised in an environment that wants her to be an altruistic homemaker. She wants to rule the world of plumbing supplies and yet she’s told that only greedy people make money and she should teach inner city schoolchildren. A man who doesn’t care if he ever makes enough money to support a family, who would be happy traveling the world as a folk singer, is told he needs to be the accountant in a family business. A natural freelancer is encouraged to get a steady job. A woman who wants nothing more than to be an administrative assistant with a satisfying family life is told she needs to get a law degree and make partner. I see this all the time. The first step to finding one’s ‘right livelihood’ is often admitting that you don’t want to save the world, make a mint, be poor, dress for success, get a job with good benefits, plan for the future, or whatever other truly admirable thing your parents have told you that you must want but you just don’t.

Given our conditioning, it’s not surprising that it’s often hard to figure out how to make our talents work with the world around us. Coming to terms with our true vocational natures is not always easy. But boy does it feel good when you get up the courage to do it.

Part 2

5 More Things to Know About Choosing the ‘Right’ Career.

6. It’s Not the Right Career, It’s the Career for Right Now. As a kid, I internalized the idea that when you grew up you became something (like a baseball team manager or a writer) and then you stayed that thing forever. As boomers have experienced, this is no longer the cultural ideal for a lot of reasons. And it never really was the ‘natural’ human pattern. Baseball managers start as baseball players. Movie stars become directors. Businesspeople become politicians. Teachers open dry cleaning businesses. Nightclub owners become journalists. People’s lives and careers change over time. They’re meant to. I’ve read non-astrological sources more than once that talk about apparent ‘internal clocks’ that prompt people to change careers or jobs every so often. I see a handy guidebook to those internal clocks in a person’s chart. They’re important.

7. Know Your Own Job Expiration Date. This goes along with the idea of the internal clocks above. People will often sense in a visceral emotional way (often accompanied by great discontent) when their ability to do a certain job happily has expired. This is not a rational event (although it can be predicted astrologically); it just happens. When it does happen, you need to take action if you want to move to the next level. When I see people who have ended up spending a lot of time in jobs or careers they didn’t like, it often seems to be because they didn’t move when the ticking time bomb inside them said “MOVE!” The internal clock will only tick loudly for a certain period of time (often the length of an outer planet transit). If you don’t act when the time for action is ripe, eventually you and your chart will reconcile to your situation. This is absolutely fine if what you have decided that you want is security or steady employment in the same place for a long time. You can have that if you’re willing to endure these ‘move’ periods.

However, these days I do caution people that staying too long can actually be a career detriment in today’s market and lead to loss of opportunities for promotion and income growth. A person who sits out their discontent for too long can become seen as being difficult to retrain for a promotion, as unambitious, or as inflexible. This comment isn’t based on astrology by the way–just observation of the job market! At the least looking for ways to be promoted when your job clock expires is more prudent than doing nothing.

8. Frustration and Resistance Lead to Best Results. This rule isn’t ironclad but it seems to come into play about 80% of the time and it can be very comforting to know about when you’re trying to change jobs or careers. Briefly, it works like this. The best time to make a change is often during a difficult transit. These transits provide the desire for change, but they also provide obstacles to making the change quickly and easily. You have to work for it. Even a change initiated during an ‘easy’ transit often requires jumping through intimidating hoops. These hoops are a good sign! For example, you are given an opportunity, out of the blue, to design a website for a respected local firm. Since you want to be a website designer, this is great! The catch is that you have to spend money you barely have on a software package you’re not familiar with and produce mockups in 48 hours utilizing formats and conventions you’ve never used before. Panic time!

Panic time is good. Panic lets you know whether this is what you want or not. If you panic and produce the mock-ups, you’re on your way. Same thing applies for not getting the first 6 jobs you apply for, including the dream job you saw advertised. Rejection is painful but not a bad omen. On the other hand, occasionally it will seem like everything is just falling into place and you just scored a job that’s too good to be true, almost without effort. And then the company goes out of business  in six months and you’re stuck without insurance, your last paycheck, or even unemployment benefits. Beware that which is too easy and do not fear that which seems to be too hard.

9. It’s Not in A Government Handbook. Conventional career counseling often attempts to match your skills and interests according to some test (or set of tests) to identifiable currently existing occupations, often those listed in government publications like the Occupational Outlook Handbook. To some degree, any type of career discussion has to take into account common careers that people are familiar with. But… in real life, when I see people who feel satisfied with their career paths, what they do isn’t exactly something listened in the OOH. They’re a chiropractor, yes, but a chiropractor in a group practice that specializes in health promotion publications, and they think of themselves as part of a team of ‘alternative health educators.’ You can’t find that niche in a government handbook, and being any old chiropractor doesn’t fit the needs of the chart.

The things that people actually do for a living never stop amazing me–so many of them I’ve never heard of, and I can’t imagine that a career interests to job matching service would be able to do as well as these people have done by allowing themselves to make the right choices as opportunities presented themselves. I’m not sure you can plan to be an international insurance product inventor (the perfect niche for one chart), but you can help yourself stumble into the right spot.

For one thing, lots of people today are working in jobs that didn’t exist 20 years ago, and by the same token, jobs that are lucrative today may be dead occupations in 15 or 30 years. I mean, no one worked for Google or MySpace or YouTube in 1992. And it’s possible that no one will work  for some of these companies in 2024. So having a vision of what you want would feel like (something you can often generate by working with your astrological potentials) can be a better guide for successful decisions than you might think.

10. It’s Not Just What You’re Interested In. There are a lot of ways to identify the things you are interested in or have talents for. I wouldn’t discount any of them, including ways to assess your own skills. As far as I’m concerned, you might as well avail yourself of all the self-knowledge resources you can. But I’ll add the caveat that it often seems to me that in chart terms, it is not just what a person is interested in. Sometimes, it’s even what a person isn’t interested in.

Charts (or the lives of people with charts) often seem to gravitate with an invisible pull toward industries and sectors represented by certain sign or house energies, even if a person has no real awareness of an interest in that field. This phenomenon would take too long to explain in a post, but I’ll give the example of a person I knew who somehow or another always seemed end up working in a financial services field even though he didn’t care about financial services and his own jobs had nothing to do with them. The placement of Scorpio in his chart seemed to make financial services the industry in which he could most easily find a job doing the type of tasks he actually liked to do.

In other words, you might as well be aware of the types of industry sectors your chart is pulled toward–even if that doesn’t mean you want a traditional job in that field. You may care a lot more about art than about construction, architecture, or the hotel industry. But someone has to figure out what art to put in hotels and new buildings. It’s often the ingenious combination of an interest with an industry sector that provides a satisfying niche. Sometimes finding that niche can mean a previously unattractive industry becomes attractive. Alternatively, knowing what type of sign, house or planetary energy your chart is attracted to can sometimes help you find a more enjoyable way to use it (e.g., using Scorpio energy for research instead of dealing with ‘other people’s money’). And astrology can help with that, too.

Part 1

Another interesting topic, although not very astrological. I recently had an Ayurvedic consultation for a puzzling physical condition and wanted to share more about it. Ayruvedic medicine is a traditional medicine practice from India and is often used as a form of complementary medicine in the West for cancer patients and other people with chronic conditions. If you’ve ever heard of doshas or looked into Deepak Chopra’s writings, you’ve undoubtedly run across references to Ayurvedic principles.

My guest for this podcast is a recent graduate of an esteemed medical training program in India, and she talks about the ideas and practices behind this ancient wisdom. A great introduction to a fascinating topic. Click here to listen.

Earthquakes in Japan! Nuclear crisis! Revolution in Egypt! War in Libya! Capture of Osama bin Laden! Shootout in Tucson! Union protests in Wisconsin! Flooding Mississippi!

The past several months have seen more than their share of big news events. What is going on?

In this week’s podcast, we tackle some of the astrological symbolism behind world news today.

Some of the topics addressed include:

Can astrology predict earthquakes?
Why 2011 might be more rocky than the so-called doomsday year of 2012
Global structural reform
What does the Uranus square Pluto configuration mean to you?
Egypt, Libya & the Middle East
Union-busting in Wisconsin
The symbolism of the Japanese nuclear crisis
and more….

The guest is Scott Wolfram, an evolutionary astrologer and relocation specialist.

We’re living in interesting times. Learn a little bit more about them.

I get asked about past lives a lot. Clients or potential clients often say to me things like “Do you do past lives too?” or “I want to know if this person I am having troubles with was linked to me in past life,” or they want to know what their karma is and so on.

I’m not an expert in past lives. I know, as most mainstream astrologers do, that the south node is often considered to be an indicator of a person’s roles in past lives. But truthfully, I do most of my work with a person’s current life. I have more than enough (way more than enough sometimes) information to work with about a person’s current life. Plus, most of the people I know have their hands full with one life at a time, let alone delving into other ones!

But that doesn’t mean we aren’t all curious about past lives. Most of us are. I’ve had past life regression sessions a few times and I’ve even conducted a few. Since so many people have asked me to present more information on past lives, I decided to address them in a podcast as requested. I interviewed an expert in past life regression, a Board certified hypotherapist and member of the International Board for Regression Therapy, Marilyn Redmond.

Marilyn uses past life regression for therapeutic purposes, to help people uncover phobias, understand their psychological problems, and even fix practical situations in their own lives regarding health and relationships and so on. She talks about what happens in past life regression session and what kinds of lives she uncovers. If you’ve ever curious about what happens during past life regression, listen here.

The latest podcast is up. It features Atala Toy, president of Crystal Life Technologies. This company has a website that is a gem gazers dream. It has tons of items to browse and lots of information on the properties of various crystals, stones, and other tools. Even if you’re not in the mood to buy right now, it’s a wonderful place to window shop and learn about various natural healing technologies.

During the podcast, Atala covers a lot of information on crystals and how they work, how to choose stones for your needs, information on chakras and other fun stuff.

In honor of Neptune in Pisces, I’m posting a podcast on dreams and dream interpretation. We have an odd combination of influences in the coming era. One, Neptune in Pisces, is the ‘sleep, perchance to dream’ influence that opens up the collective consciousness to a greater understanding of the subconscious mind (a hot topic in scientific research these days, by the way). The other influence, Uranus in Aries, is the ‘wake-up call’ influence.

One use of that combination of energies is to take what’s learned from exploration of the subconscious and translate it into effective action on the conscious plane. Understanding your dreams can be a great way to learn from the subconscious, as I know from personal experience. I have used dreams in my own life to significant effect.

My guest on the podcast is Michele Avanti. She’s an astrologer, author, and also the creator of an accredited university course on dream interpretation, one that she taught for 16 years. She’ll give a handy explanation of how you can interpret your own dreams.

You can find out more about Michele at her websites: www.talesoftamoor.com and astrologyandmore.blogspot.com. Here’s a link to her Facebook page as well. Enjoy!