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  Dedication

  This book, this life, this work does not exist without my love, my best friend, my partner in all things, my wife.

  Sonya Priyam Passi.

  You gather me daily. You captivate me endlessly. You inspire me to discover what is possible and what is beyond that. You are the bravest, most compassionate person I have ever met. You are my Fortuna, my greatest blessing, and my calling. I thank the heavens for you every moment of every day.

  Your love is the most powerful force I have ever known. It has transformed every wound into a lesson, every heartbreak into a moment that no longer owns me, every obstacle into an opportunity. It is an indomitable force that surrounds, protects, and uplifts me. Being your partner is my greatest privilege, my honor, and my most precious gift.

  I know every day that I lived before meeting you was in preparation for you. Meeting you activated my potential in ways I could never have imagined. It is no mistake that when we came together everything else in my world fell into place. Thank you for finding me, keeping me, and creating this incredible life with me.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Being Witnessed

  Radical Self-Acceptance

  I. Your Birth Chart

  The Blueprint of Your Potential

  The Three Keys of Your Chart

  Pulling Up Your Chart

  Committing to This Process

  How to Use This Book

  II. The Basics

  The Who: Planets

  The How: Signs

  Modalities and Elements

  Homes, Thrones, and Hostile Environments

  The Where: Houses

  Relationships: Aspects

  The Gifts

  The Challenges

  The Mergers

  Putting It All Together: The Rules

  III. The First Key: Your Sun

  Your Life’s Purpose

  Sign of Your Sun: How Do You Shine?

  What Sign Is Your Sun In?

  House of Your Sun: In What Area of Life Do You Need to Shine?

  What House Is Your Sun In?

  Relationships With Other Planets: Who Is Impacting Your Ability to Shine?

  Which Planets Are in Aspect to Your Sun?

  IV. The Second Key: Your Moon

  Your Physical and Emotional Needs

  Sign of Your Moon: How Do You Meet Your Physical and Emotional Needs?

  What Sign Is Your Moon In?

  House of Your Moon: Where Do You Meet Your Physical and Emotional Needs?

  What House Is Your Moon In?

  Relationships With Other Planets: Who Is Impacting Your Ability to Meet Your Physical and Emotional Needs?

  Which Planets Are in Aspect to Your Moon?

  V. The Third Key: Your Ascendant and Its Ruler

  Your Motivation for Life and the Steersperson of Your Ship

  Sign of Your Ascendant: What Is Your Motivation for Life?

  What Sign Is Your Ascendant?

  Planets in the Same Sign as Your Ascendant: Who Is Influencing Your Motivation for Life?

  Do You Have Any Planets in the Same Sign as Your Ascendant?

  Planet That Rules Your Ascendant: Who Is Steering the Ship of Your Life?

  What Planet Rules Your Ascendant?

  House of Your Ascendant Ruler: What Area of Life Are You Being Steered Toward?

  What House Is Your Ascendant Ruler In?

  What’s Next

  Acknowledgments

  Appendix 1: Each Sign and Its Symbol, Modality, Element, and Planetary Ruler

  Appendix 2: Each Planet and Its Symbol, Sign of Domicile, Sign of Detriment, Sign of Exaltation, and Sign of Fall

  Appendix 3: The Houses

  Appendix 4: Cheat Sheet on Aspects

  Appendix 5: Dr. Maya Angelou and Frida Kahlo’s Birth Charts

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  Being Witnessed

  The first time I encountered astrology was the first time I remember feeling seen. I was eight years old. Living in a small town snuggled in the base of the Rockies, I was surrounded by both the immeasurable beauty of nature and the unforgiving wreckage of addiction. I spent a lot of my childhood alone. While the adults in my life partied and self-destructed with wanton abandon, I watched The Cosby Show and dreamed of a life with parents, siblings, grandparents, and a lineage to claim me. When the party came home, I felt a different kind of loneliness. An overdose, a fatal accident, a shotgun fired, a conviction. I knew what cocaine tasted like by the time I was five. I knew not to tell anyone about anything that happened in my home. I was terrified all the time. So I hid. I hid in any bathroom with a lock on the door. I hid inside a self-constructed personality that was aloof, sarcastic, and remote. I hid to protect my excruciatingly sensitive and porous being from the sharp edges of adult sorrows that swallowed my childhood.

  As those around me wreaked havoc, it wasn’t uncommon for me to find myself in some makeshift shack up a dirt road, with adults I did not want to be with, witnessing events that I was unable to make sense of or navigate. I was in such a situation on that fateful day I first encountered astrology. A total stranger, a skinny, white woman with unkept hair and an unloved look in her eyes, gave me a gift I have never forgotten. Armed with only my birthdate, she looked up the location of the planets on the day I was born, gazed at me with a glimmer in her eye, and said, “You’re very judgmental.”

  Yes. Yes I am, I thought with pride.

  I had no real idea what that word actually meant, but I immediately resonated with what I felt it implied. She was distinguishing me from my surroundings. She saw that I possessed the kind of discernment that others around me lacked. I had judgment, and, with it, I would find a way out of this mess.

  Though I never met her again, that brief interaction gave me something to hold on to. It may have only been a thread, but when that’s all you’ve got it feels like spun gold. In a situation that threatened to obliterate me, someone looked down at a book of symbols and numbers and used astrology to uncover a truth about me that would save my life.

  Being witnessed is essential to our humanity, our growth, and our ability to move past the trauma that we have survived. If astrology does its job, it offers a mirror in which we see both our best selves and our growth edges.

  Radical Self-Acceptance

  When I was twelve years old, I had my first thorough natal chart reading. My father had just moved across the country to Toronto with my second stepmother, a woman I had grown up with. I had spent many weekends with her and her two children. Our childhoods were parallel. Our parents had partied, worked, and teetered on the brink of madness together. We were witnesses to some of each other’s most harrowing moments and we had survived. The fact that my father and their mother fled the small town we grew up in meant that they were ready to leave behind (at least some) of the violence, drugs, and self-destruction we had all been so embroiled in.

  The trauma bonds between us all were solid, and for a moment, it seemed like together we might be able to heal the collective heartbreak of the past decade. We were a rag-tag bunch, shell-shocked, from a small town, a family of misfits looking for another chance at life in the Big City.

  My new step-grandmother, Anita, was a reiki master. Besides being the most captivating, witchy, spiritual, tell-it-like-it-is healer woman I had ever met, she had a collection of friends who were equally talented in the healing arts and as weird as she was. Psychics, astrologers, past-life explorers, artists, and the like surrounded her, and me, when I got to spend time in Toronto. All
the people that I met through her seemed to be dedicated to living less harmful lives. They spent their time developing their healing practices, and knowing them gave me a glimpse of another way of being.

  Shortly after the move, Anita gifted the family with a reading from Taina Ketola, an astrologer she knew and had worked with. Taina lived in a small town just outside the city, in a normal-looking house, in a subdued, suburban subdivision. Inside, the world she constructed for me was anything but. As soon as she started describing each one of us, I was mesmerized. I was hearing this symbolic language for the first time, but I felt like I had always known it. Explaining the intricacies of our charts with great skill and humor, she helped me to understand how and why we were each coping with the situation we were in differently, and how we would each cope with life in general. The distinctions that she was able to make between us helped me understand myself in relation to everyone else, which is always useful, but in a new family unit is essential. She had written a book, The New Astrology, which my father bought for me. It became my bible. As a child in search of any kind of wisdom and guidance, astrology became my immediate, full-blown obsession, but it would be decades before I finally accepted it as my path.

  I am a late bloomer. Like a late, late bloomer. Astrologers warned me that with a Saturn placement such as mine, it might be the case, but it’s hard to understand what that might actually mean when you hear it at a young age. I had tons of drive, but the only place I knew to put it was therapy, reiki workshops with Anita, spiritual ritual, self-help books, affirmations, meditations, episodes of Oprah, and astrology. I spent my twenties largely in a healing incubator. To support myself I did community work, astrology readings, reiki sessions, a lot of waitressing, bartending, cleaning, temping, and whatever else would pay the bills. Though I knew giving astrology readings was a way to make money, I didn’t feel emotionally, psychologically, or structurally strong enough to do so. Exclusively doing readings was also never quite enough for me. Though it is an honor to read people’s charts, I’ve always known that I wanted a larger outlet than only one-to-one work. Before social media, however, those outlets were open to only a select few. My business as it exists today wasn’t an option when I was twenty. Sometimes we are late bloomers because the world needs to catch up to us.

  The truth is that I felt lost for most of my professional life. By my early thirties, I was working long hours, teaching yoga to folks from all kinds of backgrounds and situations—celebrities, cancer patients, those experiencing homelessness, and folks in systems of mass incarceration. My work was in the healing realm, but I still felt unfulfilled. I wasn’t living my purpose, and it haunted me. I didn’t want to be part of the Yoga Industrial Complex. I didn’t want to be teaching a spiritual and physical discipline that came from a culture that wasn’t my own. I didn’t want to be another white lady culturally appropriating Indian spirituality. I searched and searched for something to do. I whined. I was bitter about the fact that it wasn’t easy for me.

  Meanwhile, I dreamt about the planets constantly. I talked about astrology in therapy, and, when I did, my therapist would say, “You know, every time you talk about astrology you light up, the energy comes into the room, your entire being shifts.” And I would stare blankly at her, annoyed that she didn’t understand my crisis.

  I was deeply frustrated, really broke, and not getting any younger. So I did what any person in their midthirties does when they can’t figure out what to do next.

  I went back to school.

  I finished my BA at CIIS in San Francisco, where a group of thoughtful, compassionate, and brilliant educators helped to reawaken within me my need to be involved in social justice work and my need for and love of writing. At the same time, social media was shifting our way of communicating with each other, and I was reengaging with astrology in a new way because of it.

  I didn’t want to be an astrologer: in my mind it wasn’t a “real” profession. I wanted to be something respectable. After growing up in a town filled with so much make-believe and escapism, I wanted something that would ground me in the world and be of real, practical use to others. How could astrology give me that?

  The planets had a few ideas. They were still visiting me in my dreams like they always had, only now they were getting louder and more domineering, waking me up terrified in the middle of the night. It seemed like the only way to quiet them was to oblige. Armed with a blogspot and my first awkward and jumbled horoscopes, I started writing—not because I thought anyone would like my brand of astro-political self-help (I was certain, in fact, that people would hate it), but because I felt like if I didn’t channel everything that was awakening within me, it would backfire on my system.

  It still took a few more years of self-doubt, failed attempts at finding a meaningful career elsewhere, and dropping out of three master’s programs before I finally decided to give it my all. I had worn myself out. I had tried everything else I could think of. I kept returning to what my therapist and others had told me before. This is where the energy was. When I spoke about astrology I came to life. It was easy for me to dismiss that when I was younger, but as I aged I realized how rare it really was. When we turn toward the things that fill us with a sense of purpose, energy, and enthusiasm, we become a channel for more of the same.

  Writing horoscopes gave me a connection to the outside world. I was still single, without much in the way of family, and painfully lonely most days, but writing felt like (then and now) a love affair. I was actively carving a place for myself in the world, and I could sense that it was the start of something I had been searching for my whole life. A couple of years into writing horoscopes, I started formally studying traditional astrology with Demetra George, and in doing so I came to realize that astrology, ritual, and working with people in the way I was beginning to was right there in my birth chart. Clear as day. Waiting for me to see it, accept it, and own it. Soon after, I met the woman who would become my wife, and all the pieces of my life started to fall quickly into place.

  Astrology has helped me to accept my past, present, and future potential more radically and with greater certainty than anything else has. This book is offered to you in the hope that it will validate your deepest desires and dreams for your life while challenging you to accept the responsibility of bringing them into being.

  I

  Your Birth Chart

  The Blueprint of Your Potential

  Your birth chart is a snapshot of the sky the moment you took your first breath. It marks your arrival here on earth; a celestial blueprint, if you will, that holds the keys to living a life of purpose. Popular astrology has focused heavily on one part of the astrological alphabet: your Sun sign. While the Sun may have been in Sagittarius when you were born, that is only one small part of what was occurring in the sky. You have every planet and every sign somewhere in your chart. Astrology represents the entirety of life and, like life, we escape none of it. You are not just a Virgo or a Gemini or a Libra; you are a moment in time, with every sign, planet, and point playing a part in who you are, how you move through the world and what you came here to do.

  Whatever pattern constellated in the heavens at the moment you took your first breath is the cosmic imprint of your soul, the map of the journey you will take in this lifetime, and the ways in which you will go about it. Whether Mars marks your chart in a prominent way—stirring controversy and courageous acts from you—or Jupiter is in charge of your life’s direction—encouraging you to open doors through optimism and generosity—you, like everyone and everything else here, are an amulet of celestial significance.

  The positions of the planets in your birth chart reveal the nature of your life without any kind of judgment attached. Your astrological makeup is a neutral reflection of your life, much like a mirror. Only the person looking at the reflection judges it; the mirror simply reveals what is there. Astrology reminds us that we are exactly as we are supposed to be for good reason. On purpose and with a purpose that we must li
ve out if we want to feel any kind of fulfillment.

  The Three Keys of Your Chart

  There are three keys in every chart that fundamentally explain your life’s purpose, your physical and emotional needs, and your motivation for living. It is almost embarrassing to admit that the meaning of my chart was not crystal clear to me until my late thirties. I had pored over it for decades. I had gotten lost down a million rabbit holes trying to understand its most obscure angles. I had received many readings, by many talented astrologers, but until I had the tools of traditional astrology in my grasp and could understand my chart through these three simple keys, I could not see the blueprint of my life that they represented. The specifics of my potential were just vague references to a future that felt like it was constantly eluding me. That is why I am so passionate about teaching you how to understand your chart in this way.

  The three keys are

  Sun—your life’s purpose

  Moon—your physical and emotional needs

  Ascendant and Its Ruler—your motivation for living and the direction your life is steered in

  By the end of this book, you’ll understand each of these three keys in your chart and have the tools for unlocking them. They will anchor your understanding of yourself, your life, and its meaning, and aid in your ability to love and accept yourself as you are. Understanding our astrology chart is the doorway; the effort to move through it is our own.

  The Sun in your chart will detail the nature of how and where you need to shine. The Moon in your chart will tell you how you can best unpack your life’s purpose daily, with great care and consideration for your unique physical and emotional needs. The sign of your Ascendant will detail the specific kind of motivation that you have for living your life. The planet that rules your Ascendant will tell you the direction that your life is steered in.