EP10 | Chani Nicholas: Parented by the Planets - What's Underneath Podcast

what's underneath is a cast box original produced in partnership with studio 71 cast box is the fastest-growing highest-rated podcast app on both iOS and Android where you can find all of your favorite podcasts you can listen to what's underneath wherever you get your podcasts but we hope you'll give cast box a shot and see for yourself hello and welcome to what's underneath the podcast that will inspire radical self-acceptance through empowering you to embrace what's unrepeatable in you I'm lily Mandelbaum and sitting next to me as my mom ELISA Goodkind and we are style like you in our new podcast we are going to expand the types of intimate unfiltered conversations we've been having in our viral video series of what's underneath project each week we will interview diverse nonconformist about their relationship to style self image and identity being radically honest without shame and holding that honesty with compassion is self-acceptance hey mom hi Lois how you doing well I'm extra extra extra good right now why because we're interviewing Chani Nikolas I maybe could like fall down on my knees and be like this is might even be bigger than bono for me she is astrologer extraordinaire for me in my life and I think and for a lot of people she had a recent article in Rolling Stone magazine that called her the social justice astrologer which I thought was an was an apt was an apt description but not quite apt enough because you feel as if she's speaking to you in the most precise deep intuitive profound psychological empowering way and she has literally taken me through some of my most difficult times in the last few years like not kidding often we're like where's the new Chani when is Chani coming and and then when it comes it's like a hanging off in the morning and we're each competing for one to read the other one because they want us we each want to read the others to read our own we're competing for who's our more accurate so and I reserve extra time in the bathtub at night to then concentrate on all the people that I love in my life and read their is after I've digested mine which which one of the reasons why it's so great is that it does take a minute to really you know take the incredible amount of profound wisdom from it so it really really really really happened to have her here and then we're also here with Clark one of our dogs is in the room and so if you do hear any random moments of barking OOP there we go and more some chewing of a bone that is our friend Clark so he's here with us as well so hi Jane hi Danny thank you for having me hi I hear it but I'm blushing thank you how are you feeling today I'm good I am you know in Brooklyn right now with you all and incredibly like excited to be doing everything and also I just don't know how anybody in the city accomplishes all the things that they do because it's there's so many things to do and fun to be had and so many people to hang out with that like I'm just like how do people get any work done right cuz you're here visiting from yeah yeah but I think yeah you've done everything so good luck with your horoscopes I think that I think that about it I think that about LA because of the weather oh I hear you I just have to ask along the lines of like good luck for your horoscopes is one of the things that really that I do wonder about is I guess how you have the time to like write these unbelievably deep and profound things for everybody and and how do you do that I wonder about it like it's especially when you were doing it weekly yeah weekly is really challenging I wonder now that I haven't done it weekly if I'll ever be able to go back to it you know every time I sit down and write horoscopes it's like three to five thousand words but the the more I do the work the more like even the the more I'm getting pickier about what I say then it's also like you don't want to be repeating yourself all the time but you really do feel like you're repeating yourself all the time when you read when you're writing in the same kind of genre mm-hmm so it's there's the there's the length of time that it takes but then there's also the like emotional energy that it takes and then the like worrying and the futzing and the like editing and the and so you know each one usually takes me about an hour all things said and done each each individual sign yeah yeah like if I'm really if I'm really like sometimes I could just like write one and a half an hour which is amazing but generally after everything's said and done usually each one takes me and then there's the intro so and then there's like whatever's going on politically and then climate like what we're going through collectively like how do you even begin to write something that might hold just the most unfathomable things and we were just being you know there's just wave after wave after wave of just excruciating miss in this world and so it's like how do we how how can I so a lot of it's like a meditation on like okay that's happening and then we all have personal lives when was it a hard decision I was saying earlier that I felt like this sense of I felt proud of you when you stop doing it weekly because like I could set I was like in I was like sometimes getting stressed on your behalf for like how much energy that jokes and like imagining that you're also juggling a lot else and I and I and you always talk about things you know like boundaries first and like self-care and like those things they're always really helpful to me Lily of course being the humble understate her that she is I think is understating it in a way how much he admires or was affected by what you did because we have huge boundary issues and struggles with InStyle like you in terms of feeling that we have to put so much out and have put so much out that has been that that had has brought the three of us in the last year basically to our knees right and it's also like what's what's we're saying right now and what's worth sitting on and just letting it have a moment like when when am i when do I need to be a container for the energy and hold it and allow it to do something and when do I need to release it and in this social media world it's really fun and entertaining but there's this constant like demand to to be releasing and I think it really devalues the time of incubation like we need period my creative incubation contemplation yeah we need that reflection all that like inner work mm-hmm but also you know it's like getting caught up in the internet culture and then also like pulling back and thinking would I want to leave as my life legacy I'm pretty clear about what I'm able to do at this point in my life and what I'm not and I can't do both I can't be totally engaged and just content creating all the time if I want to do something like write a book and so and that that is a it's like what baby do you feed like which ones are you growing which ones will like you have to I had to take food away from one in a sense and just like grow it at a slower rate or let it do its thing and just and it's all about trust and having faith that that you're following your own creative intuition and that when it's time for something else to come that you give up the safety of the thing that's been that's been feeding you energetically or that you've been in a relationship with you you change that relationship for the sake of something else and that's the hardest thing I think especially if your self support you know salt you're an entrepreneur you're needing this yeah and you're carrying people you have staff you have like it's a it's a whole thing art is not something and content is not something that you just can spit out like it's something that comes from dairy deep inside of you especially if you are putting something out meaningful right and that matters and that's singular and authentic and not just regurgitation and not duplication and not what tends to happen which is this incredible amount of shallow information what's exciting to me is just listening to you about it and even being able to share this with each other because hopefully in this Wild West arena where we're creating what is the new form of business or art and art and business and art and commerce right that there's enough people that are taking care of it being something special and unique and not succumbing to the shallowness so that right we evaporate any of the depth right completely right and I think about things that I read that I love or that I see that I love or that I've experienced and the the artists that that created that and the the time it took to create that thing and the statement that it makes that yes and a thousand other people can try to like spin on and replicate but it was the depth of that thing and the honoring of that creation original something truly original yeah yeah and what it and it it takes time and it takes choice and so you have those that's part of boundaries right like you have to say like I'm choosing to this thing and I'm gonna doubt it and I'm gonna fear it and I'm gonna feel the emptiness of doing something on my own and all of the intensity that comes with creating something but I got us to stick with that commitment to it it's who you are and why you're here it's not you're not we're not here ultimately I don't I I'm sure you feel the same way ultimately we're not here to be liked right hope we're not here to be we're not we're here to love hopefully other rhythms you know we're we're here we're here we're here - we're here to be loved and give love Andrea's loving to ourselves and to others and all of that but we're not here to like be popular maybe right that that's I mean popular right now and then it's weird cuz it's skewed now in so many ways cuz then what's happened on the Internet is it's been really great part of like those that haven't been liked or haven't been included I've had a space but then it like tips over into being liked there too so it's I think we're always navigating that right how do we work with our egos and not like what am I getting sucked into what's the price what's the benefit where am I and it's always for me it's always like am I losing my self can I go to events that have you know like um where am i I might have I lost myself or am i when I scroll through Instagram where am I like how am i where am i what do I need in the moment so can you talk a little bit about like that struggle in that navigation and like maybe well basically my whole life is navigating moment to moment my FOMO constantly and my wife is completely opposite of me she never feels like she needs to be anywhere else but where she is that's amazing which is so nvivo of a trait because she really gets a lot more done than I do I feel like because she's not worried she doesn't worry about being in the wrong place or being in the wrong anything she's like this or I am and this is what I'm doing and if I wanted to do something else I'd do it mhm and for me it's much to our you know our issues just manifest in different ways so I'm always constantly navigating that and as I get older it gets I guess I just get more I'm just more familiar with it can I hear like a specific example just bring it to light a little bit like I know it's probably yeah just like at a moment where okay okay so this is my experience cuz I also don't live on the east side of LA I live on the west side away and nobody cool lives over there yeah it's not hot so that's all good but I'm only I always feel left out I just always feel like I'm not in the scene I'm not like I come to New York and I feel like it's much easier to feel like you're integrated into everything and I'm like oh cool it feels like summer camp but you can just go somewhere and you'll know seven people in LA it's I don't feel that and so I always feel like I don't really have any all these people know me but I don't do I have enough friends like I'm not I wasn't invited that party like I don't I'm not engaged in the world like I feel exactly the same yeah I think I feel exactly the same way I'm never I'm always a little bit misstepped yeah I know it's like just just just off step with all I don't get invited to things yeah I don't I there's panels everywhere I do not understand why we are never like how like you should be on these panels like well I love your panels like why yeah I like you not on a like but everyone else is always on a panel and like it's all your abandonment issues right just get laid out over and over and over again in all these areas of your life and then so then I'm like oh cool where am i well that's that little part of me my family is very there's a lot of different iterations of family for me so but I I can't like my mom's side of the family's like Bronx New York born and raised and then she like quote-unquote ran away to Canada and I got it up living in a small little town in British Columbia and stayed there and she met my dad who grew up there who grew up like in a shack without anything on the side of a mountain with like 13 brothers and sisters and dropped out of school when he was 13 and had to like take care of the family so they're very different people like and then I came together but I grew up in a culture that was very escapist and it was very like white hippie culture so there was a lot of draft dodgers from from here that went up to Canada and then there was a lot of like people like my dad that like grew up there but they just created this little like environment that really took the whole sex drugs and rock and roll thing to the so I grew up in a party like I grew up in like was it like a commune of feel or it was more like I was born in the common without running water or electricity or anything like that whole thing and then and then the 80s happened and like everybody you know got a little faster with their drugs and everything but so I grew up in a place that everyone just wanted to have absolutely zero responsibility and they did they had this little like Enclave in the mountains and really just partied and did whatever the they wanted and the kids really like we were just like Lord of the Flies right just like running around without any parental supervision at all so I come I grew up in a party and I am I don't drink at under drugs I you know I've got I've been in some sort of therapy since I was 14 I've like actively sought out healing and becoming aware since I was very young and I was just a really lonely kid that was just I was just a kid in a giant party and it didn't have the parenting at zero parents yeah yeah yeah so I was the parent you know it's just that whole thing so I've always chosen a really different way which was the way of like I I'm either I'm gonna kill myself or I'm gonna heal and yeah I was a really depressed kid I was really repressed I was just really I was just I was I was super super neglected I think the great thing I and thank God I escaped I don't know how but I escaped a lot of forms of abuse mm-hmm but what I what I experienced was just nobody nobody's I was on me so everything that I write is like when I write the affirmations that's that's just me talking to myself yeah that's just that's how I learned how to parent myself was I had to again moment by moment like choose to stay alive and choose to keep my eye on myself and it's not an easy thing to do and when you feel that unloved and unlovable it's really hard to claim yourself and so all of those things that I write are just it's from that place of such deep self rejection and having to reclaim a self that nobody seemed to want because they were too caught up in their own healing crisis Jib siblings yeah I have step I have a half-sister who's incredible I have step siblings I have a lot of people in my family that I've had a really hard time with substances and with incarceration and with really difficult life choices that they've had to then work through I was lucky enough to be rejected from a lot of family structures that actually were really toxic and would have I would have I don't know it's it's you know like you might not have survived yeah like you go through these things especially when you're young like you're 20 out in the world without a family and you don't really know like where to locate yourself and it's really shitshow emotionally but at the end you you know a couple decades in it's like I think God I was so rejected thank God I was so different thank God I because I would have stayed in and tried to you know like save people or help people or whatever and I would have I was losing yeah totally for a child it's so incredibly difficult or for a lifetime maybe you it's so difficult to understand or accept that level of pain yeah and rejection yeah and and of not being understood and or you think something's right and it's really just not the way it should be yeah it's just a very very very very difficult thing to accept and to not take it personally right that's the hardest piece it's like this is my circumstance and I can I was you know when you're a little you train you just think it's you you think it's all because of you right but you it takes so long to start to differentiate and parse out like had to go really far away I had to travel like really really really long distances to be able to get some kind of perspective on it I think and come to terms and have really have breakdowns like what I would what would I would term like separations for myself and massive like cracks psychologically in places where I wasn't familiar with their surroundings didn't speak the language in order to find a way to hold it I'm a really extreme person so I'll just like go way out what can you give us like like before the internet I went to like the other side of the world and there was no one knew I was no one knew where I was and no one knew I mean I just wasn't in touch with anybody and I was just in the middle of of countries that weren't necessarily safe for me to be there in and so and I really had no right going by myself like Canadian girl like I'd you know what was i doing and I it was like I had to have that experience of going so far away to get perspective on what had happened right and only in being in those extreme situations was I able to just see myself in some way and witness something about myself and therefore start to repair something the relationship with myself because I never know that it wasn't you that that these is that what you're saying like that yeah it was like either I can just walk off this cliff or I can or I can hold myself here but I can't I can't I can't be in the in-between anymore like either I'm going to make too dangerous of a decision and that will be it or or I like claim myself for myself here and now are you kind of saying like I know where do you feel like when you were like in a way you were like toying with like the edge of safety and things like that like always I mean there's it's shocking that I'm alive yeah yeah so like literally you were like contemplating pretend like were you actively contemplating essentially like there's an temptation I don't think I think that that was actually much later in my life I think that was later in my adulthood that I was like this pain is too great to sit with any longer because it had been so long I think when you I think when the when there's like a constant and you've tried so many things and you a couple decades into adulthood and it's still that difficult those are the times were that for me that was what really weighed on me I think when I was younger I was just like no one cares about me no one knows that I exist in the world I'm not important to anybody no one's checking in on me so it I might as well not be get in that car with that guy and do that drug and do the thing you're living in that young age of what was handed to you it's like an image of like you're reflecting the image of the way you were treated and that's who your person has become and you know what you need to do is what you needed to do is separate from that person yeah and understand that the real person or the you know the person that you are in that present moment not the child is entirely different person that has a different feeling about themselves yeah or like that there was something in me that was valuable to live that there was something that that deserved to live do you feel like there was a moment that you like remember any yeah like I'm like yeah where you did see that yeah it's kind of like it's very stereotypical and how were you I was 20 okay I think so this is the beginning of my turnaround I had lost somebody the I had lost the only person that I ever felt really loved me like romantic like a row man it was a romantic relationship but it was very much just like like you know he was just like an angel you know thankee I moved out with him when I was 16 and we had like we were only together for a year but I felt like he was the only one that's like had his eye on me and was like you matter you're important I love you and so it didn't matter if it was romantic or not it was just someone was witnessing me and he he passed away when I was I think right before I went on this big trip and I think that's it what it did for me was it constellated my grief so I had been grieving my life my whole existence and I didn't know it and when he passed away he was like he was like something I could name people were like oh you're grieving and I was like yes and so all of my grief for my whole life and losing him could be poured into that experience and then I went on this year-long trip when I was 20 and just like had a complete psychic emotional psychological breakdown and what it has elected myself it looked like the outer manifestation of all of the south hatred that I had so I think I was really awful to people I think I was really mean I think it was really caustic I think I was really inconsistent as a person I think I was really I probably just appeared really like the wrong with her because I it was just like you were hurting pretty much yeah it was like I was a wounded animal yeah right but I remember splitting from myself like I have that recollection of watching it and being like holy but then not being able to kind of collect it mm-hmm and then having this experience of I need you know I guess I needed some help but I was in the forest in the middle of nowhere and with like two other people but they had wandered off and I was just sitting watching a sunbeam on the forest floor and I like went into a kind of meditation and a lot of time pass because the patch of light was one place and then it was by the time I realized what had happened it was another but it was this experience of turning literally feeling like the outs at the part that was separated from me turnaround or the or the part that was whatever and see me and and literally making a choice it wasn't conscious but it was like an experience of choosing myself and choosing to see what was worth saving and myself and I like kind of came down off the mountain and had another you know decade and a half of drama and pain and whatever but I had that something I made a choice in that moment and what I meant to say before was when he died I was like you know I already had like years of Reiki and I had had a little bit of therapy and I had had a lot of healing stralla ji was already in my life and Tarot and all these things and I thought well either I either I like believe in all this I've been reading and studying or I don't either like this means something and and it is part of some other bigger theme of my life and he is still existing and his energy you know alright or like I was on the subway and I was like or I can just step in for the subway and like be done with it okay I felt really extreme and that at that time for me I had to pull myself back like piece by piece and integrate like stitch by stitch of myself so going back to the earlier thing like FOMO that's all just part of that it's all part of feeling like days with you yeah forever I think yeah I don't exist unless Marty on seeing me but like when am I gonna just see myself mm-hmm when and so again the affirmations are all like like it's those ways in which I'm trying to witness other people but also myself if you're enjoying what you're hearing please subscribe and give us a good rating so the powers that be to keep this podcast going how I know that you're in a really wonderful relationship and I'm curious like how some of your struggles with like feeling lovable have like played out and in having some yeah but like yeah he seems like you're in a healthy relationship and and it seems like far removed from I mean yeah it's like we met and it was like all the things that I had yeah all the things happened and it was do you mean like all the things came up kind of or well there was that but I what I mean is like all the things that I needed were all of a sudden I mean look I like was 38 when we met so until the age of 38 I was like pretty single I had relationships but I had come to the point where I was like I'm never gonna meet anybody this is not gonna be a thing I'm not gonna have a family I don't real not really connected to a family like I'm just really out here on my own and that's that's my deal and then when we got together it was like she just she just like melted everything away like it she just she is all the things that I needed and wanted and the relationship is all of those things as well so I just I had hoped that that would happen but I hadn't really given up hope hmm so I lived in a place for a very long time where I was like okay it's just not that's not how that's not and I had to be okay with that mm-hmm and so when I say like it's all the things it's like it's that got all my wishes which is a very bizarre feeling for someone who who I just had to like tough it out for up until that point hmm so what are some of the things like as far as that you feel you needed and that she provided it's the first time my life where I'm with somebody who's as committed to doing their own personal growth work as I am and she's she's so incredibly intuitive and she's so incredibly powerful and she's such an amazing manifester and when we got together it was like this huge psychic experience where things started to happen that neither one of us should have known about but we would pick up on and so all that to say I'm connected to somebody in a way that I've never been before and it's it's it's so much it's love of course but it's so much more than that it's a it's a way of being energetically matched with somebody mm-hmm where when we came together everything just like exploded imploded and then took off so it's and so we're in this relationship where there's constant growth and there's constant we're constantly like okay what's next we're both really hungry we're both really driven we both utilize the relationship for our healing and for our intimate personal pleasure and satisfaction and growth and all that great stuff just for her and I as two human beings and then we also utilize the relationship as a vehicle for the work in the world whether it be her organization we have a lot of future projects that we're working on in developing now and so it just feels like we're I'm in this really exciting creative partnership that's that's loving and it's sexual and it's creative and it's its intellectual and it's also energetically just really gratifying and inspiring and I've never been with anybody in a romantic relationship that was energetically so aligned yeah it's it's like a whole there's just this constant rebirthing kind of feeling so it's a very it's a very intense relationship but not in a way that's draining not drama no drama it doesn't seem like an accident that that happened totally because or you know just some kind of necessary like miracle really it has a it seems that it has a lot to do with those decisions that you made along the way to accept something bigger than yourself yeah and it's everything that I asked for and like put on on my list and like didn't in my New Moon rituals and all that but it just didn't happen for so long so I thought it was actually impossible right and then it did like it's it's I'm it's striking you know you're just like and it seems like an unreal proposition I'm like oh I can just be like happy now and the minute we got together the business like my writing to everything just like exploded like literally I was on the plane took she was living in New York and I was on the plane to come and see her and it was my grandmother's birthday whose past and it was a full moon and my numbers went up to a place they'd never gone before literally as I was flying here Wow so it was like there was so many and not that it's about numbers but there were so many confirmations of like something's happening mm-hmm and there's like so our lives were like showing us all these like wow signals and she could read them along with me and that was I was like oh my that's when I didn't feel alone for the first night right like I was with someone like you're seeing this to get it like and then the dreams we were having and there was just a lot of ancestral stuff that was going on and a lot of people coming through energetically and being like really like thumbs up and so it was really and it was a huge leap of faith for both of us and we gave up a lot to be together were you both were you long-distance at the beginning we were long distance for a very short time how is the astrology went how did that all happen and then how has that played into healing healing and yeah first time anybody looked at my chart they looked down at it this woman I was in this very I was like eight years old and I was in a situation that was very illegal and lots of adults were doing things they shouldn't and I was like the only kid there and this woman was like what's your birthday and that's the adult that I was with told her and she looked down at I think an ephemeris and she looked up at me and she was like you're very judgmental and I was like yes none of these have any judgment yeah I actually have judge I didn't even know what she anything right where I'd never heard the word but her intonation I was like I like this you're distinguishing me that was like my first like what is this and then when I was 12 which is an important astrological time because it's your Jupiter return so it's a time like Jupiter's about knowledge and growth and expansion and opening to some things it's like that prepubescent like wait there's more what are witches my father hadn't married his third wife and that her mother had was as a Reiki Master and she's one initiated me and I did Rikyu with and was introduced to everything from she got us at an astrology reading for the family and I had knew it was very strange setup where I knew my stepmom since I was like four six and I'd known my then stepsisters since I was four and she was too my brother I knew before he was born and I was like their babysitter and her mom and my mom owned a store together and her dad and my dad worked together so that we were from a very small town so it's very incestuous everybody knows each other it's like queer community and so they ended up together and moving to the other side of Canada in Toronto and so we were there and so I knew them really well and I loved them a lot and but we were always in this new family and we were trying to like figure out and so we went for a reading and the astrologer started to talk about everybody and talk about like my sister and why I was like oh my god she is like that and I'm not like that and I'm like envious of how she can be like that she's not quería so she didn't give a how do you do my wife's authentic raise but and so I was like enthralled with this this system of understanding how different we were and she could articulate all the things and why and so it just it like it explained my life too and then of course having a reading was the I was the first time I thought anybody like ever anybody had ever seen me she was like oh you have a head and hair and shoulders I was like I felt formed for the first time in my life happened to me to 26 with the first reading I ever had every single thing was true and happened right and so you just you come into existence if especially if you're somebody who's been not seen your whole life and a lot of us feel that whether for a million reasons it's a family system or gender or whatever the things are we feel invisible eyes and so a reading brings you into like 3d like I almost said inherits you know you pop out from one d23 and and but the thing was is that I understood what she was saying astrologically it was like this language that I knew but no one had spoken to me in mm-hmm so I was like ravenous for more she'd written a book I got the book and I've been studying ever since the symbolic language just like burned itself into my subconscious and then I would dream about the planets and they talk to me in my dreams and when I wasn't doing astrology there were times when those dreams would get really loud and kind of they're not really planets aren't really friendly they're not like because I've had a lot of experiences like psychic dream stuff like that so we're kind of terrifying but also really important it took me a long time to recognize them for being important I just would dismiss them all the time and then different therapists or people in my life I'd be like that's not normal because I don't have that right right that's weird and then when I started to write the Australia G finally I remember seeing my therapist like I think I'm in a relationship with this like all of a sudden I don't feel as alone and that's really what astrology is for me it's a it's like one of the best friends I've ever had I have this dream where I'm like trying to open my eyes but I can't open them because the lights too bright the light is gonna like blind me or something you're not supposed to open your eyes if it's gonna if it's going to burn your eyeballs do you mean like there's a part of you that's like hunting for this thing that is so that will destroy you because it's too much for the human as' but you got that hungers you got a temperate you're not supposed it can't you listen yeah it's got I hate to hate it sit with it with your eyes closed and feel it and receive it in other ways and let a little bit in at a time but if you if you expose yourself to too much it'll burn you Oh it'll burn you up it's so hard not to want it all and rising sad and by the way in the sad suppose I did have more yeah ten houses and said no I don't even know wait so so when was it that then you actually started like doing Australia like like making it a career move for like I like I've been paid for astrology for decades but I didn't want to have it as a career I didn't think it was a career it wasn't something that I was like gonna do and why did you feel it was not legit or something yeah yeah I was like I grew up in such a wackadoodle place like I grew up like I didn't have walls for most of my like I'd like hippie dippie to the extreme so I was like okay like Burning Man is like my nightmare but I was I think I was searching for something different like not out there as much as your childhood or something yeah I think so I think you felt like maybe it was telling legit yeah an awesome astrology to like go back into the abandonment FOMO place it's like I don't connect with a lot of other professions when I was an actor I loved being on set or in I loved that man of commader camaraderie but I'm also really independent and as a writer you just don't have that so it's been a really big struggle for me a profession solitude yeah the isolation I'm really deeply isolated a lot of the time which it just goes back to my past of like being locked in a room at a party what was the moment then that you like embraced it and didn't like stopped resisting it as your main I think it just chose it was like great like nothing else really worked I was getting older like and it was the thing that was picking up steam mm-hmm and then when were you already at that point like writing and sending newsletters of horses doing it all but it was only as a way to like not feel so as your best friend expressing yourself yeah it was just a way also to just like I felt I needed to do this otherwise I would kind of implode the creative energy so I was like wow no one read this but this is what I have right and it was never a thought that it would do anything right and then when and then so I did that for a long time I did it for free I'd worked around the clock all the time in a lot of different healing capacities and then when Sonny and I got together she was like great this is something let's turn this this is ridiculous why what are you doing like we could really do something with this right then and then all of a sudden I had a partner which I'd never had great never had somebody that helped me and like had their eyes on everything and she works I'd say this a lot but like there was this moment where we were working side-by-side and I was like mm-hmm obsessive as I am and like as like past eek yeah and I was like that was another one of those matches rose I felt it was like an engine revving and then taking like whoa this is cool so for so I needed that and I can see that in my chart mm-hmm I know that that like my the ruler of my second house of making money is in my first house which is me and the ruler of my seventh house which is marriage is in my first house which is me so I know that my partner has to work with me you know but I didn't know that until I really had a partner and I was like oh that's how that could you read your own chart like is it hard to read your own chart No so did you did you know in your own chart but like I guess like if a partner is gonna come as is not like you're a psychic but like did it say didn't know did you know the role of partnership like in your life through your chart at all or you know it's funny the when I met when we met I had just started studying traditional astrology which cleared things up for me in a way that nothing else ever had and so I wasn't a modernist all modern Western astrology is very psychological and so it's looking at the chart as your psyche and you it's very Jungian kind of based and there's an incredible beautiful complexity in it it's great it's not something that was I was ever really incredibly astute at to be quite honest and then when I started learning the traditional techniques all of a sudden I was like oh it's all so clear now because the traditional astrology looks at your chart as the setup of your life where you're like what how things happen so for some people they meet their most important people through work through some people right it's not at all like that and it's so there's these very clear distinction so like how you want what area of your life do you want to ask me about and then I look at it and I can tell where you need to go to get compass yeah exactly it's very like directive which I love that's very rule it's got like amazing boundaries and I love that yeah but the cool thing was that when we got together I looked up the asteroids because my teacher does Dimitra George does a lot of asteroid work so within this very rigorous structure you can overlay asteroids and so if you meet somebody that's important or you're your children or your mates or whatever you can look up their name because there's like hundreds of thousands of asteroids right and so they've all been named all these different names and you can get somebody who's like similar in name enough and look it up and see where it falls in your chart and there's a there's this thing in our chart called the part of fortune which is as it as it sounds it's a place where you kind of get lucky or you have some grace in life and we all have one it's a mathematical equation of the Sun Moon ascendant of the life places and it's where you have like literal like fortune yeah and on my part of fortune is the asteroid Sanya that's unbelievable [Laughter] like how do you deal with knowing so much about this and like knowing what's happening in terms of astrology and the planets and and all like why we do what I want to know do you know I don't know how it's gonna roll out but I know like the hot spots right so as we're in this moment you know I can say look of course there's a eclipse and cancer in July and there's like babies and parents are like being separated so like what is an eclipse and cancer are cancers the sign of the parents cancer is the sign of the family cancer is a sign of love and bonding not love necessarily but bond that bond between which is love it's the sign of cohesion and like the connector waters of the womb it's all it's family literally and it's an eclipse so it's going to show the shadow side of that there's going to be it's a huge marking it's we haven't had eclipses in cancer in a really long time this is the first one in a long time and so as I'm living through I'm looking at the world and thinking of course like were this is the image not of course I've never would have thought fathom this got you know god forbid anybody you know dream this up and then you live it and you're like yeah that's exactly it and as it's going on there was other these other things happening with Venus and cancer and Mercury and cancer and they're just foreshadowing the Eclipse and so I was I kept saying that like oh okay this is foreshadowing the Eclipse this is for shutting the Eclipse and then it wasn't until very recently I was like unfortunately this is part of how this part of the world there's off obviously other parts of the world they're gonna be experiencing it differently but this is a really big moment in the globe in the global scheme of things because what it says is that we have a dictator for sure for sure like this is this is this is the way down the line of what experts that study the Holocaust say was happening and before the hall we are in it there's no way to not see that the marking of it astrologically is very unfortunately a very succinct it's not you don't have to know much about astrology to know that that's the images of seeing children without their parents like the shadow side of cancer it's the it's the other part of not being bonded and so what is that pulling up for all of us how are we what are our little children in inner/outer like you know we walk yet I was in the airport the other day and there was a kid walking the plane he just by himself no but you just see a kid there's nothing more unbearable so the what is the thing a child suffering because it and also basic it's like so basic I mean all of us you know anybody suffering is awful but and so there's this it cancers like to care like how do we how do we utilize our care and our energy to mm-hmm to overthrow the fascist government I don't know it's like it's beyond it's overwhelming and it's all that but we're in the moment and I was just in Europe and I was just in Amsterdam and I was down the street from the Anne Frank House and I'm you know you're in Europe and you feel like in this house you feel like you're kind of on this you've seen so many World War two movies there's so many things about the Holocaust there's so much so much so much and so you're in it you kind of feel like you're in that history you've you're so inundated with it and then Betsy DeVos well by and I just I when I were there yes oh my god she walked by and she looked me in the eye and I was like and then I was like what do I do like this is a monster like this is evil is in front of me and I I'm right down it's here I'm in the past of it and I'm in the present of it Wow and I want a what and then I'm like Chani they're gonna like haul you off careful like a comet but I literally was like oh my god my god and it's like it's so much cataclysmic it feels like everything yeah like I think and all right and all right and and also it is you know we this is in fairy tales this isn't our dreams this is in our this is this is a movie this is in books but like no it's here it's here it's now we're living in it right this moment I have another question so what is that what do you feel is the biggest risk you've ever taken in your life the most important risk I ever took was getting married it was a no brainer like I wasn't ever not going to but it was it was an affirmation of believing in myself marry leaving and building a new life and your worth yeah choosing all the good things in my life I had the marriage sit the ceremony of that was so significant and I had such an extreme reaction and experience of it that I think I don't know if it's maybe it's not a risk no I it is a risk you know to commit to yourself to anything gulnur abou yeah it was the biggest really vulnerable who's the most vulnerable I think I ever was what what is your biggest source of shame you know the moments of my life where I've been really awful to other people because I've had a lot of them I think I've been a very difficult person like in your early 20s and stuff like what you're talking about yeah and my teenage years in my I think in my childhood years like not being nice to people be like to sharp to cutting to envious you know my thing was like well nobody likes me I'm not wanted anywhere so I'm gonna just keep replaying that over and over mm-hm and so I've done a lot of things I think to a lot of people are I'm sure a lot of people have a lot of memories of me that aren't very nice so can what is your book about Oh astrology it is hopefully going to be a very clear concise manual kind of of how to decode the most important parts of your chart so we're kind of flooded with a lot of astrological knowledge and it's kind of floating around and not really put anywhere in a sense so I want to take these traditional techniques that I have that have been so clarifying and helpful to me and make them accessible and so it's it's a book that's going to focus on the preliminary very important pieces of your chart and and how it really does illuminate life purpose if you can just focus on the first couple of main themes and then start adding in things so it's really going to be like an opener for help how to how to understand your chart how to understand what your what your chart says about your life purpose so it's not about your sign I'm really trying to get people off of the sign thing because astrology is not about science it's about planets and the where planets are moving and the signs of course lend a style they're very important style but there's so much more underneath that and so I'm hoping to get the masses interested in a little bit more depth than just astrological signs and they'll be like stories I'll you know I'll put it in little biographical things to kind of explain okay my friend I'm not exactly sure what my friend my friend responded to our prompt asking asking any questions that people had on Instagram I'm not exactly sure what her question is we're gonna read it and see if it okay so she wants you to talk about like querying astrology is what she said like the nuances at play of gender sexuality and astrology so very Pearlman and I before there was a queer astrology conference we did a workshop called querying Mars and Venus and so in traditional astre there's a long tradition of separating everything into masculine and feminine and I don't think that it was really seen in the same way as we see it now in the ancient world it was obviously very gendered very heteronormative very sexist very all those things but I think that when we're talking about her medics we're looking at things in terms of qualities of like hot dry white we're looking at things of shapes prickly tastes we're looking at all these different what they call humors and so masculine feminine is part of that but I think that what's been harmful in later iterations of astrology of modern astrology especially around like the seventies 80s they were like very like men or Mars and women are being right you know it's like there's a lot of ways in which really problematic heteronormativity can be it was proliferated throughout that that like the seventies wave of astrology and so it's really important to deconstruct that and to talk about like what what is Venus well Venus is is feminists feminine energy and we all obviously all have that and it's all expressed but the way in which we're also having different conversations about gender also has to show up in the ways in which we're looking at astrological significations mhm and so I think it's really important for astrologers because we're the ones putting out content to especially those that are sis and living a heteronormative existence which is up until recently been the majority of astrologers hmm majority not all and so what's what what our generation has been really pushing at the older generation to do is like get educated right and understand that like you're really being problematic and shutting down a lot of conversations or turning people off of astrology that don't live life like you do and don't see the world like you didn't feel experienced gender like you do right so there's that piece of it right I think it's really important for for astrologers to have the same kind of conversations that therapists have teachers have that we all need to be in this conversation and be educating ourselves in each other mm-hmm all the things right all the ways in which our identity and our representation matter and our are incredibly diverse like as diverse as there are astrology charts there are anna fost asians of human beings right gender arrays all the stuff and great and so that's been part of my focus is to be pushing a different conversation through the body of astrology because a lot of astrologers still use like if you're like male leo and male and maybe a nice moment right right like who is that rating for who's left out of this conversation what the are you talking about right what are we talking about right right and I get it if it's like really over there and I mean like times no just you know yeah what what is self-acceptance mean to you self-acceptance means an incredible amount of accountability and compassion existing at the same time so it's like really being very willing to understand when I've been an and when I've been hurtful and when I've done things that were unnecessary and how I can do better and then also not berating myself to the point of shutting down completely so that I don't actually get to grow it's beautiful really yeah what's kind of like forgiving yourself you know but at the same time not letting yourself off the hook from right right being ongoing forgive yourself yeah what would you say to your 12 year old self I had a reading with a psychic he just sat there and he said you're gonna be okay he said it he said it for like five yes straight and I just cried I cried and cried because he really he was just like you're just gonna be okay you're you have no idea but you're gonna be so so so okay and I think that's it you know it always stuck with me he was so compassionate and so loving in it and he was so fathering in that moment and I I knew it to be true I for as much of the difficulty in pain and everything I knew that I and so I think I would say to myself like you're right you're gonna get out mm-hmm all that fury and passion and creativity that's in you will get you out and if you can not hate yourself so much along the way that would be really great but it might not be possible but it's true that you've got that other voice in you that knows that you're going to survive and that you're here for a purpose is is spot-on and you'll get there thank you thank you you are both experts you're like Oprah's dual digging out thank you what we think your thunder [Laughter] we hope you were inspired by this episode until next week that's it for me ELISA and me Lily if you agree that facade separate us and being radically honest brings us together help spread the movement for radical self-acceptance by sharing this episode and subscribing to our podcast you can also watch our videos by subscribing to our YouTube channel and following us on Instagram Twitter and Facebook using the handle at style IQ that's the letter U instead of the word view and check out our book true style is what's underneath the self-acceptance revolution on Amazon or at a local bookstore near you we can't skip ahead to a happy ending or live inside a photoshopped image or an Instagram filter there's no finding oneself when glossing over the truth

Channel: StyleLikeU

Views: 5,420

Rating: 4.9344263 out of 5

Keywords: StyleLikeU, StyleLikeYou, style like u, style like you, stylelikeu, empowering women, empowering videos, what’s underneath, what’s underneath project, what’s underneath stylelikeu, body image, body image and the media, beauty, fashion, the what’s underneath project, style, self love, self love affirmations, self love motivation, self image and self esteem, self image speech, self image affirmation, astrology, horoscopes, star sign, star signs

Id: tKzAlg4t4co

Length: 59min 27sec (3567 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 10 2018