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YOUR WEEKLY DOSE OF PRACTICAL ASTROLOGY FOR REAL LIFE
BREW #124

My head is swirling with the flutter of a thousand urgent whispers.

Don't say that, it's not safe.
That's heretical and you know what they did to those people.
You can't talk about that.
Please, be careful.

It's not safe, it's not safe, it's not safe.

Of course, this is coming on the heels of a what has essentially been the energetic equivalent of getting hit by a bullet train of clarity and insight (the DOWNLOADS this season! 🤯 anyone else??). I'm peeling myself off the track, patting my clothes for blood, and worldbuilding my next chapter into reality...only for the words to freeze in my throat.

It's not safe, it's not safe, it's not safe.

Someone less versed in the spiritual realm might say this is a visibility wound, but I know better.

This is the panicked echo of the watchful feminine; of all the mothers and grandmothers, that came before me, who were literally prohibited from speaking their truth.

Who endured violence, suppression, and deep spiritual injury that I can feel in my own psyche to this day.

That latent fear of being labeled as a heretical, opinionated woman is something that has been very loud for me these past few weeks.

I have many essays half-finished (like the one I wanted to send this week about what Neptune in Aries tells us is the ONLY strategic asset that really matters) but I cannot seem to write to completion before being internally overwhelmed by the ancestral reflex to put my head down and try not to draw too much attention lest I be ostracized, institutionalized, or beheaded (all valid assumptions since historically that was the response to mystical, self-sovereign women).

And just like it happens EVERY FREAKING YEAR, I agonize about why the heck am I feeling like this? Why is this so rampant for me rightnow?

Then, just like every month when I start thinking that maybe I'm just no good and all my shirts are suddenly too tight and that I'll self-combust if I feel so much as a 🤏 single 🤏 strand 🤏 of 🤏 hair hit the back of my neck --- it dawns on me...oh yeah, luteal phase.

Womp, womp, womp.

Except the astrological equivalent of luteal phase is the 8th house.

The house of the desecrated, the fallen sacred.
The house of taboo.
The house of sex, power, and (other people's) money.
The house of life, death, and rebirth.

It is the house of our deepest transformation and if the themes above give you any indicator...it's not a Princess Diaries Mia Thermopolis glow-up type of transformation.

It's excavate all the skeletons you've been shoving in your closet and use the bones to re-architect your new being type of dark-and-gritty transformation.

It's giving less Hot Girl Summer and more I'd Rather Not, Girl Summer. ✋

But this is the path my soul choose or whatever, so we go spelunking through the depths anyways.

The 8th House is the house of hidden things and inheritance.

Yes, taboos and shadows are hidden things and they are definitely par for the course for the 8th house, however, I'm also talking about hidden inheritance.

Most people think this means money. And it does.

But that's not the only inheritance we get.

Inheritance is also your DNA, your gene codes, and generational stories.

(It is also the positive side of hidden inheritance: generational gifts, ancestral guidance & protection, and the confidence that comes from walking within a lineage that has been praying a blessing over your existence since before you were even born -- but more on that in a second.)

In Cancer, specifically, this gets translated to mean that Cancerian themes of motherhood, femininity, duality, emotionality, and spiritual or energetic practices of wellness + protection = TABOO! FORBIDDEN! SCARY! 🙅‍♀️🙅‍♀️🙅‍♀️

So back to the girlie ghosts haunting my thoughts:

I know part of this is my own lived experience of growing up as a woman in our patriarchal (translation: inherently misogynistic) world. When anything that is perceived as womanly or girly is deemed as less than, subpar, or stupid...it's hard not to internalize that at some point, right?

But I know, because of the context the 8th house gives me, that this is also bigger and older than just me.

Epigenetics tells us that trauma has the power to overwrite genetic code. If a woman survives her house burning down and develops the totally valid fear of losing everything -- or of fire itself -- that fear writes itself into the DNA of every egg in her body.

It's how you end up with great grandchildren that are also, inexplicably, afraid of fire (or become hoarders because they're afraid of losing any of their stuff).

So when we have collective trauma, like the Inquisition, like the crusades, like the civilization-wide witch hunts against WOMEN...it starts to make sense that, maybe, an extreme level of fear and survival like that would etch itself into my genetic inheritance, altering my personality to self-edit and censor myself out of saying shit that would've gotten me burned at the stake 1,000 years ago.

Or lobotomized just 50-100 years ago!

The self-editing, as much as it frustrates me, is them. And I get it.

It's all the women before me that were never granted their own autonomy. That don't know the taste of a liberated tongue, free to say whatever she damn well pleases. That don't know the buoyancy of a wide open day full of a life that I've planned for myself.

Which means that being an educated, opinionated woman is an act of veneration; to all the women before me that never knew anything outside domestic servitude.

It means that this spirituality-based business of mine, including this woo-filled newsletter, that lights me up to serve from, to talk about, to write my obsessive little essays for, is something I can't for one second forget what it cost them.

And it's why I can't tell you about Neptune in Aries this week (next week though, fer sure! 😉).

We've talked a lot about rhythms recently, but putting it into perspective and practice like this is what turns it into a FELT EXPERIENCE OF REALITY. That's what astrology is about (or at least, the way we do it here).

Now, this might feel mean, but it's with a purpose: I'm not going to give you the house-by-house breakdown this week. 🙂‍↔️ Because I want YOU 🫵 to connect the dots because THAT is what breathes life and meaning into this practice, more than any snippet I could give you.

So! You have two options to do this:

Option 1: Download the Astrology Glossary

Look up the house that Cancer occupies for you: what are the themes of that house? What comes up for you? What does that remind you of? Trust what comes up; this is why astrology is an intuitive art as much as it is a skill of pattern recognition. Lean into the nudges and don't downplay your gut knowing.

What's the general pattern of what this sign in this house means for you?

GET THE ASTROLOGY GLOSSARY TO HELP YOU MAKE CONNECTIONS

Option 2: Let me connect the dots for you!

Especially if you can feel that you're standing at the threshold of a new chapter of Life, leadership, or visibility. This is ripe ground for uncovering patterns and weaving your own layer of myth + meaning into how you actually want those to play out for you now. Where have you been, where are you going, how do you get there, and what do you want it to mean? That's a reading that my private advisory sessions, Waypoint, are for. I have a few open spots yet for July.

HOP ON MY CALENDAR

From Ash's Corner

I come from a long line of women with something wrong with them.

Wait, that came out wrong.

I come from a long line of terrible women.

No, no, still wrong.

What I mean to say is that I descend from a lineage of witches, shamans, and ancient peoples with a rich, closely guarded history of mysticism, magick-making, and earth-based spirituality.

Except, those same people, my people, were silenced, sold, and conquered into a submission where they FORCED to stop practicing those traditions.

(You probably hail from a similar lineage, no? Human history loves to repeat itself unfortunately.)

If there's one thing depth psychology has taught me, it's that without the ability to freely express the gifts of our soul, we lock it away where it doesn't just wither, it festers.

The pain of not being able to BE YOURSELF, to exist in the full truth of who you are hurts. And it's a wound that cuts into the fabric of the soul and is carried down a line until someone is finally safe enough, rooted enough, maybe even healed enough, to look beyond all the scar tissue and see it for what it is.

Buried treasure.

Being an 8th House Cancer means I find my buried treasure via maternal memory, a vessel for the ways of the old world to be transmitted to the new. In the same way that a mother transmits genetic and energetic information in the natal waters of the womb to her child, so to have I received the map to my ancestral inheritance through Cancer's symbolism.

This is the positive side of the hidden inheritance I was talking about.

It doesn't matter how much time has passed, how long the information has been lost. The channel never goes completely silent, the buried treasure doesn't budge.

There are gifts waiting for you to recover them, to be activated simply through your acknowledgement. Your own 8th house placement can tell you a lot about what exactly those might be. And Cancer season can give you a lot of clues into how to weave a new reality with those myths, both for you and those that come after.

But only IF you have titties tough enough to seek the answers for yourself.