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Happy Holidays

The holiday season is quickly approaching and our final classes of 2021 are coming to end soon. We are all looking forward to celebrating the beginning of a new year at the FCEA, our school’s second year of operation. I am so proud of the job everyone is doing in both the 100-level and 200-level instruction! To me, the quality of analysis and interpretation demonstrated by FCEA students suggests so much more than their hard work and effort. It reflects a kind and caring collaboration, the gifts we receive from a shared community of love, support and encouragement.

This is a community that the students and FCEA staff have built together, one worth celebrating and cherishing. We could not do this school without you! In this month of giving thanks, let’s appreciate ALL the voices we have gathered and recognize the feast we have at our FCEA table. 
There is much to look forward to in 2022 as well. We are excited to roll out another new course in January, FCEA 203, The Biopsychic Script. This is a big one for me, personally, because I will experience my own Second Saturn Return next year. I remember singing along to Joni Mitchell’s The Circle Game when I was just a small child back during the late 1960s. If you recall the song, you may remember Joni’s lyrics were about the passage of time and the rhythms of life’s cycles, as if we were riding a carousel horse through each changing year. 
Something seemed so authentic to me back then when I first heard Joni Mitchell’s words, even though my own life in this incarnation had barely gotten started. Over the years, wisdom seemed to grow within my understanding of her song’s poetry. Was I getting a better sense about life’s stages of maturity? Was this developing self-awareness evident in the planetary cycles and rhythms of evolutionary astrology? 

“And the seasons, they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return, we can only look
Behind, from where we came
And go round and round and round, in the circle game”

– Joni Mitchell

Perhaps the answers to these questions are best summed up by Steven’s definition of the biopsychic script as we will study it in FCEA 203, “As we mature, our consciousness – and our circumstances – change in somewhat predictable and rather universal ways. Within limits, everyone experiences these maturational developments similarly. Astrology can take us beyond the realm of what is immediately obvious, sensitizing us to the subtleties of these life-chapters in very illuminating ways. We call this particular area of astrological study the biopsychic script.”
In FCEA 203, we will continue to rely upon the birthchart as root prediction and set these commonly experienced life events, such as the Saturn Return, the Uranus Opposition, the Jupiter Return, to name just a few, into the biographical stories of specific individuals, individuals undoubtedly experiencing other important transits, progressions or solar arcs simultaneously in unique ways. And we will return again to Wilma’s chart, our fictional client, with whom we have been developing a counseling rapport. How will her fiery primal triad and her stellium in Gemini and her 10th house work with the rhythms of the lunar nodes and her Nodal Return?
We will also consider some key events of the biopsychic script, such as the Saturn Return, within the context of the client’s age. Can we see certain themes during the first Saturn Return in a person’s late 20s that change with advancing age when a soul reaches the late 50s? What lessons or questions do we encounter when Saturn again returns to its natal position? Thinking back to my first Saturn Return and comparing that time to my current reality in 2021, as Saturn again travels through Aquarius, I notice some similarities of experience; the universe sets up the carousel horses once again in ways I must mature into and work through with patience and discipline. Ah, Saturn, you really do remind me of ‘father time.’ And what is it Steven always tells us about Saturn? “How bad do you want it”? No doubt in my mind that FCEA students will meet the challenge!