Master’s Musings, January 2022

I know that many of you are probably feeling overwhelmed at the project you have taken on, learning astrology here in the FCEA. It’s not easy! And if you feel daunted or discouraged, please don’t read that as ineptitude. You probably just haven’t done your ten thousand hours yet. Stick with it, in other words. How long would it take you to become a medical doctor? Or a fine violinist?

I actually kind of envy you. I learned astrology the hard way, completely on my own. With the FCEA curriculum and community supporting you, I think you can follow a bee-line to mastery. My route was a lot more circuitous. I want to share a little bit of my own story here. Maybe it will encourage you. As an astrologer, I think I turned out pretty well. With persistence I’m sure you can turn out well too.

As a teen, I asked my mom what time I was born. She told me “6:15 in the morning.” Two or three years later I found my baby book and learned that I was actually born closer to 3:30 – but that I weighed six pounds fifteen ounces. Mom’s error was actually helpful. I didn’t know the math of chart calculation back then, but I had set up a crude chart for 6:15, putting the winter Sun just below the horizon. It gave me a massive first house and Sagittarius rising. That was totally wrong, but it was exactly what a shy little second house Capricorn needed to hear. I had to live up to that chart somehow. And I think that was probably when the first seeds of “evolutionary astrology” took root in me. I began to look at a chart as something to which you aspired rather than something in which you were “trapped ‘til death do us part.”

Joseph P. Goodavage’s Write Your Own Horoscope fell into my lap as I was recovering from a late-in-life tonsillectomy at age seventeen. He was pretty old-school, but he gave me over a hundred little paragraphs describing each of the planets in each of the signs. That book got me going as to how astrology really worked at a technical level. I am grateful for Goodavage’s work, but the people he described seemed more rigidly defined by their traits than my friends actually were. So I did something that turned out to be really smart – to check out his work, I started keeping a spiral-bound notebook about the sign positions of the planets of everyone I knew. When, for example, I wanted to understand Mercury in Aries better, I just looked up everyone I knew with Mercury in that sign – and, voila, I saw not only the common denominators among them, but also a spectrum of possibilities. Some people seemed to be doing better with that Mercury position than others. Some improved over time. Again: the idea of evolution was pressing at me.

Around that time, I started reading more metaphysical astrology too, mostly the British Theosophists, like Charles E.O. Carter and Ronald C. Davison. I liked their references to spiritual evolution and how someone’s life-purpose might be revealed in a chart. But, in all honesty, their work was still pretty “descriptive” – all the Virgos were meticulous and responsible, and so on. But somehow the idea of personal evolution on a day-to-day basis began to percolate up into a broader scope of change over time. Tellingly, I had been reading about “the sleeping prophet” Edgar Cayce since I was maybe thirteen years old. He was not an astrologer, but he was all about reincarnation. Two plus two came together in my head. What if our evolution happened over many lifetimes? What if our charts gave us some clues about all that?

Sometime during my college years, I got my first ephemeris and a copy of Dalton’s Table of Houses, and I began to learn how to set up accurate charts. Inevitably, I found myself beginning to do readings for my friends – you can’t do this work for long without people asking you what their chart says. I still didn’t foresee a career as an astrologer. That never crossed my mind. I didn’t even realize that astrology could be a profession. For me, it was still really just a hobby. But after a couple of years in college, I switched my major from Economics to Religion. When friends asked me if I planned to become a minister, all I could think of to say was “I don’t think so.”

After I graduated, I worked for a while on a sociological survey for the National Institute of Mental Health, then I got a soul-numbing job working in an administrative capacity for a university. It was a blessing that I hated that job so much – if I’d found a more copacetic work situation, I might have remained in it. Meanwhile, strangers – friends of friends mostly – had begun phoning me and asking me if I would take a look at their charts. Somewhere in there I charged someone for a session for the first time. I think my fee was $10.

By the time I was twenty-seven, I had my full-time university job, plus a thriving astrological practice in the evenings and on weekends. I was starting to behave, in other words, like a Capricorn with Saturn on his Midheaven. It was the time of my progressed lunar return too, and my Aries Moon called. I needed an adventure to help me sort out my midlife direction. So I quit my dead-end job and bought an aging 22’ sailboat called Puffin for $4000 and I sailed away. My sweetheart and I spent a summer cruising from New York harbor, down the fabled New Jersey coast, through the Chesapeake Bay, and all the way down to the Virginia line. By the end of that life-changing journey, I was resolved to take a shot at really “being an astrologer.” We returned to North Carolina, and in November 1977, just before my twenty-ninth birthday and my first Saturn return, I cut the umbilical cord to the American Dream and hung out my astrological shingle. Inside of a year, I was booked ahead for several months. I never looked back.

Three or four years later, in 1981, my phone rang and it was a literary agent in New York asking me if I might like to write an astrology book on spec. I’ve told that story elsewhere, so I won’t repeat it here. Three more years passed and The Inner Sky came out. I entered the national and, eventually, the international stage as an astrologer.

The main drum I want to beat here is that long before I “became famous,” I had a thriving local practice. I could have remained in that relatively anonymous context and been a counseling astrologer for the rest of my days, living a meaningful and reasonably comfy life more or less at the level of any other successful mental health professional. That’s not what happened, but it would have been fine.

I am guessing that I reached my fabled “ten thousand hours” sometime around this pivotal period of my life. My language was smoothing out, and I mean that very specifically. I had developed a huge storehouse of stories and metaphors, most of which I had by then used countless times. I could sort of mentally “punch Play” on those lines while my mind was planning where to go next. It took me a while to realize how helpful these “oral formulas” were to me. I know that even today when I am fielding random astrological questions, I probably seem to be sort of supernaturally articulate. I also understand how many of you comparing yourselves to me might feel daunted. If you read the last few sentences again, you’ll know my trick – it’s really just another facet of that fabled “ten thousand hours.” And if you ever just hang out with me, you’ll see that in normal conversation I am just as tongue-tied, ungrammatical, and dependent upon expletives as anyone else.

Probably in about 1985 or 1986, about the time that my second book, The Changing Sky, was coming out, I was invited to speak at my first astrology conference. It was an National Council for Geocosmic Research (NCGR) event in New York City. I got off the plane and climbed onto the stage with a few of my astrological heroes, notably Robert Hand. Amazingly, this was the first time in my life that I had ever met another serious, professional astrologer. Rob was kind and welcoming, and I will always love and honor him for that. To this day, I wonder about the effects of my early isolation from the larger community of astrologers. In some ways, I wasted time “re-inventing the wheel.” In other ways, it compelled me to think freshly and not to be swept along by the tides of group-think and the search for approval.

Along the way to that conference, I went down an awful lot of astrological rabbit holes. I read voraciously across the wide scope of the field. I had no map and no plan. For every technique I use today, back then I probably learned ten. Some seemed to be empty of any practical meaning. Some were effective, but just not as compelling as others. I realized how vast a field astrology actually was. I also realized how helpful it is to keep it as simple as possible and to master a defined arsenal of techniques – ones that actually speak to people. I came to realize how supportive it is in pursuing that particular holy grail to have a private astrological practice. There is no positive reinforcement more effective than a tearfully appreciative client – and no negative reinforcement more telling than glassy eyes and suppressed yawns. Half of what I know about astrology comes from simply sitting with my clients.

Earlier I said that I envy all of you who are enrolled in the FCEA. I know it’s a long slog, but I hope it’s mostly a joyful one. We are aiming for a four-year program, much like any university –  the field of astrology deserves to be taken that seriously. Being a soul-doctor is not something you pick up in a weekend workshop or on a Youtube video.

The idea of “leaving the world a better place than the one we found” is a cliché of course, but it’s still a noble one. I think of the FCEA proudly that way and I anticipate that it will live on after I’m gone from this body.  If this school had existed when I was starting out, I might have circumvented some of those ten thousand hours, or at least spent them more wisely. I might have cut the number to eight thousand.

I’m smiling as I write those last words, but they are honest. You are all embarked upon a Great Work. May the great god Saturn smile upon your faith and your persistence.

Steven Forrest
January 2022

Much of what was discussed was technical – the scheduling of classes, how to get everyone paid, and so forth. None of that is my territory, so I had to make an effort to pay attention. My responsibilities lie in the creation of the teaching materials, not so much in the day-to-day running of the teaching programs. But when it was my turn to speak, I decided that we should “walk our talk” as astrologers and actually look at what was going on currently in the chart of the school.

Many of you have seen this chart before. It’s set for the moment that Catie, Jeff, and I sat down at Jeff’s kitchen table in Pleasanton and began talking seriously about pooling our talents and creating an online school of evolutionary astrology.

I noticed a lot of impending Saturn energy, plus even more impending Jupiter energy – it was all looming right on the immediate horizon too. Saturn was about to cross our Midheaven a final time and begin its long march through our 10th house. Meanwhile, Jupiter was soon to enter Pisces solidly – and of course, the FCEA could hardly be more Piscean if we all sprouted gills and fins.

As you can see on the chart, Saturn had already hit our Midheaven in March, then returned to the 9th house in August. It would cycle back to the Midheaven on December 11 – right about now, in other words. We knew that we’d been working hard, which fit the symbolism well – but I warned everyone that we were likely to hit some speed bumps as Saturn approached that final hit on the 10th house cusp. I also made a point of emphasizing our evolutionary perspective – that the most helpful way to view these upcoming Saturnian speed bumps was to see them as a call to move to our next level of maturation as a school. (Those of you in the 200-level courses are learning all about this dimension of any Saturn transit.)

I, of course, had no idea what would happen. “Predicting the future” is not really what we do. It’s more like preparing for the future, and in fact, preparing to create a future we envision intentionally. 

Sure enough, as Saturn got within the orbs of that conjunction with the Midheaven, Jeff unexpectedly announced that he needed to resign. We depended on his skills in a great many ways, so the news was a blow. Only half-jokingly, I used to say that the school could survive my death more easily than it could survive Jeff’s. But that’s approximately what we faced, right on schedule – thankfully, Jeff did not die, but he was no longer there, which was about the same thing in practical terms.

We are weathering the storm! In Catie’s article in this newsletter, she describes the three new staff members we are hiring. It takes three people to do what Jeff used to do, and we think that we’ve found them. And Jeff is still helping out for another few weeks. Like us, he is determined that the FCEA will continue to be a success.

Here’s the deep perspective: An institution that is dependent on specific personalities is a doomed institution. How could it be otherwise? People die. People move on. For the FCEA, our Saturnian “next developmental stage” involved proving that we were stronger than that – that we could survive as an institution. Personally, my hope – and the intention that I am trying to crystallize – is that this approach to astrology will live on after me. At our staff retreat in October, I quoted the former French president, Charles DeGaulle. He lost a critical member of his government. Reporters asked him how he could possibly go on without that “indispensable man” in place. DeGaulle’s answer: “the graveyards of the world are full of indispensable men.” Saturn challenged us to grow up, just like it challenges teenagers to become adults.

Saturn will be in our school’s 10th house until February 2024. It promises to be a time of hard work and, above all, of building. The learning curve will be steep, but with our three new staff members and a few new tutors ready to launch, we seem to be on the right track.

That’s Saturn. What about Jupiter?

Jupiter entered Pisces for a few weeks this past May, but by late July, it was back in Aquarius. It fully enters Pisces with no backward glances on December 28, less than a month from where I sit writing these words. Once there, it will spend a year in that sign, crossing our triple conjunction of the Sun, Moon, and Neptune in March 2022.

At our staff retreat, I spoke of the school growing. I knew that doorways of opportunity  would be opening. Our first year had already been more successful than we had dared to imagine – but daring to imagine is really the heart of Jupiter. During its transits, as those of you doing our 200-level training already know, the basic question we face is how have I been underestimating myself? Knowing this, when it was my turn to speak at the retreat, I said, “Let’s aim for a thousand students.” I believe I heard a gasp or two. The number itself was not important – it was really more Jupiter poetry than Saturn mathematics. I just knew that Jupiter always rewards us for thinking big – and seems to  get bored with us if we don’t.

There are practical reasons why suddenly having “a thousand students” would spell disaster. But that brings us right back to good old Saturn – we have entered an era of building. In this case, we are building a foundation that could eventually support that kind of weight. Saturn basically said, “Grow or die.” We’ve chosen to grow. As mentioned earlier, in her Dean’s Corner column, Catie is introducing you to our new staff members – Carlos, Paula, and Penelope. Our five new tutors are ready to step up too – Karen, Allison, Sarrah, Bryan, and Ryan.

The FCEA can build Jupiter-fashion on this solid Saturnian ground. Saturn always spells hard work, but if we’ve made the right choices, we actually enjoy the work. It is rewarding. It breeds confidence and self-respect in us. And with Jupiter in the mix – well, Santa Claus is probably about to come down the chimney.

Our FCEA chart has worked well so far. It now promises that 2022 will be a good year for us – probably a tiring year, but tiring in a meaningful way, and joyful too.

Steven Forrest
December 2021

That really says it all, right from the bottom of my heart. So thank you, brother Jeff – and may the wind be on your back in whatever direction you choose to sail from here. 

Meanwhile, our work goes on.

That is still the big-picture plan and we are still on track to fulfilling it.

One obvious issue in terms of me eventually teaching those advanced classes is that because the FCEA is still relatively young, none of our students have as yet moved up to that Master’s Level. Out of respect, I’d like to immediately insert that I know some of you are indeed very advanced, even professionals – which brings me right back to the “little red schoolhouse” dilemma I faced in my old Apprenticeship Programs. When I taught master classes in the AP, I was kind of shocked – some of the students were 100% brilliant and ready for prime time, and some . . . were not. That won’t happen in the FCEA! No one moves to the next level until they’ve really absorbed the previous one.

Currently, our most advanced students have graduated from our “100-level” Apprentice program and are currently enrolled in our Craftsperson courses. They are busy learning transits and progressions. That means that there are still some miles to go before anyone is an FCEA Master-level student. That will certainly happen down the road and I look forward to it – but we’ve not yet crossed that bridge.

We’re not sure precisely what form those masters’ classes will take. I dearly love sitting in a small group, face to face, working at that intimate level, helping individual students find their own voices. But of course the FCEA is international, and we want to be fair to people living outside the United States too. Likely, such programs will involve some hybrid of live work and participation via Zoom. Another wild card – with Pluto ruling my chart from the 9th house, I’ve done astrological work on all the continents except Antarctica, and I’m open to the possibility of traveling to teach classes in other countries too. We’ll see what the world looks like and what kind of shape I am in when we get to that crossroads.

The first point I want to make will sound pretty dogmatic, but I do believe it to be true:  astrology never fails. I would quickly add that astrologers themselves often fail, but that is a different issue. Astrology is fundamental to how the universe operates. Astrology failing would be like gravity failing. I’ll temper that remark slightly a little later in this essay, but I really want to put it up there “in lights” before I write another word.

Still, astrologers’ predictions sometimes do fail and it behooves us not to be afraid of acknowledging that fact and perhaps learning something from it. There are a lot of potential issues here. Let’s have a look at them.   

SYMBOLISM IS NOT LITERALISM

I have beaten this drum since long before The Inner Sky was a gleam in its daddy’s eye, so I don’t want to belabor it here. Still, this core point is the heart of the matter when it comes to “astrology’s failures.” Symbolism is not the same as literalism. We don’t read an astrological chart in the same way that we read a news feed or a computer manual. Let me give you an example. An astrologer sees Uranus entering someone’s seventh house. The astrologer predicts divorce. No divorce happens. 

That left us with Marie O’Neill, Joey Paynter, and Teal Rowe: the survivors! And our three treasures. There are so many ways that our selection process could have crashed and burned. God is good – it didn’t. We are so fortunate to have these three fine human beings on the FCEA team.

We’re on our second round of tutors-in-training now. They are all promising. We’ll see how many of them stick with it. I’m not going to name names yet out of respect for their privacy. This time around, we did a better job of approximating fairness. For this second cycle of potential trainees, we opened up an application process. We didn’t advertise it in a big way, but it was announced in Catie’s “Dean’s Corner” newsletter for the month of May 2021. I immediately want to point out that we are not currently soliciting new tutors since we’re not sure we will need them. For the sake of archiving FCEA history, here’s the link: – Expanding the Herd

How many tutors will we eventually want? That of course boils down to the question of how large the FCEA will grow. Naturally, we have no idea.

Again, my aim in writing this newsletter is simply to be as honest, open, and transparent as I can possibly be about how we’ve selected our candidate tutors. Even though the results have been blessedly perfect so far, the process itself has admittedly been imperfect. Obviously “who you know” (namely, Catie, Jeff, or me) has been a big factor in it, and that’s ultimately not fair to anyone. My only excuse is that the system was cobbled together under extreme pressure and we did the best we could. And we are getting better at it. The pressure still remains though – Catie, Jeff, and I continue to be grievously over-extended, teaching, creating material, administering, and all the while putting out the inevitable brush fires as best we can. Because of all that, in order to move ahead as efficiently as possible, I ask any of you who are interested in possibly tutoring to please refrain from contacting any of us informally – for example via social media – and instead just check the FCEA newsletter for any future tutor searches down the road. We’ll announce them, just as we did last time.

The long-term solution? 

The FCEA is becoming more solvent, and we anticipate hiring some much-needed technical and administrative help very soon. That will make a big difference – but that’s Jeff’s department, so I’ll let him make those announcements when the time comes.  

Until then, it is onward through the fog. As my friends in the tech world often say, “Perfect is the enemy of good enough.” We’re doing our best, I’m proud of what we have accomplished – and I promise that the best is yet to come.

I knew that this break would give me some unbroken time to write. Even after all these years, I still love doing the readings – but a chance to write is also something I relish too. After the marathon of creating the four Elements books, I wanted a project that was a little easier though. It dawned on me that this would be the perfect opportunity to do something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, and that is to create a collection of my articles and newsletters. So that’s exactly what I am up to. It will be called The Endless Sky: Collected Astrological Essays, 2002-2021, and I expect it will be available before the end of the year.

My dear friend Jaan Uhelzski has agreed to write the Foreword. I’m really happy about that. She’s an astrologer herself, but her main claim to fame is that she was one of the original rock’n’roll journalists for the old Creem magazine. She was even on stage in makeup with the band KISS once, and I have a photograph to prove it. Some of you may be too young to remember the magazine. Suffice to say, I expect Jaan’s writing will be edgy, as well as professional.

Meanwhile, creating the new book remains a big job, even though much of the writing is obviously already done. With Saturn in Virgo on my Midheaven pestering my poor innocent Mercury via a quincunx, of course none of the articles were good enough as they sat there. I’ve had to line-edit each one of them, re-writing them here and there, adding some later thoughts, and so on. I’ve also written a brief introduction to each one of them individually, placing them in context. In the “new writing” department, I’ve added a substantial introduction and a serious concluding chapter. It’s been a lot of work. Still, in all honesty, some of the material is old, and much of it has been available for free on my website in the past. It just felt like time to bind everything under one cover for the sake of convenience and easy reference.

The articles range widely. Interested in the meaning of Mercury retrograde? Curious about Eris, the new planet? Planets in Exaltation or Fall? Wondering if transits still work after someone is dead? (Yes – and we prove it with Vincent Van Gogh and Jim Morrison) It’s all in there. I think The Endless Sky will be a fun read for astrology fans – the kind of book you leave on your bedside table or in your bathroom, picking it up at random.

Meanwhile, Lila, the astrological cell phone app I’ve been helping to create has just launched in “beta” form – which means it’s a shortened, stripped down version, complete with some bugs. We passed a big hurdle just getting it out – and also getting it placed in the Apple store, which is not easy. Try heylila.com if you are interested. Eventually Lila will include lots of transits and progressions material, and I am madly writing all of that while I’m here in New Orleans too. 

I’ve always been all about creating easy stepping stones between simple Sun Sign astrology and the “real deal” as we practice it in the FCEA. Lila is part of that larger framework of intentions – it’s geared toward the general public, but the same choice-centered, evolutionary philosophy permeates it. The app will also grow more sophisticated over the next year – I’ve already written a lot of deeper material that’s not yet been unveiled.   

So that’s what I’ve been up to. 

When I get back home to California, I’ll be making more videos for our school. As the wheels turn in the Craftsperson program, we will soon need a demonstration video of a “real life” transits and progressions reading, sort of like the birthchart one I made for Ines . . . promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.

We cannot tell a lie – with these upcoming courses, there’s a lot of hard work ahead. For one thing, this series of teachings takes a long time. When we take into account the 200 and 300 level coursework, we are talking about a commitment of 70 weeks. The FCEA is a serious, professional program. We think of it as more or less equivalent to training as a mental health professional or an attorney. There is a lot to absorb and the process cannot really be rushed without too much depth getting lost in the shuffle. We know there are people out there who take a six week astrology course and get their business cards printed up and their website launched. That’s not the FCEA.

What you have learned so far is how to read a natal chart. As you surely know by now, that’s a complicated task! Mastering it is a real accomplishment. In the first half of the Craftsperson program, the new FCEA 200 courses, you’ll add to what you already know by bringing in the ever-changing astrological environment as reflected in transits, progressions, and solar arcs. You will also learn about synastry – the astrology of human relationships. If you thought one chart was complicated, try reading two at the same time! You need to understand them both, plus their interactions, plus a powerful third type of chart called the Composite. 

With “predictive” astrology – transits and so on . . . well, you already know what to do with a person’s natal Mercury. Now let’s try adding three more Mercuries to the mix: transiting Mercury, progressed Mercury, and solar arc Mercury. Each one has something important to say, and each one is in conversation with not only the natal planets, but the other moving ones as well. 

Balancing all of this at once is tricky – but don’t worry! We think you will do just fine. That’s because you are already standing on the solid foundation we laid down in the FCEA 100 courses. You already know astrology’s basic language – and just like when you are learning to speak a foreign language, once you have mastered an initial vocabulary of 100 words, the rest of the process is a whole lot easier – you are on the glide path to eloquence. That linguistic skill is what you have already attained with your hard work in FCEA 100. Getting started is always the hardest part, so congratulations! You’re halfway there.

You’ve probably detected the fingerprints of my Sun sign, Capricorn, in our very structured, step-by-step approach to astrological mastery. Those same orderly values have guided us in creating the architecture of the 200 and 300 level course work. As I’ve said, with our Craftsperson courses, we are about to complicate the astrological picture enormously – but we will do it slowly and strategically. And, no surprise: we will continue to emphasize preserving your intuitive function above everything else – you will need it as the density of the data increases. 

Birthchart analysis, transits and progressions readings, and synastries – in astrological practice, those techniques are the big three. Most professional counseling astrologers spend at least 90% of their time employing that triad of tools. Long ago, I could have given up teaching and writing, and just focused on offering those three skills in my private astrological practice. It would have been a good life, a meaningful one, and a prosperous one. That is what we mean when we say that as you complete our Craftsperson program, you can truly call yourself a professional-level astrologer. Naturally, your skills will deepen with experience – that’s true in any profession. But even a brain surgeon has to start somewhere. That surgeon might not want to tell his or her patient, “hey, this is the first time I’ve ever tried this” – but logic guarantees that, just like you, every brain surgeon sooner or later had to solo. You will too. And we will help you succeed.

Our Craftsperson program embraces not just our 200-level courses, but also the FCEA 300 courses. In those classes, we will add some more advanced techniques to what you know already – we’ll be working with the phases of the Moon, for example, along with lunar declination. We’ll also delve more deeply into all the planets, both in the natal chart and in motion. You will see many, many more real-life examples of planets in action. Your confidence will grow, as will your vocabulary and your arsenal of metaphors. We’ll get to know Chiron a lot more deeply. We’ll meet the newest major addition to the astrological syntax – Eris, orbiting way out in deep space far beyond Pluto. There is so much to know! But when you have internalized the Craftsperson material, you will have reached a significant plateau. The mountain continues upward, but once you arrive on that plateau, you can practice astrology effectively, helping other people with skill, confidence, and a significant degree of mastery.

Thanks for being part of our maiden voyage. Your feedback has been enormously helpful. Even more importantly, your faith and enthusiasm has sustained us as Jeff, Catie, and I have climbed our own mountain, often hanging onto cliffs and ledges by our fingernails, trying to stay one step ahead of you.

Once again, a deep and sincere congratulations to all of you on completing your Apprentice level work and entering our Craftsperson program.

For the student Zoom call on May 20th, we are going to try a different approach. The first 30 minutes will be the usual Q & A. During the second 30 minutes, we will put an actual chart up on the screen – and that second “30 minutes” might turn out to be 45 minutes, we’ll see how it goes.

We’ve usually been getting 12- 15 questions submitted for each program. I’ve generally managed to answer most of them. Next time, we will need to be pickier. I’ll choose between four and six of the most interesting ones and respond to them in that first half hour. Then we’ll put the chart up on the screen.

Which chart? And how to deal with the time limitations? Here’s how we plan to do it . . .

Everyone is free to submit a chart – and it’s fine if it is your own. Jeff is going to come up with some random method for choosing which chart we will use. All charts are interesting, so we have no agenda there at all. I’m sure that he will be fair and transparent about his selection methods. For purposes of confidentiality, we will obscure the identifying characteristics of the chart – but please do remember that these Zoom calls are archived for future student use. The analysis will be available to FCEA students “‘til the sun refuses to shine and the mountains tumble to the sea . . .” If potentially having your chart made public makes you uncomfortable, think twice about submitting it. Again, we’ll not show your name. Realistically, however, it’s not too hard to deduce birth information from planetary positions, and from there, someone might connect the dots.

Since we will have only 30 or 40 minutes to spend with the chart, we will need to keep the process very focused. If you choose to submit a chart, please also submit a question about some specific configuration within it – a planet or node or aspect, whatever . . . even a human question, such as “talk about career” or “why did I marry that creature from Outer Space.” I will use that question as our launching pad, and see where it leads us. Again, the clock will be our guide there. We’ll cast our interpretive net as widely as time allows.

We know that once you have learned the basic vocabulary, much help comes from seeing real-life interpretation in action. That’s what this little half-hour demo will be about. On a closely related note, I recently did a birthchart reading for a woman in Switzerland. She has agreed to let me use it as a teaching tool in our school. Usually with the private work I do, I just make audio recordings. This one is a video. It runs about two hours in length and it’s divided into four more “bite-sized” parts.  My aim was to create an example of how I actually bring all of our 100-level course material to a practical, integrated focus with a client who is not an astrologer. We’ll find a place for it very near the end of the Apprentice Level part of the FCEA program.

Meanwhile, let me chime in and wish a warm welcome to our newly-fledged FCEA tutors, Marie O’Neill, Joey Paynter, and Teal Rowe. They were all already fine astrologers, and they faced a steep learning curve mastering Moodle and the specific content of our program. Six began; three survived – and thanks for hanging in there!

When in doubt, always look for that north star: what is the true core of your mission? What would you be a fool to compromise? For me, once again the bottom line was bringing evolutionary astrology to a wider audience. I didn’t care about impressing other astrologers. I cared about reaching people who didn’t already know about it. On that flight, five miles high over God only knows what land or ocean, I began jotting down some ideas. First and foremost, I knew that before I died, I needed to “write down everything I had learned about astrology” – impossible, of course, but that dream is what led to my four Elements books, which I started writing in early 2018. I also began musing on how I might continue my teaching, or even expand it, in a way that didn’t involve me being on the road so much. An online school was the obvious answer, but I knew very little about how any of that worked. 

Angels came to the rescue, as they often do when you follow your heart. With my progressed Moon in the 12th house, I knew that I should run on faith and be open to a new vision. Covid-19 helped me let go of my beloved-but-exhausting apprenticeship programs, along with half of my private counseling practice. I used the time to dive into completing the Elements series – 1728 pages in three years, which is a lot of writing! Just two months into that lunar progression, I had my first meeting with Jeff and Catie, which led to the founding of the FCEA. Our program launched a few months after my Moon progressed into the 1st house – right on schedule, in other words.

We’re proud of the FCEA, but my age-old dilemma still remains: how to reach more people? How can we bring this kind of illuminated astrology to a wider audience?  It can be so helpful, and yet so few people are aware of what we can offer them. There’s also a lot of dumb astrology out there, further muddying the water.

Angels helped there too. In 2017, former National Football League great, Ricky Williams, became a student of mine, as well as a dear friend. His wonderful wife, Linnea Miron, soon followed. Together, they had an idea for a serious astrological cell phone app based on my work – and we’re talking about genuine  “date, time, and place” astrology, not just Sun signs. We met over the last weekend of January 2018 and Lila was born. Ricky and Linnea had connections and resources beyond what I could imagine, and skills far outside my domain. They soon assembled a fabulous technical team. Meanwhile, I started writing the actual content. Here’s a link to a 3-minute video about the Lila vision, in case you are interested:

Lila Vision (click here)

Ricky Williams is hugely famous in the sports world, with hundreds of thousands of followers on social media and a stadium in Texas named after him. We’ve also got the AstroTwins – Ophi and Tali Edut – working with us. Their astrostyle.com website gets 12 million visitors each month. Ophi and Tali are “popular astrologers” for sure, but they also know what they are doing astrologically. Blessedly, they think of themselves as evolutionary astrologers and they know my work well. I really liked them both right away. Interestingly, their Jupiters and my own are almost exactly conjunct. They now write that same column for ELLE that was once mine. Karma!

Between Ricky’s marketing power and that of the AstroTwins, we think Lila has the potential to get very big. Lila is definitely a glossy commercial project, but 99% of its actual content is my own. In preparing the material for the app, I’ve basically written yet another book in the past year or so. It’s a simpler kind of astrology than what we do in the FCEA, but it is still honest evolutionary astrology. 

The point of my saying all of this is that Lila offers the missing third ingredient in my grand strategy after the first two, which are the FCEA and my Elements books. That third ingredient is outreach. Between Lila itself and the support of the AstroTwins, we anticipate a lot more attention being drawn to my existing work. A likely side-effect is that the school will grow rather dramatically over the next two or three years. 

I want to thank all of you for being part of this process, for helping us smooth out the technical wrinkles in Moodle, and in getting our teachers, tutors, and material up to speed before we start growing. You are the first wave. Among you, I am sure, are some future teachers in the FCEA. I feel as if we are making history, and I appreciate your faith in us and the support you have offered.

One more quick point. Beyond writing the Lila material, I’ve been busily creating videos and written content for the more advanced FCEA courses. We’re excited about what’s in store next for you in the program. Once all the school material is created and Lila is launched, my own life will change a lot. For one thing, I will have a lot more free time than I do now – and if my personal history can be trusted, that time will quickly fill up with other projects, one of which will be more active, higher-level teaching in our school. I look forward to seeing more of all of you when the pages of that chapter start turning.