On Sacred Counsel

Master’s Musings, August 2022

On Sacred Counsel: The Blurry Zone Where Astrology Edges Toward Psychotherapy

Many years ago, I faced an ethical dilemma in my private practice. I would sometimes do an astrological reading and a day or two later I would get a phone call from the client. “I loved the reading, but it shook me up. Is there any way that we might schedule a follow-up session just to talk about everything?”

I know that even if we are the soul of gentleness and counseling skill, astrological information can go off like an emotional bomb in a person’s life. Truth is like that – no wonder that society always treats it as a “controlled substance.” Obviously, I needed to be responsive to that client – no way that I could just leave someone hanging. So the client would return and we would sit there in my office. The chart would be in front of us, but often it would be ignored or only referenced in vague ways. We’d be speaking plain English, working through whatever loose ends the reading had left hanging for that client personally.

And it dawned on me what I was doing: I was practicing psychology without a license. Or perhaps more importantly, I was practicing psychology without any training.

How could that possibly be ethical? But how could it possibly be ethical to leave a client shaken and unresolved, and me saying “sorry, I don’t have a license to speak with you?” Think about it: perhaps my words in the reading had raised questions about a person’s marriage, or his profession, or her religious faith. People deserved some follow-up – but perhaps they deserved it from someone other than myself?

That thought leads us quickly into a brief digression. That “someone other than myself” might obviously be a qualified mental health professional of some sort. As one’s astrological practice matures, it’s natural that we begin to establish a list of people to whom we might refer any clients who are interested in ongoing psychotherapy. The two fields are complementary. I’m a fan of psychotherapy and I’ve been through it myself. I’ve learned not to be overly impressed by academic credentials though – I’ve met psychotherapists who were saints and I’ve met some who were educated fools. Putting a client’s soul in the hands of the wrong person smacks of heavy karma.

Without much effort, a happy solution soon presented itself: as my practice developed, psychotherapists began to appear as clients. That gave me a chance to get to know them – and to know who among them to trust and who not to. I built social relationships with them, became good friends with a few. An added bonus was the fact that their presence in my office indicated an openness to astrology – and thus neatly avoided the blunder of me sending clients who were confused by their readings into the arms of someone who viewed them as deluded for believing in astrology in the first place.

Referrals are good! They help significantly in solving the problem that I am writing about here. But there’s an obvious issue. It starts with the fact that, via conversation, a psychotherapist takes weeks to get to know a client. We astrologers start with the X-ray – the chart itself. It’s only a small exaggeration to say that we know the client pretty well “before she walks through the door.”

Think of that client who was left feeling unresolved as a result of my work. If she comes to sit with me again, we are already well into that conversation, so we start without preamble. We are already on page 127 of the novel. We are ready to take it further without any preliminary fuss. Sometimes all it takes is a half-hour chat to create liberating understanding and resolution. Put yourself in the client’s place, and compare that quick semi-astrological follow-up with the prospect of facing weeks of psychotherapy at often calamitous expense just to reach the starting line.

There’s more – if astrology created the problem, perhaps it’s astrology that is going to solve it. I don’t mean for that line to sound too glib, but the basic idea is that the symbols always hold the answer – we just need to do a better job, or a different job, of translating them for the client. It wouldn’t be fair to expect a psychotherapist to be able to succeed at that anymore than we would expect an astrologer to understand the nuances of the famous (or infamous) DSM – The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, with its often hairsplitting nuances distinguishing this mental affliction from that one. We are talking about two different languages and two mostly very different forms of expertise.

Personally, I felt better offering the follow-up, so that’s what I did. And some of those clients came back for further “talking cure” sessions. Soon enough, I was doing a kind of ongoing counseling work of a sort that was probably indistinguishable from psychotherapy in any meaningful way – other than the fact that, technically, there wasn’t actually a psychotherapist in the room, that is. By the time I left North Carolina, about one-third of my practice actually took that form. I loved the depth and humanness of it. In the process, I learned a lot, much of which fed back into my astrological understanding. People expressed gratitude. I saved a marriage or two, and I talked more than one person “off the ledge” – and no one jumped off it as a result of my ministrations either, I am happy to say.

In other words, welcome back to Square One – the question remains, which is the more ethical path, to offer plain-English follow-up to the client who asks for it, or to withhold it, and perhaps send them onward into the arms of the conventional mental health system?

I read a lot of straight psychology during that period, trying to educate myself. Synchronistically, an opportunity arose for me to apprentice myself to a licensed psychotherapist. I’m sure we skirted many laws as I sat with her and a few of her clients, but I certainly learned a lot just by listening. Perhaps most importantly, I knew my limits – if someone’s problems seemed beyond my scope, verging into psychotic or borderline territory, I still had those referrals. I knew who to call and who to recommend. For example, I knew nothing about psychiatric medications – except an abiding belief that it is wrong to give them out like candy to anyone who reports the blues.

I no longer do much of that kind of one-on-one counseling work. The reason is simple: in 2008, I moved to the desert, miles away from any population centers, and so the logistics of any ongoing counseling became impossible. Astrology began to call me more loudly too and in a different way. My “legacy work” began. I realized that I needed to write several more books and, of course, to help establish the Forrest Center for Evolutionary Astrology, which, I pray, will keep this holy flame burning after my own physical flame has burned out.

For those of you actively enrolled in our classes, down the road we will come to FCEA 401 – Sacred Counsel. That’s where we will learn to thread the labyrinth that connects evolutionary astrology to the array of human counseling skills that allow us to make a difference in the lives of people who entrust their souls to us, whether it’s for two hours or for a longer time.

We’ll learn about how psychology and astrology can complement each other – and how they also present some seemingly irreconcilable differences. It’s one of my favorite topics, and I think it has a whole lot to do with the future of all the helping professions. That material will essentially be the culmination of our Master Level program, as it should be.

Steven Forrest
August 2022

Bad Moments with Clients

Master’s Musings, July 2022

As you’ve undoubtedly seen, the techniques of evolutionary astrology are robust. They work reliably well. They produce accurate insights. Trust them and they won’t fail you. But for a variety of different reasons, it’s unlikely that 100% of your clients will be satisfied. Some of that might be your own fault – none of us can rule out making mistakes. But certainly some of it will stem from issues that the clients themselves bring to the table. Inevitably you are going to encounter some bad moments, so it’s good to be prepared emotionally to weather them. Naturally they are miserable experiences. In becoming a professional astrologer, that’s just something you have to accept. It won’t happen often, but sooner or later, it will almost certainly happen.

Before I dive into all of that, here’s a little perspective: I’ve lost track of how many thousands upon thousands of readings I have done over the years. In all that time, I can honestly say that 99% of the feedback I’ve gotten has been positive and gratifying. That hard 1% can really sting though, and that’s my subject in this newsletter.

One more point of perspective before we look the devil in the eye: practice makes perfect. You’ll get better at your craft as time goes by.

That’s at least one way that being an astrologer beats being a professional athlete or a teenage idol – age and experience are nothing but good news. That means that there’s a pretty good chance that any negative scenarios are more likely to happen early in your astrological career – sadly, we might add the fact that that’s when you least need them because you are still trying to build confidence in yourself.

Stick with it no matter what happens – that’s really the bottom line.

Once, probably around 1990, I did a recorded reading for a woman in New York City. I knew very little about her and I had never met her. A week later I got a scathing phone message from her telling me that I “should be ashamed of myself.” She sounded crazy with rage. She never mentioned the precise nature of my transgression, so I have no idea what her beef with me was. I’d done the work using the same tried and true techniques that had produced helpful results with crowds of other people. I thought of calling her back. I never did. That was a judgment call, and I think it was the right one. My guts told me we’d just upset each other even more. Maybe I had already done enough harm. Maybe she had too.

I guess that was the worst experience I’ve ever had with a client. Nothing like that has ever happened before or since.

Clients of mine once bought a reading for the local Chief of Police. They were friendly with him and thought he might like a session with me. He was quiet during the consultation, but we seemed to be getting along just fine. Later, through those clients, I learned that “he had no idea what I had been talking about.” That wasn’t actually a “bad moment” in terms of our interaction, which was pleasant enough, but it made me sad when I finally heard about it.

Probably that kind of “disconnect” has happened more than once without me knowing it. I just wish the man had mentioned something – asked for clarification or said there was something he didn’t understand. If I had known, I might have been able to build a better word-bridge to him. But I didn’t know – my (mis)impression was that he was following me just fine.

The take-away: an astrological counseling session is a joint act of creativity. Both you and your client have to participate. It’s not your fault if clients don’t hold up their end of the deal. You cannot know what they do not tell you. All you can do is do your best.

Years ago, in my office in North Carolina, a woman came to sit with me for a birthchart analysis. She was from a very “blue blood” Southern family, held her nose high, and was probably the most argumentative person I’ve ever met in my life. I couldn’t say anything right. All her sentences – most of which were interruptions – started with the word “No.” I endured the misery for maybe half an hour. Finally I told her that the process was obviously not working between us – that we were “on different wavelengths.” I invited her to leave and of course I mentioned that there would be no charge. It wasn’t like I was angrily “throwing her out of my office.” I was polite – just call me “Mister I’m OK, you’re OK.”

The result was a transformation. She became courteous and receptive. She urged me to continue. By the time our session was over, everything was fine between us. We hugged.

Two take-aways from that story.

To this day, I have no idea what was going on with that woman. Often that’s the case. People bring their invisible histories into the counseling room. Maybe they have some psychological need to put you in a no-win situation. That says more about them than it does about you or your level of skill.

You’re not a dancing monkey doing astrology tricks. If a relationship with a client isn’t feeling comfortable to you, you have as much right to terminate it as does the client. Maybe you’ll both be better off.

Another woman came to me. There were a lot of unresolved family dynamics in her chart. Unlike the Police Chief, she was wonderfully forthcoming about everything – her father had shamed her and tyrannized her. In following up on what she had told me, I casually mentioned that her father “thought that she was no good.” She immediately objected and said, “No! My father thought that I wasn’t good enough.” The distinction seemed like a nuance to me, but it was important to her. Naturally from that moment on, I used her wording – and I guarantee that had I stubbornly persisted in my original phrasing, my story with that client would have been another tale of a “bad moment.”

Words matter, but they often have different meanings to different people. Listen to your client and let their vocabulary guide you.

I also want to contrast this “not good enough” story with my session with the Chief of Police – the former is an example of a client actually holding up her end of the bargain, not leaving me in the dark playing guessing games.

You never know where the minefields are. I spoke with a client in her late twenties about her 11th house Neptune, emphasizing an ever-increasing need for some kind of inner practice and the benefits to her of some manner of sangha. As always, I mentioned that if we don’t get something right, we’ll surely get it wrong. I told her that her Neptune, if she didn’t take care of it, could trigger a pattern of escapism later in life, or perhaps even something “spacey” – something that might resemble dementia.

She immediately burst into tears. Turns out her father had just been diagnosed with early-onset dementia and she was terrified it might happen to her. Boom! There’s me, stepping on a psychological landmine. They are always there, but you never know exactly where. The client and I worked through it, and all in all, I think it was a good experience for her – but you’ve got to be ready for anything. People don’t have a list of their emotional triggers tattooed to their foreheads. As astrologers, we are always feeling our way through the darkness. We have to accept that. Your ace in the hole is that everything in astrology has a higher purpose and can be gotten right. With that client whose dad had dementia, I underscored that I didn’t “see dementia in her chart” – it was not that simple. What I saw was that dementia was one possibility if she didn’t aim that Neptune toward the higher ground. And she could! So I reinforced the higher meaning of the configuration, and her path to realizing it.

The take-away: empowerment in the face of truth – that’s our Holy Grail. We never shy away from the truth, but we never forget that everything has a purpose and that no one has a chart that they are inherently doomed to get wrong.

A very Piscean/Neptunian gentleman came to me. I immediately began speaking of spirituality, psychic phenomena, and so on. He cut me off, professing atheism and his belief that death was strictly “lights out.” That practically stopped me in my tracks. Then, to my dismay, I noticed an active 5th house in his chart – and I immediately wondered if he was wasting all that Neptunian energy on sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll. In a last ditch effort to save the day, I brought up creativity. And he lit up. So did I – and I realized that, for him, creativity was his spiritual path. Neptune basically boils down to some kind of “trance work” in which we establish conscious contact with the larger self. Mystics do that, but so do artists – where does their inspiration come from? This Piscean fellow is the one who taught me that principle – he did, or maybe angels whispered it in my ear to save me from another “bad moment with a client.”

The take-away: don’t lock yourself in a cage of verbal concepts. Try to find the language that works for your client. Creativity can be a path of inner work. So can dream work. In the same vein, love doesn’t have to be sexual or romantic – never forget friendship when you are speaking to a client in the Venus tribe. Capricorn’s “Great Work” does not always need to take the form of a career.

Maybe at some point in the past you came to a painful realization about your family. Maybe you had a past-life recollection that left you shaking. These are common enough psychological experiences. Why do they happen when they do? Astrologically, we know that there will likely be some Plutonian correlation for them – but what does that mean in plain English? Here’s the answer: that you were ready. It was time. You were strong enough. There’s a corollary – a year before, you were not ready. Before today, your psyche was committed to defending you against that information, and that was for your own good. When a client reacts defensively or seems to grow numb or unreactive, you may very well have hit upon something he or she is just not ready to deal with.

The take-away: when you see those “boundaried” verbal or body-language signals, don’t press the point. Just move on. Always remember what Uncle Hippocrates suggested: first do no harm.

Once I was invited to speak over a weekend to the Fellows in Andrew Weil’s Integrative Medicine program at the University of Arizona, Tucson. There were maybe fifteen people in the group, all of them already MDs, all wide-open spiritually and every one of them brilliant. I was doing little mini-readings for them, going around the table, trying to give them each a quick personal taste of what evolutionary astrology could do. There were plenty of “oohs and ahhs” and I heard “that’s amazing” a few times – except for one poor woman, who kept shaking her head and saying. “No, I’m sorry, that’s not really me at all.” She was wonderful – I could tell it was hurting her not to be more agreeable, but she wasn’t going to lie to us: what I was saying about her simply was not meaningful to her. Obviously it was awkward for me – a classic “bad client moment,” for sure. All I could do was apologize and move on to the next person, and the next, and the next. All of those readings went well. At the end of Day One, I had batted 14 for 15 – not too shabby.

The next morning as we gathered again, the woman piped up right away. Her words were among the sweetest ones I’ve ever heard. She said, “I’m so sorry about this, but I just spoke with my mother last night. It turns out that she gave me the wrong time of birth. My chart was wrong.”Sitting with a group of scientists, this was the best conceivable news. What they all saw – and what is the truth of the matter – was that if you give me good data, evolutionary astrology triumphs. But if you give me bad data, it fails. Garbage in, garbage out. Quod erat demonstrandum. From a scientific perspective, this one failure was a gift from the gods.

The take-away: if you are having a bad moment with a client, always consider the possibility that you have been given erroneous birth data.

When I was seventeen and getting interested in astrology, I asked my mother what time I had been born. She told me “6:15 in the morning.” I was actually born at 3:22 AM – but I weighed six pounds fifteen ounces. If I had known more about our craft back then, I would have felt that astrology was bogus – that it was failing me utterly. Me? Sagittarius rising and a massive first house? Forget about it. Again I would have given up on it. Angels used my own ignorance to protect me.

Never forget: inaccurate birth information is our Achilles’ Heel. It’ll give you a “bad moment” every time. And that will not be because you are a bad astrologer. This is sort of a delicate point, but it is an important one. If a session is not going well, there are many possible reasons for that. One of them is that you were given the wrong time of birth. But of course another is that you just aren’t doing a very good job. Then there is the possibility of defensive issues in the client – basically all the things we’ve been exploring in this newsletter.

The take-away: when you are having a bad moment with a client, don’t be too quick to blame yourself for it. There may be something else going on. Stay neutral and run through the check list. And above all, trust the symbols.

Steven Forrest
July 2022

Astrology and the Spiritual Path

Master’s Musings ~ June 2022

How can astrology really be part of a spiritual path?

The most familiar metaphor for spirituality is “transcending one’s ego,” yet astrology often seems to be reinforcing our identifications with our egos rather than helping us release ourselves from their grips. So much of what we wind up talking about in practicing our craft revolves around our personalities, our needs, and our desires – and yet the most fundamental thrust of mystical spirituality lies in somehow realizing that we are far bigger than those ego-appetites.

In our student Q&A call on May 18, this exact question came up. One part of my response included a reference to a rejection letter I got from a publisher back in the late 1970s. I’d written a book based on a statistical study of astrology – (or, more honestly, it was a book in which I pirated data from a more academic sociological study that was employing me at the time.) The project was officially called the Urban Policy Study and it was funded by the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health. In pursuit of the usual social science goals, we had gathered people’s birth dates among other things. That meant that I was able to mathematically link various personality variables with people’s Sun Signs. It worked pretty well too! I could prove statistically, for one example, that Cancers were the shyest group, that Scorpios were the most depressed, and so on. None of it was very inspiring, but it was valid science. I was also in my twenties and still a little wet behind the ears, so I thought I’d quickly become a famous astrological zillionaire. One rejection letter I received included the fateful words, “The thrust of modern astrological publishing is egocentric, and we expect it will remain that way.”

Ouch – but bull’s eye. My book was never published. That was heartbreaking at the time, but I now see it as an unmitigated blessing. That book would have pigeon-holed me as “a statistical astrologer,” and that was not where my path lay. But that one editor who rejected me was correct – much of the body of astrological literature, both then and now, underscores the ego. It enshrines our “personality traits” and encourages us to focus on human differences as if they were set in cement.

How can we reconcile any of that with any notion of “transcending the ego?” It’s a serious issue and one with which any kind of astrology purporting to be “spiritual” needs to reckon.

We had a dozen really excellent questions in that last student Q&A call, so I was under a lot of time pressure to keep things moving. I felt like I had five minutes to respond to an issue that could occupy sages on Asian mountaintops for months. I hope that what I said in the call was clear and helpful. The subject feels important enough for me to dive back into it here in the context of this newsletter, and perhaps to go a little deeper.

First, a big belated Yes indeed to that book editor – most of what is published under the banner of astrology is purely egocentric. That’s not quite the bitter indictment that it sounds like though! For example, psychotherapy is mostly centered on the ego too – although in this case labeling it “the conscious mind” makes the idea go down a little more easily. And psychotherapy can be very good for people. So can psychological astrology, and for similar reasons. The ego is not the enemy, in other words. We need our egos or we would just stare into space, probably drooling – and the more we fine-tune our egos, freeing them from their various snakes and lizards, the better off we are, both spiritually and practically. We could say, echoing most of the saints of history, that the spiritual path “lies beyond the ego.” Fair enough – but I would rather say that the spiritual path routes through the ego, and that a healthy ego is an essential part of it.

If you are driving to that sacred mountain top, you’re going to need a car in order to get there. That’s the ego. The trick is to keep your attention on the mountain top rather than on how cool you look in the vehicle you are driving.

Astrology is a big tent. There are many branches in it. We can speak of Hellenistic astrology, Cosmobiology, Jyotish, modern psychological astrology, and so forth. We can make another division, realizing that in terms of spiritual levels, humanity runs from kindergarten through the 12th grade. There are forms of astrology – and astrologers – to address the perceived needs of the most primitive souls, along with forms that speak to the most evolved ones among us, and everything in between. Our field is vast and that’s probably a good thing.

Of all the forms that astrology takes, it is we evolutionary astrologers who are probably the most unabashedly “spiritual” in our orientation. Put simply, we see our existential and psychological lives – the ego’s life, in other words – as reflections of far deeper journeys unfolding against a background of many lifetimes. We use that metaphysical language – and, generally, the clients we attract are people who are looking for that kind of broad perspective too. How can we give them what they need? How can we do our best work? How can we really help them? After all, we are employing the same basic tools that the silliest Internet pop astrologer is using – signs, planets, houses. Astrology is indeed about tuning up the old ego, and like that book editor, we can “expect it will remain that way.” Ego is the focus, and yet we are aiming for something beyond it. It’s a pickle, for sure.

Here’s how I reconcile what we do in the FCEA with the deepest realities of our spiritual lives. It starts off with a statement that will sound pretty harsh: your birthchart represents your karmic predicament. That means that where you’ve got planets, you’ve got problems. (We've all got planets and we’ve all got problems, end of story). Well, not exactly – because all of those planets also represent solutions.

Do you talk too much? That’s a Mercury problem. What’s the cure? Learn to listen better. That’s a higher response to Mercury. Everything in the chart is like that. Everything has a double meaning. Everything astrological is a problem and everything astrological is the solution to the problem. What evolutionary astrology does is to chart the path between the low, self-defeating response and the higher ground. Thus we use the ego – and clarify, purify, and strengthen it – in order that it stops hindering us and starts serving the evolutionary needs of the soul.

In the East, the great enemy of the soul’s growth is generally referred to as attachment. In the Western Judeo-Christian tradition, the First Commandment is “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” Strip it of the Bronze Age language, and that commandment is about attachment too. It means don’t let anything become more important to you than surrendering to your own divinity. Keep your spirituality front and center – and don’t let any attachments get in the way.
But what are we attached to? Hint: it’s not always just money, power, and looking hot. What we are attached to are the less conscious responses to each configuration in our charts. We’re not that way out of some innate perversity either – once again, the chart simply holds a mirror before your karmic predicament. It reveals your attachments. There’s nothing to be ashamed of except complacency.

Say you have Mercury in Leo in the 3rd house. Again, let’s say you talk too much, just like that silly Internet astrologer might tell you that you do. What’s actually driving that behavior? A need for attention. What drives the need for attention? An underlying insecurity. There’s the attachment. You were born with it. Maybe through nodal analysis, we can even figure out why you were born with it. But either way, there it is. All your friends can see it. Maybe you can see it too – and if you can’t, maybe an evolutionary astrologer can help you become aware of it.

Where conventional astrology can actually become an obstacle to spiritual growth is when it implies that you “will always talk too much” because that’s the meaning of that chart configuration. You were born with it, so you are stuck with it. But ask the evolutionary astrologer about the cure. Here’s what you will hear . . .
Start with Leo – we suggest that you aim to cultivate the generosity of the good king or the good queen. That aspiration motivates you to listen to other people because it would be cheap of you not to grant them that attention – hey, you are the king, after all! You can afford it.
Then you take the risk of expressing yourself creatively, which means being vulnerable and painstakingly real in what you say.
That sense of risk generates compassion in you toward others who might be stepping out on the stage in the same risky way. That compassion makes you a better listener.

In all that I just wrote, note the basic fingerprint that distinguishes evolutionary astrology from all the other forms. We just described that 3rd house Leo Mercury as a path rather than as a “trait.” In one simple statement, we define what makes evolutionary astrology different from all the other forms.

We underscored the fluidity of what we call the personality rather than reinforcing the illusion that it is fixed and stable.
We turned an attachment into something entirely different – a yoga, or a spiritual discipline, what Buddhists would call a “skillful means.”

If anyone ever accuses you of reinforcing people’s egos with your work, this is where we make our stand. Your chart represents a path, not a personality profile. It’s a path that confronts you with your attachments and offers you a cure for them. And curing them is the essence of everyone’s spiritual journey.

In a nutshell, evolutionary astrology helps you know where to put your foot next on the spiritual path. And if you always have a good answer for that one, you’ll always be doing just fine, on track eventually for Enlightenment. It may be miles away, but at least you are heading in the right direction.

And the alternative to the spiritual path? Actually, there isn’t one.

Steven Forrest
June 2022

Forty Years Ago...

Master’s Musings, May 2022

Not long from now, some of you will be advancing to FCEA-302. There, in Module 7, we explore the mysterious Venus Pentangle – how every 584 days, a retrograde Venus lines up with the Sun, and how if you plot the sign positions of five of those consecutive “inferior conjunctions,” you’ll see an almost perfect pentangle. It’s one of those tears-in-your-eyes miracles of astrology. I also write about it in Chapter 21 of The Book of Air too, in case you want a preview.

That cycle of five inferior Sun-Venus conjunctions takes almost eight years to complete – actually just two days plus eight hours short of eight years. Repeat it five times, and you’ve got forty years – plus the cycle returns to its starting point.

Bottom line: transiting Venus, even though it’s one of our fast-moving “trigger” planets, also presents us with an eight-year cycle and a forty-year cycle. Five pentangles repeated five times – five times eight years – and we hit reboot and the cycle starts all over again. Anyone can see it’s amazing, but what might it signify?

Of all the courses we’ve created, in many ways that Venus module in FCEA-302 lies closest to my heart. Here’s why. I really don’t know what it means. I have some ideas. They work meaningfully for me personally. In that Venus Pentangle module you’ll be getting to, I present my thoughts and my own hypotheses – but I invite you to explore this strangely beautiful, totally mysterious cycle yourselves. I’m sure that as we put our heads together, I will learn from you. By the time any one of you reaches the 300 courses, you’re getting pretty experienced as an astrologer. I think of you more as a colleague than as a student.

I do find it intriguing that even though these Venus cycles have been known for a long time, I’ve never read anything about them that really spoke to my heart. There are no doubt major discoveries and insights that remain hidden.

Welcome to May 2022. Forty years ago – one complete “five times five” cycle of Venus – I was busy writing The Inner Sky. Bantam Books had given me the contract and half of my $10,000 advance in August 1981. That was on the strength of a single sample chapter and some fast talking. A few months later, I was earnestly engaged in tapping out the complete text on a manual typewriter. A ream of paper was slowly being transformed into a book manuscript. That was forty years ago – so whatever Venusian seeds were planted then are getting a reboot now. As you get to FCEA302, you’ll see what I mean – that you can “connect the dots” in your life in a very meaningful way by counting out eight-year and forty-year intervals. The eight-year ones are easier to wrap your head around, of course – but forty years completes some kind of mega-cycle.

Here’s the proof of the pudding. We can easily trace the roots of the Forrest Center for Evolutionary Astrology to a 33 year old guy banging away on a manual typewriter in North Carolina in 1982. The publication of The Inner Sky set wheels turning in my life in big ways, both personally and publicly. It doesn’t strain the imagination very much to see a kind of seed-to-flower relationship between me writing my first book and the current emergence of the school. Astrology works in a mechanical way like that, but it also works in deeper ways. So let’s be careful here . . .

There is a natural tendency when we think of cycles to think of repeating patterns – of “history repeating itself.” That’s ultimately a pretty depressing way of viewing life. It’s as if history teaches us nothing – which actually often appears to be the case at a world-history level. Let’s just hope it’s not always the case at a personal level. Even for individuals, the metaphor of the endlessly circling merry-go-round can be sadly accurate sometimes, but only if people miss the point of having experience in the first place. Experience should teach us something. We should be wiser – and thus different – for it. If we get a second look at the same thing, maybe we can react in an unprecedented and creative way. Maybe we’ve learned something from our mistakes. Maybe we can do better.

Let’s replace the cyclical metaphor of the merry-go-round with a helix – like an ascending corkscrew. Hopefully, we are not just going ‘round and ‘round – hopefully, we are also going higher and higher.

Here are some examples of exactly that kind of evolution as my own helix completes a 40 year Venus cycle. Watch a pile of typing paper forty years ago morph into an international online school today.

Example #1

In The Inner Sky, you read that the Ascendant is the “mask we wear.” That’s not a bad way of expressing it, but the trouble is that a mask hides a face and that’s not exactly what the Ascendant does. So you’ll read “mask” in those pages, but in later books, in the videos I’ve made for the school, and in our Q&A sessions, you’ll more often hear me speak of the Ascendant as the “stained glass through which the light of the soul is shining.” That’s a more accurate metaphor – and I fervently wish that I had thought of it forty years ago when I was writing that book!

Live and learn – and isn’t that the point? Please know that as a student in the FCEA, as you read my books, you’re exposed to a shifting landscape. You have my thinking today, plus my thinking forty years ago, plus all the steps in between. Naturally, you will find some inconsistencies. Hallelujah! If there were none, it would mean that I had learned nothing in four decades.

Example #2

In the Pluto section of The Inner Sky, you’ll read a lot about destiny and finding meaning in your life. I still believe all of that, but I think I’ve probably learned more about Pluto over the past forty years than I have about any other planet. Back then, I still had not fully grasped the nature of the intense inner work Pluto requires – facing our innate woundedness and all of that. I don’t need to repeat it here because you’re hearing plenty about it in courses you are taking. The point is that I didn’t know it when I was writing The Inner Sky, so it’s not there in those pages. I regret that omission. I know it now, but it’s too late to put it in a book that’s already written. Like you, I am a work in progress.

Example #3

In The Inner Sky, I called Pisces “the Face Dancer.” That’s an image taken from the then-popular book, Dune, by Frank Herbert. “Face Dancers” were a race of people who could take on anyone else’s appearance – and that nicely encapsulated one dimension of the sign Pisces. The metaphor worked like crazy for a few years. But then Dune sort of faded from public attention and soon I was spending a lot of time answering emails about what I meant by “Face Dancer.”

Using that culturally-transitory term was a rookie mistake on my part. I’ve learned not to do that in my writing anymore. That’s why in my subsequent books and articles, you won’t see words like “chicks and dudes” or the more current “do you feel me” – or “dope” or LOL, OMG, or TTYL. That kind of language may be the cat’s pajamas today and old hat tomorrow – and that sentence sure was fun to write.

Of course, Dune is now back in the form of the Denis Villeneuve film, so maybe my use of Face Dancer will get a lucky reprieve for a few years. Whatever its fate, the term is hard-wired into those unforgiving pages and I have to live with the consequences.

Example #4

In The Inner Sky, I called Sagittarius “the Gypsy.” I’ve occasionally gotten some grief for that, as if I’d somehow insulted Roma people by using the term. Given the folkloric implications of the word “gypsy,” especially here in the USA, it works like crazy for conveying at least one dimension of the spirit of Sagittarius. To me, using the word “gypsy” in this context doesn’t seem any more insulting than . . . well, calling someone a Sagittarian. But people are sensitized now, and I frequently find myself trying to use more neutral terms, such as “voyager” or “traveler.”

No writer wants to write “plain Vanilla” language, but we all have to pick our battles.

Despite growing up in the times I did, I think I’ve been relatively clean when it comes to racism, sexism, and homophobia. I don’t think there are instances of any of those toxins in the pages of The Inner Sky or any of my other books. I thank divine guidance for that. How would you like to have everything you said forty years ago a matter of public record? The printed page, once printed, does not change or update itself. It is unforgiving.

I used the term “evolutionary astrology” several times in The Inner Sky. My editor at Bantam wanted me to “soft-pedal the spiritual stuff,” but I was already working with the lunar nodes and reincarnation in those days. I snuck a bit of that into the material about John Lennon. He was “the warrior who lost the war,” with his Aries south node in the 12th house. I’m glad it’s there, but I wish there were more of it.

Naturally, back in my salad days, I was working with transits, progressions, and solar arcs. The Inner Sky just wasn’t about them. My thinking about these moving points was already pretty well-established, but I didn’t go to print with it until The Changing Sky in 1986. As you read that book, you’ll also see that I was finally beginning to get clearer about the function of Pluto. I still feel good about what’s in those pages, but there is one big feature of The Changing Sky that has come back to haunt me right here today in the FCEA. That’s The Four Nets. I probably get more questions and requests for clarification about that system than about any other single topic in the entire curriculum of the school.

As you know, the Four Nets were an attempt to establish a kind of formal hierarchy of importance among all the possible transits, progressions, and solar arcs. Without some kind of system, they quickly become overwhelmingly chaotic. In the FCEA, we always emphasize a “first things first” approach – but for people learning the system, knowing how to weigh transiting Saturn conjunct the Sun versus progressed Mars squaring the Ascendant isn’t intuitively obvious. Hence: the Four Nets – they are a rote and mechanical way of at least defining four basic “bins” based on the relative importance of various configurations Those bins come packaged with a big “thou shalt not:” do not worry about the second bin until you’ve gotten the stuff in the first bin figured out.

All in all, I think the Four Nets work pretty well. I think they have proven helpful. But when I was first formulating them back in 1984 and 1985, I still had a lot to learn. Back then, I didn’t fully grasp the importance of the progressed lunar cycle, for example – but a progressed New Moon can stand your life on its head. It’s Net One material, for sure! I didn’t grasp the significance of declination either.

Over the years, The Changing Sky came out in several editions and the Nets were always getting tweaked. Once the book was in its final form by about 1998, I continued to learn. Various handouts of The Four Nets were created over the twenty years or so of my Apprenticeship Program, all of them slightly different.

On top of all of that, there is the practical problem of trying to get the Four Nets to fit on one page. If you set out to make a simple, clear guideline, then you start over-complicating it, you’ve defeated your own purpose. That’s tough because there are so many nuances to deal with. For example, we read Net One, #3 – “Any progressed planet or Angle (except the Moon) conjunct, square, or opposed to the natal Ascendant, Midheaven, Sun, or Moon.”

That’s already a mouthful! But by “any progressed planet,” I actually meant any planet that we in fact use in progressions – so no progressed Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto. That point is clear enough in the text of The Changing Sky, so I didn’t clutter the Four Nets with it. Maybe I should have – we’ve had a lot of questions about it.

The real problem is that The Four Nets are only a guideline, nothing more. They’re kind of like training wheels on your bicycle. They’ll keep you in balance until you learn to ride. And “learning to ride” with transits, progressions, and arcs really depends on gauging the individual power of each planet – with Gemini rising, those Mercury progressions pack more punch than if you have Taurus rising, for example. Lunar people react more strongly to the Moon than do Mercurial people.

We could program a computer with the latest version of the Four Nets and it would mechanically set up a reasonably effective interpretive strategy for you. The point is that with two or three years of experience in our school, you’ll do a better job than that computer ever could. The Four Nets are your launching pad, that’s all – and if they feel a little shaky under your feet sometimes, I think that uncertainty is good mindfulness medicine for you.

I do apologize for any confusion that’s been created by the discrepancies among various versions of the Four Nets! Really, it was inevitable though – and inevitable for a good reason. Forty years has taught me a lot of astrology! It’ll teach you a lot of astrology too. And if you are wise today, think how wise you will be after Venus has spun its mysterious pentangle in your life five more times. Astrology is as infinite as life.

Thanks for sharing the journey with me.

Steven Forrest
May 2022

Questions & Answers

Master’s Musings, April 2022

Every month, we do a Zoom session with all the students in the FCEA in which I try to answer a series of questions that have been submitted in advance. Four times a year we do the same thing with the wider FCEA community – that’s the “Members’ Call.” Guided by a specific question, I also analyze a single submitted chart in each one of these sessions. I look forward to these calls – they’re always a lot of fun. They last an hour and a half, even two hours sometimes, and they fly by. In this newsletter, I want to clarify a few points about the Zoom calls I do in hopes of making them even better.

What we’re looking for are questions where the answer will be most helpful, meaningful, and relevant to everyone watching. For example, I’m much more likely to go into depth if someone asks about Venus-Uranus aspects than I am with questions that begin with “In my chart . . .”

Sometimes we get half a dozen questions and 25 chart submissions. All the questions get answered, but only one of the charts is ever chosen (and by the way, we use a random number generator to make the choice so it’s totally fair.) The point there is pretty obvious – your odds of getting a general question answered are excellent, but the deck is stacked against you in terms of getting your chart chosen.

We’ve had people pretty obviously submit their own chart “as a question” by writing it all out. “Say someone happens to have the Sun in 27 degrees of Pisces square Jupiter in 26 degrees of Gemini, and Jupiter is quincunx the Midheaven at 25 degrees of Capricorn” . . . and so on. Don’t do that!

We aim for a 90-minute Zoom call, although we often go a bit over. The general shape of it is 45 minutes of Q&A and 45 minutes for a specific chart analysis. Naturally it doesn’t always work out quite that neatly – but we do have to cap the amount of time spent on the questions. If we get a lot of them, I have to sort through them and choose the ones that seem most generally helpful to everyone.

Depending on the complexity of the submitted chart and the number of questions we receive, sometimes we hit two hours and it’s just time to stop. Other times, we have some minutes left. We’ve experimented with breakout rooms for some socializing and also with continuing the Q&A in a more spontaneous way – with follow-up questions and comments. We’re open to any feedback you might have about which path you find most attractive. Please contact us to let us know your thoughts.

The FCEA is an international school, with students in Asia and Europe as well the Americas, so scheduling these Zoom calls is a real mess. We’ve settled on alternating 8:00 AM and 5:00 PM Pacific Time. We know that for some of you, those times translate into “less than convenient.” We’re sorry – it’s just the best compromise we could find. If you miss a call, no worry – they are always recorded and made available to you soon after.

If you submit a chart and it gets chosen, please don’t submit it again, even with a different question about it. Each of these Zoom sessions will feature a fresh chart.

We always honor confidentiality when it is requested, but please make that clear if it’s your desire. If you want to keep your name out of it, there is a place to request anonymity on the sign-up form when you submit your chart. We’ll give you a false name and delete the birth info from the chart we display. Be careful with the wording of your question too.

In my old Apprenticeship Groups, students would volunteer to put their own names in “the Sorting Hat.” We’d pick two or three charts and apply whatever principles we had been studying in that session. After I’d done an interpretation, we would invite the students to share their reactions and maybe some relevant biographical information. I miss that! We learned a lot from each other that way and it helped turn the group into a community. No pressure – I meant what I said about confidentiality . . . but I wanted to say this too!

A student submitted several questions that were of a philosophical nature, then withdrew them. He felt that broad “perspective” questions were less useful to the other students than more “nuts-and-bolts,“ practical questions. I told him that I disagreed. Just like any other form of human counseling, astrological practice is full of tough judgment calls. Our philosophical and ethical foundation is what gives us the ability to make the right decisions there. Such broad questions are always welcome.

As time goes by, we are developing a large library of these Zoom calls. The first iteration is already available to active students and FCEA Members. While a basic search function is available, we are working on a way of further indexing them so you’ll be able to search for a specific segment where I talked about Saturn-Moon aspects, for example. If you are a current student or member, log in to our website and check out the Q&A Call Archive. We welcome your feedback about this, too.

Just to keep everything transparent, we want you to know that we’ll be releasing a few of these question and answer segments publicly as part of our campaign to attract new students. To survive, the school still needs to grow a bit more, and that seems like a helpful way of generating interest. These short videos will just feature my “talking head” – we were not able to identify all of the faces, so we’ve (reluctantly) abandoned the idea of showing a screen full of students.

Thanks for participating in these Zoom sessions. I really enjoy them a lot, and we hope that you are finding them helpful. Our next one is scheduled for 8:00 AM PDT on Thursday, April 21st. See you there!

Steven Forrest
April 2022

Building a Professional Practice

Master’s Musings, March 2022

Many of you in the FCEA have no interest in making your living as professional astrologers. A lot of you are here for reasons of simple interest or personal growth. That’s fine – everyone is welcome. But one thing is nearly 100% sure – as word gets out among your friends that you are studying astrology, some of them are going to ask you to have a look at their charts. Before you know it and without even intending it, pretty soon you are at least practicing astrology at a professional level – regardless of whether any money is changing hands.

Where will that process eventually lead? Who knows?

It’s easy to say that the choice is yours, and that is mostly true. But it’s not really quite that simple. As you master evolutionary astrology, you begin to have a kind of spiritual superpower. And with that power comes certain ethical imperatives. If someone is drowning and you are the only person who can swim…well, you see where this is going.

The first time I ever accepted money for an astrological reading was in the summer of 1973. I was 24 years old. A friend was at a turning point in a relationship and asked me to have a look at her chart. I’d been studying astrology as a hobby for about seven years at that point, and had learned the rudiments from a potpourri of mostly-contradictory and generally pretty depressing books. Naturally I had already looked at the charts of many friends and even “sat with them.” But getting paid for it? The whole idea made me nervous. But I did that session with my troubled friend, and she was moved and helped by it, and so she insisted on giving me some money in exchange. I think it was ten dollars – and even though I argued that it was not necessary, I soon enough realized that getting paid in fact was necessary.

It wasn’t about paying the bills. The exchange of money completed a kind of energetic circle and allowed both she and me to release any entanglements of imbalance that might have otherwise arisen and instead just bask in the goodness of the experience.

Wheels turned. Four years later, I cut my ties to any semblance of a conventional career and embarked on being a full-time astrologer. I’ve told that story before, so I won’t repeat it here. Suffice to say that I now had to do a certain number of paid readings per week to keep the famous wolf from the door. I had crossed the line into becoming a professional astrologer and I needed to pay some attention to the practical matter of building my practice.

Only a few times in my life have my inner guides actually spoken plain English in my mind, planting a specific sentence there. This was one of those times. I found the words “say yes to everything” having somehow taken root in my thoughts. I knew what those words meant too – whenever any chance arose anywhere for me to be public about my work, I needed to take advantage of it. Once, for example, I drove 150 miles to speak for free in a bookstore for seven or eight people. That’s the kind of behavior my angels advised. At first I took it to be savvy marketing advice. And it was. But only later did I realize their advice had another dimension to it.

Every time I spoke about astrology, whether it was privately to a client or publicly to a “horde” of seven people, I was moving closer to finding my voice. And, really, in the end, that is what building a practice is all about.

During that whole period, I was living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the town where I went to college. All together, I lived there for a little over forty years. By 1984, The Inner Sky had come out and I really could have made my home pretty much anywhere I chose. But I loved Chapel Hill and my community of friends and clients there. I still wasn’t making a whole lot of money, but I was getting by. Here’s a photo of the house where I lived. I had the upstairs apartment.

This is where I wrote The Inner Sky and The Changing Sky, right behind that middle upstairs window.

Reflecting back on those days, I do think that staying in one place as I did actually helped me build my practice. That’s because there’s no advertising as effective as simple word-of-mouth buzz, and it simply takes time for that famous “Holy Grail” of marketing to reach critical mass. After forty years in Chapel Hill, I almost felt as if I could have run for mayor. It seemed as if I had done astrological sessions with half the population – a big exaggeration of course, but it makes the point. In building a practice, there are big advantages to staying in one place. Word gets around about your work.

Nowadays, the Internet and Zoom have changed the playing field for aspiring professional astrologers. The benefits of remaining in one place long enough to become part of the woodwork are not as stark as they once were. There are “wandering astrologers” whose practices basically exist in cyberspace. That works too! And maybe it suits your desires and your disposition better than putting down deep roots in a single community. If so, go for it. Still, when it comes to soul-counseling, there is something unique about eye to eye human contact.

A deep, almost familial, bond can develop between astrologer and client, and the precious word-of-mouth advertising that results from it still probably functions most effectively among networks of people concentrated in a single geographic location. If someone hears your name in a positive light, that’s a good thing – but if that same person hears your name independently from six different friends, that’s pure gold. On top of that at a less tangible level, there’s much to be said spiritually for serving a single community over the years, and there are advantages if that community is local. I know it worked splendidly for me – and that happened long before my books had given me any kind of national profile.

People often ask me about advertising. The conventional wisdom is that ads make the world go ‘round, and I suspect that is true with cars, beer, and politicians. I’m not so sure it’s true with astrologers. In all honesty, I have done very little advertising over the years, so what I say here is speculative and personal. I do know that if I were seeking an astrologer, I would be much more likely to trust the recommendation of a friend who had had a good experience over a glossy ad in a magazine. Choosing an astrologer is closer to choosing a medical doctor or a psychotherapist than it is to choosing a soft drink.

In the end, there is no substitute for being good at what you do. Getting you there is what the FCEA is all about. Do skillful, helpful readings, and your reputation will grow. That is the bottom line and it is guaranteed. There is no shortage of starving astrologers, but I suspect it says more about the quality of their work than anything else. The actual potential market is vast and still mostly untapped. As most of you know, I’ve had to stop booking clients entirely – I’m in my 70s and my waiting list runs over a decade. I know I am in a unique situation because of my books and my public profile, but you really don’t need to be “famous” to have a vigorous practice.

There are a lot of spiritually hungry people out there who want the kind of guidance that astrology can give without the long-term commitment and often-calamitous expense of psychotherapy. You just need to be good – and along with skill and caring, you need to stay consistently “in one place,” whether it’s actually a city or some niche you have carved out for yourself in cyberspace. Wherever form it takes, you need to be there long enough for people to become aware of you and start telling their friends how much you helped them.

That’s all it takes.

Plans are still vague, but we do intend that as we come to the Masters Level of the school, we’ll have an elective course in building a professional practice. My first thought is that we’ll bring in some successful astrologers and let them tell their stories.

Steven Forrest
March 2022

Adventures in Promotion

Master’s Musings, February 2022

We were all happily surprised when the FCEA got off to such a successful start in its first year. Our classes were full, our students were appreciative and enthusiastic, and, despite my recurring nightmares, the technology worked pretty well. Being that I’m a Capricorn with a strong Saturn, our early success actually made me nervous – I had been anticipating that first year as sort of a trial run. To that end, we really didn’t advertise for fear of being overwhelmed. But everything mushroomed anyway, and the angels who watch over astrology took good care of us. We were off to a good start. We trained five more tutors, and hired three new staff people, and looked forward to 2022 being a big year.

Jeff Parrett suddenly needing to leave his leadership position threw us all a curveball. I’ve spoken elsewhere of our great debt to Jeff and I don’t want to rehash that here. Simply said, his leaving triggered a major scramble – hiring those three new staff people to replace him was part of it. We’re still reeling a bit from his departure, but Carlos Velazquez (our tech guy), Paula Wansley (our accountant), and Penelope Love (our communications coordinator) are finding their feet. With their help, I believe that the school will be fine – even if Catie and I really could use a vacation! No vacation for either one of us though – we’re staying busy. The new semester is rolling along. The new tutors are doing well. And the new crop of students are energetic and engaged – but we wish we had more of them!

We were poised to grow, but we didn’t. It’s not that the classes are ghost towns – far from it. But we thought this would be a bigger year than last year, and it’s not. We’re down about 15% – not a huge shortfall, and the year isn’t over yet, plus Jupiter is still triggering the FCEA’s Piscean Sun and Moon. Read on! We’re doing something about it.

Here’s the issue in a nutshell:

With all the transitional chaos I just described, there was one ball we dropped – or rather, one ball which none of us had time to deal with. That was advertising, which is of course mission-critical to our growth. The FCEA is still one of the best-kept secrets in the astrological community. That’s something we need to change.

Around the holidays when we saw our numbers were low, I quickly made a three-minute promotional video for social media. Most of you probably saw it. We recruited as many of you as we could to help share it. The video worked. Our numbers quickly went up. A little advertising goes a long way, it seems. Here’s a link to it if you want to see it or share it:

https://www.facebook.com/619131770/videos/353621172820873/

Since then, we’ve been brainstorming about ways to get the word out about the school. We want to make a video of testimonials from our students. That would give the school a boost, but it would also show its friendly face to the community.

Naturally, word-of-mouth advertising is the best kind, so please spread the word whenever that feels appropriate to you.

I did an interview a couple of weeks ago with Ophi and Tali Edut – the AstroTwins of Astrostyle.com. They’ve become dear friends over the past year or so. They are also absolute masters of advertising. Last I heard, their website gets 12 million visitors a month. Our interview – which was really more of an enthusiastic conversation – was long and wide-ranging, but I did manage to get a word in about the FCEA near the end. That made me happy since I know that video will reach a lot of people. If you feel like watching the interview or sharing it with anyone, here’s a link:

https://astrostyle.com/astrotwins-2022-convo-with-astrologer-steven-forrest/

On May 15, I’ll be doing a short presentation about the road I took to becoming a professional astrologer for OPA, the Organization of Professional Astrologers. It’s my favorite of the big astrological organizations, so I was happy to help them out. In return, they unexpectedly offered me a little “thank you” in the form of a full-page ad in their elegant online journal. I used it to plug the FCEA as well as my books. The ad will run in their March Equinox edition. The target date for digital release to OPA members is March 20 and the general public release on their website will be April 1. Here’s the advertisement:

As you read these words, Penelope Love and I are working on another big promotional project for the school. This one promises to be a big help, and it will be an ongoing effort, not a “one-shot” like the OPA ad. We plan to take a few of the questions that have come up in the Student and Member Zoom calls over the past year or two and offer them to the public for free as “teasers” on social media. People will learn some astrology from them, but they’ll also get a sense of how evolutionary astrology is different and how the “culture” of the FCEA actually operates. And maybe some of them will feel drawn to learn more about the school. Here’s the opening screen – the photo is from one of the old Apprenticeship Program masters’ classes I used to run my living room.

We need your help though! On some of these Q&A videos, we want to show your smiling faces. To do that legally, we’ll need signed release forms. The problem is that I don’t know all your names, so please if you recognize yourself (or anyone else!) in these two screenshots, please shoot me an email at steven@forrestastrology.center and connect your name with the number or the letter. We’ll get back to you with a release form – or if you don’t want your face in the video, just let us know. We can make sure that you’re not visible.

All in all, we are very optimistic about the future of the FCEA. With our new tutors and staff, we have a terrific team in place – but we have a lot more “mouths to feed” too. We are also committed to keeping the fees for the school as affordable as possible. To do all that, we need to grow – not “hugely,” but significantly. This is just a little update about where we are in that process. There’s more to come, and more that we’ve never even thought of yet. Let us know if you have any ideas. As we get back on an even keel, we anticipate that the second half of 2022 will be good for us.

Please do help us spread the word! When it comes to letting people know about what we are doing, you, the students and members of the FCEA Community, are our ace-in-the-hole. Thanks for your help – and thanks for carrying the sacred torch forward. In the end, that is really what it is all about.

Steven Forrest
February 2022

Long Ago, In a Galaxy Far, Far Away...

Master’s Musings, January 2022

As you read these words, I’ll be completing my seventy-third journey around the Sun. That’s over forty-two trillion miles – and that doesn’t count the fact that our solar system is moving around the galaxy at 448,000 mph. I’ll spare you the math on how much distance that covers in seventy-three years, but it spells serious progress. What do I have to show for it? Well, for one thing, I’ve become a better astrologer. And it took time.

Steven Forrest — *Steven starting out on the road of life*

In his book, Outliers, the brilliant Malcolm Gladwell popularized the idea that it takes “10,000 hours” of practice to get good at – well, anything. The number is impressionistic, of course. Obviously angels aren’t standing there with stopwatches. But it seems about right. It’s hard to know exactly how long I’ve been doing this work, but with astrology I started early. I probably hit that magic ten thousand hours a little before I was thirty years old, just before I got the deal to write The Inner Sky.

“Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.” ― Malcolm Gladwell

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

Jupiter and Saturn Transits for the FCEA

Over the weekend of October 23 and 24, we held a small staff retreat here in my hometown of Borrego Springs, California. We wanted to catch up with one another and do some vision-building for the future of the school.

Catie, plus our three active tutors, Joey, Marie, and Teal, all attended. They stayed in a sweet, strange cowboy-themed airbnb that we had rented for the weekend. Jeff was ill and couldn’t face the long drive down from the Bay area where he lives, but he was able to attend via Zoom. On Friday night, everyone came over to Michelle’s and my house for a party. On Saturday, we got down to business.

“An institution that is dependent on specific personalities is a doomed institution.” — Charles DeGaulle

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

Fond Farewell

Jeff Parrett is resigning from the presidency of the FCEA, effective immediately, apart from him helping us through the transition period. He is prioritizing self-care, and naturally we all support him in that. Otherwise we would not be who we are as a school..

In the nearly three years since Jeff, Catie, and I began talking about creating an online venue for serious evolutionary astrological education, Jeff has worn more hats than I can count. I get dizzy thinking about them all. Suffice to say, we could not be where we are today without his multifaceted expertise. As Catie and I talk about how to fill his shoes, we realize that we are talking about hiring at least two or three people – it will take that many just to cover all the bases Jeff covered on his own.

Without Jeff Parrett, the FCEA simply could not have existed. That is really the bottom line.

For starters, Jeff supplied the seed money we needed to get the project off the launching pad. He’s done so much beyond writing a check that I feel bad even mentioning money right off the bat. But money is so often the elephant in the living room, and in the FCEA it is our policy never to “ignore an elephant,” so to speak. That’s what makes us counselors. Jeff’s investment launched us and I thank him for his generosity and his faith in the importance of this work we do. I’m happy to say that the school has already been successful enough that he’ll not lose a penny.

Beyond the financial support he offered, Jeff is a man who understands technology. While we are making every effort to keep the school as warm-hearted and human as possible, there is no escaping the fact that we are a tech company. The limits of my own “tech savvy” are basically emailing people and punching a “record” button. Without Jeff, I would be about as useful as a French Poodle in that category. You all know how complex Moodle is – you see that as you work through our FCEA courses. Behind that “somewhat” user-friendly face there are bells and whistles beyond my imagining . . . maybe beyond your imagining too. Little of that could have been gotten right without Jeff’s knowledge and skills, not to mention his willingness to put in long hours of digital headbanging. Some of those tasks are completed, while some are not. But the school is a living, breathing technological phenomenon – once again, thanks to Jeff.

Then there’s the business side of things, where yet again, Jeff was always operating “above and beyond the call of duty.” Just “simply” hiring someone in the state of California practically requires a law degree. Then there are all the rules and regulations that must be obeyed – who’s responsible if someone slips on a banana peel while sitting at home in front of a computer taking FCEA101? We’ve had a lawyer. We’ve had an accountant. Jeff has been on top of all of it, with patience beyond my wildest imagining.

I often joked with Jeff about being ‘the hardest-working retired guy I’ve ever met.” He gets the irony – and after playing such a pivotal role in launching the school, he’s ready for his life to be a little less “ironical.”

My new book, The Endless Sky, should be available about the time you are reading these words. Here’s the dedication:

“I gratefully dedicate this book to the students and staff of the Forrest Center for Evolutionary Astrology, and especially to my partners in creating it, Catie Cadge and Jeff Parrett. Together, we will keep this sacred flame burning.“

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.