The Pain of Not Living Your Path
**New Free Class Coming Soon**
White Lotus and (Wrong) Love Magic
I was not the biggest fan of a lot of the latest season of The White Lotus but it got one thing right: the wrong relationship can ruin your life.
**Spoilers for Season 3 of The White Lotus**
If you’ve been following along with the “rich people in their own hell” show, then you’re probably either been delighted or disgusted by Chelsea and Rick, the couple that meet their death in the finale. I would log onto twitter and see people gushing over their tender lovemaking scenes or the way Rick runs to embrace her after his long, distant absence.
I felt perplexed by the moony declarations because I know what this kind of relationship is like: hell. Sure when I was in it, I could tell a good story— the most beautiful, romantic story about the tragedy of our love that actually bound us deeper together, how all the different signs pointed to us being irrevocably meant for each other, no matter the hardship endured in the process of staying together.
In the reality of Chelsea and Rick’s relationships, he constantly dismisses, belittles, and ignores her in between brief moments of true connection and romance. Chelsea, of course, has a noble and spiritual-sounding story about the power of their love and what is symbolizes but in the end, it quite literally kills her.
And while plenty of women do lose their lives at the hands of their partners, even without the dramatic ending, Chelsea was already experiencing a sort of soul death. She spends hours trying to reach him on the phone when she should be at the club. She gets held up at gunpoint during a robbery and he can barely contain his irritation at wanting to talk about it. At one point, her new friend Chloe tells her she’s acting like his mom. That is not how I want to feel in a relationship.
For a long time, I ignored myself and my intuition when it came to love. I was, in essence, sacrificing my actual experience of love for my vision, my aspiration of it. I would tolerate however my partner treated me because I could see their innate goodness and imagine a future where it finally emerged so he would treat me how a partner should.
That day never came. I would be left in a daze, slowly piecing together my actual experience and mourning not just how they treated me but how I had abandoned myself.
It made me feel noble, this self-abnegation, but something real love magic has taught me is that real love enforces our relationship with ourselves, rather than taking away from it. It has taught me that what I want from a person is different than what they can actually give me. But I’m not wrong for wanting it.
Real love magic also teaches me that the right sort of love for me may be different than what I think I currently want.
When I call what I do “real” love magic I’m not saying other forms of love magic are fake or don’t work. Rather, I think calling it love magic is wrong. I am referring to the primary form of love magic I see, which is about drawing a particular person to you, being magnetic or a “black cat” or in your “dark feminine” to get your ex to text you back. This is more like desire or lust magic, something that can work but sometimes at the expense of yourself.
As The White Lotus illustrates, the wrong relationship, even fervently wished-for, can take everything from you.
Chelsea seems like a spiritual girlie. I wouldn’t be surprised if she performed a Full Moon binding ritual to keep her and Rick together forever. If she did, it clearly worked. She got exactly what she wanted.
But remember that getting what you want can also be a curse if not guided by spirit.
When I do love magic, I want to be blessed with relationships that only bring more love, more possibility, more life into my own.
If you want this too, my Stars of Love Lecture is meant to do just that. We explore the theory and practice of 4 fixed stars conducive to love and romance while I walk you through their specific contours to help you choose which star to work with.
When guided by the stars, in their infinite wisdom, you are led to where the love *actually* is, not where you wish it were.
I have been practicing with these stars personally and have been taken on a wild, romantic journey that has been taking me to places I couldn’t imagine. Have I found a partner yet? No. I am working through my own internal landscape and wounds around boundaries, commitment, responsibility and trusting my intuition. The stars tell me that, right now, that is where the love is. I listen. They’re right.
~Purchase Below~
Finding Your Place In Sun Cult
One of the best things about being an astrologer is witnessing the magic of people up close. There really is a unique path, a unique method of approach, a unique set of gifts and challenges, for each and every person. But despite the diversity of lives and futures I’ve encountered in my work, consultations often seem to boil down to one question:
Will I be safe if I do it my way?
I feel for everyone suffering under a fear of their own path, a resistance to their unfolding, especially in an increasingly stratified and chaotic world. Self trust is hard, especially in a world that tells us to distrust our desires and dreams.
It’s hard to be yourself in a world that tells you there’s one right way to live and that you’re always doing it wrong.
Welcome to Sun Cult.
Sun Cult is the phrase my friends and I conjured a few years ago to name the prevailing ideology of the Western world. Drawing from how modern Western astrology has been reduced to just our Sun signs, we used this name to identify the totalizing, dominating, oppressive culture that reduces our idea of what a good life can be to one, rigid ideal.
There are many ways we encounter Sun Cult: through the patriarchy, white supremacy, transphobia, classicism and other forms of oppressive hierarchies; through the social and cultural pressures to get (straight) married, have children, buy a house on a certain timeline despite the disappearance of this dream; through the perfectionist parts of us that wants to throw away our imperfections, doubts, ambiguities, mistakes.
I also use Sun Cult to understand sect, a fundamental astrological technique that tells us that much is decided on the division between night and day:
Though we are born either to the night or day, we must use both the light and dark parts of ourselves to live our best lives. This task can be hard when the diurnal side, characterized by abstract ideals, singular heroism and individual achievement, is often seen as the only important part of life.
Neglected is the night, i.e. the part of our lives that cannot be reasoned with or deciphered through out effort alone. The night is sensual, embodied, intuitive mysterious: like a dream, we can only decipher the nocturnal path by walking it, letting in unfold within and trusting our own feelings in the process. The nocturnal, or lunar side, speaks to our intimate relationships, our unruly desires, our creative inner lives, our internal sense of satisfaction.
We see the neglect of the nocturnal in devaluation of care work and emotional labor, the dismissal of subjective forms of knowing, the belittling of the Humanities, and the policing of the unruliness of the body, especially the bodies of the marginalized.
The Sun Cult even hurts the day charts among us: in a truly balanced world, there would be as many forms of heroes as there were people, each individual empowered to follow a unique, god-given path that is both outwardly successful and internally fulfilling.
In our world, however, we are told there is one way to be successful so even our outward achievements aren’t ours. Rather, they are done for the approval of the larger neoliberal, white supremacist culture that values bootstrap individualism, unmitigated greed and dominion over self and other.
When we don’t learn to balance the day and night, we let the Sun Cult’s view of success supplant our own and live a life that isn’t ours.
As the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips puts it, “We police ourselves with our purposes…Believing in the future can be a great deadener” especially when it’s at the expense of our actual lived experience. I have seen it and tried to indulge it myself countless times: the immediate sacrifice of the life we truly desire because it’s not “practical” or “secure”.
What happens when we believe Sun Cult and sacrifice our actual path for what we’re told to want?
Well, I am reminded an anecdote told by Jim Carrey about his father. He was apparently a talented jazz musician but chose to become an accountant because of the risk that came with pursuing his ambitions. But nevertheless, his father still lost his safe job at 51. Carrey was deeply impacted by seeing the difficulty of, as he puts it, failing at your compromise. How, despite the perfect ideals that the Sun Cult imposes upon us, there is no path we can walk that protects us from contingency.
Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky sums up the consequences of sacrificing your version of the good life in favor of toeing the status quo:
“Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”
So, if we know the conventional script only serves to make us pliant subjects rather than actually serving us, what are we to do?
The first thing is to identify and follow our own ideals, which Phillips says “should feel like affinities, not impositions”. Your natal chart, specifically understanding it through sect, can help you find the balance between outer achievement and private joys in your picture of the good life.
By understanding sect, you understand your personal will and vision in relationship to your unconscious desires and interdependence. You get to have both, exactly your way.
In a few weeks, I will be dropping my guidebook that goes into everything in sect you wanted to know but couldn’t find.
But first, I have a free class for you.
**New Class** The Path of Day and Night: Understanding & Embodying Sect in Astrology"
I will be highlighting this simple yet pivotal technique that helps you break up with Sun Cult in favor of something wilder, truer, and way way more satisfying and successful than what something from outside you can predict.
The world is uncertain, now more than ever. I see how many people struggle to find stability, consistent resourcing, fulfilling employment, a clear path.
But I have also seen the ease, unexpected boons and magic that happens when we follow our unique mix of day and night, following our vision in hand with the mysterious moonlit path.
Want to learn how sect can help you determine your formula for the good life?
My free masterclass, which will be held on Wednesday April 30th at will help you understand sect, regardless of your relationship to astrology.
if you understand and are moved by the poetics of the day and night, this class is for you:
In this Free Masterclass we will cover:
What is Sect?
The Planets of Each Sect (+ Mercury)
How to Determine Sect
Sect, Rejoicing, the Role in the Chart
The Diurnal and Nocturnal Path
Understanding Planets in and out of Sect
Mixed Sect
Embodying the Day and Night and Your Path to the Good Life
After the lecture there will be Q+A where you can ask any of your burning questions and begin to understand how sect works in practice and beyond.
This lecture is for astrologers, novices and anyone who is enchanted by the poetry of day and night or want to use astrology to help them find their own path to the good life <3
Until next time,
Love,
Chloe