Rose's Astro Academy | An Astrology Podcast

E15 *Topic* My Journey of Becoming an Astrologer (And Some Family History)

• Rose Potts • Episode 15

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In this episode of Rose's Astro Academy, I take you through my personal journey of becoming an astrologer, beginning with my first encounter with astrology at age six. I share how, even as a child, I felt that something was missing in the way astrology was presented. This feeling followed me for years until I discovered the depth and wisdom of Hellenistic astrology, which completely transformed my understanding. 

I'll share with you a life-changing "loosing of the bond" that got me to fully take the leap and become an astrologer while living on the shores of Lake Atitlan in Guatemala. I'll also share with you some surprising astrological family lineage, and a powerful Pluto transit to my career line that coincided with this journey of becoming.

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Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome to episode 15 of Rose's Astro Academy, where we demystify the system of astrology piece by piece. Has it been 15 episodes already? Wow, that is super exciting. 15 episodes already? Wow, that is super exciting. Anyways, I thought we were due for more of a get to know me episode. So today we're not going to be demystifying astrology per se, but we're going to be demystifying the speaker and the host of the show myself.

Speaker 1:

So today I'll be sharing with you all about my journey of becoming an astrologer. We'll go all the way back to where my interest in astrology began, at the age of six, all the way up to when I left my career and fully took the leap. I also have some interesting family lineage to share with you that involves John Travolta. Not that we're related, it involves him in another way. But regardless, grab a snack and get comfy or settle into whatever it is that you're doing, because for this podcast it's going to be story time. So let's begin by going all the way back to my first interaction with astrology. I was in Giant Tiger with my mom and I was about six and, if you don't know, giant Tiger was this kind of like discount store, that's like a smaller and cheaper version of Walmart and there was this shelf of coffee mugs and each mug had a different sun sign printed on it and my mom goes oh, you're a Taurusaurus, so this mug describes you. And she hands me the mug and I read it and it says things like stubborn, loyal, down to earth, you know whatever very cliche things. And I recall, and this is very vividly burned into my memory I immediately felt both fascinated by the concept of astrology and also like something was missing from it, like this idea of astrology fascinated me, but even in my six-year-old mind I felt that this way of doing astrology wasn't right, that there was something missing. And I held on to that feeling of both fascination with it but knowing that whatever it was was somehow buried and lost from the way that our culture thought about astrology. So, anyways, fast forward. And I'm a teen and I often look at my sun sign horoscope in the newspaper. Yes, I'm dating myself a bit here because no one does that anymore, but that's about it in terms of my connection to astrology at this point. The fascination is still there, but I haven't found that answer yet to the there must be more question that was burning in my psyche.

Speaker 1:

Fast forward more and I'm now in university. I'm very into learning about the human psyche and how to understand and read people. Astrology wise, I found the realm of online birth chart calculators and I'm trying to interpret my chart and other people's chart by googling each placement and just reading them, like the first search result that comes up Like oh, moon, neptune means means this, but really I have no idea why it means any of that stuff and I'm just accepting the first search result that Google tells me. I don't have a deeper understanding of where these interpretations are coming from, or even if they were accurate and many of them probably were not at all accurate and I think this is a very common place that a lot of us start out when we first start getting interested in astrology, and I want you to know that there is a much better way to try to learn astrology and, in fact, going about it in this way, where we're just randomly google searching things, is probably a huge waste of time. But fast forward a little bit more and I'm in my early to mid-20s and I meet this friend and he's really into astrology. In fact, he somehow manages to make every single conversation about astrology something that I thoroughly enjoyed. But the way that he talked about astrology felt different. There was this real sense of depth to what he was saying, and when he spoke about astrology and the planets he would speak a lot about the different archetypes. The way that he talked about it to me really felt like what I had thought astrology was supposed to be but hadn't been able to find yet. So of course I asked him like where did you learn how to think about astrology in this way? And he told me that he learned what he knew from a channel called Nightlight Astrology, and I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with this channel. And if you're not familiar with this channel and you like the way that I talk about astrology, I highly recommend you go and check out this channel, because I learn most of what I know from this teacher. So I started listening to this channel, adam Ellenbos, and for the first time I really felt the depth that I had been searching for ever since I had been that six-year-old who first learned about astrology.

Speaker 1:

Adam primarily practices Hellenistic astrology, which was developed over 2,000 years ago. In this form of astrology, the movements of the planets serve as symbols or omens, and the meanings given to each layer of the system. So planets, signs, aspects and houses and everything in the system it's all derived from, like Stoic philosophy and Platonism and other very esoteric ancient origins. So learning Hellenistic astrology is as much about learning about ancient philosophies and how ancient people saw it on karma and fate as it is about learning about the significations, say say, of the planets and things like that. Understanding this system becomes a spiritual endeavor, and I think that Adam does a really great job of bringing out the spiritual component in it. So, anyways, I've already given you the spoiler on this part of the story, but after diving into his YouTube videos for a while, I decided to take his one-year introductory course.

Speaker 1:

A couple of months into starting this course, though, some very interesting events took place in my life, and those events were actually aligned with what's called a loosing of the bond in zodiacal releasing, and if you don't know what that is, it's a Hellenistic astrology technique where one's life becomes segmented into these larger spans of times, like 15, 20-year chapters, but at some point during that large chapter, there's this thing called a loosing of the bond. That takes place, and it's a period where the script really gets flipped in a big way in our lives and we all of a sudden step out of all of these karmic ties or things that have been holding us in that chapter in some regard. So I was too early at this time in my studies to know that this was happening in my chart, but it was really cool to see what happened align with this big loosing of the bond moment for me. So I was a couple of months into this course and at this time I had graduated with my psychology degree and I was working at a counseling office as a neurofeedback technician. It was a really, really cool job and I really loved it, but I was super burnt out. It was the height of COVID and I had this therapeutic role where I was holding space and listening to people all day while giving them these therapeutic sessions, and people were just dumping their COVID woes on me day in and day out and honestly, I got really burnt out and I had worked really hard all the way through university and after university I had immediately started a yoga teacher training. I did an additional college certificate program. I started working on the crisis lines. I really didn't give myself any break and so I went. You know what? It's time to give myself a break and I'm going to quit my job and I'm going to go abroad for a bit, and I decided I was going to go to Guatemala. So I left my job, I sold most of my possessions and I basically uprooted my life in Vancouver and got a one-way ticket and really had no idea what was in store for me or when I was going to come back. I just knew that I had to do this.

Speaker 1:

The reason that I bring this story into my astrology journey was that, in my opinion, this decision allowed me to take the leap into being an astrologer. By the time I actually left to go abroad, I was about six months into my course and at this point I wasn't working anymore. I was just going to be living off of my savings. So I turned my focus to studying astrology full-time. By six months into the course, I was absolutely sure that this is what I had been searching for and that this beautifully combined my knowledge in psychology with my space holding skills that I had spent years developing, and that it was what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

Speaker 1:

I ended up living in Guatemala and Peru for a year and spent most of my time in Guatemala, in this small village on Lake Atitlan that is just traveler central. I was very immersed in community there and always meeting new people because people were coming and going all of the time so I was able to give so many readings and it was being there in that environment that really helped me step into being an astrologer. And I never really consciously planned that like, oh, I should go abroad. So I am like immersed in community and really able to meet a lot of people and give a lot of readings. It just ended up working out that way and I was so grateful to have that opportunity of stepping into being an astrologer in a community like that, where the people around me were so open-minded and supportive and really interested in astrology. For the first time in my life I really felt on purpose and like I was truly doing the work that I was meant to be doing in the world. And like I was truly doing the work that I was meant to be doing in the world. But it took me time to get to that place of actually giving readings. I was probably about eight months into the first year course before giving my first reading.

Speaker 1:

I remember back in those early days when I was trying to wrap my head around it all and learn how to layer the archetypal meanings together, I would have dreams about astrology almost every night. Or I remember where I was living, right on the lake. There would be a lot of drum circles down at the beach and I would go there in the evening after a day of studying and I would just sit there and listen to the drums and gaze into the fire and I would see the planets moving in my mind and forming and unforming aspects with one another, and it was like watching my brain form the synapses of understanding. Anyways, so while living abroad still, I began the Nightlight Astrology Year 2 course and I ended up taking four courses with Nightlight in total. And then I've also studied under Ren Butler taking his course on archetypal astrology, and then I dove into Robert Schmidt's archives and went through a lot of that. There's a lot there, if you know. You know, and I've read texts by many other astrological authors as well, such as Demetra, george, richard, tarnas, chris Brennan the list can go on and on. So, but those are my main courses and my main teachers that I've taken, and I'll do a future episode where I get into the specifics of just how I go about practicing, but you can probably tell it's a blend of Hellenistic, archetypal and psychological. So after this one year spent abroad, I came back to Canada, and I actually moved back to where I was from originally, in Ontario. There I continued to study and grow my practice, and now here we are.

Speaker 1:

What I love, too, is that my parents and family have always been really accepting of me being an astrologer, and this is thanks to my great uncle, who, back in the day, was actually a well-known astrologer in London, england. In fact, john Travolta, on his tour to London after the release of Grease, actually went and sought my great-uncle out for a reading, because he was a prominent astrologer At this point after the launch of Grease. Of course, travolta was at a very peak place in his career, and my uncle actually told him that his career would go through a lull, a long lull, but that he would come back to prominence later, and John Travolta got really mad at him for saying that, but that's exactly what ended up happening in his life, anyways, so that's a bit of family lineage that I have with astrology. Unfortunately, I never got to meet my great uncle, though, because he died before I was born. He spent a lot of his life as a traveler and spent many years living in India, and that's actually where he learned astrology. So he was a Vedic astrologer, but while he was there he picked up a liver disease which he eventually died of. I would have loved to have met him in person, but I do feel like I carry on his spirit and I'm grateful that everyone in my family is accepting of astrology as a viable career, because he paved the way for me in that sense. So I hope you've enjoyed my origin story of how I became an astrologer.

Speaker 1:

One thing that I'll add is that it was really cool to see this big transit happening with my career line at the same time that I was stepping into being an astrologer. So in my birth chart, uranus and Neptune are in the later degrees of Capricorn and they're very close to one another, and then they're also square to my moon, which is at my midheaven, and the square that they have to my moon is a degree or two on other side. It's extremely close. The midheaven speaks to career and work. So for me, this trifecta between my moon and Uranus and Neptune really speaks to my career, and so, of course Pluto was moving through the later degrees of Capricorn at the time and what's really really cool is that I can time each step in my journey of becoming an astrologer perfectly to an exact alignment between Pluto and Uranus in my chart.

Speaker 1:

With these slow-moving outer planets like Pluto transiting another slow-moving outer planet like Uranus, we have to get really, really narrow with that window of where the transit matters. So for outer planets transiting outer planets, I like to really only pay attention to it when it's like in that fraction of a degree range and, if you don't know, each degree is actually broken down into 60 fractions of a degree as well. So I could time and I could look when did Pluto hit Uranus in my chart to that exact fraction of a degree and that moment would be like a day-long transit and what I saw was incredibly striking. And I saw these things all in retrospect after they had happened. But the first time that Pluto hit that exact fraction of a degree, lighting up that trifecta between Uranus, neptune and my moon at the midheaven and activating something in my career, the very first time was the first day of the first course with nightlight astrology. I can't make this stuff up the second time because Pluto was retrograding back and forth over this point. So he hit this exact point three times.

Speaker 1:

The second time was the first time I gave an official astrology reading to someone like sit down one hour session type of reading, and the third time it was this week. That was such a flurry of activity for me. I was in Peru and I chose my business name, got my website domain, launched my Instagram, had a photo shoot sessions with all of the photos that you see now on my website and, for the first time in my practice, I was booked up for the entire week with clients. So in retrospect, it was so cool to see those precise alignments of Pluto activating this place in my chart to do with career and how I make money, and that this is a once in a lifetime transit that I was going through. Pluto represents these deaths and rebirth, transformations, and Uranus is taking this kind of really radical leap in this new direction and it's really emancipatory and liberating, and that it coincided perfectly with my journey of becoming an astrologer. So, anyways, I hope you enjoyed this get-to-know-me story today.

Speaker 1:

I plan on doing another episode in November where I talk more about how practicing astrology has transformed me personally and the way that I see the world and the way that I navigate my life, and also talking about the ways that I specifically practice astrology.

Speaker 1:

So stay tuned for that in November. In the meantime, though, new episodes air every Monday and Wednesday, and on Mond we do a transit talk, where we talk about a big transit for the week, and on Wednesdays we do a topic episode, which is typically exploring a new layer of the system of astrology. So not usually so personal, but the personal element is important to bring in here and there as well. On our next episode on Monday, we'll be talking about Jupiter's upcoming retrograde, so stay tuned for that. If you want to book a reading with me, you can do that on my website, rosesastroacademycom, and you can follow along on my Instagram at rosesastroacademy. Finally, if you enjoyed this episode or you're a frequent listener of the podcast and you'd like to say your thanks and help us grow and reach a larger audience, you can really really help out by leaving a review of the podcast. Well, that's all I have for you.