Astrology as a salve for creative anxiety
Hi, friends. How are you today?
I am here today to talk about how the practice of creative astrology has allowed me to stop holding on so tight in my business and my creative practices, and go towards being led by desire and allowing myself to be open to receiving. This episode is part of a four part, lead up to the launch of my upcoming offer called Illumi9ate. Illumi9ate is a four week one on one offering for lightbearing leaders who are leaping towards transgressive creative freedom.
In this transformative four part journey, you are invited to inquire and release the illusory fears and thought presence that try to keep you stuck or small — so you can remember and reclaim your dream, playful, creative self. This offering brings together astrology, tarot, human design, and poetry.
I recorded this as an audio episode, transcribed here.
Last week, I introduced the notion of who lightbearing leaders are, and you are welcome to go back and revisit this newsletter. I say in this last episode that, light-bearing leaders have a deep sense of sense of responsibility and duty towards nourishing the collective and taking action that supports others. I also go on to talk about some of the challenges that come with that. To summarize, a lot of that has to do with being able to, shine a light on other people while not being able to shine a light on yourself or struggling to shine a light on yourself, struggling to take up space, knowing always that you can show up for others, but being unsure if you are even open to others showing up for you. Sometimes it feels like if you don't show up for yourself, nobody will show up for you, and that is, a way this can manifest.
And my work and my upcoming offer is geared towards these light bearing leaders, who are making a pivot or transition towards becoming the leaders of your own creative practices. Perhaps you are wanting to start a business. Perhaps you're already an entrepreneur, and you want to deepen into being really free and open and bring all the weird skills or what you think are weird skills that you hide from your people because you think that it doesn't fit with everything else or fits with the persona that you've created. And that can be true if you're switching from, like I did, from a, leadership role in the tech world working as a software engineer and then an engineering manager, and leaving to be a coach and then, you know, continuing to really not find my footing in that world, to embracing interdisciplinary freedom.
At first I was trying to study astrology and tarot and human design kind of, you know, on the side. I was like, I'm gonna, be a writer and a poet and these things that I dreamed of my whole life, but, I couldn't think that they would be anything more than hobbies. And even if I thought that I could get published or I could publish myself, I didn't think that I could sustain myself from it. And that's gonna root us into this episode too.
Like, this notion of can we sustain ourselves, with our creativity, with all these things that are supposedly weird, with these things that feel out of place in the audiences or people or teams or communities that we are already in, and so we might be hiding or masking thoughts of ourselves.
So our story starts with me a few years ago, about four years ago when I started my business. And I had a sense that, you know, I was skilled at working with people, at building relationships that especially, like, working in tech, I had perhaps a bloated sense of ego around the skills that I had. And I was like, oh, well, I have done a pretty good job of showing up as a leader in this context and supporting my people. My people seem to agree. They are often telling me that I am either the or one of the best managers that they've ever had. And I know that the bar in tech is very low because I've not, met a lot of managers who do this in tech, but there are also lots of people that I have met who are really, you know, invested in the growth of your people and not so much in, empire building and power grabbing, and even just kind of ignoring the interest of your people because because you're too caught up in the technical details. And while it was gratifying to receive this kind of praise and appreciation, I felt that when I started my business, I would just kind of immediately succeed, right? I was like, oh, well, I've done lots of things for lots of people. So now lots of people will do lots of things for me.
I'm not planning on asking them what they're going to do, but I will, you know, just just hope for the best, and things will pan out because I am skilled and talented, and I have a lot to offer. And guess what? That worked for a little bit, and it worked mostly because my first clients were people who were, my teammates or people who, at the time, were my reports. And I had initially planned to continue to support them in a different role, or at least the company I was working at was meant to create a role that would allow me to show up as a coach, but that didn't actually materialize.
So I decided to leave, because I was really frustrated that I wasn't doing the work that I cared about and I wanted to be doing less tech things and more of a growth, development and people oriented, teaching oriented, coaching oriented role. So when that didn't materialize, I had created this program that was, you know, inviting people into a, twelve week software engineering leadership skills oriented group coaching container with me, and I worked with around five people. It was so beautiful, so rewarding. And after that, I slowly realized, okay, I enjoy doing this.
But then when I try to kind of launch this offer out into the world, nobody signed up. And I was like, why didn't anyone sign up? And to be clear, I posted about this exactly, like, once or twice on LinkedIn. I sent one email to my newsletter, and I reached out to a few people, and that was it. And I thought, "why didn't it pay off? I had a job where lots of people thought I did really good work, and I left that job. I made some posts on the Internet, and people should have lined up."
They didn't. And when I say it like this in in retrospect, it sounds kind of naive, but I'm saying it because I think that lightbearing leaders maybe feel this way in different ways in relation to your own experiences because, like I said, like, we're so used to showing up for other people, and it's very hard to ask for ourselves. Even making two LinkedIn posts about this felt so daunting for me.
I was like, this is so visible. I'm putting my whole heart out there. My entire self-belief is on the line. And, of course, that kind of shot right back at me, and my self-belief tanked because I didn't get what I thought I wanted. And even though I continued to do coaching work, I kept feeling like there was something that was missing for me about the act of making money from business that I hadn't figured out. And if I found the right people, I would be able to figure it out. I just needed to learn something. I needed to learn some information that's held behind lock and key, of some marketing teacher or a business incubator or something like that that would give me the wisdom that will allow me to know what it is that I'm missing in order to make money. And when I had talked to one of my mentors who is a coach that I respect so much, they had told me, hey, I've heard that you people have to see something at least seven times before they take notice of what you're doing.
I was like, what? Let's assume that I'd make a post seven times, then the chances that you see it is probably lower than that. So I was like, okay. So it sounds like I need to post something at least, like, I don't know, 30 plus times, 35 times, let's say, in order for somebody to notice it seven times in order to for it to register once for them. And it was so daunting. Making that many requests of people was so daunting. It just felt like every time I'm making a post, a newsletter, a LinkedIn post, whatever that is, that I was kind of, yeah, ripping my heart out and putting it on the table. And when people didn't respond immediately, or reach out to work with me, it was so personal. It landed so personal for me, not even their actions, but their inaction. How can people that I don't even know take responsibility for what's going on in my business?
Once again, in retrospect, it seems really silly, but in that time, it did feel so heavy. I think that a lot of that heaviness really comes from this kind of, like, one-sided dynamic of believing that it's okay to continue to show up for others and subvert my needs. And to be clear, I didn't even know entirely what my needs were at the time or that I was subverting them. But I was just like, this is unfair. It should be more fair. Not only was it unfair that I didn't get the job that I originally wanted, that I thought I was gonna get, but it's unfair that I did all this for all these people, and that isn't paying off right now.
The people who told me, oh my god, like, you do such great work. And to be clear, I'm not talking about the people who I ended up working with or really, like, anybody, but specifically, like, the kinds of people who really only say something to me about how good my work is. But when I have reached out to them for actual support, whether it was in the job or outside the job, it's really not panning out. Once again, no one else is responsible, and things work out for lots of reasons in some relationships versus other relationships. So be it. But it was all landing too close to heart for me.
From this place, some of the conclusions that I was drawing about what it means to be a business owner, was that it was hard to make money in business, that it takes a lot of time, that it's not really easy. It's only possible to make plenty of money if I say had a corporate contract. In order to have corporate contracts, I need to have some kind of credential and an accreditation. So I should work on those things. So I was like, okay, I'm gonna go try to learn some stuff about marketing that I don't know. It's gonna be the thing that I need to know in order to unlock whatever this is because just asking people over and over again is not what I want to do to even though that's exactly what marketing is.
I was really trying to get some kind of institutional guarantee that I will continue to get paid like I was getting paid in tech. And tech pays a lot of money. And these days when I talk to my friends, I share my salaries in tech. And often, it's met with surprise because, living in Toronto/Tkoronto, people don't get paid this much, you know, as unless they work in tech. And even if they work in tech, companies that are are outside of Canada tend to pay more, even though their their Canadian bands might be lower. When I was trying to formulate a plan for switching into not working full time, I kept trying to figure out how will I make the salary that I was making in tech. Right? And, I will do some paper napkin math and be like, hey. I wanna charge my clients, like, this much for a coaching session, and I would do all this math and be like, okay, so the only way I can, make the amount of money that I was making in tech is if I have a ridiculous number of clients that I am seeing constantly. And I'll be like, oh, I don't think I can do that. So there must be some other trickery. So just kept, like, looking for trickery, and, trickery showed up. You know?
I met and tried to learn from teachers who, even though I had some doubts about their offerings or framing or how they were showing up, I still thought, oh, well, this is just a step. This person seems better than the, person who, you know, like Tony Robbins or something like that who I mean, I read a lot of Tony Robbins as a kid. I don't know why, but here we are. I guess I know why. Because his books wwee in my home, and I read a lot of things. And it's always this kind of bootstrap mentality that is part of what fuels American capitalism. You know, you can do it, If you believe it, you can pull yourself up by by the bootstraps.
I thought, I'm not succeeding because the system doesn't want me to succeed. And maybe that's true to some extent, and I'm sure many of you can relate to that. And yet I didn't see at that time how I was sabotaging myself. Because in all of this so far, whether it is how I feel about marketing or how I feel about my income, I was still r avoiding what is it that would be so filled with passion and desire for me that I would want to do it over and over again, that I would wanna come back to it over and over again irrespective of what's going to be the outcome, irrespective of it being for anybody else, irrespective of it being the thing that immediately matched with my old salary. I was coming from a place of what can I do that will allow me to make enough money so that I can pursue things that are within my Zone of Desire, as Ayana Zaire Cotton would put it.
And that, my friends, was doomed to fail, for me. At some point, this all was present for me, you know, underneath. So I think a couple years ago, I had sent an email saying and that's when I changed the name of my business from Kolam Coaching to Kolam Creative Collective, that it was gonna be oriented towards supporting creative people across lines of, disability and neurodivergence and people who specifically come into the business path or the artistic path from not really fitting into mainstream definitions of these things. And I did say in that that I don't know how this is all going to pan out, but I still felt a lot of urgency. I felt a lot of urgency, and I just felt like, I was just holding tight holding tight and being like, I need to get to the end. I already have the skills. I should be able to do it, and yet I'm not able to do it. I would keep spinning through cycles.
Astrology kind of came into my life, not because I thought I was gonna become an astrologer, but because I just kind of felt this draw towards it. I was raised in a dominant caste, South Indian home where reading horoscopes and electing specific times for specific activities was such a day to day occurrence that it was so normalized in my upbringing. But it was also really challenging for me to even accept my curiosity of astrology because of how I felt towards this kind of, oppressive use of this amazing, cosmic technology. And some of the ways I think that shows up are, one, like, growing up, you know, when someone wants to get married, you would consult an astrologer. And if they don't agree that your horoscopes are a match, then your parents might not agree or it might just not pan out and can often be a way to say yes or no to things.
It can be a way to kind of take away agency from people making their own decisions because an astrologer says so. And that, it's just kind of, all or nothing. And this all or nothing way of looking at astrology is not just within, in those contexts, but coming into the West in queer communities, astrology is so commonly, talked about, and often we exchange, what's your sun sign or your sun, moon, and rising sign. And in some conversations that I have been in, people would either share experiences of or directly to me share some kind of, like, one line summary of what that sign could be. And it often felt pretty reductive.
I was like, I don't even know what they're talking about because at least I knew some of the astrological terminology in the context of, Jyotish Indian astrological traditions, but I didn't entirely know beyond the names of the zodiac signs what anything meant. I was just like, why is what they're saying not resonating? And it, in fact, made me not like astrology. It made me avoid it. I was like, I don't like things that are reducing entire people to these kinds of binary statements and how can that be true. But also, I was like, okay. Everybody around me is speaking this language. I need to understand what this language means. So I started to get into it.
Then I ended up coming across astrologers like Renee Sills and Chani Nicholas who put out liberatory, embodied ways of connecting to astrology that I was like, there is something here. There's something here, and I wanna know more. So I just kinda kept listening to, weekly or monthly readings for some signs, and I would listen to signs that are not mine. I'm just kind of playing around with it, and, it was just kind of a side thing. Meanwhile, I was still doing the the panicking in my business, but on the side, I was just kind of absorbing this.
And the more I absorbed, the more I absorb, I find this sense of, connection with what's going on in the larger collective. In astrology, for instance, the outer planets take long times to transition between signs. So Pluto can take, you know, roughly twenty years to transit through one sign. Neptune takes 14. Uranus takes seven. In these big time spans, generational changes happen. And even learning which generation of any of these planets you're part of then started to make sense to me --- Oh, interesting, we are in this pattern, and this is a way that I can understand how, you know, people who are in my same age group show up to, collective issues and to understand, oh, yeah. These are the challenges that our collective is facing.
It made me feel less alone in the large scale struggles that we all face and that we are witness to in this colonial hellscape that we are often, plunged into. Beyond that, learning about the specifics of my own chart and getting really deep with it --- it's one thing to know your sun sign and have some information about the quality of your energy --- but when I started to see my whole chart, then it just started to come alive for me in my life. All of the symbols and the archetypes started to interplay and interlace with how I connect with other people.
I felt so much freer in terms of how I showed up in my relationships with these expectations, like I was talking about, as to how people would show up to my business or any of these things. And I felt a lot more empathetic and understanding of how we can be so different, how we can respond to situations so differently. And astrology provided for me one way to really visualize and picture that. Instead of feeling like I could reduce a person into a one line description of one sign, I felt that astrology made people endlessly complex, and not only does it connect us to our own path, our own gifts and our own challenges, it also opens us up to understanding what's happening in the collective. It allows this kind of sense, I feel, of zooming out really and looking into what's happening, what's unfolding, and what's been unfolding in, your life and your creativity, your relationships, your friendships from up above, and things feel --- even if you learn about the challenging parts of your life in this way, It feels so validating. It feels so like you're being seen by the cosmos in your unique pathway in this life.
That was so attractive to me, and I kept going deeper and deeper until one day, I was telling my therapist, "I think at this point, it's more likely that I will be an astrologer than a coach." And it was kind of a passing joke, but it also was not. And I like that tension of, is it a hobby? Is it a passion? Or is it work? Because I think that to keep coming back to astrology or any of these creative pathways, whether it's writing poetry or essays or making music or learning divinatory technologies, consistency isn't really a matter of discipline, but a matter of desire. What you desire, you will be consistent in. And, yes, of course, having structure and rituals and all of these things will help, and yet desire feeds us as artists to keep coming back. And when I kept my desire the side, and I thought that in order to feed my desire, I'll have to feed myself. And in order to do that, I have to do something whether or not I desire it --- I could not I could not connect the dots on how I was going to show up in my business over a long time. It felt more like a means to an end. I kept wanting to support artists instead of be an artist. Because being an artist meant taking a risk on myself and believing that I could be supported to experience creative freedom. And instead, I was finding all these reasons why I wouldn't I wouldn't succeed as an artist entirely.
So I've been so grateful to experience astrology in these beautiful creative ways that it has lit up this fire and passion to learn even more, to learn not just astrology, but to go look at the stars outside and it connects me with the natural cycles of the Earth. It makes me feel like everything is possible if I choose to follow my path and my desire. And it so happens that one of my desires is to support people in feeling this way towards their own charts, to see this cosmic map unfold that makes you connect with yourself in a deep transformational magical way. I also particularly delight in practicing astrology in co-creative ways where one person isn't the expert on any charts. Because you whoever it is that is getting the reading, is an expert in your chart because it's a representation of your own life.
No matter what I learn or how much I learn, I will never have the same expertise that you have on your chart. And so you bring that. I can bring my own ability to look at patterns and connect dots and listen and reflect back to you through my astrological learning. And together, something happens, and we figure out what it all means together. I had this beautiful opportunity to read charts for a few people in my close community who volunteered to be in my, you know, first, chart reading trial — I always try to look for words that are that are not clients because it's so impersonal, but then I'm just kinda searching in my brain for another word —anyway, my friends, they showed up to readings with me, and it was so beautiful. Something that I really love doing is also to, lace a sense of intuitive education, so you learn to interface with your own charts intuitively and that it becomes part of your or your toolkit of how you understand what's going on around you, as well as map out what is upcoming or figure out what happened in the past.
It was so fun, and a couple of people sent me testimonials that they wrote, and it's so rewarding. I made it a point to show up to these not having studied their charts ahead of time. I had looked it up, so I knew I have all the right information, beyond that I got to show up and play with it so that we are, navigating what comes up together. We learned beautiful things in these sessions, and I'm very excited to have astrology be the very first week of the offering that I'm putting together, Illumi9ate, because it's gonna really go into the illusory prisons that we build in our mind, the boxes that we create for how we can succeed, whether it's institutional approval or, what we think we can learn, how if you're an artist you can't succeed — all of these thought prisons that we build up are easily melted away by attending to them and taking this cosmic view of in your chart.
So I hope you'll keep tuning in, and next week, I'll talk about the tarot portion of this program, which will be week two, and, you know, the role that tarot has played in that creative practice. Thank you for listening, thank you for reading, and see you on the Internet 🌈
