Welcome to Ghost of a Podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Lanyadoo. I'm an astrologer, psychic medium, and animal communicator, and I'm going to give you your weekly horoscope and no-bullshit mystical advice for living your very best life.

Jessica:            Max, welcome to the podcast. What would you like a reading about?

Max:    I would like some guidance about my next steps.

Jessica:            Say more.

Max:                I'm at intense crossroads. I'm 54, turning 55. And I am on a spiritual path or dedicating myself to step into living more aligned in the healing arts and trying to remember this is something that I've always known but haven't fully stepped into yet.

Jessica:            When you say the healing arts, what do you mean by that?

Max:                I studied a modality. I just came back from Mexico, where I was for the last three months, and words always do an injustice to something that is ethereal. I am seeing people and able to align them in a more holistic, spiritual way, whether it's a sense of opening, having kundalini awakenings, having a sense of alignment on a level of being in harmony with the divine. These are some, I guess, words that I could describe to what I'm—

Jessica:            So you're talking about being an energy healer—

Max:                Yes.

Jessica:            —and not just about—

Max:                Correct.

Jessica:            —your personal journey.

Max:                Correct.

Jessica:            Okay. And so what's the question part? Because it sounds like a lot of things that you're really clear about and that you're already choosing.

Max:                With the sense of knowing and following my intuition, it's causing me to have to step away from every thing, community, person I used to be able to be in social situations with and in community with, which is a deeply painful and lonely process.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Max:                I'm curious, in looking at my chart, if there's any information you could interpret that could be helpful to me if I actually honor this path, which means moving physical location and really stepping out and off into the unknown.

Jessica:            Okay. So let me just really ground this as much as possible. And I'm going to share your birth data, which is you were born August 7th, 1970, in Eugene, Oregon, at 7:59 a.m.

Max:                Yes.

Jessica:            Okay. Great. So, grounding this, it sounds like part of the question is about relocating, and part of the question is about the endings that you're having with other people. Am I hearing that right?

Max:                Yeah. It is about, yes, deep, huge, gut-wrenching endings where I can't even physically be in environments. My body won't let me be there. So there's a sense of—not like, "Am I crazy?" because this is happening. I guess I'm looking to see if you have any insight about what this next chapter could be. Is it doable? Are there things that can help fortify me along the way?

Jessica:            Yeah. Absolutely.

Max:                Does that make sense more?

Jessica:            Yeah. I have lots of answers—well, not answers, because you're actually not exactly asking questions.

Max:                Can I do this?

Jessica:            Can you do this?

Max:                I mean, from your reading 21 years ago—

Jessica:            Yes. We did a reading 21 years ago. Yes.

Max:                —you mentioned that you saw someone—I think you said it was over here. I'm not sure if you saw my grandfather, my zayde. You mentioned them wearing kind of a coat, a long coat, and opening the coat up and having kind of potions—

Jessica:            Oh. Interesting.

Max:                —and medicine. You mentioned them almost being like a snake oil salesman, which kind of translated, to me, like a hustler. And the deeper question—I don't know if that's my relative, my zayde, but it has to be vulnerable and honest. Some aspect of this snake oil kind of person has come to play in other parts of my life, which has not been—I'll just—without details, really honestly authentic and really honestly in alignment. There's been aspects—I don't want to say a charlatan. I don't want to say with—is it [malicion 00:05:36]—

Jessica:            Yeah.

Max:                —as being a snake oil person. So it's more about, do you have insight about, like, aspect of alignment or authenticity? So I don't know how to make that into a question.

Jessica:            Yeah. No, I got it. I got it.

Max:                Like, could I be successful at this?

Jessica:            On a professional level?

Max:                Yes.

Jessica:            So you're talking about money, in a way.

Max:                It doesn't necessarily have to be totally about money. It could be a combination of service, which is for the people, of the people, by the people in these dark times, and yes, a little bit of money. But money is probably not the hugest guiding force.

Jessica:            Okay. So you don't need money from your work?

Max:                It's not my main thrust, although I would like to incorporate this as a professional career aspect.

Jessica:            Okay. Okay, but it doesn't need to be a professional career.

Max:                I'm going to give you a 50/50 split on that answer.

Jessica:            Okay. So there's layers and layers and layers. The first layer of what I'm going to say is that I'm not sure what I saw at that time, and I'm not going to look in this moment because that's not where I'm going to start. But I am going to say, in your birth chart, you've got a lot of indicators that speak to spiritual calling, spiritual work, and spiritual abilities. You have just as many indicators for being so in your head, it's just like you'd be like, "Okay. Well, that's interesting, but"—and so you've got just, I mean, your South Node, your Ascendant, Mercury, Pluto, Venus all in Virgo. And your Venus is at that anaretic degree of Virgo.

Max:                What does anaretic mean?

Jessica:            The anaretic degree of a zodiac sign is—it's the final degree, and it's when the energies of that sign are at its peak performance. So your Venus is peak Virgo, okay? A lot of times, when people think about Venus, they think about relationships. But when I look at Venus, the first thing I think of is your values system.

Max:                Interesting.

Jessica:            And so the Venus in Virgo that you have has a lot to do with valuing what you can quantify, what you can process, what you can commit to ritualistically. And a lot of times, people who have a lot of Virgo placements or strong Virgo placements—you have both—will put themselves in a position where they're like, "Okay. Well, I'm open to that, but I need to know why." So the "but" and the "why"—

Max:                Yes.

Jessica:            —can get in your way. Okay.

Max:                My teachers have—the practice that I'm offering spiritually to others doesn't work if you think. And as a Jew and coming from a culture where education and intellectualism is the utmost goal—mas o menos—in life, my teachers tell me every day, "Get out of your head. Get out of your head. Get out of your head. If you're trying to put words or intellect, you're missing the point. This is not about"—so—

Jessica:            Right. And even before you and I got into this conversation/started the reading, you were like, "I want to give you all the details." And I was like, "Don't give me the details."

Max:                Right.

Jessica:            So it's like it's a consistent theme. And I want to just give you a tiny bit of context for that, and then I'm going to go back to what I was saying. And the context is—it's not, "Don't think." It's not, "Don't be smart." It's not, "Don't use your analytic tools." It's, "Have faith in those tools. You don't have to consistently and constantly return to them to prop up your intuition, to justify your instincts." It's about recognizing that you have spent a lot of years and a lot of time and a lot of energy and had a lot of reinforcements on your intellect, your analysis. And so, at a certain point, you have to have faith that that's a really well-honed muscle. And that means if you've got a muscle that's really well developed, then you can use it on a damn dime, right?

Max:                But you just said something very important. You just said the word "faith."

Jessica:            Yep.

Max:                And in these dark times and with stepping into power, I don't know. I mean, to really have faith and to feel faith and to live faith is huge. I don't know if I—you know, I'm trying to step into that, but that's a struggle from the head.

Jessica:            It's a struggle from the head, and it's—again, I'm going to make it simple. It's a practice. That's all it is. That's all it is. Some people are just faith-based. They're easy-peasy faith. You're not one of those people. Neither am I. You know what? It's a damn practice. And everything that a human practices a human falters and fails with. That's the process.

So, if you can embrace the process of cultivating a healthy relationship with faith—for you, might be more analytic than for someone else. For you, it might mean that you take wild risks at times or that you just do something radically different than what you might have thought. Whatever it looks like for you, you don't need to know the future in order to be aligned in the present. And that itself is an act of faith because the analytic mind, the anxious mind, says, "If I know what comes next, then I can handle the present because if I know what comes next"—

Max:    Yes.

Jessica:            —"then I can prepare, and then I can get it together, and I won't fuck up and I won't make a mistake." But the faith-based mind says, "If I am present and I make good choices and I am aligned in the present, then the future can't help but become and become whatever it's meant to be."

Max:                Yes. I do want to put a pin in something that you said so that we can maybe come back to it.

Jessica:            Okay.

Max:                You mentioned—referred to Venus in Virgo.

Jessica:            Oh, I'm coming back to that. Oh, I'm coming back to that.

Max:                And what I remember from our reading 21 years ago, or from just my limited baby reading in astrology, is that Venus in Virgo is not necessarily good. I don't know if [crosstalk].

Jessica:            Okay. You definitely did not hear—you did not hear that shit from me.

Max:                Okay. Okay, not—

Jessica:            Some motherfucker on the internet has been saying—

Max:                Yeah. Yeah. Okay. But hold on. Hold on.

Jessica:            Okay. Okay.

Max:                What I'm getting to is I think a couple of things feed the concept of faith. I think experiences from the divine feed faith, and I think the sense of intimacy and love feed faith, fuel faith. This kind of references back to stepping away from community and loneliness, deep loneliness and grief. So there's something in this process because I'm uncoupled. I've been single the majority of my entire life. And in this process, I'm aching for intimate love, sex, connection.

                        And I think a spiritual practice intuitively is actually a practice of self and not being partnered in my lived experience. So the pin that I'm going to stick in is, in this process, can I get some love? Can I get some fucking—

Jessica:            Yeah. Yeah. Let me speak to all this. Let me speak to all this. Okay. You're saying a lot of things. The first thing I want to reflect back to you—you used the words "I think" to talk about faith a lot, my friend. You have a lot of theories about faith.

Max:                Yes.

Jessica:            And that's cool. I'm not going to take the Virgo out of the Virgo. I don't have any intention to do so.

Max:                I'm a Leo. I'm a Leo. I'm a Leo.

Jessica:            I mean, yeah. Okay. Sure. You're a twelfth-house Leo. But we'll come back to that again. We'll come back to all that. First, let me say, sure, faith can be all those things. Also, it's just a practice. It's just a way of being. It's just a way of being in time. It's a way of being in space. It's a way of engaging with fears and with hopes. But I want to give you a much more simple version of faith because my worry for you is the more complex it gets, the more it feeds into your analyzer, which is motivated by fear and scarcity, right?

Max:                Yes. A thousand percent.

Jessica:            Yeah. Yeah. And so I am a fan, for busy brains with big old noodles like yours, to keep it really simple, to think about how essential oils—they're distilled. They're super strong. You won't put it directly on your skin because it's so strong. But it's also like this teeny, tiny, little bottled thing, right? I want to encourage you to distill down your relationship and your concepts around faith because the more complex they are, the more you're thinking. And faith is a practice. It's not a thought. It's not a theory. It's a practice.

                        That said, Venus in Virgo—okay. Venus in Virgo—first of all, this is not the first time on the podcast that this has come up where somebody who has Venus in Virgo has read on the damn internet from some astrologer that I could strangle—and maybe it's like a form of astrology believes this. I think it's some bullshit. Venus in Virgo is not unlucky in love. Venus in Virgo is, I think, fucking spectacular. Venus in Virgo—I'm not into love languages, but I'm going to use this term, and I don't mean it in the way that love language is, but the way that you love is through acts of service. Who doesn't fucking like that?

                        Now, that said, you've got your North Node conjunct your Descendant. That's your relationship issues, not your Venus in Virgo. Venus in Virgo means lots of things, but we're not going to fixate on that part, the relationship part in the context of Venus in Virgo. The nodes in astrology refer to your soul's journey in this life. So they're not like the planets, which are your personality. This is your soul's journey.

                        So, when we look at the North Node, it represents where your soul is journeying towards in this lifetime. Wherever the North Node is, the exact opposite point is where the South Node is. So they're also called the dragon's head and the dragon's tail. The dragon's tail, or the South Node, is what you've already done in your previous incarnations. But we all come into this life with a strong memory of what we did in our last life, so we try to do it again.

Max:                Can I ask you a question?

Jessica:            Yes.

Max:                Your cursor went to the right, east, and to the west. Is the north and the south not at the very tip-top and at the very bottom?

Jessica:            So the nodes are similar to planets in that what we do as astrologers is we look at the exact moment of your birth, and we see, "Oh, look. The North Node was at 2 degrees of Pisces and 51 minutes." And then we look at where you were in the world and the moment of your birth, and we are able to cast the chart. And the chart tells us where 2 degrees and 51 seconds of Pisces falls in your chart.

Max:                Oh.

Jessica:            So they are not access points on the wheel. They look more like a planet, as you've kind of seen drawn here.

Max:                Got it.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Max:                Okay. Thank you.

Jessica:            Yeah. Very Virgonian questions. You may be a Leo, but in this reading, honey, you're a Virgo. Okay. So the nodes are really important because in your birth chart, the North Node speaks to two really important things—I mean, seven million things, but we're going to keep it succinct. You have come here in this life to learn how to cultivate intimacies with other people, one-on-one intimacies where you do not shrink or betray yourself to show up with and for someone, and you let them in. You let them in by taking care of them, showing up for them, but also by letting them know you.

                        That's what intimacy is. It's that back and forth. It's not just acts of service. It's not just roles played or patterns repeated. It's a meeting in the present moment. And that brings us to the fact that it's in fucking Pisces, the zodiac sign that governs—oh, I don't know—faith, the zodiac sign that governs the process instead of the drive for perfection. What your North Node in Pisces speaks to is that you have come here to untangle all the cords and let them just be on the ground, messy. You don't have to fix them.

Max:                When you use the word "cords," are you talking about generational trauma?

Jessica:            Whatever the cords are that you're fixated on in the moment. You and I ran into each other when I was just in Oakland at the Oakland Museum. And I said something in that talk, which I'm going to repeat to you. I'm going to tweak it. I'm going to change it a little for you, but I'm going to tweak it, okay? It's—whether we're thinking about, yeah, the cords of your relationships to ancestors, the cords of your ideas and theories about free will or about faith, whether it's the cords of "I've made a decision, and  I don't know how to execute it yet, and there are so many details, and I can't figure it out, and yada, yada, yada"—

Max:                Yes.

Jessica:            —allowing yourself to visualize these—you can think of them as fruit on the ground. You can think of them as cords. You remember this that I said, right?

Max:                I do. I repeated it, actually, at a community meeting—

Jessica:            That makes me so happy.

Max:                —because I was thinking about the concepts of fruit on the ground composting—

Jessica:            Yes.

Max:                —and nurturing the soil into rich compost.

Jessica:            Yes. So let's say that these ideas, these connections, these attachments take energetic form as fruit with seeds. Your job is to stop picking them up and putting them in your pocket so you can figure them out, but instead to let them compost and sprout something new. The North Node in Pisces asks you to let go of containing perfectionism and control—

Max:                From your mouth to some goddess's ear. Shit.

Jessica:            Exactly. Totally. So this is the thing about the North Node. Nobody is good at their North Node. Nobody has complete ease in their North Node. People who have listened to me give lots of readings will know that I always say that the North Node tends to show up after 40. You tend to start knowing yourself well enough to be like, "Oh," because now you're almost 55, right? So, in the last 15 years, being able to be like, "Oh, I actually just need to let this go," not in a Plutonian "release it and burn it" kind of way, but in a Piscean way. Pisces governs fog. Pisces governs—

Max:                Wow.

Jessica:            —the gas that releases. Yeah. You get it. You're in San Francisco—

Max:                Interesting.

Jessica:            —right, or in the Bay? So you know fog.

Max:                Well, it's also gray, not black and white, which is so hard for me.

Jessica:            Yes. Well, that's your North Node in Pisces.

Max:                And when you were speaking about intimacies, is it friendship intimacies? Is it love/sex intimacies?

Jessica:            It's all of it. It's all of it.

Max:                It's all of it.

Jessica:            It's literally all of it. It's truly just intimacy. And the thing that gets riled up in you around sexual intimacies is your impulses are strong and fast. Your impulses burn hot. And so you do what anyone would do with a hot potato. You know what I mean? You balance it in your hand. You throw it. You go grab it. You know what I mean.

Max:                Yes.

Jessica:            It's an active thing. And this Pisces North Node requires presence, hanging out and letting that hot potato hang out near you, not needing to grasp it, not needing to direct it.

Max:                When you said direct, do you also mean control?

Jessica:            Yes.

Max:                Okay.

Jessica:            I'm glad you're asking the questions, and also, when I say direct, I mean it's like nervous system regulatory behavior. It's just like you get excited, so you start processing it and planning it out and going, and there's 70 directions, and now you're out of your body. And when you're out of your body and you're out of the present, you do what every human does. You go into a mode. And when you go into a mode, now you are—maybe you're people-pleasing. Maybe you're being provocative and kind of counter to your own fucking ends. Maybe you are getting so in your head that you're having great exchanges, but they're not from you being present with you, and therefore, they're not based in you.

                        Being successful at something, whether it's an intimate relationship, a sexual relationship, a job—whatever it is—being successful at something that requires you to abandon yourself or not be present, that thrives when you're not present, always feels like a failure, never works. Let me say this. I believe that it is in your highest good to be partnered. Now, whether that's a sexual partnership or romantic partnership, a platonic partnership, this is relevant to your—you know.

Max:                Yes.

Jessica:            It doesn't really matter to me when I look at you from a spiritual perspective. Now, if you're like, "I want to fuck," it matters to you, right? I respect that. But—

Max:                It's about a witnessing. I mean, there's a depth. It's about a witnessing and a companionship. It's really about an energy bank of—I want my tank to be filled, and I want to fill the tank. It's like a flow of a beautiful, gentle stream of energy that is replenishing and nurturing.

Jessica:            So there's no reason why you can't have that. And here's the "but." This is not the moment, okay? This is not the fucking moment. You are currently going through two once-in-a-lifetime transits. One of them is called Neptune opposite Venus. Now, Neptune opposition to Venus doesn't happen to everyone. When it happens to you, it's a big fucking deal. And it is one of the worst transits for dating and falling in love, not that it can't happen, but that it is likely to be based on projections and fantasies more than reality. And therefore, it's just not a great time.

Max:                When does it—how quick is this—does this—

Jessica:            Yeah. It's a two-year transit total. The transit will be over by March of 2026. This is a period that is meant to teach you about boundaries and relationships. So the reason why most people have a hard time under this transit is because most people have terrible fucking boundaries. It is very hard to have healthy boundaries, whether you're really assertive or really introverted. It doesn't matter. Everybody has a hard time with boundaries. And everybody likes to talk about how somebody else trampled on their boundaries, and nobody likes to talk about how we didn't honor our own boundaries and we didn't navigate our own boundaries, right?

Max:                Yes.

Jessica:            So transits like this come around, and they teach you, in a really direct, experiential way, the consequences of not having healthy boundaries—

Max:                Yes.

Jessica:            —whether that's in your projections onto others, whether that's by not having safer sex and dealing with the consequences, whether that's by being in a relationship where you're codependent or you merge in a way that's not healthy.

Max:                Right.

Jessica:            So, if you are down for the labor of boundaries as an act of love for self and other—

Max:                Yes. Yes.

Jessica:            —then there's no reason why you can't have a relationship in this period. I will say there's the textbook of the way things go. I, as a psychic, might see something or, as an astrologer, I might know this is what it means. But the truth of the matter is anything can happen at any fucking time. And energy is just energy. And so, if you work with energy, you can, ideally speaking, co-create and engage with your life in a way that is healthy and really generates flow or participates in flow. So don't get too hung up on—I'm giving you these dates. These dates are to know it's boundaries time, okay? Doesn't mean you can't get into a partnership. It's not the best time because—

Max:                Right.

Jessica:            —boundaries are hard, and it's hard when you start a relationship with someone and boundaries are clearly the most important thing at the beginning. That said, you have a North Node in Pisces, so that might just work for you. Me—I'm a triple Capricorn, so I tend to get into relationships during heavy Saturn transits. That's technically not supposed to happen. But we live our chart.

Max:                Yeah. I don't know if this is normal. Everything that exists—all my signs line up in [crosstalk]—

Jessica:            It's very normal. Yes. It's very normal.

Max:                And it goes boom, boom, boom, Leo, Virgo, Libra. But every person that is coming into my life, if there's a possible intimate connection, they are inherently completely looking for way different things than I am and completely not the people that I'm looking for, and the patterns and meeting people who are like—it's happened five times in a row. The Universe is hilarious, and I'm not laughing that people who are, let's say, poly—and I'm monogamous or this, and I don't want this or this, and I don't—it's like the Universe has said, in neon letters, N-O, screaming at me, "No."

Jessica:            That's not what it is. Let me give you a reframe.

Max:                Great.

Jessica:            And this is really important, and this has come up a couple times so far in our conversation. You want to be mindful of your narrative because you're so quick to create a story out of an experience. You are weaving a narrative. You're putting all those fruits in your pockets, carrying them everywhere you go, and it's not allowing things to kind of compost, if you will.

Max:                Okay.

Jessica:            So there's two things I'm going to speak to because you asked me two questions, right?

Max:                Okay.

Jessica:            And I want to reflect back to you you just asked me two radically different questions at once, which is a sign that your head is moving too far in the future as opposed to staying really present. So it's just good to be able to notice it as it happens.

Max:                Okay.

Jessica:            So, to your question about the zodiac signs, yeah, some people have cluster charts. Some people don't. A chart has to have a shape. So some people have scatter charts. Some people have really angular charts. And some people have, you know, a cluster chart. And when you have a cluster chart, it just means a lot of your nature—you are very fucking intensely yourself. You're just very yourself. That's what that means. Okay.

Max:                Yes.

Jessica:            Now, to the other part of your question, you say you're getting a big, neon "No." And I say you're learning boundaries. So you're like, "Yeah, I want to have love, and I want to have like, and I want to have crush and I want to have sex," and the Universe is like, "Okay." It's asking you to have better boundaries with yourself as you manifest.

Max:                Yes.

Jessica:            It's asking you to have better boundaries with yourself in your yearning. And so the Universe is like, "Okay. You say you want love and you want sex. Somebody just came through," and you could actually feel love with them. You could have great sex with them. But they're not what you want.

Max:                Correct.

Jessica:            You have to have healthy boundaries. So I'm going to give you this slight but powerful reframe. The Universe is not saying no. The Universe is saying, "Deal or no deal." The Universe is saying, "Do you have boundaries? Are you willing to live with your boundaries? Are you willing to say no to the things you want so that there's room in your life for the things you need? And so far—so far, so good—you're saying no. And I understand, of course, you're a person, and you're like, "Saying no feels like no. It feels like, fuck, no."

Max:                Yeah.

Jessica:            But what it actually is is you saying yes to yourself.

Max:                Correct.

Jessica:            And this is where faith comes in. You're going to have to have faith that this will not last forever. Will it last through 2025? I bet it will, but maybe it won't. You know what I mean? Maybe it won't. It's worth it. If it lasts a year of your life, it's worth it because it's not forever.

                        And that brings me to this other transit I want to tell you about. You are going through another once-in-a-lifetime transit. It's called Uranus conjunction to the Midheaven. This is the Midheaven. It's the highest point of the chart. It's the way you organize your life. It is your career. It's where you point yourself towards. And Uranus is sudden and abrupt change. It's the unexpected. So people will often change careers, move—make a big move, not just a move of an apartment, but sometimes it's move of an apartment—but make a big move. It's like, "I'm ready to change my life so that I can get free."

Max:                Yes. Yes. Yes.

Jessica:            That's what this transit is about.

Max:                Yes.

Jessica:            And I would be remiss if I didn't tell you about that, because one of the first things you mentioned was that you're thinking about making really big changes. And this transit says, yeah, fucking go. Fucking go. And because Uranus takes about 84 years to move through the chart, it's not a transit that you'll go through again. And so being willing to take leaps of faith is what this transit speaks to. But the caveat is they must be values-based because your Midheaven is in Taurus, which is a—and it's at the anaretic degree of Taurus. So, again, it's that final degree that's like peak Taurus energies.

                        What that means is that when you point your life in the direction of the things that you value, which sometimes is creativity and the arts, which sometimes is someone or something that you love, which sometimes is purely like sense-based and aesthetic and sometimes is values-based, like doing healing work—whatever it is, it must be a reflection of what you believe and be something that you can invest time and energy because Taurus is the bull. Taurus is all—it's like a fixed earth sign. It's all about doing things slowly, but they last. They fucking last. Taurus is all about the depth of things, lasting.

                        And in your birth chart, you've got Saturn sitting right on top of your Midheaven, which means that when you build things, it usually takes longer than it should. It takes a long fucking time for you. And sometimes that feeling of "It doesn't work in the end" comes up because in the end, the thing you were working so hard on actually didn't reflect your values, or the environment you were in didn't leave room for you to be in alignment with your values. And so you end up in this conflictual situation where you need to, again, have boundaries.

Max:                I think that I'm now realizing the values system of what success and what I believe happiness to actually feel is, simplify, ground, nature.

Jessica:            Mm-hmm. All of these kinds of realizations and these shifts—they're very classic of the Uranus conjunction to the Midheaven. And so, if you've been thinking about moving, yeah, I say go. And the thing that I think is the best advice I could give you is, if you can, relocate without attachment. In other words, do it with the kind of attitude and expectation of exploration and experiment—

Max:                Yes. Yes.

Jessica:            —until the summer of 2026, so for—depending on when you would leave—like a year, year and a half. That is going to be the best match energetically for what's happening in your birth chart because you can't know—

Max:                To start exploring or to think that if I go exploring, keep on that explorer's hat and give it a year to play out, to feel out different locations, until maybe something resonates, maybe in the summer of 2026?

Jessica:            Yeah. I mean, listen. You might, let's say, move to Kentucky and be like, "Okay. I'm going to get an apartment in Kentucky, and I'm going to just explore what it's like to be in Kentucky for a minute." You can be there for a year. I'm not saying you have to put on a backpack and hike everywhere. I'm saying, if you do land somewhere—

Max:                Yes.

Jessica:            —don't go full perfectionistic Virgo on it.

Max:                Yes.

Jessica:            Don't go full fixed-sign person, a.k.a. Leo with a Midheaven in Taurus, on it. Instead, tap into those Piscean energies and be like, "Okay. This is my experience at this time, and I'm not investing in a year from now. I'm investing in the present. So I'm creating the stability, the security—I'm reflecting the needs that I have in the present"—

Max:                Yes.

Jessica:            —"and not overextending." You want to do it with a common sense, right?

Max:                Yes. Yes.

Jessica:            But instead of being like, "Okay. Well, if I'm going to be here, then I have to invest in this, and I have to create that, and I have to research this"—that is really a good way of approaching moving most of the time, not this time.

Max:                Okay.

Jessica:            This is a period of your life that is different than that. And it makes sense that these transits are happening and you're having this shift spiritually for yourself. And that brings me to the kind of final part of your question—because I want to get to all the parts of your question—which is about your career and having a career in the healing modalities.

                        The reason why I asked about money is because there's being of service to people who show up, and then there's creating a service that you advertise and have a money exchange. And that money exchange could be barter. It could be cash. Whatevs. But there's having a private practice, and then there's being on a path.

Max:                I would like to have a service where there is an exchange. That is what I would like.

Jessica:            Are you talking about having a private practice?

Max:                Yes.

Jessica:            Okay. So that is about money. We're not saying that you need the money in order to survive. Maybe you do; maybe you don't. But we are saying—so this is the boundaries piece, right?

Max:                Yes.

Jessica:            Because to be a spiritual practitioner, unless you are from money or you have money sitting in an account for you somewhere, you need resources in order to be healthy and well and to support yourself and to buy good food and do the things. So there needs to be a boundary there around clarity about what your needs are and also the value of your service.

Max:                Yes.

Jessica:            I don't know how long you have been on this journey, and you don't have to tell me, but how long you've been on this journey with learning this practice that you're doing. I don't know where you're at with it. But I will say to you something that I would say to anybody who wants to become a professional—any kind of New-Agey, outside-of-institutionalized-services kind of person. Building a business and a private practice takes a lot of time and a lot of admin. It just fucking does. Even if it flows, even if you are the greatest practitioner and the service you give is invaluable to people, you still gotta answer emails. You still gotta let people know what you do and what you don't do and create healthy expectations and deal with people's projections and disappointments in your work and all the things that happen when you do service-based labor.

Max:                Yes.

Jessica:            And so those things may or may not be in alignment for you at this time, from what I'm seeing—doing that part. And so that might be part of why, when I asked you at the top, "Are you trying to make money from it or not?" you were kind of like, "No," kind of with a question mark but kind of a no, and then you do want to create a private practice.

Max:                With having my own businesses prior, I was the cook, the producer, the marketing person, the social media person, the meetings person, and the seller on the street. And so I thrived because I'm a Virgo, and I love details, and I love numbers, and I love—so—

Jessica:            Okay. Let me jump in on this. Let me jump in on this.

Max:                Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. This is very important. Your ability to be the cook and the admin and the this and the that is you being in the old pattern that you're trying to outgrow, fool.

Max:                Word.

Jessica:            Yes. I called you fool, but I did it with love.

Max:                Yes.

Jessica:            Now—okay. What I want to ground you into is, if you do the new thing in the old way, you'll get the old results. Boundaries—the hardest boundaries to have are the boundaries we have with ourselves. So what I want to ground you into is, if you're going to do this, you gotta do it different. You gotta do it different. And that—

Max:                Tell me how to do it. Tell me how to do it.

Jessica:            It means moving slower. It means moving slower. Have you ever done Pilates?

Max:                No.

Jessica:            Okay. The reason why I ask—

Max:                But I—build your core.

Jessica:            Okay. So you know about that. So the reason why I ask is because, in Pilates, you're not supposed to lift your leg without doing it from your core.

Max:                Yes.

Jessica:            So, if you just lift your leg and you floop-a-doop it without engaging your core, then they make you do it again. It didn't count.

Max:                Yes.

Jessica:            Right? And so everything moves slower. Your body trembles. And you are constantly, constantly, constantly engaging your fucking core.

Max:                Yes.

Jessica:            That's the metaphor for you because, yes, you could set up a private practice and put together a website and blast your services and do all the things, and then you'd be doing your same old bullshit. You'd be Virgoing a Pisces thing. Do you know what I'm saying? You would be trying to control, contain, micromanage something you are meant to be present and flow with. We're talking about where your soul is journeying towards. Where your soul is journeying towards is learning to allow the fruit to sit on the ground and compost and those seeds to become seedlings and those seedlings to become flowers or trees or whatever.

Max:                So let me ask you—as a cook and as someone who has a garden with a massive food garden outside my house, whenever I see my limes, oranges, and lemons right now on the ground, I pick them up and I juice them and freeze them, or I give them to other people. So the actual, actual concept of letting fruit/food rot on the ground is against my Jewish, political feminist sensibility. So can you reframe that?

Jessica:            Sure. I'm not going to reframe it. We're going to dig into it. We're going to use it.

Max:                Okay.

Jessica:            So what you're talking about is the fruit was ready to be picked. You hadn't gotten to it yet, and it fell on the ground. Right?

Max:                Yes.

Jessica:            You're not talking about fruit that was ready to be picked, and you didn't notice that it was on the ground for a week and it's rotting.

Max:                Okay. Okay.

Jessica:            And that's what we're talking about. These ideas of you being a micromanager—you already know that's a rotting fruit. We're not going to pretend that's ready to be juiced. Don't give it to your friends. You've done it. You know what I'm saying?

Max:                Yes.

Jessica:            Let's be real, okay?

Max:                Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Jessica:            So this is not edible fruit. You eat the edible fruit. You share the edible things. Yes, when the flowers are blooming and beautiful, fuck yes, that's when you take those flowers and you give them as gifts.

Max:                Yes. Yes.

Jessica:            You put them on the mantel. Whatever.

Max:                Yes.

Jessica:            It's about recognizing that there are so many fruits, there are so many flowers, you don't get to them all in time. So a lot of them are rotting, and they've been rotting a long damn time. And what this metaphor is to speak to is—you know how a lot of people like to keep their gardens really tidy, and so at the end of the season, they gather up all their leaves and they put them in a bag, and then they put it out in the compost bin or they throw it out? Don't do that, because if you leave the leaves, they create an ecosystem for all kinds of insects that do so many amazing things. And then they eventually compost, making your soil more rich.

                        That's what I'm talking about. You already know that micromanaging and hypervigilance do not work for you. So this is to say, when you know you have already been doing the same thing over and over and over again and it has never yielded the results you want, or eight out of ten times, it doesn't yield the results you want—

Max:                Yes. Correct.

Jessica:            —that's what we're calling the leaves that need to be left on the ground. That's what we're calling the fruit that needs to return to the soil and the seeds that get to do their damn thing.

Max:                Okay.

Jessica:            That's what we're referring to. So it's good to use your hypervigilance and your ability to micromanage to create abundance, to share, to navigate life. We don't want to get rid of that skill. It's that instead of having faith that you have enough and you have ability, you're constantly returning. You're constantly returning to the hypervigilance. You're constantly returning, so you're cleaning things up that aren't messy.

                        In other words, more functionally, what is happening is that you know that you are cultivating a faith-based life. You know that the way you have approached private practices and small businesses in the past has burned you out and not yielded the results you want. You know all these things.

Max:                Yes.

Jessica:            But you haven't figured out how to sit with the discomfort of doing things differently. And that's the invitation. That's the boundary work. It's values-based boundary. It's self-love. All I'm talking about is loving yourself enough to say to yourself, "I am not in charge of the rotting leaves. The rotting leaves are the gift from the tree to the soil. I don't need to micromanage the way this is going to turn out, even though I know I can, even though I know I want to, even though I fear that it's actually necessary. But instead, I can take that hypervigilance, I can take that micromanaging nature, and apply it in a place that it's actually needed. I can—I don't know—learn how to braid rugs. I can learn something about the energetic body that is really meticulous and hard to learn." Apply those skills where they're needed instead of where there's habits, deep grooves and habits that you already know don't do shit for you.

Max:                Is there anything that you can speak to, chart-based, about the concept of fucking stepping away from community and the deep grief and the loneliness? Is there any insight? Because that's just like—talking about feeding or fueling or nurturing, as a little tender sprout or a seed, faith or just my heart—the inability to relate to community and to people and thinking about moving and severance is so painful.

Jessica:            Yeah. Yeah.

Max:                Do you have any insight on that?

Jessica:            My insight for you is that you're really clear. It's you know that the relationships have already changed. You know that you're leaving, and you know that there's grief.

Max:                I don't believe in myself about leaving yet. I mean, there's the faith of, like, I know these things and I can't ignore them. But I'm not—

Jessica:            Until the day you're gone—

Max:                Yes.

Jessica:            —there cannot be, because the hypervigilance that is core to your nature says, "Until I'm on the plane, I might not take the flight."

Max:                Yeah.

Jessica:            "It doesn't matter that I bought the ticket."

Max:                Yeah.

Jessica:            And okay, that's your nature. We're not going to change your epigenetics. We're not going to change your whole, entire personality, and we shouldn't try.

Max:                So is there any soothing, or is there any—

Jessica:            Grief.

Max:                I don't know. I'm angry. I'm fucking angry about this. I'm angry that my friends don't—I can't relate to. I'm angry that I fucking can't have some tenderness. What's the balm? Is there any soothing?

Jessica:            The anger is your way of staving off the grief. I mean, I'm not saying that there aren't little things that you are actually really authentically very angry about, but most of it is actually just grief. And the truth is that hypervigilance that is really intrinsic to your nature, that you've over-relied on in your nature, has got you in a position where you are sad. You are grieving. And your brain says, "Why? Fuck. Why? Fuck. Fuck. It's them. No, it's me. I'm mad at me. No, I'm mad at them."

                        Anger is, in this situation—and not only this situation for you, but in this situation, it is the scab that sits over the wound of loss and grief. And the truth is, from what I'm seeing energetically, many of those people you have authentically loved and shared love with. Many of those people, it was never exactly it, but—you know, community, friendship—it happens. And you have changed, and some of them—maybe most of them—haven't.

                        And you can point fingers, and you can get mad, and that's fair. But the deepest truth is that you're grieving. You're grieving for what could have been, what once was, what won't be. And it's spiritual grief. It's emotional grief. And you are trying to process it analytically, and so it's coming out as anger when what it is is sadness. And for you, when you feel really sad, fear comes up. And when fear comes up, your brain takes over.

                        And so, every time you catch yourself in that loop, gently say to yourself, "It's okay to be sad. I don't know where this is going. I don't know when this ends. But right now, I'm sad. It's okay to be sad." And that's it. There is no person in their 50s who's looking to leave their community that they've built—what, 30 years?

Max:                35, 40.

Jessica:            35 years, 40 years building. There's no person who's thinking about leaving their liked ones and their loved ones—because you're leaving both, right—

Max:                Yes.

Jessica:            —who's not going to feel overwhelming waves of grief. There is no astrology, there is no drug—I mean, there's probably drugs, but there's nothing, really, that's going to, quote unquote, "fix" that. Feeling grief is a validation of how deeply you love. Here's the thing. If you don't love those people, you have nothing to grieve. If you don't yearn, you have nothing to grieve. But you actually have a lot to grieve because you have this big, old heart. And your brain says, "Other people have to act a certain way in order for me to know that they care, too." But that's not true. Everybody is currently in trauma, consciously or unconsciously.

Max:                Yes.

Jessica:            Everybody is dealing with fear. Everybody is thinking, "Should I go? Can I go? I can't go. You shouldn't go." Right? Some versions of those things?

Max:                Yes. Yes.

Jessica:            Especially for Queer folks, right?

Max:                Yes.

Jessica:            And so, if you go around and you say to your loved ones and your liked ones, "Hey, I'm going," and they have a weird reaction, it might have nothing to do with you. It might have everything to do with their own terror and their own difficulty or inability to face it because you're going and they can't go, or they haven't made the choice to go.

                        If we pull back—and this is a very Piscean practice, my friend. If we pull back and we separate from narratives and attachment and we don't micromanage, but we just try to gaze at the tapestry instead of the yarn—right? So you look at the whole tapestry, right? Yeah. So, when we do that, what happens is you can start to kind of easily see a lot of people's reactions to you are just about their own shit right now and maybe their own shit in general—a nice little cocktail of the two.

                        No one—not you, not me, not them—can overcome our own psychological, emotional, and spiritual hurdles for someone else just like that. And everybody is exceptionally triggered right now.

Max:                Yes.

Jessica:            Everybody's terrified. And everything that you're going through—which is scary and triggering, right—

Max:                Yes.

Jessica:            —is happening in this larger backdrop of everyone being scared. And so, if you can hold that, it doesn't mean you don't feel grief. You'll feel just as much grief. But you might not take some people's behaviors as personally, and you might not need to be as angry. Now, you'll still have some anger. Anger is fine. Be pissed. That's fine. When people piss you off, be pissed. That's fair. But some of this anger is just a smokescreen, right?

Max:                Yeah.

Jessica:            It's not really like, "I'm angry at you. You've harmed me."

Max:                No.

Jessica:            It's, "Why can't you show up?"

Max:                Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            And the reason why people can't show up—you actually can—you can easily hold space. If you're pulled—again, if you're in the tapestry zone, you can easily hold space for why people can't.

Max:                Yeah.

Jessica:            But what you mustn't do is then collapse your own boundaries and invalidate your perspective. I see you doing that in this moment. It's not either your perspective or my perspective. It's, "Oh. This absolutely sucks because I can get why this person isn't showing up and probably can't show up, and it's breaking my fucking heart and it's hurting my feelings. And I can't even be mad at them because I can kind of get where they're coming from.

Max:                Yeah. I don't want to throw you off your thought, but with my main thrust, to go live very close to water, like water that I can jump in on the daily—I mean, we already know as woo people, you know, return to the womb, embryo, yada, yada. But is there anything that you can—I mean, I know this.  I don't know what I'm asking. But—

Jessica:            Correct. You know it. You know it. You already said something you know. You don't need any feedback from me. I'm happy to give it to you. Yeah, everything in your chart screams go to the water. Yes, 100 percent.

Max:                But if Leo is fire, water puts me out.

Jessica:            It doesn't mean anything—okay. So you're being very Virgo right now. You're taking the three data points you know about astrology and trying to invalidate your inner knowing. Okay?

Max:                (laughs)

Jessica:            Yeah. That's right. You laugh at yourself. Thank you. Yes, you do have a Leo Sun. It's even conjunct Mars, the fieriest planet in the zodiac. How-the-fuck-ever, it's in the twelfth house, the house of Pisces. So any fire planet, any fire sign, you put it in the twelfth house—it becomes steam. Okay? And so you also have Neptune at the bottom of your chart, at your IC. That means put your body in water. Put your feet in water. Drink water. You've also got a North Node in Pisces. Have I mentioned that? And so, yeah, go to the damn water. Water and fog? Fantastic. Water—water is good for you.

                        Now, that said, the most important thing I can tell you is, in this hour we've spent together, I have heard and watched you speak something that you know and then ask three questions rapid fire afterwards about it. Speak to faith in thinking and analytic terms. And I want to just name those things for you so you can practice noticing it because that's where shifts can occur. Most of what we've talked about you already fucking knew, right? You already fucking knew. It's a practice of giving yourself permission to sit in your knowing longer than you are habituated. I'm not saying forever.

                        So okay. You just said, "I need to move to water." It took maybe half a second for you to say, "But I don't know. Tell me about my chart." And so what the practice might be is 30 seconds. Put 30 seconds on your phone, the timer, and sit in the knowing, not chasing the thoughts, not chasing the thoughts, not chasing the thoughts, not chasing the thoughts. "Okay. 30 seconds passed. I can chase the thoughts." Practice sitting in the knowing and noticing what emotionally and mentally emerges to pew-pew-pew-pew-pew you out of alignment. It's quick and it's habitual.

                        The older we get, the deeper the grooves are in our habits, and the harder they are to break. And so this is not going to be easy for you. That's okay. You've already chosen it. I mean, this is the thing, Max. You have already chosen it. You have chosen it. You've done it. Now, you could undo it. It's not written in stone, although, of course, were it written in stone, you could also break the stone, move on, whatever.

                        You've already chosen it. But instead of staying in alignment with your choice, you're questioning your choice. You're picking at your choice. You're looking for validation. You're looking for somebody to poke holes in your choice. And on the one hand, hey, fair. You know what I mean? Big choices. And on the other hand, that sits in opposition to your life goals. You want to practice supporting people energetically on their path. Well, do you really think you get to do that without being on your fucking path?

Max:                Fuck you (laughs).

Jessica:            (laughs)

Max:                God. You just had to get down right in there into the core.

Jessica:            Nobody could see this, but I got two middle fingers—not one middle finger, two middle fingers. It's true. It's true. I did. So this is where it is, right? This is what it is. When developing a new skill, one that's this deep, you want to titrate. You want to just—like, 30 seconds on the clock, 10 seconds if that's all you can take. Do not ever invalidate progress, even if it's miniscule. Progress is progress. Progress is energy. Progress is movement. That's all it is. It's not big progress or little progress. It's progress.

                        So strive to sit with your knowing a little longer, and then you can go back to your "I'm going to tear it apart to make sure it's real" thing. But then, maybe after a month, that 10 seconds becomes 30 seconds. Maybe after six months, that 30 seconds becomes 35 seconds. It doesn't have to happen quick. It has to happen for real. That's all. That's all. Right?

Max:                Yeah.

Jessica:            So we never want to get rid of that hypervigilance. I want to speak to your inner child right now, okay? Your hypervigilance is a beautiful skill. We're never getting rid of it, never getting rid of it. But what you want is adaptability so that you use the hypervigilance in a way that keeps you safe instead of using it in all situations just in case, which is what you've been doing. So, if you're going to build a private practice, if you're going to build a new life, if you're going to build new friendships, new love relationships, you need to be different. So far, you're actually doing it. It doesn't feel to you like you're doing it. What you're doing is having fucking boundaries. That's doing it, by the way. That's doing it.

Max:                Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            So it's about slowly practicing, slowly practicing and understanding that you don't have to get there quick. You just want to get there. When people are like, "I have to procreate. I need to have a baby. I need to give birth to a baby, and I only have so much time," I'm like, "Okay. We gotta talk about speeding up the process." For every other human, love comes when it fucking comes. There's no timeline on it. There's no timeline on it.

Max:                Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            So I want to just remind you that if there is a tapestry to life, if there's this bigger picture and we get too caught up on each individual piece of yarn, then what happens is we never get to actually enjoy the full picture. And this has been something that you have learned recently, like really in your body. I see that. You got it. And then you got back home, and you were like, "What? No. Wait. No. Wait. What?" Right?

                        And so it's a practice. This is what happens when we leave home; we go to a retreat. We travel. When we leave home and we have these out-of-our-life kind of experiences, so much can get downloaded. So much can make sense. We can change so quickly.

Max:                Yes.

Jessica:            But it doesn't get integrated. It never gets integrated. Integration occurs in your regular life over time.

Max:                Yeah.

Jessica:            This is the shit part. The grief is the shit. Compost is shit. The shit is part of life. The grief is part of love.

Max:                Yeah.

Jessica:            It's a practice that you're going to keep on returning to yourself around. And hold on. There's one last thing I'm supposed to—bear with me. I don't do parts work. Have you heard of parts work?

Max:                Mm-mm.

Jessica:            I don't know. [indiscernible 01:03:36] because I can't explain it because I don't do it. I've never studied it. But you have such a loudmouth analyzer. I'm going to give you one last piece of advice here, okay? When you find yourself caught up in narrative or really angry—a.k.a. caught up in narrative—you may want to get out pen and paper or whatever—your digital device—and write a letter from one part of you to another part. So write a letter, or maybe have a text exchange, between the part of you that is faith-based, the part of you that knows what your choices are, knows what your boundaries are, and the part of you that's like, "But, but, but, but, but, and also, and also, and also."

Have those two parts have a conversation so that you're validating them both. This would be progress for you because it would be bringing your faith-based part into the conversation as an equal.

Max:    Yeah.

Jessica:            And that'll really help you.

Max:    Yeah.

Jessica:            And if you find yourself over-centering one part of you, then you can be like, "Oh. I'm really in a mode." And that's when you take this next step. When you cannot use your analyzer to come to a place of neutrality or positivity—it's not always possible, right?

Max:                Correct.

Jessica:            Then what you do is you distract with something neutral. So maybe that means you cut up an apple, and then you put it in some lemon juice because you have all these lemons from your tree, right? Maybe that means you listen to music. You do something that's not self-harm but that's not that deep and that's completely off topic, and you return to the topic when you're less activated, when you can give all your parts equal space at the table so that you can come to the truth.

Max:                A teacher of mine asked me where I found home in my body, and I could not answer that question. And I think what you just said about having literally a text exchange or a verbal text exchange between faith-knowing Max and angry-child, activated Max could be a way to legitimize so that it's both—

Jessica:            Yes.

Max:                —the dualistic nature of me, which gives validation, which could really give me a better sense of knowing—

Jessica:            Yeah. Absolutely, and—

Max:                —because pros and cons lists, I'm too—

Jessica:            No. Yeah.

Max:                No.

Jessica:            No, it doesn't work.

Max:                But the reframe and the context that you just said could be very, very, very helpful.

Jessica:            Yeah. And if you stay with this practice—I'm going to say for a couple years—and you find it works, something is going to emerge, and it's that there will be more parts that come to the table. So the analyzer part is so fucking loud and takes up so much space there's no room for anything else.

So what this practice is of bringing in the faith-based part—and then, once that faith-based part has an actual seat at the table instead of the analyzer part just being like, "Fuck it. You can sit here for now," there will be, then, room—the faith-based part is now maybe 50 percent, maybe 40 percent, maybe 30 percent—doesn't matter—will be able to be like, "Well, there's this other part. And it's this spontaneous knowing part. Here's this passionate part. Here's this excited part." All these other parts are getting drowned out by the hypervigilance, right?

Max:    Mm-hmm. Yes.

Jessica:            And so the cool thing is, if you make room for this other part, you really do—over the course of time, more parts are going to emerge. More parts are going to show up. And it will deepen your practice as a spiritual being. It will deepen your intimacies with others. It will make it easier for you to have boundaries with people that are just not a match at this time. And that shit's gold—gold.

                        So we do have to wrap up.

Max:                Yes.

Jessica:            But we answered your questions, right?

Max:                I mean, what are the questions?

Jessica:            That's the real question.

Max:                I'm moving. You know, can you tell me where I should go? Will you tell me if I'm going to find love? How do I process my grief and anger? I mean, these are huge questions.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Max:                But I got various gems of insight, and I just want to thank you. I'm very grateful for you.

Jessica:            My pleasure. I'm so glad we got to do this 21 years later. That's kind of cool.

Max:                Wow. I'm telling you.

Jessica:            Yeah. Look who got old. Look who got old. Both of us.

Max:                And we're alive. And we're alive.

Jessica:            Yeah. We really are. We really are.

Max:                Yeah.

Jessica:            It's really cool.