Living the Spiral

🎙️ Seven-Eight Magic: A Conversation with Stephanie FoleyA Magicians interview with Alison of Living the Spiral

Stephanie Foley of Moon Feather Hollow joins Living the Spiral for a conversation that started with a shared obsession over the number seven and unfolded into something bigger: the relationship between seven as process and eight as the structure that holds it. We trace this through Inanna's eight-point star and seven gates, the seven planetary days of the week, grief and the gold buried in returning cycles, the masculine wound around shedding and regeneration, and the shift from matriarchy and patriarchy toward what Stephanie calls synarchy.

In this episode:

How Stephanie and Alison found each other through Substack and recognized a shared body of work

Inanna's descent, the seven gates, and the eight-point star

Why seven is the living process and eight is the structure that holds it

Returning to old grief from a new vantage point in the cycle

Building a life around the seven planetary days

Moon Feather Hollow as an imaginal sanctuary

The masculine wound and the fear of shedding

Moving from matriarchy and patriarchy toward synarchy

Asynchronous voice notes and untethering from performance

A shared Jupiter placement in Gate 34, the gate of power

Find Stephanie:Website: moonfeatherhollow.comSubstack: Seasons and Stars (stephaniefoley.substack.com)YouTube: Moon Feather Hollow

Find Alison:Substack: Living the SpiralInstagram: @hearthandspiralWebsite & sessions: hearthandspiral.comAlison's Ecosomatic Astrology course opens this fall, six Tuesdays on Zoom, September 22 through October 27. Recorded if you can't make it live. Register at https://www.hearthandspiral.com/ecosomatic-astrology-human-design

Both Ends of the Axis

My Uranus opposition landed the same day as the Leo solar eclipse, and it taught me something about integration, fire and air, and letting go of nodal shame. In this episode: two eclipses landing on my personal planets a year apart, fruit-versus-mycelium and flowers vs. wildfires, and why every axis in the chart needs both ends instead of a winner.

Mentioned in this episode:

Sign up for my new course Ecosomatic Astrology 101, starting September 22nd on the fall equinox → https://www.hearthandspiral.com/ecosomatic-astrology-human-design

Ecosomatic Human Design (bundle discount if you take both, plus a free one-on-one consultation)

If you've got Leo or Aquarius placements, or this eclipse landed on your own personal planets, I'd love to hear where it showed up for you.

Liberation Magic: A Conversation with Aki Hirata Quetzalyolotzin

This week for the Magicians series on Living the Spiral, Alison sits down with Aki Hirata Quetzalyolotzin, a medicine woman, storyteller, and founder of Minka Brooklyn and Minka Mystery School. They talk about claiming a cosmic slut identity after divorce, what magic actually means, why decolonial liberation starts with desire, and how love and grief are the same act.

Topics covered

[02:00] On claiming a new identity after divorce

[08:00] On work as an offering rather than a role

[11:00] On what magic really means

[17:00] On liberation and undoing separation

[24:00] On desire as a creative engine

[53:00] On trauma culture and what comes after naming it

[55:00] On love as a brave act

[1:04:00] Aki's offerings and where to find her

About Aki

Aki Hirata Quetzalyolotzin, also known as Jewel Moon Medicine Woman, is a multidisciplinary energy healing facilitator and community organizer whose work centers on decolonial spiritual liberation. She has dedicated her life to studying mysticism, philosophy, and various healing systems. She lives between Japan and the US and is teaching this summer in LA, the Berkshires, and New York, including a Young Witches School for teenagers working with intuition and oracle cards, and a Reiki training during the Lion's Gate portal built around what she and her teacher call Earth Evolution Reiki.

Writing: Field Notes from the Inbetween on Substack

Instagram: @soulflowermedicine

Teaching home: Minka Brooklyn

About Alison

Alison is an ecosomatic astrologer, Human Design guide, breathwork practitioner, and creative sovereignty coach based in the high desert outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her work lives under the name Hearth & Spiral, where she blends astrology, Human Design, somatic practice, and myth into a path back to the body and the land. She hosts Living the Spiral as both a podcast and a Substack publication, and co-created ELA Map with her partner Jackson.

Writing: Living the Spiral on Substack

Instagram: @hearthandspiral

Website: hearthandspiral.com

Interested in being interviewed on Living the Spiral: Magicians? Send Alison a DM.

Leo Season 2026: Stepping Onto Pride Rock

If you want to go deep into your own chart and how this season lands for you personally, my books are open at hearthandspiral.com. And I also want to invite you to join the waitlist for ELAmap, the new astrocartography app my partner and I have been building- it's going live next week on the Aquarius full moon!

This Leo season episode traces the sign all the way back to Babylon and Egypt, through the Thema Mundi, the ancient world chart with the sun in its own home in Leo, and into the Human Design gates of the season and the transits of an eclipse-charged summer.

We cover the nodes shifting into Leo and Aquarius, a Full Moon in Aquarius standing cazimi opposite a Jupiter-Sun conjunction, Mars easing into Cancer, and the total solar eclipse in Leo on August 12, the first of a new two-year series and the season's real centerpiece.

The season's invitation is to step fully into the light, and to figure out which parts of that radiance are true and which were only ever built for applause. Come out of the den before Virgo season asks you to get to work.

Key dates:July 24/25 · Mercury stations directJuly 26 · Nodes shift into Leo and AquariusJuly 29 · Full Moon in Aquarius / Sun cazimi Jupiter, Gate 31August 1 · Lughnasadh/LammasAugust 6 · Venus enters LibraAugust 9 · Mercury enters LeoAugust 11 · Mars enters CancerAugust 12 · Total Solar Eclipse in Leo, Gate 4 (Formulization)August 17 · Venus sextile JupiterThanks for listening! Find more posts at livingthespiral.com, or on IG and TikTok @hearthandspiral

Hey friends,

I’m trying something new here on Living the Spiral.

For years I’ve moved through forecasts of different shapes - weekly deep dives, then biweekly on the full and new moons, then monthly, always tracking the sun and planets through the signs, gates and seasons. That work isn’t going anywhere- it’s my foundation. But today I felt called to record without a plan, to speak from the hip instead of from research, and to let whatever wants to come through actually come through.

This is new for me in a specific way. I’m a 5/1 in human design, and that one line in my unconscious profile is about investigation, about laying a foundation before anything gets said out loud. I’ve spent years earning trust with myself by going deep before I speak. So sitting down to talk without that groundwork first is its own kind of edge. But as a self-projected projector, I need to speak out loud to know what I mean and what I desire. So it’s also, I think, exactly what today is asking of me.

Listen in the player above or find Living the Spiral wherever you listen to podcasts <3.

The Gate of the Now

It’s Friday, July 3rd as I record this, and we’re sitting inside the Mars-Uranus conjunction in Gemini, in Gate 20, the Gate of the Now. Mars and Uranus meet up roughly every two years, so the conjunction itself isn’t rare. What is rare is the sign. This is the first time this pairing has landed in Gemini in about 84 years, after about a decade of these conjunctions happening in Taurus. A new flavor of energy is moving through, and it’s arriving right as the United States marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

I don’t think that timing is incidental. The Fourth of July always falls when the sun is in the Gate of Provocation (39), whose gift is dynamism and whose siddhi is liberation. There’s no liberty without provoking or bringing attention to the thing that’s making you feel trapped.

The gate of Provocation is a Cancer gate, and I keep thinking of the crab: a creature built to withdraw into its shell, and also built with claws. Hiding isn’t the only option. Sometimes the claws come out because the shell alone won’t do the job anymore.

So we’ve got Uranus and Mars electrifying the present moment while the sun sits in the gate of Provocation, and the message underneath all of it feels pretty blunt: look around at where you believe yourself to be trapped, and take action. Shock the system a little. Move.

My own Chiron in this

My natal Chiron sits in the Gate of the Now, so this conjunction is landing directly on it. Chiron is the wound we hold that can eventually become the thing we teach from, once we’ve alchemized it. For me, this wound is about not feeling heard and not feeling fully seen by my community. Gemini rules communication and local networks, and this placement sits in my 11th house, the house of larger community and friendship groups, so having Uranus and Mars stir that up is landing in a very specific spot.

What I’m noticing under the provocation is a pattern I’ve built without meaning to. I tune myself down sometimes. I round off the complexity of what I actually think so that I’ll be easier to receive, softer to meet in the moment. And that habit, born out of wanting to be understood, ends up being the very thing that keeps me from being fully met.

A Chiron wound reopening tends to work that way. It doesn’t just point at the wound. It points at the strategy we built around the wound so we don’t feel it as intensely, and asks whether that strategy is still serving us. The pain can turn into medicine once it has an outlet.This is where self-understanding becomes part of the medicine. I've spent years with astrology, human design, the gene keys, meditation, and deep reflection, and what they've shown me about my own wiring is specific.

The only channels active in my chart are collective understanding circuits, and my sun gate is Gate 64, the gate that alchemizes Confusion into Illumination. So much of my design leans toward the big picture, toward zooming way out across long stretches of time and pattern. So when my Chiron is met by Uranus and Mars in the Gate of the present moment, I feel real friction there.

For a long time I treated that friction as something wrong with me, something to smooth over or apologize for to my community. Now I hold it differently. It's information about how I'm built, and it lets me meet the now on my own terms instead of forcing myself into a shape of how the now should look that was never mine.

I think this is available to anyone doing this work with their own chart. Getting to know yourself this closely means you can choose your response instead of running the old strategy without noticing. And once that kind of self-knowledge starts to settle in, it stops feeling like a personal project, and starts feeling like part of something much bigger moving through all of us.

From tribal bargain to individual sovereignty

Zooming out, we’re approaching a much longer transition that ties into all this.

In 2027, the precession of the equinoxes moves the vernal point from Gate 37, the Gate of Family and Community, into Gate 55, the Gate of Spirit and Abundance. Gate 37 is a tribal gate. Gate 55 is an individual one. Ra Uru Hu is said to have brought human design through in part to help prepare people for this exact shift.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how Tribal life runs on bargains. You give something, the group gives something back, and the whole structure depends on those trades holding. What I’m hearing from clients, and feeling in the wider culture, is that a lot of those bargains are starting to unravel, quietly failing. Institutions that promised protection in exchange for years of loyalty are backing out of the deal. Insurance companies drop coverage the moment it’s actually needed. Family systems built on the promise of safety in exchange for compliance stop delivering the safety once the compliance has already been given.

We’re standing in the brackish water where one system meets the next, and it’s uncomfortable in a very specific way. It’s not simply relief that a shift is happening. There’s real grief in a transition like this, and real fear in learning to trust your own inner authority instead of an external arrangement.

What abundance actually means

Gate 55 carries the word abundance, and I want to slow down on that word because I think it’s been flattened. Abundance comes from the Latin abundare, built from ab (away) and undare (to surge), rooted in unda, meaning wave. It’s a picture of water overflowing its banks. Abundance, at it’s root, is not accumulation. It’s the opposite. It’s overflow.

That distinction matters a lot to me right now, in a collective moment of time defined by the outer planets all in fire and air signs after a long stretch of earth and water. Water hasn’t disappeared. It’s just moved into the earthen cells of our bodies, into the emotional and energetic current each of us carries. Into the wave that fills and spills over rather than the pile that gets hoarded.

The shadow side of Gate 55 is victimization, and I want to be careful here, because there is real reason for people to feel like they’ve been trapped or targeted. This isn’t a manifest-your-own-reality message. It’s more a question of where our attention goes once the old bargains stop paying out.

Do we keep waiting for a system that isn’t going to fulfill its end, or do we start filling our own cup first, tuning into our internal wellsprings so what we have to offer comes from overflow instead of depletion or an outdated exchange?

Where this is heading

I’ve been deep in research on Egypt this year, on the pyramids as possible superconductors drawing on the Nile’s rise, and I keep landing on the idea that the human body works on a similar principle. The heart generates its own electromagnetic field. There’s a real connection between the water in the earth and the water in our blood, the same abundant overflow I’ve been circling all through this piece, just traced through a different lens.

I think this collective shift toward abundance is going to show up first in the body, before it shows up anywhere else. Abundance was always about what moves through us and spills over, and the body is where that movement actually happens. It’s in the blood finding its rhythm, the breath filling past capacity and letting go, the heart’s own field reaching past the edges of skin. Learning to trust that overflow in your own body is practice for trusting it everywhere else - in your relationships, your work, and the wider shift we’re all living through together.

I’ll be teaching a free masterclass later this summer on these larger planetary configurations, including the Barbault Basket, the grand fire and air trines forming among the outer planets, and the shift to the Cross of the Sleeping Phoenix. Comment or send a message if that’s something you’d be interested in!

I’m also building toward a small group coaching offering in September, back to school season, where we’ll look at your individual chart alongside these collective shifts and work through embodied practices to meet this transitional moment with abundance. I want to talk there about what it means to attune to your own life force, your own frequency, and create from that place, instead of the one that got handed to you before you had a chance to shine your light.

Happy Gate of Provocation and 4th of July, however you choose to celebrate. May whatever’s been holding you tightly loosen its grip enough for you to notice it was never as fixed as it seemed.xo,

Alison

Thanks so much for being here! Here are a few ways you can support me and my work:

Wyrd Magic with Petah Raven

Petah Raven is an editor, writer, and the creator of Pandora's Lost Gift, a Substack weaving together astrology, tarot, myth, and mysticism. Petah writes with the rigor of a researcher and the honesty of someone reporting back from inside the experience - and this conversation reflects exactly that. We meandered through goddess mythology, the magic of words, integrating polarity, and what it means to wield power responsibly in a world drowning in information.

Find Petah at Pandora's Lost Gift on Substack and watch for his forthcoming book, The Living Language of Tarot.

In this episode:

(00:00) Introduction - who is Petah Raven and how we found each other through Inanna

(02:00) The origin of Pandora's Lost Gift - the myth of the jar (not the box), hope as the lost gift, and the feminist lens on Zeus

(07:00) The audacity of hope and the audacity of magic - what it takes to claim either

(09:00) Petah's visitations by the goddess - what they were, what they weren't, and what they asked of him

(13:00) Being initiated into women's business and sleeping under the stars in a sacred circle

(16:00) Imagination, magic, and the imaginal realm - why something doesn't have to be historically real to be true

(19:00) Astrology as meaning-making - why engagement with the symbols matters more than whether the planets "actually" do anything

(21:00) Words as spells - the etymology of wyrd, spelling as casting, and the runes as the original language of magic

(23:00) Imaginal cells and the butterfly - sitting in the goo before the new form arrives

(24:00) Rune notes passed in junior high and the history of codes and ciphers in magical practice

(26:00) Neurodivergence, following breadcrumbs, and why curiosity is the real spiritual practice

(28:00) The pollinators of Gemini season and the Gate of Enthusiasm - on cross-pollination of ideas and following what lights you up

(30:00) The Wild West internet as hyperlinked oracle - and how the algorithm ruined the surf

(33:00) Magic, power, and responsibility - what happens when you hand people chainsaws without teaching them to wield the blade

(36:00) The magician card, Trump as magi, and how trickster energy shows up in politics and propaganda

(39:00) World building, myth making, and who gets to plant the seeds of new stories

(42:00) Finding your path - Petah's long and winding road from private school misfit to writer and archeologist

(45:00) Gnosis, presence, and how you actually know when you're on the right track

(48:00) Polarity vs. duality - why yin yang is one word and what gets created in the space between opposites

(51:00) Full moons, the infinity loop, and integrating the opposite sign's medicine

(55:00) The I Ching's first hexagram - how even pure yang contains the instruction to wait

(57:00) Fuxi, Nüwa, and the cosmic polarity woven into creation myths across cultures

(59:00) The Golden Dawn, tarot, and why creation requires polarity - from Waite and Colman Smith to sperm and egg

(01:01:00) Non-binary figures in the Inanna myth, two-spirit traditions, and the rising integration of the sacred third

(01:02:00) Petah's upcoming book The Living Language of Tarot - developing visual literacy and building your own relationship with any deck

Mentioned in this episode:

Pandora's Lost Gift - Petah's Substack: ravenastrology.substack.com

Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta

The Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck

The Tarot of the Witches (the deck from Live and Let Die - yes, really)

Fuxi and Nüwa - the Chinese creator myth

The Inanna descent myth and Enheduanna, the world's earliest recorded author

The Lord of the Rings / Tolkien on world building and the imagination

The I Ching / Yi Jing - hexagram one and the hidden yin in pure yang

About Alison Dale

Alison Dale is an artist, writer, astrologer, and Human Design guide based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her work lives at the intersection of ancestral systems that track the seasons and the planets, embodiment practices, and earth-based spirituality.

Book a reading or explore more of what she offers at hearthandspiral.com, follow along at @hearthandspiral on Instagram, or on Substack at livingthespiral.com.

Cancer Season 2026 Rising Sign Horoscopes (Part 2) | Chiron in Taurus, Mercury Retrograde & Jupiter in Leo

I welcome you to Living the Spiral for part two of my Cancer season 2026 rising sign horoscopes, and I explain why rising signs are the most accurate way to track how the season lands in your real life (and where to find yours), while noting part one covers Cancer’s history, Human Design gates, and the season’s major transits. Then I move sign by sign, tying Cancer season to the house it activates for each rising sign and highlighting the big dates: Chiron entering Taurus on June 19 (an ~8-year healing journey), the Capricorn full moon on June 29, Mercury retrograde in Cancer from June 29–July 23, Jupiter entering Leo on June 30 (a year of expansion), and the Cancer new moon on July 14 as a fresh seeding moment. I wrap by sharing where to listen, subscribe, book readings, and grab my Cancer season guidebook.

00:00 Welcome and Overview

01:50 How Rising Signs Work

02:43 Aries Rising Home Roots

06:48 Taurus Rising Voice Care

10:50 Gemini Rising Values Worth

17:15 Cancer Rising Season Reset

21:31 Leo Rising Inner Retreat

27:02 Virgo Rising Community Check

31:39 Libra Rising Career Nurture

36:12 Scorpio Rising Big Beliefs

40:09 Sagittarius Rising Deep Healing

45:33 Capricorn Rising Relationship Axis

50:50 Aquarius Rising Routines Health

55:36 Pisces Rising Creative Bloom

01:00:11 Closing and Resources

Cancer Season 2026: The Fierce Embraceif you want to go deep into your own chart and how this season lands for you personally, my books are open for Soulshine Readings at hearthandspiral.com.

The crab is older than you think. This episode traces the sign all the way back to Babylon and Sumer, through the Thema Mundi -the ancient world chart with Cancer rising - and into the Human Design gates of the season and the transits of a busy, electric summer.

We cover Chiron entering Taurus, a very full end of June (full moon, Mercury retrograde, and Jupiter into Leo all in one day), the Mars-Uranus conjunction on July 4th, and the New Moon in Cancer on July 14 in the Gate of Details.

The season's invitation is to go dark enough to find out what's incubating inside you. Come home before Leo season's stage calls you out..

Key dates:June 19 · Chiron enters TaurusJune 20/21 · Summer SolsticeJune 29 · Full Moon in Capricorn (Gate 58) / Mercury Rx begins / Jupiter enters LeoJuly 4 · Mars conjunct Uranus, Gate 39July 7 · Neptune stations retrogradeJuly 12 · Mercury cazimi, Gate 56July 14 · New Moon in Cancer, Gate 62

In this episode of Living the Spiral: Magicians, your host Alison Dale interviews astrologer and community builder Britten LaRue. She's the creator of Emergence Astrology, author of the book Living Astrology, and host of Moon to Moon podcast. Alison and Britten chat about magic as change and the willingness to be moved by it. They discuss skill as a Saturnian devotional practice developed over time, “voice” as the sum of our choices and boundaries, and one of Britten’s guiding phrases, “there’s no such thing as potential, there’s only emergence,” as an antidote to shame and striving. The conversation contrasts astrology as a living language with predictive approaches, distinguishes divination from fortune-telling, and connects desire, unshaming, and self-trust to magical practice.

Britten shares her path from academia to astrology after a mystical period of intuition and lunar guidance, and she describes restructuring her offerings, clarifying Living Emergence as a community space and Emergence Astrology Pathway as a multi-year school.

About Britten LaRue

Britten LaRue is a recovering academic who now teaches, writes, and offers transformational readings from a place of sacred unknowing. She is the creator of Emergence Astrology, the author of Living Astrology, and the host of the Moon to Moon podcast. Her work invites us to think of the signs and planets as a living language designed to equip us to meet what is happening with our fullest, most vibrant power.

Work with Britten:

Enrollment for the Emergence Astrology Pathway opens at the summer solstice. If you've been looking for a long-term home for your astrological studies that feels mystical, spacious, and genuinely transformational, it's worth exploring. You can also find her in Living Emergence, her ongoing community space for practice and belonging, and pick up her book Living Astrology in her shop.

Visit brittenlarue.com to learn more, follow her on Instagram at @brittenlarue, and subscribe to Moon to Moon wherever you listen to podcasts.

About Alison Dale

Alison Dale is an artist, writer, astrologer, and Human Design guide based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her work lives at the intersection of ancestral systems that track the seasons and the planets, embodiment practices, and earth-based spirituality.

Work with Alison:

Book a reading or explore more of what she offers at hearthandspiral.com, follow along at @hearthandspiral on Instagram, or on Substack at livingthespiral.com.

Timestamps:

00:00 Meet Britten LaRue

05:21 Claiming the Magician

05:58 Magic as Change

08:29 Emergence and Voice

11:32 Skills Desire Guidance

15:57 Unshaming Astrology

18:13 Saturn and Skillbuilding

25:06 From Academia to Astrology

28:55 Neptune Awakening Leap

32:38 Why Community Matters

39:06 Maui Intuition Moon Call

40:15 Moon Ritual Beginnings

41:16 Learning Lunar Astrology

49:22 Deconditioning and Unshaming

50:33 Divination and Trust

58:49 Restructuring Offerings

01:03:52 Community vs Pathway

01:05:29 Imaginal Spaces Online

01:07:25 Compost and Rebrand Metaphor

01:08:17 Where to Find Britten

Get your Gemini Season Guidebook here!Alison of Living the Spiral shares Gemini season 2026 horoscopes by rising sign. With Uranus newly in Gemini and a Gemini New Moon on June 15, each sign is guided through the house Gemini activates and what Uranus may revolutionize over the next seven years, with key dates including the Uranus cazimi around May 22, the Sagittarius Full Moon on May 31, the Mars–Pluto square on May 25, Uranus square the nodes on June 12, Venus entering Leo on June 13, and the Venus–Jupiter conjunction in Cancer on June 9. She has a Gemini season guidebook available at hearthandspiral.com and invites listeners to work with her through astrology and human design readings, coaching, and her Tending the Hearth offering.

00:00 Welcome

02:47 Why Rising Signs Matter

03:09 Gemini Season Big Shift

03:31 Aries Rising Third House

06:00 Taurus Rising Money Values

08:26 Gemini Rising Identity Rewire

11:19 Cancer Rising Twelfth House

14:22 Leo Rising Community Shakeup

17:33 Virgo Rising Career Calling

20:21 Libra Rising Beliefs Travel

22:48 Scorpio Rising Deep Transformation

25:39 Sagittarius Rising Partnerships

28:41 Capricorn Rising Routines Health

31:15 Aquarius Rising Creativity Play

33:34 Pisces Rising Home Roots

37:01 Wrap Up Resources and Links