Skies and Currents

Dear Friends,

Happy Scorpio New Moon.

I am so happy to be writing to you in the wake of a rare moment of hope after so many months of collective darkness.

Brandon and I recorded this podcast on the morning of the midterm elections, and because we could not have allowed ourselves to hope for such a stunning and decisive outcome, the recording contains none of the happy astonishment or tender overwhelm I’ve felt over the last few days. However, as I relistened to our conversation in preparation for posting this episode, I am amazed at the archetypal resonance of planetary action with this extraordinary turning point.

For many months, I’ve been curiously and cautiously anticipating this strange conjunction of Mars, Jupiter, and the South Node in Leo. These conjunctions go exact in the next seven days (amid the direct stations of Venus and Mercury). But the stunning collapse of the ruling party into the gaping void of the South Node in Leo is a potent beginning to the configuration. We discuss these dynamics in much greater detail in the episode, and I hope it helps provide context for this moment and the long battle ahead.

While it’s hard to imagine the rest of the month living up to the bang-opening of its first week, I don’t think November is done with us yet. The weeks ahead contain some extraordinary and unusual astrology that asks us to be brave and act in alignment with our most deeply held values, even if we can’t fully imagine or control the outcomes.

On one final technical note, apologies for my audio on this episode—I’m not sure what happened. But as always, I am learning as I go.

Wishing each of you peace, grace, and power.

Warmly,

Christina

www.skiesofgrace.com

After a brief hiatus in September, we are back with the October forecast. Much of our discussion centers around the Venus retrograde and the liminal passage between the high-society realms of Libra and Scorpio’s underworld domain. I hope you enjoy the conversation!

A Few Announcements:

* In January, Brandon will be teaching an Introduction Class at the Foundation for Shamanic Studies in Los Angeles! Read more and Register.

* There are still a few slots open for our Pluto Remediation Workshop in Redmond, WA, on Sunday, October 18th. If you live in the greater Seattle area, join us! Read a detailed description and register here on my site.

If you would like to attend but require financial assistance, reach out to me directly: [email protected]

PLUTO: CONFRONTING THE SHADOW

A four-hour immersive experience that weaves together Astrology, Spiritual Empowerment, and Ceremony to initiate participants into a powerful practice for transforming their individual relationship with Pluto.

OCTOBER 18 · 1 PM | Redmond, WA

Pluto often manifests as deeply embedded fears, compulsions, and patterns of avoidance. When Pluto is triggered or featured heavily in our natal astrology, these patterns can profoundly undermine our mental and physical well-being, limiting our sense of freedom and agency.

You will leave with a deep understanding of your personal relationship to Pluto, a tangible practice for working with the Plutonian aspect of yourself, and the healing support of a Chöd ritual to help clear the path forward.

Read a detailed description and register here on my site.

Dear Friends,

Keeping this note short today because I’m on the road and the August Forecast is already late! Soooorry!

The big news this month is, of course, the eclipses, the first of which arrives this Wednesday, August 12. Brandon and I sat down to talk through both eclipses, along with the larger astrological landscape they’re unfolding within, and there is quite a lot going on.

More from me soon!

With love,Christina

Calling all Virgo & Libra Risings:

Journey with the Sun is a year-long program for building a living, embodied relationship with your birth chart. Together, we use the Sun as our guide, moving through each house and sign in your chart over the course of the year.

This work is about developing a functional, expansive relationship with astrology: one that helps you better understand what’s present while opening to more of what’s possible.

Each journey begins in the season of your rising sign. I offer a free 15-minute consultation on the program if you’d like to learn more.

Dear Friends,

In honor of this very Pluto full Moon, I am releasing a conversation I recorded with Theresa earlier this month. I meant to post this episode two weeks ago, but I was swallowed up first by finals (summer school, ew, gross) and then by my birthday, which was not just any birthday but was, in fact, my 40th birthday—a milestone for which I felt a sort of uncharacteristic reverence that I didn’t know how to meet or what to do with.

I ended up spending the day with friends and family, and the next morning my boyfriend took this photo of me eating cake for breakfast on the couch. The photo made me smile because, as a child, I was notoriously unable to keep my eyes open for pictures, and I felt, somehow, like I could reach through the image of this forty-and-one-day-old lady into the heart of my inner child (who, by the way, has ALWAYS loved chocolate cake as much as the photo suggests).

My boyfriend has a theory about kids who can’t keep their eyes open in family photos. He says these little squinters are the “good” kids—the attentive, hyper-attuned, eager-to-please children who wait with their smiles and faces camera-ready while the rest of the group gets wrangled and wrestled into order. By the time the camera flashes, the good kids miss the moment; their eyes flutter shut from the fatigue and unnatural straining. I have no way of assessing the accuracy of his theory, but it certainly falls under the category of feels true. And yesterday, as I relistened to parts of Theresa’s and my Pluto conversation, I felt a powerful kinship with the good little kid inside me and a reverence for all the transformation she’s undergone to get to where she is today.

The truth is I still am the good kid. I am terrified of messing up, of disappointing others, of being misunderstood. There is a part of me that still wants to smile when it’s time to smile; to get the best grades; to be the perfect homemaker; to embody the pleasing visage of feminine grace my mother hoped and prayed and begged of me. But my life had different plans for me.

In this episode, Theresa and I dive deep into all things Pluto, but if I were to sum up the Lord of the Underworld in one line here, I would say Pluto represents the layers of deeply held, conscious and unconscious fears that barricade our path to transformative change. His transits tend to correspond with one or the other side of this process: encounters with the fear and/or experiences of transformation.

This morning, the Moon reaches the apex of her fullness at 6 degrees of Aquarius in conjunction with Pluto, opposite the Sun-Jupiter cazimi. It also happens to be a full Moon on top of my natal Moon, which, for those of you beloved astro nerds who are paying close attention, means I am currently in the throes of an extended Pluto-Moon transit. Pluto has become my Moon’s multi-year bedfellow, and today takes a highlighter pen to this very long transit, the transit I believe represents the real force underlying the heavy reverence I felt about turning 40, as well as the weepy, yearning love I feel for that good kid inside me.

Robert Hand described the Pluto-Moon conjunction as a powerful transformation of the most intensely personal and preconscious part of the psyche. I was born with Pluto in Scorpio in the 12th house, and I suffered from extreme anxiety and terrifying intrusive thoughts as a child. For the most part, this went unnoticed by others because—hello, Saturn, planet of boundaries and responsibility, on my Ascendant—I wasn’t much of an externalizer. I kept my complaints and feelings to myself.

What were the root causes of my childhood anxiety? Probably a lot of things, but fundamentalist Christian day-school is high on my list of prime suspects. I was, for better or worse, both an innately spiritual and innately serious child—a perfect storm of vulnerabilities that resulted in my taking the greatest hits of Christian fundamentalism much too much to heart at far too young an age.

You were born wrong, bad, sinful, broken. Your mind is not to be trusted. Your heart is corrupt. God can save you, but only if you think the right, rightest, most righteous thoughts and remember to ask forgiveness for the wrong thoughts! That is, if you have time and you don’t get caught sinning with your bad, broken mind at the very end—which is totally near, scheduled for a time nobody knows, except for… this fucking thief in the night guy?

To a large degree, the 12th house represents the unconscious mechanisms of our psyche that color our experience of our innermost selves. The 12th house contains places of retreat, experiences of isolation, and the mental states and physical places we enter into during forced and voluntary solitude. Sometimes I think of the 12th house very simply as what being alone feels like. And as a child, being alone was the fucking worst. Alone is when my mind would begin to swirl and struggle against the rip current of the underworld. Pluto, through his fear-inspiring religious actors, had managed to isolate me almost entirely from myself. I couldn’t trust my own heart; I feared doing wrong; I feared harming others; I feared the end of the world; my mind projected violent, intrusive images of the worst things I could imagine. I felt trapped in a prison inside myself, all the while smiling when I was meant to smile and doing my best to project my perfect, rule-following trustworthiness.

In my forty years of life, Pluto has moved through three houses in my chart, and my relationship to these early childhood experiences has transformed and evolved. I no longer feel the acute pain that raged within me throughout my 20s and 30s; I have come to accept that an intense relationship with spirituality is part of my path. I wish it had not started with harm and religious trauma, but the intensity never stopped; it transformed into a deep, profound, personal, sensory, heart-centered relationship with the Divine. And when Pluto opposed my Sun for nearly three years in the early 2020s, I cultivated a unique and personal spiritual practice that I might not have gotten to if I hadn’t had the harm to press up against with all the force of my unyielding anger and indignation. But my spiritual practice didn’t fix everything. In fact, the most consistent effect of my practice is that it reveals what has yet to be resolved and routinely sets me down new paths of healing, equipped with the internal and external resources I need to help me change myself. (This, by the way, is my definition of grace, but that is the topic of another essay.)

What is relevant now is that even though my spiritual trauma is much healed and largely transformed, I am still working on the raw sensations beneath the Christian schoolgirl story. As transiting Pluto comes to sit on my Moon, I am still learning to trust myself. I am still cultivating an inner sense of my own goodness. I am still interrupting both the impulse to seek external validation and the extreme pressure I place on myself to perform—to be insightful, to say only the right, correct thing, and never the wrong, accidentally harmful thing. And as Pluto transits around my chart, he will always bring circumstances to the surface that will threaten to isolate me from myself. How I respond to those circumstances determines if Pluto will tug the knot tighter or loosen its hold.

When I turned 40 last week, I moved into a Mars profection year. Mars is a troublemaker, but he is also my favorite of the planetary deities. I love him like you love a brother you’re always fighting with. Mars never holds back—not on criticism, conviction, or love.

On the eve of my birthday, I went into meditation and found Mars inside myself. I asked him to help me face this very Pluto-Moon year with grace and determination, to help me move through the world with more courage, and to help me overcome the patterns of dissociation I’ve been running since childhood. I asked Mars to help me learn how to stay in my body when I want to eject, …

The much-feared and long-debated month of July 2026 is finally here.

In a way, July began two days early. If you felt a jolt of psychic whiplash course through your mind and life early this week, you’re not imagining it. Mercury stationed retrograde on Monday, Mars moved into Gemini, and Jupiter has finally exited Cancer after a long residence in our moon’s tidal kingdom. Each of these shifts is significant, and each represents complications and activations of the new outer planet order.

We know that change is the only constant, but there are times when change feels terrifyingly tangible, when change takes center stage and becomes undeniable. This month has the potential to be equal parts disruptive and energizing. We’ve all been sensing changes coming and witnessing enormous shifts in the collective. Part of the tension of 2026 has been not knowing what form these changes will take. This July, we may start to see a more complete picture of what’s to come. In our own lives, it may feel uncomfortable, even disruptive, but it also represents an opportunity: a surge of energy shoving us through a portal into something new.

If you’d like to work with me, you can book a reading here.

Calling all Cancer & Leo Risings:

Journey with the Sun is a year-long program for building a living, embodied relationship with your birth chart. Together, we use the Sun as our guide, moving through each house and sign in your chart over the course of the year.

This work is about developing a functional, expansive relationship with astrology: one that helps you better understand what’s present while opening to more of what’s possible.

Each journey begins in the season of your rising sign. I offer a free 15-minute consultation on the program if you’d like to learn more.

Deep breath in… we’ve made it to June.

I am coming to you with good tidings, as Venus and Jupiter reach toward each other in the final days of their luminous embrace. The Great Benefic and the Planet of Love will perfect their conjunction on June 9th, and we are headed into a very special weekend as the Moon and Jupiter enter into a state of special reciprocity in honor of the occasion.

I am a little late in releasing the June podcast, which I had the pleasure of recording with the inimitable Brandon Alter of the Spiritual Gayz last week. But I am happy to be writing you this evening, and calling your attention to the skies at this moment.

As the Moon moves into Pisces this weekend and into mutual reception with Jupiter, take some time to soak in these life-giving waters and appreciate how far you’ve come. As a Cancer Sun, I have experienced Jupiter’s year-long transit through my Sun sign as a period of incredible growth.

It is Jupiter’s nature to expand whatever he touches, and as he moves through a sign, he seeks to bless and support growth in the corresponding area of life. But the hard truth is that sustainable growth rarely feels like we imagine it will.

As a rule, Jupiter’s blessings are not always lasting; there are circumstances in which—if we’re being honest—as much as we love him, the guy can be a bit of a blowhard. Think of Indra. Think of Zeus. In every pantheon, the King of the Gods is routinely overdoing it. Sometimes Jupiter traps us in a too much too fast dilemma. It’s easy to ride the intoxicating energy of his enthusiastic momentum into a shape we ultimately can’t hold. Short-lived blessings are not necessarily worthless. Jupiter’s adventures are full of learning and often represent treasured experiences, whether or not they lead to long-lived or lasting circumstances. But what is unique about Jupiter in Cancer (and one of the reasons I believe that Jupiter is exalted in Cancer) is that growth in the home of the Moon can never really outpace the limits of our nervous system.

In Cancer, Jupiter works on our capacity to love, nourish, and remain in consistent, loving contact with ourselves. Jupiter can’t blow past our limits in Cancer because the nature of Cancer is to be responsive to emergent need. Cancer is the home of the mother. It is the primordial, nourishing waters of the womb, and no matter the quality of nourishment we received from our inevitably limited human mothers, each of us must eventually learn to mother ourselves. It is from this capacity to create safety for our hearts, bodies, and minds that real, lasting, sustainable growth can occur.

Jupiter’s time in Cancer is coming to an end, but the wealth he leaves behind is lasting. Jupiter has strengthened our container. We can hold more because we can love ourselves more. We can be present with the world because we can be present with ourselves. We’ve met the boundless self by tending to its limits.

I wish each of you a beautiful month, full of gentleness and pleasure. I don’t know what final gift Jupiter and Venus will bring, but I hope each of you receives it with joy and love for yourself and others.

Love,

Christina

Journey with the Sun:

I am currently enrolling for Journey with the Sun, a year-long container for building a living, embodied relationship with your birth chart. Together, we move with the Sun through each house and sign in your natal chart. Each journey begins in the season of your rising sign.

If you’re a Cancer or Leo rising, this is your time. You’re invited to reach out for a free 15-minute consultation to see if it’s a fit.

Astrology Office Hours:

For astrology enthusiasts, students, and practitioners who want to deepen their understanding of chart interpretation. These sessions are not structured classes and do not follow a set curriculum. Instead, they are guided by your questions, example charts, and/or areas of interest. Sessions may include topics such as chart interpretation, transits, timing techniques, astrological symbolism, and practical application. These sessions are designed to support your learning and exploration of astrology.

Book a study session

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of talking with Brandon Alter of the Spiritual Gayz about the month ahead!

We begin the month with the Sun and Moon in opposition, reacquainting themselves with the Scorpio-Taurus axis newly vacated by the chaotic and fickle Uranus, who has finally completed his 7-year stay.

You may find that this lunation feels purgative; we are expelling subtle attachments to old ways of being, ghosts of patterns, remnants of the people we used to be. This moon is about preparing a space in our lives for what is actually already here, allowing what needs to grow to take root and allowing what needs to transform to pass from one life to the next.

The first week of May is spikier than the second and third. Pluto will cast his heavy rays to and fro, but stay the course, because this month has the potential to give much more than it takes.

Wishing each of you nourishment and love. May 2026 acts as a portal to some of the loveliest astrology of the year, and I know that each of you will receive a special piece of it.

Warmly,

Christina

I am currently enrolling for Journey with the Sun, a year-long container for building a living, embodied relationship with your birth chart. Together, we move with the Sun through each house and sign in your natal chart. Each journey begins in the season of your rising sign.

If you’re a Taurus or Gemini rising, this is your time. You’re invited to reach out for a free 15-minute consultation to see if it’s a fit.

Dear Ones,

I am back after a long break with the April forecast. Brandon of the Spiritual Gayz joined me for this conversation and, as always, their voice is a gift and a refreshing treat.

We are skyrocketing headlong into the Mars+Saturn conjunction, which dominates the skies for several weeks in mid-April. Unfortunately, Mars is likely to ramp up the tension and confusion in an already challenging moment. There is no good way to talk about the times to come. I feel myself gravitating between overwhelm and defensive levity, but if April feels crushing, know that you are not alone and that May and June will bring happier skies and a much welcome reprieve from the relentless quality of 2026.

On April 15, Theresa and I will hold a free community session. If you are in need of community or extra support, we would love to see you on Zoom.

Additionally, Inner Currents holds a meditation every Sunday morning, which is centered on offering up a special prayer and healing for the world. If you are looking for a way to offer your heart in support of all who are suffering at this time, join us at 8 AM Pacific on Sundays. You can email Theresa at [email protected] for the Zoom link.

with love,

Christina

www.skiesorgrace.com

Theresa and I are back with a new episode covering the action-packed final weeks of February 2026

Today is a big day!

Saturn made his final ingress into Aries, where he joins Neptune at zero degrees until they perfect their conjunction on Friday, February 20th. As we move through this collective distortion field, realities will crumble, old dreams will die, and visions of new worlds emerge within us.

I am a little under the weather tonight, so I will have to keep this message short, but I want to invite you all to join our live astrology group chat on Sunday.

I will be answering questions about the upcoming solar eclipse in Aquarius on Tuesday, Feb 17th, which is sure to rule over many challenging endings and profound new beginnings.

Under these skies, we may feel tempted to lose faith in the future—but it will be those of us who continue to fiercely pursue our collective possibilities who will make the most of this dramatic year ahead.

With Love,

Christina

Additional Information:

Free Community Astrology Session

Sunday, Feb 15th | 5 PM PST

All are welcome | Zoom in here

Links I promised at the end of the episode:

Inner Currents Meditations and Events Schedule

Journey with the Sun Free Exploration Call

Book an Astrology Reading with Me!

Happy New Year. I am back after a long pause, and very happy to share the 2026 year-ahead forecast, which I recorded with the wonderful Theresa Ulfa on January 1st. There is so much to say about the year ahead, which is sure to bring twelve months of hurricane-force beginnings and endings, but I am going to try to condense the most essential message I’d like to share about 2026 into a few imperfect words below:

As we move into this new year, the gate between the watery dissolution of Pisces and rebirth by fire in the Martial territory of Aries is acutely magnetized. The feeling is one of standing on a precipice with a blindfold. The path we’ve crossed to get here has eroded behind our footsteps, and the path forward is obscured by the smoke of a still-smoldering fire. If ever there were a moment for a leap of faith, this is it. The question is who and what deserves the incredible gift, blessing, and power of your faith?

(Spoiler alert: it’s you.)

For some time, I’ve been internally relating to 2026–2027 as a portal to the new world. Normally, I hesitate to use this kind of hyperbolic language, but as Saturn and Neptune pass hand-in-hand through the last sign of the zodiac and into the first, it may truly feel as if the known, charted world is collapsing, like a pop-up paper diorama flattened by a tug on some great invisible cosmic pull-tab. As Neptune’s fog calls Saturn across the ocean of Pisces and meets him at the equinox gate of zero degrees of Aries, we will surrender to both welcome and unwelcome endings. And like any good apocalypse story, in the wake of this flattening, a great war is sure to be fought over whose influence and vision will lead in reshaping the world to the specifications of its new, and yet unknown, dimensions. Many people and groups will declare themselves the winner of this war, only to be dethroned in short order by a parade of relentless and short-lived usurpers. We are in for a period of long, chaotic change. Give nobody authority over your life; hold fast to your vision and to your goodness. Do what you can to build what you want to see and experience in your life and in your community.

I chose for this podcast (and for the year) the image of the sword-wielding Kalki and his white horse. For those unfamiliar with the Hindu spiritual traditions, Kalki is the future Avatar of Vishnu, foretold to incarnate at the end of the Kali Yuga (the age of spiritual and material degeneration) to restore the creation and all life to a state of perfected integrity. I am not an expert on Kalki, and I am sure this prophecy is differently relevant and differently meaningful to the many sects and lineages, but from my perspective as a Western spiritual aspirant and astrologer, as I stand at the end of this precipice, what I am expecting to burst forth from this thick Neptunian haze is exactly Kalki. But I know we won’t find him in a single human or even necessarily in the world. We’ll find him inside our hearts.

with love,

Christina & Theresa

www.skiesofgrace.com

www.innercurrents.com