A special astrology workshop with recurring guest and evolutionary astrologer Dena DeCastro.

We're taking a deep dive into Venus placement in your natal chart. Venus affects not only your love life but also other partnerships — including your relationship with money. Learn about the strengths and challenges associated with your Venus sign.

*Each and every sign is explained.

Ep 40 - Love & Money Personified with Morgana Rae

Ep - 74 - Astrology & Past-Lives: Karmic Patterns in the Birth Chart with Dena DeCastro

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Let’s set you up for this astrology workshop as well as any others we do in the future ... If you know a lot about your natal chart, you may know some of these planets and signs without having to look them up.

Feel free to go ahead and listen along right now.

For those of you who are beginners or who want to reference your chart and take notes — we are going to explore additional areas of your chart on future episodes, so you may want to start a document or a notebook — the site I most use and recommend is:

astro.com

There’s quite a bit you can do with a free account. There are a lot of places where you can cast your natal chart online—and I don’t get any kind of kickback for referring astro.com —the reason I prefer Astro is you can store up to 100 profiles with a free account.

That’s helpful if you have clients you’re casting charts for, BUT even more importantly, you may want to store the charts of people you’re in relationships with. There’s a partner report in astro you may want to explore for spouses, people you’re dating, family members, coworkers, people you’re in business with … that person you’re about to marry!

After you sign up for a user name and password, you’ll be asked to enter your exact birth information.

Under the Free horoscopes tab, you’ll find a daily personal horoscope that’s pretty good for computer generated, but for the purposes of our workshops here, you’ll want to look under the Free Horoscopes tab, in the Short Horoscopes list is Personal Portrait.

The personal portrait is what astro calls the Natal chart or the birth chart.

Now, on that Personal Portrait page, they will offer some highlights from your chart, but that is nowhere close to everything. They may or may not interpret your Venus placement, I’m not sure how their algorithm works.

But if you scroll down to the bottom, you will find a list called planetary positions of every planet in your chart and what sign it is in.

For this episode, you’ll want to know what sign your Venus is in.

You may also want to find the Venus placement of your significant others

Of course, if you have an astrology site you like, or a natal chart that was professionally prepared for you, by all means use those.

Find your Venus, we’ll jump right in to this conversation and let Dena tell you what it means and what you can do with this information in terms of Love and Money.

Dena:

So evolutionary astrology is a branch of astrology that focuses on past life and karmic patterns as part of the reading of the natal chart. We look at that through something in the chart called the nodes, the south node representing that past life or karmic pattern situation and then the north node representing what it is in this life that we're here to learn, that we have not experienced in past lives, that we've not mastered.

And so we're here learning about that thing which is foreign to us.

So it's much more... it's less predictive than some other branches of astrology. In fact, it's not predictive at all. It is more of a personal development kind of astrology, where in the reading, I'm offering people a way to look at themselves differently, not only from this life's perspective but from a soul level perspective.

With that knowledge, I'm giving them suggestions about how to best live in alignment with their soul's plan coming into this life. And how ultimately, to live a more fulfilling, content and happy life.

So that's the aim of it.

So it's not meant for prediction. It is more meant for personal development and for growth.

Slade:

I actually really like that, because it's a little bit more woo woo and yet, also the personal development aspect of it really brings it down to earth. So, of course I'll link to the show that we did earlier so everyone can listen to that and find out about their node astrology, but what you told me on that show about my own south node in Virgo, has been really impactful going forward from that moment.

It explained a lot of things about the way that I operate. It also explained a lot of my relationships with Virgos.

Dena:

Oh totally. I'm with you on that one.

Slade:

So anyway, I really love that piece of information.

And one of the things that I noticed, talking to you the very first time that we ever spoke, which is that conversation by the way, and the reason why I wanted you back on the show is, well, first I'd love any excuse to talk to you, but...

One of the things I found myself recommending to my friends and my clients about your readings is, astrology I've often noticed can have this really, really old, like old testament doom and gloom kind of quality to it sometimes...

Dena:

Yeah.

Slade:

Especially if you're looking at things that are computer-generated sometimes, I often tell people, Okay, you need to dial back the negative a little bit.

Dena:

Dial that back!

Slade:

And you have a way of speaking about astrology that feels kind of more hopeful and more positive and enthusiastic to me. And I was wondering if you are aware of what I'm talking about and if you get a sense of that as well.

Dena:

Yeah, you know, I think that in the astrological community, one of the viewpoints is that evolutionary astrologers are too much Pollyanna perhaps, or positive, compared to some others, which will tell you more of the doom and gloom aspects, like if you have an afflicted Venus, that your love life is going to be challenged for your whole life.

Some branches of astrology are more deterministic, I will say that. And I am not coming from an, evolutionary astrology is not coming from a deterministic perspective. We embrace the idea of free will as being the prime mover and that once we have self-knowledge, we can make better choices.

That's the whole point.

We can, the reading itself changes what you can do with your future. It's not telling you that this is the future that's laid out for you. That this is what's going to happen because Saturn squared your Venus and it's gonna suck.

Slade:

Right.

Dena:

That it's a... it's saying, here are some choices. I will say though, that it is not all love and light. Anybody whose gotten a reading from me will tell you that we go into the shadow stuff. We go into what is, what are the lower possibilities for you? What are the things that can trip you up or the places where you can get tangled up in old patterns and get stuck.

But in knowing that, then you can more likely avoid those places, right?

Slade:

Yeah, like, to explain what I meant by how that information for me impacted me going forward, what it did was, it just identified a certain thought process or where something's coming from in the way that I think and react to things.

And knowing to look for that and to be aware when it popped it's head, I'd be like, Ooo... that's totally my south node in Virgo! And then having a polar companion opposite of like, Okay well so in order to balance out that energy that idea is to move towards this more Piscean way of looking at things.

So when I say it's impactful to me, you're right. It's not like, Oh, it's just going to be this way and I'm just screwed to be that way.

Dena:

Right.

Slade:

What it does is it allows me to say, Oh, there's my tendency to do THAT, now I'm going to make a willful conscious decision to lean this other way in order to kind of balance that out, or to move away from it.

So yeah, I'd like that. I definitely don't want to... I don't want information that I can't change or manipulate in some way.

Dena:

Right. And I said this on another podcast recently, that I'm always thinking, as I do a reading, how can I empower the client, not how can I disempower the client. Or to be careful not to say things that are going to disempower the client.

That's super important to me. It really guides everything that I say as I go through a reading.

Slade:

Mmm... Well you're doing a good job of it.

Dena:

Thank you.

Slade:

So there is some great astrology content obviously online, on social media...

Dena:

Yeah!

Slade:

A lot of astrologers do time sensitive current posts about what's going on in the skies and you do a little of that as well. But when you and I were brainstorming astrological topics that we could explore on the show, I talked about how much I try to create evergreen content, meaning, whenever someone comes along and they find this show, even if it's two years from now, I want the information to still be relevant to them.

Aspects of the natal chart, or birth chart, are those items that aren't as time sensitive, so I'd love for you to explain to us the difference between transits and our natal or birth chart elements.

Dena:

Yeah, so the natal chart is the birth chart that you're born with. It is the permanent chart. It's not going to change. However, how you respond to that chart can change. YOU can grow and change. But that chart doesn't change.

So when I do a reading that's focused mainly on the natal chart, we're really looking at those lifelong themes and patterns, not the things that are happening now.

The transits and progressions and solar arcs, those are three things, three tools that astrologers use. And there are more tools, but those are the three common ones. They tell us what is happening right now in this person's chart. What are the things moving through, that transits from the outside, the cosmic weather.

For example, let's say Neptune is currently in Pisces and it may be connecting with something in your chart. It may be trining your moon or, I think it is trining your moon, I'm not sure... Maybe soon..

That is its own set of meaning about what's happening now or in this coming year, or maybe for the next two years. A Neptune transit is two years long, for example. So that's time and that's forecasting. That's not prediction. That's like saying, "Here is the cosmic weather that is around you. How can you best navigate it?"

Progressions and solar arcs are a little bit different. They're something that unfolds from the chart itself and I won't get into a technical discussion of those, but they're just other tools that we use to look at this moment in time, but also what's coming down the road, maybe the next year, two years for somebody.

To say, what are the lessons that are on your plate right now, what are the themes that are up in your life?

And it can be really helpful, particularly if you're going through a challenging time, to understand that there are forces at play that may be affecting you, that are causing this to be a challenging time and there is something you can do about it. There are things that you can do to better work with those energies than if you didn't know about it.

Slade:

I like your weather metaphor because it's kind of like, if you know a hurricane's coming, then you can close the shutters and go underground. You can respond to those conditions in a different way.

Another thing that I do think that astrological transits are good for, and I was just talking to a friend of mine who is going through a really rough life transition, and I said, "One of the things I like about astrology is, it's not a psychic reading. It's actually external, you know? It's like, here's a spreadsheet about stuff in your life."

It has a little bit of a disconnect from being so much in our own heads a little bit. It's something that also can give you a sense of... Like if you are really going through something, and you're thinking, gawd, when is this ever gonna end?? I find it really helpful for someone to say, "Well, you know, April something is totally gonna shift."

And just having a sense of, oh, okay. I may feel like I'm smack in the middle of it, and then I get a reading with you and you talk about some transits, and you're like, "Oh actually, it's been going on for a long time but you're almost done."

That can be the difference between being in a really dark hole in the ground and having a little sense of, okay, I can go for two more months or whatever.

Dena:

Right.

Slade:

I love the emphasis on it not being so much about prediction as about conditions, like weather conditions and sort of windows of time as opposed to specific moments.

Dena:

Yeah.

Slade:

Well just to get back to the birth chart stuff. So we decided we wanted to do some shows where we focus on some of the bigger elements in birth charts. I feel like for people who are new to astrology, it makes sense for them to study their birth chart or their natal chart first, as a way of learning about this vocabulary and these concepts and how it relates to what they're working with in this lifetime.

Dena:

Yeah.

Slade:

So one of those big elements in our birth chart is our Venus. So teach us about Venus.

Dena:

Haha...

So Venus is a planet that most peop