And, given that we’re in the middle of an eclipse season, now seems like a perfect time to address this misconception.

The South Node represents the past: old karma, familiar patterns, and territory we have already mastered. The North Node represents the future: growth, unfamiliar experiences, and the direction we are developing toward in this lifetime.

Taken literally, the advice seems obvious.

Leave the old behind. Focus on the new.

But that is not actually how the lunar nodes work.

The North and South Nodes form an axis, and the goal is not to choose one side over the other. The work is learning how to balance and integrate both, and it’s a process that takes a lifetime.

Early on in my astrology career, I had to learn this for myself, because the idea that I was supposed to simply “move away from” my South Node is one that scared the hell out of me.

Back When I Thought My South Node Was the Problem

I was twenty-three years old, more than halfway through a Master’s degree in Clinical Psychology, when I began seriously questioning what I was doing with my life.

I had gone into psychology because I wanted meaningful work that allowed me to help people. But counseling didn’t feel right, and my attempt to redirect into neuroscience research didn’t feel right either.

I had a research brain and a heart meant for service, but I couldn’t figure out how to combine the two in a way that felt right.

At the same time, my health was deteriorating.

Getting out of bed each morning felt like an ordeal. I watched other people my age go to class, work, exercise, socialize, and make plans for the weekend while I constantly calculated how much energy I had available for the day before I needed to rest.

I was ambitious, but I was also sick, exhausted, and increasingly unsure what all that ambition was even supposed to be directed toward.

And then, during those early years of studying astrology, I discovered that I was born five days before a total solar eclipse in Virgo, with my South Node conjunct my natal Sun.

My Sun also rules my 10th house of career.

This did not seem like particularly good news.

The Sun is connected with our expression of purpose in physical reality, along with vitality, visibility, success, accomplishment, and our capacity to shine. And much of the modern Western astrology I was reading portrayed the South Node as something we were supposed to leave behind.

Some interpretations suggested weakened vitality. Others suggested difficulty attaining recognition or the need to completely relinquish attachment to success and accomplishment.

At twenty-three, already sick and uncertain about my career choices, it sounded less like spiritual wisdom and more like I was doomed.

Was I supposed to stop trying to improve my health?

Was I meant to give up on finding a fulfilling career?

If career ambition and external accomplishment were somehow tied to an area of my chart I was supposed to move away from, what was I supposed to do with the fact that I was only 23 years old and had some very big dreams?

The two things that felt most depleted in my life at that time were purpose and vitality, both significations of the Sun, and I couldn’t ignore another connection.

I didn’t understand what that meant yet.

What I did understand was that the South Node area of my life was not something I wanted to discard.

I needed to understand how to work with it.

The South Node: The Wise Old Man

The lunar nodes are astronomical calculations used primarily to track and predict eclipses. Unlike the planets, they are not physical bodies in space.

In Western tropical astrology, we call them the North and South Nodes. In Vedic astrology, they are Rahu and Ketu—the head and tail of the celestial dragon.

I like to think of the South Node, or Ketu, as a wise old man who is very set in his ways.

The South Node represents what we bring with us from the past: past-life experiences, ancestral wisdom, old karmic patterns, and areas we have already deeply developed.

This is territory where we have been there and done that.

Because of that, there can be tremendous talent here.

South Node abilities often feel instinctive. We may be so naturally competent in this area that we barely recognize our abilities as anything special. It is simply what we know.

And that is one reason the advice to abandon the South Node makes so little sense.

The South Node is not only your karmic past. It is also your foundation.

We need what we have developed there in order to grow.

But the South Node also has a shadow.

The wise old man can become stubborn.

We may become overly identified with what is familiar, continue relying on strategies we have already exhausted, and resist the new experiences life is trying to introduce.

Comfort eventually becomes stagnation.

The South Node can also represent weakness, depletion, leakiness, or unraveling on the practical and physical level. It is an area where things may begin to fall apart when we dwell there too long or pursue its outcomes for the wrong reasons.

And this is where the image of Ketu as the dragon’s tail without a head becomes important.

The South Node is instinctual rather than rational.

We cannot always think, strategize, or force our way toward the outcome we want here. There is an element of surrender involved—following signs, trusting instinct, and allowing God or the Universe to take the reins instead of insisting that our ego control the outcome.

But surrender is not the same thing as abandonment.

The North Node: The Excitable Toddler

If the South Node is the wise old man, the North Node is much more like a toddler.

Rahu is the dragon’s head without the tail.

It has appetite.

It has desire.

It has willpower.

But it does not have the accumulated instincts and wisdom of the South Node behind it.

The North Node represents an area we have not previously mastered. It draws us toward new experiences, growth, ambition, experimentation, and unfamiliar territory.

And because it is unfamiliar, our relationship with it can be contradictory.

We may feel terrified of it one moment and irresistibly compelled toward it the next.

And the main keyword for the North Node is insatiable.

The North Node wants experience. It wants more. It can create obsession, nervous excitement, unconventional choices, and a tendency to take things too far.

And this is the problem with telling someone to simply “follow their North Node.”

You don’t really know what you’re doing there yet.

Like a toddler learning to walk, we may start running before we have learned how to stand.

We trip.

We fall.

We bump our heads.

We get scared.

We throw tantrums.

Then we conveniently forget just enough about what happened just in time to get up and try again.

The North Node can bring tremendous growth, but it can also bring turbulence, inconsistency, upheaval, and major mistakes precisely because we are still learning how to use that energy.

Too much South Node can keep us trapped in the past.

Too much North Node can send us racing toward the future with no instincts telling us when to stop.

We need both.

And What About My South Node–Sun Conjunction?

Understanding the Nodes this way completely changed how I viewed the placement that had frightened me so much in my twenties.

My South Node conjunction to the Sun did describe real struggles.

At this point in my life, I’ve gone through many South Node activation periods when both my sense of purpose and my vitality felt profoundly depleted.

But the same placement also described natural abilities and a path that required me to stop forcing myself into careers that looked rational on paper but didn’t fulfill a bigger purpose.

As I followed the thread that eventually led me into astrology, I found work that combined the two things I had struggled for years to bring together: deep research and meaningful service to other people.

It all came together in a very illogical, synchronistic, South Node sort of way that was clearly guided by something outside of myself.

And as that sense of purpose developed, and my success as an astrologer grew, something else slowly began changing alongside it.

My health began to improve.

I don’t believe that finding purposeful work is the cure for everyone’s illness. We all have our own unique personal struggles and our own patterns in our birth chart that reflect how those struggles connect to our health.

But in my own life, I cannot completely separate the period when I felt disconnected from purpose from the period when I also felt profoundly disconnected from my vitality.

Both were represented by the same Sun conjunction to the South Node.

And both began to shift as I learned to work with that South Node rather than believing I needed to run away from it.

The answer wasn’t to live entirely in my South Node.

And it certainly wasn’t to abandon it for my North Node.

It was integration.

Balancing the Nodes Is a Lifelong Process

This is ultimately what the lunar nodes require.

The South Node gives us the natural talents, gifts, instincts, experiences, wisdom, and karmic patterns we already carry.

The North Node pushes us toward experiences we have not yet mastered.

If you lean too heavily into the South Node, you become rigid. The familiar becomes a rut, and eventually life begins pushing us toward something different.

And, if you pursue a path simply for the accolades, the South Node has a distinct way of causing things to unravel.

If you become too consumed by the North Node, desire and ambition can overpower wisdom. You run too far, too fast, and discover the consequences of trying to navigate unfamiliar territory without enough experience.

Then the South Node becomes what we can fall back on when we take things too far in the way of the North Node. It can become what steadies us.

Ideally, over time, we all become better at moving back and forth along that axis.

The North Node is said to mature around age forty-two, while the South Node matures around age forty-eight. And even then, the process does not simply end.

We are continually learning how much North vs South Node energy each moment requires.

Sometimes the North Node needs more nourishment. We need to take the risk, try the unfamiliar thing, and allow life to pull us beyond what we already know.

At other times, we need to return to the wisdom of the South Node—to the instincts and natural abilities that keep us grounded while we navigate new territory.

When we nourish the South Node, we create fertile ground for something new to grow in the North Node area of our lives.

And when we carry the talents and wisdom of the South Node forward, we are better equipped to handle what the North Node asks us to become.

That is the real work of the nodal axis.

Not leaving one behind.

Not living entirely through the other.

But learning, over the course of a lifetime, how to recognize when the wise old man has become too rigid—and when the toddler needs someone to keep him from running headfirst into traffic.

The goal is balance, and we spend our lives learning how to find it.

Until the night I heard a knock on my bedroom door, even though I was completely alone.

In my early twenties, my ambitions were grounded, practical, and firmly rooted in science. I was living in Chicago, in graduate school for Clinical Psychology, and working as a research coordinator in a world-renowned lab at the University of Chicago—one of only two programs in the country allowed to study recreational drugs on human subjects (which, honestly, is a story in its own right).

I had a very clear plan for my life: clean up my grades after a little too much partying in my undergraduate years, earn glowing recommendations from my thesis advisor and the researchers I worked with, and go on to pursue a PhD in behavioral neuroscience.

Suffice it to say, my belief system was very rational, evidence-based, and highly skeptical.

And while I was living what I thought was my dream life, working at my dream job in what was objectively one of the most fascinating research labs in the country, I was deeply unhappy.

My financial situation was a mess. The lab I worked in was one of the lowest-paying at the university, and I was barely scraping by—constantly doing the math of whether I could afford rent, groceries, and gas without overdrafting my account. I had grown up in a family with very little financial stability, and in an effort to create opportunities for myself, I had taken out significant student loans and credit card debt. At the time, it felt like the only option. But now, all of that debt was starting to catch up with me.

My health was steadily declining as I slid deeper into chronic illness—exacerbated by choices that were fueled by stress and lack of resources. I was broke, overwhelmed, and still learning how to take care of myself in the real world. To keep up, I was taking a high dose of Adderall during the day, prescribed by a well-meaning doctor who had misdiagnosed me with ADHD (another story for another time), and, at night, I was out late drinking with the people I called my friends.

And underneath all of it, a deeper sense of unease was stirring within me. Even though my boss was incredible, and I was performing well, I felt no connection to the work I was doing.

I couldn’t ignore it anymore.

For the first time in my young life, I realized I was heading down a path that looked good on paper but felt completely empty—a path that lacked passion and purpose.

If you’ve heard me share my “astrology origin story” before, this first part might sound familiar.

But what happened next… is the part I haven’t really talked about publicly.

Partly because it still feels difficult to explain.
And partly because, if I’m being honest, it sounds a little bit insane.

At the time, I was just trying to get by. When rent went up at my old place, I quickly found a new apartment, sight unseen, that felt like a lucky break. The price was right, it was in the exact neighborhood I wanted, and somehow, the landlord didn’t take issue with my abysmal credit score.

But from the moment I walked in, something felt off.

It was an old building at its core, super old, with new additions built around its 100+ year old foundation. I chose a room at the very back of the basement unit—the largest bedroom, but also the oldest.

Almost immediately, things got weird. There was this constant, low-level sense of being watched. I would catch shadows or movement out of the corner of my eye, only for there to be nothing there when I turned to look. The power in my room would go out randomly—but only when I was home alone, never when my roommate was there.

At first, I chalked it up to paranoia and nerves. After all, ghosts weren’t real, and clearly I was getting myself all worked up over nothing.

But one night, while spending what I thought would be a quiet night at home alone, something happened that I couldn’t simply brush off or explain away.

I was in the kitchen, grabbing a snack, when I felt it—that familiar sensation of being watched. The kind of feeling that gives you goosebumps and makes the back of your neck prickle. And then I saw it: a dark, blurred movement in my peripheral vision.

I didn’t stop to investigate. I rushed back into my bedroom and shut the door behind me.

And this time, something followed me.

Within seconds of closing the door, there was a loud, forceful knock. Not a tap. Not a creak. A knock—like an enormous fist hitting the door.

My cat heard it too. She sat upright, staring at the door for hours, completely still. I stayed in my room the entire night, too afraid to open the door while my roommate was out bartending.

After that, things escalated quickly.

The moment that finally broke whatever sense of certainty I had left happened on Halloween night. My then-boyfriend (now husband) had come by to pick me up for our very first date. While we were in another room, we heard a loud crash coming from my bedroom.

When we walked in, my college diploma—something that had been securely hanging on the wall—was lying in the center of the room. Not near the wall. Not fallen straight down. It had somehow landed several feet away, as if it had been thrown.

There was no reasonable explanation for how it got there. And now, I wasn’t the only one who had seen it.

That was the moment that broke my mind wide open.

Whatever was happening in that apartment, it wasn’t subtle, and it wasn’t imaginary. It was physical. It was observable. And for the first time, I had to seriously consider that reality might be far more complex than anything I had been led to believe.

(Side note: Somehow, despite all of this, the date went well. And thankfully, my future husband didn’t assume that experience was some kind of weird, elaborate prank!)

From then on, I became deeply interested in all things paranormal, inexplicable, and “woo.”

Not long after that, I was visiting a friend I hadn’t seen in a while—someone who was into all the things I had always written off as new age nonsense: crystals, meditation, and of course, astrology.

At one point, she started describing a series of transits I had been experiencing—and, without me saying a word, she articulated the exact challenges I had been navigating over the past several months with unnerving accuracy.

That was the moment something shifted. I needed to know how she did that.

She recommended a book. I used it to pull up my birth chart, and then the charts of anyone who would let me, and I became completely obsessed with learning astrology.

But the truth is, if it hadn’t been for what happened in that apartment, I don’t think I would have been open to any of it. I would have dismissed astrology the same way I had dismissed everything else—too strange, too unscientific, too far outside of my belief system.

Instead, I followed my curiosity. I moved past the surface-level “woo,” realized that astrology has nothing to do with “woo,” and dove deep into the practical application and structure of astrology as a technical, symbolic language.

That path eventually led me to working 1–1 with my first mentor, Robert Phoenix, and to giving over 50 free readings just to practice and build confidence—readings that would eventually turn into thousands of professional consultations. From there, I built a YouTube channel, a business, and a body of work that has now reached and impacted hundreds of thousands of people.

None of that was part of the plan.

But it all began the moment I realized that reality might be far more complex—and far more mysterious—than I had been taught to believe.

So, there you have it. My real astrologer origin story… poltergeist and all.

That same week, I was deep into preparing for my Celestial Self-Care workshop, where I taught students how to regulate their nervous systems by aligning their self-care practices with the unique astrology embedded in their birth charts.

Over and over again, the same themes surfaced in my research and preparation: the need to step away from overloading ourselves with screens and technology—to repair our attention spans, reconnect with the natural world, return to real human connection without the technological “middle man,” and stop damaging our brains and nervous systems through constant scrolling.

And that’s when it hit me. By creating an endless stream of disappearing short-form content, I was a part of the problem.

Short-form content is dying—it simply isn’t serving us anymore (and I’m not entirely convinced that it was ever actually serving us to begin with).

As Pluto moves fully into Aquarius, we’re entering a collective chapter defined by an intensification of technology, data, artificial intelligence, and technocratic systems of control—alongside the inevitable exposure of their shadow.

Pluto in Capricorn did something similar for the plutocracy. It made power visible. It revealed who actually holds the reins in our society—and it coincided with an aggressive doubling down on rules, regulations, and top-down control (2020 lockdowns, anyone?).

Aquarius governs the internet, technological advancement, AI, and social networks—Pluto reveals the core truth—our collective and individual core truth. It exposes our deepest needs and desires, and it also reveals what’s toxic. Ever since Pluto began edging into Aquarius back in 2023, I’ve felt a growing sense of dread every time I opened Instagram.

That feeling hasn’t gone away; it’s deepened.

And I know I’m not alone in that.

More people are waking up to the very real harm of doom-scrolling. More creators are quietly stepping away from platforms like Instagram and TikTok, choosing depth over reach, meaning over metrics, and long-form content over constant fragmentation.

For me, the realization crystallized during the Mercury cazimi conjunct Pluto in Aquarius on January 22nd. I wasn’t meditating. I wasn’t “looking for a sign.” I was just going about my day when the message showed up, and it felt so clear and undeniable:

It’s time for me to leave Instagram behind.

Instagram is where my long-form work—YouTube videos, blog posts, workshops, courses—is chopped into bite-sized pieces. And while those pieces are always created with good intentions, they strip away context, nuance, and depth.

I’ve been creating video sound bites and “scroll-stopping” carousel posts that, despite my best efforts, contribute to shortened attention spans, nervous-system dysregulation, and a growing inability to think deeply and critically—not just about astrology, but about anything.

And yes—walking away from a platform with over 32,000 followers that I’ve spent years of my life, immense energy, and a significant amount of money building is genuinely scary.

In essence, leaving Instagram means fewer eyes on my work.

It means saying no to an algorithm that rewards constant output over coherence. It means trusting that depth will find the people it’s meant for—without being force-fed through a feed.

It also means leaving behind my connection to a community of people and even a few “Instagram friendships” I’ve come to really enjoy.

But, after quieting all of the fear-based mental chatter and giving myself the space to actually listen to my body, my nervous system, and my values, I realized something important: I don’t need Instagram to share my work or reach new students.

And more than that, leaving likely won’t destroy what I’ve built.

If anything, it may deepen it.

So I’m officially stepping away from Instagram and redirecting my time and energy toward creating astrology content that’s slower, deeper and more comprehensive—not skimmed past during another dopamine-infused doomscrolling session.

A 30-second reel of me walking through the forest while keywords pop up on your screen can’t teach you to truly understand astrology. And neither can a two-minute “quick overview” talking-head video discussing complex astrological topics that require nuance, synthesis, and real contemplation to be fully integrated and understood.

Humans are complex, our world is complex, and astrology reflects that complexity.

And that’s why I’m joining you here on Substack.