Years ago, I heard someone tell the story of a teacher who tore a paper map of the world into pieces and handed it to a rebellious student, certain the boy would never be able to put it back together. About thirty minutes later, he returned the map to her whole.

Astonished, she asked how he had done it. He explained that when he turned the pieces over, he found a man torn into fragments on the other side of the map. When he pieced the man back together, the world came back together…

We are now in the Hebrew month of Elul. Elul is the month of preparation before the Jewish New Year, and the month tradition sets aside for repair.

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Repair is not the same as starting over. This month does not ask us to become someone new. It asks us to return to the real self: the self that existed before fear, habit, ego, and reactivity began shaping how we learned to survive, and then to mend what has come apart since.

But…

We cannot release a pattern while some part of us still believes that it serves us.

As long as distraction feels like relief, we will continue choosing distraction. As long as anger feels powerful or protective, we will continue to reach for it. And as long as editing ourselves creates the illusion of belonging, we will continue hiding parts of the truth.

This is the work of repair. And it is also, I believe, why the image of the vessel feels so important this week. This is an image I explore in more detail in this week’s video; if you’d like to watch or listen, please click the image below.

31 August: Jupiter trine Saturn

We begin the week with Jupiter in Leo forming a trine to Saturn in Aries.

Jupiter represents expansion, possibility, faith, and the desire to become more. Saturn represents boundaries, discipline, responsibility, and the structures through which possibility becomes real.

When these two planets cooperate, we have an opportunity to expand the vision while strengthening the container that can hold it.

Jupiter can see what is possible, but Saturn asks whether we have the discipline, maturity, and capacity to sustain it.

This is excellent astrology for making meaningful progress with something you have been developing over time. It may help you take a large idea and translate it into a practical plan.

The invitation is to create a form spacious enough for the future, but strong enough to hold it.

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Venus enters her retrograde shadow

The same day, Venus enters the territory she will revisit during her retrograde cycle. This begins a much longer story involving relationships, money, values, self-worth, reciprocity, beauty, and desire.

Pay attention to what is beginning to surface now.

A conversation, attraction, financial decision, creative desire, or relationship dynamic that may seem relatively small may become part of a larger review process over the coming months.

Venus beginning her shadow in Libra may reveal where we have confused peace with self-abandonment and where we have maintained harmony externally while becoming increasingly divided within ourselves.

This does not mean that a relationship must end or that every agreement must be overturned. It means that something about the way we relate, value ourselves, or seek approval is preparing to be reconsidered.

1 September: Mercury sextile Mars

Mercury in Virgo forms a sextile to Mars in Cancer.

This can give us the courage to say what needs to be said.

Mercury in Virgo wants clarity, precision, and practical solutions. Mars in Cancer acts from emotional instinct and from the desire to protect what matters.

Together, they can help us identify a problem and take a practical step toward resolving it. This is useful energy for decision-making, creative problem-solving, and necessary conversations.

But our words may also emerge more forcefully than intended.

It’s worth remembering that Mars in Cancer can become defensive when it feels emotionally exposed, while Mercury in Virgo can become overly focused on what is wrong. Together, they may produce words that are accurate but sharper than necessary.

Mars square Saturn

Later the same day, Mars in Cancer forms a square to Saturn in Aries, and this square sets the theme for this week.

Mars wants movement, but Saturn introduces a boundary.

You may encounter a delay, an obstacle, an authority figure, a task, or the realization that something will require more effort and patience than you anticipated.

This can feel deeply frustrating, particularly when you are emotionally invested in the outcome. But the obstacle may not be telling you to abandon the vision. It may be revealing where the vessel needs to be strengthened.

Mars square Saturn can bring us into contact with anger, resentment, helplessness, or a sense that our actions are continually blocked. But anger may also be one of the patterns we need to examine during Elul.

The same is true of overworking, withdrawing, procrastinating, or trying to force an outcome.

If you encounter resistance this week, pause before pushing harder.

Ask:

What is this limitation showing me?

Is this a boundary that needs to be respected? Is it revealing a flaw in the plan? Or has it exposed an old response that I automatically reach for when I no longer feel in control?

Remember, not every delay is a denial. Sometimes Saturn slows us down so that what we are building will not collapse under the weight of what we are trying to hold.

2 September: The Moon goes out of bounds

From September 2, the Moon moves out of bounds and will remain there until September 7.

When the Moon is out of bounds, feelings can move outside their familiar range. Emotional responses may feel stronger and more difficult to contain.

Some people may feel unusually detached from the world, while others may experience emotions that seem to exceed the ordinary vessel.

This can also be a fertile period for artists, writers, and anyone whose work requires imagination. But because Mars is also squaring Saturn, we need to be careful not to treat every powerful feeling as an instruction to act immediately.

The out-of-bounds Moon may show us what has been pushed beyond the edges of the old container. Something we have tried to control, repress, or manage may no longer remain hidden.

Perhaps the feeling is not the problem. Perhaps the vessel has simply become too small for the truth that is trying to emerge.

xo

Yolanda

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I actually broke out into hives one day when she invited me over for a weeknight supper because I knew what to expect. It turned out to be a five-course dinner. She fussed constantly, checked the meat temperature every ten minutes with a thermometer, dipped her finger into the brown sauce over and over again until finally her husband said, “Enough. This will do.”

Every dish was, of course, perfect. But I hesitate to use the word delicious, because I could taste the stress. The angst of perfection.

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We are now in Virgo season, and on Tuesday the 25th, Mercury will also enter Virgo, his home sign. Virgo is commonly associated with perfectionism. What’s less known is that every Virgo, underneath that reputation, is seeking simplicity.

Perfectionism and simplicity are often mistaken for each other because they can look identical from the outside.

But they come from opposite places.

Perfectionism stems from fear. It’s a need to control, a bid to pre-empt judgment before it arrives. Simplicity comes from ease. It’s function without excess. It’s the version of a thing that actually works, stripped of whatever was added to prove something.

Both are after a kind of clean result. But simplicity invites people in, and perfectionism pushes them away. My friend’s five-course dinner didn’t make me feel welcome in her home. It made me feel like a guest at an audition, watching someone perform hospitality rather than offering it.

We’ve confused complexity with intelligence

Many of us have been trained to equate complexity with true intelligence. If someone can lead us down enough rabbit holes and weave together quotes and facts, surely they must be brilliant? Surely if we can’t “keep up”, that says more about us than it does about them?

But real intelligence does the opposite. It cuts through confusion. It takes a hard idea and hands it back to you in plain language.

Complexity is often the fear of being seen as simple, slow…

Virgo, at its best, edits. It asks what’s necessary and removes the rest because it cares enough to want the thing to work, not just to impress.

As Mercury settles into his home sign this week, the invitation isn’t to do more, or to do it more precisely. It’s about asking what you could remove and noticing what’s actually left when the excess is gone.

Journal Reflections

1. Where in your life are you performing instead of offering? Think of a recent moment where you fussed, over-prepared, or checked something more times than it needed. What were you afraid would happen if you’d stopped at “good enough”?

2. What have you made complicated to avoid being seen as too simple? Notice one area — a project, a relationship, a way you explain yourself — where you’ve added layers that don’t serve the outcome. What would it look like to say the true thing in the plainest language?

3. What’s one thing you could remove this week, not replace?

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IF THIS ESSAY HIT HOME
The Houses of Inheritance is a new live series tracing the patterns you didn't choose but still carry. Session one, the Fourth House, is September 3rd — 6 seats only. Details & registration →

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xo

Yolanda

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The morning I woke early to work on this essay, I opened the front door to find an eastern sky glowing orange and red and an ominous thundercloud rushing over the mountain, spitting lightning bolts. It was one of those dramatic weather scenes that I have unfortunately become accustomed to because of the increasing number of out-of-control wildfires every Summer here in BC.

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So we begin with an image of stormy weather, but the storm heading our way this week is a different sort. It’s not scary-looking or loud, and it is primarily driven by wind.

Prefer to listen instead of read? You can watch this week's video version here.

This is the wind that comes after the fruit has ripened on the branch or on the vine… the kind of wind that comes to shake loose what was never going to hold on anyway.

So let’s talk about what’s being loosened in you right now.

Mars in Cancer square Neptune in Aries

Let’s start with what might feel the most disorienting.

On Monday the 17th, Mars, the planet that says I want this, and I’m going to move toward it, runs into a square with Neptune. This square manifests as thick fog. You may be struggling with feelings of uncertainty or a sense of fogginess.

You may feel like you can’t quite locate what you’re protecting yourself from because your usual instinct to act, to defend, to move isn’t finding its target. This isn’t a failure of your instincts. It’s that the thing you’re bracing against is diffuse. It’s kind of scattered…

In depth psychology, we’d say this is a moment when the ego’s usual tools — assessment, strategy, direct confrontation — simply don’t work, because what’s happening is happening below the waterline. Remember, Mars is in Cancer. He’s wading through water.

And when Mars can’t find a target, it’s tempting to manufacture one. To pick a fight, to get sharp with someone who didn’t earn it. I’d gently ask you not to do that this week. Not because your feelings aren’t valid, but because the target isn’t out there.

Mars in Cancer sextile Uranus in Gemini

The same day, Mars is in an easy relationship, a sextile, with Uranus.

Uranus is the lightning strike. The sudden knowing. The thing that was invisible a moment ago and is now obviously and undeniably true.

So you have this strange pairing happening at once: confusion with Neptune, and clarity with Uranus. And if you’ve ever done real inner work, you already know these aren’t opposites. They’re a sequence. The fog doesn’t clear because you're straining to see through it. It clears because something inside you breaks suddenly and you think: Oh… that’s what this was.

This is liberation or a sudden loosening. The kind that happens when a leaf that was already dead finally lets go of the branch because the leaf has stopped holding on.🍂

Notice where that might happen for you this week. The insight that arrives this week probably won’t come from thinking harder or attempting to “gain clarity”. It’ll come from a sentence someone says in passing, or a memory that surfaces out of nowhere, or a moment where your body just... releases something your mind was still gripping.🍂

Sun conjunct South Node in Leo, crossing into Virgo

On the 22nd, the Sun, which is our sense of identity, our vitality, the thing we’re here to be, sits directly on the South Node in Leo. And then, almost immediately after, it crosses the threshold into Virgo.

Leo asks you to be seen, to take up space, to stop performing smallness and inhabit your own radiance.

But every season that opens a door also asks you to walk through it and close it behind you. The South Node is the well-worn groove, the thing that’s familiar because you’ve done it before, possibly for years, possibly for a lifetime. And when the Sun sits directly on it, right at the edge of Leo, right before Virgo begins, the question changes from what did I express this season? To what did I over-rely on, out of habit, that I’m now allowed to set down?

Virgo doesn’t ask you to put away your crown or face glitter. It asks you to stop needing every room to witness you, and start trusting that some of what you built this season doesn’t need an audience to be real.

If Leo said be seen, Virgo says: now, be precise about what’s actually yours to carry forward.

I want to bring this out of the abstract for a moment because you may be understanding this as more of an idea than an embodied experience.

If this week has felt foggy, a little directionless, maybe even a little grief-adjacent without a clear object for the grief that tracks. Because you’re in the gap between an old identity loosening its grip and a new posture not yet fully arrived. It may feel like you’re in a waiting room.

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Let it be that.

You don’t have to rush yourself into the next room. The leaf that is ready to fall will fall on its own timing🍂 and with far less effort than you’re currently spending trying to force it.

Notice what you’re still holding onto out of habit rather than truth.

xo

Yolanda

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Tomorrow’s New Moon in Leo is a total solar eclipse, and because this lunation is conjunct the South Node, this New Moon flushes away whatever has been preventing you from shining your light and living a more heart-led life. The Sun is not just the seat of ego. The Sun is the giver of life. And this eclipse is clearing the path for what sustains you and is essential to your radiant, unobstructed shining. This is especially true if you have planets around 17-23° of fixed signs (Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, Aquarius).

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This is not a moon of pure new beginnings; the South Node is the point of release, and release comes before anything new can take root. Depending on your placements, this eclipse has already or will eliminate whatever is standing between you and your authentic self-expression.

There’s a story that keeps repeating in my head the past week or so, and while I don’t remember where I first heard it, I do know it resonates with Kabbalistic teachings. I want to share it with you here today.

Imagine our Creator as a giant living body. You are like a cell in this body, and you occupy time and space. Whatever happens in your space is contributing to our Creator’s experience. This means you want to maintain equilibrium. You want to focus on staying healthy because whatever happens in your space impacts the cells around you. Just like cells share essential nutrients with other cells, you are here to share what is essential for the wellbeing of the greater whole. What is essential from a spiritual perspective is not the same as what you personally desire or what others expect from you. In other words, you carry within unique qualities that only you can offer as medicine. But also you carry poison. Your contribution, however small, either assists in the healing or the poisoning of your “area” in time and space.

This is why tomorrow’s eclipse matters. A South Node New Moon asks you to notice what you’ve been secreting into the body of the whole without realizing it. Judgment. Old grievances. The reflex to relive a wound instead of releasing it. These are not neutral. When you sit in resentment, replay a slight, or rehearse the ways you’ve been wronged, you are not just having a private feeling that “goes nowhere”. You are a cell releasing something into the tissue around you, and the cells nearest you absorb it whether they consent to it or not. This is, for example, how families pass down bitterness for generations without anyone choosing it.

We underestimate how porous we are to each other.

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But the same porousness is also mercy. Because it means the reverse is equally true: when you do the unglamorous and hard work of metabolizing your own pain instead of distributing it, you are not just healing yourself. You are changing what’s available to your area and therefore also the whole body.

Leo governs the heart, the life force, the light that wants to be seen and shared. This eclipse will loosen whatever has kept you performing smallness, hiding your unique fire because it once got you punished, rejected, or ignored. It will strip away whatever has been standing between your authentic self and the world that is, quite literally, waiting on your revitalizing nutrients.

So the question this New Moon asks isn’t “what do I want to begin?” It’s “what am I circulating?” Unforgiveness or compassion. Old story, or presence. Poison, or medicine.

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Remember, you’re not here to fix the whole body. You are here to tend your own small patch because whatever heals in you, by design, heals outward. That has always been and will always be how a soul serves something larger than itself.

xo

Yolanda

P.S. I have new videos out on my Youtube channel.

Eclipse Season

The Real Reason You Hide

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The Nodal axis moved on January 26th. North Node left Pisces and entered Aquarius; South Node left Virgo and entered Leo. From now until March 26, 2028, these two points will be rearranging the furniture … but to understand where they’re taking us, we have to look back first.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe, watching this transit move through client after client: the Nodes don’t lead with growth. They lead with shadow. It seems to me that before the North Node’s medicine can take hold, the South Node’s less desirable qualities have to be felt, lived and grieved. What follows is a record of that shadow work and a brief forecast.

What the Nodes Are Actually Asking

Before we go further, it helps to know what these two points actually are. The Nodes aren’t bodies. They’re the points where the Moon’s orbit crosses the ecliptic, the Sun’s apparent path through our sky. That makes them lunar markers of development, and they’re generally read as pointing the way. The South Node holds the well-developed skills, the experiences already lived, the things we don’t need to prove again. The North Node describes what we’re being asked to reach for…

The real work isn’t abandoning the South Node. It’s learning to take those qualities and skills and put them in service of the North Node’s unfamiliar terrain.

Steven Forrest put it like this: the South Node represents the gravity of old habits holding us back, while the North Node is the remedy that can liberate us.

North Node in Pisces pointed us toward spiritual aspiration and toward dissolving, surrendering, opening to something larger than the self. But Pisces is also a place of overwhelm, so for two years, many of us have been swimming far from shore.

When the Nodes move into new signs and houses, everything belonging to those placements comes up for review. In my experience, the shadow material always surfaces first.

With Virgo, we’re talking about internalized criticism and hyper-judgement. This is about judging yourself too harshly, measuring yourself against others…but it's also about hyper-judgment, which is when we turn an analytical eye toward others and measure them against impossibly high standards.

This isn’t theoretical for me. I saw this in session after session.

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The South Node in Virgo also widened the rift between mind and spirit. Client after client described an absence of faith: not only in themselves and in God, but in other people.

Pisces, meanwhile, asked for surrender to Mystery, to Spirit, to letting go of the need for facts and figures, for certainty, for proof. But its shadow ran alongside that invitation the whole time.

And what do I mean by that?

Escapism confused for faith and psychedelic experimentation confused with mysticism. A temporary sense of unity and sacredness is not the same thing as a true spiritual path.

Aquarius and Leo: The New Assignment

Now, with North Node in Aquarius and South Node in Leo, we’re being asked to move toward radical, progressive ideas that have a real chance of creating positive change.

Saturn rules Aquarius, and Saturn is currently in Aries: the sign of the head, but also of courage and drive. This means it’s time for courageous action, not just courageous thinking.

Uranus, the modern ruler of Aquarius, is asking for a fresh perspective entirely. Time to throw out the old way of thinking along with the bathwater. In many ways, this Nodal shift speaks directly to the future we’re building and how that future might help create a better world. But the Leo South Node is clear about one condition: this must not happen at the expense of the Self, and your ability to express your own uniqueness.

Pluto is currently moving through Aquarius, and his presence deepens everything. Your mission, should you accept it, is to work on what has decayed. What is so rotten it finally has to be laid to rest so something new can take its place?

We can expect Aquarius and Leo’s shadow to surface first here too. Aquarius can turn detachment into coldness, ideas over people, ideology over feeling... Leo’s South Node, for its part, needs a sense of self-worth that depends on being seen and admired rather than simply being. Expect to see much more cringey displays of “worth” and success before the more healthy versions of these signs have room to breathe.

Where This Lands in Your Chart

The North Node’s message plays out differently depending on which house Aquarius falls in for you. Find your rising sign below:

Aries rising — Aquarius is your 11th house. This is about community, friendship, and the future you’re building with others. The invitation is to find your people so you can work toward something bigger than any one of you.

Taurus rising — Aquarius is your 10th house. Career and public role. You’re being asked to bring something more original, more forward-thinking, to how the world sees your work.

Gemini rising — Aquarius is your 9th house. Belief systems, higher learning, the big questions. Time to update your worldview.

Cancer rising — Aquarius is your 8th house. Intimacy, shared resources, transformation. This is deep-water work: what needs to be released so something truer can be built with another person?

Leo rising — Aquarius is your 7th house. Partnership, one-to-one relationship. Since this sits opposite your rising sign, growth comes from learning to meet others as equals, not mirrors.

Leo rising tends to find its identity through being seen. Through the reflection that comes back from a partner, a collaborator, an audience of one. But the 7th house in Aquarius asks for a different kind of relationship: one built on mutual respect and independent thought rather than admiration and reflection. An equal is someone who can disagree with you, bring a completely different perspective to the table, and still stand beside you.

Virgo rising — Aquarius is your 6th house. Daily routine, health, the way you work. The old, over-critical way of managing your days is up for an overhaul.

Libra rising — Aquarius is your 5th house. Creativity, self-expression, joy. You’re being nudged to create in a way that’s uniquely yours.

Scorpio rising — Aquarius is your 4th house. Home, family, inner foundation. The invitation is to rebuild your sense of roots on your own terms, not the terms you inherited.

Sagittarius rising — Aquarius is your 3rd house. Communication, siblings, the immediate community. New ways of thinking and speaking your truth.

Capricorn rising — Aquarius is your 2nd house. Money, values, self-worth. Time to detach your sense of worth from convention and decide what you actually value.

Aquarius rising — Aquarius is your 1st house. Identity itself. You will experience a reinvention of how you show up in the world.

Pisces rising — Aquarius is your 12th house. The subconscious, solitude, the unseen. The work here is about releasing old patterns that live below the surface.

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The Planet That Moves the Pieces

There’s one planet that’s actually responsible for how you’ll develop your gifts and connect with others through this whole transit.

North Node in Aquarius is traditionally ruled by Saturn, and Saturn is currently sitting in Aries. Aries is ruled by Mars. Which means the planet actually moving the furniture around is Mars.

So here’s where I’d recommend you put your attention:

1. Know your Mars. Get a real understanding of how Mars operates in your chart. Know where he sits, what he wants, how he tends to act when provoked. If you’re not sure, that’s worth booking a reading.

2. Follow his transits closely. Wherever Mars is moving through the zodiac will colour your experience of this Nodal shift in real time.

3. Let Mars do what he does. He cuts, defends, protects, severs, instigates. Growth in your Aquarius house will come through courageous action and standing up for yourself. This may look like friendships ending and connections being severed. Not every loss here is going to be painful.

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I'd love to know which house is Aquarius activating in your chart, and what's already starting to shift or fall away?

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xo

Yolanda

A short post this weekend.

I want to start with where we’ll find ourselves on Tuesday, July 14th, because the days leading up to this lunation are firmly stuck in the past.

You may find yourself entertaining a reconnection with an ex-lover, answering messages from people from way back, or even dreaming about faces you haven’t seen in years. The energy is thick with ghosts. I had a client tell me last week that he’d had a paranormal experience at work.

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This New Moon is Out of Bounds and Void of Course, so not a moon for setting intentions. OOB Moon in Cancer makes you extra sensitive and moody, but also extraordinarily psychic, so trust your gut over your calendar this week.

Saturn in Aries is square Mercury retrograde, the Moon, and the Sun in Cancer. That tells us one of two things is happening: you’re being rewarded right now for hard work and discipline, especially if you have planets on or near 21º Cancer, or something is coming to an end. Either way, this New Moon will feel more like a Full Moon.

What struck me immediately was the Yod: Neptune in Aries quincunx Venus in Virgo, and Pluto in Aquarius quincunx Venus as well. Venus is conjunct the South Node. Don’t be surprised if you’re feeling depleted, or if your savings have taken a hit because of a cosmetic expense or holiday expenses.

In my video, I tell the story of Osiris and Isis, because the asteroids Osiris and Isis are travelling beside Jupiter in Leo. They’re trine Neptune, opposite Pluto. The message underneath it all: collect the pieces. That’s how you restore your own inner light.

So tell me whose face showed up in your dreams this week, or are you feeling tired and/or more emotional than usual? I'd love to hear it in the comments.

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xo

Yolanda

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Others stay, but are never really there.

And long after childhood ends, we continue searching for them.

We look for them in partners who can’t commit.
We work harder than everyone around us.
We become capable, responsible, and endlessly accommodating, hoping that somewhere beneath all that effort someone will finally say,

“I’m proud of you.”

But what we are searching for is not really our father or a father figure.

We are searching for the part of ourselves he never helped us develop and hold onto.

My father was charming, generous, intelligent and funny.

When I was ten, and he and my mother were already living separate lives, my father would take me to the only bookstore in our city every month so I could choose a book. Because I was an avid reader, he would sometimes buy me two. He encouraged my reading but never actually talked to me about it. Maybe it was because he wasn’t a book reader. I remember he would pay for the books, place them in my hands, and move on.

When I was little, he would play with us, but never for long. I am certain now, though he was never diagnosed, that he had ADHD. You could not hold his attention for more than a minute before he changed the subject, excused himself, or drove away.

I never felt special or important to my father. I understood early that gambling was his first love. If he wasn’t placing bets on the horses or organizing card games, he seemed bereft. For as long as I can remember, there was never a night when my father came home for supper. He would return in the early hours, trailing cigarettes and alcohol and other women’s perfume. I remember one particularly violent night when my mother spotted red lipstick on his face, and she assaulted him.

By the time I was an adolescent and living with my paternal grandmother, my feelings for my father had congealed. I can’t think of a better word, really. Between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, I don’t think I saw him once. We reconnected after I completed high school, and what became clear was that his drinking had grown progressively worse, and that the life he had chosen had drawn him into serious danger. At one point, there was a hit on him, and he had to leave the city where he’d been living.

The year I turned thirty-four, my father came to live with our family. He had found honest employment, a job with a good pension and healthcare, and I was hopeful that we could forge a bond. We began slowly. He started joining us for meals. And just when things were beginning to shift, he was killed in a hit-and-run accident the day before my thirty-fifth birthday.

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What the Father Wound Is

In Jungian psychology, the father is not simply a person. He is the first carrier of what Jung called the principle of Logos, the masculine organizing force that mediates the child’s relationship to the outer world. He is the one who, ideally, models authority from the inside. This is the capacity to bear difficulty, to hold limits, and to take up space with integrity. He provides the child with their first template for how to act in the world, how to trust their own judgment, how to stand up for themselves.

For women especially, the father is also the first masculine figure and shapes how she relates to the masculine dimension of her own psyche, what Jung called the animus. The way her father receives her femininity shapes how she grows into womanhood. His attitude toward success colours her attitude.

Sons carry the father wound differently. They often struggle to trust their own masculinity, swinging between passivity and overcompensation, forever measuring themselves against an impossible standard. The expression differs, but the wound is the same: an uncertainty about one's own authority.

My father was what Jung called a puer aeternus — an eternal boy. He was a Don Juan figure: running from woman to woman, from one bet to the next, unable to stay. In Jungian terms, the Don Juan is a man with an unintegrated anima as he pursues women as stand-ins for an inner feminine he can’t hold within himself.

The father wound shows up in daughters as a weak ego structure…

A shakiness at the foundation, a difficulty trusting one’s own knowing.

It can look like an inability to form lasting relationships, chronic people-pleasing, a tendency to seek external permission to exist fully. It can look like a woman who tries to compensate for her father’s failures by succeeding in the world on his behalf by working harder than she needs to, achieving more than she wants to, hoping that somewhere in all that accomplishment, the ghost of him will finally be satisfied.

How The Father Wound Shows Up in the Chart

The father does not only teach us how to relate to men. He teaches us how to relate to ourselves.

The Sun

In psychological astrology, the Sun often reflects our experience of fathering, not only our actual father, but the masculine principle as we first encountered it.

Melanie Reinhart speaks of the father as the one in the best position to affirm the child’s otherness and to say: I see you as a separate being, distinct from me, and I celebrate that distinction. When this mirroring is absent or incomplete, the Sun in the chart can become underdeveloped: you struggle to feel central in your own life, to experience yourself as the author of your own story. You wait. You defer. You shine only when given permission.

Sun–Neptune

Sometimes the father wasn’t absent physically, but psychologically. Addiction, fantasy, illness, avoidance, or idealization blurred the relationship. In my own chart, the Sun is trine Neptune.

Sun–Saturn

The father becomes difficult to please. Love feels conditional upon achievement, obedience, or perfection. As adults, these individuals often wait for permission before trusting their own authority.

Sun–Pluto

The father may be experienced as intimidating, controlling, or emotionally overwhelming. Visibility becomes dangerous because being seen once came with consequences.

Sun in the Twelfth House

Sometimes the father remains hidden altogether—through absence, secrecy, addiction, imprisonment, illness, or simply emotional invisibility. Rather than growing up feeling witnessed, the child grows up wondering who they are in relation to someone they barely knew.

Saturn

Saturn governs the internalization of authority: the capacity to self-authorize, to trust one’s own discipline, to feel entitled to build and be seen. When the outer father fails to embody this, we often spend decades waiting for an authority figure to grant us permission, not realizing we are looking outward for something we must ultimately grow inward.

The IC/MC Axis: Foundation and World

The Imum Coeli, the IC, and the fourth house represent the root of the chart. This is the ancestral home, the paternal lineage, the earliest conditioning, and the foundation on which the self is built. The Midheaven, its opposite, is the public face: the vocation, the place of being seen in the world.

When the IC has been destabilized through an absent, chaotic, or ungrounded father, the Midheaven often reflects this instability as ambivalence about visibility, difficulty in claiming professional authority, or an unconscious belief that the world is not safe for one’s full expression. You can’t fully inhabit your Midheaven if the ground beneath you feels unreliable. This is why the father wound is structural. It lives in the foundations.

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Marilyn Monroe

Perhaps no woman illustrates the father wound more poignantly than Marilyn Monroe.

Born Norma Jeane Mortenson on June 1, 1926, Marilyn’s mother, Gladys Baker, struggled with severe mental illness, and at just two weeks old, Marilyn was placed in foster care. She spent much of her childhood moving between foster homes and an orphanage, never knowing the security of a stable family.

The question of her father remained unanswered or unconfirmed for most of her life. Although Martin Edward Mortensen was listed on her birth certificate, he was not her biological father. Gladys later told Marilyn that her father was Charles Stanley Gifford, a supervisor at RKO Studios where she had worked. Marilyn spent her life wondering whether this was true. It wasn’t until 2022, sixty years after her death, that DNA testing confirmed Gifford was indeed her biological father.

While no single placement can diagnose a father wound, Saturn in the foundations of the chart often describes an early life in which safety, structure, or dependable parental authority had to be built from within rather than received from without.

I too have Saturn in the fourth house, and although our stories are very different, I recognize the slow work of building inwardly what was not fully established in childhood.

Throughout her adult life, Marilyn repeatedly sought in older men what she had never received from her father: protection, affirmation, and permission to shine. Husbands, directors, mentors, and powerful men became more than partners became the psychological stand-ins for the father she never knew. Unsurprisingly, these relationships often developed into unequal and painful power dynamics because no partner can repair a childhood wound.

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Healing

The father wound heals through the painstaking work of building an inner father: a relationship with your own authority that does not depend on external validation, a capacity for self-witnessing, and the ability to grant yourself the gaze that was withheld.

In astrological terms, this is the work of the Sun: learning to shine from the inside out.

It is also the work of Saturn. The slow, unsexy, but essential work of becoming your own authority. Of making decisions and living inside the consequences. Of recognizing that the limits your father couldn’t hold are limits you can choose to embody.

People with difficult Sun-Saturn contacts often grow into adults who constantly wait for someone to tell them they’re ready. They over-prepare. They hesitate before stepping forward. Success feels dangerous because somewhere inside them lives the belief that authority belongs to someone else.

My father bought me books. I became a writer. I am still, in some ways, writing toward him, and also, probably, writing past him.

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Reflection

If you are curious about your own father wound in the chart, begin here: look at your Sun by sign and house, and look at any aspects the Sun makes to Saturn, Neptune, Pluto, or Chiron. Then look at your fourth house and the sign on your IC. You can also book a reading with me.

xo

Yolanda

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P.S. I believe some ideas deserve careful research, real-world application and the time it takes to shape words that stay with us long after we’ve finished reading them.

If you value this kind of work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support allows me to continue writing essays that honour both the depth of astrology and the complexity of being human.

Further Reading:

Reinhardt, Melanie Incarnation, The Four Angles and The Moon’s Nodes

This Full Moon in Capricorn sees you.

This Full Moon in Capricorn on June 29th at 4:47 pm Pacific Time is Out of Bounds. This means the Moon has moved beyond the Sun’s maximum reach of 23°27’. In plain language, she has wandered outside the territory the Sun governs and is not answering to the king.

An OOB Moon is extra-sensitive and highly intuitive. If you are Cancerian, or have Cancer placements in your birth chart, you may be aware of a permeability, as though the boundary between you and everyone else has grown thin.

At the same time, this moon is in Capricorn. The sign of scaling mountains and of patient ambition, of work performed across long spans of time. There is tension here. This lunation may reveal where you have been doing too much, or too little…

Watch for the pull to either collapse into feeling or to bury it beneath busyness.

This Moon is ruled by Saturn. And Saturn is in Aries, the sign of his fall.

In astrology, a planet in fall is a planet working against its nature. Saturn governs structure, patience, wisdom, and time. In Aries, he is asked to act impulsively and to lead with instinct rather than experience. He is, in the language of fairy tale, a king lost in a dark forest, making decisions under duress.

Saturn is in a separating trine from Venus, which means a period of grace has recently passed through your life. You may have come into money unexpectedly, or a relationship may have deepened or begun. The gift has been given. And now the test arrives.

Every Full Moon is a conversation between the sign the Moon occupies and the sign the Sun holds opposite her. Here, the Moon is in Capricorn and the Sun is in Cancer.

Cancer is the sign of family, nourishment and devotion. Cancer is where you endure anything for the people you love. Cancer is the mother who stays up all night with a sick child, the person who organizes their entire life around the ones they belong to...

Capricorn is what that devotion builds. Capricorn looks at the mountain and begins climbing because reaching the summit matters. This is the sign of long labour, of a task sustained across years, of the ordinary repeated until something extraordinary emerges.

Together, they form the axis of sacred work performed for love. This is why I chose the following fairy tale.

The Six Swans

There is an old Brothers Grimm story called The Six Swans.

A king goes out hunting but soon finds himself lost in a dark forest where he encounters a witch. She will save his life, she says, if he agrees to marry her daughter. Fear speaks louder than wisdom. He agrees.

The king has seven children from his first marriage. Six sons and one daughter. Fearing his new queen’s intentions, he hides them in a tower deep in the forest, visited only by him. But the witch’s daughter is curious, and eventually she finds them. When the boys run to greet her, believing her to be their friend, she throws enchanted shirts over their shoulders and transforms them into swans. They fly away into the sky. Only the sister remains uncursed.

The sister sets out to find her brothers. She learns, eventually, that she can break the curse if she sews six shirts from aster flowers in complete silence. If she makes a sound before the last shirt is finished, her brothers are lost forever.

She sews in a tree in the forest. She sews when another king finds her in the tree and falls in love with her. She sews when his mother falsely accuses her of cannibalism and condemns her to be burned at the stake. She is at the pyre, flames rising, still sewing the final shirt, when the six swans descend from the sky.

She throws the shirts over them, and her beloved brothers are transformed back into princes. She can speak at last. The evil mother-in-law is punished. The sister is vindicated. Justice arrives, but one brother retains a swan’s wing where his left arm should be, because the last shirt was not quite finished when she threw it.

Healing is possible. But it often leaves its mark.

The king is Saturn in Aries. He is in a forest. The forest is the unconscious, the territory of everything unknown and unintegrated, and he is afraid. He makes the panic-choice. A bargain struck with a witch in the dark. He hides his children rather than integrating them into his new life.

Saturn in fall does not make evil choices. He makes frightened ones. And frightened choices, over time, cost us the things we love most.

This Full Moon asks What decisions are you making from fear right now? What are you hiding in a forest tower because you do not trust yourself to hold it in the open?

The new queen is envy given form. She cannot tolerate the children’s existence because it reminds her that she is not the only love the king has known.

Her curse is a regression: the boys become swans. In ancient traditions across Europe and the Near East, swans are liminal creatures, neither fully of the earth nor of the sky, dwelling at the boundary between the conscious world and the unconscious depths of the water. The brothers have been pushed to the threshold. They exist between worlds, waiting.

What in your life has been pushed to the threshold by someone else’s envy, or your own fear?

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Messages from the Underworld

Mercury stations retrograde the same day. Your ancestors are standing close. They are watching. They want to offer a helping hand.

Mercury retrograde in this context is not the planet of missed flights and miscommunications. Mercury is psychopomp, the guide between worlds, the carrier of messages across the threshold between the living and the dead. When Mercury moves backward, the veil thins.

I recommend you pay close attention to your dreams. A face may appear that you haven’t thought of in years. A symbol may repeat. Something half-forgotten may surface.

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What healing leaves behind

When the shirts land on the swans and the brothers are restored, one is not entirely restored. The last shirt was unfinished because the sister was seconds from being burned alive, and so one brother retains a swan’s wing where his arm should be.

Healing is possible because love accomplishes what fear insists is impossible. But growth leaves its marks. We do not emerge from the transformative times of our lives unchanged. The swan’s wing is the permanent reminder that this person lived in the in-between and came back.

If you are carrying something like a swan’s wing, this Full Moon honours that.

xo

Yolanda

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Further reading

• von Franz, Marie-Louise. The Interpretation of Fairy Tales.

In my previous essay on the Mother Wound and the Moon, I wrote about how the Moon describes our experience of mother. The Moon tells us something about our emotional inheritance, about the ways we learned to seek comfort, safety, and belonging.

But the Moon isn’t the only place she lives.

She is also in the tenth house.

The tenth house, or the house in which you find the MC (Midheaven), is the highest point in the chart, the most visible place. It describes our public life, our reputation, our achievements, the part of ourselves that the world sees most clearly. It is also where we are most conscious.

For example, if Virgo sits on your Midheaven, you may describe yourself as hardworking, responsible, and detail-oriented. If Leo sits there, perhaps you identify with creativity, leadership, or visibility. These qualities become part of how we see ourselves.

They appear on our résumés, and they slide off our tongues in interviews or self-development workshops.

What’s less obvious is this:

The tenth house is often where we continue a conversation with our mothers through our ambitions, achievements, and public lives.

This is because the woman who first shaped our understanding of worth often remains woven into what we strive for long after we’ve left home.

Sometimes we pursue our own dreams, but sometimes we still try to prove ourselves worthy of our mother’s love.

This is especially visible when planets occupy the tenth house.

Take the Sun.

A tenth-house Sun can describe a mother who was highly visible, ambitious, accomplished, or simply larger than life in the child’s experience. She may never have demanded success. She may never have said, “Make me proud.” But all children are sensitive to expectations.

They feel what isn’t said.

And so the child goes on to succeed as something that he or she knows or believes will make mother proud.

Madonna’s chart offers one of the clearest examples of this dynamic I’ve encountered.

Madonna’s mother died of breast cancer when she was five years old.

“I was forced to grow up fast and understand my mother’s death, to understand the psychological, all the things that were going on. It was too much for a child, I think,” she continues, adding that she felt an “emptiness” afterward.

As for what she remembers about her mom, Madonna says in a separate clip, “She was beautiful and sweet and a hard worker.”

via people.com

Madonna’s Midheaven sits in Gemini. The MC is the point associated with public life and reputation. Gemini wants to communicate, connect, and gather information and experiences.

Mercury, ruler of Gemini, is conjunct her Ascendant in Virgo alongside her Moon and Pluto.

The planet governing her public voice is linked with the Moon, the significator of mother, and Pluto, the planet associated with death, loss, and transformation. Voice, grief, mother, woven together and forged into her sense of self.

When Madonna reinvents herself and provokes and performs, she is doing more than building her career.

On some level, she is still communicating across a distance that opened when she was five years old. She is still speaking to her mother. This is what I mean when I say that wounds serve.

The opposite point in the chart tells a different story.

The IC, at the bottom of the chart, describes our roots. Our ancestry. Our private self. In traditional astrology, the fourth house represents the father.

If the Midheaven describes what we build, the IC describes the ground beneath the building.

Madonna’s IC falls in Sagittarius, and Saturn occupies her fourth house.

Sagittarius seeks meaning. It searches for truth. It asks philosophical and spiritual questions.

She was raised Catholic, and religious symbolism is threaded through her work. The sacred and the rebellious. Devotion and transgression.

Saturn here suggests an inheritance that is both weighty and formative. It is perhaps no coincidence that she eventually found her way to Kabbalah, a tradition concerned with the hidden architecture beneath visible reality.

I offer Madonna’s chart because it makes visible something that usually remains hidden.

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There is nothing wrong with wanting to honour our mothers, to make them proud. It is one of the most human things there is. Some of what we’ve built in that spirit is an outward expression of our love and gratitude. But for some of us, the desire to make our mothers proud has pushed us toward things we might never have attempted on our own.

There is a difference between honouring your mother and disappearing into her expectations. Between doing something that would make her proud and abandoning what you truly wanted because it didn’t fit the shape of what she needed you to be.

The Good vs Bad Mother

I should make something clear at this point. This essay has leaned toward the “good mother”, the woman who nurtured and wanted more for you. But there is another kind of mother, and her influence is no less present in the chart.

She is the mother who expected nothing. And I had such a mother.

Perhaps she was absent, emotionally or literally. Perhaps she was too consumed by her own wounds to really see you. Perhaps her gaze, when it did land on you, was indifferent, or critical, or withholding in ways that left you with a hunger to be seen.

This mother shapes us just as powerfully. Where the first kind of mother nurtures a child who performs, the second tends to produce a child who is permanently “stuck” and can’t seem to find their place in the world or achieve anything significant.

That shift begins with the willingness to look honestly at what we’ve been carrying, and for whom.

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So here is my invitation to you.

Look at what you’ve built, or want to build.

And ask, as honestly as you can:

Does this feel like mine?

xo

Yolanda

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P.S. You may find value in my short audio recording, Your Emotional Shift.

In just a few minutes, I share the insight that changed my life and helped shift my understanding of self-worth.

Sometimes healing begins not by changing ourselves, but by recognizing what was never ours to carry.

The recording is available for $11 here.

If you haven’t watched it yet, I’d love for you to. But I wanted to write this alongside it, because some things are worth repeating, and because I try to keep these videos relatively short, which means there’s always more left unsaid.

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The wound is not what we think it is

Most astrology interpretations of Chiron in Taurus stop at the obvious layer — self-worth, money, security, material resources. That’s true. It’s also incomplete.

Taurus is not just wealth or possessions. Taurus is the body’s experience of enoughness.

You can have money in the bank and still carry a nervous system organized around scarcity. You can own a beautiful home and still feel homeless inside it. You can be surrounded by people who love you and still keep a hand on the door.

I have lived all three of these. Maybe you have too.

To understand how Chiron in Taurus will guide and heal you, you have to understand where Chiron has been. Chiron moved through Aries from 2018 until now — eight years that, for all of us, regardless of house placement, asked for a shattering of ego and a reconstruction of identity. I don’t mean trauma in the clinical sense alone, but in the broader sense: something happened that was the complete opposite of what you expected, and it shifted who you understood yourself to be.

That doesn’t mean you’re ego-less now. But you’ve likely made certain corrections. Maybe you’ve taken back power you’d given away, or learned to hold yourself with less self-focus and more awareness of others. Both are Aries lessons.

What Chiron in Taurus asks now is that you build from that experience. Even if you still feel some of the shattering because what happened was not only a loss. It deepened your life. It added meaning and strength.

So you’re moving forward with a new sense of self. A self that may still feel unsteady, because the body takes longer to integrate change than the spirit does. The growth happened, but your nervous system is still catching up.

And if you’re reading this thinking “yeah, not really”, wait until your Chiron Return, around age forty-nine. If you were born between 1976 and 1984, you’re approaching that threshold now, and this integration will ask for your attention more directly.

I can tell you what my Chiron Return brought back.

I was born in 1970. My natal Chiron is in Aries in the third house — the house of communication, learning, siblings, the early environment where you first discover whether your voice is welcome. I grew up among adults who believed children should be seen and not heard. And I had a deep desire to be heard and to share my thoughts and stories.

I have always been obsessed with stories 😊.

But here’s the part that matters: my caregivers were verbally abusive. Most of them were depressed, holding onto thought patterns that were destructive. Their speech was rarely sweet. So yes, I was wounded by words, and I learned early to use words as weapons myself, because that was the only model I’d been given.

My Chiron Return brought it all back to the surface. It brought back the mother wound specifically because my natal Chiron is square my twelfth-house moon. And it helped me take the very thing that wounded me — words — and use them to heal instead of harm. That choice goes against my programming. It goes against what I inherited. I make this choice daily, again and again.

You serve through your wound.

This is where Chiron in Taurus does the real work. Chiron will reveal a wound around the body’s capacity to receive — safety, nourishment, pleasure, rest, support, abundance, belonging. Not the capacity to pursue these things, but the capacity to receive them, even when they’re already here, right in front of you.

The wound isn’t in your circumstances. It’s in the body’s ability to accurately register reality. If your nervous system learned, early and often, that the world was unsafe or unpredictable, it may still be searching for danger long after the danger has passed. It will scan for threats in stillness. It will mistake rest for risk.

Safety, in this sense, isn’t a possession. It’s a relationship between your body and the world. And if that relationship was never established, no amount of external acquisition will ever quite land as enough.

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The body doesn’t heal alone

Taurus has always been associated with land — with place, with rootedness. Your nervous system is constantly reading signals from your environment: is there beauty here, is there rhythm, is there something alive moving through the air?

Research on nature deficit and ecological psychology consistently shows what most of us already feel: that disconnection from seasons, from birdsong, from the colours of the living world, deepens anxiety.

Chiron in Taurus may expose wounds that were never psychological at all, but environmental.

So the healing question isn’t only “how do I attract security?”

It’s specific:

Does the place where I live support the life I am trying to grow?

Not every environment will allow your nervous system to settle.

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What I actually want you to take from this

Healing, in this framework, is not merely psychological. It’s ecological. It’s somatic. It’s relational. It’s the slow work of restoring right relationship between your body, the place you inhabit, and your own sense of belonging.

xo

Yolanda

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If this is landing somewhere in you, I made something to go with it. A free one-page guide called The Enoughness Map. It’s not a checklist or a quick fix. It’s four areas of inquiry — body, place, pattern, and practice — meant to help you sit with these questions in your own life, at your own pace.

If you’d like it, you can grab it here.

There is a widespread misunderstanding, even among people with some astrological knowledge, that the benefics — Venus and Jupiter — are like benevolent fairy godmothers who arrive only bearing happy-making gifts. Nothing could be further from the truth. Venus, for example, has long been associated with conflict, because she carries within her an aspect of the Dark Feminine that our feel-good astrology culture tends to set aside. Jupiter, meanwhile, expands. And he expands not only light but also shadow. What has been suppressed or hidden gets amplified to the point where it can no longer be ignored.

From the moment Venus entered Cancer on June 8th, I witnessed an insistent requirement among my clients: address the mother wound.

The mother wound (which I wrote about here) is more complex than most people realize. It’s not simply a wound inflicted by your mother or primary caregiver. It is a wounding of the feminine within, regardless of gender, passed down through lineages, carried in the body, and lived out in your patterns.

Let me illustrate this with a client I’ll call Joanne.

Joanne has Venus conjunct Moon in Cancer in her birth chart. She’s a successful artist in her late seventies now. She splits her time between two cities, London and Strasbourg. She always yearned for marriage, a family of her own, roots…the Cancerian dream. And yet, despite years of therapy and self-inquiry, every relationship she found herself in eventually “blew up” in spectacular fashion. She couldn’t understand why.

Joanne was conscious of her Venus and her Moon in the sense that she knew her desire for a stable relationship, but she hadn’t reckoned with her Uranus in Gemini, which is highly intelligent, unpredictable and craves independence. Her Uranus lived beneath the surface of her awareness.

Here’s something worth noting: In a contest between the conscious mind and the unconscious, the unconscious always wins. Because the highest truth of your soul sits above your waking mind, orchestrating what your personality cannot see.

So when Venus and Jupiter conjoined in Cancer earlier this week, they didn’t deliver a sweet partnership for Joanne. This conjunction delivered a revelation. It showed Joanne that the life she had consciously pursued wasn’t aligned with the soul mission beneath it. Her soul wanted her to accumulate experiences, gain knowledge and give birth to provocative creative projects.

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The Deeper Story Beneath the Pattern

This is what I find myself returning to again and again — both in my own life and in my work with clients. Beneath every repeating pattern, every relationship that “blows up,” every transition that feels inexplicable, there is a deeper story, in the form of an “unconscious” planet or a powerful aspect that has been overlooked or misinterpreted. And that story almost always has roots: in lineage, in inheritance, in the loyalties we carry toward people we may have never met.

Your birth chart is a map of that story.

I created Breaking the Pattern — a 90-minute private session for those of you who sense that something deeper is at work beneath the challenges and transitions unfolding in your life right now. Using your birth chart as our guide, we explore inherited family patterns, karmic themes, soul purpose, and the unconscious loyalties that may be shaping your choices.

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And now, here's what this New Moon is asking of all of us.

The Moon meets Sun at 24º Gemini at 7:54pm on June 14th, and then the Moon goes void immediately afterwards and stays void until after 5 pm on Monday, June 15th. As if this isn’t extremely unusual, she is also out-of-bounds. This means the Moon’s declination - the angular distance north or south of the celestial equator - travels temporarily beyond the bounds of the Sun. When planets do this, they take on the qualities of being untethered and unhinged. An OOB planet’s expression is exaggerated, and this does not always translate well psychologically or emotionally. The ruler of this lunation is Mercury and he is also OOB. And if you are sensitive to these things, you will be aware that Mercury is in “underworld mode”.

Thoughts may drift toward the past. Old memories surface…

You are likely not feeling your best, possibly experiencing mood swings if you are moon-ruled (Cancer Rising), if your natal moon is in detriment (Capricorn) or fall (Scorpio). And, if you have planets in the late degrees of the mutable signs, or planets in challenging aspects to this lunation.

I do not recommend you set intentions under this lunation. They are literally going to slide into the void.

So what to do?

In my video, I share the myth I believe is playing out at this time, as Venus in Leo is sextile Sedna in Gemini. The myth of Sedna is a tale of abandonment, betrayal and severed trust. You may be working through these feelings this week or over the next two weeks. The sign opposite this lunation (Sagittarius), where we find Earth, points to the medicine that is available. You will find it if you seek guidance and support from a teacher, a religious leader, a mentor, and books.

I also highly recommend spending as much time as possible in stillness or meditation this weekend in order to disentangle your thoughts from your emotions. When emotions are involved, it’s impossible to acquire clarity of mind, and honestly, this is what a New Moon in Gemini is supposed to bring: clarity of mind.

xo

Yolanda

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My mom grew up as the youngest and only daughter in a low-middle-class, Catholic family. She never sugarcoated her feelings about motherhood with us. In fact, she told us many times over the years that she hadn’t wanted children and even described, in detail, how she tried to end her second pregnancy by drinking heavily. My sister was born prematurely as a result.

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On weekends, she would lock my sister and me out of the house. We’d end up stealing fruit from our neighbours’ fruit trees just to get by. She left school at sixteen and started working as a bank clerk — a job she kept for twenty-plus years. Growing up, she faced a great deal of violence from her father, and by nineteen, she’d married my dad to escape her parents’ home. She was always very straightforward about that.

This is what the mother wound looks like in my family.

When your mother — or primary caregiver — isn’t able or willing to inhabit that role, one that demands a high degree of selflessness, it creates patterns of dysfunction that echo through generations. In our culture, the “good mother” is expected to be endlessly nurturing. If she wants something more — if she wants to inhabit other roles — she is unfavourably judged. The wound, then, is not only personal. It is cultural.

Reading the Moon

I won’t share my birth chart here, but you can read my experience of my mother in it. You cannot read her, only my experience of her. My Cancer Sun is in opposition to my 12th house Moon in Capricorn, which tells you that my experience of her was one of emotional unavailability, separation, addiction and madness. That did not mean I did not love her. My mother was a beautiful woman who had men at her feet. She had difficult friendships with women her whole life. But my 12^th-house Moon goes beyond just describing my mother.

The Moon describes your experience of your mother and your matrilineal line. It does NOT give a complete description of your mother’s personality. Only your experience of her. This is important.

Our gifts are inherited; they have come down the line.

My mother had a beautiful singing voice, but her father prohibited her from doing anything with that gift. If an ancestor was prevented from expressing their gifts due to trauma, colonization, or religious dogma, those gifts do not disappear. They go underground.

There are many secrets to the Moon, and one is that the Moon is your body, which is to say, it is through your body, through your relationship with Mother, that you get to express and share your gifts.

Ultimately, what this means for those who are serious about “manifesting” their best lives or living their truth is that you have to heal your mother wound. You see, you embody your mother, whether you realize it or not. You carry her hopes and dreams, you carry her trauma.

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Jung & His Moon

Carl Jung had a fascinating relationship with his mother. His exalted Moon sits in Taurus in the fourth house.

Neptune is at 3° Taurus and Pluto at 23° Taurus. The Moon is sextile Mercury and Venus in Cancer. Moon and Venus are in mutual reception. Venus rules Taurus while the Moon rules Cancer.

This is how Jung described his mother, Emilie Preiswerk:

“She had a hearty animal warmth, cooked wonderfully, and was most companionable and pleasant... She had a decided literary gift, as well as taste and depth. But this quality never properly emerged; it remained hidden beneath the semblance of a kindly, fat old woman, extremely hospitable, and possessor of a great sense of humour.” And yet: “I was sure that she consisted of two personalities, one innocuous and human, the other uncanny... By day, she was a loving mother, but at night, she seemed uncanny. Then she was like one of those seers who is at the same time a strange animal, like a priestess in a bear’s cave. Ancient and ruthless; ruthless as truth and nature.”

We can read every word of his experience of his mother in his birth chart. The exalted Moon in Taurus: the animal warmth, the wonderful cooking, the taste and depth. The sextile to Mercury: the ready listener, the literary gift. And then the Moon conjunct Pluto: the nightly strangeness. His maternal grandmother was clairvoyant. Both she and his mother participated in séances. These experiences went on to shape Jung’s life’s work — his study of parapsychology, mediumship, and alchemy, his refusal to dismiss such things as mere fraud. The gifts of the matrilineal line became the intellectual and spiritual inheritance of one of the twentieth century’s most consequential minds.

Where do we see this lineage?

Emile had 4 planets in the 12^th House. The 12^th House is the home of paranormal episodes, ranging from clairvoyance and telepathy to mediumship. The 12^th House is haunted.

So — How Does This Help You?

What can the Moon reveal about your mother, and about your matrilineal line?

Start here: find your Moon.

Note her sign, her house, and the planets she aspects. The sign tells you the quality of your experience of your mother — was she fiery and dominating, airy and inconsistent, earthy and physical, watery and emotional?

The house tells you the domain in which that experience played out most powerfully. The 12th, as in my case, points to hiddenness, spiritual inheritance, and what was unspoken. The 4th, as in Jung’s, speaks to the foundations of the self, the home, and the roots.

Then ask yourself: What did she long for and never reach? What gifts did she carry that were never properly expressed?

The wound and the inheritance often arrive together.

The mother, who was cold, may have come from a line of women who did not feel safe or supported. The mother who was chaotic may have descended from women whose wild, visionary natures had no sanctioned outlet. Your work is not simply to grieve what was missing — though grief is part of it — but to locate what was preserved, against all odds, in you.

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xo

Yolanda

A Personal Invitation

Many people spend years trying to build confidence, improve their relationships, increase their income, or step more fully into their purpose without realizing they are still carrying an emotional inheritance that was never theirs to begin with.

The way we see ourselves is often shaped long before we have the words to question it.

This is why I created Your Emotional Shift, a short audio recording about the one realization that transformed my understanding of self-worth, visibility, and belonging.

In just a few minutes, I will walk you through the perspective that changed my life.

If you’ve ever wondered whether some of your self-doubt, scarcity, or fear of being fully seen belongs to an older story, this recording is for you.

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Continue Exploring Your Emotional, Psychological and Spiritual Inheritance

Dear reader,

The essay that follows is a little longer than usual, so settle in with your favourite beverage and join me as we explore a fascinating psychological map hidden within a familiar fairy tale.

On June 30th, Jupiter enters Leo, and we have four weeks to prepare. This is a window of time in which the groundwork can be laid, our inner rooms examined, and the soul made ready for what the planet of expansion is about to offer over the coming year-long transit.

Jupiter expands everything he touches, and by this I mean he expands your consciousness, expands your capacity to hold onto more, expands your investments and fills your bank account…but he is also the planet that continues your family lineage and is therefore the planet that blesses you with children. Jupiter, then, is the planet not only of wealth but also of inheritance. Karmic inheritance. When he enters Sun-ruled Leo, the themes of your Leo house begin to open. Jupiter is one of the two great planetary teachers, alongside Saturn, which means you don’t receive the magical opportunity or miracle unless you have learned something. Jupiter rules both Sagittarius and Pisces — the philosopher and the mystic — which means he is invested in your spiritual and psychological preparation as he is in your material flourishing.

Several myths and fairy tales map onto this ingress, but the one I want to focus on today is one you almost certainly know. Rumpelstiltskin, read carefully and symbolically, is a strange but instructive story about a girl who makes a bargain with a goblin.

A Note on the Tale Itself

Before we enter the symbolic reading, it is worth knowing what kind of story we are actually dealing with. Rumpelstiltskin is ancient with roots reaching back to Mesopotamia and the world of textiles and spinning, where the labour of turning raw fibre into thread was essential, exhausting, and almost always done by women and children. In its earliest forms, this was a story about exploitation: about the extraction of skilled labour for someone else’s profit.

The tale underwent many transformations across centuries before arriving in the Brothers Grimm collection with its tidy moral resolution. Along the way, it absorbed a range of cultural anxieties: about women’s work, about women’s creative and magical abilities…

There is even a documented case from sixteenth-century Germany of a spinner accused of witchcraft because her skill was considered supernatural.

All of which is to say: this is not a simple tale. It is a palimpsest — layers of cultural meaning written over one another across millennia.

The Story

There was once a poor miller who seemed to have no luck. No matter how hard he worked, there was never quite enough. One day, his wife put a thought in his head: if the king believed the miller to be someone special, everyone would want to use their mill. Since he was not a “special someone”, or so they believed, they were destined to die poor.

The next morning, the miller set off for the palace and stood before the king and said, “Your Majesty, my daughter is not only beautiful but also special. She can spin straw into gold.”

Of course, the king did not believe him, but his curiosity was stirred. He sent for the girl. If what her father claimed proved true, the king would reward him richly. If she failed, she would lose her head.

The miller went home and told his daughter, Rose, what he had done. She was horrified, but she accepted her fate and set off for the palace, where she found the king had prepared a small room in the tower full of straw and a spinning wheel.

Rose sat down at the wheel and wept. She was a fine spinner, but turning straw into gold was beyond her. Then a voice came from the corner of the room. A small figure appeared, promising to help her — but asking for something in return. She gave him her necklace. By morning, the straw was gold. The king was delighted - of course- and led her to a room twice as large. Again she wept; again the figure appeared; this time she gave him the ring her mother had placed on her finger.

A third room — three times as large as the first two combined. This time, Rose had nothing left to offer. The little man made her promise her firstborn child. She agreed, because what else could she do?

Rose was crowned queen. A year later, she gave birth to a son, and the goblin reappeared to collect his debt. She offered him all the jewels of the kingdom. He responded with “I would rather have something living than all the treasures of the world.” He granted her three days: if she could discover his name, she could keep the child.

She sent messengers to every corner of the land. Long tongue-twisting names, strange names, but none were his. Then the king returned from a hunt with a curious story: deep in the forest, he had come across a little man dancing around a fire, singing to himself.

“Although today I brew and bake,

Tomorrow the queens’s own child I’ll take.

This guessing game she’ll never win,

For my name is Rumpelstiltskin.”

When the goblin appeared for the last time, and Rose spoke his name, he flew into a rage, and he stamped his foot straight through the floorboards and vanished into the earth below.

What the Story Is Actually About

The number three appears in fairy tales for a specific reason: once is chance, twice is coincidence, three times is a pattern. Rose must spin three rooms of straw on three consecutive nights, surrendering something each time. We do not fall into our deepest psychological traps in a single dramatic moment. We arrive there through a series of seemingly reasonable decisions, each one incrementally deepening our commitment to a mode of being that is not truly our own.

The miller is a man who has internalized a devastating belief about worth: that without some external marker of consequence, like the king’s recognition, his life amounts to nothing.

Take a moment here to sit with this and see if it resonates with you.

His wife confirms and reinforces this belief, and together they pass it on to their daughter in the most damaging way possible: by staking her survival on a performance she was never equipped to deliver.

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This is the wound that precedes the story. Rose enters the tower already carrying her father’s definition of what she must be worth. She has not been asked who she is, what she loves, or what she is actually capable of. She has been asked to prove something that was never hers to prove. And the anxiety that this creates is the anxiety that summons the little man.

The goblin is the solution to a problem that was already there: the impossible gap between who we are and what we have been told we must demonstrate in order to survive.

His name is instructive. Rumpelstiltskin means, roughly, “little rattle stilts” — a creature related to poltergeists, to the invisible disturber that makes itself known through noise and disruption within the walls of the house. And stilts are instruments of artificial elevation: they make someone appear taller than they actually stand. This is an inner figure that haunts from within, that creates the impression of height without providing genuine ground beneath it.

The objects Rose surrenders in payment deserve careful attention. First, the necklace — a circle worn at the throat, close to the voice, close to expression. Then the ring her mother placed on her finger — another circle, a token of origin and belonging. These are circles, and in symbolic language, circles speak of wholeness and the bonds that define us. Each one surrendered deepens the bargain and loosens something that was originally and genuinely hers.

By the third room, there is nothing left but the future — the child not yet born, the creative life not yet lived. She promises it, because the present terror feels more real than the abstract loss of a becoming she cannot yet imagine. This is how it works. The soul’s creative future is always abstract — until we have the stillness to feel its absence. Until then, we trade it away one perfectly reasonable decision at a time.

It is also worth sitting with what the little man is not interested in. When the queen offers him the jewels of the kingdom, he refuses. “I would rather have something living than all the treasures of the world.” He is not after the king’s gold. He wants the aliveness — the creative force that the king cannot buy and cannot value. Which means that everything the complex produced — all the anxious spinning, all the performed gold — was never truly what it wanted. What it wanted was to be the source of the soul’s genuine vitality. And that vitality was never truly taken.

Children, Creativity, and the Wound We Pass Forward

In the symbolic grammar of the fairy tale, the child is always the soul’s creative issue. Not necessarily a literal infant — though it may be — but whatever arrives in a life when a person is no longer merely surviving but beginning to genuinely inhabit themselves. A creative practice, a meaningful vocation, a way of being in the world that feels like one’s own.

Rose has found something like this — some genuine territory of selfhood that the little man’s gold could never produce and the king’s approval could never grant. And it is precisely at this moment, when the genuine self begins to emerge, that Rumpelstiltskin returns. Not when she was poor and frightened and spinning at midnight — but when she has something real.

This is the pattern the tale is most interested in encoding: the complex does not dissolve with success. It waits for the genuine thing to appear. The creative wall. The loss of confidence that arrives bewilderingly in the middle of a life that looks, from the outside, like it is working. The sense of not-enoughness that no amount of spun gold was ever able to permanently silence.

There is one more thread in the tale, and it concerns the way wounds travel across generations. When our deepest needs go unmet in childhood, we carry a hunger forward into every future relationship. Sometimes that hunger lands on a partner. Sometimes it lands on the child.

The unspoken bargain at the heart of the third night’s promise is this: when I have a child, I will finally be truly loved by someone for who I am. But when you are a parent, you must be the one giving love.

The moment Rose fights for her son is the moment she stops reaching toward the future to fill a wound from the past. It is the beginning of breaking the pattern.

Rose does not discover the name through brilliant insight or mystical revelation. She discovers it through diligence: she sends her messengers out into the world with a genuine question.

But it is the King who brings back the name. He encountered it by accident, while hunting in the forest, doing something entirely ordinary. The unconscious reveals itself through exactly such sideways encounters: a dream that lingers, a stranger’s throwaway comment, a book that falls open to the right page. You send the messengers, you do the deliberate inquiry — and then the answer arrives from a direction you were not facing, carried by someone you were not expecting.

When Rose speaks the name, the little man’s fury is total. The named complex cannot hold its form in the light. Something dissolves, and there is real grief alongside the relief. The trickster served us. The performing self got us through years when authentic expression was not yet possible.

What remains when it is gone is not emptiness. It is what was always waiting beneath the performance: the soul’s fire, ready at last to be spun by hands that are undeniably our own.

Jupiter in Leo and the Work Ahead

Jupiter in Leo is not going to reward performance. Jupiter in Leo rewards aliveness. The joy of creative self-expression through whatever means feels true to you.

The planet of faith and expansion moves into the sign of solar self-expression and asks: What is actually yours? What can you offer the world that does not require a trickster to produce it on your behalf?

It asks us to understand the self so that we can have a genuine cultural impact: to take what we have discovered to be true and bring it forward into the world.

This is the gold the transit is after. Not the king’s gold, not the spun-from-straw kind. The living gold that cannot be manufactured, bought, or forced, that emerges only when we are in contact with the self that has always been there beneath the spinning. The four weeks before Jupiter crosses into Leo are the time to begin that contact. To send the messengers out. To listen, for the true name being sung by firelight.

xo

Yolanda

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Sources and Further Reading:

Rumpelstiltskin, Ladybird Well-loved tales

https://www.pookpress.co.uk/project/rumpelstiltskin-history/

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