Welcome to Ghost of a Podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Lanyadoo. I'm an astrologer, psychic medium, and animal communicator, and I'm going to give you your weekly horoscope and no-bullshit mystical advice for living your very best life.

Jessica:           Welcome back to Ghost of a Podcast. I have a very special episode here for you today because I had the honor of being a guest on Sisters in Sobriety and getting  to talk to Sonia in depth about astrology and sobriety. It was a really great conversation, and it was so great that I wanted to share it with you here. I hope you will really enjoy it, and if you do enjoy it, go ahead and check out all the other episodes of Sisters in Sobriety. You can find their podcast wherever podcasts are heard—from YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and beyond. Enjoy.

Sonia:              Welcome to Sisters in Sobriety. Today, we are joined by the brilliant Jessica Lanyadoo, a humanistic astrologer, psychic medium, and host of the wildly popular podcast Ghost of a Podcast. Jessica has been working with clients for nearly three decades, offering what she's known, no-bullshit mystical insight, emotional accountability, and practical tools for navigating life's hardest patterns. And today, we're going to explore topics she's spoken powerfully about, the intersection of addiction, sobriety, astrology, and healing.

                        Welcome, Jessica.

Jessica:            Thanks for having me. This has been really fun already.

Sonia:              Yes. Thanks for being here. So, Jessica, for listeners who are maybe meeting you for the first time, how do you describe the work you do, and what makes your approach humanistic astrology?

Jessica:            Yeah. So I am an astrologer. I'm a psychic medium. I'm an animal communicator. I do lots of woo-woo stuff. And my work is deeply humanistic, and I am a humanistic astrologer. A lot of people don't realize that there are different kinds of astrology, and my specialties exist within the humanistic framework. And that humanistic framework is keeping human experience at the center. So I work from a harm-reductionist model.

There's a way that astrology can kind of put the astrologer on high where you listen to the astrologer and you kind of have to figure out what they mean when they say x, y, and z because astrologers can use this "in" language. As a humanistic astrologer, I'm always going to strive to meet my client where they're at and adapt the astrology to meet the human experience instead of require my human clients to adapt to gods and goddesses or any kind of fantastical thing.

My work is really pragmatic, and I have a trauma-informed perspective and history within my work. And so, inevitably, working with addiction and sobriety, which—kind of po-tay-toh/po-tah-toh, right—are a very big part of my work. I even have a class on my website. I call it High Times and Addiction in the Birth Chart, exploring not just addiction to substance but the underpinnings of why we compulsively leave ourselves and attach to externals, whether it's shopping or doomscrolling or messing with substances that ultimately, of their own volition, addict the body or—etc., etc. So yeah. I don't know if I answered that question, but—

Sonia:  Yeah.

Jessica:            —it's a starting point.

Sonia:              You did. And so, when you started developing this approach, what were you seeing in people about their emotional patterns and pain and coping?

Jessica:            So there's a lot of ways that I want to answer this all at once. One is that, as I started my practice, I set the intention to really make space for people with marginalized identities, including people from multiethnic/multiracial backgrounds, because there's something really inherently that can happen for people who are of mixed backgrounds to where they're like, "Oh, I'm not enough of this, and I'm too much of that," or, "I don't belong here and I do belong there." And this happens with other marginalized identities as well.

                        And keep in mind I started my practice in the mid-1990s, so it was before the internet, right? And so much of what that required from me was stepping outside of astrology text because so much of astrology texts are written—the old-school ones are written by men for men, by white people for white people, by straight people for straight people. And so I had to kind of really do a lot of listening and, again, bend the astrology to meet the person in their complexity.

                        And through the process of doing that, my work as a medical astrologer, which—it encompasses addiction and sobriety issues—started to reveal itself to me very organically. And there are, from an astrological perspective—and I'm going to oversimplify grotesquely here, but there are a number of places from which the compulsion to abandon self and reach for something external to make you feel better inside of yourself can bloom from. And I kind of anchor it through different planets, and I'm going to speak in incredibly broad strokes to say I'm going to look to Jupiter for party drug people, people who are just like, "I want to be fun. I want to just drink with my family. I just want to go to the bar and feel good and just relax."

                        That Jupiterian impulse astrologically is not about—the person is not thinking, "I'm abandoning myself." They're thinking, "I just want it to be easy. I just want it to be nice and fun." There's the Neptunian kind of seed, I'll call it, for addition, which is more about feeling really panicked, feeling really separated from oneself, and not knowing what to do, and so reaching for help, often through pharmaceuticals, to—and when I say pharmaceuticals, I mean street drugs. I'm including street drugs. We're talking about pills. I'm talking about—oftentimes, it's downers—as a way to kind of make sense of internal chaos and feeling unmoored or untethered.

                        And then I'm going to look to Pluto. Pluto is kind of the premier planet for addiction. And I don't know if this feels like an offensive term or not, but like the trash-can addict, somebody who's just like, "Give me whatever. I'll take anything. Like, anything, anything, anything"—that's Pluto. Pluto is like, "I don't like how I feel, and I'm going to just squash this feeling. I'm just going to change this feeling."

                        Somebody once said to me years ago—a friend of mine who was sober—she said the worst thing you can say to any addict is, "You're having a feeling right now." And I was like, "Oh." I was just like, "That tracks." It's like there's something about the difference between addiction and so many other things is really about emotions, and it's about how we process emotions, how we do or don't abandon ourselves when feelings get intense, when situations and feelings get intense.

                        And so, again, this is a gross overgeneralization, but through astrology, I can identify where the impulse around addiction is coming from. And that's not even speaking yet to doomscrolling or shopping or TV, all of which are addictions. They can be addictions because they kind of do that same distance-from-emotion dopamine hit thing. And that wasn't the case in the '90s in the same way as it is now because I think our human vulnerabilities have been weaponized against us from so many corporations. And humans are addictive.

Sonia:              Speaking of that addiction and that escapism and abandoning ourselves, have you ever found people use astrology—

Jessica:            Yeah.

Sonia:              —for that and to—yeah, to make sense of that internal chaos that you were talking about?

Jessica:            So, when people do that, they're using it a lot like online gambling or shopping. So, when people are kind of—we'll use the term "abusing" astrology—it's when there's not a depth of knowledge underneath it. They're looking for an answer to make them feel better. And people do that with Christianity, and they do that with every other religion, right? Because anyone who's looking for a way to not use spirituality to understand and to cope but instead to feel something different, not be where you are—that gets into addictive behavior because, at core, what it's about is not coping and meeting the moment, but instead getting away from the feeling, replacing your headache, your migraine, with getting your ears pierced. Well, they both hurt, but now I'm focusing on this pain instead of this pain kind of thing, you know?

                        So people do it with astrology because it's easy to just fixate on things like that. But again, I've seen people do it with every religion. You can do it with anything.

Sonia:              Oh yeah. Yeah. That makes total sense. I'm trying to think of difficult times. When I went through a divorce, I remember I really wanted to drink, and I didn't. But I also—because I really wanted to know if I was going to be alone for the rest of my life, and so I also was always like, "We should see an astrologer." And you're right. It was the same dopamine hit I would have been getting from—

Jessica:            Yeah. Yeah.

Sonia:              —drinking. And so, yeah, that's really interesting. And you've answered the question, is addiction fated in the stars? So what is your response when somebody asks that? You mentioned a little bit about finding out where it comes from, but is it fated, in a sense? Or what does fated mean in that sense?

Jessica:            So that's a really good question. I really passionately believe in free will, and I equally believe in fate. And I think that there is—you can build a sailboat, and you can put it on the perfect conditions. And if you don't know how to ride the boat and you don't pay attention to the wind and the sea and so many other factors that I don't know because I've never ridden on a sailboat, then you will not have an easy time.

                        So the answer to this is not either/or. It's "and also." And so some people can drink their faces off and never develop an alcohol addiction, you know? It's not particular healthy. It's not particularly helpful. Whatever. But it's not an addiction. And other people—one sip, and something happens inside of them, right? So this is where there's a physiological component to addiction, I feel. It's not just mental or emotional. It's certainly not just about willpower. There is a physiology to it.

                        And so is physiology fate? I would say no, especially not with modern medicine. But I do think that we have tendencies. And given the right cocktail of choice and circumstance, fate and behavior, which—we have free will around those behaviors, but you know, fate—it's more likely for some people than others. I look at some people's charts, and I'm like, "Oh, I'm not going to bring up addiction ever. It's never going to come up with me and this person." And other people, I'm like, "We have to talk about all the addicts in your family. We have to talk about this compulsion inside of you and how it's showing up behaviorally."

                        And so I wouldn't say it's fated, but I would say there are certainly markers for tendencies and potentialities, right?

Sonia:              Yeah. Are there markers for tendencies, also, towards anxiety?

Jessica:            Yes.

Sonia:              Anger?

Jessica:            Absolutely. Cancer, heart disease, dental disease—all of those things. Yes.

Sonia:              Does that show up in astrological charts?

Jessica:            Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. So one of the things I do is I am a medical astrologer, and it's something that I don't talk about or practice in public a great deal because of the way that people misuse astrology. They don't study it comprehensively, and then they try to apply it, and then it becomes, actually, quite dangerous. But when I look at a birth chart, I can see the likelihood of certain diagnoses from psychologists. I can see physiological patterns in the heredity, which doesn't mean fate.

                        So, if there's Type 2 diabetes and your mother has it and your aunt has it and your grandfather had it, does that mean you're going to have Type 2 diabetes? No, it doesn't mean that. But a little cocktail of behavior and heredity can make you more likely to have it than someone who doesn't have it in their heredity, right? So, if we use that kind of common-sense thought, astrology articulates the leanings in our system. And so it tells us, for instance, from an astrological perspective—from my astrological perspective, I'll say, there are two different kinds of anxiety, okay?

                        There's the anxiety of, "Oh my God. Oh my God. There's a monster in my bed. I've never seen the monster, but I can tell there's a monster. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. What do I do? What do I do?" And then there's the anxiety of, "I want to focus on this; I want to focus on that. I want to focus on this; I want to focus on that. If I don't see the thing in the [fridge 00:14:49], then it doesn't exist." It's like that kind of mental electricity. And one comes from Uranus, that electricity. And the panicky one comes from Neptune.

                        And so, many times, I'll have clients come in, and they are, let's say, diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. And they are treated for something that's Neptunian when they actually have Uranian anxiety, and their meds never work. And their meds never work because they're misdiagnosed because psychology has a different lens than astrology. And so, sometimes, people will describe their pain in such a way that it sounds like they're depressed, but what's actually happening is anxiety. But the way they articulate those symptoms sounds like depression, so they get medicated for depression, and the medication doesn't work because they're not depressed; they're anxious, and their presentation is depressed. See what I mean?

Sonia:              Can you help people tell the difference?

Jessica:            Yeah. Yeah. That is what I have done—so I'm currently not—I met with clients for my full-time living up until 2020. And I saw COVID coming, so I stopped taking clients for 2020, and I've been focusing on more of my podcast and different kinds of work at this time. But that is a huge part of what I would do with and for people.

                        And make no mistake: this is intertwined with addiction because, whether or not we're talking about people who are addicts or what we're talking about is coping mechanisms that work at a moment and then stop working at another moment, it's kind of the same conversation. The nuances and the lived experience are meaningfully different, but ultimately, most people start using a substance because it helps them. And at a certain point, it stops helping.

And that moment, that switch, is not obvious. And even if it is obvious, once you're in the throes—thinking of addiction, in a way, as momentum, right? You build up momentum, and then once the momentum is going, it's really hard to just be like, "Maybe this isn't working. I'll stop," because there's a momentum, right? And so, astrologically, my work is to meet people where they're at, not just psychologically, but in the momentum of their choices.

And as we know, anyone who's sober, whether you do it through AA or any other means, that creates a momentum eventually. But it's so much harder to create momentum being present with yourself because it's like, "I've abandoned myself. Oh shit. I felt anxious for three days. Now I have to come back to myself." That's a really eke kind of momentum, right? It's not like you start snorting drugs. The momentum comes real quick. It comes real quick, and it stays for as long as you keep drugs in proximity to you or you're actively seeking out the drugs.

Seeking out alignment, seeking out presence, seeking out psychologically processing pain—what? It's slow. It's slow. And so the momentum is a lot slower, right? And this is why people often, when dealing with addiction, will deal with the behavior, but it's so much harder. It's like in AA we call it—there's sober people; there's dry drunks. Right? There's a big difference. There's a big difference.

Sonia:  Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. And the difference is, in part, momentum on an energetic level. Sober people have a momentum. They have a practice. They have a process. They keep coming back. And dry drunks are just kind of white-knuckling it or ignoring it until it comes back, right? And there's a phase of life for everyone. No judgment. But astrology articulates these things. It helps us find these things, and not horoscopes, obviously, not sun sign astrology. It's not based on if you're a Scorpio or if you're a Taurus. It's based on the complexity of the birth chart.

Sonia:              Is there something about the steps, the 12 steps, that helps us build that momentum?

Jessica:            Yes. Okay. I'm so happy you're asking this. This is something I always want to talk about. I never get to.

Sonia:              I'm working the steps right now, actually, and I've been sober for like eight years. And it's the first time I'm working the steps.

Jessica:            Okay. So a lot of people have a lot of very valid criticisms of AA.

Sonia:              Yeah.

Jessica:            And I think to criticize AA is great, and I also think to criticize AA is a part of addiction, right?

Sonia:              Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. But I am a huge fan of AA. And that doesn't mean that I don't criticize things I'm a fan of. Okay. So I just want to start with that, to say in astrology—let me reframe. In my use of astrology, Pluto is the planet that is the premier addict. Pluto governs all-or-nothing impulses. It governs your survival mechanisms, your flight/fight/fawn. Pluto governs addiction, the addiction that is like, "I want to fucking destroy myself. I want to destroy how I feel. I will do anything to not feel what I'm feeling."

                        And how do we heal Plutonian addiction? Brené Brown did a great job talking about how shame exists in a vacuum, how when you are sitting in a room full of other people and you're not saying a damn word, but all these other people are articulating your own lived experience, your own, "Oh my God. That feeling that I thought I was the only one feeling—this person has been feeling it for 30 years"—that process is Plutonian. The process of sharing shame in confidence and not being burned for it—that's how we heal through Pluto.

                        And so the reason why I am such an advocate—and I myself am not an addict. It drives my partner—my partner is sober, and it drives my partner crazy that I'll pour myself a drink and then, a day later, be like, "Oh my God. I left that drink on the counter." I just don't [crosstalk].

Sonia:              Oh, [crosstalk] you.

Jessica:            Yeah. I know. I know. I mean, I have addictive nature in other ways but not with substances. But, that said, the reason why I'm such an intense fan of AA is because what AA is—democratic. It's free. And you go when you want. You're not locked into it. You choose it. You choose it. And the process of making a difficult choice is, in many ways, the process of not abandoning yourself. And sharing your shame and your fear and your vulnerability in a room full of strangers, or people that you've now gotten to know through this vehicle, is Plutonian. And so that's why it works.

                        It works because that's exactly how we battle the complexities that compel us to believe we don't matter/our behavior towards ourselves doesn't matter. And that empowers what we understand to be maladjusted or harmful behaviors to the self and then ultimately to others. So there is an astrology behind why AA works. It just is. Yeah. Yeah.

Sonia:              When we talk about the meetings, I think some people would argue that there is a shame element, so—or some certain meetings, right? Like if you're not going regularly, you're not working the program, or for example, the idea that you have to go back to day one if you have a relapse. Where do you put that in your—

Jessica:            Yep. I have so much to say about that.

Sonia:              Okay. Yeah. I have a lot of opinions about it, and I have like ten different types of opinions. So, yeah, what do you think?

Jessica:            As one should, because it's complicated. It's a peer-run group. So you have a bunch of addicts sitting in a room saying, "We're moving through our shame, but I'm going to shame you for not doing it my way."

Sonia:              That's it. Yeah.

Jessica:            And it's because we're all taking the same medicine, right? We're all sitting here taking the same medicine. And I mean, how many sober men have I met—oh my God. They say all the best words. They've gone to all the meetings. They understand the psychological language. And then they're just using, using, using, using, using. It's not that women don't do it, too. Of course, all the genders do it. All the genders do it, but I just have this California stereotype in my head of these guys.

                        Just because you say to yourself, "I'm going to seek help," or, "I'm going to align myself with this group because it's accessible to me," or, "I'm fucking desperate," or, "It worked for my friend," or whatever it is, doesn't mean that everyone in the group is aligned in the same way. And so what is the stereotype of an AA meeting? A bunch of people chain-smoking and guzzling coffee outside a meeting, right?

                        It's like there's a reason why that happens. It's because it's not a switch that's flipped. If your compulsion around yourself is to shame yourself and belittle yourself and abandon yourself, and then you go into a group of people who are doing the identical thing, what are the chances that half of the group, at least, is not going to be doing it to you instead of themselves because they're finally worked through their addiction, so now why aren't you doing it their way?

                        And this is exactly why AA doesn't work, and it's exactly why it does work: because in order to heal these things, whether it's addiction or self-abandonment or self-harm, unfortunately, we have to do it in community. That's the worst part. You have to do it around people, you know? And for so many people who are super introverted or people who are just like—being around other people is their trigger, which is most people—

Sonia:              Most addicts, too.

Jessica:            Most addicts, most people, right? Inevitably, people are going to be shitty. People are going to be like, "You can't drink kombucha. Kombucha has .2 percent alcohol in it." They're going to be like, "Of course you can drink kombucha. Kombucha is really healthy for you, and it's never going to give you a buzz."

There's always going to be people with different vibes and different ways of articulating things. There's going to be people who take up all the air in the room, and there's going to be people who never know how to speak up for themselves or anyone else. There's going to be all different kinds of people, and that's the trigger because being in relationship to other people, even if you're doing Zoom meetings for AA, is triggering because people are triggering, because people act like you or they don't act like you, and both of those things are annoying, depending on the circumstance, right?

                        And so my conviction is that not everything works for everyone, and AA doesn't work for everybody. And also, being able to be like, "Okay. These people are different than me. I don't like our differences. These people think I'm doing it wrong. They're allowed to have their opinion"—those skills are essential for adulting. And adulting for addicts requires being able to tolerate discord, disagreement, dysregulation, and not fall back on self-harming, self-abandoning, self-punishing behaviors.

And that is fucking a lifetime of work, which is why in AA they say you never stop being an addict, because the roots of the psychology remain the roots. And so you strengthen the rest of the tree, and that's wonderful, and the tree can get very strong. But there is a wisdom to that ideology of the roots are always going to be the roots. And also, not everything works for everyone, and we want to hold that messy space, which—in addiction, in the core of our addiction, we don't have tolerance for messiness. It's all or nothing. It's yes or no. And that kind of black-and-white thinking, I think, is core to certain kinds of addiction, Plutonian addiction.

Sonia:  If we bounce around a couple of the steps—

Jessica:            Let's bounce. Let's bounce.

Sonia:              —that I have particularly struggled with watching other people do, what about Step 8 about amends? Is there—yeah.

Jessica:            You're asking all my favorite questions. Thank you.

Sonia:              What do you think about, like, is there something that happens during amends that is sort of interesting in terms of energy shifting? Is it something that can go horribly wrong? Shoutout to my brother. But is there—

Jessica:            Yeah.

Sonia:              Yes. What do you think of it? Is it something that you think is necessary? Is it something that we need to think about a little bit from maybe a deeper level, astrological level?

Jessica:            Yeah. Yeah.

Sonia:              What do you think about that?

Jessica:            So I have so many thoughts about that. So I am a fan of the living amends. Have you heard of this?

Sonia:              No.

Jessica:            The living amends? Okay. So this is—I feel like it is horrifying that people talk about that step without talking about living amends as an option. So let's say, in my addiction, I ran over your puppy and I never apologized, and you fucking hate me. There is a value in me considering, is me calling you up/texting you for me, or is it for you? Because if you hate me so much that, actually, you don't want to fucking deal with me, then the living amends is the commitment. And so, as a step towards living amends, I might donate a certain amount of money or time to an animal shelter instead of call you up and make you relive this terrible thing I did to you.

So that's one form of a living amends. Another form of a living amends is, if you have somebody in your life who is a perpetrator to you, who is not safe for you—which we all do. Which we all do.

Sonia:              This is my whole thing. So yeah. This is why I wanted to know your opinion, because you have kind of a trauma-informed approach.

Jessica:            Yes. Yeah.

Sonia:              If someone is the perpetrator, and then you've—okay. Yeah.

Jessica:            They don't deserve your amends in a personal way. So this is where a living amends is meant to be on a soul level. On a soul level, I can hold accountability for all the ways in which I perpetrated harm, all the ways in which I acted that were not in alignment with the kind of person I want to be. I want to be honest; I lie to your face all the time. I want to be kind, and I was vengeful towards you. And you're a perpetrator. You're a monster. I'm not fucking telling you, "Hi. I'm sorry."

                        Instead, what we want to do in that situation is write a letter. Write a letter taking accountability for what you want to make amends for, what you did. And you send it to that person's soul. You send it to that person's soul. You don't send it to the fucking person, because that person is not a safe person. And then you can say, as a kind of extension of this step, of making a living amends, "I am going to"—let's say this perpetrator was a narcissist—"I'm going to read a book on narcissism." Maybe it's this person was sociopathic and actually quite dangerous and violent. Okay. "I'm going to"—again, I can drop coin to an organization that supports people who suffered through the abuse I did, or I'm going to—you know. You can do any number of things.

                        The point is the repetition of harm is not an amends, right? And if you are having to harm someone else or put yourself in harm's way in order to make amends, that's not amends. And this is where AA—again, we're talking about was created by and for white men, the apex predator—not to shit on men. I love men. Men, you're lovely. But you know what I mean? Apex predator. And so is it going to be safe for so many people, and in particular so many women, to call up their abusers who they also did fucked-up things with? No. Don't do that, ever.

                        And this, again, is where I say the step of amends astrologically and throughout the program is essential because it's accountability. But accountability doesn't require engagement. Sometimes you say, "Okay. I can recognize on a soul level you must have value. And so I'm going to speak to your soul, and I'm going to take accountability. And the gift I give to myself in sobriety is to not invite monsters to my dinner table." That's fair. And what it requires is boundaries. And what do addicts not have? Healthy boundaries, by definition, because if you had healthy boundaries, then you'd be like, "Oh, okay. So this much drugs is good, and that much drugs is bad for me." There's no boundaries. That's the whole point.

                        And this is where life becomes unmanageable because one is not able to have healthy boundaries embodied and practiced. And so, for me, doing the steps is about developing relationship to self. And so sometimes what's asked of us in the steps—you can't do it yet. Okay. You hang out in relationship to yourself there. And sometimes you recognize, "I can't do this because it's not healthy for me at any fucking stage. It's nothing to do with my sobriety. It has to do with this person." And in that situation, that's what your dear diary is for. That's what your therapist is for. That's what donating to causes is for. And I will sing it off the rooftops.

                        And again, when we talk about our critiques of AA, the fact that the book hasn't been amended to say sometimes you make an amends/sometimes it's a living amends—it's wrong. It's wrong. Yeah.

Sonia:              I love the idea of a living amends. I'm so happy we talked before I got to that step because I was just going to ignore those ones. But the idea of still acknowledging it feels really authentic.

Jessica:            Because we all have our part.

Sonia:              Yeah.

Jessica:            I think about the person who treated me the worst in my life, and that doesn't mean I can't take accountability for ways I engaged in reaction that added to my own harm, because that's what this is about, right?

Sonia:              Yeah.

Jessica:            As we treat others we treat ourselves.

Sonia:              Yeah. Even, "I'm sorry I let you hurt me."

Jessica:            Yeah. "I'm sorry I didn't have the boundaries I needed. I'm sorry I let you believe that was okay."

Sonia:              Yes.

Jessica:            There are so many—okay. So this is really—we've gotten to something really important. There is a way that—listen. Let's say you and I are dating, and I fuck you over left, right, and center. You can break up with me; you can get over it. But what really bites and the thing that's really hard to get over is what you let me do to you, right? What we really struggle with is not what other people do to us; it's the abandonment of self that occurs. And that is not to blame victims. Let's be exceptionally clear. If somebody harms you, they've harmed you. That's on them.

                        And also, part of what happens with shame is that there's this kernel of truth and then maladjusted coping mechanisms and false narratives wrapped around it. And so we do need to get to that kernel of truth. And sometimes the kernel of truth is, "I didn't know how to take care of myself, and I look back and see that I could have done x and y. And it wouldn't have changed things, but it would have changed things." You know? It's being able to hold that messiness. If program isn't adaptable, then it's not going to work because rigidity is Pluto, all or nothing.

                        And so, when anyone—you or anyone else—is in program and doing the steps, and you start to catch rigidity inside of yourself or you start getting messages that are rigid from other people, recognizing, "Oh, that's actually addiction at work. That's actually addiction at work." And people who are sober and healthy and all these things—they're still fucking addicts. They still have that tendency.

And so there is a way that maybe what helped you get sober is doing a monthlong silent meditation, and so there might be a part of you that whenever you see somebody staying in their lives and not leaving their lives, you're like, "That person is not really going to make it. That's not going to work," because we all have that rigidity as a part of our coping mechanism, whether it's around staying in addiction or healing within addiction.

And I just think—I think that there's so much to be gained from "and also." There's so much to be gained from honoring your own vulnerabilities and your own reality with a living amends. And again, scream it from the rooftops. Scream it from the rooftops. It's so important, and I'll never stop talking about it.

Sonia:              Yeah. And you mentioned the monthlong silent retreat. And so, in terms of coping strategies, are there some that work better for certain people from an astrological point of view?

Jessica:            Yeah. Yeah.

Sonia:              So, for example, if one more person tells me to work out harder, I'm going to kill them because I work out. I work out so that I stay strong and don't hurt myself as I age, but let's not confuse that with enjoying working out.

Jessica:            Absolutely. Absolutely.

Sonia:              And so I'm just not that person. So, when I'm having a bad day, I'm not like, "God, I need to get out there and do a run. Let me get out there. Let me lose some weight."

Jessica:            Totally.

Sonia:              So are there coping strategies—are there ways you can help us eliminate trying things that don't work and get to what does work faster for us?

Jessica:            Sure. And again, this thing about working out harder—again, it's kind of a boys' game. If you're perimenopausal, working out harder is really bad for your body. More and more studies are coming out talking about how things are different at different stages of life, etc. But that's a diversion.

                        So let's say—and the problem with what I'm going to tell you is that you have to have a fair amount of astrological knowledge in order to apply this. But regardless, some people will recognize themselves in what I'm going to say. So Jupiter—if you have a Jupiterian addiction model inside of you—which tends to be alcohol, sometimes fun party drugs, but it's anything that helps you have experiences or alcohol on its own—it gets too depressant, so eventually, people get really alone sometimes with their alcohol addiction.

                        But if the thing that you loved about alcohol was having experiences with people, feeling free, feeling like everything was easy and everything was good, then remembering that you need some kind of expansive experience and adventure is really helpful. So that's not go to the gym. For some people, that's go to the gym; for most people, it's not. That might be reading a book. That might be—I don't know. Maybe it's getting on your Peloton and being like, "I'm in Scotland on the hills, and I'm taking a bike ride," instead of a class, right? It might be having a social exchange with somebody in a place you've never been, like a café that you've always passed. It's about just kind of expanding your world a little bit. Again, you can do it alone; you can do it with other people.

If the addiction is more Neptunian and the person is really driven by having a hard time being in their body, living in this time, just a hard time navigating the fear of what could happen next, then for them, cultivating a spiritual values system that is faith-based can be really centering so that the person—so, again, this is not about exercise—so that the person is like, "Okay. I can have those thoughts, and I can have those feelings, and also hold on to the conviction that"—insert conviction here, because I don't believe in any one conviction is right. There's a lot of different people. It's a really big planet. Lots of different things work for different people and at different times.

For a Plutonian person, it gets hardest. And that's most addicts, to be fair, and it gets hardest because sometimes you are going to feel like shit. Sometimes your life feels irretractably terrible. Sometimes you're stuck and you can't go past the stage you're at. Sometimes you backslide. And holding space for that while being accountable to yourself is the hardest thing for an addict to do. I can hold space that I fucked up and then beat myself up about it. I can make excuses for why I backslid or self-harmed or whatever and then blame someone else. These are two really deep patterns.

And if—again, this is where I come back to practicing "and also." "I did this thing that was—I haven't done this in six months, and I'm doing this again, and I know better. And it hurt me, and now I have all these negative consequences. And also, I caught it in 23 hours instead of 23 weeks. And also, I have a conviction to not do this again. And that's a first for me." It's owning, "Oh fuck. I stepped in shit and walked on white carpeting. And also, I recognized it. I'm going to be accountable to it. And it's okay to be and this fucked-up place."

Giving ourselves permission to be human and to err and to not go into a carceral or punishing state of mind is the key. And for some people, the way that they can get there is through exercise. Some people, the way they can get there is through meditation. For a lot of people, what I end up recommending is a mantra. And the reason why—and I'm not talking about any specific mantra. The reason why I recommend a mantra is because repetitive, obsessive, fixated thoughts are the bane of most addicts' existence. "Why did I do this?"—remembering it and thinking about it and, "What did they say? And what did I do?" and all that kind of shit.

And so, when that kind of obsessive fixation emerges, what I'll often recommend to people is just pick a word. "Love" is the easiest one for me because there's no downside. But it can be "purple banana." It doesn't have to be anything deep. It doesn't have to be a mantra that is deeply spiritual. It can just be "pickles." And say it over and over and over and over and over again.

So let me say this. Pluto, this big culprit with addiction—I often describe it as the undertow of the ocean. And so, if you've ever been caught up in the undertow of the ocean, you know if you try to swim away, if you panic, you're dead. You have to just kind of go limp, and then the undertow passes you. That's addiction. That's Pluto. It's—when we try to struggle with our compulsions and our—yeah, our compulsions, they will always win because they are stronger than us. And if instead we don't engage—we recognize, "Okay. All my shit is activated. All my shit is activated. Pickle, pickle, pickle, pickle, pickle, pickle, pickle, pickle, pickle, pickle. I'm in a pickle. I'm a pickle, pickle, pickle, pickle, pickle"—20 minutes of pickle—it will pass. It will pass.

And then you remember yourself because you are not your addiction. None of us are. We are not the worst things that happen to us. We are not our worst impulses. They are impulses. They are the experiences we've had. They're a part of us. But we get to reshape our relationship, but not in any way. So, when we talk about free will—just to date myself, I would often say to people, "You have free will. You don't have the free will to be like Paris Hilton born into the Hilton empire, who's like an heiress." We don't have a free will to just not have the circumstances and the nature and the experiences we have. We have the free will within our circumstances, within our nature.

And so this is where attempting to choose to not engage with the undertow doesn't change the undertow, but it changes your relationship to it and eventually its impact on you. And that is called sobriety, right? That is called not just surviving but learning how to thrive and live in abundance more. And it takes a lot of time.

Sonia:  It does. And with it, I find, for me, came an identity shift.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Sonia:              And so is that something that you see recovery as, or is our identity the undertow? Is it something that stays—

Jessica:            No.

Sonia:              —relatively stagnant?

Jessica:            I think it's something else. I think that when living in addiction, something that most all addictions have in common is you organize your coping mechanisms around doomscrolling, around drinking, around whatever, right? Popping pills—whatever it is. And so your relationships are—100 percent of your relationships are between you doomscrolling to cope, drinking to cope, and that person. And so it is impossible for your relationships to stay the same.

                        The idea that you can keep on going to the exact same place, doing the exact same thing with the exact same people, and nothing has changed, is fantasy. Right? We engage with addiction because we are trying to bend our whole personality around a coping mechanism. And so an identity shift is essential.

                        Coming back to astrology, Pluto also governs the phoenix rising from the ashes. But that means it inherently governs the flames that destroyed that phoenix. We always love to talk about the hero's journey, the phoenix rising from the ashes. The phoenix first had to perish. The phoenix had a whole life. Then the phoenix was burned, and then it rose. And Pluto governs all stages of that cycle.

                        Pluto is inside of every human. And for addicts, it is usually a part of their healing or self-destructive journey. And so can the phoenix go back to its old family and be like, "I'm completely unchanged. Everything's the same"? No. It's like trial by fire, right? And so I think that embracing change is an inevitable part. Again, it's adaptability. It's "and also." It's an inevitable part of dealing with addiction because if you're not willing to change and be changed, how can you change and be changed? Right? That's how it goes.

Sonia:              Not everyone sees that metaphor the same way. I feel like some people feel like they've had a negative circumstance, and they want to rise and become the same person they were before that negative circumstance. So they want the same phoenix to rise from the old ashes.

Jessica:            That's really, really hard, you know?

Sonia:              Yeah.

Jessica:            I think that's really, really hard. And I think that is, in part, a function of addiction itself because how do you change your core coping mechanisms and remain the same? Show me. You can't. So you have to lie to yourself. You have to lie to the people around you—you know, kind lies. It's like, no, no, it's fine that they're doing this thing and I'm pretending I'm okay with it. We cannot change and remain the same. And this is my work as an astrologer.

                        Astrology—it articulates one's nature, but it also articulates the cycles and trends that we're going through, what we're meant to learn from them, how long they're going to last, what part of our shit they stimulate, etc. And so there is a way that I will say as an astrologer that change is inevitable. If you want to be the same person at 25 and 35 and 45 and 65, then what is it that you want from life? What do you think life is? The body changes. You look different, sound different. Your experiences are meant to change you. We are not meant to stay the same. We are meant to evolve.

                        And that doesn't mean we have to lose our friends and lose our jobs and all that kind of stuff. But if our relationships don't adapt to meet us as we adapt, then they are not based on authenticity. And at core—listen. Does every sober person have to be authentic all the time? No. Obviously, no. And also, if one is moving through addiction and seeking not just to no longer have self-harming behaviors but also to meet oneself authentically, you're going to change. Things have to change. Things have to change. There's an inevitability to change.

And if you think you can walk through fire and look and feel and sound the same and want the same things and not be changed by that experience, then you don't understand the very nature of fire. I mean, that's my take. But again, I say that while also wanting to hold space for the people who are just like, "I can't hear that, or I can't hear that now. I don't agree, and I don't want to agree," because we get to be whoever we choose to be. We're not free of consequences, but we get to be whoever we choose to be.

Sonia:              I have one last question for you, which is, if sobriety is an act of coming back to yourself, what does astrology remind us about why we left in the first place and what makes that return possible?

Jessica:            Astrology is the practice of looking at planets, zodiac signs—right? We're looking at celestial bodies that are far, far from us. And we're using those to understand how they influence our nature and our lived experience. If you accept the interconnectedness of these organisms—of the Moon to the tides, of the Moon to my moods—if you can accept all of that, then you can understand that none of us are meant to be cars that came out of the lot working perfectly.

                        Life itself is about ebb and flow. Life itself requires failure. It requires misdeeds. And it requires these things because we live in an imperfect world surrounded by imperfect people. We are organisms growing and evolving, and we will inevitably struggle. And how we meet those struggles—again, it's like a merging of circumstance and free will.

                        And I really do believe that astrology articulates that life is about evolution, and it's about interconnection. And no person lives isolated from other people truly, truly, truly. And when we are engrossed in our addiction, it feels like it's only affecting us. It feels like we are the ones who it's happening to, when in fact each of us is an important thread in the tapestry of this Universe, of the collective. And we affect each other intensely.

                        And when you think back to the worst moments of your addiction, would you ever have believed that you would one day have a podcast and you would talk about those worst moments and help people in their worst moments? Right? You couldn't have thought of those things because you weren't that person yet. You were not yet burned to a crisp. You couldn't yet rise. And that is reiterated astrologically. We must go through experiences in efforts to evolve. This is what makes me, unfortunately, a bit of a reverse ageist. I am like, "Older people are"—I just—age doesn't guarantee that you will use your lived experience, but no matter how wise you are in your 20s, you don't have that much lived experience.

                        I believe that experience is the best instructor. And so, if you've experienced the bowels of your nature and the worst of other people and you found a way to treat yourself with kindness, to use that poison and turn it alchemically into medicine, if—as this podcast is, right—if you've found ways of being able to evolve and grow and heal and make even the teeniest, tiniest amount of progress, then you're living.

                        And if you commit to the ashes, if you commit to staying like stone, unmoved by the tides, unmoved by your lived experience, what kind of a life is that? What kind of a life is that? We must grow. We must change. We must fuck up. Our failures—this is how I always say it. Anyone who's listened to my podcast has heard me say this five million times. What is hard for you is not what's wrong with you. Your struggles are a reflection of your journey. They're not a reflection of you being inherently bad. Do some people have it easier than you? Sure. Do some people have it worse than you? Absolutely.

                        It doesn't mean anything. Comparing ourselves to other people is useless. Comparing ourselves to—comparison is the thief of joy, right? We want to make sure that in choosing this moment, we understand that we will always have messy feelings. We will always have done some things wrong and some things right. And if you're wiling to learn, then there's a utility to it. And if you punish yourself, then there's no utility. But you can punish yourself for 15 years and then wake up one morning and be like, "Actually, I'm going to learn from something that happened 12 years ago." Okay. Now there's utility. And that utility helps us to be stronger threads in the tapestry, and it helps us to be better aligned with ourselves. It makes life easier.

                        And the one last thing I'll say—I know I'm talking too much here, but—

Sonia:              No.

Jessica:            —at the center of my work as a humanistic astrologer, I am primarily interested in helping people so that they can find the ability to, in those moments when you're lying in bed and you're about to fall asleep and you're alone with yourself and all the shit starts to come up—all the shit starts to come up—my hope as a practitioner is to help people to have peace in those moments or to have coping mechanisms for when those unpeaceful feelings emerge so you can be accountable, so that you can be in process, not so that you can be perfect.

                        And any spirituality that requires or demands perfection is bullshit, as far as I'm concerned. We want to be in process. And so, to anyone who is struggling with sobriety or struggling with addiction in any phase, stay in the struggle. The struggle is the way. The struggle is the point. The struggle is the path. It's not hitting a destination, because anyone who's been to a meeting and there's somebody who's got 30 years sober and they keep coming back because they need to keep coming back—it's the journey. And you can hear them tell a story and be like, "Oh, I want that story." It's just one telling of one story. It's not the whole story.

                        We're all fucked up, you know? People like me who—I'm not addictive to substances. It doesn't mean I don't have problems, right? So being able to just be where you are and give yourself permission to be where you are, accountable and trying, not carceral, not punishing—that's the move. And astrology articulates this. Good psychology and good astrology articulate these things. And when you find the right meeting—because in AA, there's 7 million different kinds of meetings, right? When you find the right meeting and you find the right people, that comes together, too.

Sonia:              Yeah. Oh, Jessica, I can't even tell you how amazing it was to have you on.

Jessica:            I'm so happy we did this.

Sonia:              Me, too. You've left me with so much to think about and journal about. And so I'm so excited. And had I known you were so into the steps, we could have done a full step deep dive. So maybe we'll have you back for that.

Jessica:            Bring me back. I'd love to. I love—again, I'm not sober myself, but I've really educated myself about it personally because I have so many sober friends or friends who've dipped in and out of sobriety, and also because I love AA because it's so Plutonian, because it matches astrology so perfectly. It's—yeah. It's a cool thing.

Sonia:              I'll say one of the things that hit me the most about what you said with the momentum—because I've always had a different way of describing it, which is alcohol and drugs worked so fast for me to fix whatever was—it was just like, boom, come home from work feeling stressed. Boom. And now it takes like 32 things and 18 hours to get to the same place.

Jessica:            Yeah. Yeah.

Sonia:              So I feel better now knowing that that is normal.

Jessica:            Momentum. Yeah. You might want to even watch a video or go to a park of, like—look at swings. Look at the momentum because building new habits means the lack of momentum, and seeing how addiction is just momentum, it's like, "Oh, of course I want that." Who doesn't want that? Alcohol is instant, right? But choosing emotions is so slow, but you build momentum over years. And it changes. It gets better. It gets easier.

Sonia:              Oh, thank you so much.

Jessica:            Thank you for having me. This was awesome. Take really good care, and enjoy maple tapping.

Sonia:              I know. I'll be maple tapping this weekend. I will send updates.

Jessica:            Very jealous. That's exciting.

Sonia:              Thank you all for listening to Sisters in Sobriety, and we will see you all next week.