My move last year has seemed to unleash a torrent of unexpected spiritual experiences. Neptune is the planet of spirituality, and I moved to where Neptune conjuncts my Part of Fortune (a point of luck in our charts) which seems to be leading me down a spiritual path of events. It all started in mid-February this year with some tension with a friend during a book club meeting. She expressed support for the idea of the universe being inherently loving and supportive.
“What about the people who are homeless? What about the people who live in constant danger, like in a war zone?” I asked. I didn’t word it like this, but politically, it felt like a pretty out-of-touch and irresponsible westerner perspective to take. Near the end of the meeting when we were planning for our next meeting, that friend suggested we all come back next week with some positive stories about how the next chapter material had uplifted us. I felt like that was an oblique jab, that because I didn’t believe in her Christian god, I wasn’t self-aware or “open” or growing. After we hung up on the Zoom meeting, I spent quite a bit of time thinking about why that provoked me so much- did I have to believe in a loving universe to be doing “the work”? What was the end goal of Enneagram self-awareness work? Positivity? I knew in Christianity, love was the highest ideal, but in meditation, spaciousness is the highest ideal, so wasn’t it enough to aim to be spacious like the Buddha? I mourned the fact that my beloved and sacred Enneagram space was being infiltrated with Christian teachings. The universe didn’t have an intelligence or an egoic structure that was capable of loving.
That inquiry seemed to set off a long string of events that made me feel like I entered some kind of spiritual car wash that has persisted for some months.
The first in a string of events was that I somehow got logged out of my youtube account, and instead of my usual suggested videos, I got some generic ones. Wanting something light in the background while I prepared supper one afternoon, I clicked on a video by this psychic with a sparkling gold jacket standing in front of an arena of people, communicating what their loved ones were saying from the other side. Sure, I thought, something inconsequential. Well the first video got me clicking on his next one, and his next one. I was intrigued by this guy who seemed to be able to talk to the dead- was he really capable of doing that? Eventually I dug into his story; it turns out that this man, Matt Fraser, has a mom and grandma who both had “the gift” to either predict the future or communicate with the dead, and his sensitivity to “the other side” was passed on to him. Interesting! Well after watching about 100 of his videos and buying a ticket to one of his public reading shows, I had to admit, I now believed in psychics.
At the same time, members of a board I’m on were sharing about their varied interests in astrological 12th house topics like The Telepathy Tapes, fairies and gnomes, past life regression, and praying to spirits. It was a little too wild for me, so I contented myself with my lighthearted belief in Bigfoot, Matt Frasier, and my tarot cards. Although I was working my way through the Telepathy Tapes podcast and had to admit I was finding the stories of autistic people with telepathy very interesting.
I was starting to get back into my spiritual practices I’d neglected out of frustration with life back in Saskatchewan, and I started reading Gurdjieff again. George Gurdjieff, one of the godfathers of the Enneagram, was the only spiritual teacher I trusted because he said, “Don’t believe anything a spiritual teacher says to you- test everything.” In other words, only trust when you see enough proof to trust, which ironically helped me trust him more. He became my guide into what came next. With my birthday coming up, I knew that I was approaching a 12th house profection year which would be all about spirituality, so because life had drawn attention to my Neptune, the lord of the 12th house and the archetype of trust, I felt called as a 2026 goal, to learn how to trust.
At the beginning of March, Matt Fraser started advertising that he would open up peoples’ Akashic records in his public readings. I googled what Akashic records were- a spiritual library in another dimension, filled with spiritual records of every living thing that had walked on the earth, and every soul’s action and intention. We could apparently access this library through special meditations. I needed life guidance, so I thought I’d try one of the meditations and try and find my Akashic record. Well holy smokes, I had a couple very interesting experiences “in” the Akashic records. In one, I seemed to see Gurdjieff. In another, I seemed to see an angel that sent white and gold light to my throat (which actually felt very good). Eventually, I had a harder and harder time having a spiritual experience and I stopped doing Akashic record meditations, but I realized over time what was happening: my chart was kicking in. Neptune in my chart is squared by Saturn, and Saturn makes it hard to access what he’s squaring or conjuncting. I realized that I was only having spiritual experiences because I was going through a massive– albeit temporary– transit. I was going through a nodal reversal that was exactly conjunct my natal nodes, and on March 5, we’d had a full moon lunar eclipse exactly on my nodes. This was an incredibly potent spiritual time for me. I was particularly interested in Gurdjieff during what ended up being about a week- I felt like his presence was in my house with me and coincidentally, I looked up Gurdjieff’s astrological chart, and his nodes are the exact reversal of my nodes, meaning I was born on his antipode. Furthermore, I was born on his North Node line. This experience of fate renewed my interest in Gurdjieff’s teachings, and I began some astrological research into his life.
On March 11, I did an astrocartography appointment for a couple who wanted to move somewhere where they would move some of their significant planets into their respective 12th houses. I was nervous for them- I hated the 12th house and wanted to warn them that it could be a difficult placement, but I knew other astrologers had really good things to say about the 12th house, and I wanted to give a balanced perspective. I looked into how it might turn out positive for them, and some people said the 12th house offered gifts like psychic abilities, telepathy, communicating with beings on the other side like angels, spirit guides, or people who have passed on. I kind of rolled my eyes but I offered this perspective in case it resonated with them and it kind of did! I was surprised.
I spent quite a bit of time thinking about my next client’s Moon in the 12th house. When we met, she talked about her connection to the trees on her land, and her journey to developing her psychic abilities. So because I thought trees were a safe bet, I thought I’d try communicating with the trees outside my window to see if they’d say anything to me. Nope.
Probably based on a search for how to communicate with trees, I ended up on a youtube channel of a young lady who talks to pets– she took a course and is now a pet psychic. She seemed like a pretty genuine Type 6 lady and I found her anecdotes fascinating, so I added pet psychics to my list of things I believed in.
A friend had visited in early February and after a conversation around positive thinking, I lent him my copy of The Magic, the follow-up to the 2006 best-seller, The Secret. “Good riddance”, I thought, “I don’t believe in that crap”. Although yup, you guessed it, in mid-March, I realized my “realistic thinking” was kind of negative. Even though all I was doing was just realizing how tough my astrological chart was- that was the basis for my realism- what was happening was that I was repeating out loud to myself in a discouraged and bitter tone what was depicted in my chart and being played out, and I was realizing that it was the spoken repetition of my negative luck baked into my chart was backing me further into certain negative realities in life. So I made a conscious decision to do a hard turn toward thinking more positively when in fact, those hopefully-uttered sentences didn’t reflect my current reality. I approached it like an experiment, and I have about 40 positive sentences that I now repeat to myself daily. Have any of them come true? Ehh… maybe?
Then on March 13, 2026, I watched the first of what would become over 150 Near Death Experience videos on Youtube. It seems like the arrows were pointing here, or at least this is where my Youtube algorithm led. NDE’s are stories of people who medically died, were revived, and came back telling amazing stories of the things they saw on the other side. I was gobsmacked by how most people- regardless of religion or belief- talked about being wrapped in rapturous love when they crossed over. “Like, really??” I thought. I thought when we died, it was just lights out and the world forgot about us and moved on. I was so captivated by these stories, I kept track of the ones I’d watched in an Excel spreadsheet and highlighted the most impactful ones. Some of these NDE’ers had encounters with loved ones, some with angels, some with a version of “God”, some with Jesus (one western lady had a visit with an Indian ascended master who said he loved her and was her heavenly father which intrigued me!) Some people got advice from their spirit guides, some visited other realms with what we’d call imaginary creatures. But overwhelmingly, people tend to experience an all-consuming love on the other side and often get a life review of how they’ve lived on earth. If I were to take a stab at a summary of what they say when they come back, it’s that the purpose of life is to metabolize the density or darkness (aka struggles) through our bodily form to grow closer to Love, which is “god”, and therefore we should strive be kind and loving to others. “Huh, just like in the Bible”, I thought. This led me into an uncomfortable dance with my old religion- I wasn’t going back there, but could I interact with love in my meditative practice? Although eventually, I saw enough NDE’ers talk about how they saw prayers light up like lights while they were having their NDE. They encouraged us to pray because they said prayer actually works with the energy on the other side, so my meditation morphed into prayer. But then I had to reckon with the question- “Who am I praying to?” I decided that now it was appropriate to believe I was loved by a Being or Source that was pure love, but wasn’t the Abrahamic god from the Bible, although among a bunch of other beings of light, Jesus is apparently up there infused with love too. So I’ve had to throw my hands up in the air and believe because if enough unrelated people are telling the same kinds of stories, they must be true. I’m no skeptical Enneagram type 6, but I have a bit of a threshhold.
But I’ve also felt trapped by this knowledge because if this Love-god loves me and wants me to pray, surely she or he will listen to my prayers for myself, not just my prayers for others. I left Christianity in my mid-thirties because the three prayers I’d been praying since I was in my early teens weren’t being answered and I had determined that if the Christian god was so dull that he couldn’t answer them after two decades of prayer, he either didn’t exist, didn’t care, or was absolutely incompetent. It sounds like I was partially right. So when I came back to those same prayers in my mid-40’s, and I felt that same nothingness as I grew up with in the church, I had to wonder if I even existed, and then I fell into the psychological darkness that’s the other side of spirituality- the fighting with “god”. And now I realize that my fight with “god” is my fight with Saturn, the crushing planet that’s squaring my Neptune: the entire first three and a half decades of my life were a psychological fight with my Saturn for a connection with my Neptune. What to do- this is what I already knew from Astrology, and now I’ve ended up in the exact same place I was with religion and astrology: the deadness of my god experience. Square one, but with my god’s mask off. The same old stopping point. I want to believe in love, and I want to have a good life review, but what if God is alive for others, but not for me? What do I do? How can I work with Saturn in a way that Saturn actually responds?
I’m taking little steps that I’m being hinted at. It’s like walking blindfolded through a forest, but with someone whispering hints in your ear every 50 km’s about how to proceed. It’s not enough and I’m complaining pretty bitterly about it. I’m not sure where this will lead, but I hope it’s to love… although do I actually want the humiliating form of love I’m being offered? Like now I’m fighting with this blessing-withholder who has disguised himself as love, who alternately has the face of my former Christian god, the disciplinarian Saturn, and the NDE’ers god of love. Through my renewed prayer practice, I’m apparently supposed to be the conduit of love for others, but I can’t partake of the love myself because to open myself up to love opens up the contradiction that I’m not actually being aided by the love- it’s love that doesn’t care about my life, I’m just told to pass it on to others. So it’s just me occupying a fake space- me pretending that God’s love is useful and practical for me while I pray for its practical application to the lives of others. Can a non-loved person pass on the love of god to others who are hurting? How can I be a conduit to real love if I know from experience that the love I’m personally getting is in name only? At least it feels unhelpful. Isn’t love practical? Shouldn’t it be? The exchange I distilled down from watching the NDE videos seemed brilliant to me- I pray for others in exchange for help in my own life- I was totally capable of that and I enjoyed praying for others, so where were the results? Who was going to uphold the other side of the bargain?
I have to stop being so vague to bring this blog post home, although I don’t really want to talk too much about my personal life on the web, so hopefully you can read between the lines enough. One of the things I’m praying for is something that is just not coming with regular effort, and I seem to have to make more effort than is necessary. This over-exertion has been going on for quite some time, so today in my meditation time, I finally said, “Enough. I’ve taken more risks than any human is expected to take, I’m done. This is my boundary.” And suddenly I felt a cool and delightful stream of love coursing into my soul. This is a long and complicated story, and someday maybe I’ll tell it, but suffice to say I was quite pleasantly surprised to have my boundary honored. Saturn is sometimes hard work and striving, sometimes it’s the somatic weight-lifting of thinking positively when there’s nothing positive happening, but sometimes Saturn is ourselves saying no. That was a pretty remarkable experience so I’m going to hang out in that space for a bit and see what else I can glean around it.
That is all. Stay in touch with the body. Study your chart. Know yourself. Come up with positive-thinking phrases that somatically charge you. Engage safely with good-hearted and trustworthy beings on the other side of the veil. Test everything. That’s all I know right now.
