Exhaustion belongs to the woman whose body has turned on her. It lives in the joints that ache before the day begins, in the thyroid that slows everything to a crawl, in the skin that flares and the gut that burns. It lives in the waiting rooms, in the blood tests that come back "a little off", in the years it takes to be believed.

Most of what we are offered is a fire extinguisher. Suppress the immune system. Quiet the inflammation. Manage the flare. These tools can be lifesaving, and I will say more about that at the end. Yet a fire tells you something about the house it burns in. It tells you where the fuel has gathered, where the air is getting in, and what has been smouldering for a very long time.

This essay is an invitation to turn toward the fire and let it show you something.

Why it is mostly women

Roughly four out of every five people living with autoimmune disease are women. Lupus, Hashimoto's, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, Sjögren's, Graves'. The list reads like a census of the female body.

Part of the answer is written in our biology. The female immune system runs hotter and more vigilantly than the male one, a design that likely evolved to protect us through pregnancy and to protect the children we carry. Oestrogen tunes immune responses upward. In 2024, researchers at Stanford found that a molecule called Xist, which the body uses to silence the second X chromosome in female cells, can form complexes the immune system mistakes for a threat. Our very womanhood, at the level of the chromosome, carries a vulnerability.

Biology loads the gun. Something still has to pull the trigger. Identical twins share their genes, yet when one twin develops an autoimmune condition, the other very often does not. The difference lies in what each body has lived through, breathed in, eaten, absorbed and been told about itself. That is where this conversation gets interesting.

The voice that learned to attack

Autoimmunity is the body mistaking itself for an enemy. The immune system, built to defend, turns its weapons inward. Anyone who has lived with a relentless inner critic will recognise the shape of this.

I want to be careful here, because there is a cruel version of this idea that says you made yourself sick with your thoughts. That version is false, and it adds shame to suffering. What I am pointing toward is subtler. The body and the psyche speak the same language of threat, and they often learn it in the same place.

In Internal Family Systems, the inner critic is a protector part. It usually learned its harsh voice from someone else, often a parent, a sibling or a whole family culture where being criticised, mocked or shouted at was ordinary. The child takes that voice inside and runs it on herself, believing that if she attacks herself first, the world will hurt her less. Decades later she is still doing it, at three in the morning, in the mirror, in every small failure.

The research on this is striking. The Adverse Childhood Experiences studies found that people with more childhood adversity, including emotional and verbal abuse, carry a significantly higher risk of being hospitalised with an autoimmune disease as adults. A large Swedish study published in 2018 found that people diagnosed with stress-related disorders, including PTSD, were more likely to go on to develop autoimmune conditions. A nervous system raised in a war zone keeps its immune system on a war footing.

So when I say the self-attacking thought and the self-attacking cell share a root, I mean it in this sense. Both are protectors that learned, in a dangerous place, that vigilance is survival. Both soften when they are finally met with curiosity.

The family is inside a larger family

No family invents its cruelty from nothing. The mother who criticised her daughter's body was criticised for her own. The father who dismissed his daughter's feelings lived inside a culture that dismissed women's feelings as hysteria. Zoom out from the kitchen table and you find the same voice speaking at the scale of a civilisation.

Systemic misogyny is an atmosphere women breathe from birth. It tells us our bodies are too much and never enough. It teaches us to monitor ourselves constantly, to shrink, to apologise, to stay pleasing. A woman raised inside that field learns to watch herself from the outside, as an object to be corrected. Self-surveillance becomes second nature, and the immune system lives inside that nature too.

The same field shapes our medicine. Women wait years longer than men for many diagnoses. Our pain is more often attributed to anxiety. Autoimmune disease in particular has a long history of being dismissed as psychosomatic, a cruel irony given what I am writing about here. A woman who is not believed by her doctors learns, once again, to doubt the signals of her own body. The attack arrives from within and is then confirmed from without.

The attacks that are real

There is a danger in making everything about the inner world. It can leave a woman believing that if she just heals her trauma enough, her body will calm down, while she keeps living inside an environment that is genuinely assaulting it. Your body may feel under attack because it is.

Autoimmune diagnoses have been rising steadily across the industrialised world for decades, far faster than genes can change. Something in the way we live is feeding the fire.

Consider glyphosate, the most widely used herbicide on earth. It works by blocking a biochemical pathway that plants use, and that same pathway runs inside many of the bacteria in our gut. Animal studies show it can disrupt the microbiome, and the gut is where around seventy per cent of the immune system lives. The World Health Organization's cancer agency classified glyphosate as probably carcinogenic in 2015. Research tying it directly to autoimmune disease in humans is still young, and I hold it with that honesty. Still, a substance that alters the ecology where immunity is trained deserves our attention.

Glyphosate sits within a much wider chemical load. Endocrine-disrupting compounds such as PFAS, the "forever chemicals" in non-stick pans and waterproof fabrics, and BPA and phthalates in plastics, interfere with the hormones that already steer women's immunity. Many of them concentrate in exactly the products marketed to women: cosmetics, fragrances, period products. Microplastics are now found in human blood, placentas and breast milk.

Then there is the electromagnetic environment. The science on everyday EMF exposure is genuinely unsettled. The WHO lists radiofrequency fields as possibly carcinogenic, while large reviews have not found clear harm at typical exposure levels. What I see in my clinical work is simpler and harder to measure: bodies that never get to rest. Phones under pillows, screens until midnight, a nervous system that is never offline. Whatever the mechanism, a body denied deep sleep and darkness loses one of its primary ways of regulating inflammation.

Add ultra-processed food, chronic sleep debt, mould in our homes and the relentless low hum of overwork, and you have a body that is defending itself on many fronts at once. An immune system that is constantly provoked will eventually start to misfire.

Illuminating the fire

Fire is one of the oldest symbols of the feminine sacred. The hearth, the vestal flame, the kundalini coiled at the base of the spine, the inner heat of the Tibetan tummo practitioner. In these traditions fire is life force, transformation and clarity. It burns away what is false.

Autoimmune inflammation is that same force with nowhere true to go. It is a woman's vitality and vigilance turned inward because the outer world never felt safe enough to receive it. So the question I want to ask is how we give that fire a hearth.

Illumination begins with listening. When the flare comes, ask what it arrived alongside. A conflict swallowed. A week of saying yes when the body said no. A family visit. A season of eating on the run and sleeping with the phone beside your head. The flare is information, and it is often precise.

It continues with meeting the inner attacker. In IFS we turn toward the critical part and ask what it is afraid would happen if it stopped. Almost always it is trying to protect a younger part of us that once got hurt. When that younger part is finally comforted, the critic can stand down. Many women notice their bodies soften in the same moment.

It asks us to redirect the fire outward, where it belongs. Anger at a culture that taught us to hate our bodies. Anger at an industry that sprays our food. That anger, felt cleanly and expressed in boundaries, activism, creativity and truth-telling, is the immune system's energy finding its rightful target.

And it asks us to reduce what we can of the real attacks. Organic food where possible, filtered water, glass instead of plastic, fragrance-free products, phones out of the bedroom, darkness at night. These are acts of devotion toward a body that has been fighting for you all along.

Your body has been on your side the whole time. It has been trying, in the only language it has, to tell you the truth about what you have lived through and what you are living in.

A note on care

None of this asks you to abandon medicine. Immunosuppressants, thyroid replacement, biologics and steroids have kept countless women alive and functioning, and stopping them suddenly can be dangerous. Please keep working with your doctors and make any changes to treatment together with them. Illuminating the fire happens alongside good medical care, in the same body, at the same time.

What I am offering is a wider lens. Your autoimmune condition is biology, biography and environment woven together. When we tend all three, the fire can return to the hearth and warm the house again.

Want to learn to work with the root cause of illness? Study with Sigourney in her medical medium school. We start January 2027 and this month is the last month to join on a payment plan.

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If this essay stirred something in you, I would love to hear what your own fire has been trying to say. Leave a comment, or share this with a woman who needs to hear she is not attacking herself alone.

The Shape of October

October 2026 belongs to Venus, and Venus walks backwards for most of it. She stations retrograde in Scorpio on 3 October, meets the Sun in her underworld midpoint on 24 October, and slips back into Libra on 25 October. Mercury joins her in retrograde on 24 October. The body follows this sky inward.

The month moves through the Libra–Scorpio threshold, the passage from the kidneys and lumbar spine into the pelvic bowl, the organs of elimination and the reproductive waters. Libra asks the body to rebalance its fluids. Scorpio asks it to release what it has been holding. Between them sits a long, slow descent that favours review, repair and deep rest over new effort.

The Taurus Full Moon on 26 October closes the month at the throat, opposite the Scorpio Sun, squared by Pluto. What has been held below rises to be voiced.

In the southern hemisphere this unfolds in mid-spring, when the outer world is surging and the inner sky is turning down into the dark. Many people will feel that mismatch as fatigue, heaviness in the low back, or a pull toward solitude in a season that seems to demand activity. Honour the pull.

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I view the body as a living miracle.

I see the body as a living text, a bible with depth and history and stories to tell.

I see symptoms as those stories asking us to be seen and witnessed. The body needing something from us that we’re not able to see otherwise. An opportunity to slow down and listen.

Unlike western medicine, I don’t see anything as incurable.

And I don’t view anything as pathological.

I see the body as a spectrum of light — a musical scale with notes, which we need to learn to attune to and play.

That doesn’t mean everything is meant to be “cured” — sometimes a disease becomes a part of us; a story that desires to stay with us and to live in on our body. Like the Japanese art of Kintsuge — broken pottery is mended with gold and the fracture becomes the place where its history shines.

We are not robots, we are not mechanistic and we are far from simple. We are living myth, rich as the fertile soils that we belong to.

There is still the opportunity to join on a three part payment plan this month only — from next month that opportunity closes.

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From birth, we can determine your unique constitution and the constitutional remedies best suited to balance your entire system. I work with planetary herbalism, advising on herbs that balance the particular planetary forces present in your chart, since every plant carries the rulership of a planet.

Take my own chart as an example. I have a Sun-ruled chart with a Leo Ascendant, and my Sun sits in Scorpio, a water sign, conjunct Mercury and Pluto. Water can put out the light of a Sun-ruled chart, so I have to stay mindful of excess damp. I’m prone to melancholy as a result, and clearing damp heat from my system is something I return to again and again. Sun-ruled medicines are my most powerful allies here — St. John’s Wort chief among them, alongside sunlight itself.

My practice draws deeply on sympathetic medicine — the ancient principle that like treats like. Rather than suppressing a symptom with its opposite, I work with the body’s own pattern of disturbance, using remedies in gentle doses to stimulate its natural intelligence. It’s a philosophy that shapes everything I offer, from herbal protocols to homeopathic consults.

Work with me: receive a personalised medical astrology natal reading with constitutional remedy advice — herbal and ayurvedic protocols specific to your chart — with the option to add a separate Homeopathic Consult and Remedy. You can book your reading in here.

Want to learn this work for your own clients? Join my year-long Medical Medium Apprenticeship, starting in January. You can find out more about it, here.

Warm love,

Sigourney Belle & The Soma Mystica® Team

If you are interested in learning more about your chart ruler, subscribe to our paid membership to read on about your rising sign, planetary ruler and a herb that is likely going to be an ally for you, balancing your system at times of stress.

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I was saying that my dreamscape is extremely active, and often gets disturbed next to a partner.

We ended up talking about Kundalini and I mentioned that my work, the past couple of years, has been a lot about learning how to ground my own Kundalini energy through earthing and really nourishing my Kidney Yin.

So many people fall victim to “this is just how I am now” when they have a kundalini awakening — and so many people go into Kundalini Crisis.

This article goes into how you can work with grounding this energy, so that you don’t become depleted from it.

Grounding Kundalini Energy

Why the Awakening Process Needs an Anchor

Kundalini awakening is often described as fire, rising heat, a current that moves up the spine and floods the nervous system with charge. What gets discussed far less is the other half of the equation: the descending current, the anchor, the root that keeps that fire from burning through a person’s capacity to function. An awakening without grounding tends to produce exactly the symptoms so many practitioners report — insomnia, racing thoughts, dissociation, a wired-but-fried nervous system that can’t land in the body. Grounding isn’t a spiritual afterthought here. It’s the physiological and energetic counterweight that makes the whole process survivable and integrable.

Two threads matter enormously in this work: the electrical relationship between the body and the earth, and the depletion of kidney yin that so often accompanies intense spiritual opening. Understanding both gives a much clearer map for how to hold kundalini energy without being consumed by it.

The Ion Exchange Between Body and Earth

Every living body carries an electrical charge, and so does the surface of the earth. The ground itself holds a mild negative charge, sustained by the planet’s own electromagnetic field and constantly replenished by lightning activity across the globe. A body that stays insulated from that charge — rubber-soled shoes, elevated floors, synthetic carpet, hours spent indoors — accumulates positive charge instead, largely from environmental oxidative stress, electromagnetic exposure, and the general friction of modern living.

This matters for kundalini work because the awakening process itself generates enormous charge. Practitioners frequently describe the sensation as electrical: currents, tingling, heat, a buzzing that runs the length of the spine. Without a route for that charge to discharge, it tends to pool at the crown, the third eye, or the nervous system generally, producing overstimulation rather than expansion. Direct skin contact with the earth — bare feet on soil, grass, sand, or stone — allows electrons to flow from ground to body, neutralizing some of that excess positive charge and giving the nervous system somewhere to release into.

This is the physiological layer beneath what many traditions have long intuited about the earth as a stabilizing, receptive force. The root chakra sits at the base of the spine for a reason; it’s the point of contact with exactly this exchange. Practically, this means kundalini work benefits from bookending itself with earth contact — barefoot walking before an activation practice to establish baseline charge, and again afterward to discharge whatever has been stirred. Even a few minutes matters. The body doesn’t need convincing to release charge into the ground; it does this readily once the insulation is removed.

Kidney Yin and the Fire That Has Nothing to Cool It

In Chinese medicine, the kidneys hold the deepest reserves of the body — the jing, the constitutional essence a person is born with and slowly spends across a lifetime. Kidney yin specifically is the cooling, moistening, substantive aspect of that reserve, the yin that anchors yang so fire has something to burn against rather than simply consuming itself unchecked.

Kundalini rising is, in many respects, a yang event. It’s ascending, active, hot, and it draws heavily on the same reservoir the kidneys are meant to protect. A practitioner moving through repeated activations, especially without adequate rest, sleep, and nourishment, can burn through kidney yin at a rate the body wasn’t built to sustain. The signs are recognizable: night sweats, a wired exhaustion that won’t resolve with sleep, lower back weakness, tinnitus, hair thinning, a dry restlessness that sits underneath even calm moments. This is the body’s yin reserve running low while the fire above keeps climbing.

Tending kidney yin during kundalini work isn’t a separate wellness task bolted onto the spiritual process; it’s the ballast that makes the process sustainable. This looks like deep rest that isn’t negotiated away for more practice, foods and herbs traditionally understood as yin-nourishing (black sesame, goji, mulberry, rehmannia in appropriate preparations, bone broths, seaweed), and deliberately slowing the pace of ascending practices when depletion signs appear rather than pushing through them. The lower back and kidney area itself can also be a direct point of somatic attention — warmth applied there, hands placed there in stillness, breath directed there — as a way of physically signaling to the body that this reserve is being protected rather than spent.

Where Earthing and Kidney Yin Meet

These two threads aren’t separate interventions running in parallel; they reinforce each other. The kidneys, in Chinese medicine, govern the water element and sit low in the body, close to that same root chakra connection to the ground. Strengthening kidney yin is itself a grounding act, drawing energy and attention down and inward rather than letting everything pour upward into the crown. And earthing practice, by discharging excess charge through the feet, reduces some of the burden the kidneys would otherwise carry in trying to metabolize and cool an overactive ascending current.

A practitioner in the middle of an intense awakening might combine both directly: standing or sitting with bare feet or hands on soil while placing attention on the kidney area, breathing down into the low back and pelvis rather than up into the head. This single practice does double work, discharging excess electrical charge while also drawing attention and blood flow toward the yin reserve that needs replenishing.

A Grounding Practice for Kundalini Work

Before any activation practice, spend several minutes with bare skin against earth, whether that’s standing in grass, sitting on stone, or simply walking a short distance without shoes. Let the breath settle before beginning anything ascending.

After the practice, return to the earth again. This second contact matters as much as the first, since it’s the point where accumulated charge actually discharges rather than continuing to circulate through an already-activated nervous system.

Alongside this, build a rhythm of kidney-yin support into daily life rather than treating it as emergency intervention after depletion symptoms appear. Warmth at the low back, adequate sleep protected as non-negotiable, yin-nourishing foods, and a willingness to slow the pace of spiritual practice when the body signals exhaustion all belong in this rhythm.

Kundalini energy isn’t dangerous because it’s powerful. It becomes dangerous when it rises without anywhere to land. Earthing gives the current somewhere to discharge; kidney yin gives the fire something to burn against instead of consuming itself. Together, they turn an awakening that could easily become destabilizing into one the body can actually hold, integrate, and grow from.

Remedies to Boost Kidney Yin

Kidney yin depletion responds best to a combination of food, herb, and rest-based approaches held consistently rather than any single remedy taken occasionally.

Among foods, black sesame seeds are one of the most reached-for yin tonics in Chinese medicine, traditionally ground into a paste or added to congee. Mulberries, both the fruit and the dried berry form, nourish yin while also supporting blood, which tends to run low alongside yin in intense practitioners. Black beans, walnuts, and seaweed such as kombu or wakame all carry a similar cooling, moistening quality suited to the kidney organ system. Bone broth, simmered long and slow, is often considered one of the most direct ways to rebuild depleted essence, particularly when made from marrow-rich bones.

Among herbs, rehmannia (Shu Di Huang in its prepared form) is the classical anchor of most kidney-yin formulas and appears in the traditional pairing Liu Wei Di Huang Wan, a formula many practitioners find useful during periods of spiritual overexertion. Goji berries work gently and can be taken daily as a food-herb, steeped in tea or eaten directly. American ginseng, unlike its more stimulating Asian counterpart, tonifies yin rather than yang and suits exactly the kind of depletion kundalini practice produces. Schisandra berry is worth particular mention, since it nourishes kidney essence while also calming an overactive, wired nervous system, making it well matched to practitioners caught in the wired-but-exhausted state that yin depletion tends to produce.

Beyond food and herb, rest itself functions as a remedy here rather than simply the absence of practice. Sleep before midnight is traditionally considered the most restorative window for yin generation, and protecting it matters more during intense spiritual periods than at almost any other time. Reducing or pausing ascending, activating practices when depletion signs appear, even temporarily, allows the reserve to rebuild rather than continuing to be drawn down. Warmth applied directly to the lower back and kidney area, whether through a hot water bottle, moxibustion, or simply resting a hand there in stillness, supports the area energetically as well as physically.

Working with Fulvic Minerals

Fulvic acid is one of the more direct bridges between earthing and kidney yin, since it works on both fronts at once. It forms through the decomposition of organic matter over centuries, and it carries an unusually high mineral and trace-element content in a form the body can absorb with very little effort. Practitioners drawn to earthing often find fulvic minerals a natural extension of the same instinct, since fulvic acid is, in a sense, the earth’s own concentrated charge taken internally rather than absorbed through the skin.

Two properties matter most here. Fulvic acid is strongly electron-donating, meaning it carries a similar charge-balancing effect to standing barefoot on soil, but delivered systemically through the bloodstream rather than only through the nervous system’s contact points. It also carries a dense mineral load, including many of the trace minerals — zinc, magnesium, selenium among them — that kidney function depends on and that depleted practitioners are often quietly short on without realizing it.

In practice, this looks like a small daily dose of a high-quality fulvic or fulvic-humic mineral complex, taken in water a few itimes a day ideally sourced from a reputable deposit with third-party mineral testing given how variable quality is across suppliers.

We recommend both Black Stuff and Manna Vitality — both reputable brands that we love and work with ourselves.

Some practitioners find it most effective taken in the morning, pairing it with the day’s first period of earth contact, so the internal and external charge-balancing work happen together. It’s worth introducing slowly, since a nervous system already processing significant charge from kundalini activity can, in rare cases, feel the mineral load as additional stimulation before it settles into its more typical grounding effect.

A Grounding Practice for Kundalini Work

Before any activation practice, spend several minutes with bare skin against earth, whether that’s standing in grass, sitting on stone, or simply walking a short distance without shoes. Let the breath settle before beginning anything ascending.

After the practice, return to the earth again. This second contact matters as much as the first, since it’s the point where accumulated charge actually discharges rather than continuing to circulate through an already-activated nervous system.

Alongside this, build a rhythm of kidney-yin support into daily life rather than treating it as emergency intervention after depletion symptoms appear. Warmth at the low back, adequate sleep protected as non-negotiable, yin-nourishing foods, and a willingness to slow the pace of spiritual practice when the body signals exhaustion all belong in this rhythm.

Kundalini energy isn’t dangerous because it’s powerful. It becomes dangerous when it rises without anywhere to land. Earthing gives the current somewhere to discharge; kidney yin gives the fire something to burn against instead of consuming itself. Together, they turn an awakening that could easily become destabilizing into one the body can actually hold, integrate, and grow from.

Sigourney teaches a really powerful and short practise with the energy centres in her masterclass Commanding The Room: The Energetics of Space Holding which helps you to centre and circulate kundalini energy. This is key for any practitioner, who is holding energetic space, to know and work with before seeing clients.

This is also the principle behind Spinal Attunement — our practitioner training which teaches practitioners how to responsibly work with the energetic field.

Spinal Attunement is a globally accredited practitioner training that teaches practitioners Eastern Energetics Maps that are overlayed onto the nervous system — and in particular, the spine. With 8 years working in the field of neurology, Sigourney is passionate about bridging Eastern and Western Medicine and knowedge about the nature of Trauma and Somatic Healing and she developed this modality to bridge the missing gap — between the world of science and spirit.

We have three spaces remaining for our Byron Bay September training at Temple Farmhouse in Byron Bay. You can find out more, or apply to join us here.

With Love,

Sigourney Belle & The Soma Mystica® Team

Wow, I cannot believe it is nearly September already! Ummmm… where has 2026 gone?! I remember watching a youtube video by Gregg Braden some years ago, on how there will be a sense that time is speeding up. It comes from the Hopi map of time and their predictions of the acceleration of time. You can watch it here. I have my own theories around the sense of time speeding up and it relating to where we are currently transiting through the solar system. Bruce Lyon alongside Janine Ma-Ree give some insightful pieces of wisdom on the changes that we are going through in his book The Dark Divinity.

Virgo Season: 23rd September 12.19pm — 23rd October 10.05am AEST Melbourne Time. Please note that all dates and times mentioned in this article are on Melbourne AEST time.

As of yesterday, at midday Melbourne Australia time (12.19pm to be precise), the Sun entered the sign of Virgo, meaning we are now in “Virgo Season” — right on cue for the gut-health, digestive-reset, purification energy this sign always brings in.

In Medical Astrology, Virgo rules the whole gastrointestinal tract, the gut-brain axis.

Speaking of the gut-brain axis… Virgo is a mutable earth sign, ruled by Mercury and Mercury rules the mind. So whilst we think of Virgo as an Earthy element, I often see this sign as somewhere in between Earth and Air (or the next sign, Libra), because of it’s rulership. It is pertinent then that it rules the gut-brain axis as the majority of fibres in this axis run from the gut to the brain and not the other way around, suggesting that our gut influences our brain more than we realise. Excess mental energy therefore, can be settled through clearing our debrit in the GI-tract.

It is a time for spring cleaning — quite literally, internally and externally. If you are living in the Southern Hemisphere, like I am, then this time is also when we start to move into Spring time, so it makes even more sense to have a “spring clean”. That being said, no matter where you live, this season is always about inner purification and so it is a good time for any cleanse… particularly a colon cleanse.

I have just ordered the ZenCleanse One Colon Cleanse and will also be doing the Zencleanse Forgive Liver Cleanse this coming fortnight aswell. These are just one day cleanses, however they are extremely effective. Because I live cleanly and do regular mini cleanses, I find the one day cleanse to be sufficient.

If you want to go for a deeper cleanse though, I highly suggest working with The Rainbow Protocol, a 7 day deep dive which clears out the colon and liver/gallbladder pathways.

Another favourite of mine is the Black Stuff Paradetox, which I did at the beginning of the year. I love it because it does not destroy the biome, but instead nurtures it with fulvic minerals, in a blend that both factilitates parasite and toxin release and biome restoration at the same time. The zencleanse products are also a good option for this reason. They are both nurturing and clearing all at once.

If you are looking to build the health of your biome (I suggest everyone does this, and daily, by the way), a fulvic mineral is great. I work with both the black stuff capsules and / or the manna vitality fulvic mineral blend.

I also wrote an article just last week on the importance of staying mineralised, and how I believe many of our health issues stem back to demineralisation and a loss of vitality at this level. You can read it here.

In the next section of this article, I will be sharing the upcoming Astrology transits and forecast and how you can best keep yourself well and in balance during this season of purification.

Our educational newsletters are free for all subscribers, however our month-ahead astrological forecast and medical forecast is for our paid subscribers only. Become a paid subscriber through the link below to receive these forecasts, to help you to plan your health and wellness routine for the month ahead.

If you would like to learn the foundations of astrology and medical astrology, we have a short course you can purchase. It is available here.

With Love,

Sigourney Belle & The Soma Mystica® Team

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Many people are critiquing either the world of psychology or the world of spirituality for being incomplete.

Just the other day I did a post, sharing about a quote on Tantra by Barry Long.

I loved this quote. And if you are a Tantra devotee, you will understand it.

However it stirred up a little bit within a few people.

Some people tense at the idea of the obliteration of the Self — or the non self — because, we have a self, right?

Therein lies the difference between Psychology and Spirituality.

Psychology is about shaping the self. It is a project of construction…from object relations to attachment theory to somatic work… it exists to help a person build a self that can hold its own weight. A self with edges. A self that can metabolise experience instead of being flooded by it. Winnicott spent a career studying what happens when that construction fails: a self that never fully solidified, forever defending territory it never actually owned.

Spirituality is about the destruction of a sense of the smaller Self, to know the divine. It is about dissolution into the one. It begins from the premise that the self, however well built, was always scaffolding — a temporary structure erected to survive the world, never the final form of the person underneath it. The work here is not to reinforce the walls. It is to walk through them.

We must understand the difference. And we must know when to source one and when to source the other… it is like a tightrope or a dance… and a fine line.

Why the Quote Stings Before It Sings

Obliteration, spoken to someone whose self is still under construction, reads as threat. The nervous system does not parse metaphysics. It parses safety. Tell an undefended person to dissolve and you are asking a house with no foundation to remove its walls.

This is the piece that gets lost in a great deal of contemporary spiritual teaching, and it is the piece I keep circling back to in my critique of New Age tantra: dissolution offered to people who have not yet built anything to dissolve. Ecstatic states mistaken for awakening. Dysregulation mistaken for transcendence. A nervous system in freefall, relabelled as liberation because the language sounded holy enough to justify the fall.

Barry Long was not speaking to that nervous system. He was speaking to a self that had already done its structural work — one stable enough to survive its own undoing, the way a seed survives the breaking of its casing.

And this is why I believe the work of Somatics and the building of a solid self is imperative before we can traverse the spiritual realms.

Self before Surrender.

This is where I think the real teaching lives: self before surrender.

Psychology’s task comes first, chronologically and developmentally. It builds the vessel. It teaches boundaries, discernment, the capacity to stay present with intensity without collapsing or projecting. Spirituality’s task comes after — not instead of, not in competition with, but downstream of a self solid enough to hold the dissolution or “obliteration” of a self.

Skip the first task and the second one turns dangerous. A person without psychological ground who attempts spiritual dissolution does not transcend the self. They fragment it. What looks like a mystical opening is sometimes a trauma response wearing sacred language, and the two can be almost indistinguishable from the outside — which is precisely why so many people, and so many teachers, confuse them.

Knowing Which Room You’re In

The practice, then, is not choosing a side. It is developing the discernment to know which room you are standing in at any given moment, and which discipline that room is asking of you.

When you feel scattered, reactive, unable to hold your own experience without being consumed by it — that is when you need to build, shape and strengthen your container. This is not spiritual bypassing to say so; it is the ground the bypass always eventually reveals it skipped.

When you feel so held, so resourced, so met in your own skin that the walls themselves start to feel unnecessary — that is when surrender and dissolution to something larger becomes available to us as a valuable practise. Let what has been built finally do the thing it was built for, which was never to last forever.

The tightrope is not a flaw in the system. It is the system. A dance between the hand that builds and the hand that lets go, and the wisdom to know, in any given moment, which hand the moment is asking for.

With Love,

Sigourney Belle & The Soma Mystica® Team

What Are Minerals, Exactly?

A mineral, in the nutritional sense, is an inorganic element — meaning it doesn’t contain carbon — that the body requires to function but cannot manufacture on its own. Unlike vitamins, which are organic compounds the body can sometimes synthesise or store in complex forms, minerals arrive in their raw elemental state. Calcium is calcium. Iron is iron. There’s no shortcut, no internal factory. Every atom of mineral in your body was mined from soil, drawn up by a plant root, eaten by an animal or a human, and passed along the chain.

Minerals connect your body directly to the mineral composition of the earth beneath your feet — to rock, to soil health, to the water table. When soil is depleted, the food grown in it carries less. Mineralisation isn’t just a biological process; it’s geological.

Inside the body, minerals perform work far beyond “building strong bones.” They regulate the electrical signalling that fires your heartbeat and every neural impulse. They activate enzymes — the catalysts behind nearly every chemical reaction your body runs, from digestion to detoxification to hormone production. They hold water in balance across your cells. Without adequate mineral supply, none of these systems run cleanly.

How Many Minerals Exist?

Geologically, there are thousands — somewhere in the range of 3,800 to 5,000 known minerals occur naturally on Earth, most of them irrelevant to human physiology (quartz and feldspar won’t help your thyroid).

Of that vast catalogue, only 21 elements are currently classified as essential to human health. "Essential" here means that the body cannot produce them internally, and without them, dysfunction or disease follows. These 21 fall into two broad camps:

• Macrominerals — needed in larger quantities (generally more than 5 grams stored in the body): calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, sodium, chloride, and magnesium.

• Trace minerals — needed in smaller amounts but no less critical: iron, zinc, copper, iodine, selenium, manganese, chromium, molybdenum, fluoride, and several others.

Zoom out further and an interesting fact emerges: roughly 96% of your total body mass is made up of just four elements — oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen, mostly bound up in water, protein, and fat. The remaining 4% of your body weight is minerals. That sliver is doing an outsized amount of work.

The Percentages: What’s Actually In You

Based on data from the International Commission on Radiological Protection, here’s roughly how the major minerals break down as a percentage of total body weight in an average adult:

Calcium — ~1.5%
Phosphorus — ~1.0%
Potassium — ~0.4%
Sulfur — ~0.3%
Sodium — ~0.2%
Chlorine — ~0.2%
Magnesium — ~0.1%
Iron, iodine, and other trace elements — <0.1% each

Small numbers, enormous consequences. Calcium alone — at just 1.5% of your body weight — is responsible for bone density, muscle contraction (including your heartbeat), blood clotting, and nerve transmission. A percentage point can carry the weight of an entire physiological system.

The Most Important Minerals — and What They Actually Do

Calcium — Structural integrity of bone and teeth, muscle contraction, nerve signalling, blood clotting.

Phosphorus — Partners with calcium in bone formation; central to how cells generate and store energy (it’s a core component of ATP).

Potassium — Governs fluid balance and the electrical charge that allows your heart and nervous system to fire correctly.

Magnesium — Involved in over 300 enzymatic reactions; supports muscle relaxation, nervous system regulation, and energy production. Chronically under-consumed in modern diets.

Sodium and Chloride — Fluid balance, nerve transmission, blood pressure regulation. Rarely deficient, often excessive.

Iron — Carries oxygen through the blood via haemoglobin. Deficiency is the most common nutritional deficiency worldwide, particularly among menstruating women.

Zinc — Immune function, wound healing, and a cofactor in hundreds of enzymatic processes.

Iodine — Essential for thyroid hormone production, which governs metabolism, temperature regulation, and — critically — foetal brain development during pregnancy.

Selenium — A powerful antioxidant cofactor, also central to thyroid hormone conversion.

Where to Source Them

The best mineral sources are, unsurprisingly, close to the earth — foods that haven’t travelled far from soil, root, or sea. So local, from your farmers markets, and where possible biodynamic / organic.

• Calcium: dairy, sardines and tinned fish with bones, leafy greens (kale, bok choy), sesame seeds and tahini.

• Magnesium: pumpkin seeds, leafy greens, legumes, dark chocolate, whole grains.

• Potassium: bananas, potatoes (with skin), avocados, leafy greens, coconut water.

• Iron: red meat, liver, lentils, spinach — paired with vitamin C to improve absorption.

• Zinc: oysters, red meat, pumpkin seeds, chickpeas.

• Iodine: seaweed, iodised salt, dairy, seafood.

• Selenium: Brazil nuts (one or two a day covers your requirement), fish, eggs.

• Sulfur: eggs, garlic, onions, cruciferous vegetables.

A note worth including for readers: soil quality matters. Decades of industrial farming have measurably depleted mineral content in commercial produce compared to fifty years ago. This is part of why sourcing from mineral-rich, well-managed soil — or supplementing thoughtfully where diet alone can’t keep pace — has become a live conversation in nutrition science, not just a wellness trend.

We also suggest having a basic daily fulvic mineral, that contains a lot of these minerals. Our recommendations are Black Stuff or Manna Vitality

I use either of these daily along with the ZenCleanse products — Ambrosia is my current daily go-to as I have been experiencing insomnia as of lately, but Chi is also an incredible daily supplement to keep the body mineralised, counteract deficiencies and keep all of the body systems vital and well.

Why This Matters Beyond Nutrition

Mineralisation is, in a real sense, the story of how the inorganic becomes alive. Rock becomes soil, soil becomes plant, plant becomes flesh, flesh becomes thought and heartbeat and movement. When we talk about “grounding” or “being embodied,” there’s a literal substrate underneath the metaphor — actual atoms of calcium and magnesium and iron, mined from the earth, holding your structure together and firing your nervous system in real time.

Minerals rarely announce themselves the way a vitamin deficiency might. Their absence shows up slowly — in fatigue, in muscle cramps, in a nervous system that never quite settles, in bones that thin without warning. Paying attention to mineralisation is a quiet, foundational form of care.

Not only that, but as a company that teaches Somatics, we feel a sense of duty of care to also speak about mineralisation. Because a body that is not electric, alive, which literally comes from being mineralised — is a body that cannot be revived through somatic therapies alone. We need the ground work. And that work happens through mineralisation.

Our Somatic Therapy programs are truly Wholistic in this sense — we are always looking at the whole human picture.

We have two upcoming trainings.

Spinal Attunement Byron Bay with Sigourney Belle - find out more / apply

and Sigourney’s one year Medical Mediumship Training — Early bird ends September 1st 2026 — find out more / apply

Sources: International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) body composition data; standard nutritional science references on essential mineral classification and dietary sources.

We are so happy to have you here.

We have been craving to create a space for more educational holistic wellness content — long form articles where we can discuss the latest frontier of research and hottest topics in the space of Somatics and with Energy Therapy Technologies. We will also be sharing upcoming Energy forecasts about the …

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Look at the degree itself. 20° Leo is a hinge point — the last threshold of the second decan and the opening line of the third. The second decan belongs to Jupiter, and its card is the Six of Wands: Victory. Recognition. The parade after the ride is won. But this eclipse doesn’t quite live there. It lands a fraction past that boundary, into Mars’s decan — the Seven of Wands: Valour.

Victory is the moment you’re seen for what you’ve already proven. Valour is the moment before that — the one where you’re still standing your ground, still holding the higher position while everything below tries to pull you down. The Seven of Wands is a single figure on a hill, wands raised, outnumbered but unmoved. Not because the fight is finished. Because it isn’t.

That’s the real invitation of this eclipse. Not “here is your reward.” Rather: “here is the ground worth defending — do you still want it?” Whatever in you has been fighting quietly for visibility, for creative legitimacy, for the right to take up space without apologising for it, this is the degree asking you to plant the wand and hold the line.

Eclipses erase the middle ground. They don’t negotiate. With the South Node this close, something old — an identity, a role, a version of yourself performing confidence rather than living it — is being asked to fall away, cleanly, now. What replaces it won’t arrive as a trophy. It arrives as a stance. A body that has stopped bracing and started standing.

Six months from now, the corresponding lunar eclipse will show whether the hill was worth it. For today: hold your ground. Let go of what was already lost. Let the rest be Valour.

*New Moon Total Solar Eclipse, 20°08’ Leo — August 13, 3.37am Melbourne AEST 2026*

Why the old physicians put down their instruments

Long before modern medicine had a name for the placebo effect or the nervous system’s role in healing, physicians timed their work by the sky. Bloodletting, surgery, the first dose of a new remedy — all of it was scheduled around the Moon, and eclipses were the one time everything stopped. The reasoning was simple and, honestly, still holds up: an eclipse obscures the normal channel between intention and outcome.

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We end the month of July with a huge collective shift — we start to emerge out of the fog of a Mercury retrograde in Cancer on the 24th of July as it starts to station direct. It will be in shadow period still, as we enter the month of August. Alongside a Neptune retrograde, our lenses feel foggy and it is like holding the steering wheel tight, driving through the misty forest at night with minimal visibility.

Enter, eclipse season, this August.

The month of August, like July did also, starts off with some huge iniatory transits in the prior month.

On the 26th of July, we have the Lunar nodes shifting signs, from the Healing Axis of Virgo (south node) and Pisces (north node) to Leo (south node) and Aquarius (north node) shifting the tone of the next 18 months.

You also have Saturn Stationing Retrograde in Aries on the 27th July and that colours the Full Moon in Aquarius — 30 July.

All of these events will bring about a collective shift of energy in that will be felt throughout the month of August.

Whilst it is my nodal return (I have my north node in Aquarius at 21 degrees on my DC) and I am a little excited about it… I am also nervous about it taking place right on the turning of Saturn going retrograde. Aquarius is the sign of fixed air that rules the collective vision / dream, but also, it rules elements of technology, the digital world and… the skies (ahem, aliens, satellites, starlink, and the likes).

With Saturn retrograding around the same time as the lunar nodes are shifting into this sign, there is a lot of talk about stronger digital / technology control being put in place. Saturn = control, Aquarius = technology. I am feeling a lot of trepidation for the end of July / August… I like what it is bringing forth in me individually, but some of the collective themes feel challenging to me.

You can read more about the July transits in the last report. In this report I will focus on some of the core transits of August, including the eclipses, and how you can best support your health and wellbeing in this time. The transits of August + suggestions on herbs and protocols you can work with in the coming month are behind a paywall.

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We have what is called a Barbault Basket occurring on the back of a gorgeous start to the week with a Mercury Cazimi and new moon in cancer.

Today at 7:43pm AEST, the New Moon rises in Cancer — the Moon's own home sign, still standing close to Mercury's clarity, still warm from it. A New Moon in Cancer asks something different of us than a New Moon anywhere else. It doesn't ask for a vision board or a list of goals shouted into the void. It asks for a seed pressed into soil, in the dark, where no one can see it yet. Cancer is ruled by the Moon, and the Moon doesn't perform. She waxes in secret before she ever shows her face. Plant something true here, in this window, and let it stay private. Don't announce it. Don't explain it to anyone, not yet — not even to yourself in full sentences. Let it gestate the way everything real gestates: unseen, unhurried, protected.

And Underneath Both, Something Larger Is Assembling

Later this week, four outer planets — Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto — gather into what astrologers call the Barbault Basket. It’s a rare configuration, named for the French astrologer André Barbault, whose cyclical index famously forecasted the shape of the 2020 pandemic years before it arrived, tracking the conjunctions of the outer planets like a seismologist tracks fault lines. When Barbault’s index dropped low, the world contracted. This configuration is not that one. This one carries a different signature entirely — expansion after contraction, reorganisation after a long crisis phase, the exhale after the exhale everyone has been holding since 2020. Astrologers have anticipated this one for a long time. It is, by most readings, one of the most fortunate and structurally positive alignments of the year.

Three timescales are moving through the sky this week, and they are not moving separately. The mind steadies first, under Mercury’s return to clarity. The body and the home ask for tending next, under a New Moon in it’s own sign. And underneath both, slower and larger than either, the collective turns a corner — because the architecture of the sky itself is reorganising toward expansion.

What’s Asking to Be Seeded in You Right Now?

Not a resolution. Not a plan with five steps. A seed — small enough to fit inside a closed hand, true enough that you don’t need anyone else to believe in it yet.

What has been circling in you for weeks, refusing to resolve into words? What did you feel shift yesterday, before you could explain why? What wants to be planted tomorrow night, in the dark, in home ground, and left alone to grow?

The sky is not asking you to announce anything this week. It’s asking you to know something, quietly, in your body, and to trust that knowing enough to protect it.

What’s asking to be seeded in you?

Right on theme for July, I would say.

This month is the month Astrologers have been talking about ahead of time — it is an intense month which kicked off with a series of planetary movements on the 30th of June (Melbourne AEST) with a full moon in Capricorn, Mercury stationing retrograde in Cancer where it will remain until it stations direct again on the 24th of July, and Jupiter moving into Leo… all within one day.

Jupiter changed signs, from the watery Cancer, where it has been since June 2025, until now — entering Leo on the 30th of june at 3.52PM Melbourne time. This moon was a deep dive into the unconscious feminine body — many reported feeling exhaustion, needing to sleep more. This is the gift of a full moon in Capricorn… she is yin earth and she summons us down deep into the body to listen to what is emerging in the unconscious. With Jupiter moving into Leo, the sign that rules the heart and spine, we may have started to feel activation in this area… or just a little more audaciousness that we have not felt for some time.

I know myself personally, I had a chiropractic session that day that was focused on my thoracic spine and heart. I have seen a number of clients online since then, and there is a big theme around heart healing & opening. This makes sense, with Venus also currently in Leo, where it remains until it enters the sign of Virgo on Thursday, July 10, 2026 at 3:22 AM Melbourne time. This is a really big moment, as Venus comes to meet and conjunct the South Node on Friday, July 10, 2026 at 5:34 PM Melbourne time. We are rewriting the script with this alignment. Think: big relationship closures, particularly related to relationships that are karmic in nature, with the south node in the mix here. You may also experience physical purging of the gut in this time, with the sign of Virgo ruling the gastrointestinal system. If you are going to fast, now is actually a good time. Or just eat lightly. Be gentle on your digestive system.

As Venus moves into Virgo, turning our attention toward the small intestine, the gut microbiome, and the daily rituals that either regulate or dysregulate the nervous system. A supportive backdrop for recommitting clients (and yourself) to unglamorous, consistent self-care — routines, not overhauls. My favourite product for biome restoration is Black Stuff. It is one of the only “supplements” I take religiously, daily. Healthy terrain is key for overrall health and vitality — You can purchase black stuff here.

If you're fasting through this window as you noted, the bitters (dandelion, and a little gentian if you have it) before your first meal will support the Virgo-ruled purge without overtaxing the system Venus is trying to soften.

Other Herbal allies for this window:

• Hawthorn (Crataegus) — the classic heart-mending herb, Venus-ruled, cardiotonic and astringent. It doesn’t force the heart open; it strengthens the muscle around old grief so release doesn’t feel like collapse. Use as a tea or tincture through the days surrounding the conjunction.

• Motherwort (Leonurus cardiaca) — literally “lion heart,” a fitting bridge herb as Venus exits Leo. Traditionally used for heart palpitations tied to emotional upheaval, and as a releasing herb for the reproductive and nervous systems. Good for anyone feeling the karmic-relationship theme in the body, not just the mind.

• Dandelion root — bitter, Virgo-ruled organ (liver/gut) support, and a gentle purgative. Bitters wake up discernment; this is the “is this love real” question Venus in Virgo asks, metabolised.

• Fennel or ginger tea — if physical purging shows up as you described, these settle the gut rather than suppress the process.

A ritual for you:

Light a candle at dusk on the 10th, when Venus and the South Node are exact. Write down one relationship or relational pattern that has run its karmic course. Hold hawthorn tea in your hands while you read it back once, silently. Then either burn the paper or bury it — burning if the theme is transformation, burying if the theme is composting into new growth.

Virgo is an earth sign — however it is between Earth and Air and it is also mutable, so it can really create a lot of friction in the mind… particularly hypervigilance and perfectionism. Be aware of that. And also be aware of the fact that when the gut is out of balance, this mental agitation will be stronger. Try and root into the earth and into earthly rituals with herbs — it can help take you out of the agitation and to anchor and root the energy.

To find out about what is on for the remainder of the month, the biggest month of this year, become a paid subscriber below.

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The summer solstice window is here (in the northern hemisphere) & winter solstice in the southern — and we are inside a triple fire activation.

We are in the Fire Horse year (Bing-Wu) — a combination so rare it arrives once every 60 years. The last time was 1966. The Fire Horse doesn’t simmer. It boils. It clears. It runs.

Since June 15, we also entered the Horse Month in the Chinese lunar calendar — a double-Horse window that runs through July 13. Fire Horse year *inside* a Fire Horse month.

And the solstice fell inside all of it.

In Chinese cosmology, the summer solstice (for you northern hemisphere folks) is the peak of yang — the moment solar fire reaches its zenith before beginning its slow descent. It’s the exact moment yin is born.

For those of us in the southern hemisphere, we are at the opposite pole — peak yin, the longest night — and it is here, in the deepest dark, that solar fire begins its return. Thi kind of fire is a rekindling from the ground up. The yang seed born inside winter.

The seed of return, planted at the height of burning.

This fire comes not just to destroy something, but to offer a controlled burn. The kind that clears old growth so something true can come through.

The things that have been simmering in you? This window was made for them to finally boil and alchemise down into the dusts of transformation.

Triple activation: Fire Horse year. Horse month. Peak solar fire.

What are you letting finish burning?

Btw this is your reminder that early bird for my Medical Mediumship training this September closes July 1st

Apply now for your interview: https://theinstituteofesotericmedicine.com

We also have our spinal attunement online training in energy mastery coming up and starting in just 2 weeks. You can find out more here: https://spinalattunement.com

For those in the northern hemisphere, be mindful if you have a history of heat imbalances. Due to planetary shifts, taking place at the same time of summer, heat will be prevalent in the earthly and celestial atmosphere.

Heat imbalances include the following experiences:

• Itching, irritability, and agitation

• Impatience

• Restlessness

• Need for extra electrolytes

• Inflammation

• Perfectionism & being critical

• Tendency to overwork & burnout

• Headaches

• Heart palpitations

• Redness

• Dry skin

• Blood pressure issues

June 1 | Mercury enters Cancer

When Mercury moves into Cancer the nerves within the stomach and digestive system tend to dance to the tune of emotionality. Mercury will be in Cancer all month because it is going retrograde near the month’s end. A heightened emphasis on bringing the body into the parasympathetic state when eating meals is advised during this time.

June 3 | Moon in benefic embrace (Note times in different locations)

June 3 | Mercury in Cancer square Neptune in Aries

We have a lovely moment where the Moon is in a trine between Venus and Jupiter on the 3rd. This brings a graciousness to the day although the Mercury square to Neptune can bring a haze to the mind as well. Meditation can be enhanced on this day and also could bring the feeling of being on a cloud that can easily lead to a forgetfulness to the everyday essentials of daily living. Be sure to breathe, drink enough water, and eat food. Sexual encounters and erotic practices to elevate the spirit can feel more easily accessible on this day.

June 5| Moon briefly besieged

Whenever the Moon is besieged it is wise to be watchful of your intake. The Moon is the planet of nourishment and absorption. Check in with the amount and quality of food, media, water, and conversation you are letting in.

June 9 | Venus conjuncts Jupiter in Cancer

Cancer is the sign of the stomach, the breasts, and the womb. It is the sign of nourishment, of the mother, and of what we hold most tenderly within us. When Venus and Jupiter meet here, they are two benefics embracing in the most maternal of signs — and the body feels it. There is an expansiveness to the heart, a softening in the belly, and an invitation to receive.

This is one of the more genuinely beautiful transits of the month. Allow yourself to be fed — by food, by beauty, by love, by rest. The body’s capacity to absorb nourishment is heightened under this sky, which makes it an ideal day for a deeply nourishing meal, for gathering with people who fill rather than drain you, and for any practice that opens the chest and heart center.

Be mindful, however, of Jupiter’s tendency toward excess. In Cancer, overindulgence often lands in the stomach first — bloating, heaviness, or that particular kind of emotional eating that isn’t really about hunger at all. Let Venus guide the quality of what you take in, and let Jupiter expand your capacity to truly receive it rather than simply consume it.

June 9 | Mercury in Cancer square Saturn in Aries

Mercury, the ruler of the nervous system and Saturn, the planet of coldness, restriction, and limitation come into a square with one another. This is an ideal day for a massage, sauna, and lots of therapeutic movement. This aspect can also manifest in a very precise manner. Because Mercury is in Cancer, if the stomach and ability to absorb nourishment is hindered, it can create what the old physicians called “ill vapors” that can ascend and cause Saturn in Aries to enact the headaches it already has a tendency to increase in natives with the placement and during its transit. On this day Venus and Jupiter are conjunct in Cancer so this can easily take place through indulgence. Although Jupiter and Venus are benefic, we still have to be mindful of the constellation of forces taking place simultaneously.

The second half of June is where the celestial weather truly shifts — subscribe to read the full forecast, including the Chiron ingress into Taurus, the Summer Solstice medicine, and what the Full Moon in Capricorn is asking of your body.

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One tracks the seasons — the tilt of Earth, the body moving through solstice and equinox. This is tropical astrology, and for me, it rules the body-mind. It rules matter. The incarnate self in time.

This is the chart we use for Medical Astrology, a niche form of astrology that reads the body as a living cosmogram — each sign governing an organ system, each planet a physiological current, each house a terrain of vitality or vulnerability. It traces how the incarnate self holds form, where it tightens, where it leaks, where it asks to be tended. It is the chart of flesh, fluid, breath, and the seasonal weather of being alive in a body.

The other tracks the actual stars — the fixed stellar geometry your soul oriented to before it ever entered a body. This is sidereal astrology. Astral means of the stars. It is the soul’s chart. The path beneath the path.

Lately I have been laying both charts side by side. Reading them in juxtaposition. Watching where they agree, and more interestingly — watching where they don’t.

A Sun in tropical Leo might sit in sidereal Cancer. Suddenly the body-mind is fire-coded, but the soul current runs through water. The performer and the priestess. The flame and the womb. Both true. Both you.

For example, in tropical astrology, I am natally a Scorpio sun — in Sidereal astrology, natally I am a Libra Sun. I relate to both — my personality is definitely more watery, more intense, more shamanic. My soul self loves balance, beauty, mending relational conflict and peace. I am often having a dialogue and stretching between these two seemingly polar aspects of self.

This is not a contradiction to be resolved. It is a contrast to be inhabited.

The Vedic traditions have always held the sidereal chart as the soul’s map. The Western traditions, post-Ptolemy, formalized the tropical frame around incarnation and material life. To read both is to re-member a distinction the lineages themselves carry — and to meet yourself across two registers at once.

The body has its sky. The soul has its own.

When you lay them down together, you stop asking which one is correct — and start listening to the conversation between them.

Where do your body and soul disagree in your chart? And what might that disagreement be asking you to integrate?

Here’s why I use Tropical astrology in medical astrology (why all good medical astrologers use this system) and why I believe it is the most accurate system for this work.

The Tropical zodiac is not about stars. It’s about the Earth.

The Tropical zodiac is anchored to the Earth’s relationship with the Sun — specifically, to the four cardinal points of the solar year: the spring equinox, summer solstice, autumn equinox, and winter solstice. Aries begins at the spring equinox. Cancer begins at the summer solstice. Libra at the autumn equinox. Capricorn at the winter solstice.

This is a terrestrial calendar. It maps the cycles of light, darkness, growth, and death as experienced here, on this planet, in this body.

And the body is matter. The body is Earth.

This is the essential philosophical key that most people miss. Medical astrology is not astrotheology or cosmological myth-making (though it contains those dimensions). It is a system for understanding how cosmic cycles express themselves through embodied life. The body is seasonal. The body is terrestrial. The body breathes, bleeds, grows, and dies in rhythm with the Earth.

When we speak of Aries ruling the head and Mars ruling inflammation, we are not simply describing a fixed symbolic correspondence. We are tracking how the energetics of new fire, of cardinal force, of the thrust of spring — express themselves physiologically. When we speak of Virgo and the digestive system, we are speaking of the sign that governs the harvest, the refinement, the sorting of what nourishes from what doesn’t. This is seasonally coherent.

The Tropical zodiac gives us a map that is calibrated to lived biological reality on Earth. That is precisely why it works for medicine.

The Sidereal system is not wrong — it’s differently oriented.

I want to be clear: this is not a dismissal of Jyotish or Sidereal astrology. It is a profound and ancient system with its own internal logic, its own remarkable predictive accuracy, and its own body of medical knowledge (Ayurvedic astrology included). But the Sidereal system is oriented toward the fixed stars and the galactic backdrop. It tracks our relationship to the cosmos beyond the solar system.

For spiritual astrology, for karmic mapping, for understanding soul-level orientation — the Sidereal system carries its own wisdom.

But for the body? For the terrain of tissue, organ, fluid, and nerve? We use the system that mirrors the Earth’s own seasonal intelligence. Because the body doesn’t live in the galaxy — it lives in the soil, in the seasons, in the tidal rhythms of this particular spinning rock.

When sidereal astrologers say Tropical “isn’t real” — they are conflating two different questions.

“Real” relative to what? To the positions of constellations? That’s one frame. But the Tropical zodiac was never claiming to track constellations. It is tracking solar-terrestrial geometry. It was always about the relationship between Earth and Sun, not Earth and stars. Criticising Tropical astrology for not aligning with constellations is like criticising a tide chart for not tracking cloud formations. Different phenomena. Different tools.

Both systems have accuracy within their own domain. The question is simply: what are you measuring, and why?

For medical astrology, we measure the body. And the body is Earth.

In medical astrology, Uranus governs the higher central nervous system — the cortex, the electrical impulse, the sudden awakening that cannot be undone. Gemini, ruled by Mercury, governs its counterpart: the peripheral nervous system, the branching network of nerves that carry sensation, signal, and meaning between the world and the self. When these two meet, when Uranus moves through Gemini, what we are witnessing is nothing less than the electrification of the collective nervous system.

This is Shiva. This is Kundalini. This is the lightning that does not ask permission.

The Shiva Principle — Uranus as Kundalini Fire

In the tantric and Shaiva traditions, Shiva is not merely a deity — he is the principle of dissolution that precedes renewal. He does not destroy for destruction’s sake. He burns away what has calcified, what has mistaken its form for its essence. Kundalini — the coiled serpent energy that rests at the base of the spine — rises in exactly this way: suddenly, disruptively, reorganising the entire nervous system as it ascends the Sushumna nadi.

Uranus operates by identical law.

Where Saturn builds, Uranus shatters. Where the nervous system has been conditioned to contract, to protect, to brace — Uranus sends voltage through the system that the old patterning cannot contain. In Gemini, this force moves through the channels of thought, language, perception, and signal. The mind itself becomes the site of initiation.

Kundalini does not ask whether you are ready. Uranus does not ask whether it is convenient.

The question for the practitioner is not how to stop this awakening — it cannot be stopped — but how to resource the nervous system so it can receive, integrate, and transmit what is moving through it.

The full article explores how to work clinically and personally with this transit: the somatic practices that build tolerance for Uranian activation, and the herbal nervines, adaptogens, and Ayurvedic formulations that support the central and peripheral nervous system during periods of collective electrification. Become a paid subscriber to continue reading below.

Want to learn Medical Astrology? Join our Foundations of Medical astrology course through the Institute of Esoteric Medicine, here

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Track to see if you have any planets in the early degrees (1-7degrees) of fixed signs (Aquarius, Taurus, Scorpio, Leo) – as these will all be getting impacted by this transit.

In the Evolutionary Astrology framework pioneered by Jeff Green, Pluto represents the soul’s unfinished business — the deepest karmic patterns carried across lifetimes, encoded in the natal Pluto placement by house and sign. It governs the evolutionary skipped steps: what the soul has been avoiding, and what life will continue to recreate in ever-intensifying forms until it is finally faced. At its most fundamental level, Pluto speaks to the desire nature itself — not surface wanting, but the soul’s core orientation toward either separation through ego consolidation, or return through merger with the whole.

When Pluto transits in hard aspect to natal planets — by conjunction, square, or opposition — it is therefore not simply a difficult period to endure. It is a soul-level appointment. The planets it touches are being asked to shed an outgrown identity structure and reorganise around a more evolved expression of themselves.

The Core Principle of Pluto Retrogrades

Pluto doesn’t respond to avoidance — it intensifies when resisted. The remedy is always conscious descent: choosing to go into the underworld rather than being dragged. The retrograde period (May–October) is actually ideal for this — the energy is internal rather than eruptive, making it more workable.

The shadow of unbalanced Pluto is the compulsion to control what cannot be controlled, or the terror of annihilation. The medicine is surrender into transformation — which, given your work, you know intimately.

Ways to balance Plutonian Energy with Energetic & Ritual Practises to work with Pluto Retrograde Periods

• Shadow work journalling — ask: what am I controlling? what am I avoiding transforming?

• Working with obsidian, black tourmaline, or smoky quartz — traditional Pluto/Scorpio stones for transmutation

• Scorpionic herbs — wormwood, blackthorn, nettle, mugwort; any bitters that support elimination

• Ancestral clearing work — Pluto governs lineage and inherited patterns; this retrograde is potent for it

• Ritual release — burning, burying, or water ceremonies around what needs to die

The retrograde dimension

When Pluto stations retrograde over these degrees, the initiation turns inward. What may have been erupting externally from January–May now becomes an interior reckoning. This is the soul being asked to metabolise what was catalysed — to integrate rather than react.

In Evolutionary Astrology terms, this is the difference between unconscious evolution (things happening to you) and conscious evolution (choosing to do the inner work the transit is demanding). The retrograde window is a gift — it slows the pressure enough to work with it intentionally rather than simply surviving it.

🔒 Continue Reading — Moon Cycles, Remedies & Your Full May Forecast

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Inside: the May moon cycle breakdown — New Moon in Taurus, Full Moon in Scorpio, their relationship to the Pluto retrograde, and the specific practices and remedies I recommend for working each lunation consciously this month.

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