37: Aging Gracefully with Astrology

37: Aging Gracefully with Astrology

You are listening to Parts & Charts: The IFS and Astrology Podcast. Be sure to subscribe here on Substack and follow — available on Apple Podcasts [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/parts-charts-the-ifs-and-astrology-podcast/id1819784738], Spotify [https://open.spotify.com/show/2iR7QcdimkXeGQ0HPTl14M], and wherever you get your podcasts. Parts & Charts is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Chelsea Owens [https://substack.com/profile/9362340-chelsea-owens] ’s still off on her paradise vacation, so it’s another solo transmission from KP Kaszubowski [https://substack.com/profile/19649812-kp-kaszubowski] — and this time she’s turning toward the question underneath all her years of practice: why has she given her life to this study? The answer she lands on isn’t the sun-sign entry point that hooked her as a kid, or even the pleasure of reverse-engineering Brad Pitt’s inner workings from the couch. It’s timing. It’s the discovery that every human life moves through the same set of ages and thresholds, whether or not we have language for them — and that astrology, at its best, is a way of knowing what season you’re standing in instead of fighting the fact that you’re in one at all. The premise: unfoldment Before she gets into the returns themselves, KP borrows a word from Joanna Macy’s Buddhist-rooted thinking: unfoldment. The idea that nothing changes in isolation — we’re all co-arising, co-changing, moving together in ways too tangled to trace a single cause back to a single effect. It’s the frame she wants underneath everything that follows: not a checklist of ages to hit on schedule, but a reminder that none of us are unfolding alone, and none of us are behind. She also draws a line here to Internal Family Systems — not her own clinical training, but a way of thinking she admires in how it treats a part that isn’t ready to speak yet. You don’t force it forward. You listen, and you let it arrive on its own timeline. She wonders out loud what Chelsea would make of the overlap. The early returns * The Mars return (every ~2 years, first hitting around age two) — the “terrible twos” as a Mars return: the moment a child starts practicing assertion, wanting, no. Every two years afterward, the same energetic rehearsal comes back around. * The first Jupiter return (~age 12) — the container starts expanding past the family and into society; kids start testing integrity, honesty, the rules that hold a group together. * Saturn’s early checkpoints — age 7 (first responsibility: tying shoes, keeping a cubby, walking the dog around the block), age 14 (the Saturn opposition, and the first real high-stakes decisions), age 21 (more independence, more consequence). * The Saturn return (~28) — what KP calls an authentication checkpoint: if your life isn’t lining up with what your soul actually wants, this is the transit that applies the pressure to get honest. * The first nodal return (~18–19) — another fate-adjacent threshold: the age of enlisting, marrying, making the choice that sets the next decade in motion. * The second nodal return (~36) — buying the house, starting the company, having the child — one of the “fated portals,” as she puts it, where big decisions cluster. Her guidance for anyone under 30: don’t worry about the nodes yet. Saturn is enough to lean into. 🍼 Want insight into how to care for your kiddo through an astrological lens? KP Kaszubowski [https://open.substack.com/users/19649812-kp-kaszubowski?utm_source=mentions] offers Caregivers’ Readings [https://www.kpkaszu.com/services] now. Click the link here to schedule yours: https://bit.ly/astrocaregiversreading [https://bit.ly/astrocaregiversreading] Midlife: the Uranus opposition and the Neptune square (~40–43) This is the stretch she calls the real midlife crisis — the Uranus opposition alongside a Neptune square, landing anywhere from 40 to 43 depending on the person. Handled well — with the Saturn and Jupiter work already done — she describes it less as chaos and more as a kind of aliveness: purpose arriving with real electricity, a pull toward mentorship, toward getting excellent at your craft, toward liberation from roles you’d mistaken for permanent (the caretaker who stops being someone’s sidekick, the employee who’s done being the gopher). The Neptune square is harder to describe — something closer to awe, or to losing the need for language around what can’t be explained. She’s careful to say the discomfort is real even when the outcome is good: being liberated from a structure you thought was load-bearing doesn’t feel gentle while it’s happening. The Chiron return (~50–51) KP flags her own uncertainty here — Chiron has only completed one full observed cycle since its discovery, so she holds this one loosely. Still, she points to what other astrologers have noticed: a healing checkpoint, a moment where enough has been lived and felt that a person is ready to guide others through it — the age, she suggests, to become a therapist, a chaplain, a pastor, if that calling has been waiting. It’s also, often, the year the body’s aging becomes impossible not to feel. The second Uranus threshold (~63) The Uranus square — a second chance, gentler than the opposition, for anyone who stayed inside a “self-chosen imprisonment” instead of taking the liberation on offer at 40. Not as intense, she says, but still a real push toward finally doing things your own way. Not rushing the process KP circles back to something her dad told her: life’s not a race. She admits she still fights this daily — the impulse to have twelve things solved before their season arrives, the fifth-grade version of herself so excited for sixth grade’s stock-market unit that she couldn’t fully live in fifth grade while she was in it. Her point isn’t anti-ambition; it’s timing. Twelve is for being twelve. Forty-five is for being forty-five. She offers her own recent 12th-house year as an example — a year of loss and non-design, of things simply happening rather than being built, arriving alongside hard transits to her sun, Mars, and Mercury. Instead of pushing through it the way she did in her twenties and most of her thirties, she leaned in: yin yoga instead of lifting, no long drives she wouldn’t have the energy to return from, permission to just be low-lift. She calls it one of the most physically difficult years of her life so far — and also proof that leaning into a hard season, instead of fighting its timing, is its own kind of relief. She closes, as ever, with the door open: tell her what season you’re in, whether it matches what she’s described or not — especially if you’re near a Chiron return and want to report back. Work with us / stay close: Subscribe to Parts & Charts on Substack — episodes and in-person workshops land there first. → partsandcharts.substack.com [http://partsandcharts.substack.com] Chelsea’s Oracle deck, Outer Realms for Inner Archives — a collage deck shaped by exactly this work, made the way she makes images of her own parts. Pre-orders coming; this email sign-up form gets you deck news only, nothing else. → subscribe here [https://chelsea-owens.kit.com/19ebf9c33a] Meet your Moon. KP’s guided audio course for meeting the Moon as an inner figure, on your own time. ($42) → https://kpkaszu.gumroad.com/l/meetyourmoon [https://kpkaszu.gumroad.com/l/meetyourmoon] Work with Chelsea. Licensed therapist, Leo moon, first house everything, art supplies on every surface. → www.chelseaowenstherapy.com [http://www.chelseaowenstherapy.com/] Work with KP. Astrology readings (written, voice note, or live; in person if you’re in Wisconsin), Astro Parts sessions, and Book Doula — a monthly retainer for people serious about making the book real, three clients at a time, waitlist when full. → Book Doula Waitlist: forms.gle/3LwpmAinnBN2Q4aY8 [http://forms.gle/3LwpmAinnBN2Q4aY8] → Schedule a 1:1 session: https://app.acuityscheduling.com/schedule.php?owner=22372975 [https://app.acuityscheduling.com/schedule.php?owner=22372975] 🌟 Credits Music “Vape Juice Dave’s Bistro” composed by Scott Cary (Wild Western Avenue) for the feature film RINGOLEVIO (2020) directed by KP Kaszubowski — performed by Scott Cary, Max Wikoff, Else Albeck Gasparka, and Sarah Luther. Get full access to Parts & Charts at partsandcharts.substack.com/subscribe [https://partsandcharts.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

36: The Astrology of Flow State - Writing Alone With Your Chart

You are listening to Parts & Charts: The IFS and Astrology Podcast. Be sure to subscribe here on Substack and follow — available on Apple Podcasts [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/parts-charts-the-ifs-and-astrology-podcast/id1819784738], Spotify [https://open.spotify.com/show/2iR7QcdimkXeGQ0HPTl14M], and wherever you get your podcasts. Chelsea is on a pilgrimage this week — location undisclosed, whereabouts protected — so KP is flying solo, and what comes out is less an episode than a transmission from the middle of her own writing life. She teaches undergraduates how to write and think critically for a living, and she opens with a confession that doubles as a thesis: writing is hard for everyone. Not hard in the sense of unteachable, but hard the way anything worth doing with your whole self is hard. It asks for all of you. She wants to talk to the person who disagrees, who finds it easy — she isn’t sure that person exists. This episode is a chart-reader’s field guide to getting unstuck. It’s built around one question: what does your birth chart tell you about how to get into flow? A note on framing: this episode doesn’t lean on IFS language the way some Parts & Charts episodes do with Chelsea’s clinical lens in the room. This is KP working from her own lineage — Jungian, archetypal, rooted in active imagination rather than a parts-work model — and the astrology carries the weight instead. Quick cheat sheet: what to check in your chart for writing flow * Sun sign & house — where you have endless, bottomless interest; what a stuck scene or project can be reoriented toward * Mars sign & house — the kind of physical movement or exertion that opens up your capacity to sit and write * Mercury sign & house — your fixed mental filter; what comes naturally to say, and what you’ll have to work against on a project outside that filter * Venus sign & house — what you care about enough to become intimate with on the page; a clue toward subject matter * Moon sign — your emotional weather and self-care needs; ignore it and the writing stops being possible * Outer planet aspects to personal planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto) — what makes your process electric, intense, or hard-won rather than flat * Third house sign & planets — a candidate for how you drop into flow (ritual, cognition, environment) * Fifth house sign & planets — a candidate for why the work stays pleasurable, and what’s missing when it doesn’t If you’re looking for a 1:1 Artist Audit - KP Kaszubowski [https://substack.com/profile/19649812-kp-kaszubowski] offers this as a live virtual session now. Click the link here to schedule yours: https://shorturl.at/PQJbJ [https://shorturl.at/PQJbJ] Topics, in order * Solo episode intro — Chelsea’s on pilgrimage, whereabouts undisclosed * Framing: writing is hard for everyone, even the naturally talented * Disclaimer for listeners not interested in birth-chart-and-writing content * Flow state via her dad — pastor, sermon-writer, former athlete * The premise: birth chart as energetic blueprint, working with or against your nature * Sun and Mars as the two “natural energy” planets * Sun sign and house — endless interest, illustrated with Virgo sun and Taurus sun in the ninth * Her own Libra sun in the tenth * Mars sign and house — kinetic/physical energy, illustrated with Mars in Capricorn in the second * Her own need to move her body before writing (Saturn in the first) * Air-sign Mars and the pull toward intellectualized movement * Mercury as a fixed filter for processing information * Fire-sign Mercury example * Anticipating a reader’s or student’s filter * Her own Mercury in Libra in the tenth, and the difficulty of writing violent scenes through it * Noticing kinship with poets who share her Mercury sign, plus an unexplained pull toward Mercury in Cancer writers * Mercury by house, with a sixth-house example * Venus as what you’re intimate enough with to write about * Her own Venus in Scorpio in the eleventh, and its link to her war-novel subject matter * Venus by house — first house and memoir, fourth house and memoir, eleventh house and collective/historical material * Her own failed attempt at a personal memoir * A brief note on the moon as empathy, emotional landscape, and self-care (future episode) * Outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto) aspecting personal planets — complexity as aliveness * Example: Aries Mercury squared by Pluto in Cancer * Her own Mercury–Mars conjunction/opposition and what it taught her about sustaining flow * Third house as a possible key to how to get into flow, with sign-by-sign examples * Her own Pisces third house and meditation/chanting practice * Fifth house as a possible key to why the work stays pleasurable * Her own Taurus fifth house, ruled by Scorpio Venus * Closing invitation to reach out and trade notes * Sign-off and well wishes for Chelsea’s vacation The premise KP’s father is a pastor who writes a sermon fresh every week and used to play competitive basketball. He’s talked to her about flow state on the court — that feeling of moving with the game instead of against it. She’s never had that in her body. But she has it on the page, and in session with clients, when the energy just moves through her. Every person has an activity where this happens, she says. The work is finding yours. Her working theory of astrology: we’re each born with an energetic blueprint, and every moment after that is spent either working with it or against it, because the world teaches us to do things a certain way regardless of our nature. The goal isn’t obedience to the chart — it’s knowing your nature well enough to choose when to lean into it and when to stretch past it. Sun and Mars: where your energy is endless The sun tells you where your consciousness naturally focuses — a Virgo sun leans toward detail, adaptation, making things work better. A sun in Taurus in the ninth house might mean bottomless appetite for philosophy, travel, other people’s belief systems, alongside a Taurean hunger for the body and sensual pleasure. KP’s own Libra sun in the tenth gives her, she says, endless energy for people, cooperation, and effort in the external world — so when a scene stalls, she asks herself how to make it about relationship, about people working toward something together. Mars is more physical — the kinetic charge rather than the consciousness. Mars in Capricorn in the second house might mean losing interest in a project is a cue to move the body, or to write toward the material world: finance, long-term stakes, the historical consequences of a character’s choices. Her rule of thumb: you can’t sit down and write until you’ve moved. She has Saturn in the first house and sits still by nature, which meant her twenties were a fight to finish the novels she wanted to write — until she learned that some form of physical exertion has to come before the page opens up for her. If your Mars is in an air sign, she suggests the movement itself might want to be intellectual — she does walk-and-talks, and studies the muscular systems she’s exercising, because movement has to be a little bit of a study before her attention will stay in it. Mercury: the filter you can’t take off Mercury is fixed at birth and doesn’t change with the world around you — it’s the lens all incoming information passes through. A fire-sign Mercury reaches for what’s inspiring before what’s practical. KP has Mercury in Libra in the tenth, which means her filter wants fairness, grace, connection, intimacy — and she’s currently trying to write war scenes full of violence and betrayal. What comes out, she admits, keeps turning into Jane Austen: the interpersonal instead of the blood. She’s training herself toward something more Martian in the writing, and finds it genuinely difficult — the filter doesn’t switch off because the project demands something else of it. Knowing your own filter, she says, is also how you get better at anticipating someone else’s — a reader’s, a student’s, a child’s. You’ll never actually know what’s happening inside another mind, but the act of imagining their filter is what makes writing (or teaching, or parenting) sharper and more useful. She’s also noticed she’s drawn to poets with Mercury in Libra — kinship she didn’t know the astrological name for until later — and, more surprisingly, to writers with Mercury in Cancer, which she suspects has something to do with her own moon in Cancer reaching toward that emotional register. Her suggestion: if you know your Mercury sign, go find writers who share it. Reading their filter might teach you something about your own. Venus: what you’ll stay curious about long enough to write If Mercury is how you make sense of things, Venus is what you care about enough to become intimate with — not expertise in a credentialed sense, but the kind of closeness that lets you write about something honestly. KP’s Venus in Scorpio in the eleventh gives her, unsurprisingly, an endless fascination with war, spiritual deception, and the politics of institutions — the exact terrain of the novel she’s writing, even though her Libra filter makes the writing of it hard. The eleventh house adds the collective angle: revolutions, movements, the history of people organizing around scarcity. She offers a few house-based hunches, held loosely: Venus in the first house might pull toward memoir, toward the self as subject. Fourth-house placements — contemplation, origin, memory — show up again and again in the charts of memoirists she’s studied. Her own attempt at a 200-page lyrical memoir never landed, and she thinks it’s because her chart’s weight sits in the houses of other people and groups, not the personal ones. If your fifth or eleventh house is loaded, maybe the book you’re meant to write looks more like The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants than a memoir. Often, she says, you already know your subject — you’ve been drawn to it since you were small — and Venus just explains why. The moon gets a passing nod as its own future episode: our capacity for empathy, our internal weather, and — not incidentally — how we’re supposed to be taking care of ourselves. Skip that upkeep and the writing stops being possible at all. When the outer planets get involved Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto complicate everything above when they aspect your personal planets — and if you take writing seriously as a practice, she suspects you probably have some of these aspects active, because that’s what makes a person’s process electric instead of flat. An Aries Mercury squared by Pluto in Cancer, for instance, might mean information gets processed with real intensity — explosive, bodily, hard to look away from. No aspect, and the filter stays quieter. KP’s own Mercury and Mars are exactly one degree apart, facing off — and she credits understanding that placement with finally learning how to sustain flow state long enough to write something long-form, after years of only being able to sprint a single page as a poet. Two houses worth watching: the third and the fifth Still a hypothesis she’s testing across a year of artist interviews, but: the third house — cognition, environment, absorption, the house of ritual — may hold clues to how you get into flow. An Aries third house might want you to hit something and get sweaty first. A Virgo third house might want outlines, index cards, the physical act of handwriting. Her own third house is in Pisces — watery, boundary-less — which tracks with what’s actually working for her: meditation and chanting until she drops into a rhythmic pulse where she can feel herself channeling a character’s voice and memory. The fifth house — creativity, play, pleasure, the house astrologers have pointed to for centuries — may be less about how and more about why bother. Her fifth house is in Taurus, ruled by her Scorpio Venus, and when a project stalls, it’s almost always because the pleasure went first. Getting back to beauty, to the body, to something that feels good to make, is how she finds her way back in. Closing KP ends where she always seems to land: this is the conversation she’d rather be having in person, with you, about what’s actually working in your own writing life. She means the invitation literally — DMs open, Substack open, and a standing offer to trade notes on flow state, birth charts, and whatever strange, difficult project you’re currently a little afraid of. And: send good energy to Chelsea, off in an undisclosed paradise. She’ll be back in a week. Maybe two. Parts & Charts is co-hosted by KP Kaszubowski, Hellenistic astrologer and Chelsea Owens, licensed IFS therapist. Work with us / stay close: Subscribe to Parts & Charts on Substack — episodes and in-person workshops land there first. → partsandcharts.substack.com Meet your Moon. KP’s guided audio course for meeting the Moon as an inner figure, on your own time. ($42) → https://kpkaszu.gumroad.com/l/meetyourmoon [https://kpkaszu.gumroad.com/l/meetyourmoon] Work with Chelsea. Licensed therapist, Leo moon, first house everything, art supplies on every surface. → www.chelseaowenstherapy.com [http://www.chelseaowenstherapy.com/] Work with KP. Astrology readings (written, voice note, or live; in person if you’re in Wisconsin), Astro Parts sessions, and Book Doula — a monthly retainer for people serious about making the book real, three clients at a time, waitlist when full. → Book Doula Waitlist: forms.gle/3LwpmAinnBN2Q4aY8 [http://forms.gle/3LwpmAinnBN2Q4aY8] → Schedule a 1:1 session: https://app.acuityscheduling.com/schedule.php?owner=22372975 [https://app.acuityscheduling.com/schedule.php?owner=22372975] 🌟 Credits Music “Vape Juice Dave’s Bistro” composed by Scott Cary (Wild Western Avenue) for the feature film RINGOLEVIO (2020) directed by KP Kaszubowski — performed by Scott Cary, Max Wikoff, Else Albeck Gasparka, and Sarah Luther. Get full access to Parts & Charts at partsandcharts.substack.com/subscribe [https://partsandcharts.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

35: Dressing for Your Venus Sign: Style as Self-Expression and Protection

You are listening to Parts & Charts: The IFS and Astrology Podcast. Be sure to subscribe here on Substack and follow — available on Apple Podcasts [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/parts-charts-the-ifs-and-astrology-podcast/id1819784738], Spotify [https://open.spotify.com/show/2iR7QcdimkXeGQ0HPTl14M], and wherever you get your podcasts. Parts & Charts is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Dressing for Your Venus: Style as Subject Matter, Protection, and Play KP and Chelsea just spent a week together in San Francisco — an in-person workshop, one impulsive shared tattoo (a Gertrude Stein line, worn now by three people who all met through cards), and by the time they sat down to record, a listener request had been waiting: how do you actually dress for your Venus sign? Neither of them wanted to give the version of this answer that’s already everywhere — Venus in Aries, wear red. So the episode becomes something closer to a working session between two frameworks than a style guide. They lay it out early: Venus doesn’t just point to a color, it points to a subject matter — the material a placement is drawn to make sense of in the world, whether that shows up in a wardrobe or an entire body of work. Chelsea’s Gemini Venus wants variety and synthesis, the instinct to hold two unrelated things until a third thing appears between them — a design impulse she recognizes in the crocheted pants she makes, because nothing in a store has ever quite matched the flash in her head. KP’s Scorpio Venus wants texture and secrecy, a piece of jewelry with history already built into it, the specific comfort of something that costs a little to look at directly. From there they map rising, moon, and Venus against yin and yang, and the pattern holds uncomfortably well. Chelsea’s placements land entirely yang — Leo rising, Leo moon, Gemini Venus. KP’s land entirely yin — Capricorn rising, Cancer moon, Scorpio Venus. It explains, retroactively, why Chelsea’s attempt to dress KP in bright pink during the visit met an immediate, full-body no. The conversation turns, as it tends to on this show, from placement to protection. KP names the gap between the version of a dress that looks perfect online and the one that arrives and grates against her actual skin — an aspirational self reaching for something the felt self isn’t ready to wear. Chelsea meets this with her clinical lens directly: this is parts territory. A protective part reaching for volume, or for invisibility, isn’t always distinguishable from self-expression in the moment — the same “weird” outfit can be armor or announcement, and the only way to know which is to ask the part what it’s actually defending. They trade their own evidence. Chelsea’s clown-phase jumpsuits, loud on purpose, later softened into something more specific and less defended. KP’s reading glasses, worn in public whether she needs them or not, functioning less as vision correction than as a small buffer between herself and being fully seen. Both read as the same instinct wearing different fabric: cover enough to stay inside yourself while still choosing to be looked at. They close, unresolved on purpose, with a shared assignment — go watch Bella Freud’s Fashion Neurosis if you haven’t — and a question for the audience: what are you wearing for your Venus? KP answers first, on air: a thrifted white t-shirt, secondhand lapis lazuli earrings, and a ring bought at the Taj Mahal now doing the job her wedding ring used to do. Scorpio Venus, unmistakably. What we get into: * Venus as subject matter — how a placement points to a material, a texture, a subject you keep returning to, not just a color * Rising, moon, and Venus mapped against yin and yang, and what it means when all three land in the same register * The gap between the aspirational self (the dress that looks right online) and the felt self (the one that has to actually wear it) * Protective parts versus self-expression — how the same “weird” outfit can be armor or announcement, and how to tell the difference * Style as identity history: Chelsea’s clown-phase jumpsuits, KP’s reading glasses as a buffer against being fully seen * Bella Freud’s [https://fashionneurosis.com/]Fashion Neurosis [https://fashionneurosis.com/], [https://fashionneurosis.com/]and an open invitation to the audience: what are you wearing for your Venus? Parts & Charts is co-hosted by KP Kaszubowski, Hellenistic astrologer and Chelsea Owens, licensed IFS therapist. Work with us / stay close: Subscribe to Parts & Charts on Substack — episodes and in-person workshops land there first. → partsandcharts.substack.com Meet your Moon. KP’s guided audio course for meeting the Moon as an inner figure, on your own time. ($42) → https://kpkaszu.gumroad.com/l/meetyourmoon [https://kpkaszu.gumroad.com/l/meetyourmoon] Work with Chelsea. Licensed therapist, Leo moon, first house everything, art supplies on every surface. → www.chelseaowenstherapy.com [http://www.chelseaowenstherapy.com/] Work with KP. Astrology readings (written, voice note, or live; in person if you’re in Wisconsin), Astro Parts sessions, and Book Doula — a monthly retainer for people serious about making the book real, three clients at a time, waitlist when full. → Book Doula Waitlist: forms.gle/3LwpmAinnBN2Q4aY8 → Schedule a 1:1 session: https://app.acuityscheduling.com/schedule.php?owner=22372975 [https://app.acuityscheduling.com/schedule.php?owner=22372975] 🌟 Credits Music “Vape Juice Dave’s Bistro” composed by Scott Cary (Wild Western Avenue) for the feature film RINGOLEVIO (2020) directed by KP Kaszubowski — performed by Scott Cary, Max Wikoff, Else Albeck Gasparka, and Sarah Luther. Thanks for reading Parts & Charts! This post is public so feel free to share it. Get full access to Parts & Charts at partsandcharts.substack.com/subscribe [https://partsandcharts.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

34: The Bad Therapist — Felicia Keller Boyle on Parts, Rules, and Running a Business

Be sure to subscribe here on Substack and follow — available on Apple Podcasts [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/parts-charts-the-ifs-and-astrology-podcast/id1819784738], Spotify [https://open.spotify.com/show/2iR7QcdimkXeGQ0HPTl14M], and wherever you get your podcasts. About Our Guest Felicia Keller Boyle is an LMFT, business coach for private pay therapists, and host of her own podcast, The Bad Therapist Show. Before successfully growing her own six figure practice and launching her multi-six figure coaching business, Felicia spent years working in community mental health and agencies where she experienced the immense pressure therapists feel to put everyone first. After much soul-searching, she decided to see if it was possible to do great work and be paid well. Spoiler: It is. For the past seven years she's been helping ambitious therapists do the same and leave good therapist conditioning behind. Felicia calls her podcast The Bad Therapist Show, and she means it as a badge, not a confession. She’s still licensed. Still renewing. Still a good clinician. But somewhere around 2021 she split off from the room where you’re not supposed to coach, not supposed to tell anyone what to do, not supposed to want what you want out loud — and built a business teaching other therapists to do the same. This week she joins KP and Chelsea to talk about what happens when the part of you trained to disappear into your client’s process has to go build a business in public instead. You are listening to Parts & Charts: The IFS and Astrology Podcast. Be sure to subscribe here on Substack and follow — available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Parts & Charts is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Therapists are trained to disappear. Whatever they think, whatever they want, whatever they’d say if it were their session — it stays out of the room, redirected back to the client, again and again, until redirecting becomes a reflex that doesn’t turn off at five o’clock. Felicia names this directly: she loves rules, she’s a rule-follower by nature, and the rule she took most seriously in clinical practice was that therapy is process-led, not opinion-led. You don’t tell people what to do. But there was a part of her that wanted to teach, wanted to lead, wanted to stand in front of a group and just say the thing — and therapy had no room for that part. Coaching did. Liberated Business, her program for therapists building and scaling private practice, is what happens when that part finally gets a job description. This is parts activation in its most literal form, business-flavored: not exiles and protectors in clinical language, since Felicia isn’t IFS-trained even though she’s currently a client in it herself, but the same architecture underneath. A part that follows rules so well it built an entire professional identity on self-erasure. Another part that’s been waiting since childhood — the puppeteer behind the church curtain, the kid leading a group that never asked for a leader — for permission to be looked at. The business isn’t just a business. It’s the place where the part that performs finally gets to stop apologizing for wanting an audience. KP pulls the chart and finds exactly this tension built into the architecture: Felicia’s sun and chart ruler both sitting in the most private house there is, while Jupiter — expansive, lucky, loud — sits in the most public one, in Pisces. A person whose core identity is structurally guarded, who has nonetheless been performing since she was small. And then Mars in Capricorn in the eighth house, the house of real intimacy and shared resources, which reframes the whole conversation: Felicia isn’t bad at vulnerability, she’s built vulnerability into a craft. Professional vulnerability. Vulnerability with a fee attached and a clear beginning and end, brick by Capricorn brick. That’s not a workaround. That’s the actual shape of the gift — the eighth house doing what the eighth house does, slowly, on purpose, for other people’s benefit before her own. The “bad therapist” framing earns its keep here, too, because it isn’t really about being bad at therapy — Felicia is emphatic that she’s good at her job, good enough that she’s almost offended when someone implies otherwise. It’s about being a good rule-breaker, which is its own discipline. She talks about skipping high school constantly her senior year — not to do anything illicit, but to go study for harder classes than the ones she was assigned to attend. Same instinct, different decade: know the rule, understand why it exists, and break it anyway when you’ve got a clearer reason than the rule does. That’s the same engine that let her leave a stable clinical identity to build something the rulebook didn’t have a category for yet. Running underneath all of it is the 2023–2025 stretch — grief after her brother’s death, a business slump that lined up almost exactly with an astrological progression her astrologer later named and dated, and two and a half years of fighting weather that was telling her to rest. Felicia didn’t rest. She launched a podcast and invested in SEO instead, the opposite of what her astrologer would have advised in real time. It worked out — her business calls this period the rocket ship now — but the episode doesn’t let that read as proof the fight was right. It’s proof that sometimes the bruising and the outcome arrive together, and the chart’s job isn’t to spare you one or the other. It’s to eventually explain both. What we get into: What happens to the part of a therapist trained to disappear when she has to build a business in public “Bad therapist” as identity, not confession — rule-following, rule-breaking, and the difference between the two Sun and chart ruler buried in the most private house, next to a Jupiter that wants an audience Mars in Capricorn in the eighth house: vulnerability as a craft, not a deficit Why therapists specifically struggle with visibility and marketing, and what coaching gave Felicia that clinical work couldn’t The 2023–2025 progression: grief, business malaise, an astrologer’s blunt forecast, and the two and a half years spent fighting it anyway “Choose your hard” — Felicia’s operating philosophy for entrepreneurship, no spiritual bypass attached Find Felicia: The Bad Therapist Show — abadtherapist.coach — Liberated Business, one-on-one coaching, and the Magic Sheet (her private-practice fee calculator) Links below> Website [https://thebadtherapist.coach/?utm_source=partsandcharts&utm_medium=podcast&utm_term=&utm_content=&utm_campaign=website] Magic Sheets Private Practice Fee Calculator [https://thebadtherapist.ck.page/revenue-stimulator?utm_source=partsandcharts&utm_medium=podcast&utm_term=&utm_content=&utm_campaign=magicsheetsoptin]Liberated Business [https://thebadtherapist.coach/liberatedbusiness?utm_source=partsandcharts&utm_medium=podcast&utm_term=&utm_content=&utm_campaign=liberatedbusiness] The Bad Therapist Show [https://www.thebadtherapist.coach/thebadtherapistshow?utm_source=partsandcharts&utm_medium=podcast&utm_term=&utm_content=&utm_campaign=thebadtherapistshow] Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/the_bad_therapist] Parts & Charts is co-hosted by KP Kaszubowski, Hellenistic astrologer and APM educator, and Chelsea Owens, licensed IFS therapist. Work with us / stay close: Subscribe to Parts & Charts on Substack — episodes and in-person workshops land there first. → partsandcharts.substack.com Meet your Moon. KP’s guided audio course for meeting the Moon as an inner figure, on your own time. ($42) → https://kpkaszu.gumroad.com/l/meetyourmoon [https://kpkaszu.gumroad.com/l/meetyourmoon] Work with Chelsea. Licensed therapist, Leo moon, first house everything, art supplies on every surface. → www.chelseaowenstherapy.com [http://www.chelseaowenstherapy.com] Work with KP. Astrology readings (written, voice note, or live; in person if you’re in Wisconsin), Astro Parts sessions, and Book Doula — a monthly retainer for people serious about making the book real, three clients at a time, waitlist when full. → Book Doula Waitlist: forms.gle/3LwpmAinnBN2Q4aY8 → Schedule a 1:1 session: https://app.acuityscheduling.com/schedule.php?owner=22372975 [https://app.acuityscheduling.com/schedule.php?owner=22372975] 🌟 Credits Music “Vape Juice Dave’s Bistro” composed by Scott Cary (Wild Western Avenue) for the feature film RINGOLEVIO (2020) directed by KP Kaszubowski — performed by Scott Cary, Max Wikoff, Else Albeck Gasparka, and Sarah Luther. Thanks for reading Parts & Charts! This post is public so feel free to share it. Get full access to Parts & Charts at partsandcharts.substack.com/subscribe [https://partsandcharts.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

33: With Exiles, You Can't Skip to the End

Every other part in your system has a job — protectors protect, managers manage, firefighters put out the fire. Exiles are the ones with no job at all. They just hold the feeling. This week KP asks Chelsea, the resident IFS therapist, to teach the foundations of exiles: who they are, why your protectors guard them so fiercely, and why grief — the step most of us skip — is how you actually reach them. You are listening to Parts & Charts: The IFS and Astrology Podcast. Be sure to subscribe here on Substack and follow — available on Apple Podcasts [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/parts-charts-the-ifs-and-astrology-podcast/id1819784738], Spotify [https://open.spotify.com/show/2iR7QcdimkXeGQ0HPTl14M], and wherever you get your podcasts. Parts & Charts is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. There’s a part of you balled up in the corner of the room with a blanket over its head. It’s young. It’s holding something heavy — shame, a rejection, an attachment that ruptured or never formed — and it has been holding it for a long time. In IFS, that’s an exile, and the rest of your system has organized itself around keeping you from ever feeling what it feels. Chelsea Owens [https://substack.com/profile/9362340-chelsea-owens], a licensed therapist trained in the model, walks KP Kaszubowski [https://substack.com/profile/19649812-kp-kaszubowski] through the foundations: how exiles differ from the protectors and firefighters running the show, why you can’t march straight up to a tender part (picture a stranger knocking and asking to speak to your four-year-old — of course the gatekeepers say no), and what the textbook arc actually looks like, from getting the protectors’ permission, to witnessing, to grief, to unburdening a belief like I’m unlovable and letting the part take on something new. The throughline is grief — the piece Chelsea says we’re never really taught to do, the one protectors are most afraid of, the one that, when you stay with it instead of running, turns out to feel less like drowning and more like room being made. KP keeps catching the resonance with creative process: you can’t rush a revision to its tender center any more than you can rush a part to its. (She also clocks, mid-episode, that the novel she thought was about the medieval period is actually about her grandmother. The work knows before you do.) And then the chart. KP’s distinction to sit with: a birth chart is a snapshot, but the moving sky — transits — is where this kind of process actually shows itself, which is why “you have an exile doing X” is exactly the wrong way to read a placement. Where to begin instead: Chiron for the named wound, and the Moon, the tender spot every one of us shares. A note on staying in our lanes: Chelsea teaches the IFS model here; KP translates it toward the chart. What we get into: * What an exile is, and why it’s the one part with no job — it only holds the feeling * Protectors as gatekeepers, and why reaching a tender part is slow on purpose * The energetic “tell” that you’ve met an exile rather than a protector * The arc from permission to witnessing to unburdening — and the new qualities a part can take on afterward * Why grief is the step we skip, what our protectors fear about it, and why staying with it makes more room than it takes * Where exiles come from: the classroom humiliation, the un-sent birthday invitation, the friend who stopped without a reason * Reading this in the chart without flattening anyone: Chiron, the Moon, and transits as the place process lives Work with us / stay close: * Sun & Moon Workshop — in person, San Francisco. Solstice, June 21, at Birdhouse Gallery on Judah St. in the Sunset. Three hours of astro grounding, meditation, and art making — we meet the Sun and the Moon as inner figures and build something in response to them. Priced to cover the venue and supplies so the room can be full. → sign up [https://www.eventbrite.com/e/arts-parts-charts-the-sun-and-the-moon-creative-workshop-tickets-1990029492783?utm_experiment=test_share_listing&aff=ebdsshios] * Subscribe to Parts & Charts on Substack — episodes, in-person workshops, and the part-two we keep threatening (where the wounds actually live in the chart) land there first. → partsandcharts.substack.com [http://partsandcharts.substack.com] * We’re curious. We want to map exiles and wounding onto real placements — Chiron, the Moon, and beyond. Tell us in the comments where you find this energy in yourself, and what house it lives in. → * Chelsea’s Oracle deck, Outer Realms for Inner Archives — a collage deck shaped by exactly this work, made the way she makes images of her own parts. Pre-orders coming; this email sign-up form gets you deck news only, nothing else. → subscribe here [https://chelsea-owens.kit.com/19ebf9c33a] * Meet your Moon. If the Moon is the tender spot for everyone, this is the guided audio course for meeting yours as an inner figure — KP’s active-imagination approach, on your own time. ($42) → https://kpkaszu.gumroad.com/l/meetyourmoon [https://kpkaszu.gumroad.com/l/meetyourmoon] * Work with Chelsea. If you’re in California and you’ve been looking for a therapist who will actually go there with you — the deep stuff, the weird stuff, the stuff you’ve never quite found the words for — Chelsea Owens is your person. Licensed therapist, Leo moon, first house everything, art supplies on every surface. She brings clinical rigor and genuine delight to the work in equal measure, which turns out to be exactly what the hard stuff needs. 👉 www.chelseaowenstherapy.com [http://www.chelseaowenstherapy.com/] * Work with KP. Astrology readings (written, voice note, or live; in person if you’re in Wisconsin), Astro Parts sessions, and Book Doula — a monthly retainer for people serious about making the book real, three clients at a time, waitlist when full. → Book Doula Waitlist: forms.gle/3LwpmAinnBN2Q4aY8 [http://forms.gle/3LwpmAinnBN2Q4aY8] Schedule a 1:1 session → https://app.acuityscheduling.com/schedule.php?owner=22372975 [https://app.acuityscheduling.com/schedule.php?owner=22372975] 🌟 Credits Music “Vape Juice Dave’s Bistro” composed by Scott Cary (Wild Western Avenue) for the feature film RINGOLEVIO (2020) directed by KP Kaszubowski — performed by Scott Cary, Max Wikoff, Else Albeck Gasparka, and Sarah Luther. Collage cover art by Chelsea Owens. Get full access to Parts & Charts at partsandcharts.substack.com/subscribe [https://partsandcharts.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]