Hello, I’m Nicole. I am an astrologer, artist and parent located in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas in Northern California, the ancestral homelands of the Nisenan, home to the Yuba River, Deer Creek, manzanita, madrone, oak, pine, cedar, mountain lions, bears, bobcats, banana slugs, red-tailed hawks, river otters and countless more beings that shape and are shaped by the dreaming of and with this place.

The dreams of my own ancestors are many and varied. I feel the ways I orient and navigate life as being supported by my Filipino ancestors, their wayfinding by the stars, between many islands, their relationship to wind, water, the Moon and tides.

My path of remembrance has felt all over the place, defiant of any linear template. I went to a math, science and engineering college for biology and worked for five years in a bioengineering lab on a stem cell therapy for trauma brain injury. I moved to Costa Rica and worked at a sustainability education center for four years, building with earth and teaching fermentation. I painted murals at music festivals for a few years, and was a goatherd for ten. I worked and lived at a high school semester program in the woods here as a math and art teacher, kitchen manager and intern coordinator. I also became a caregiver for a parent recovering from brain surgery and began my training as a craniosacral therapist, which was put on pause when I became pregnant.

In 2016, I gave birth both to my first child and to a daily practice of astrological contemplation. The two have always been intertwined. Astrology has radically supported me through the portals and initiations of parenthood. It’s shifted my perception of what seemed faulty about me into a re-cognition of it as one of my core gifts. What had seemed to be my perennial inability to focus, aim and make progress, I got to watch come into a rhythmic weaving of purpose, embodied empathy and a living wholeness that is both inner and outer, horizontal and vertical, above and below. Which was incredibly resourcing.

The reason I offer this work is that, well, put simply, it is delightful, enriching, enlivening and whole-making for me, and I have seen for myself and my clients how astrology can be a living language that helps more parts of ourselves start relating and talking with each other. Astrology can help hold us together, when it feels like we are coming apart. When we fear we can’t re-member all of what’s being asked of us to remember. It supports our relationship to Self through times of cognitive change.

Most of us who have been initiated into parenthood know from experience that the brain changes with immersive caregiving. The phrase “mom-brain” refers to an overwhelm of disorganized thought, fogginess, forgetfulness, emotionality, heightened sensitivity that comes with early parenthood and intensive caregiving. Often, it is a source of frustration, stress and shame.

Living astrology is a way of re-minding our minds that they are not separate. Mind extends beyond our individual skulls. Mind is woven into a living body of relations, moments, memory and Story. This can be directly experienced. When related to as more of a mycelial consciousness, mind can make meaningful connections that are most relevant and life-giving for what wants to come forward in this moment.

Tending an embodied relationship with the planets and celestial rhythms is a way to directly experience a wider, wilder mind, to think-with/dream-with this moment, in this place on Earth, in this body. Through relational astrology, mythic contemplation and embodied storytelling, we can expand beyond the limits of what was previously known to be possible through an either/or mindset around taking care of ourselves and taking care of others, and dive into a radically fluid co-creative journey with what and who we love … and the animate path we follow.