Competencies, Capacities & Cultivations
What you need to begin and what you’ll come away with
In astrology, there is a long-standing habit of perceiving one person with the answers and one person with the questions. It can feel unsettling and risky to step outside this pattern, inhabit your own inner knowing – your inner oracle, astrologer, teacher, guide, diviner, artist, maker, lover – and share from this place. It asks for courage, vulnerability and willingness. But when we lean in, immense beauty can unfurl inside a differentiated yet shared intentionality and fidelity to an astrological symbol, with focused attention, soft gaze, embodied contemplation.
Centering ‘play’ in our astrological practice and ways of being and participating in the world, is not the same as centering frivolity. It engages and develops a range of competencies that supports our maturity as humans – through honoring the inner child and one’s source of endless creativity.
You do not have to feel “good at (playing / art / sharing in groups)” to step into experiential astrology; you will be supported in letting your system show you and lead you into the kind of play that it needs and wants in order to let life and creativity flow through in revivified ways.
You don’t have to feel extroverted, charismatic, creative, artistic, or whatever other qualities you might associate with being playful or available to group work.
You do have permission to explore what it means to take up space, and to make space for others.
You can come as you are and find a home — a habitat here for your inner ecosystem.
Prerequisites
That said, there are a few prerequisites that we ask of our participants in order to help tend our experiential group containers, and which will also support you in diving in.
With respect to astrological foundations, you should have basic knowledge of your own horoscope, and some familiarity with the signs, planets, houses, aspects.
More generally, this work asks for:
a willingness to be surprised;
a practice of staying with discomfort while also tracking and tending to your own needs of felt-safety;
foundational interoception – the ability to notice inner sensations, emotions, thoughts, memories, impulses;
an appreciation for the imagination and desire to let your imagination roam;
curiosity, and more curiosity.
What you’ll come away with
After participating in our experiential courses, you’ll leave with:
a deepened sense of field awareness;
a felt understanding of how you are already inside and can intentionally steward an imaginal relationship with the field of myth and astrology;
what it’s like to be in a process of mutual discovery and co-creation of astrological intelligence;
the potency of being in a space of shared intentionality that guides our attention and reveals threads leading into hidden playgrounds, secret gardens feeding new visions to the wider world, and wild side-journeys nourishing the longer arcs of our lifetime;
experiences of creating art with one’s attention on poesis – on a mysterious journey of making, a collaboration and conversation with the unseen, a caring and carrying of peripheral insights through center – more than an effort to produce ‘good art’;
A sense of trust in the sky’s intelligence, resourcing and emboldening us to stay with the tension of not-knowing and not-collapsing meaning into pre-grooved definitions, but rather creating new grooves for energy to flow and for nourishment to circulate through our shared ecosystems.
Amanda’s art from the Hermes-Hestia Center’s Experiential Astrology Practitioner Program in-person intensive
Nicole’s art from the 2026 Argonautica Experiential Reading Group: A Voyage with Saturn and Neptune in Aries with Jason Holley and Chris Skidmore
We hope you’ve enjoyed these articles, perhaps felt illuminated and enlivened by them, and are closing out with a celebratory sense of your own birth chart being a reflection of inner and outer ecosystems teeming with creaturely life.
To tend the field of ‘experiential astrologies’ is to step into a relational, imaginal, embodied and ecological custodianship of this living land, home to all kinds of creatures. We have an opportunity to conceive of the separate self, and the human self, as not the primary focus, but one voice of many in our wild web of relations. We really appreciate you being here with us, in this work.
May your journey here with us through this email series continue to ripple out, enhancing your already-relatedness to the living sky and dreaming earth, bringing forth its texture and tangibility.
with much love, and perhaps see you in class if you feel called to wander, wonder & work together in this way,
Nicole & Amanda
Join us for Living the Signs of the Zodiac:
Experiential Astrology Class on the Earth Signs
Discover Experiential Astrology for yourself with Living the Signs of the Zodiac. Note: Change in course start date. Begins now on September 22nd/23rd with the Fall Equinox.
Tuesdays with Nicole beginning Sept. 22nd 5- 7:15pm Pacific - OR -
Wednesdays with Amanda beginning Sept. 23rd, 9-11:15am Pacific.
Nicole is a Living Astrologies Practitioner, artist-maker and parent raising two young humans. Each of these journeys draw her ever more deeply into the question of how to tend a benevolent field of consciousness able to receive a child and foster their incarnation —whether this ’child’ is an actual human child or a dream within that wants to be lived out. She approaches living astrologies as the multiplicity of practices that give permission, resource and a relational container to our many creative instincts, so that these creatures might be felt in the depths of their own essential nature while also re-membered into wider cycles and circles of life. Learn more.
Amanda is an artist and consulting astrologer with a particular passion for the art of astrological listening, recognising astrological attunement as a continuous conversation between humanity and the sacred - an ongoing reciprocal unfurling with mystery through attending to our living sky. Amanda has contributed a chapter to “Sideways from Saturn” (2026) a book dedicated to the Centaurs of the sky; her chapter focused on Okyrhoe, Chiron’s prophetic daughter. She is currently working on an article for the Mountain Astrologer's special edition dedicated to Chiron. Learn more.