Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things Pod Squad.
Chapter 2: What unexpected topic did the hosts explore with Sonya Renee Taylor?
Today you're about to hear something we did not see coming. We asked our beloved friend, Sonia Renee Taylor, if she might read our astrological charts. Mostly because we just thought it would be fun and maybe you could find little pieces of yourselves in what she saw in us. But what happened was wild. So Sonia shows up and she starts showing us our charts as a map of our soul's purpose.
She explains... that the gap between who we really are and our learned personalities is suffering. The gap between the two is where all suffering comes from. She said, the way that we lessen suffering in our lives is by becoming more aligned with what our souls came here to do. The rest blew our minds and kind of changed a lot about how we're going to approach 2026.
So today, you'll hear Sonia tell Abby and me about the journeys we're on, and why it feels the way it feels right now in our actual lives. It rang so deeply true that we needed two episodes to digest everything Sonia said.
So on Thursday, you'll hear Amanda's reading, which absolutely blew us away, after which the three of us had to stay on to stare at each other and debrief about what the hell had just happened. So you'll hear that debrief too. See if any of this lands for you as we go. We weren't sure about astrology before this conversation, and now we might be believers.
Sonia Renee Taylor is a New York Times bestselling author, transformational thought leader, world-renowned activist, artist, and founder of the international movement, The Body Is Not An Apology. She is a podcast host, sought-after speaker, and new world midwife. She is also an intuitive astrologer, helping to decipher our unique soul work through the planets.
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Chapter 3: How can astrology help us understand our soul's purpose?
Here is Sonya Renee Taylor reading our charts. Let's go. So Sonia, we just finished some technical difficulties. We are about to launch into this beautiful conversation. Abby suggested that the technical difficulties might be due to retrograde. Mercury being in retrograde. And then you said what?
I said that I recently, I'm not going to take credit for this.
Chapter 4: What is the significance of the gap between our true selves and learned behaviors?
There is a choir, I think, that was singing. And the song was, Mercury's not in retrograde. You're just an asshole.
That checks out. I have been a real big asshole lately.
Yes. And it feels so fitting in the sense that like oftentimes I feel like it's a very asshole thing to blame all the stuff happening on you on something else other than looking inward first. So it feels like an appropriate song for self-reflection.
And it's so depressing when that happens. Like my sister keeps going to the doctor asking if she's in perimenopause because she's being such a bitch and they keep saying, no, you're not. And then she keeps having to leave. You deal with her situation?
It's me. It's me. It's just me. Hi. Hi. I'm the problem. It's like the new Cardi B album. Am I the drama?
Yes. Sonia, before we jump into all this juicy stuff, why is astrology important? Why have you chosen to dive in so deeply and understand the world through it?
I really believe that we are not an accidental experiment on the planet. And we're not an accidental experiment in the cosmos.
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Chapter 5: How does Sonya interpret Glennon and Abby's astrological charts?
I believe that life is happening intentionally, on purpose, in service of our highest good with radical love. I believe that with the deepest parts of me. And I believe that we are inherently connected.
And I think it's really interesting because I say I believe like I'm saying something subjective as opposed to the objective reality that we are made of the exact same materials that the stars are made of and that the planets are made of and that the oceans are made of. That we are all the same chemical compounds.
And so there is, for me, an understanding that there is an intrinsic relationship between us and all of life. I believe that all of life is trying to be in relationship with us as we journey through this experiment called life. And every opportunity that there is to see life
more clearly through the multitude of mediums that exist in the world why not look at life through that why not be like oh what do you have to teach me tree what do you have to teach me ocean what do you have to teach me mars what do you have to teach me sun i believe that all of them are teachers and they're all here to guide us and also i just found that like it works the first time i saw my birth chart
the snapshot of the sky at the moment I was born, I was like, oh, that's why my life looks the way it looks. Really? It was so...
clearly evident it was so clearly this is you this is who you are through these symbols through these energies this is your existence Sonia and I don't know what else to say except it works so I'm a firm believer that I don't need to know how or why it works once I know it works I know it works
It's so interesting because I'm just starting to form language around these thoughts. So I don't I don't know how to say them yet. But as we close up witness the illusion of.
all of these people in power taking what is God-given wisdom in the form of the stars and plants and all the things that they've kind of taken it, made it their own and then sold it back to us in the form of dogma and religion and all of that. It is a very ancient and something inside of me that's saying maybe we should have been listening all along to the people from whom they took it.
And maybe they figured out that there was power in what these largely women were doing with the herbs and the stars. They took the midwives from us. They took the astrologist from us. They packaged it all up, put it in buildings and rules and sold it back to us. And so there's something to me that feels very right about thinking maybe we go back to what was always ours.
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Chapter 6: What insights does astrology provide about personal suffering?
One is one of the sort of key principles of the way in which I live my life and some of the experiments that I'm in right now around world building. The focus of them is to become new by becoming ancient. How is it that that which wants to emerge comes through by reclaiming that which has always been, right?
And so there's this practice for me that's like, there is something in the ancient wisdoms that has information for us in this moment. about how we might move into the future.
But the other thing that I think about that's specific about astrology is so, and we'll talk more about sort of some of the specifics, but each, um, in the zodiacal wheel, it has 12 houses and each house corresponds to a different aspect of life. And the 12th house historically used to be called the house of death institutions and prisons.
And which is awful right it's like that's horrible and what I realized is that we called it the House of death institutions in prisons because it's actually the House of the spiritual realm and the ancestral realm and if you were engaged. in trying to access that realm by yourself, you would be a heretic, you would be imprisoned, you would be called crazy, or you would be burned alive.
And so yes, it is the house of death in institutions and prisons because the systems at the time held the power to access that part of life. And if you tried to access that part of life without them, you were going to have some consequences. But actually what it is is the location where we
have profound connection with all of existence with what is and what was and what will be why were you and amanda so taken back like what was your feelings well first of all number one i feel about sonya what
she just said about the ancient and the new. Like when we were in Colorado at Andrea's memorial all together and Sonya took the stage, it's just a very in your body experience of you can see something very ancient, the sageness, the wisdom that comes out and then Sonya's like colors that she's wearing and all the brightness and the vividness.
It's like very now and brand new and very old and whoa, we better pay attention vibes, okay? That's how I feel about Sonia. So that was cool. And then I just always resonate. It feels true to me that whenever people or women in particular get close to truth and power, that the people in power label that as death and dangerous and crossbones and stay away and burn them.
Like that makes perfect sense in the history of the world.
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Chapter 7: How can understanding our astrology charts influence our actions?
That's actually what I think is happening. So yes, I'm happy. Who wants to go first?
What does your intuition tell you, Sonya? Who should go first? Does it just mean you know everything now? No. Just tell us.
Damn it. Let's start with Glennon. Let's start with Glennon. Okay. I see a chart. You see a chart. So I'm going to shout out one of my favorite astrologers, Chani Nicholas.
She's the only other astrologer we've ever had on We Can Do Hard Things.
We love Chani and we love Chani's birth chart app inside of her website. What Chani does that I think is amazing is that oftentimes when you pull up someone else's chart elsewhere, you'll see these symbols on a circle, on a wheel. And then you'll see a bunch of lines going through that symbol. There'll be red lines and blue lines, and it can look very intimidating.
And what that's demonstrating is the relationship that each planet or placement has to another planet or placement on the chart. All of those things are energies happening all at the same time in the chart.
My first experience when I saw that was like, oh my God, there are 35 red lines going across my chart, which almost feels like when someone marks up a paper you wrote with a bunch of red lines. I was like, okay, obviously I'm failing at my entire life, right? And what actually is happening is all of the planets in the sky, the moment that we were born,
are in conversation with other planets in the sky the moment that we were born. And those energies all exist. But you're not plucking every string of energy all at once. The way I describe it is, you're born and your life is like a harp. And the universe, God, source, whatever you want to call it, will pluck some strings.
There are things that are going to happen in your life that are out of your control. People will die. People will be born. Incidents will happen. Those things you don't have any control over. Those are just things that happen. But you are also co-creating the music with life, which means you will pluck some strings as well.
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Chapter 8: What does it mean to align with our soul's purpose through astrology?
The sun never has to try to shine. It's never doing any effort to shine. It doesn't matter if it is cloudy where you are, if it's nighttime where you are, if there's a tornado where you are. Guess what the sun is still doing? Shining.
Shining its ass off.
Shining its ass off. And so part of what our chart is asking us to do is stop trying to shine because when we stop trying to shine, we just will. Our authentic self just will. And so you, my dear, have a sun in Aries. Aries is the first zodiac sign. It represents the first sign in the zodiacal wheel. It represents beginnings. It represents energy. It represents life force. It represents action.
It is ruled by the planet Mars. And Mars is assertion, action, go. Aries understands the value of going first, the willingness to go first, the willingness to pursue a thing. And it's all about beginnings, beginning energy, starting something new. And this is at zero degrees for you in your chart, which means... It's a very baby sun. It's a brand new sun, learning how to do something brand new.
One of the things that you'll notice is, like I said, there are 12 slices of the pie in your zodiacal wheel. And then inside of that, there are all these little symbols and signs. They all represent planets or asteroids or placements in the sky. And then on a zodiacal wheel, you may notice that there are little numbers beside those symbols.
Those numbers are called degree points, and they represent how far along that particular planet was in its journey until it moved to the next sign. And so it goes from zero degrees to 30 degrees in each slice of the pie. This is the way I think about it. And each 10 degrees is called a decan. So zero to 10, first decan, 10 to 20, second decan, 20 to 30, last decan, then you move to the next sign.
I correspond these degree points to grade school levels. So 0 to 10 degrees is first day of preschool. First day of preschool to end of eighth grade, right? End of middle school. And then the next 10 degrees, 10 to 20, is high school to end of college. And then the next 20 degrees, 20 to 30 degrees, is grad school, doctoral program, dissertation, turn it in, get out of here, right?
So a zero degree sun, my love, is the first day of preschool. It's the first day of preschool. And here's why this is awesome. Because part of what I believe is when we see a zero degree, one degree, two degree placement in our charts, it means we are brand new. Life sent us here to initiate a brand new energy inside of us and inside the world that has not been here before.
Something is starting that has not been before. And it also means the sign before it is the energy it's leaving behind. And the sign before it that is the energy that it's leaving behind for you is Pisces. And that is the energy of being absorbed. Pisces is happening for you in the seventh house. The energy of being absorbed, of losing yourself to the other.
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