What brought you to astrology?
I was born into it, in a 5-generation matriarchy who all spoke astrology and knew the archetypes. My chart was drawn when I was born. The stars pulled me further in at about 11-12 when I found a set of books in a “secret” credenza in the basement of my grandparents’ home: Dane Rudhyar, Isabel Hickey, Alice Bailey. A couple years later I started doing people’s charts and teaching a class to my friends in high school.
Why do you practice astrology? What makes it juicy for you?
I love what Audre Lorde wrote: “The aim of each thing that we do is to make our lives and the lives of our children richer and more possible.” Astrology in my life does that. Astrology is a beautiful way of sensuously engaging with all of life, continuously re-ensouling our experiences, again and again helping us to re-embed in the experience of deep time and the reality of our connections with all of the circle of animals and relations we are a part of, and who are a part of us.
These stars and stories live in us, through us, as us. The more we get to know them, the more we can love them, love all our relations, and love ourselves. As humans, instead of destroying and disconnecting from our webs of relations, we also have the potential to play a genuinely positive role in our interspecies communities that actually enhances and increases life in its wild diversity. This is true in our shared earth and also in our shared psyche.
What is your specialty, or focus?
At this point my deepest interest is to facilitate an experiential immersion into the field of sky and story, to participate in the ongoing conversation of the dreaming earth and the reflecting sky. I do this in individual consultations, but especially in groups such as retreats, workshops, and online experiential classes.
Is there a planet, sign, or aspect you’ve been exploring lately that represents an archetype or energy that feels important to you right now?
Jupiter has been speaking to me. We are currently staying in Sausalito in the San Francisco Bay Area. Each evening since we arrived to the Bay a month ago, we watch him rise over Angel Island, an island that is almost completely untouched by human beings. When I see him ascending over the Island I am reminded of images of Zeus/Jupiter carrying the youth Ganymede into the heavens. I have Jupiter in Aquarius and Ganymede is the figure the Greeks associated to the Water-Bearer. Here in Sausalito (and also in Seattle!) he was at the midheaven when I was born. So it seems for me its very much a season to know my Jupiter more deeply.
What is your picture of astrology in the future?
Participatory, relational, local, embodied. S l o w. People taking their time with getting to know the creatures of the sky and their stories. A diminished focus on categorizing and fixing, a stronger capacity for relating and loving.
Are there any additional comments you would like to make about your lecture and/or workshop?
The lecture is based on the way I work in consultation: relational with a strong emphasis on the felt sense as a way of experiencing astrology directly and connecting with instinctual life. The workshop will be spent most of the day in the field of the stories and symbols themselves, my favourite way to spend time with astrology. As to which stories and symbols, we will be led to them according to what is alive for people in their own skies and our shared sky that day. Rather than merely talk about the symbols, our focus will be on giving them a place and a means to speak and then listening! Then when we do talk ‘about’ them, it will be from a deeper, more embodied place. Technique stops being a head-trip to “know” and control life, and becomes instead a way of loving and relating to life even more deeply.
If you discovered a new planet, or asteroid, what would you name it and why?
Patience. Penelope. Something about the beauty of waiting.
Click here to register to Jason’s lecture and workshop
Jason Holley has been a practicing astrologer for 35 years and a practicing psychotherapist (LPCC) for over 15 years. Jason’s work as an astrologer is relational and archetypal: how do we connect more with all our relations, both within ourselves and around us? He facilitates a living experience of astrology through experiential methods developed from long study and practice of mythological storytelling, archetypal psychology, psychodrama and action methods, meditation and ceremony, and ecopsychology and relational-somatic therapies.
Jason leads online and in-person classes, workshops, retreats, and pilgrimages/tours to sacred sites. He has been an invited speaker for most regional-national (US) and international astrological conferences and organizations (including NORWAC, ISAR, UAC, FAA-AUS, EAC, AFAN, Kepler College). He has led retreats and workshops in Argentina, Australia, Canada, France, and throughout the US. He has been a faculty member of Southwestern College in Santa Fe, a consciousness-oriented counseling and art therapy graduate school, for 15 years, teaching Psychology of Consciousness, Addictions, Career and Life Development, and courses on Human Sexuality. He is also faculty for Astrology University and the Center for Psychological Astrology – Mercury Internet School (CPA-MISPA) online, as well as the newly-established Center for Astrology, Myth, and Symbol (CAMS).