Q & A for Speaker Leisa Schaim

I was always interested in understanding different frameworks of meaning, as well as how exactly we each end up with our unique personality and particular path through life. Initially this took me through majoring in interdisciplinary social sciences in college, and then beginning a graduate program in academic religious studies.

After I graduated from college, I was living in a Buddhist meditation center and one day in the town bookstore happened upon that much-maligned title, The Only Astrology Book You’ll Ever Need. Which of course isn’t – but that introduced me to planetary placements beyond sun signs, which I excitedly read out loud for all of my housemates’ charts. Then I put it aside for a few years, until I became seriously ill for a while and kind of in a dark night of the soul, wondering why I was going through hell. I stumbled upon sites online to look up your full birth chart and curiously cast my own and some for family and friends, and even the basics seemed to line up in meaningful ways, both natally and with my experience at the time. That impressed me enough to keep learning from there.

I’m honestly still kind of shocked, even after years of study and practice, that something actually exists that maps so well both our interior emotional experiences as well as concrete circumstances of our lives. The fact that this same phenomenon of astrology can accurately reflect things as varied as the ambient mood on a certain day, macrocosmic societal trends, the answer to a question you ask at a specific moment, and so many other things is kind of mind-blowing. It feels to me something like discovering the secret underlying structures of time and life itself. Also, when I was a kid I hated the thought of having to get a boring job someday and wished that I could just sit around having meaningful conversations with people, which I’ve somehow actually succeeded in getting to do as an astrologer, while hopefully being of service at the same time. Astrology has made life make a lot more sense to me, and I find that same validation happens in conversations with clients.

I practice a blend of modern and Hellenistic astrology, and have moved over time towards more of a focus on the concrete areas of life than on the psychological, though I find it useful to be aware of both. I use the Hellenistic timing technique of zodiacal releasing to look at career and relationship trajectories over an entire lifetime and in the short-term, which is a specialty since it’s a more recently recovered technique and I happened to learn it relatively early. I’ve also become known for electional astrology, the practice of proactively choosing certain moments to start things for the most auspicious possible results, first through co-authoring an electional column in The Mountain Astrologer magazine, and later through the monthly Auspicious Elections Podcast.

Well, I’ve been thinking about the Saturn/Pluto conjunction for the past few years, unsurprisingly, along with most other astrologers. It’s been quite an experience to know intellectually what that is supposed to mean ahead of time, and then much more viscerally be living in the actuality of it later.

It’s been interesting to see such a large new cohort of younger people become interested in astrology over the past several years in particular, compared with being more of an outlier as a young person a decade and more earlier. I’ve been impressed with the critical thinking of many newer people coming into astrology, who are also arriving at a time when many are automatically learning the best of both traditional and modern approaches because of an increase in synthesis happening more generally. I’m sure there will always be a variety of approaches within the field, but that is one trend I expect to see continue into the future, more synthesis or cross-pollination than polarization.

Are there any additional comments you would like to make about your lecture and workshop?