On the Soul's Terms

The Planets Series begins with our closest and most intimate neighbour: the moon.  The moon represents the dreaming mind, our instinctive life and our guidance system to the emotional waves of our turbulent lives.  Each of these elements of the moon is explored in this episode with the help of three mythic figures: Selene as a personification of the moon riding her white cow through the sky, visit...

I disappeared for a few months, went a bit underground, and even partially relocated my life to Greece so I could be a little closer to the gods I keep talking about. Now I’m ready to return with something simple, specific, and surprisingly alive: a new astrology podcast series on the planets, approached as characters of the psyche rather than abstract symbols on a page. If the houses are the plac...

The series on the houses wouldn't have felt complete without one last fairytale.  In this, the 40th and last episode of the series, we explore the German tale of Dornröschen, which loosely translates to 'the little rose inside the thorns'.  It begins with a talking frog who crawls out of the water to deliver a prophecy to the bathing queen. And it takes us into those places in ourse...

My guest for this episode is... well... me! Astrologer Brian Clark interviews me, Chris Skidmore, in this episode as we look back on the journey that was the 12 Houses of Astrology. In no particular order, we move back through the images that captured our attention from the fairy tales, and revisit our 13 guests that helped us along the way.  Thank you to all of you who have come along with me in...

Melanie Reinhart joins me once more to speak into and from the 12th house of the wheel of houses. The episode itself is a wonderful example of how that which we talk about can sometimes be 'conjured up' by our speech. This is something that Gregory Bateson called a 'metalogue' - a word introduced to me by Melanie many moons ago.  Our metalogue was a disruption from the gods of...

The 12th and final house of astrology is often given a bad wrap. It's considered the house of hidden enemies and of our own undoing. It rules over places we'd rather not be such as prisons, hospitals and asylums. And yet, deep in this oceanic place in our charts we may meet the gods themselves. Figures from the collective unconscious who shape shift and morph, reveal and conceal themselv...

Part Two of our wanderings with Iron John/Hans. The episode begins with the moss bed made for the boy in the forest. Ryan shares soulful reflections on moss itself; known as a 'boundary layer' that draws moisture not from the ground up but from the air down. Moss forms little cups to gather water from the electricity in the air, which must be one of the most Aquarian/11th House symbols I...

Ryan Nielsen joins the podcast again (see episode 104 for our circuitous meanderings on Allerleirauh) to explore the Grimm tale of Iron John (or Iron Hans) whilst reflecting about the cusp between the known and unknown worlds (the 11th and 12th house cusp).  Iron John is a story that was made famous by the poet Robert Bly in the 1990s. It became the central story that he worked with in his book by...

Astrologer Jason Holley joins me again on the podcast today to delve into the 11th house - the house of groups, the polis, mass media, theatre, the audience, 'the people'. It’s a rich and far-reaching conversation that, we both felt, got right to the heart of this complex and often misunderstood house that takes us into the entangled world of collective consciousness.  Along the way we s...

What happens when personal destiny meets the wider world of friends, teams, and the public square? We dive into the Eleventh House as the arena where your hard‑won calling turns into collective contribution, guided by Aquarius’s twin rulers—Saturn, who sets the frame, and Uranus, who refreshes it. Along the way, we unpack how projection travels from siblings to partners to society, why the traits...

Michael Meade rejoins the podcast to discuss all things 11th house; the house of collective consciousness, groups, teams and the Polis: society at large. The 11th is where the great mystery occurs in the interaction between the individual cell and the whole organism.  Michael's words act as a steadying force in unsettling times. He brings us back to a sense of cohesion and collaboration, remi...

Calling doesn’t arrive as a neat job title. It asks for consent. In this deep, playful, and piercing conversation with Thomas Moore—author of Care of the Soul—we explore how the Midheaven (tenth house) points not to status but to a life that can bear its own meaning in public. Thomas shares how fifty years of quiet preparation—monastic study, Latin and Greek, music, Jung—suddenly opened into visib...

A tower without roots looks impressive until the wind picks up. We follow Rapunzel and The Six Swans to uncover how a real calling demands both height and depth: the Midheaven’s shine, the IC’s ground, and the sixth house’s quiet craft. Using vivid fairy-tale images, we explore the earth-house triad—second, sixth, and tenth—and what happens when desire for “more” outruns our sense of enough. From...

What if your calling isn’t one narrow lane but an oak with many strong branches? We open the year by climbing from the ninth house of vision to the tenth house of visibility, where ideals must learn to walk, speak, and serve a real-world “whole.” The Midheaven becomes our threshold: a place to meet power, define vocation, and decide how to be seen without cutting off the roots that feed us. We gro...

A winter wish, a juniper tree, and a song that won’t be silenced. We read and unpack The Juniper Tree through the lens of myth and astrology, following a stark arc from dismemberment to remembrance, from underworld descent to the ninth house return of voice. The tale’s violent turn isn’t spectacle—it’s symbolic. A sister gathers bones and lays them at the roots; a bird rises from fire, sings what...

A sun at rest can see farther. That’s the mood we step into as we explore the Ninth House with artist-astrologer Amanda Simon—an airy, unhurried place where conviction meets humility, myth meets method, and meaning proves itself alive. We trace how the Ninth becomes the sun’s joy, not as a grind toward achievement but as a space to linger, radiate, and speak from what you truly know. The conversat...

The night breaks and a mountain appears. We step out of the eighth house and into the ninth, following a mythic trail across four Greek peaks—Helicon, Delphi on Parnassus, Olympus, and Pelion—to understand how vision is born, tested, codified, and taught. This is a journey from trauma to Pegasus, from memory to the Muses, from riddled answers to living oracles, from the banquet of certainty to the...

The most alive wisdom often waits at the edge where things end. We step onto the threshold between astrology’s eighth and ninth houses with Dr. Travis Elliott , a naturopath who traded protocols for presence and found his way into Asclepian dream healing, plant medicines, and the kind of listening that lets the body speak. This conversation travels from Santa Fe’s Living Astrologies conference to...

A weary wish turns a princess into a raven and launches a map of descent: a forest thick with symbols, an old woman’s tempting cup, a heap of alchemical tan, and a precise appointment at 2 PM when the sun’s power wanes. We follow that map step by step, using a Grimm story to illuminate the eighth house as lived experience—where unprocessed memory, shame, appetite, and inheritance ask for contact r...

What happens when you stop analyzing the eighth house and start walking into it? We invite you into a guided descent—part myth, part meditation—through sex, death, shared resources, and the hidden currents that shape intimacy and power. Recorded close to midnight, this journey leans on feeling more than theory, letting the night world rewrite how we meet fear, trust, and desire. We unpack the anxi...

Ever felt the ground give way beneath your life and, somehow, found renewal waiting in the dark? We go there with astrologer Melanie Reinhart as we explore the Eighth House—where loss, endings, and the mysteries of descent turn into a deeper kind of aliveness. We begin with a radical reframing of “death” as the series of mini-deaths that define a lifetime: the mask that falls away, the role that e...

A winter window, three drops of blood on snow, and a mirror that refuses to flatter—this is where our journey into the Seventh House begins. We take Snow White out of the nursery and into the soul, reading the fairy tale as a precise map of relationship, projection, and the parts of ourselves we meet in the other. If the First House says I am, the Seventh answers you are, and the tension between t...

Step through the door marked “Descendant” and into the seventh house, where the self meets the other and the mirror talks back. We dive into the psychology of partnership, the craft of vows, and the often-misunderstood terrain where love and conflict live side by side. I unpack why the descendant tends to fall into the unconscious, how projection turns lovers into open enemies, and what it takes t...

What happens when we venture beyond the horizon of self and encounter the world? In this profound continuation of our houses journey, Brian Clark and I explore the second half of the astrological wheel - where we meet the other, confront our shadows, and discover our place in the cosmic order. Recorded during a solar eclipse at the equinox (coinciding with Brian's 76th birthday), our conversa...

What can a centuries-old fairy tale teach us about our astrological journey? In this illuminating conversation, jazz musician and professor Ryan Nielsen explores the Grimm Brothers' tale "Allerleira" (Thousand Furs) as a profound map of psychological development through the first six astrological houses. Ryan shares his personal path from a rigid religious upbringing to discovering...