Читать книгу: «Material Girl, Mystical World: The Now-Age Guide for Chic Seekers and Modern Mystics»

COPYRIGHT

This is a work of non-fiction. The events and experiences detailed herein are all true and have been faithfully rendered as remembered by the author, to the best of her ability. Some names have been changed in order to protect the privacy of individuals involved. The information provided in this book is for reference purposes only. It is not intended to be a substitute for professional advice, diagnosis or treatment that can be provided by your own medical or mental health provider. Neither the authors nor the publisher are providing health care, medical or mental health services, or attempting to diagnose, treat, prevent or cure in any manner any physical, mental or emotional issue, disease or condition. If you have or suspect that you have a medical or mental health problem, contact your medical or mental health provider promptly. Also, before beginning any physical activity suggested in or inspired by this book, it is recommended that you seek medical advice from your personal physician.

Thorsons

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in the US by HarperElixir, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

This UK edition published by Thorsons 2017

FIRST EDITION

Text © Ruby Warrington 2017

Illustrations © Ina Stanimirova Tontcheva 2017

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

Cover photograph © Shutterstock.com

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Ruby Warrington asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Find out about HarperCollins and the environment at www.harpercollins.co.uk/green

Source ISBN: 9780008151171

Ebook Edition © May 2017 ISBN: 9780008151188

Version 2017-04-18

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

‘Material Girl, Mystical World makes the mystical accessible and cool, and reminds us all that to truly thrive we must learn to embrace our capacity for wonder and spirituality, and engage with something larger than ourselves. With this book, Ruby Warrington is helping to redefine success for the 21st century.’

Arianna Huffington

‘I love Ruby’s book! She writes about meditation in the context of spiritual activism in a way that makes it accessible and fun. The deeper message of Material Girl, Mystical World is one the world sorely needs in 2017 and beyond.’

Bob Roth

CEO, David Lynch Foundation

‘Ruby Warrington is the Malcolm Gladwell of the mystic scene! Material Girl, Mystical World is a bible for young women lusting after a deep and meaningful antidote to modern life, without disappearing from society.’

Jasmine Hemsley

bestselling author and wellness expert

‘I’m a massive fan of Ruby Warrington and her fabulous book Material Girl, Mystical World. It’s a down to earth, current, relatable, and at times hilariously funny take on what it means to awaken in these times, also proving that you don’t have to choose between the altar of Mother Mary or Chanel. Today you can actually worship at both.’

Rebecca Campbell

bestselling author of Light Is The New Black and Rise Sister Rise

‘I am a super fan of all Ruby does, and have been a follower of The Numinous since day one. I loved reading about her journey in Material Girl, Mystical World, which both inspired me and made me laugh out loud!’

Henry Holland

fashion designer

‘For thousands of years, the “Spiritual Journey”, East or West, has been followed according to a rigid tradition. But now that we’re in the Aquarian Age – and yes, it’s for real – with its accompanying freedoms, each student is responsible for mapping their own journey. Consequently, Ruby’s is unique to her. However, she details its joys, agonies and miraculous moments with such poignant detail that it will serve as both inspiration and a guide for those who are eager to learn about spirituality or, possibly, follow that path themselves.’

Shelley von Strunckel

astrologer and spiritual teacher

‘Ruby Warrington’s intrepid exploration of the mystical realm is sharp and refreshing. Material Girl, Mystical World is a stylishly spiritual book for people who are seeking more than just the obvious explanations about life.’

Ophira and Tali Edut

The AstroTwins, astrologers for US ELLE magazine

DEDICATION

For my Pisces

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction: Coming Out of the Spiritual Closet

Part I: The New Age, but Now

1. Astrology as Basic Life Skill

2. Interpreting the Tarot the Now Age Way

3. “You Know You’re Psychic If You Have a Body”

4. Do Your Dharma, Fix Your Karma

Part II: Health & Well-Being

5. Confessions of a Reluctant Yogi

6. Highly Meditated

7. You, the Shaman

Part III: Love, Sex & Relationships

8. Calling in Number One (On Self-Love)

9. Your Period as Sacred Goddess Code

10. The Universal Mother

11. Finding My Divine Feminine

Part IV: Fashion & Beauty

12. Spiritual Style Icons (A Numinous Best-Dressed List)

13. The Inner Beauty v. Botox Debate

14. Get Your Rocks On: Crystals as Wearable Healing

Part V: People & Parties

15. Healing Is the New Nightlife

16. Feeling the Plant Medicine Peer Pressure

17. Lost and Found at Burning Man

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Glossary of Now Age Terminology

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION
COMING OUT OF THE SPIRITUAL CLOSET

Brooklyn, NY. October 31, 2013.

So what exactly do you wear to a séance? It’s Halloween; my friend, the psychic Betsy LeFae, has invited me to a “Dinner with the Dead” at her apartment in Williamsburg, and I’m having a wardrobe crisis. On Facebook, my feed is filling up with people dressed as sexy nuns. But if Halloween fancy dress is about laughing in the face of death, I’ll hopefully (gulp, really?) be spending my evening looking death in the face and asking who it thinks it is. Instead of a “meet the parents” outfit, I need a look to potentially meet and greet my dearly departed ancestors.

My instinct is to play it superwitchy and dress head to toe in black, even though I know it’s considered more high vibe among spiritual circles to wear white. Apparently it raises your “auric radiance.” In the end I settle on a long black Agnes B skirt I picked up at a consignment store in the East Village (just witchy enough), and I pair it with a sleeveless white silk blouse. A mouth of MAC’s bright red Lady Danger lipstick completes the look. It’s what I always wear when I want to feel properly pulled together. It’s the same shade Alexa Chung wears (she told me when I interviewed her once), and I think it makes me look like a lady. A dangerously smart, sexy, and pulled-together lady.

In the street outside I can already hear the sounds of the impending zombie apocalypse as my fellow New Yorkers congregate outside the bars to smoke and flirt. Getting wasted and fornicating in the face of death is the other big theme of the evening, after all. Meanwhile, I think about all the spirits I won’t be drinking but will instead be inviting to deliver their spine-tingling messages tonight, and I pick up the tray of tamari-roasted vegetables I’m taking as my dish for the potluck supper we’ll be eating in silence after the séance. The idea is we’ll be dining with any deceased ancestors who’ve decided to join us.

All of which, if I’m honest, has become a pretty standard Friday night for me.

Seriously, you should hear some of the conversations I have with my girlfriends these days. Women like Madeline, who used to work at Nylon magazine but left to go to psychic school in L.A. and is convinced she’s a reincarnated mermaid. Raquel, a former fashion stylist who’s devised a spiritual detox program to open your third eye and cleanse your chakras along with your colon. Or Marika, a financier turned modern shamanic practitioner who mainly wears Isabel Marant and introduced me to my spirit animal last summer.

And no, I didn’t meet these women on some mind-bending plant medicine retreat in Peru. Although that’s probably on their vacation wish list, along with swimming with dolphins, a trip to Burning Man, and a ten-day silent meditation Vipassana. Nor do my friends and I waft around in purple caftans (unless they’re by Mara Hoffman), grow out our armpit hair, and imbibe only homegrown kombucha. Rather, the women I have been known to refer to as my coven are the hip, switched-on denizens of New York, L.A., and London, cities fast embracing the dawning of what I like to call the Now Age. As in New Age … but given a totally modern upgrade for NOW. And I connected with many of them after I launched my website, The Numinous, an online magazine where Material Girl meets Mystical World.

The by-way-of-intro e-mail often goes something like: “OMG at last. A platform that speaks to my twin passions—fashion and astrology!” And then we get into how a fascination with all things esoteric has opened up whole new worlds of inquiry about what it means to be thriving as a twenty-first-century woman.

Because from Ayurveda to the tarot and Tantric healing, on any given evening in Brooklyn, Venice Beach, Shoreditch, Sydney, or Berlin, Now Age curious seekers are flocking to workshops to waken our Divine Feminine, sitting in ceremony to welcome the New Moon, experimenting with shamanism, and getting seriously high on the vibes, man. The night I attended a pranayama breathwork session in a tepee in a park in Williamsburg last summer, I didn’t come down for days.

Which sounds pretty woo-woo, I guess. But if embracing the New Age in the 1960s meant changing your name to Echo, rejecting your traditional upbringing, and running away to live on an ashram, in the Now Age, choosing to check out a more spiritual worldview is no longer seen as incompatible with an appreciation for fashion. If anything, the fact that we’ve evolved into such an exaggeratedly material, hypervisual, and device-dependent world has given these ancient human technologies a newfound allure. If social media, for example, has created what some people are calling a “disconnection epidemic,” then esoteric practices like astrology and meditation become a (necessary) way to reconnect—sure, to each other, but not least to ourselves.

And on the flip side, spending half our lives in the alternate reality we casually refer to as the Internet (I mean, let’s take a step back for a minute; everything being “online” now, and existing somewhere in the Cloud, is actually seriously sci-fi) means we also get to investigate these Now Age practices from the comfort of our own living rooms. Not to mention the freedom it’s given us to totally blur the lines when it comes to what a person who identifies as “spiritual” should look like. Um, have you checked out Miley Cyrus’s IG feed lately? #GODDESS. The week I’m writing this, even Khloé Kardashian had penned an essay on her spiritual leanings for Lena Dunham’s “Lenny” newsletter.

Enter mass meditations that devolve into networking events, spiritual speed-dating, and my friends and I discovering the joys of the “healing hang date.” Also celebrities like Russell Brand (God bless that man) discovering yoga and going from Hollywood wannabe and recovering addict to total Now Age pinup. Oh, and his ex, Katy Perry, telling a reporter for GQ magazine, “I see everything through a spiritual lens. I believe in a lot of astrology. I believe in aliens. I look up into the stars and I imagine: How self-important are we to think that we are the only life-form?”

Well, I could not agree with you more, Katy, and astrology was my gateway drug into the Mystical World, too. I must have been about three years old when I discovered I’d been born in the Chinese year of the Dragon. Result! Most people got normal animals, like pigs or dogs, but lucky me had obviously been singled out for some pretty special cosmic treatment (not that astrology is for narcissists or anything. No, really, it isn’t—as I’ll explain in detail later on!).

Anyway, there followed a period of about six months where I’d scrunch my features into a “scary” dragon face and do this heavy breathing thing through my bared teeth, to show everybody how the mythical beast lived in me. And then my brother was born (year of the Sheep, yawn), and people stopped paying attention.

I also grew up knowing that my mum had my full astrology chart done by a family friend when I was born. I was an Aries, which meant I was “confident and extroverted, and sometimes quite bossy.” Beyond the home environment I was definitely more on the shy side, though, and I was desperate to know what else the astrologer had said. But Mum was always frustratingly vague about it. “Ummm, you have a lot of planets in Cancer …” she’d murmur, balancing my baby brother on one hip while stirring a pot of buckwheat noodles.

If you haven’t already guessed, she was kind of hippieish, and we ate mainly macrobiotic when I was a kid. I think mostly because John and Yoko did. The other families in the rural country village where I grew up were the same, a tight little clique of “alternatives” who embraced natural remedies, grew most of their own vegetables, and wore a lot of cheesecloth.

It wasn’t until I started at the tiny village school that I realized there was anything strange about my mum taking my brother to see the fierce Dr. Singha, an Ayurvedic practitioner who cured his recurring ear infections by banning him from eating dairy, or us spending weekends at music festivals where I got pink henna streaks in my hair. But my flask of homemade adzuki bean stew felt decidedly unsexy next to my friends’ pizza and fries at lunch, and even aged five I was acutely aware that my home-stitched smock dresses were no match for Claire Maplethorpe’s shop-bought tutus. To my five-year-old eyes, not only did pizza and tutus look waaaay cool—it was also evident that without them in my world, I would always be on the outside looking in.

Up until that point I’d been completely satisfied with my social life too, which consisted mainly of hanging out with the fairies at the end of our garden, making mud pies, and tumbling down the rabbit holes in my imagination to explore magical, underground kingdoms. But now I wanted a Barbie. My fairies were mysterious and mischievous and very stylish in their own ephemeral way, but Barbie had long blond hair, an extremely covetable wardrobe, and a boyfriend called Ken, just like an actual princess. And I’d consumed enough fairy tales by this stage to know that princesses, even more so than little girls born in the year of the Dragon, got all the luck.

So what’s this got to do with my adult interest in all things Now Age? Allow me to explain. If you think back, you’ll remember there was a lot of talk about how 2012 was going to mean “The End of the World” as we knew it, due to it being the final year to be represented in the ancient Mayan calendar. And this was certainly the case for me. I want you to keep this deadline in mind as we fast-forward to a few months before D-day, when I was working as features editor at the UK’s Sunday Times Style magazine.

I’d obviously decided at some point that the most direct route to getting my hands on a wardrobe like Barbie’s and achieving as close to princess status as an outsider like me could really hope for was to pursue a career in fashion. I fell in love with magazines in my teens, which—by now the only “poor kid” (relatively speaking) in a progressive North London private school—found me grappling with the mother of all identity crises. And in shuffles a lineup of the usual teen rebellion suspects—early experimentation with drugs and alcohol, an eating disorder, and a six-year relationship with a much older, sexually domineering man (whom I’ll be referring to as the Capricorn), who also managed to completely rob me of my sense of identity.

Magazines, and the glossily perfect world they represented to me, became an escape. And by the time I’d mustered the courage to leave the Capricorn and rebuild my life in the image of my own choosing, I became hellbent on pursuing a career as a fashion and lifestyle journalist. But after twelve years in the industry, I was dismayed to find that I was bored out of my mind.

Perhaps it was because landing a job on Style magazine pretty much represented the apex of my ambitions at the time. After all, a lot of the anger and frustration that lay in wait just beyond my tedium on the job was directed at myself for not being utterly satisfied with a position I’d worked so hard the past decade to achieve.

A lot of my friends were experiencing the sense of fulfillment I realized I was craving by having kids, but I’d decided long ago that I didn’t want to be a mother (more, oh-so-much more, on this subject later). Whereas I had become increasingly aware that I was essentially trying to fill the creative Source energy, second-chakra-shaped void (the seat of our creative energy) that had appeared in my life with copious amounts of cocktails, designer clothes, and … cocaine. Yes, over the past decade I’d also morphed into the quintessential work-hard-play-hard party girl. In the beginning, it was a world that fueled my post-Capricorn desire to fill myself up with all the FUN I felt I’d been denied in my teens and early twenties—but lately, it felt less hedonistic, more like a way to numb my existential angst.

Sure, my “on paper” life was pretty fabulous—great job, great relationship (I’d since married the love of my life), great, generally heavily discounted, wardrobe. Loads of holidays, loads of freebies, and a home of my own on one of the most desirable streets in one of the most desirable parts of London. #Blessed. So why was it all tinged with the underlying sense of unease that something MAJOR was missing? Like, something fundamental to the purpose of me taking up space on the planet. Was writing about what T-shirt some celebrity was wearing or getting them to “open up” about the state of their relationship in an interview really all I had to contribute to the world?

I don’t blame the drinking or the drugs, although they had become part of the problem. The morning after a binge, the anxiety and the despair, the anger and the frustration came on ten times worse. But essentially the nonstop party was just a way of distracting myself from the little voice that kept insisting, It’s not enough. It’s NOT ENOUGH. Because how dare I? This was what “having it all” looked like, wasn’t it? How much more, exactly, did I want? No, the real problem was that as the months went by, and my anxiety reached a level that I actually sought professional help with a therapist, I continued to ignore the Voice. And well, 2012 was the year kismet decided to intervene.

I’ve since, thanks to my adventures in the Now Age, been able to understand exactly how dis(self)respectful it is to blatantly blow off the Voice (a.k.a. your intuition, your soul, your higher Self, the Universe, um … God), and I’m actually beginning to believe (more on this later too) that if each and every individual was in a position to truly honor this Voice, we might have the blueprint for world peace, right there.

Luckily for me, my soul wasn’t going to give up that easily—instead, it led me back to astrology. Like: Okay, why not learn astrology. Like properly, so you can read people’s charts and stuff, it said, while I was lying on Salinas beach in Ibiza, mojito in hand, pretty pissed off that I’d spent so much money on a new Missoni bikini that had begun to dissolve the first time I wore it in the sea. You’ve always been into astrology, and it sounds like what you need is a passion project. Because if my life was lacking anything, it was passion.

My childhood interest in astrology had bloomed over the years, and even my colleagues referred to me as Mystic Ruby, since I was the girl who always knew when Mercury was going retrograde (and all our writers were going to miss their deadlines and our photo shoots would fall through). Maybe our in-house astrologer, the eminent Shelley von Strunckel, would deign to teach me a thing or two?

Turns out she would, and soon I was being invited for dinners at her loft in Kings Cross where this grande dame of mystical glamour began filling my mind with stories of ancient spiritual folklore over bottles of biodynamic red wine. All the stuff that had been swirling in the background in my childhood, but which I’d locked away in a box marked “crazy, crunchy, and NOT VERY COOL”—along with the adzuki bean stew. Now Shelley was taking me back.

I was instantly in awe of her being so worldly and so well read—and not just in astrology but all things mystical! Shelley had traveled the world and experienced the magic of the Universe firsthand, and my heart thrilled at her vision. It was as if her stories were the missing link, as if she’d opened the door to a whole new world, which, conversely, I realized I’d been seeking all along—a Narnia she described as “the numinous.”

“It means ‘that which is unknown or unknowable,’” she explained … and I felt my soul swoon. Not even the hypnotic allure of a new pair of Miu Miu shoes could have inspired such tingles in me as the web of intrigue the word numinous wove in my mind. Having been raised atheist (I once had to walk out of a midnight mass in case I started yelling “cult!” at the top of my voice), it was kind of like getting the whole concept of, um, God, for the first time. (In fact, sometimes when people ask me what the word means, I have been known to reply: “basically ‘awesome’—but in a biblical sense.”)

Was this the moment I “woke up,” as people in Now Age circles often refer to the day they finally decide to walk out on their corporate career and go train to be a yoga instructor in Bali? Well, in a similar vein, I basically decided there and then that beyond the study of astrology, my new side project was going to be investigating all things numinous for myself. And while we were at it … wasn’t that a great name for a magazine?

Beyond the personal sense of “awakening” I was experiencing, this whole conversation was tugging hard on what had become my finely tuned journalistic sensibilities. I knew (also because the Voice told me) that in the face of such rapid/rabid technological evolution, I couldn’t be the only one experiencing this deep sense of existential unease. From my fashion industry perspective, the whole esoteric shebang could use a bit of an image upgrade (all that patchouli and crushed purple velvet had been hanging around since the 1970s, after all)—but maybe I could have a go at that? The message that the “something more” we were all searching for was actually just sitting there, waiting to be dusted off and given a polish, was something I felt compelled to share. Before I knew it, I was envisioning a beautiful publication that would make it as cool to get to know your spirit animal as it was, say, to shop at Chanel. And lo, The Numinous was born!

Or conceived at least. There was no way in hell I was going to actually jack in my job on Style and start my own magazine instead (or more likely, due to my lack of funds or contacts with connection to funds, lowly blog). I was waaay too attached to the kudos and the baubles, despite the fact I was by now well aware that all the designer trinkets in the world were not going to make me happy. It’s one thing to want to surround yourself with beautiful things (actually a very spiritual thing, since I’ve come to believe that “beauty” is simply the physical manifestation of “love”—a.k.a. pure spirit consciousness)—and quite another to, like, literally worship at the church of Chanel (as many a colleague had declared over the years).

It’s actually been little surprise to me that a lot of the women in my Now Age coven describe themselves as “recovering fashion industry victims.” Because isn’t it also the definition of an addiction? When you keep reaching for the same magic potion (in my case yet more pairs of $350 shoes) expecting a different outcome—and ending up back at rock bottom?

I’ve also learned that as soon as you begin to pay actual attention to the Voice, however, and take even the most tentative steps in the direction it’s urging you to go, the Universe will step in and take matters into its own hands. It’s Law of Attraction 101. As above so below … thoughts becoming things. And it was only a few months later that my husband, from here on referred to as the Pisces, landed a job in New York—starting January 2012. Whether I’d go with him was a no-brainer, which meant it was time to leave the shiny baubles behind, woman-up, and step boldly into the Numiverse.

And here’s the real kicker. Turns out when the Voice was whispering It’s not enough … , it wasn’t trying to tell me that I didn’t have enough—enough stuff, enough success, even enough love. I clearly had buckets of all that; in fact, way more, on a global scale, than my fair share. The message the Voice was trying to hit me over the head with was that I wasn’t living in alignment with my truth. Meaning I wasn’t doing enough to work out all the crap—the karmic lessons, the conditioning, and the limiting beliefs—that was standing in the way of me experiencing a relationship with my most authentic Self. And, as such, a relationship with the Universal Source energy commonly referred to as “God.”

I think I might have mentioned I was raised atheist, correct? And, well, as a result, the G word doesn’t sit that comfortably with me (as you may have guessed). But if not having any religious beliefs drummed into me as a kid had never registered as a lack in my life, I have since come to see how the fathomless sense of emptiness I now found myself struggling with was essentially a lack of faith in the idea that all life on Earth is sustained and united by our connection to the Divine.

In the meantime, I’d been willfully plastering Band Aids over the other “wounds” I’d sustained over the course of my life. The superficial flesh wounds of being the weird kid in school and of my parents’ divorce. And then the deeper lesions inflicted on my soul by my eating disorder, my relationship with the Capricorn, and my investing pretty much all my spiritual development and sense of self in glad rags and handbags.

But as I began to investigate all things numinous, it was as if every gong bath, every meditation, and every intuitive tarot session was clearing a path back to Source (my higher Self, the Universal oneness … okay, God), and soon all the skeletons came screeching out of the closet, begging (in a kind of zombie apocalypse way at times) to be healed. Slaying them (or, rather, putting them to rest, RIP) has not always been pretty, but it has been consistently empowering, endlessly awe-inspiring, and often waaaay more fun than another Friday night drinking my cares away (because why would I want to wash away the things I care about?)—as we’ll discover in the chapter on how, for me, healing is the new nightlife.

Another word on the concepts of “healing” and “wounds” here, too, since these are words you’ll find me using a lot. Rather than be repelled by the idea that this suggests there’s something “wrong” with you—how about leaning in to the concept that there’s actually something very, VERY right with you, that needs “healing,” meaning bringing into wholeness in order for you to be fully empowered.

As for the people you may encounter who prefer to dismiss all things numinous as “woo-woo” bullshit or a bunch of silly girls getting squeamish over their Ouija boards? (a), screw the patriarchal system that decided anything to do with divination and intuition has little bearing in the “real world.” And (b), when not so long ago I was interviewed for British Vogue about the subject of astrology entering the mainstream, my response to a variation on the above objections went something along the lines of: “The world is divided into scientists and mystics—those who mainly ask ‘how’ and those who mainly ask ‘why.’ Left- and right-brain thinkers. I stand firmly in the latter camp (thanks in part to my Cancer Moon—lol), because, for me, without this kind of existential self-inquiry, life is meaningless.”

Not that we don’t need our fully-functioning right-brain faculties to navigate the daily task of being human, of course. But with no other word for “God” in my five-year-old lexicon, I can also see now that even as a child astrology spoke to a deeply human need in me—a need to know my place in the cosmos, in order to feel connected to my highest Self, to my fellow beings, and to the planet we happen to call “home.”

Because you know, one of the best things about deciding to simply embrace the numinous, to marvel at the magic of the Universe, and then do the internal work it tends to ask of you, is that you get to align yourself with the beating pulse of our Mother Earth. And if there’s anything we all know it’s that we need to do everything in our power right NOW to foster a more harmonious coexistence with the natural world.

It also seems to me that it’s only once we get truly happy in our selves, get healed, that we are in a position to stop with all the navel-gazing and reach out to help the people around us, too. As we all know, when the airplane is going down, it’s essential to put our own oxygen mask on first.

So, before I send you on your own numinous journey, I ask you to consider this: if YOU are the greatest “numinous” there is, then accepting this mission could be the fastest route to unraveling your unique unknowables, tuning in to your own inner Voice, and excavating your happiest, truest, most empowered, and empowering self as a result. The sort of self who believes that maybe, just perhaps, you too have a unique and essential role to play in the future thriving of our species and our planet. Even if, for you, saving the world looks a little less Mother Teresa (since there can be only one of her) and a little more like simply being the best sister, daughter, lover, friend, and community activist you can be. BIG change has to happen one human at a time, after all.

I wrote this book to share the tools and ideologies, not to mention introduce the mystics and the teachers, I’ve found to be most inspiring in this not-so-humble pursuit, so you can use it as a road map of sorts. Some chapters have a more prescriptive, “how to” feel; others are more philosophical in tone. I encourage you to take copious notes, applying my experiences and observations to the transformations you’re experiencing, or would like to experience, in your own life. Not to mention breaks between chapters to go out, have fun, and inspire others by walking the talk—for it is in the day-to-day, real-life experience of these practices that you’ll make the greatest leaps on the path to a more high-vibe life.

Not that I claim to be any kind of a guru myself. Just a Material Girl in a Mystical World, who happens to think that if The Numinous was the new normal we might find ourselves inching a little closer to, you know, world peace. I

PART I

1.
ASTROLOGY AS BASIC LIFE SKILL

One of the best things about being a journalist is the deeply random conversations I get to have with complete and utter strangers, many of whom also happen to be semifamous. Like the time I interviewed “plus size” supermodel (ridiculous, she’s like a U.S. size four) Crystal Renn. It was supposed to be a basic Q&A for London’s Stylist magazine, but the first thing Crystal wanted to know when we sat down were my Sun, Moon, and Rising signs. It turns out we were both astrology mad. Soul sister! I thought to myself, as the first thing I usually do when I get asked to interview someone is look up their chart.

Of all the wonders of the Internet, the fact that you can google most celebrities’ birth details will never cease to be a constant source of entertainment for me. And by the way? For the student of astrology, this is also a great way to hone your skills. After all, once you’ve got their birth chart in your hands, the lives, loves, failures, and successes of the A-list are all out there just waiting to be analyzed.

For the uninitiated, your birth chart is essentially a map of the sky, showing the exact position of the planets on the wheel of the astrological zodiac at the moment you were born—that is, the moment your soul chose to incarnate this time around. Each placement of each planet is a window into a different aspect of a person’s personality.

Back to Crystal, who loved astrology because as a model she found herself interacting with new people all day, every day. At every casting, every photo shoot, and every catwalk event, she would be faced with a whole new team—and what better way to break the ice, not to mention work out who the hell you are working with, than a little astrological inquiry? Knowing somebody’s Sun sign (their intrinsic personality), Rising sign (how they come across), and Moon sign (deep-seated emotional needs and how they react to stuff) helped her find her place within the group, work out how to read different individuals, and, on a more advanced level, how best to communicate her own wants and needs. When the people in question (photographer, makeup artist, stylist) were responsible for how she was going to look in the resulting images, not to mention potentially recommend her for the next job, you can see how she’d found this to be a highly valuable life skill.

Sun Sign = Your Intrinsic Personality

Rising Sign = How You Come Across

Moon Sign = Emotional Needs and Responses

And in my book (this book, ha), it’s not only supermodels who can benefit from getting a grip on the basics of astrology. Yes, it’s fun to read a daily, weekly, or month-ahead horoscope for your own Sun sign, but it’s when you learn some of the other key aspects of your chart and then apply this insight to your relationships with your Self and others that things get really interesting.

Astrology tends to get a bad rap from people who assume it’s about trying to “predict” future events—and because it’s based on something as seemingly random as the position of celestial bodies circling the Sun millions of light-years away. In answer to this, (a) I’d like to remind us all for a moment how profoundly our lives are affected by the seasons—not to mention the impact the daily weather forecast has on our mood. And if we can see the influence of the Moon in the ebb and flow of the tides, is it really such a stretch to believe that the other planets in our solar system might also affect life here on Earth? That the “cosmic weather” might also play some kind of role in our lives?

Meanwhile, (b) my take on astrology is that it’s actually a complex language of symbols for describing the intricacies of human nature. After all, for anybody fluent in astro-speak, it’s so much simpler to describe myself as having my “Sun in Aries” than go into a whole riff about how I can be self-interested, but at the same time am deeply loyal; or how I’m a born entrepreneur, prone to risk-taking, with a warrior soul that really, truly, underneath all the ego BS, wants to save the world.

For as far back as I can remember I have been fascinated with the way this mystical language just always seemed to make sense. That is, if I didn’t spend too long trying to wrap my head around the concept that each individual life on Earth is shaped by the position of the planets at our time of birth. But for me, how astrology works isn’t really the point (scientists versus mystics, remember?). I see it more as a tool for personal development, with which to interpret what, why, how, and when certain events, emotional states, and evolutionary processes are presenting in our lives. And all in the name of our evolution/karmic journey.

Yes, astrology can also seem like an extremely navel-gazing pastime. But I think the desire to know yourself and the world you move through better is essentially a drive to be a better, more effective human being. Not that it’s there to be used as a scapegoat, either. Cultivating an awareness of the way certain astrological aspects could influence events is a very different beast to simply blaming all your shortcomings, your just-couldn’t-really-be-assed-to-go-there fuckups, on the stars. This is where the concept of “free will” comes into play, the idea that while we are undoubtedly children of the cosmos and part of the Universal grand plan, we still get the deciding vote as to how our lives play out.

As my astrologer friends Tali and Ophira Edut, better known as the AstroTwins, put it, it helps to see your birth chart as kind of like your “factory settings.” The cosmic blueprint you’re working off in this lifetime.

How you then go about constructing your life depends on all sorts of external factors, including the people you meet, the opportunities you’re presented with, and, ultimately, the decisions you make. But having that original blueprint on file to refer to is a great way to ensure that the foundations remain solid. As such, when you study the language of astrology as a tool for personal development, learning the basics of interpreting your own chart is a really great place to start. With this information at your fingertips, I guarantee you’ll be granted a whole new perspective on your life, your relationships, and, yes, your karmic destiny.

It was the fabulous AstroTwins who lifted the lid on chart interpretation for me. Tali, who met and married her husband at Burning Man, studies shamanism in her spare time, and Ophira, whenever I visit her apartment in the East Village, has a pack of Angel cards out on the table. But they also write the horoscopes for ELLE and appear as regulars on The Real Housewives—in other words, they’re a pair of Mystical Girls, making some seriously magical waves in the Material World.

Numinati alert! I thought when we first connected. (The “Numinati” being my affectionate term for my Numi coven.) And when I then discovered they were leading a Become Your Own Astrologer retreat in Tulum, Mexico, that summer, I knew I would move heaven and earth, not to mention all the freaking constellations in the zodiac, to be there.

This is where I first got a proper handle on basic birth chart interpretation, using what the Twins refer to as the “three-part puzzle” for examining each “aspect”—or planetary placement in non-astro-speak—in a chart. More on this to come. It was also where I got my first taste of comparing two people’s charts (another of the Twins’ pet subjects)—in the process uncovering some home truths about my chart in relationship to my mum’s, for example, that have gone on to shape the way we understand and therefore communicate with each other, taking our mother-daughter connection to a whole other, more forgiving, level. Big stuff. And yet more fuel to my already burning astrological obsession.

READING YOUR CHART

So first up, it’s very important to understand that your Sun sign, which is the sign you read for when you check your daily horoscope, really only represents part of your nature, even though popular culture puts so much emphasis on it. But there are actually eleven planets at play in any one birth chart (including the Sun, Moon, and North Node, which aren’t technically planets, but which astrologers treat as such), each of which has a bearing on said chart. As such, you also have a Venus sign, a Mercury sign, and so on.

And then there is your Rising sign, or Ascendant—the sign of the zodiac the Sun was rising in at the specific time of your birth—which also has a major role to play. Rising signs change every two hours, though, so it’s only possible to calculate your Rising sign if you happen to know, to the nearest two hours, what time you chose to come into the world. But if you don’t, never fear, it’s by no means essential for calculating your chart.

Which, thanks to the aforementioned wonders of the Internet, you can do for free online. In fact, if you haven’t already, go and do it now at www.astrostyle.com, the online home of the AstroTwins, where there’s a link on the homepage for you to “Do your chart for free.” If you don’t know your specific time of birth, you can just enter 12 P.M. (this won’t affect the other planetary aspects). It might also be a good idea to print it out, so you can take some notes.

Okay, got it? Good. And if you don’t have access to a computer right now, here’s what my chart looks like, to give you an idea:

Pretty technical looking, I know, and I’m not going to go into too much detail here. But there are four things to focus on for now.

First, see that circle in the middle? That’s you. Or, if you’re looking at my chart, that’s me. Hi! Yes, pretty egotistical, since IRL, the planets actually revolve around the Sun. But in our birth chart, we get to sit center stage.

Now, look at the outer ring of the chart. This is the Zodiac Wheel, and as you can see it’s divided into twelve sections, one for each SIGN of the zodiac, as denoted by the twelve different symbols or “glyphs” in the right-hand columns of the table opposite—which you may recognize from when you read your horoscope or see your Sun sign written about. My chart begins in Sagittarius on the left (or East) at “9 o’clock,” where it says “A.C.” (for Ascendant).

LEARNING NO. 1: The signs of the zodiac represent the different aspects of our personality, how we show up in the world and deal with situations.

Next up, you’ll see that the middle ring is also divided into twelve sections. These are the different HOUSES of the chart, and they’re numbered 1 to 12, beginning, again, at the nine o’clock position on the left. Each house is “ruled” by the sign it intersects—so my First house is ruled by Sagittarius, my Second house by Capricorn, my Third by Pisces (just), and so on. As such, each house will be colored by the personality of the sign it’s ruled by.

LEARNING NO. 2: The houses represent the different areas of life that we operate in—love, work, home and family, and so on.

Finally, check out the symbols floating in the different houses. These represent the PLANETS, and the chart is essentially like a screengrab of their position in the solar system at the time of our birth.

LEARNING NO. 3: The planets represent our motivation in life, the things that drive us to act.

Basic chart interpretation lies in learning how these three elements interact with one another—planet, house, and sign—as they show up in different combinations in each and every individual birth chart. Here are a couple of examples to help explain what I mean.

As you can see in my chart, Mercury is in Aries in the Fourth house. Since Mercury is the planet of communication, and Aries is the sign of passion and all things new, it makes sense that I’ve always felt compelled to write about the next big trends! In my Fourth house of home and family conditioning, this could speak to the fact I feel most productive writing in my home environment (in fact in every magazine job I had, I did all my actual writing at home), as well as the fact that I was always encouraged to read as a kid.

On a deeper level, the Fourth house also rules women’s issues, suggesting that my writing is destined to somehow impact the lives of women. Add my Moon (subconscious impulses and needs) being in Cancer (the sign ruling the feminine principle) in the deeply “mystical” Eighth house and, well, I bring you The Numinous. Um … confused yet?! As you are beginning to see, the “language” of astrology can get pretty complex, offering layers and layers of information to be interpreted. So, for now, let’s get back to basics.

Before I move on to an overview of the different areas covered by each planet, house, and sign, a quick word about the Rising sign and house positions if you don’t know your exact time of birth. Basically, it’s impossible to get an accurate read on these without a time—but you will still know which sign each planet is in, plenty to work with as you begin to get to know your chart.

So once again, the rule to remember is:

BASIC BIRTH CHART INTERPRETATION

Planet (motivation) + Sign (how you direct this) + House (the area of life where that motivation and effort will manifest).

As you’ll begin to see once I get into the traits of each planet, sign, and house of the zodiac below, there’s lots of crossover, all kinds of subtleties, and many, many different ways to interpret what the AstroTwins call this “three-part puzzle.” And besides bucket-loads of experience, I believe the most skilled astrologers employ a degree of intuition, tapping into the numinous nature of this mystical science, when interpreting a chart.

As Julia and Derek Parker write in their brilliant Parkers’ Astrology (a great beginner’s book for anybody serious about the study of astrology): “The art of interpreting a chart is to look much more deeply—to consider the many different aspects shown by planets and signs and their inter-relationships, and weigh them so that one mitigates or strengthens the effect of another. You can, in this way, discover an in-depth portrait of yourself that is astonishing in its light and shade, its subtlety and persuasiveness.”

And, well, if that’s the end goal, we all need to start somewhere—so here’s a cheat sheet for you to refer to as you begin to look at your own chart:

The Planets

	THE SUN: Self-awareness, personal power, life force, creativity, essence, self-expression, spirit, will, drive for personal significance
	THE MOON: Feelings, instincts, moods, response to things, gut reactions, emotional security, basic needs
	MERCURY: Communication, speech, thoughts, logic, analysis, ideas, intellect
	VENUS: Beauty, love, taste, harmony, aesthetics, attraction, charm, romance, sensuality, comfort
	MARS: Action, energy, desire, impulse, drive, strength, courage, anger, competition
	JUPITER: Enthusiasm, luck, fortune, optimism, positivity, generosity, benevolence, truth, outgoingness
	SATURN: Discipline, structure, wisdom, ambition, practicality, realism, responsibility, karma
	URANUS: Breakthrough, the unexpected, innovation, sudden change, insight, awakening, originality
	NEPTUNE: Imagination, ideals, sympathy, compassion, intuition, emotions, universal love, dreams, fantasy
	PLUTO: Fundamental transformation, change, death and rebirth, basic drive, regeneration, inheritance
	NORTH NODE (not an actual celestial body, but a point referring to the Moon’s position in relation to the other planets at the time of your birth): Life purpose, destiny, personal growth, supportive people, potential

SOUTH NODE (this may not be shown on your chart but will always be in the opposite sign as the North Node): Old patterns, past-life experience, inherited traits, innate talents, cultural conditioning

The Signs

Remember! Your chart will be influenced by ALL the signs to some degree—so no simply looking at your Sun sign and going: “Oh yeah, that’s me.” The traits of each sign show how you direct the energy of the planet it holds in your chart.

	ARIES: Self-starting, outgoing, active, forceful, entrepreneurial, self-confident, strong
	TAURUS: Stable, persistent, productive, deliberate, wealthy, practical, reliable
	GEMINI: Communicative, witty, adaptable, curious, many sided, variety seeking
	CANCER: Sensitive, feeling, receptive, nostalgic, security oriented, emotionally perceptive
	LEO: Expressive, self-aware, entertaining, playful, warm, childlike, creative, dramatic
	VIRGO: Analytical, logical, intelligent, detail oriented, sensible, methodical
	LIBRA: Balanced, just, tolerant, relationship oriented, sociable, cooperative, diplomatic
	SCORPIO: Intense, determined, thorough, energetic, secretive, passionate, forceful
	SAGITTARIUS: Enthusiastic, optimistic, jovial, friendly, generous, expansive, honest
	CAPRICORN: Organized, serious, practical, ambitious, hardworking, disciplined, realistic
	AQUARIUS: Friendly, intuitive, original, independent, unique, inventive, experimental
	PISCES: Imaginative, sentimental, sympathetic, compassionate, artistic, dreamy, escapist