astrologer + teacher
Learn & Integrate Live
Starting November 15th, and for every Sunday for 10 weeks thereafter, you will meet with Joe on Zoom for a 90 minute live class. The class experience will be a studious seminar/conversational vibe, Joe's favorite, with beautiful imagery in a powerpoint format. PDF Workbooks will also be available for you navigate each class week to week.
Classes will be held live at 1pm EST. After a live class concludes, each class recording will be uploaded to your private course portal for lifetime access, as well as access to any additional materials added to the course over time.
As a student, you will also gain life time access to all future Academy of Planetary Arts student live stream events.
When Life Changes You
There are seasons of life that invite us to look more deeply at who we are, what we carry, and who we are becoming. Sometimes these passages arrive through grief, heartbreak, depression, or the loss of something we once believed would last forever. Other times, they emerge through quieter transformations: a shifting sense of identity, a longing for deeper meaning, the desire to understand our emotional patterns, or simply the recognition that growth often asks us to release parts of ourselves we have outgrown.
Our Deepest Wounds: From Grief Cycles to Rebirth is an ten-session journey into the emotional, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of the human experience. This course is not only for those navigating grief or profound life changes, but for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of love, loss, vulnerability, healing, surrender, and personal transformation. Whether you are moving through a difficult chapter, reflecting on experiences that have shaped you, or simply feeling called to explore the deeper mysteries of the human heart, this journey offers an opportunity for meaningful reflection, greater self-awareness, and a more compassionate relationship with yourself and the ever-changing nature of life.
Astrology as a Language for the Underworld
Astrology has always contained symbols for the more difficult chapters of human life. Throughout our time together, we will explore Saturn, Chiron, Pluto, and the archetypal landscapes of the 8th and 12th houses—not as technical placements to memorize, but as profound symbols for experiences such as grief, limitation, woundedness, surrender, psychological transformation, and rebirth. No previous knowledge of astrology is required. Rather than learning how to interpret a chart, we will allow these ancient symbols to become mirrors through which we can better understand experiences that are often difficult to put into words.
Grief, Love & the Wounds We Carry
At the heart of this course is a simple but difficult truth: we grieve because we have loved. We will explore the many forms grief can take—not only death, but heartbreak, estrangement, lost dreams, changing identities, missed possibilities, and the quiet mourning that accompanies becoming someone new. We will also examine how our wounds follow us forward: how abandonment can become fear of intimacy, how betrayal can become hypervigilance, and how loss can make us afraid to love deeply again. Rather than asking how we can erase our wounds, we will ask a different question: How can we carry what has happened to us without allowing it to determine everything that happens next?
Tarot, Reflection & Practices for Difficult Seasons
Tarot will accompany us throughout the journey as a contemplative and reflective practice. The Tower, Moon, Hermit, Three of Swords, Death, Five of Cups, Temperance, Judgement, and Star will become symbolic companions as we move from rupture and descent toward acceptance, surrender, and renewal. We will also explore practical forms of remediation and care—including ritual, journaling, prayer, contemplation, creativity, intentional solitude, community, remembrance, and spiritual practice. These practices are not offered as ways to magically remove pain or control what cannot be controlled, but as ways of remaining in relationship with ourselves, with life, and perhaps with something greater than ourselves while we move through difficult seasons.
The Return to Life
Ultimately, Our Deepest Wounds is not a course about remaining inside our suffering. It is about discovering what it means to return to life after something has changed us. Astrology can help us recognize the season we are moving through, psychology can help us understand what has been awakened within us, and tarot can give imagery to experiences that language sometimes struggles to contain—but there are mysteries of life that no system can completely explain. Across eight intimate, two-hour sessions, we will move through rupture, descent, acceptance, wounding, transformation, grief, surrender, and rebirth, asking what it means to trust life again without requiring ourselves to forget what we have lost. Perhaps healing is not becoming the person we were before. Perhaps it is learning to love the life that remains—and slowly discovering who we are becoming within it.
Curriculm
Session One — When Life Breaks Open: The Beginning of the Descent
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November 15th - Live Class
We begin with the experiences that divide life into a distinct before and after: loss, heartbreak, betrayal, illness, endings, and futures that no longer unfold as we imagined. We explore grief not only as the loss of someone or something, but as the loss of identity, certainty, and the life we thought we were going to live. Through the symbolism of The Tower, we begin asking what happens psychologically when familiar structures fall and we can no longer return to who we were before.
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Session Two — The Underworld: Depression, Darkness & the Seasons of Withdrawal
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November 22nd - Live Class
This session explores the psychological and spiritual experience of descent: those periods when direction disappears, the outer world becomes quieter, and we are asked to encounter parts of ourselves that normally remain beneath the surface. The 8th and 12th houses become symbolic landscapes for impermanence, vulnerability, surrender, solitude, and the limits of control, while carefully distinguishing archetypal darkness from clinical depression. Through The Moon, we explore how to remain present within uncertainty when we have enough light for the next step, but not yet the entire path.
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Session Three — Saturn: Grief, Time & Learning to Live With What Cannot Be Changed
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November 29th - Live Class
Saturn introduces us to one of grief's most difficult lessons: there are realities we cannot bargain with forever. We explore mortality, limitation, aging, responsibility, loneliness, separation, and the difference between acceptance and resignation, while questioning a culture that often expects healing to happen quickly. Through The Hermit, we consider how time itself becomes a teacher and what it means to slowly build a life around something we cannot undo.
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Session Four - Live Q&A & Integration Gathering
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December 6th
A pause in the course material for us all to gather, ask questions and discuss the course for further clarity.
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Session Five — Chiron: The Wounds We Carry Into Love
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December 13th - Live Class
Our wounds do not remain neatly contained in the past; they often follow us into intimacy, friendship, creativity, work, spirituality, and our relationship with ourselves. This session explores how abandonment, betrayal, rejection, and loss can quietly become expectations we carry into future experiences, and how a wound can become an identity if we are not conscious of it. Through the Three of Swords, we ask a central question: how do we remain open to love after life has given us legitimate reasons to close?
Session Six — Pluto: The Death of the Person You Used to Be
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December 20th - Live Class
Some experiences do not simply hurt us; they fundamentally change us. Through Pluto, we explore psychological death and rebirth, attachment, control, powerlessness, survival, and the strange space between an identity that has ended and a new self that has not fully emerged. With Death and The Devil, we confront what we continue trying to resurrect, control, or remain attached to even when life may be asking us to release it.
Session Seven — Grief Is the Price of Love: Loss, Memory & Continuing Bonds
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December 27th - Live Class
At the emotional center of the course, we step away from planetary archetypes and speak directly about grief itself. We explore the many things human beings mourn—people, animals, relationships, places, identities, dreams, and futures—and consider the possibility that grief is not evidence that we have failed to heal, but evidence that something mattered deeply. Through the Five of Cups, we explore memory, remembrance, unfinished conversations, continuing bonds, and the possibility that grief and joy can eventually exist within the same life.
Session Eight — Surrender: Faith When You Don't Know Why
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January 3rd - Live Class
There are questions astrology, psychology, and spirituality may help us explore but cannot definitively answer: Why did this happen? Why this person? Why now? Why wasn't I protected from something I prayed would not happen? Through Temperance, we explore surrender, faith, mystery, ritual, remediation, and what it means to develop a relationship with something larger than ourselves without forcing suffering into an explanation such as “everything happens for a reason.”
Session Nine — Rebirth: Learning to Love Life Again
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January 10th - Live Class
Rebirth is not always dramatic; sometimes it begins when we laugh without guilt, make plans again, become curious about the future, allow ourselves to want something, or discover that we are capable of loving again. This final session explores the complicated return to life after profound change, including the fear that moving forward somehow betrays what or whom we have lost. Through Judgement and The Star, we arrive at the final question of the course: can we love life fully again, knowing now that nothing we love can be possessed forever?
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Session Ten - Live Q&A + Final Integration Gathering
January 17th
Our last session together in which questions will be answered, and further teaching will be casually be discussed depending on your needs.
