A new episode of The Mystical Underground is live! “TMU Time Machine: Katy Herman: Cassadaga I”:
Join Trish and Rob in the Mystical Underground time machine for a conversation with…
Kathy Herman about the history of Cassadaga, FL, the setting for the TMU Halloween Special and Rob’s short story, “The Devil’s Chair,” from their short story collection “The Outliers.”
*MacGregor, Rob; MacGregor, Trish. The Outliers. Crossroad Press.
Available in print and digitally on Amazon: tinyurl.com/yskzkk6m
We’ve recently teamed up with writers Glenn Meganck and Jerome Preisler on a ghostwriting venture. All of us have done ghostwriting over the years. We enjoy it. It’s something that pushes you to expand what you write about, to step outside your comfort zone, and deliver a product that pleases the person who hired you. Agents and editors aren’t in this picture. Delays are those you or your client trigger and not the result of a publishing schedule.
https://ghostwritingyourbook.com/
New moons typically usher in new opportunities according to their sign and house placement in your birth chart. The new moon in Scorpio on November 4 may hold some surprises, thanks to an exact opposition from Uranus, the planet that usually shakes things up. Uranus, for instance, rules evens like earthquakes, and that may be what things feel like on or around this new moon.
Along with new opportunities, there may be news that comes out of the blue and sweeps something out of your life. You may decide, for instance, to make changes in your professional life, to move, or someone may move into or out of your home. Or, a colleague may suddenly quit and you have to assume additional responsibilities.Or you may decide against taking a trip overseas because of a rise in Covid cases.
Saturn makes a wide but hard aspect to both the new moon and Uranus, which indicates an obstacle of some kind. Whatever it is, work with it or around it but don’t let it discourage you.
To find out how this new moon impacts your sign, click here.
Not all synchronicities are biggies. Some occur just to remind us we’re in the flow.
I walked out into the kitchen to tell Rob about an article I’d just read and saw the cut fruit he was preparing for a salad. Then I walked outside to get the mail and found this, the cover of Life Extension Magazine:
An image nearly identical to what’s on the cutting board.
The message seems obvious: Get more Vitamin C!
A new episode of The Mystical Underground is live! “Halloween Special: The Devil’s Chair”:
Join Rob for a special Halloween episode as he reads from Trish and Rob’s short story collection “The Outliers”…
“The Devil’s Chair is a story based on an urban legend about a brick chair that faces two gravestones in a cemetery in central Florida, north of Orlando. The cemetery is located outside the spiritualist community of Cassadaga, which offers weekly ghost tours of the town. In this story, the spookiness is enhanced when a reporter looking for a Halloween story visits the cemetery at midnight as he investigates the urban legend.”
*MacGregor, Rob; MacGregor, Trish. The Outliers. Crossroad Press.
Available in print and digitally on Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/yskzkk6m
At some point in my love affair with astrology, I read that the degree of your natal sun usually corresponds to a pivotal event in your life that helped to shape who you are. Possibilities include: parental divorce, a significant move, the birth of a sibling, the death of a loved one. In other words, a significant, PIVOTAL event, something that influenced the course of your life.
When I first learned this, I tested it on the charts of people I knew well, starting with my own chart and that of my family. My Gemini sun is 16 degrees and 12 minutes. Five months after my 16th birthday, my parents left Venezuela, where I’d been born and raised, and moved to Florida. The significance of that move once prompted my dad to remark that since that move, I was reluctant to call any place home. And he was right.
Rob’s sun is 25 degrees and 27 minutes of Taurus. His corresponding age was around 25 – or 1973. He received a pardon from Gerald Ford for dodging the draft and refusing to go to Vietnam, for which he was convicted in 1972 and sentenced to alternative service.
Our daughter’s Virgo sun is 8 degrees and 32 minutes. Around that age – third grade – I had her I.Q. tested and she was admitted into a gifted program, which changed the course of her public school education.
My dad had a 26 degree 44 minutes Libra sun. He was around 27 when he met my mother on a blind date.
Recently, I did Bernie Beitman’s chart. He’s the psychiatrist who started the Coincidence Project, part of his serious study of synchronicity. His Pisces sun is at 8 degrees 30 minutes. So I asked him what pivotal event had occurred between the age of eight and a half and nine. Here’s his response:
That is when I lost my dog and I got lost and found him. That set the stage for my interest in human GPS, a subset of coincidences.
It’s easy to find out the degree of your natal sun. Cafe Astrology offers free astrology charts here.
Just enter your name, place and date of birth. If you don’t know the time, use noon. The sun travels a degree a day, so you’ll be able to see the degree but the minutes may not be correct. Take note of the sun’s degree, think of it as a year in your life. What pivotal event occurred for you that year? If you find something, please let me know.
I recently read an article in The Guardian about the burgeoning – and totally unregulated – life coaching industry. The article focuses on the queen of life coaching- Brooke Castillo.
She founded the Life Coach School in 2007. Its central idea is that anyone who works hard can build a thriving career as a life coach. “Last year, with more people than ever anxious, indoors and online because of the pandemic, the company made $37m in gross revenue.”
That’s 37 MILLION. How the hell did Castillo earn that much? The Guardian gives us a breakdown:
Castillo offers two streams. One stream is called Self Coaching Scholars. The cost? $297 monthly membership program. Not sure what you get for that. Initially, those who wanted to become coaches could take a six-month online course for $15,000. “The current course is three months long and costs $21,000; by comparison… tuition for Georgetown University’s professional certificate in life coaching runs $13,995.”
This queen of life coaching adapted ideas from other self-improvement gurus. “From inspirational speaker Byron Katie, she learned not to blame outside circumstances for her problems. From channeler Esther Hicks, she learned about the law of attraction (later popularized through the book and film The Secret), and practiced vibrationally aligning herself with tens of millions of dollars. From entrepreneurial guru Tony Robbins, she learned to claim her personal power and transform her life from ordinary to extraordinary,” the article says.
While I’m a proponent of the idea that our thoughts and beliefs create our personal realities, I’m not a proponent of this kind of bullshit, where you pay someone else an extravagant amount of money so that you, too, can rip off the gullible. The desperate. I don’t believe a life coach guru can coach you into making a zillion bucks. Or becoming a successful entrepreneur. You’re the only one who can change your beliefs and attitudes. No one else can do that for you. We all have the creativity and intuition to do what we need to do to achieve a dream.
As the article points out, Castillo’s rapid rise raises questions about an unregulated industry “at a time when the demand for mental health services is outpacing supply.”
The article covers Castillo’s beginnings, quotes women who have taken her courses and become disenchanted, and talks about one riveting incident that had a cascade effect.
“Then, last spring, after George Floyd was murdered and businesses scrambled to prove their antiracist bona fides, LCS was conspicuously silent. Castillo’s staff pushed her to issue a statement, or at least a Facebook post, decrying racism and voicing support for their Black members, but she refused. Instead, on 1 June, LCS published a vague Instagram text post –“Love is always the answer” – that seemed like an attempt to sidestep the national reckoning on race. It had the exact opposite effect. LCS social media was flooded with furious comments; on the internal Slack channel, coaches called Castillo out. The school was inundated with cancellations and demands for refunds.”
The article is riveting.
Because of the mental health angle, I sent a link to the article to Chris Mackey, a clinical psychologist in Australia who is also in the synchronicity group I meet with via zoom. Here was his response:
“Around ten years ago I remember Martin Seligman, the founder of positive psychology, saying that the coaching field was like the Wild West. It was an interesting comment as the numbers of coaches attending positive psychology conferences was dramatically increasing.
“Sadly the coaching field is completely unregulated, but it’s easy to learn a lingo to exploit vulnerable people and to make it sound as though you have sophisticated ways of helping people change. Most lasting change comes down to persistent hard work. Most of the principles and strategies that Brooke Castillo refers to (taken straight from CBT) are outlined in free web-based programs. It sounds like she exploits the lure of the “law of attraction”, related to synchronicity, to add some extra colour and appeal.
Brooke Castillo does sound a bit like a cult leader. She reminds me of Elizabeth Holmes who sucked in so many people with her company, Theranos, that pretended to have wonderful new ways of doing all sorts of blood tests using just one drop of blood. But at least that claim had an objective way of being disproven, whereas Brooke Castillo can just blame people for having negative thoughts as a reason for their dissatisfaction with the product. Concerning stuff! Thanks again for sending the link.”
A new episode of The Mystical Underground is live! “Trish MacGregor: Star Power For November 2021”:
Join Trish for the November 2021 astrological forecast!
Photos taken on the grounds of The Monroe Institute
At your next family gathering, bring up the topic of spirit communication. The reaction of the group will tell you quite a bit about how people generally regard the whole subject of ghost/spirits and contact with the dead. There are likely to be three types of reactions: snickers and rolling of the eyes, intrigue and fascination, and family members or relatives who eagerly relate their own experiences with spirits and spirit contact.
In 2012, when we originally posted this story, the percentage of Americans who believed in life after death was, according to a Huffington Post/Yougov survey, 64 percent and 45 percent believed that ghosts or the spirits of the dead can interact with the living. These statistics were startling different from a 1978 survey that indicated only 11 percent of people believe in ghosts and spirits. However, the problem with polls is how are the questions phrased? Is as religious organization or publication asking the question? Where does the belief stand in 2021?
In 2021,YouGov stats says that about half of Americans belief that demons and ghosts really exist. Given the proliferation of blogs, websites, books, movies and social media sites, I find that drop from 2012 hard to believe.
Regardless, the next time you’re with family or friends, bring up the subject and note the reaction – and the stories.
Another question to consider: as more people become aware that spirit contact is possible, does it happen more frequently? We believe so and that’s why we wrote Secrets of Spirit Communication.
