On Rejoining Soul and Role
Musings on the Gemini New Moon. 6.14.26.
This New Moon in Gemini has been stirring up all kinds of messages. Messages about ideas. About the power of words and thoughts. And about duality and integration.
An astrologer, lawyer, and nonprofit CEO walk into a bar…
As I sat down to write a newsletter all on how to work with the Gemini New Moon, I realized my heart wasn’t in it to flesh out the bullets I’d drawn up.
As I started closing tabs on what I call my "astrology computer" (please don't ask how many tabs were open 😆), a page I’d had open about Parker Palmer's work on wholeness popped up.
Given a lot of what I’ve been reflecting on as I approach the two year mark since I stepped into a professional role I didn’t expect to say yes to, leading a DC-based organization… I realized then what wanted to come through.
Palmer writes about the fragmentation that happens when we become overly identified with our roles and disconnected from something deeper. He talks about the lifelong work of rejoining soul and role—something that resonates deeply for me since I get asked nearly every week how a social justice lawyer and nonprofit CEO can also be an astrologer (and vice versa).
I usually reply that a social justice lawyer, astrologer, and nonprofit CEO walked into a bar—and they're all me. But underneath the joke has been a years-long journey of spiritual integration that I’ve only recently started talking more openly about.
Gemini as integration teacher.
At its lower octave, Gemini leads to fragmentation. We experience it as duality. This or that. Spiritual practices or professional life. Inner work or outer work. Astrologer or nonprofit leader. Collectively, it keeps us in the illusion of separation and scarcity. That if someone else gets ahead, we lose out.
But/and at its higher octave, Gemini teaches the magic of integration. Duality gives way to synthesis. This or that dissolves. We see it was all one to begin with.
On a spiritual level, Gemini at its higher expression also teaches us the right use of mind. That the mind is not the authority, but an instrument with the soul the musician. Our various roles become platforms. Our voice becomes a channel. And suddenly it isn't about choosing between roles or parts of ourselves. It's about allowing all of them to serve the same truth.
For a long time, spirituality and public policy work felt like separate parts of my life. In fact, when I said yes to leading the National Academy of Social Insurance back in 2024—something I wasn't quite sure I wanted to do, for about a million reasons—a big source of my hesitation wasn’t just that I’d done the DC thing and left. It was the fear that it would take me away from the astrology and energy healing practice I had just begun building. How could I possibly find time for both?
Earlier this week, some 250 people gathered in Washington, DC to celebrate the National Academy of Social Insurance's 40th anniversary.
As I felt the energy build throughout the night, my heart overflowed. There was more love and joy in the room than any pendulum could measure—which is saying something for a community that's deeply struggling to stay hopeful right now, with so many threats facing the social safety net.
And yes, even though my events team thought I was crazy, of course I chose the date of the gala to align with Tuesday’s beautiful Venus-Jupiter conjunction in Cancer. Because Cancer is about care. Family. Community. Belonging. Home. Taking care of each other. And with Venus hanging out with Jupiter upping the togetherness and celebratory energy… you don’t get astrology better than that for a major gathering about social insurance (and with Jupiter and Venus in the mix, especially one you need to raise money from 😊).
The stated purpose of the evening was to celebrate 40 years of an organization and several phenomenal leaders whose work was being honored (such as the wonderful Ai-jen Poo, founder of Caring Across Generations and a visionary who’s done more to center care in the national conversation than perhaps anyone else alive today… another reason the Venus-Jupiter meetup in Cancer was a no-brainer for the date).
But the deeper theme of the night was a deeper transmission—one that I’ve realized I was meant to take the Academy job to carry into the DC community, and which I’ve spent the past two years quietly integrating into every gathering, conference, and conversation the Academy hosts: that we’re in this together. And that the work of social policy is spiritual work. My ego may originally have balked at taking a job that would take me back to DC, but my soul knew debates over programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid would be the perfect vehicle for reminding those in power of our interconnectedness.
Frances Perkins, integration queen.
Another core Gemini teaching—that also wanted to be integrated into my remarks at the gala, and now into this newsletter—is that every major social advance began as an idea. Right down to the New Deal that created Social Security and so much else that anyone younger than 91 might take for granted.
Someone (in this case, a badass organizer and visionary named Frances Perkins) imagined a future that didn't yet exist. Enough people shared in that vision. And eventually what started as an act of radical imagination became reality.
One of the most meaningful experiences that this spring has brought was the chance to bring a group of women leaders to Frances Perkins’ homestead in Maine to mark her feast day (bless the Episcopalians for making her a saint in their church).
If you’ve never been there, it’s hard to describe the feeling. The place still carries her presence.
As we gathered in the home where she’d retreat when she needed a break from DC, walked her trail, and got muddy in her lake… we also spent time reflecting on how differently Frances Perkins understood the work of social change than many people do today.
She didn’t see the work of the New Deal as merely a policy project. She saw and spoke explicitly about it as a spiritual project. When she famously said, “I come to Washington to work for God, FDR, and the common, forgotten working man”—she was reminding us all that she didn’t understand her spiritual purpose as separate from her day job. And she woke up every day and did the work of integrating them to push manmade laws and policies a little closer to reflecting what she felt to be spiritual truth.
Trusting the transmission.
Which brings me back to the New Moon in Gemini.
Earlier today, I co-facilitated a New Moon Circle for a small group of women leaders working in social justice, public policy, and nonprofit leadership. As part of our reflections, I invited us all to sit with some very Gemini questions:
Where do we notice thoughts that hold us back? What fears or limiting beliefs are still running quietly in the background? And what stories do we tell ourselves that might no longer be true?
One by one, these incredible women began sharing. And let me tell you, these are some seriously badass women. Women leading organizations. Women shaping policy. Women who have spent their lives and careers showing up for others.
And yet the fears and limiting beliefs they shared were incredibly common. Not being good enough. Not being brave enough. Not deserving to feel joy. Needing validation from others to feel worthy. Feeling called toward something bigger but questioning whether they have what it takes to answer the call.
As we sat together in that space, witnessing and supporting one another in giving voice to limiting thoughts and beliefs (so we could swap in more supportive affirming thoughts), I could feel my own self-doubts surfacing. Were my words good enough? Did I explain Gemini energy well enough? Who am I to be leading a circle like this?
For as far back as I can remember, I've carried a wound around words. Around needing them to be perfect so I’d be good enough. Around giving away my power to what other people might think based on how I communicate and what I say. (Anyone else with Chiron in Gemini is probably nodding along right now 😊)
There I was, facilitating a circle about the right use of mind and the power of the stories we carry while simultaneously watching my own mind try to hold me back. It was quite the Gemini moment… with the teaching, teaching the teacher.
And when my co-facilitator invited me to share what was coming up for me, an affirmation emerged that feels like the perfect message for this New Moon in Gemini: My voice and my words are a channel for my soul.
The question this Gemini New Moon wants us to sit with—especially as we get ready for wounded healer Chiron to move into Taurus at the end of next week, surfacing wounds still in need of healing around our self-worth and where we look outside ourselves for validation—isn’t whether the words are perfect. It’s whether we’re willing to trust the transmission. To trust the truth that wants to move through us. To trust the ideas that won't leave us alone. To trust the voice beneath the noise. To stop waiting until we have everything figured out.
And to stop treating the mind as the authority and instead allow it to become what it was designed to be: a channel—between soul and expression.
The New Moon in Gemini assignment.
Energy follows thought into manifestation. This one’s such a mainstay in modern spiritual circles it’s lost virtually all of its punch. But it’s one of the core lessons we’re being invited to tap into around this Gemini New Moon.
A similar teaching, that feels perhaps slightly more a propos for the moment we’re in societally, comes from visionary spiritual lawyer Peter Gabel, a brilliant thinker whose writings I found some years ago when I got involved with the Project for Integrating Spirituality, Law, and Politics (PISLAP) (yes, back to integration). It’s that the work of social justice is standing in a future space and pulling the present toward it.
I love that image and invoke it often when I talk and write about imagination, and the fact that we're in a battle of imaginations right now—over what kind of society we’re choosing to be.
This brings us back to the New Moon in Gemini, which invites us to become aware of how we’re choosing to use our minds… which thoughts and ideas we’re choosing to put energy towards… and which words we’re choosing to speak into the universe, today and every day.
My own intentions for this New Moon are fairly simple: To speak openly, fearlessly, and more regularly about how I integrate astrology, spirituality, leadership, and social change in my own life and work. To trust that my voice and my words are a channel for my soul. And to not let perfection be the enemy of sharing what feels alive and true.
Some questions to consider sitting with, as you explore your own intentions for this Gemini New Moon:
How are you feeling called to use your voice, words, and mind to serve the greater good?
How would you use your voice and words if you felt no fear or self-doubt?
What fears, assumptions, or limiting beliefs are you ready to release to embody more of who you’re becoming?
What would it look like to be less identified with your roles in the world and to operate from all of them as expressions of your core truth?
What ideas are stirring for you that want to be brought into the world?
What future are you helping imagine into being?
And what might become possible if we didn’t let collective limiting beliefs hold us back?
These feel like (some of) the right questions for this moment. And as you sit with whichever resonate for you, all this Gemini New Moon is asking of us is that we get quiet and listen for the truth trying to emerge through us.
And then that we have the courage to trust the transmission.
