On Rejoining Soul and Role
Yesterday’s New Moon in Gemini has been stirring up all kinds of messages.
Messages about the power of words and thoughts. About duality and integration. And about the importance of trusting the transmission—without letting the mind get in the way.
So I’m gonna practice what I preach and hit publish on some imperfect musings. As always, take only what resonates and leave the rest. <3
xo,
Rebecca
An astrologer, lawyer, and nonprofit CEO walk into a bar…
As I sat down to write this and 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.
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 given that I’ve been nursing some guilt for not having as much time for my astrologer role in a busy few months).
Sometimes when I get that question, I quip that a social justice lawyer, astrologer, and nonprofit CEO walked into a bar—and they're all me.
But as I witnessed what was stirred up by Palmer’s words about soul and role, and moving beyond fragmentation… I realized the New Moon in Gemini was sending me a message that, instead of jumping straight into astrology, a big part of the transmission that wanted to come through here was reflection on my own spiritual integration journey.
Gemini as integration teacher.
At its lower octave, where it’s ruled by Mercury, Gemini rules the mind. When we live from our minds, we experience fragmentation. Duality. This or that. Astrologer or nonprofit leader. Spiritual practices or professional life. Inner work or outer work. Collectively, operating from the mental level keeps us in the illusion of separation and scarcity. Zero sum thinking. If someone else gets ahead, we lose out. You get the picture. In the mind, we’re anywhere but the present moment, thinking about the past, the future, our to do list, whatever we’re worried about or still ruminating over.
But/and at its higher octave, where Venus takes us into the heart, Gemini brings the magic of integration. No longer living in the mind, we experience true presence. Nonstop thoughts give way to awareness. 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 what many ancient wisdom teachings call the right use of mind. That the mind is not the authority, but an instrument, and the soul the musician. The mind becomes a tool we use to analyze, create, and shift our own state at will. And suddenly, no longer fragmented, we realize it was never 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 spiritual work that had become a huge part of my life, including the astrology and energy healing practice I had just begun building. How was I supposed to find time for both? I remember saying to a friend as I weighed pros and cons.
Cut to this past week, and I’m surrounded by 250 people at a gala we’ve organized in DC to celebrate the Academy'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 given the political climate.
And yes, even though my events team thought I was crazy, of course I chose the date of the gala to align with last week’s beautiful Venus-Jupiter conjunction in Cancer. (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—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 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 social insurance is the living expression of that truth.
My ego may originally have balked at taking a job that would take me back to DC, but my soul knew the work of social policy is spiritual work.
And that working at an organization focused on programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid would be the perfect platform for quietly reminding a community that’s largely disconnected from soul—and from the larger whole—of our interconnectedness.
Frances Perkins got it.
Another core Gemini teaching—that also wanted to come through my remarks at the gala, and now 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 most Americans younger than 91 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.
Another huge opportunity for integrating the spiritual and the professional this spring came through bringing 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. And she certainly didn’t see it as a budget problem to be solved, which feels important to note given so many of our current debates. 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”—words I have up in my office as a daily reminder to support my own integration—she was explicitly telling us 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 the two to push the country’s laws and policies a little closer to what she understood to be spiritual truth.
Trusting the transmission.
Which brings me back to the New Moon in Gemini.
Over the weekend, 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, we sat 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?
Now 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 each shared were incredibly common. Not feeling good enough. Not feeling brave enough. Not feeling deserving of 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… a perfect New Moon in Gemini exercise), I could feel my own self-doubts surfacing. Were my words good enough? Did I explain Gemini energy well enough? And who am I to be leading a circle like this anyway?
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 worthy of love. Around giving away my power to what other people might think of 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 later this week, which will start surfacing wounds still in need of healing around our self-worth and where we look outside ourselves for validation (more on this soon)—isn’t whether the words are perfect. It’s whether we’re willing to get out of the mind, throw out the script, be present, and trust the transmission.
For anyone who resonates with what I shared above, this requires letting go of sounding perfect or waiting until we have it all figured out. It requires trusting the truth that wants to move through us when give the soul the mic. Trusting the ideas that won't leave us alone, even if our mind nags at us that we don’t know enough, or aren’t ready, or that people won’t like us.
When we do this, we honor Gemini’s teachings that the mind was never the authority and instead allow it to become what it was designed to be: a channel and a bridge for soul.
The irony of course, is that when we show up and communicate from truth, it leads to morelove, not less. And it gives those around us permission to show up as their true selves too, which is a gift.
The New Moon in Gemini assignment.
Energy follows thought into manifestation. This one’s such a mainstay in modern spiritual teaching it’s lost virtually all of its punch. But it’s another of the core lessons we’re being invited to tap into around this Gemini New Moon.
A similar teaching—and one that feels perhaps slightly more a propos for the turning of the ages we’re living through 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) (another community that’s been hugely supportive of my own integration).
Peter wrote 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, especially when I talk and write about how to show up during a battle of imaginations like we’re in right now.
Which brings us back to the New Moon in Gemini. When we get in right relationship to the mind, we remember we have agency over how we use it. We become aware that we get to choose which thoughts and ideas and visions to put energy towards, and which stories we tell ourselves about what’s possible. We realize the power of thoughts and that what we pay attention to grows.
We realize the truth behind the axiom—and re-potentialize our consciousness from what has been to what could be.
And we remember the power of words, and become more conscious of which words we choose to say inwardly as well as those we choose to speak into the universe. (As the saying goes, words are spells…)
My own intentions for this New Moon are fairly simple: To speak more openly, fearlessly, and regularly about how I integrate astrology, spirituality, leadership, and social change in my own life and work. To trust the transmission that comes through when I throw out the script and the editor in my head and let my words be a channel for my soul. And to not let perfection be the enemy of sharing what’s true.
Some questions to consider sitting with, as you explore what intentions feel right for you:
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 for us as a collective if we didn’t let limiting beliefs hold us back?
These feel like (some of) the right questions for this moment. Others may arise for you, and follow them if they do. This isn’t a moment when we need to have all the answers. All this Gemini New Moon is asking of us is that we get quiet and listen for the truth trying to emerge.
And then that we have the courage to trust the transmission.
