Astrology of the Week Ahead with Chani Nicholas - The Week of December 23rd, 2024: A planetary progress report

Episode Date: December 23, 2024

Episode 210 In this podcast, New York Times best-selling author and astrologer Chani Nicholas discusses the astrology of the week and what it might mean for us all. The astrology of the week of December 23rd, 2024, is all about sustainable growth. Jupiter (the planet of abundance) gets into a tug-of-war with Saturn (the planet of limits). This moment calls us to consider the progress we’ve made over the past four years — and our plans for the next four. Then Mercury (the messenger planet) sparks conversations about how we can turn those dreams into reality. In all, the next seven days feature expansion and contraction in equal measure and spur us into the next phase of our evolution. Let’s get into it. This episode covers: The Sun’s square to the lunar nodes on Monday, December 23rd Jupiter’s square to Saturn on Tuesday, December 24th Mercury’s opposition to Jupiter on Thursday, December 26th Mercury’s square to Saturn on Thursday, December 26th Venus’ square to Uranus on Friday, December 27th This episode was recorded on 10/23/2024. For more, check out your free daily horoscope on the homepage of the CHANI app — now on iOS and Android. The music featured in the podcast was created by Latashá.

Hi, the following episode of the astrology of the week ahead was taped before I knew the election results in the United States of America. So if things sound aggressively positive, given the situation, that's why. I needed to get ahead of the game so that our team could go on winter break and things could happen in an orderly fashion. And this is what happens sometimes. So I hope that the astrology still lands in a really helpful way. I just don't want you to ever think that I don't take an incoming fascist leader seriously. I take the situation that we're in exceptionally seriously. I think it's going to require all of us to do everything we can in every single moment that we can do it. And I'm here with you. We are in community together and I just

didn't want to have you thinking like, wow, is this so spiritually bypassy and has Channy totally lost the plot? I haven't. I'm with you. And in the new year, we're going to be doing episodes much closer to the time we actually air them. But until then, please enjoy and see how the astrology lands as I'm talking about it without knowing the type of world we're moving into. I hope you enjoy the episode. What happened December of 2020 for you? Hello and welcome. This is the Astrology of the Week Ahead podcast. I'm your Astro Bestie, also the host of this podcast. I am Channie Nicholas and I am here to talk to you about what has gone on. over the past four years.

Okay, look, no one wants to think about December of 2020 because we were deep in a pandemic. It was a lonely, long, long night that wasn't going to end anytime soon. We're still in a pandemic. COVID is still a thing. Here we are. It's different times have changed, but, you know, we find ourselves forever changed because of what happen in 2020. The thing that I'm talking about in December of 2020 was when Jupiter and Saturn made a conjunction. We called it the Great Conjunction. And if you remember this, media picked it up,

spread it around quite a bit. But it was gorgeous. It was this phenomenal astronomical event. It was like this really special coming together of Jupiter and Saturn in a way that It was just gorgeous in the night sky. I'll never forget being able to see it. Now, that was the conjunction. It is a great conjunction. It is a big effing deal conjunction. It was the first time these two were coming together in an exact conjunction in an air

sign for a couple of a few hundred years. So it is the beginning of a brand new cycle. Now, what happens in astrology is there's an inception point, there's a conception point, there's a coming together point, it is called the conjunctions when two things come to the exact same degree. That is the beginning of something. It's like when the sun and moon come to the same degree, it is a new moon phase, right? It is a phase of new beginnings. So Jupiter and Saturn in terms of, you know, many different astrologies is a point of beginning for the world. Like it is world astrology. It's not just like,

Like personally, what began in December of 2020, it is like, okay, what new kind of global time period are we entering? So it's a big deal for many different reasons. For us here in this conversation, obviously we can think of what was happening politically in 2020 and who had just won an election here in the United States. Now we're at the point of another election cycle four years later. The reason why I'm bringing all this up is because when Jupiter and Saturn came together in December of 2020 and made that connection, it took them four years to come to a point,

an arc, a moment that is a 90-degree angle. And that is what is happening now this week, December of 2024. It also happened in August of 2024. It happened in August already. And it was a big deal. You know, I'm not trying to just talk about American politics, but obviously it was the DNC. It was the week of the DNC. Huge deal.

Kind of wild, never before, you know, seen moment for this country for the DNC in general. And that was the mark of the first opening square. So now we're at the second square. It's the same square, but it's just like the planets kind of go back and forth, and then they come back into exact alignment. And there will be another square that happens in 2025 between Saturn and Jupiter, but it will happen in different signs. So it'll have a little bit of a different style to it.

It'll still be the closing chapter of this scenario. But this is the last square that Jupiter and Saturn will be doing from Gemini, which is where Jupiter is, and Pisces, which is where Saturn is. Okay. So we've got the second square of three, but the last one that's going to happen from these signs. And this is astrology that's happening on the 24th of December. So, you know, a lot of people, a lot of businesses, a lot of the world, maybe that's

unfair to say. some countries in the world, some continents in the world are kind of quiet around that time. So I'm not saying that anything spectacular necessarily is going to happen on this day, on the 24th or the 25th. But I'm just saying that this is the last square that these two planets are going to do in these signs. So this week just feels like, okay, are we getting somewhere? and the vibe with Saturn and Jupiter is this. Jupiter wants to open everything up. It's the big huge inhale and it's the big expansive yes. And Saturn wants to close it down and narrow us

towards a choice. It is the exhale. So there's an expansion and contraction with this kind of astrology. Now, what does that mean for us? Well, it means we have to pick a lane. We have to pick a situation. There is a kind of decision that happens or a honing in or there's a consequence that occurs with this kind of astrology because Saturn is involved. There's often a feeling of something consequential occurring or coming into form and shape and structure. And it just so happens that Mercury on the 26th, the planet of communication, yop, yaping. It makes an opposition with Jupiter and a square to Saturn on the 26th of December. So there's just a lot of talk about this.

There's a lot of conversations. There's many conversations happening this week about what our options are and what they are not, what choosing a direction looks like, and what too many options can lead to. So we're trying to pick a lane. We're trying to find some way to focus. And we're also looking at what happened in our personal life back in December of 2020. We can do that. I mean, back in 2020, we started this company in this iteration.

I had had an astrology business for a long time. But we launched the Chani app in December of 2020. And four years later, I can see like the shape of the company has definitely taken form and structure. And we've had to make a lot of different decisions. There's not so many things that we want to do as a company. There's a million dreams that we have for the company. This is just like, feels like the very, very, very beginning. But we have to make decisions, right?

We have to shape things. We can't do everything at once. We don't take VC funding, for example. We don't use AI, for example. We don't believe in the negative environmental imprint that AI, makes on the planet, so we don't want to be an app that does that. So that means that we have to do things in a slower kind of way. We don't believe in being beholdent to shareholders or to people that fund us that have different values than we do. So we don't take outside funding. We own the

business completely. I'm saying all this to say, like, those decisions shape our growth. And we can't just do like growth at astronomical rates because we have to actually work within the reality of the What is the company doing? How is the company doing? That shapes our ability to grow and expand and to make the decisions that we need to make in order to keep growing in a way that's realistic for us. And that's also not in a way that is against our values, right? Like we don't believe in urgency culture. So I record these things months in advance because I'm not going to make my team edit it and release it the day before it's due, right? Like we want to work in a way that's conducive to cycles of rest and recovery. We are actually, when you hear this, the office has closed. It's closed for

the last two weeks of December and the first two weeks of January. We take a full month off in order to rest and reset as a company. I'm saying all this because for you, for you, years ago. We didn't do that. Four years ago, it was Sonia, my wife and CEO of this company, business partner, life partner. We worked around the clock. We and two other, three other staff people, we had like, there was none of us. There were so few of us. And we were doing everything all day long, every day, never taking a break. And then we slowly built this company. and we slowly created a system where the system of the company and the system of everybody working in the company has time to reset. We take a month off at the end of the year.

We take spring break off. We take two weeks off in July. We make sure that we shut down as a company so that everyone can go away and do their thing. And that's something that we've created over the last four years. We didn't have that in the beginning. We had none of that. We had no work balance, no life balance. We just worked, worked, worked, worked.

So over the span of these four years, I've learned so much about running a company. I've learned so much about how to show up, how not to show up. I've made so many mistakes. I have just been humbled tremendously. I've overworked. I've not worked enough. You know, like I've gone through. the gamut. I've gone through all of the extremes because of the fact that we decided to

begin something and then use these four years shaping it. And again, we're far from over. I feel like we're just beginning. But that's the thing with what we call this opening square, this opening first quarter square, is it is indicative of the ways in which you've learned how to grow the thing that you planted four years ago for this cycle. What did you plant four years ago? How is it starting to emerge and show itself as a viable thing? And now what is it telling you about the shape of it, about where it's going to go? Because in another four years, Jupiter and Saturn are going to come to an opposition, which is like a full moon point. And that's what reveals the potential of everything.

And so that's where we're going. And so it's like, okay, well, if I've got four years from now, the next four years, what do I want to build towards? And so we're kind of at this halfway point between 2020 and 28 with the Jupiter-Saturn opposition. And we think of these larger chunks of time and how we want to work with them. Yes, as a globe, as a collective, as a community, or many communities, but also in your personal life. So if you listen to your reading, this week in the Chiani app, we talk about where the decision is being made in your chart. And, you know, Jupiter wants everything, especially in Gemini.

It wants all options open. It wants to pontificate upon everything. It wants to be curious and follow every lead and be overwhelmed by details and facts and interesting tidbits. And Saturn is there to be like, pay attention. Listen, we only have so much time. what do you want to do with it? And this week is one of those weeks that offers that kind of wisdom. So some of you might be with family, some of you might be celebrating a holiday or two.

A lot of us will be in a lot of different places. Again, it is the time of year where things do get a little quieter. And it might be just that really good time, especially from the 24th to the 26, to ask ourselves since 2020, December 2020 to now. what have I developed? What have I grown? And what is the kind of critical choice or what are the critical choices that I need to make here and now in order to keep building along the lines that I eventually want to see really pronounced? Think of in four years in 2028, there's going to be an exclamation point of everything that we've been building in this particular cycle. So, if that resonates with you, take a listen to your reading this week, but also just listen to

the information that's coming in, especially on the 26th because there's a lot of really important conversations about what we want to grow and what we need to curb where the inhale is and where the exhale is. We can't birth anything without a contraction, right? We can't birth anything without getting something out. And moving something out in the world is saying, okay, I've got to limit it. This is it. It's cooked.

It's done. It's baked. This is all I've got. I've got to move it out. And so this is one of those weeks that teaches us about that in some way, shape, or form. Okay. The only other two things about this week is that on the 23rd, the sun makes a square with the nodes.

the sun is in Capricorn, of course. We just had the solstice. We just had the solstice on Saturday the 21st. And so it immediately makes a square with the nodes on Monday the 23rd. And that is like a kind of critical moment. We're halfway between eclipses. Three months ago, there was eclipses, three months from now there will be eclipses. And again, it might feel like this week has a couple of different crossroads. This is a really mild transition, the sun moving through a square to the nodes, but I think it kind of emphasizes the square between Jupiter and Saturn, if you will. And then another square. So there's a lot of friction this week. There's a lot of like activation. There's a lot of us wanting to move into some kind of action or make some kind of choice

or be like, huh, okay, this is, I think, the direction I need to go in. There's activity this week. And I'm not saying you should be busy. I'm not saying you should work. I'm not saying you should overwhelm your schedule yourself with anything. But it does feel like internally, there's a, I think a positive agitation, right? An agitation to be like, what do I need to cut? What do I need to grow? Where am I inhaling? Where am I exhaling? Where am I pivoting to? What am I growing into? And it's all in preparation for the new year, right? We've just passed the solstice. next week we'll have the new moon on Monday the 30th we'll have a new moon in Capricorn so there's a lot of closing down opening up kind of energy in the air on the 27th we have Venus square Uranus

which might agitate relationship issues it might be a moment where we are extra annoyed with the things that come up in our relationship dynamics maybe we need to just leave early. You know, we might not want to stay at the party or stay at the gathering or stay at the thing for longer than we know is good for us. When you need to leave, go leave. We will all need a little extra space this week. So give it to yourself. Give it to other people. Let's grant ourselves some room to breathe, shall we? I think it's a good idea. All right, y'all, I'm so excited to let you know that we finally have sleep stories in the app for so long. People have been telling me, and I've tried not to be offended, that my voice puts them

to sleep. It's fine. But really, people listen to my meditations. I have a whole library of meditations in the Chani app. If you don't know, they listen to them to go to sleep. So we were like, you know what? We should just create like 45 minute long sound escaped sleep. sleep stories in the app. And we have done just that. We made a sleep story for every traditional

planet. So from the sun all the way to Saturn, I take you on a journey. I take you on an expedition. We go to the temples of each of these planets. We had such a good time creating these. I'm just so excited to have them in the app. This is the time of year to work on our sleep. You know what I'm saying? this is the time of year to be like, I'm going to put my sleep first because if I sleep well, every other thing in my life can go well. But if I don't sleep well, my functioning, my executive functioning, my brain computer, all the things, it doesn't work. You know, like if you don't sleep well, it's the same as being intoxicated. And we sometimes can't sleep for a very good reason. and sleep stories are something that have helped me be able to go to sleep.

I listen to things every night when I go to sleep. So I like hearing somebody tell me a story. So I wanted to tell you stories. So we put sleep stories in the app because we love you and we appreciate you. And we wanted to give you a little gift for the solstice for this time of year for the benefit of your health and your well-being. Okay. Now I'm going to answer one question from the audience. We've been doing this every week. Let me know if you like it. I wanted to answer this question right now because we just went through the sun changing signs. So when the sun is at zero degrees of Capricorn, we go through the solstice. So somebody wrote in to ask, what does it mean if my son is at zero degrees of a sign? And I love this question because it's a really potent moment. The sun has just. change. It's just moved into a new sign. It has a brand new quality. So I don't really at all

believe in being the cusp of something. I don't think that if you're zero degrees of Sagittarius, you're also kind of a Scorpio. That's not how astrology works to me. Now, other astrologers can fight me all day long and I appreciate other people's takes on things. I really do. I don't think like I am right. It's just this is the way I do astrology because in traditional astrology, every single degree of the zodiac is meaningful. There's correlations that happen. Different planets rule different sections of each sign. There is a tarot card associated with different degrees of each sign. There are different ways of viewing each degree of each sign. So I think it's important if you are zero degrees of something or if you're 29 degrees of

something. I don't think that puts your sun in the next sign. But I will say this. Venus and Mercury are always traveling really close to the sun. So if you have the sun at zero degrees or at 29 degrees or close to that of any sign, you could very likely have Mercury and Venus in the sign before just after it, making you feel like a fill in the blank, whatever sign you think you're on the cusp of. Like, you could have other planets in that sign that are influencing the way you express yourself. But wherever your son is is where your son is. Everything I believe in the sky, the moment you were born, is there on purpose and it has a specific meaning. It's not like a little of this and a little of that. It is specific to what it is. That's what I believe. So if you're zero degrees of a sign,

that means that the sun has just shifted into a whole new thing. It's gone from being at the end of something where it can get like, you know, a little tired and it can be at a moment of like, ooh, everything's about to change to the change itself. It is in a way, I don't want to say pure form of the sign because that's not really true. What I want to say is it is emergent, right? It is very much that sign. It is the initiation of that sign and of that sun sign season. So there's nothing weird or odd about having your son at any degree. There's nothing weird or odd about anyone's chart. There's no such thing as a weird or odd chart. Every moment of time is a crystallization of the meaning of that moment. And so

every person's chart is a crystallization of the meaning of their life. And it just is. It's not weird. It's just is what was happening at that time. And it describes the conditions of your life. So it depends on what zero degree of whatever sign it is that you are born under. And it'll tell you a lot of different things. And there's a lot of different ways to look at each degree of the zodiac that can give you, more meaning. So always more to learn. There's so much depth to each and every single placement. But I would just say like take it seriously, wherever your son is, zero degrees, 29 degrees. Take that sign seriously. And then look to see, do you have Mercury and Venus in the next sign over or the sign before? And that will again color the ways in which you self-express or the

ways in which you experience yourself in the world. All right. I'm sending lots of love. Come back next week. We'll talk about the new moon and Capricorn. It's so productive. It's so responsible. It's so reliable. It wants to help you make mind maps. It wants to help you get yourself together for 2025. 2025 is a year of extraordinary change, y'all. So many planets are changing signs. Saturn is changing signs. Neptune is changing signs. Uranus is changing signs. Pluto has just changed signs and Jupiter every year, but it will also change signs. It's so big. There's so many new beginnings that we're going through. So come back and let's talk about how to prepare for this new moon. How to work with it. How to work with this next year.

Sending lots of love. Bye for now.