02/27/2026
On astrology, AI, and politicized somatics, from last week's newsletter:
Oh man y'all... we got buried again - just like my altar in this photo. How can we keep our head above the snow? As I add some spring offerings to the mix, in this newsletter, I'm trying to remember daylight savings is right around the corner, soon we'll have longer days and more light. And there are big changes astrologically speaking, too...
ZZZZZZZT! The record might scratch right here, for you, as soon as I mention the stars. So let me pause and add an aside for the skeptics in the house:
SKEPTICS! I FEEL YOU!
AND this is how I've managed the resistance I've learned from this culture's fixation on rationality and scientific proof, which sets itself above other ways of knowing. We kinda need to interrogate what this thrall to the forebrain has taken from us. Cross-culturally, looking to the sky is one technology for humans to find their way. We who have largely forgotten how to use the stars - who can't even navigate our way home with them - could cultivate a little humility with what we do and don't know. It might be important, given the dissolution of the systems this way of knowing has birthed, to open to forms of wisdom and guidance that existed for thousands of years prior. Rant over.
So the astrology this week has been major! We're living through an astrological threshold that feels less like a doorway and more like a tectonic shift. From what I understand from Mindy Nettifee and Chani Nicholas, if we're to handle all the stuff that's about to go down in watery Pisces, we're going to need practices that anchor us without hardening us. Saturn and Neptune move through this fishy sign, dissolving old certainties even as they ask for spiritual maturity. The atmosphere is electric and oceanic at once: lightning striking the sea. Saturn/Neptune in Pisces is like a reality check on what's real, AND an amplification of our longing for transcendence - an everything everywhere all at once kinda feeling. Maybe a little bit like the endless snow this winter that offers stillness and beauty, even as it totally f***s with all the systems we rely on.
Speaking of systems, Pluto is settling into Aquarius for the long arc ahead, meaning that deep currents of power, technology, community, and collective imagination are being rewired. The hidden circuitry of our societal structures are coming into view for review. The architectures of surveillance, the myth of neutrality in technology, the brittle hierarchies disguised as progress... we've got a long way to go, baby. From what I've learned, this astrological signature insists on a kind of collective reckoning. Aquarius dreams of liberation, but Pluto is the underworld planet, and it demands we confront the shadow threaded through every utopian vision. Like, a big nope to dreamy bypassing? Even as we're buried in a blanket that keeps us inside? It's COMPLICATED!
So maybe we're feeling both exhilarated and unmoored, as if the future is arriving faster than we can metabolize. And it is! So we each need a practice, as Rev. Kyodo Williams assures us, if we are to catch our bodies up to speed in meeting this moment. There's the temptation to numb out (Neptune is the dreamy and maybe slightly escapist planet, but also a good source for out-of-the-box innovative thinking), so we need to cultivate devotion to what we care about, to our purpose, without delusion. We're asked to cultivate discernment without cynicism, and opinionated superiority. Sometimes I feel like a broken record. It's not enough to think differently, we have to FEEL differently! But you know how you heard that yoga cue for like 10 years before your body had any idea what it meant? I'm thinking of, like, "hollow your armpits." And then one day you're in a handstand (or preparing for one) and you're like "OH!" Sometimes we need to hear something 50,000 different ways and then one day something clicks. So I'll keep trying to articulate this:
A politicized somatic practice understands the body not as a private escape hatch, but as a living archive of the past and our only canvas on which to paint the future (to mix my metaphors). Our muscles hold the memory of institutions. Our fascia is drawn together according to culturally-inherited patterns. Our breathing apparatus encodes adaptation to surveillance, scarcity, and control. To practice somatics politically is to recognize that regulation is not merely self-care; it's required homework, in terms of our preparation for liberation. Somatic work teaches us to track sensation, to differentiate blind fear from wise intuition, and collapse from surrender. It builds our capacity to stay present in ambiguity. Instead of dissociating in the face of vast change, we learn to widen our window of tolerance to staying in and with our bodies, as they ARE not as we will them into looking. And the work we do together refuses to approach healing as an individual achievement, appropriate only for therapy spaces. Solidarity might be more physiological than ideological - the feeling of being human among humans is more about the syncing of hearbeats than matching up opinions. In a time when technology mediates so much of our connection, returning to breath, to gravity, to the simple fact of shared space becomes radical.
Someone from Shiné (Cyane) sent me that NYT interview with Michael Pollen about what AI is teaching us about consciousness, and reorienting our definition of what it is to be human. If machines can think, are we more like intelligence machines, or are we more like feeling, breathing animals? Embodied practice rehumanizes us. We practice grounding transformation in the body. Why? Because we know we need embodiment more than analysis, if connection is the key to change! Hope some of these winter-to-spring offerings can help us practice presence - awake in our flesh, accountable to one another, and responsive to whatever this month brings. I'm so sad I'm not going to see you tomorrow morning. Hit me up if you think we should reboot our zoom room so we can convene for online practice, when necessary. Love you all, good luck in the white stuff...
Check out the website for March offerings like:
-Somatics for Expanded States
-Repatterning Domination; Reviving Mysticism
-Fireside Restorative w/ Hands-on Healing
-Body/Mind Centering with Nicole Bindler
-Somatics for the Givers (Wednesdays at 5)
https://www.katyhawkins.com/upcoming-workshops.html
