CONFERENCE SCHEDULE

Thursday, October 2, 2025

8:30am-10:15am ​​- Riverwalk and Orientation to Land, Sky, and Place

We will visit the nearby Santa Fe River to honor and orient to the local land, sky, and communities of human beings, plants, animals, elementals, who call this place home.

10:30am-11:45am - Opening Ceremony and Hearth-Making

We will acknowledge the many astrologies and lineages gathering, connect with the conference horoscope, and co-create our centering/restorative space as Vesta rises in Sagittarius.

11:45am-1pm - ​​Free Time / Lunch Provided On Site

1pm-6pm - ​Small Workshops

  • Astrology is an art of divination. Although knowledge of technique is necessary for astrologers to deliver guidance in consideration of stars and symbolism, divination can mysteriously lead us to insights that go beyond technique. Genie and Gray’s workshop will delve into the divinatory nature of astrology and how the act of divination necessitates opening to the liminal. Since this realm is teeming with spirits of all sorts of motivations, we want to enter the imaginal balanced and protected.

    Gray and Genie will begin with a discussion on how divination has involved communion with daimons and intermediary spirits across time in a wide variety of cultures. Inspired by transiting Venus and the South Node of the Moon being near the degree of stars located in the Great Bear constellation during the time of the workshop, Genie and Gray will also discuss the rich history of circumpolar stars functioning as guardian protectors.

    Genie and Gray will then guide participants in creating a collage image of a guardian daimon who will be your protector in divination. This guardian daimon could be an ancestor, a spirit you already work with, or the daimon of a planet or star. Each participant will receive a skeleton key and we will  journey together with our daimon and key to unlock the doorway to the imaginal realm in an oracular exploration.

  • This ritual workshop invokes and explores the moon as a collective and interpersonal tensile intelligence. Using movement as a primary focus and drawing and writing as supportive mediums, participants will engage in a process-oriented journey through emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual lunar landscapes. We will engage with our natal chart lunar placements individually, and then move into a group practice of witnessing each other in a playground of reflective illumination. Come with a basic knowledge of your natal lunar placements. Leave with an expressive and embodied devotion to Luna.

  • When planets relate through squares and oppositions they are said to be working at cross purposes with each other or to be rife with paradox and dynamic tension. But what are the inner images and sensations that arise as a result of that paradox and tension? What might we learn about our wants and needs as a result of allowing this imagery to unfurl? In this workshop we will explore the ways imagination, body and emotions can be particularly articulate communicators, helping us to expand understanding and integrate dissonance. Amanda will introduce methods for illuminating the poetics of squares, t-squares and oppositions in our natal charts through active imagination and somatic exploration. Participants will have opportunities to work with their natal chart configurations independently, in pairs and as a group.

  • The planets reside in, express from, move within our bodies. Our tissues are planetary in nature, stellar songs slowed down just enough to be touched, sliding through linear time with varying degrees of grace and clumsy navigation.

    We are always already subsumed within planetary currents; what happens when we deliberately open to being moved by those currents, intentionally, with curiosity, with an aim to be danced by the dance of the cosmos? This work isn’t about thinking and then enacting Ideas about planets. This is the work of relinquishing control and constrained conceptions in order to feel the planets anew, beginner’s mind and beginner’s body playing with weavings of gravity and meaning.

    In this session, participants will be facilitated through a process of independent & collaborative movement research and embodied play. Music & guided meditation will offer inspirational lubrication; notebook-scrawling will provide additional reflective structures. As this is a movement-prioritizing session, arrive ready to wiggle, frolic, plod, leap, and lay down in ways that are harmonious for your body.

  • Mythic Houses is an exploration of diurnal (or primary) motion through a mythic lens. Together we will journey through the houses in the same progression that the luminaries and planets do each day as they rise, culminate, set, and fall. We will use story as a template to deepen our understanding of each house and how the planets move through the houses, particularly as we feel where we're coming from, where we're going, and how we relate to the heart of the story. Participants will discover meaning from each house through this diurnal journey using discussion, meditation, ritual, movement, and music, and build their own unique understandings through insights from the journey. We will develop a felt sense of diurnal motion, as well as a deeper understanding of each individual house, the sects, angularity, and planetary joys.

Evening - Free Time for Dinner/Connection/Integration

Friday, October 3, 2025

8:30am-9:10am - Somatic Space / Movement Practice - Renee Sills / Steven Sprung

Greet the day and prepare the oracle of your body to receive relational transmissions from land, space and our collective connectivity. We'll work with gentle and adaptive embodiment practices to increase mind/heart/body coherence and energetic awareness, while helping us orient with Earth, elemental energetics and current planetary placements.

9:30am-3:30pm - ​Small Workshops (Lunch Included)

  • We all know that the light of the Moon dances between light & dark & influences the amount of tenderness & nourishment we need & desire at any given time. In this exploration we will look to the light of the Moon in order to play with ways we can all apply "Medical Astrology" in a way that is rooted in embodiment! In this workshop we will converse, engage with, & experience a new way of being with what the Moon has to offer us in a way that opens the pathways to receive the "Soma," or what I like to call the yummy Moon dew juice on an ongoing basis. We will explore movement practices and experiences to work with the Moon and its relationship to the other planetary bodies. Come ready to be nourished with your aliveness, a notebook, and an open heart.

  • As there is a longing for the light, so too is there a longing for the dark. When Persephone was abducted into the underworld, she did more than survive—she transformed. Her journey from maiden to queen reveals the hidden power within life’s darkest initiations. We will explore Persephone’s story alongside a profound truth seen in many spiritual traditions: the divine is incomplete without its counterpart. In Indian cosmology, this is reflected through the pairing of every god with an ideal partner, symbolizing the interdependence of all cosmic forces. This mirrors Persephone’s relationship with Pluto—a dynamic that teaches us about Pluto's initiations: power, surrender, and the transformative potential of partnership.

    Through story, guided self-reflection, and astro-dramatic action methods, we will invoke the archetype of Persephone to access our own partnership with the gods. Bring your stories and open hearts. Together, we’ll co-create a sanctuary of connection, uncovering creative responses to Pluto’s powerful initiations. 

  • Join me for an experiential immersion into the elemental nature of your astrology. Our focus will be on your Sun, Moon and Rising signs through the lens of the four elements; fire, earth air and water. How do these 4 elements and the three pillars of your chart converse and relate to one another? We will explore this through the use of image, music, story and the creative arts to anchor a lasting and tangible understanding within. You will create a hand-made art project that gives visual voice to your experience.

    “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” ~Aristotle

  • In this circle we create a container for expressed Grief and Gratitude with council practice, writing prompts and a stone ritual. We greet Saturn in Pisces conjoined with Neptune and Ceres in Aries and invoke their energies as we explore the human journey of grief and gratitude. We will create an ancestor altar with photos and sacred objects of those guiding us from beyond the veil. Poetry, some movement, and triad sharing will also be included as we dive deep and hold sacred space for one another. 

  • Mars lies poised within us like the reflexes in our bodies: ever ready for action. In this workshop, we will seek to connect with Mars in a way that is both embedded in layers of myth, astronomy, and horoscopy; and embodied in layers of instinct, emotion, and sensation.

    We will begin with an exploration of Mars stories told in Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome. The stories of Nergal, Ares, and Mars speak to crucial questions of Soul in our time, such as experiences of separation, trials, re-incorporation, sickness, violence.  They offer ways of working creatively with impulse and instinct, anger and rage, protection and defense, power and will.

    Once embedded in the stories, we will explore Mars in ways very natural to this creature: using movement, instinct, sensation, and emotion.  In this approach we dream the dreams of the ancients onward.  

    Come with an openness to the possibilities of Mars, and a willingness to move and be moved.  Depart with a richer, more multidimensional, and more instinctual understanding of this remarkable symbol of the Guardian of Night in your own life and in the lives of others.

3:30pm-6:30pm - Free Time for Dinner/Integration

6:30pm-8:30pm - Astrology Playback Theatre and Live Performances

Our Santa Fe astrology playback group will embody archetypes of the current sky as well as aspect stories in the horoscopes of participants. We will also feature two live music/dramatic performances.

Saturday, October 4, 2025

8:30am-9:10am​​ - Somatic Space / Movement Practice - Renee Sills / Steven Sprung

9:30am-3:30pm​ - Small Workshops (Lunch Included)

  • In alchemical terms, Mercury and the Moon are bound together, each reflecting the silvery and perhaps unknowable shadow-light of the universe. Light of the night sky, our inner world and our embodiment, the Moon contains our lived experiences both in this life and others. She holds our memories, both those we are aware of and those that lie implicit in our night consciousness, creating imagery that Mercury translates into stories, profoundly shaping our felt sense of belonging and safety as we move through our worlds, both our vast inner space and the apparent outer reality. Their dance together creates a partnership that weaves a spell through which we relate to life. Yet most of this process is habitual and unconscious.

    Together, we will move into the right-brained imaginal space of the Moon (night consciousness )and Mercury ( twilight consciousness) through the playful relational space of improvisational theatre and collage, bringing part of this implicit field into conscious awareness, opening new thresholds of experience in our relationship with life.

  • Cinderella is a story thought to be over 4,000 years old and has been imagined in many guises from countless cultural contexts. Following the version from the Grimm collection, we will conjure up its images and spend time exploring it from the inside. Cinderella spends most of the story in the ashes by the hearth, covered in soot, but is able to move back and forth to the 'golden ball' via a hazel bush planted on mother's grave that acts as a portal between worlds. How does this relate to the lived experience of the north and south node? And how might the magical helpers who aspect our nodes play pivotal roles in that dance between them?

    This workshop will focus on participatory storytelling and psychodrama to bring elements of our charts to life.

  • In this workshop, we will learn and explore the meaning and experience of what the Third House is all about in astrology. Placing this particular house in the larger context of the birth chat (especially the other "social houses"), we'll work and play together to understand how this house sets the tone for our experience of "you and me" - finding yourself through the Other. How does experiencing relationship bring us close to who we really are? How does this house set us up to play with the felt sense of same/different, familiar/unfamiliar not just with other people, but within ourselves? How does the third house act as the playing field for finding real aspects of who we are outside of ourselves, as well as leading us to the strangeness and "otherness" within?

  • How do we settle, become open, and available energetic arrangements able to receive; come into trusting presence with the sky as intelligent and alive, poetic through pulse and pattern? And how does our body—in all its activated, sensuous, and visceral comportment—support and stabilize this ongoing possibility?

    We will explore these questions while swimming with the Virgo-Pisces nodal current, wondering if their serpentine flow can help to enable, steady and stabilize current of conscious communing. If their dynamic interplay, between immense and minute, can help craft intimacy with all that we experience.

    Our focus will be tending to our physical presence with intentional movement, breathwork, and imaginal journeying—syncopating between enacting processes and reflection—to help grow confidence in somatic subtlety, cultivating two-way tending that is the participatory play of the astrological art.

    Throughout our time, we will be inviting an experience of the body as temple technology, architecting this capacity along the way—reawakening the felt sense of our body as techne, akin to a temple that can engage and commune with skies mysteries as an ongoing, sensuous, reciprocal relationship.

  • Step into a transformative experience where art, animism, and astrology merge through the Ecosystems Method. In this immersive workshop, you’ll decode your natal chart as a living landscape, uncovering the terrains that shape your inner world. Painting your unique ecology reveals your place within the greater biodiversity of a relationship, community or calling. 

    Next, we’ll explore transits as weather systems, shifting the atmosphere of your inner terrain and illuminating patterns of awakening and disruption. Your natal ecology holds an innate intelligence, mirroring the greater natural world—this is an invitation to become one with it.

    Finally, we animate your chart as a vibrant village, where planets become key characters shaping governance, culture, and values. Through this process, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of how astrology reflects the intricate web of life, fostering reverence for nature
    -– and your place within it.

3:30pm-6:30pm - Free Time for Dinner/Integration

6:30pm-8:30pm - Dancing with the Stars: Facilitated Free-Dance

Kate Latimer will lead us in a curated set in the style of Ecstatic Dance and Nia, with planetary prompts and awareness from your own horoscope and from the sky of the moment.

Sunday, October 5, 2025

8:30am-9:10am​ - Somatic Space / Movement Practice - Renee Sills / Steven Sprung

9:30am-3:30pm - ​Small Workshops

  • Exploring, experiencing and creating with wool that is fully saturated with color will help enliven our connection to Neptune in Aries as we dream together under the current sky.

    Playing with tools and materials that we might find in the place of Aries, we’ll both shape and watch emerge the weaves, twists, tensions, bunches, blendings, wisps, curls, knots, frays and contours associated with the different places and people of the current moment, and the ways they might be meeting and relating.

    Amidst this collaborative needle-felting and weaving process, there will be opportunities for us to step into the living, colorful field of this sky and allow our bodies to respond and participate in the conversation.

  • The Imum Coeli as the deepest part of the chart is the darkest part of the forest. But not all forests are equally lit. Some are dappled brightest in the icy depths of winter. Some are so dense, even on a sunny day, the dark-loving fungi thrive. Your IC's ecology might not be a forest at all. It might be scorched sand dunes with burrowed snakes, arctic tundra with foxes hunting the quiestest prey, a cozy suburb with stray dandelions and territorial squirrels, the unknown reaches of an ocean trench, mystery abounding.

    Come gather with Pallas and a small crew of other seekers to get to know your IC ecosystem through offerings of guided imaginal exploration, quiet writing prompts, and more lively sharing. Grounded in connection with our wisest ancestors and the lands of our home(s), we'll explore ways of being with our IC that are ecological and relational, embodied and storied, understanding anew the tether which roots us no matter where—or who—we are.

  • There is something inside that is speaking; see if you can hear it. 

    What do Jungian complex theory, parts work/therapy, and astrology have in common? Multiplicity. If you’ve ever argued with yourself, you know what we mean. In this workshop, we’re exploring and embracing our multiplicity. 

    The work of a mature, stable ego adulthood is to develop a conversation with Self. Self meaning the whole of oneself, not just conscious but unconscious. Tending to the emissaries of the unconscious (parts) is a way of studying the ordering principle of life. The ordering principle of life is always operating, and we catch glimpses of its action in synchronicities (movement of planets and activities on earth), of dreams, sensations, parts, urges, ecstatic dance, fairy tales, myth, the expressions of children…anyplace we are unedited.

    In this workshop, you’ll learn experiential ways of interacting with the unconscious that you can use to deepen your personal practice and your client work. The birth chart is a doorway to a more intimate connection with the unconscious, and combined with art, active imagination, ritual, and inquiry, it really comes to life. Whenever we engage ethically with our internal world voices, movements, values, and sensations, we enter into a process that brings us not to perfection but wholeness. It brings us to a fuller experience of what it is to be not just a good human but a full human, THIS human. To be MORE ourselves and more at home in ourselves every day.

  • Many consulting astrologers are familiar with the experience of client sessions and natal chart readings opening portals to subtle realms where information flows from spiritual, ancestral and/or unknown sources. We may have our formulas, techniques and ideas about where to start a reading, how to follow threads, schematics of planetary influence and importance etc., but there is often a strange ‘something else’ present in relational space with clients that transcends any mental logic of formulaic calculations we otherwise employ. 

    This session explores these otherwise ways of knowing and the liminal spaces of energetic interrelationship, channeling and mediumship through engaging practices that consciously connect our mental logic, intuitive/psychic organs and felt sense in connection with others, in this realm and beyond. Through zodiacal body system-mapping, glandular activation, prayer, invocation and conscious communion with astral dimensions, we’ll encounter each other’s charts as vehicles for multisensory information that “speak” through the oracles of our bodyminds.

    This session aims explicitly to expand the divinatory toolkits of consulting astrologers, but it is open to anyone with a basic foundation in astrological symbolism and some amount of practice delineating planets, signs, houses and aspects. Please come prepared to share your natal chart, with a printed or digital image.

4:30pm-6:30pm - Closing and Integration

We will honor all who have participated in our time together, and support one another in resourcing, integration, and transition.

Additional Optional No-Cost Events

Pre-Conference Virtual Meeting and Story Circle (Date TBA)

All attendees are invited to this gathering 2-3 weeks before the conference to meet each other, feel into the event together, and to be part of a story circle with two practitioners of experiential astrology active since the 1970s and 1980s, Brian Clark (author of Soul, Symbol, and Imagination: The Art of Astrology, among others) and Melanie Reinhart (author of Chiron and the Healing Journey among others).

Pre-Conference Case Colloquium - All Welcome (October 1)

Students in the Hermes-Hestia Center practicum program will present on their practicum projects — varying forms of experiential astrology with individuals and groups — both through discussion of work with clients as well as brief experientials for us to experience their work directly.

Experiential Yom Kippur Ritual - All Welcome (Just Before Sunset, October 2)

The first day of the conference happens to fall on Yom Kippur, the highest holy day in the Jewish calendar. Moshe Ovadia will lead an experiential land- and body-based journey to honor this tradition. Through the astrological archetypes and the sky of the moment, all interested are invited to join in invoking our own “holy of holies” for realignment, renewal, and grace.