Guest: Lauren Donelson Jones — Certified IFS Therapist & Astrologer
Up-Coming Virtual Event [Free]:
Chart Roulette
[Apr 18, 2026 12:00 PM CT · Virtual via Zoom]
Bring your chart. KP reads it live. The wheel decides who goes first — which is another way of saying: the planets decide. Fast, candid, and probably illuminating in ways you didn’t expect.
Astrology tells you which parts are about to knock. IFS is what you do when they knock.
Lauren Donelson Jones has been running both systems together for five years, and she came on to explain how.
About Our Guest
Lauren Donelson Jones is a licensed marriage and family therapist and IFS-certified practitioner based in Portland, Oregon. She works at the intersection of Internal Family Systems therapy, astrology, and somatic and psychedelic-assisted modalities — bringing chart work and depth psychological practice into the same room. She studied astrology with Kelly Surtees and completed IFS Level 2 certification through the IFS Institute. She sees clients in person in Portland and virtually across Oregon and Washington. Find her at laurendonelsontherapy.com.
“If someone hands you a map, you’re not going to heal yourself with a map. It’s not the greatest healing tool. But a map is still incredibly valuable.”
— Lauren Donelson Jones
Where do either of these modalities differ?
Astrology gives you a chart, or a map of a person but it can’t do any healing. The map is not the healing. It tells you the weather, names the terrain, shows you which parts are likely to surface and when. But handing someone a map of their inner life isn’t the same as walking them through it. Lauren uses astrology to know what to expect and IFS to meet what actually shows up. Neither swallows the other. That’s the whole thing — and it’s more useful than any single system trying to do everything.
What This Episode Is Actually About
Whether you can borrow a framework’s insights without borrowing its authority. Two systems, same interior territory, completely different languages — and what happens when someone is fluent in both and refuses to flatten them. Also: the Mars-Uranus conjunction this summer, and why Lauren is not going into prepper mode but is also not leaving the house on the Fourth of July.
Also In This Episode
Why a Pluto transit and a trauma-processing season feel structurally identical — and how naming the astrology helps Lauren’s parts stop catastrophizing about the timeline
A self-led Capricorn Sun will always look different from a self-led Aries Sun. What does that mean for anyone who thinks self-energy has one texture?
Can a planet be in fall and also be fine? (Lauren says yes. KP, who has her Sun in fall in the 10th house, felt personally seen.)
Chelsea on the IFS practitioner’s goal of not having an agenda or attachment to an outcome — and why holding the chart might actually be holding curiosity, not conclusions
Going to grad school during your Saturn return, finding IFS, and realizing the two things you already believed had a name and a framework the whole time
One tradition requires students to spend years watching the sky before they’re allowed to look at any data. KP wishes she’d started that way. We all kind of do.
New episodes every week. Find us, subscribe, and leave a review if something caught you somewhere unexpected: partsandcharts.substack.com.
The map didn’t heal you. But you did keep it.
Work With Us
Lauren Donelson Jones
Certified IFS Therapist & Astrologer
Lauren integrates Hellenistic astrology and IFS therapy in her private practice — five years in, and she’s been doing it long enough that most of her clients come in already wanting both. She’s also co-leading the Embodied Self Energy Retreat in Costa Rica this September: a week of group process, individual IFS work, plant medicine, and — if the timing holds — whales visible from the beach. Find her and retreat details at laurendonelsontherapy.com.
https://www.laurendonelsontherapy.com/retreat ⤵️
KP Kaszubowski
Hellenistic Astrologer & APM Educator
KP offers Hellenistic chart readings and Astro Parts Method practice sessions — one-on-one work that uses active imagination to meet the planets as inner figures. If you want to know what your chart is actually asking of you, this is where to start.
Chelsea Owens
LMFT & IFS Level 3 Certified
Chelsea offers individual IFS therapy sessions. She’s a licensed marriage and family therapist and art therapist with Level 3 IFS certification — rigorous, warm, and not at all self-help-y.
Key Quotes
LAUREN DONELSON JONES
“If someone hands you a map, you’re not going to heal yourself with a map. But a map is still incredibly valuable.”
— Lauren Donelson Jones, Parts & Charts S2E3
“For me, therapy has always been spiritual.”
— Lauren Donelson Jones, Parts & Charts S2E3
KP KASZUBOWSKI
“What makes something valid is such a white supremacist European thought process. Where do we find the authority in ourselves? If it’s true that I feel this about a placement, that is the evidence.”
— KP Kaszubowski, Parts & Charts S2E3
CHELSEA OWENS
“There’s always a little bit of an underlying agenda because we’re trying to heal. But we can have all of that knowledge and still go in with pure curiosity and see where the client’s parts take us.”
— Chelsea Owens, Parts & Charts S2E3
“When I experienced IFS for the first time, I had this aha moment — I didn’t even know therapy could feel like this. Like I’m getting a psychic reading. Like I’m on a psychedelic journey.”
— Chelsea Owens, Parts & Charts S2E3
Credits:
Music “Vape Juice Dave’s Bistro” composed by Scott Cary (Wild Western Avenue) for the feature film RINGOLEVIO (2020) directed by KP Kaszubowski - performed by Scott Cary, Max Wikoff, Else Albeck Gasparka, and Sarah Luther
The cover image is a collage by Chelsea Owens.
