You’re listening to PART ONE of our Astro 201 Episode about The Moon with Shadow Work Coach Ashley Abubakar .
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The night the Titanic hit the iceberg, the moon was new. KP looked it up on a hunch — she’d been watching the movie with Marty, who was doing his filmmaker thing, narrating what the shot got wrong — and something in her thought, what if there just wasn’t any light? And there wasn’t. A new moon means the moon is on the other side of us, dark side toward Earth, the night sky returned to its older, harder version of itself. They were going too fast. The watch was understaffed. Plenty of things went wrong. But also: nobody could see.
This is a small story and the episode is full of them, because the moon is not, finally, a metaphor. It’s a body. It pulls at the tides, it lights the road, it disappears for three days a month and the disappearance has consequences. Sailors used to know not to leave port on it. KP’s dad used to call the slim crescent God’s fingernail — like God was up there grooming, like the cosmos had a body too. That’s the register the episode keeps returning to. The moon as something you can actually look at. The moon as a fact before it’s a feeling.
Three women, three moons, one room. Ashley with her Sagittarius moon at the bottom of her chart, in the fourth house, the most private room in the building. Chelsea with her Leo moon in the first, the body itself, the front door. KP with her Cancer moon in the seventh, the house of the other, where the moon — which is at home in Cancer — gets to do its full job in relation to whoever’s across the table. None of them got to choose. Each of them, asked to describe how they meet their own moon, gave an answer that sounded nothing like the others.
About our guest
Ashley Abubakar is a shadow work coach and the founder of Moonshadow, a shadow work community structured around the rhythm of the lunar cycle. KP and Chelsea both met Ashley through the Tarot Book Club; the three of them call themselves the coven.
Find Ashley and Moonshadow on Substack: joinmoonshadow.substack.com
Ashley always looked at the moon to find her way back to herself. Growing up in a household that was sometimes loud and sometimes — as she puts it — stoically quiet, she needed a compass home, and the moon was the one thing she could count on to be there. Now she runs Moonshadow, a shadow work community structured around the lunar cycle. A Sagittarius moon at the bottom of the chart will do that — make a woman who loves to be alone build a community of people who love to be alone, then call them in twice a month at the new and full. The episode names the rare quiet of this: a mutual reception in her chart between Jupiter in Cancer and the moon in Sagittarius, two planets sitting in each other’s signs, doing for each other what neither could do alone. Like Matt and Ben, Chelsea offers. The most supportive partnership. The ride or die.
Chelsea has the Leo moon in the first, which means the body is the front of the house, and the body has not always been an easy place to live. She talks, gently, about the 90s, about Kate Moss, about the long project of un-learning what a body is supposed to look like. Her moon is in tense conversation with Pluto across the chart — the planet of what cannot be said, the power dynamics that move through a culture without anyone naming them — and there’s a sentence in the episode that lands with surprising weight: that’s why this stuff is harder for me to language. She tried to meet her moon in a guided meditation the night before recording and got a blank. The thinking mind kept rushing in to fill the silence. The moon, pre-verbal, didn’t take the bait.
KP’s Cancer moon is unaspected — in conversation with no other planet in her chart — which sounds like a deficit and isn’t. It means the moon does her job without negotiation. The moon is changeable by nature: a different face every night, the only celestial body whose appearance to us is its actual mood. A Cancer moon, KP says, has a consistency to her changing. She’s good at letting new information move through her body and out again, the way the tide does, the way grief does, the way any honest emotion does when it isn’t being held back at the door. This is also why she sits in a room of people and starts editing a podcast in her head before the recording is over.
What the three of them keep circling is the same observation, said in different vocabularies. The moon is how the body knows what it knows before the mind has caught up. A fire moon needs to move. An air moon needs to talk. An earth moon needs the idea made into something you can hold — Play-Doh, dinner, a folded shirt. A water moon lets the tide come in and trusts that it will also go out. None of these are personality types. They’re descriptions of how a particular body returns to itself. All energies of us must be expressed, Ashley said in another conversation. The moon is the one that won’t let you skip the step.
Near the end, Ashley describes meeting her moon in a guided meditation. The moon arrived dressed like Stevie Nicks, in a corner office on the top floor of a building in some city, an authority Ashley hasn’t quite reached yet but knows is hers. She’s the shadow I’m aspiring to be, Ashley says. Sometimes I have this ability to connect with her, and I’m always like, how do I get there? Of course the Sagittarius moon’s inner authority lives at the top of a tall building. Of course the path to her requires the elevator, the ascent, the willingness to keep going up. Of course Stevie Nicks. The chart had been saying it the whole time; Ashley just got to meet the woman saying it.
There’s more to say about the Cancer moon, which the episode runs out of time for, which is honestly fitting. The Cancer moon is the original to be continued. She’ll come back next week. She always does ;)
After listening to this ep, do you also want to go inward and meet your Moon figure? Here’s the link to get your own Meet Your Moon audio course made by KP Kaszubowski : https://kpkaszu.gumroad.com/l/meetyourmoon
Check back next week to hear more about Ashley, Chelsea, and KP’s Moon meeting experiences 😎
Also in this episode
Why the moon was historically a masculine entity — and what shifted with Carl Jung and Robert Graves
The case for sailing on a full moon, illustrated by a hunch about the Titanic
Mutual reception, explained via Matt and Ben
Why a moon in the fourth house is built for shadow work — and why a Sagittarius fourth-house moon builds a community of people who love to be alone
What it means when your moon goes blank in meditation, and why that’s information
The 28-day moon cycle and the 28-year Saturn cycle, side by side — and what KP finds awe-inspiring about the symmetry
Air moons need conversation; earth moons need things made material; water moons let the tide carry them; fire moons need to move
A quick parenting note for Sagittarius moons raising a Virgo moon child
Quotes
“I have always looked to the moon for a type of peace and quiet and serenity and almost like a compass back home.” — Ashley Abubakar
“Sometimes I’ll just be outside during the day and through the very corner of my eye, something will catch and I’ll be like — what’s that? And I’ll always be able to find the moon.” — Chelsea Owens
“What if the moon was new and that’s why they didn’t see the iceberg? And I looked it up. It was a new moon.” — KP Kaszubowski
“She’s always the shadow that I’m aspiring to be. Sometimes I have this ability to connect with her, and I’m always like, how do I get there?” — Ashley Abubakar, on meeting her moon
“It really is a profession that I’ve decided to take has helped me communicate my feelings a lot more. But as a child, I was very quiet and very private.” — Ashley Abubakar
“Pluto in conversation with the moon — that’s the planet of what cannot be said. The power dynamics moving through a culture that we can all feel even when we don’t have discrete evidence.” — KP Kaszubowski
Work With Us
Hellenistic astrologer · Astro Parts Work · poet
KP offers Hellenistic chart readings that treat the birth chart as a map of the psyche’s inner figures — not a verdict, a conversation starter. She’s also currently accepting a small number of practice clients for her Astro Parts Method sessions: guided meetings with your planets as parts, using active imagination. Interest form open now.
Book a chart reading www.kpkaszu.com
Chelsea Owens
Licensed therapist · Certified IFS Level 3
Chelsea works with individuals using Internal Family Systems therapy — the same framework she brings to Parts & Charts. Her sessions are warm, rigorous, and grounded in genuine clinical training. Now accepting new clients.
Book an IFS session https://chelseaowenstherapy.com/
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
