What Happens When You Actually Meet Your Venus
(Spoiler: she told me to stop acting sweet)
This article details one of Parts & Charts’ co-host’s experiences with meeting Venus as a part — met through a guided meditation.
firstly — Parts & Charts begins releasing Season Two episodes next week ;). And we begin two monthly offerings (free! for subscribers): Chelsea Owens will be offering an art therapy experience to work with our parts in an astrological context. KP Kaszubowski will host monthly live birth chart readings and Astro Parts “Meet Your Planet” group sessions.
Register for free virtual events here:
CHART ROULETTE — Saturday, April 18 at 10am PT / 12pm CT (90min) | more details at the bottom of this post!
The place came before she did.
Something like the Taj Mahal — but not a monument. A devotional space, still in use, still breathing. Marble walkways. Long reflecting pools that became a river, or maybe had always been one. A storm moving in from the edges, but you knew you wouldn’t get wet because the pagoda was right there, resonant when you stepped inside, humming at a frequency just below hearing.
A woman was weeping near a stone grotto. Her child was with her. The grief wasn’t hidden or moved to a private room — it was right in the middle of the devotional space, and it was welcome. That was the word that landed: welcome. Grief as something you’re allowed to bring here.
There was also an alligator. A serpent. Jungle at the margins.
You know. Normal Venus stuff. 🐊
Then there was Venus.
She was fastening a rope between trees. Stabilizing one that leaned too far toward the water. Barefoot. Strong — not performance-strength, but the strength of someone who has been doing necessary things for a long time and has the body to show for it. Surfer energy, I wrote afterward. George of the Jungle. She was not posing. She was not reclining. She was working, because she knew what needed to be done and so she was doing it.
I couldn’t make out her face directly until I was guided toward it. When I could: a large cat’s face. Long dark hair, healthy and thick. Something like a snow leopard, but smoky, gray-black, eyes very light.
She detested plastic. Chlorine. Anything artificial.
When I asked what animal moves through the world the way she does, I saw a tiger walking through water — calm, unhurried — and then turning back slightly to hiss. But not in an aggressive way. And not really as a warning. Just: you know better than to test me. And then it kept walking.
At some point, I asked her: How can I be beautiful like you?
She said: You’re too sweet. Stop acting sweet.
I’ve known I have Venus in Scorpio for a long time.
The keywords are familiar. Intense. Magnetic. Deeply bonded. Possibly obsessive. Sexual. Mysterious. These aren’t wrong. But they’re not her. They’re a description of a pattern.
And she is no pattern.
She is the being that lives inside the pattern, and she has opinions!, and what she thinks about my sweetness is that it’s a performance I should stop giving.
There’s a difference between interpreting a planet and meeting one.
Yep. Very much.
Interpretation is real work. I looooooooove offering interpretations of people’s birth charts (especially when there's an urgent question driving it). A skilled astrologer can read Venus in Scorpio and tell you something true about yourself. I’ve done this for hundreds of people. I’ve been on the receiving end of it. Interpretation names the shape of the thing. It is not nothing!
But when you approach a planet as a living part of you — as a being with an environment, preferences, values, a specific quality of attention — they behave differently than a symbol. It surprises you. My Venus surprised me. And it felt like she refused the role assigned to her.
And so I see: interpretation gives you insight about yourself.
But it is this direct contact that gives you a relationship with yourself.
These are not the same kind of useful.
After the meeting I made a paper doll of her.
Cardstock. Brass fasteners at the shoulders and hips so the limbs can move. It sounds like a simple craft project. But felt like something else — like making her a body in this world the way she’d made herself one in mine. She moves now! She can be posed! I have her on my desk and sometimes I look at her when I’m about to perform sweetness at someone and I think about the tiger turning in the water. Hissing.
What changes, when you work with a planet this way, is not your knowledge of the placement. It feels scarier, to be truthful. There’s responsibility now. I can disappoint her. I can ask her for help but, also, she can demand something of me too.
I can come back and say, I did the thing you told me not to do again. Now, that we’re in relationship.
And it feels true that she’s been there the whole time.
Now… who will I go meet next?
If you want to be on the mailing list to know more about the Astro Parts Method (something in the works in the background….) - click here for the mailing list.
Up-Coming Events:
Arts & Parts & Charts
Wednesday, April 8th at 5pm PT / 7pm CT (60min)
A virtual art-making experience with Chelsea Owens — licensed therapist, IFS practitioner, and art therapist, and co-host of the Parts & Charts podcast.
Each session uses the current sky’s themes as a doorway into meeting your parts through creative process. Chelsea guides the making. The astrological weather gives us the territory. Your hands do the rest.
No art experience required. Bring whatever materials you have — paper, pens, paint, collage scraps, your phone camera. The point isn’t the product.
Arts & Parts & Charts is a companion event series to the Parts & Charts podcast.
Chart Roulette
Saturday, April 18 at 10am PT / 12pm CT (90min)
A free monthly live reading event. Ninety minutes, three names drawn at random, unrecorded.
If your name is called, you get a live chart reading. If it isn’t, you watch — which turns out to be its own kind of instruction, especially if you’re a therapist or clinician curious about how astrology functions as a tool for psychological inquiry.
No prep required. Just register and show up.
Notes:
Shoutout to Chelsea Owens and Ashley Abubakar and Barry Michels and Jenna Knapp for being my psychopomps into the parts work and shadow work world — where my cerebral, thinking parts can relax and my heart can really make contact with my many parts.
This article is written by KP Kaszubowski — astrologer, writer, artist. Over at Astrology for Makers, she also speaks with artists on their creative process and personal astrology, as well as monthly astrological archetype essays. And makes the podcast Parts & Charts: The IFS and Astrology Podcast with Chelsea Owens and it’s fun :)
Read KP’s most recent archetype essay here:
And reach Chelsea Owens’ banger here:
Welcome to the shadow world!