Grabbed Episode 22: Predictable but Still Wildly Unexpected

Hey everyone, this is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology. Today, we're going to take some time to hear the stories that you have been sharing with us over the last couple of months. These are stories that you guys have been submitting to us through the comments section using the hashtag #grabbed or through our email address grabbed@nightlight astrology.com.

If you've never heard of this series before, if you're new to the channel, basically what happens is that we make a regular call on the channel for stories. If you have a story that matches one of the transits, we ask that you put it in the comment section using the hashtag #grabbed or email it to us at grabbed@nightlightastrology.com. We use the word grab because one of the names for the planets in the ancient Indian tradition was Graha, which means grabber. It has a dual meaning. It can mean the way in which the planets grab us unconsciously. We, our lives, get played out by the planet, so to speak.

And then, of course, with studying astrology comes an ability to see the hands of the planets and to grasp what they're saying and what they're teaching us. And so astrology is really, in a sense, about going from being grabbed by the forces of karma and fate and pulled along rather unconsciously to becoming more conscious about it. And one of the ways we do that is to celebrate the stories of the planets and the way they show up in our lives.

So this series is dedicated to all of you and to storytelling and to learning and embodying the planetary archetypes through hearing people's stories, which I think is one of the best ways to learn astrology. So, in these episodes, you're going to hear me sharing the stories that you have sent to us. And if you ever want to share a story in the future, use the hashtag #grabbed tell us the transit, and then tell us your story in the comment section, or email us your story grabbed@nightlight astrology.com. But just don't share anything that you don't mind that you don't want us using in one of these episodes. All right, on that note, these transits range from Eclipse Season to Jupiter, Uranus, and up to maybe Jupiter's entrance into Gemini, I think. But anyway, yeah, without further ado, let's get into it.

I'm going to share with you guys some of the hundreds of stories that you guys sent us. And I just go through them, and I try to find ones some stories that I think are are compelling and maybe something that I've never heard before; you know, there's always you never you've never heard it all you know, there's as many new experiences of the planets as there are new days and different people so All right.

Hello, nightlight. My Jupiter-Uranus story has snuck up on me suddenly, but I just welcomed it. Goes on to tell a little bit about their chart. When Jupiter made its way to conjoin Uranus, I assumed I would have more changes at work. Instead, I began feeling this desire to try tofu for whatever reason, so I did, and I loved it. Then, I began looking at my coffee pot in disgust. Then, like dominos, odd things began happening with food. I swear I wasn't consciously planning it in any way. But in these past weeks since the Jupiter Uranus conjunction, Taurus, I've quit meat and coffee and suddenly started eating a vegetarian diet. Tofu, fresh fruits, vegetables, green tea, no grease, everything is different. And oddly enough, for this one pot of black coffee a day and fried fast food person. It feels so easy and natural.

I'm not trying to eat any certain way, really; I'm just eating what feels right. It's an entirely unplanned lifestyle change in the way of my health. I am so surprised.

Yeah. What I love about astrology is that, at some point in the orbit, the planets will be orbiting around your dinner plate. They will be quietly orbiting inside of your refrigerator and you'll see them somehow floating alongside of you when you're at the grocery store choosing your food it can happen that way.

Here's another one. About a year ago, I started a new job in the beauty industry that turned out to be a bit of a nightmare. I had a difficult manager and was in a high-stress environment that felt very binding and confining. Three days before the Aries solar eclipse, I found out that I had entered my dream international program in Sri Lanka. I immediately put in my two weeks' notice that my current very stressful job and my final day is on the day before the Jupiter Uranus conjunction.

Wow. Wow. I love that. I love that. Here's what I love about astrology. What I love about astrology is that even when you know something unexpected is coming with a planet like Uranus. When it happens, it is still totally unexpected and not something that you could have seen coming even though you knew something was coming that you couldn't see coming. That's one of the coolest things about astrology. You can predict archetypically what kinds of themes, patterns, and topics, but you'll it's so rare that you can guess what exactly will happen, which is why we are both amazed by the accuracy of astrology and surprised by the novelty of life. Astrology keeps both alive.

This is my boss's story. He's a department chair at a university, and he and his boss, the Dean, have had a rocky relationship. During the sun Jupiter during the Jupiter Uranus transit, the Dean asked him to resign his chair position, take a sabbatical, and then return as a regular faculty member of demotion. He said he was shocked and angry for a few days. And then that feeling transformed into a feeling of relief and freedom. He had been so haggard from trying to please this Dean and getting rebuffed. I just saw him, and he seems so relaxed and content. There's Jupiter, Uranus, that surprising freedom, the freedom that you didn't know that you needed, but once you have it, you realize you're very relieved to have it. I love that astrology also helps us to see the planets guiding the footsteps of people around us, not just ourselves, although that's obviously huge.

It's like you can see little lanterns moving out in front of people's paths, just a few steps ahead, moving through this dark and magical forest, guiding the people that you love. Then, we can trust that other people's paths are sacred and guided. And that takes a lot of stress off of ourselves as well, because sometimes we can feel responsible for other people. And it's nice to just hand that over to the planets and say, I know you've got these people that I love. I know you love them more than I ever could, you know, or at least equally. I'm 30, and I've never owned a vehicle before. Living in big bus-friendly cities. I never had much need for a car, but I recently started a new job that was much farther from my house, and I was spending 15-plus hours a week on the bus and losing my mind.

As the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction was applying, to be exact, I decided I'd had enough of Carli's frugal lifestyle, and I was finally ready to get some wheels. During this exact conjunction, I went out and viewed half a dozen cars just as the planets were separating, I settled on a 2009 Toyota Corolla in excellent condition. With the conjunction happening and Taurus, I like how I decided to go for a car known for its stability and reliability, very Taurean traits.

Here's what I love about astrology: You can get a car, and the car is a planetary car. Your relationship with that car will never be mundane. And it's something as simple as a car. I love that astrology gives us that in our lives. It's really special, and we should not overlook how simple it is, but it is profound.

On April 19, That's the day before the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction, a drunk driver drove into my home in her Jeep, backed out, and then escaped to her home down the same street. The impact crumpled my daughter's bed in which she was sleeping and pushed it into the wall of the next bedroom, breaking beams and almost harming my bed-bound father-in-law, who had been discharged into our care post-brain injury. My daughter often likes to sleep on a pallet of blankets on the floor she had opted that night to sleep in her bunk bed. Miraculously, neither one of them had a scratch on them. The same could not be said for me. My legs sported bruises and scratches from struggling over the debris in my daughter's bedroom doorway. This Jupiter Uranus was sitting exactly on my natal Chiron; what can you even say about that?

Oh my god. But here's the thing: I don't mean this to sound trite. It is true. planets will crash into our lives. They will come through accidents. They will come through injuries; they will come through what looks like mayhem and misfortune. What's that? That car insurance commercial mayhem and like it's like a personified guy chasing things around and wrecking them. And I don't. I don't say that to take away how traumatizing that must have been. But what I love is that the planets if you live an astrological lifestyle, it makes it difficult to decide, in hindsight at least, whether that event was good or bad because you can't deny that that was a cosmic event. You don't have to know what it means you don't have to gather some lesson from it. But you can observe that somewhere in the universe, the psychedelic mandala of space and time reflected that kind of event as it happened.

What can you do but shrug and go? Well, I'm glad no one was injured worse, you know, and I'm glad everyone was relatively okay. And the planets. They just command such respect, awe, and reverence that it makes it a little harder to think about good and bad events in black-and-white terms, even if there's an element of an event that's truly bad.

Anyway, my story is short and sweet, but I'm on testosterone for hormone replacement therapy, and around the conjunction is when the medication started showing the physical signs of transitioning, some face changes, facial hair, and at the time I'm typing this, I think my voice Lisa's deepening as well. They mentioned that this is happening in their 10th house, and it literally means that they are showing up in the world publicly in a different way, more masculine for the world to see. And this is happening as Jupiter. This was happening as Jupiter-Uranus conjoined.

So yes, it is a revolution in how you see your appearance and how you show up in the world. It's beautiful. I love it when our physical appearances transform into the shape of the planets. I mean, it's truly profound to me. As someone who's been going through a physical transformation myself the past couple of years with planets in Taurus and my first house, I totally get it. It's so amazing when the planets literally start. Or if you have a Jupiter first house here and you put on weight or something like that, you get what I'm saying.

A couple that are a little heavier. Yesterday was the day of the eclipse. This is the area of the eclipse. I got news from my close cousin that her brother was missing and that no one had seen him since Saturday night. Later yesterday, my cousin sent a message they had found him he had been found drowned. He was a sailor who apparently was spending time with his colleagues in a restaurant and had been returning to their ship alone in the night and fallen into the water. He was 44.

My cousin and her parents are broken. This was right after the eclipse, while Mars was applying to make a conjunction with Saturn and Pisces in the third house, which is a place of siblings and cousins. That's what's truly devastating.

And I'm so sorry for your loss and for your family's loss. Astrology helps me to realize that souls change shapes and forms. The reason that I put my faith in this is that even as we have to mourn and grieve and sort of throw our hands up, the tragic nature of life is that you can see the shape of a person's departure in the stars. And that, for me, means that nothing is misplaced. that the soul is an eternal being without beginning or end that changes shapes and forms just as surely as the patterns of the universe are intelligible and keep changing.

We can trust the timing of a soul's departure. Ultimately, eventually, even if it is unfathomable in the moment Aries Eclipse, my husband, was hit by a car on his bike, and the car took off, leaving him behind injured. He was lucky to get to the side of the road and call 911, and he wasn't too injured to do so.

The eclipses are happening in his eighth house, with Mars conjoining his natal Saturn. The eclipse happened in her seventh house. And I feel lucky that I didn't lose my husband in this accident. We're both still pretty upset, but our car insurance is covering his medical bills. Police never found the driver, but my husband said the car waited for him to get close enough to hit him so he could not evade the car. He feels it was an intentional hit.

My mom is pretty religious and was praying earlier that week when she had a vision of being hit and killed by this car. He began praying. She began praying for safety before it even happened. She told my dad she was really worried but didn't want to scare me with her premonition. I'm convinced he survived because the prayer protected him beforehand. I always make him wear a helmet, and it saved his life. Wear your helmet, kids. Wow, you know, I believe every word of that. So I love knowing that astrology. This is like an imperfect metaphor, but astrology is a helmet. Astrology is a kind of helmet.

Right before the eclipse, This is the Eclipse in Aries, I received a phone call from my great-grandmother, who was in the hospital in her final stages of dementia. She passed away on Eclipse Hill; flipping over, she passed away on the eclipse. I had another great-grandmother who passed away from dementia eight years ago, and I feel that Venus retrograde may have had something to do with that. Thanks for the space to share. Have a great day. Hilda's she's like, and life goes on playing.

What I love is that, again, when a light is eclipse literally in the sky, we sometimes see the light leaving the body and preparing to enter another. And so I hope that you and your family are doing okay after the loss of your grandmother. Interesting connection to the great-grandmother passing with the previous Venus transit. So, this one also was the Libra eclipse that happened in the spring when my partner suddenly died of a brain aneurysm. We are in our second trimester of pregnancy with our first child. Clearly, I'm devastated. But as a follower of astrology, I'm also trying to understand this incredibly difficult moment in the context of his and my life.

So recapping, right before the eclipse, my partner suddenly died of a brain aneurysm, we are in our second trimester of pregnancy with her first child. Clearly, I'm devastated. But as a follower of astrology, I'm also trying to understand this incredibly difficult moment in the context of his and my life. So here's a grab story if you choose to use it. Oh, my gosh, yeah, that's a hard one.

I think probably all of us listening would extend your prayers and love. Good thoughts. And the wish that in time, as you grieve and process and move on that, you know, his memory and his energy, and all of the best qualities in Him would live on through you and your child and the bond that you will have. And that it be that there'll be Dharma behind all of it, that there'll be a sense of a sacred contract of some kind that can maybe in time play out in ways that are understandable, that grant deeper peace and understanding, because I'm sure that right now, there's just not, it's not going to be something to wrap one's head around.

Anyway, to me, sometimes, when there are no words, there are no reasons that you can find. And I've seen a lot of people over a long time and astrological counseling that have gone through things that, you know, I can't even imagine. But what I trust is that the planets convey things that are there. They're ready for us at some point when we're ready. They also never rush us. They never force us into any Pat interpretation or meaning. They don't tell us to look at the grief, the feeling that life is sometimes cruel and indifferent. You don't need to bypass that with an interpretation. If and when we want to see it, the sky is there for us to help us with our process, but it also does not force itself. I hope that I'm glad that you have astrology in your life. I really am. And I hope you take your time.

Hi Adam, After your video in which you discussed Richard Tarnas's idea that the Jupiter-Uranus alignments could produce seeding moments of innovation, I had an aha moment in early 2011. Just after the three Jupiter-Uranus conjunctions, for absolutely no reason, I was inspired to use fractals and chaos theory as a basis for graphic design layout. I filled many pages of my drawing tablet with ideas that poured out of my head. I still look at the pages with a bit of awe because I'm not sure where the ideas came from. I was familiar with chaos theory from a few books I'd read. I didn't pursue the idea, but it was a seed that started to sprout in 2016 When I started creating a design system called Fractal Design. I then connected these ideas to Frank Lloyd Wright's own system of organic design, and I now put my aesthetic under the same umbrella as that of REITs. I've used these ideas to design several pieces of furniture.

On a whim, I look back at the date when I first read Chaos by James Gleick, and it was August of 1989 when Jupiter opposes Uranus; you cannot make this stuff up. Thanks as always. I love it when astrology shows up in terms of the shapes of our thoughts, the evolution and development of thought patterns, and things that we become excited about, ideas that we become excited about that are themselves archetypal. That is a beautiful, beautiful thing. Truth is there, and it's it's it's never had to be. Getting an ending, there's always more of it. And there's no one who has proprietary claims or rights over truth. It's there to be experienced. And when we tap into it, it always feels new.

It always feels like it's the first time astrology, I think, is amazing in that it points us back to this kind of eternal nature of truth. We can see it; it's there, it's intelligible, and it's always brand new, just like the planets are never in the same place; twice I was burning yard debris earlier today in the wind blew embers into the woods starting a brush fire I had to call the fire department thankfully everyone is okay, and the fire was contained Geez it was pretty scary. But Taurus rising, I thought, was interesting given the Jupiter Uranus in the first house. With that sort of sudden blaze of fire, they mentioned the moon was in Leo as well.

Anyway, I love that astrology allows us to literally see something physical like the sparking of a brush fire. Or sometimes, like, your power goes out, or you know, whatever a transformer in the neighborhood blows or whatever, there's a lightning strike of a tree somewhere, and it downs the telephone line, and you go, oh my god, like that was Uranus or, or whatever the case might be. There's a way that we can revel in the precision of things that are destructive, like a brush fire. It feels wild and chaotic, but it's not a mistake. I liked this one in 2017. During the Jupiter Uranus opposition, I gave my first presentations to astrology organizations and CGR Philadelphia, northern New Jersey, and the Astrological Society of Princeton, and what I called astrological aromatherapy.

I spent the previous year thinking about a way to blend my interest in astrology, herbalism, and aromatherapy, creating a system I call a sense of self and creating personalized botanical perfumes based on the birth chart. The perfume has been meant to support the temperament aromatically, as assessed by the birth chart, since 2017. I've created over 600 personalized perfumes and have never once duplicated a scent, as my Venus is in Taurus. This book is about aromatic beauty. The birth chart could have a scent sense of self, and the response to the perfume is always a joy.

Since that time, I've labored away a nice way to sequester myself in a room and read about Hippocratic temperaments, the limbic system for firmer perfumery, techniques, etc. Every winter, try to write this book. I'm much more of an herbalist astrologer than writer.

So, it was an arduous process for me, it took years to write as I only wrote in the winter months when my garden was sleeping in my business, and making herbal products was not my main focus. I hid in my room every winter for four years, writing and rewriting Saturn transiting my sixth, so it was laborious. I had the great good fortune of meeting an herbalist and writing professor, Dino Driscoll of Druids Garden Art, in 2022, who took on the task of going through my files, editing my work, and seeing that the book had been published. What a task it was.

She believed in me and had the skills I didn't to bring the book into the world. Two weeks ago, the book finally got published. This would be with Jupiter Uranus. I gave my first presentation about it last week and it sold out of the books I had printed on the first day. Jupiter Uranus conjunction fell in my ninth house. Yeah, love that. I forgot that it all started with the opposition of Jupiter-Uranus until I listened to your talk about historical dates. I found a slide from the first presentation I gave in 2017. On that slide, I wrote with Jupiter opposing Uranus that we can create breakthroughs and understanding, heading in a direction we haven't before.

Yeah, ya. I love that. I love when astrology transits connect periods of our lives that we didn't know were connected or forgot. And we don't understand sometimes; we don't see, we don't get that there is a larger process of creativity happening behind any particular creative project we are in the midst of that project is really just the bubbling up of a much larger process of alchemical change, and astrology helps us recognize that and I think that takes a lot of the pressure off from us to feel like we have to be in control of every creative process. 2000, I was in my first full year of living in a house I bought at age 25.

Flash forward to this upcoming ingress back into Gemini, and I'm prepping to sell this place and go elsewhere after 25 years, which would be about two full Jupiter cycles. So I expect that we'll use proceeds from selling to make a downpayment and whatever new home I find, and this means I'll be straddling two houses as I detach from the old to the new and almost literal expansion of my house of self whether or not I actually physically reduce my home size dimensions with Jupiter in Gemini. I love that. There are cycles at work in life Always. Always. In those cycles and those patterns they hold us, they are the Cradle of Life itself.

We are always being held by the universe and our minds are not meant To solve anything as much as they are to appreciate everything, so I'll leave it there. I hope you guys enjoy these stories; they come from you. You are the heart of this channel with the way in which you share everything that you experience of the transits. It's so much fun to share my stories and share your stories to be here together, unpacking these beautiful patterns that constitute our day-to-day life in this enchanting and beautiful cosmos. Alright, that's it for today. Have a good one. Bye.