For a hundred rupees, about $2, I was told I would die at 50.
I had gone to India sometime in high school or college, and my family encouraged me to see a Vedic astrologer. The reading was inexpensive. Why not? I handed over my birth information, expecting insight or at least curiosity. What came back was certainty: I was going to die at 50.
For a hundred rupees, about $2, I was told I would die at 50.
I am still alive. Yet a prediction does not have to come true to exert power. Another person's certainty can lodge in the mind, quietly shaping what we fear and resist. Only years later, while talking with Eric and Allana Taylor, did I understand the connection. My distrust of astrology had a source. I had not rejected the birth chart itself. I had rejected the experience of someone using it to claim authority over my life.
A hundred-rupee prediction followed me for years
That reading in India stayed with me more than I realized. I had met other astrologers who spoke definitively about what I should or should not do, and I knew how easily my mind could absorb their words. Once a prediction enters your thinking, do your choices begin arranging themselves around it? Do you notice evidence that confirms it and overlook everything that does not? What came first: the chart or the thoughts planted by its interpreter?
Allana gave me the clarity I should have received the first time. No astrologer, psychic, Akashic records reader, medium, numerologist, or soul contract reader should predict death. In her view, that is the moment to get up and walk away. Energy is always moving. People can choose differently. A practitioner looking through one lens at one moment does not own what happens next.
Eric knew what it meant to carry someone else's declaration. At nine years old, he was told he would be completely blind by 21. At 56 years old, he could still see. The prediction even entered his marriage. Before he and Allana married, he told her what he had been warned would happen, and she felt they were on a clock. She wanted him to see their baby before he lost his sight. As Eric joked, she did not give him one baby; she gave him three babies.
There is nothing harmless about presenting uncertainty as fact.
There is nothing harmless about presenting uncertainty as fact. A prediction can affect the person who receives it and everyone who loves them. The astrologer in India was wrong about me, but the greater violation was claiming knowledge that was not his to claim. I no longer need to treat his certainty as evidence against all astrology. I can call it what it was: an inappropriate use of authority.
A birth chart can be a framework without becoming a master
Eric's answer to my lingering question was direct: no one should become a slave to astrology. A birth chart can be a guide. It can offer language, timing, and insight that make life easier to understand. But it cannot replace free will, and it should never require me to surrender my power to the person reading it.
Allana offered the distinction that changed astrology for me. Energy, by definition, is movement. It is always moving and changing. Astrology provides a framework, but I choose how to fill in the pieces that form the picture within it. A framework can help me see. A master tells me I must obey. Those are entirely different relationships.
Astrology can sit beside my intuition. It does not get to sit above it.
Eric describes himself as an intuitive astrologer, and intuition matters because a chart cannot make every decision on my behalf. He points to black moon Lilith and Pluto as places within astrology that can help someone examine gut instinct and strengthen a connection to intuition. The point is not to drown out the inner voice with an outside interpretation. It is to understand that voice more fully.
That distinction matters especially at midlife. I have spent enough time encountering inherited rules, expected paths, and systems that insist there is only one proper way forward. I am less willing now to let a person, chart, platform, or system decide what is right for me. Astrology can sit beside my intuition. It does not get to sit above it.
The chart became less intimidating when I could hold it
Part of my resistance was practical: astrology felt hard. A birth chart seemed full of specialized knowledge I did not have. Then I saw the Stars, Signs, and Rhyme Lines Workbook and Card deck, created by Eric and Allana Taylor, and the chart became something I could hold in my hands.
The cards include signs, planets, houses, chart rulership, aspects, sect, and the other attributes needed to begin reading a birth chart. They can be arranged on a bedroom floor, coffee table, or dining room table. Eric used my Capricorn moon and Capricorn rising as an example. I could hold each placement, read what it meant, and move through all 12 houses without first mastering an intimidating vocabulary.
The 188-page, full-color workbook is approachable because Allana would not let Eric skip the steps a beginner needs. She was married to an astrologer, but she did not already know astrology herself. When his language became too highbrow or he took a concept for granted, she asked what it meant. Her questions kept new readers from being shut out.
The workbook begins with pulling a birth chart and addresses basic questions, including the difference between Vedic and Western tropical astrology. Its chart check-ins repeatedly return readers to their own information, asking them to apply each lesson rather than study someone else's chart in the abstract. By the end, readers work with the charts of Queen Latifah, Tupac, and Kendrick Lamar while developing a reading of their own chart.
This form of astrology invites rather than pronounces. It lets me touch the pieces, ask questions, notice patterns, and decide what resonates. The process requires neither a special download nor the surrender of judgment. The chart is available for examination instead of being held over me by someone claiming exclusive access to its meaning.
Our different ways of preparing were written into the discussion
Eric once had to learn lines for an independent film in two days. He read the script, recorded himself reading it aloud, played the recording back, listened while looking at the page, and repeated the process until he owned the material. "Repetition is the key to ownership," he says. He arrived on set prepared, performed well, and left with a new level of confidence.
I immediately offered the Gemini version: look at something once, step onstage, and do whatever you want. Freestyle. There is a reason I call myself "no prep Priya." At a podcast convention where everyone seemed focused on practice, I looked at the material, took the microphone, and felt free.
Eric's astrological language gave those differences a useful shape. He described Gemini as connected to spontaneous communication, curiosity, fast thinking, and the movement of information. Virgo, by contrast, wants to analyze, study, practice, and sometimes become self-critical before jumping in. Neither description issued a command or declared one approach superior. The contrast made two recognizable working styles easier to name.
Then Eric complicated my own label. He had seen my Capricorn moon in the discipline beneath my apparent lack of preparation: my work ethic, writing, relationship with music, and the way I built children's skills and helped them work toward their goals. "No prep" did not mean no work. I prepared differently, and the pattern was visible to someone paying attention.
That is the kind of self-understanding I can accept from astrology. It does not tell me that something terrible must happen at a certain age. It offers a more precise account of patterns already present in how I communicate and work. I remain free to recognize, question, or use them. The language clarifies my behavior without imprisoning me inside it.
Refusing the default publishing system was part of the same choice
Allana brought this insistence on choice to the publishing of Stars, Signs, and Rhyme Lines. The default assumption was Amazon. Authors use it because that is how books are distributed, often without stopping to ask whether the arrangement serves the work or the people who created it. Allana stopped and asked.
The full-color workbook sells directly for 29.95. Allana said Amazon recommended pricing it at 39.95, then taking 40% of the selling price. That would leave $24 before printing. With another $15 or $16 deducted for the higher grade of printing, which she said still would not match the thickness and quality they produced, Eric and Allana would make less than $9 a book.
Money was only part of the problem. Amazon would not give them the purchaser email addresses they wanted for follow-up. Selling directly through bigeastrology.com lets them know who chose the book, ask how the experience is going, request feedback, and build relationships consistent with the Knowledge is Love podcast and community. A transaction can remain human when the people behind the work can see the people receiving it.
Their grassroots approach is already in motion. Missy's Mysteries, a metaphysical shop in Scottsdale, Arizona, purchased books and cards. Orders have gone to Australia, Canada, and Japan. An astrologer even recorded herself using the cards to walk a friend who did not know astrology through her birth chart. Two women sat together, laid out the placements, read the meanings, and made the chart personal.
I recognize the same question in their publishing decision and my revised relationship with astrology: who gets the authority? A platform may be useful, but I do not have to accept its terms as inevitable. A practitioner may offer insight, but I do not have to hand over my choices. A birth chart may reveal patterns, but it does not get to dictate the limits of my life.
I can use a framework without being confined by it.
I can use a framework without being confined by it. I can listen without obeying and remain curious without abandoning discernment. When any person or system claims more authority than it deserves, I can do what Allana said I should have done with that prediction years ago: get up and walk away.