“I’m an astrologer who happens to have a tech company,” Chani Nicholas told us with a laugh. She’s also an activist and mother (to a three-year-old daughter) who imbues a sense of radical hope into everything she touches. Which is probably why over two million users have downloaded her app, which gives electric yet grounded, personalized readings that help shape people’s day-to-day lives.
She speaks to us—and we mean, speaks to us—too, on social media: wisely guiding us through thornier seasons, planetary shifts, and moons of all stripes. We’re of course addicted to her all-caps, exclamation-laden monthly predictions and directions.
Not content to just help the masses weather life’s ups, downs, and mercury retrogrades, Chani is also decidedly political, dedicated to causes and movements that impact and candidates that champion marginalized communities. Chani’s employees reap the literal benefits of her ethos: everyone gets a four-day work week and seven weeks paid vacation. (Chani has also completely banned the usage of AI to build her product and within her company.)
Below, in an expert from our Getting Sticky interview with her, she gives us predictions for today’s eclipse, tips on parenting during Leo Season, and how astrology can help guide us through motherhood.
(For Spread The Jelly readers, Chani is gifting a free, 30-day, all-access pass with the code: NEWCHANI. Perfect for getting your and your baby’s chart read.)
Words by Emily Barasch. Images by Kate Owens.
“There’s a lot of everything that you experience in life in your chart or you can look at your chart to see anything that you want to see in your life. So motherhood’s definitely no different from that and it’s personal to each person—what you’re going through when you enter into parenthood. Whatever is happening in your chart will tell you about how you’re experiencing it.
Some signs are known for being more maternal or more giving. But that doesn’t mean that they’re better parents because parenting is very specific, right? With parenting, you have to deal with all your own sh*t.
Parenting, you have to deal with all of your own rejection issues and all of your own feelings of being hemmed in. It’s all about freedom versus responsibility and projection versus reality.
It’s about how patient you are. How reflective you are.
I think the wildest thing my daughter teaches me is how hard it is to sit with shame. When she has to work through feeling bad about hitting us or yelling at us or whatever the behavior was, we say: Hey, we have to work through that. It’s fundamentally hard for humans to work through conflict and to work through those feelings that come up. That is just such an essential part of being a parent.
That’s what I look at when I think about people’s astrology and their charts. It’s about the theme that runs through their life, how that theme rolls out and finds its way, and finding a through line in every aspect of our life. Whatever the theme is in your chart, it shows up in your work, your friendships, and your parenthood. It’s all about intimacy, connection, and feeling. Understanding your gifts and your challenges when it comes to being in relationships because the most intense relationship that you’re going to have is with your kids or your parents.”
“August is a really important month. There’s an important eclipse on August 12th and then there’s another eclipse on August 27th. Eclipse seasons are times where the events of our lives, our personal lives, and world events tend to speed up.
In terms of our kids, I think it’s an important month to be paying attention to their raw emotional needs. Not that we’re not always doing that, but there’s a way in which eclipse seasons tend to bring us down to a base level and where we don’t feel like we don’t have as many resources as we would like all the time. I’m not saying the whole month, but there’s going to be these inflection points.
One of the themes of Leo season and especially this Leo season is about leadership.
And we must be thinking about how we are building, how we are coaching, how we are encouraging our children to be leaders in their own lives? How are we demonstrating that? What is being reflected back to me in how my kid is showing up or through their issues of the day. How can I lead in a way that doesn’t dictate to them what to do but instead trying to model a way of being curious, creative, and also able to face our fears. How are we helping them do that? How are we showing them our own courage?”
“The state of the world is bleak in a lot of ways but I have so much hope. I think we’re in a specific predicament ecologically that I certainly feel the weight of. When we had our daughter I remember coming to New York when she was six months old. The fires in Quebec were raging and we were engulfed in smoke and I thought: Oh my god what have we done?
On her second birthday, L.A. was on fire. There’s just that reality and I think all parents feel the weight of that. Then, on the other hand, I don’t know if this is me being delusional and selfish but I feel like creating life is the most radical act of hope that you can do.
I don’t know if my daughter will agree with me when she’s my age; I don’t know what the world will be like. Maybe she’ll say, ‘Oh, that’s lovely for you to have pontificated upon when I was before I was born.’ But I reckon all the time with the fact that I don’t know if people are going to be able to live in the neighborhood that I live in now in 30 years. We are living in such unpredictable and unstable times.
You have to grapple with that; I don’t think it’s good to put your head in the sand. I think we’re going to have those conversations with our children their whole life. I don’t know if it’s selfish or not to bring a kid into this world that’s always been so full of complexities and hardships, but it’s what we’re here to do. It’s this strange human puzzle that we all have to contend with.”
For Spread The Jelly readers, Chani is gifting us a free, 30-day, all-access pass with code NEWCHANI. Perfect for getting your and your baby’s chart read.
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