You are listening to Parts & Charts: The IFS and Astrology Podcast. Be sure to subscribe here on Substack and follow — available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Chelsea is on a pilgrimage this week — location undisclosed, whereabouts protected — so KP is flying solo, and what comes out is less an episode than a transmission from the middle of her own writing life. She teaches undergraduates how to write and think critically for a living, and she opens with a confession that doubles as a thesis: writing is hard for everyone. Not hard in the sense of unteachable, but hard the way anything worth doing with your whole self is hard. It asks for all of you. She wants to talk to the person who disagrees, who finds it easy — she isn’t sure that person exists. This episode is a chart-reader’s field guide to getting unstuck. It’s built around one question: what does your birth chart tell you about how to get into flow? A note on framing: this episode doesn’t lean on IFS language the way some Parts & Charts episodes do with Chelsea’s clinical lens in the room. This is KP working from her own lineage — Jungian, archetypal, rooted in active imagination rather than a parts-work model — and the astrology carries the weight instead. Quick cheat sheet: what to check in your chart for writing flow * Sun sign & house — where you have endless, bottomless interest; what a stuck scene or project can be reoriented toward * Mars sign & house — the kind of physical movement or exertion that opens up your capacity to sit and write * Mercury sign & house — your fixed mental filter; what comes naturally to say, and what you’ll have to work against on a project outside that filter * Venus sign & house — what you care about enough to become intimate with on the page; a clue toward subject matter * Moon sign — your emotional weather and self-care needs; ignore it and the writing stops being possible * Outer planet aspects to personal planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto) — what makes your process electric, intense, or hard-won rather than flat * Third house sign & planets — a candidate for how you drop into flow (ritual, cognition, environment) * Fifth house sign & planets — a candidate for why the work stays pleasurable, and what’s missing when it doesn’t If you’re looking for a 1:1 Artist Audit - KP Kaszubowski offers this as a live virtual session now. Click the link here to schedule yours: https://shorturl.at/PQJbJ Topics, in order * Solo episode intro — Chelsea’s on pilgrimage, whereabouts undisclosed * Framing: writing is hard for everyone, even the naturally talented * Disclaimer for listeners not interested in birth-chart-and-writing content * Flow state via her dad — pastor, sermon-writer, former athlete * The premise: birth chart as energetic blueprint, working with or against your nature * Sun and Mars as the two “natural energy” planets * Sun sign and house — endless interest, illustrated with Virgo sun and Taurus sun in the ninth * Her own Libra sun in the tenth * Mars sign and house — kinetic/physical energy, illustrated with Mars in Capricorn in the second * Her own need to move her body before writing (Saturn in the first) * Air-sign Mars and the pull toward intellectualized movement * Mercury as a fixed filter for processing information * Fire-sign Mercury example * Anticipating a reader’s or student’s filter * Her own Mercury in Libra in the tenth, and the difficulty of writing violent scenes through it * Noticing kinship with poets who share her Mercury sign, plus an unexplained pull toward Mercury in Cancer writers * Mercury by house, with a sixth-house example * Venus as what you’re intimate enough with to write about * Her own Venus in Scorpio in the eleventh, and its link to her war-novel subject matter * Venus by house — first house and memoir, fourth house and memoir, eleventh house and collective/historical material * Her own failed attempt at a personal memoir * A brief note on the moon as empathy, emotional landscape, and self-care (future episode) * Outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto) aspecting personal planets — complexity as aliveness * Example: Aries Mercury squared by Pluto in Cancer * Her own Mercury–Mars conjunction/opposition and what it taught her about sustaining flow * Third house as a possible key to how to get into flow, with sign-by-sign examples * Her own Pisces third house and meditation/chanting practice * Fifth house as a possible key to why the work stays pleasurable * Her own Taurus fifth house, ruled by Scorpio Venus * Closing invitation to reach out and trade notes * Sign-off and well wishes for Chelsea’s vacation The premise KP’s father is a pastor who writes a sermon fresh every week and used to play competitive basketball. He’s talked to her about flow state on the court — that feeling of moving with the game instead of against it. She’s never had that in her body. But she has it on the page, and in session with clients, when the energy just moves through her. Every person has an activity where this happens, she says. The work is finding yours. Her working theory of astrology: we’re each born with an energetic blueprint, and every moment after that is spent either working with it or against it, because the world teaches us to do things a certain way regardless of our nature. The goal isn’t obedience to the chart — it’s knowing your nature well enough to choose when to lean into it and when to stretch past it. Sun and Mars: where your energy is endless The sun tells you where your consciousness naturally focuses — a Virgo sun leans toward detail, adaptation, making things work better. A sun in Taurus in the ninth house might mean bottomless appetite for philosophy, travel, other people’s belief systems, alongside a Taurean hunger for the body and sensual pleasure. KP’s own Libra sun in the tenth gives her, she says, endless energy for people, cooperation, and effort in the external world — so when a scene stalls, she asks herself how to make it about relationship, about people working toward something together. Mars is more physical — the kinetic charge rather than the consciousness. Mars in Capricorn in the second house might mean losing interest in a project is a cue to move the body, or to write toward the material world: finance, long-term stakes, the historical consequences of a character’s choices. Her rule of thumb: you can’t sit down and write until you’ve moved. She has Saturn in the first house and sits still by nature, which meant her twenties were a fight to finish the novels she wanted to write — until she learned that some form of physical exertion has to come before the page opens up for her. If your Mars is in an air sign, she suggests the movement itself might want to be intellectual — she does walk-and-talks, and studies the muscular systems she’s exercising, because movement has to be a little bit of a study before her attention will stay in it. Mercury: the filter you can’t take off Mercury is fixed at birth and doesn’t change with the world around you — it’s the lens all incoming information passes through. A fire-sign Mercury reaches for what’s inspiring before what’s practical. KP has Mercury in Libra in the tenth, which means her filter wants fairness, grace, connection, intimacy — and she’s currently trying to write war scenes full of violence and betrayal. What comes out, she admits, keeps turning into Jane Austen: the interpersonal instead of the blood. She’s training herself toward something more Martian in the writing, and finds it genuinely difficult — the filter doesn’t switch off because the project demands something else of it. Knowing your own filter, she says, is also how you get better at anticipating someone else’s — a reader’s, a student’s, a child’s. You’ll never actually know what’s happening inside another mind, but the act of imagining their filter is what makes writing (or teaching, or parenting) sharper and more useful. She’s also noticed she’s drawn to poets with Mercury in Libra — kinship she didn’t know the astrological name for until later — and, more surprisingly, to writers with Mercury in Cancer, which she suspects has something to do with her own moon in Cancer reaching toward that emotional register. Her suggestion: if you know your Mercury sign, go find writers who share it. Reading their filter might teach you something about your own. Venus: what you’ll stay curious about long enough to write If Mercury is how you make sense of things, Venus is what you care about enough to become intimate with — not expertise in a credentialed sense, but the kind of closeness that lets you write about something honestly. KP’s Venus in Scorpio in the eleventh gives her, unsurprisingly, an endless fascination with war, spiritual deception, and the politics of institutions — the exact terrain of the novel she’s writing, even though her Libra filter makes the writing of it hard. The eleventh house adds the collective angle: revolutions, movements, the history of people organizing around scarcity. She offers a few house-based hunches, held loosely: Venus in the first house might pull toward memoir, toward the self as subject. Fourth-house placements — contemplation, origin, memory — show up again and again in the charts of memoirists she’s studied. Her own attempt at a 200-page lyrical memoir never landed, and she thinks it’s because her chart’s weight sits in the houses of other people and groups, not the personal ones. If your fifth or eleventh house is loaded, maybe the book you’re meant to write looks more like The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants than a memoir. Often, she says, you already know your subject — you’ve been drawn to it since you were small — and Venus just explains why. The moon g
