Jennifer Freed has an MA, an MFT, and a PhD, but her greatest achievement may be advancing the ways in which we can use astrology to better ourselves and our communities. Her new book, Use Your Planets Wisely, is destined to change the way astrology can be explored and understood. Merging depth psychology with astrology, she tackles the complex, ever-changing planetary energies and turns them into a tool available to anyone.

She had her first astrological reading at the age of 18. In that one hour, she says, she felt more understood than she’d ever been in her life. “I was convinced that there was something to this art,” she said, “and I had to learn it.” 

For a decade, she embarked on a serious study of books and worked with a tutor and a mentor. In the 1990s, she and a few friends brought some of the world’s greatest astrology teachers to Santa Barbara for seminars. “That’s when I met my mentor, Rick Tarnas, who’s written the definitive cultural astrology book, Cosmos and Psyche, and he became my teacher and friend,” she said. “That was in my early thirties, and now I’m 61, so it’s been a long trip.”