You Always Had the Power

Foreword I grew up as the fourth of nine children in public housing. There was not much money, and there were years when there was very little of anything. What there was, was Ma. Ma was a Taurus — and if you know anything about Taurus, you already know something about her. Steady, practical, and grounded in the real world in a way that was entirely her nature. She did not speak in abstractions. She did not offer comfort as a substitute for truth. What she offered was something more durable — a clear-eyed understanding of how life actually works, delivered without drama and without apology. Her phrase was simple, and she meant every word of it. Your life is what you make of it. As a child, I heard it and thought — how? As a young woman moving into a world that had not been designed with me in mind, I heard it and thought — I am trying. And I was. I was trying in the way most people try — by working harder, reaching further, proving through accomplishment that the circumstances I had started with were not the circumstances I was destined to remain in. I became an entrepreneur at twenty-eight, co-founding a software consultancy. I co-owned two restaurants. I built the corporate career. I reached toward relationships that promised what I was looking for — and learned, more than once, that what I was looking for could not be found there. Each chapter was real, and each one demanded everything I had. And still the question underneath all of it never went away. What I did not yet understand — and what took decades of living, building, searching, and eventually a complete change of direction to fully grasp — is that the trying is not the answer. The trying is necessary. But it is not sufficient. Because underneath all the effort, all the achievement, all the genuine building of a life, there was a question that never went away. The same question my clients carry when they arrive, having read the books and attended the workshops and still found themselves back where they started. Why does this keep returning? Why doesn't the understanding change anything? What am I actually working with? I lived inside that question for a long time before I found the language that could answer it. I did not come to astrology easily or quickly. I came to it through the same door most people come to the things that matter most — through the persistent sense that something was pointing in a direction I had not yet followed far enough. My corporate career was real, and it was good. Twenty years at Citigroup, rising to Senior Vice President of Technology Development Program Management, managing global teams and multi-million-dollar programs across continents. Delivering results under pressure with limited resources. That career shaped me in ways I would not trade. Jeanne gets it done was not a nickname I gave myself — it was what people said, consistently, across two decades and some of the most complex technology initiatives in global financial services. And it was true. Getting it done was, it turns out, entirely consistent with who I am. What I wish I had understood so much sooner is that this was never simply a personality trait or a professional reputation. It was structure expressing itself. A Virgo stellium in the sixth house — Mercury, Venus, Moon, and Jupiter, with Pluto in Leo conjunct Mercury — is a configuration built for exactly this: precision, devotion, service, and the capacity to bring transformative depth to complex work over the long duration. And with Aries Rising, I was built to go first. To lead. To protect. To initiate what others would carry forward. These were not coincidences of character. They were the design of a life, doing exactly what it was organized to do — across decades, across continents, in every role I inhabited. I simply did not yet have the language to see it. Introduction — A Language Worth Reclaiming "You always had the power, my dear, you just had to learn it for yourself" (The Wizard of Oz, 1939). How does a life begin to make sense? Most people do not ask this question at the beginning. It emerges later, after enough experience has accumulated to suggest that something is not unfolding as expected. What once felt open begins to take on a sense of limitation. Directions that seemed possible narrow, or do not develop in the way they were once imagined. It is here that the question begins to form. Situations change, environments shift, and different people enter and leave, yet something familiar continues to appear. What once felt like isolated moments begins to show continuity. At times, a moment feels familiar, even as it is happening for the first time. What unfolds in those moments appears to belong entirely to the present, shaped by circumstance and influenced by others, and understood through whatever awareness is available. Meaning is drawn from what is most immediate, while the continuity beneath it often goes unnoticed. At first, this continuity is easy to dismiss. It can be attributed to circumstance, to chance, or to the influence of other people. When similar patterns persist across different stages of life, the question is no longer why something is happening, but why it continues to happen in a recognizable way. This continuity does not announce itself. It becomes visible through accumulation — and with enough distance, what repeats begins to show not the event itself, but the pattern through which experience takes form.