COSMIC PRODUCTIVITY WITH DOSSE-VIA
I'm doing something different for this month's paid newsletter because I've been thinking more about how to use astrology to hack my productivity. I even used it to choose the date for my event, the moon will be in Pisces in my 11th house of community and friendships, conjuncting my Jupiter (the planet of good luck and abundance)—so it couldn't be more perfect. So, I've done a bonus conversation this month with an astrologer I've long admired, Dossé-Via Trenou, the founder of Know the Zodiac. You probably follow her account for your sun sign, @knowaries, @knowtaurus, @knowgemini, and so on.
As always with these conversations, it will be so helpful if you know your birth chart! You can get a free birth chart on astro-seek.com or astro.com. It's also difficult to make these conversations feel personalized because everyone has their very unique chart. So, I would recommend doing a little further research on google (or ChatGPT if that's your thing). You can search: what are the characteristics of Mars in Sagittarius? What does Mars in the 8th house mean? That's how I continue to familiarize myself with placements or certain transits.
Welcome Dossé-Via! You were probably one of the first people to start an astrology meme account on Instagram. You started @ScorpioMystique in 2011?
Dossé-Via: I feel seen. Thank you. I definitely feel like I'm one of the OGs. I was a freshman at USC in LA, and my friends were telling me all about Twitter. I started my own personal page—and then because I was so into astrology, I was like, why not do a @ScorpioMystique page where I talk about my sign and it's like a public diary. It grew exponentially. So many people related to what I was sharing and the rest was history. I started an Instagram page a year later.
So, tell me how you discovered that you wanted to start studying astrology.
Dossé-Via: I remember signing up for different astrology newsletters that would tell me about the transits. That's really what helped realizing that astrology was more than just about our sun sign. Digging deeper and realizing, oh, we all have cycles and seasons of life, and the transits are reflecting back at me some of these dynamics that I have in my relationships and overall desires. I applied it so much as a tool for personal healing, self-acceptance, and self-confidence, it became natural to help other people.
I started off doing readings for friends and family. It was a very organic process. I studied narrative studies and French at USC, and then I went on to get my master's degree in English education at Columbia University in New York. I do have two West African parents who are very accomplished and came to America, for the American dream, so I was still resting with the part of me that's like, well, you still need a traditional path, and you went to university.
Everything is in divine timing. It needed to be more of this passion project first. Then I gradually started monetizing when my boyfriend at the time was like, you know, could sell readings. I had never made money on the internet, so I thought, Let me just do mini readings for a dollar each. I put that on Twitter, I got a hundred orders in a few hours, and I was staying up all night doing these readings and obviously overgiving because my moon is in Virgo and my Mars is in Cancer. Then I was like, maybe I should raise the price just a little.
It was a game changer. It happened organically to see that people really resonated with my work, and it was a natural exchange of energy to provide readings. May 2017, I decided to go all in growing Know the Zodiac and @ScorpioMystique, and that's what I've been doing since, in addition to Magic & Melanin, the tourism company.
I've always appreciated how inspiring your horoscopes are. I think as, I'm sure you've seen this, but as astrology has grown on social media, so has the fearmongering around astrology. It used to give me anxiety when eclipses were coming and this was going retrograde, and oh my God, I'm just starting to see this person, and now Mercury retrograde’s is going to ruin my relationship. I hear it from other people as well. Now, it's only because I started learning it that I know… it's like you almost take it less seriously in a sense like, okay, yeah, it's mercury in retrograde. That happens four times a year. Whatever’s going to happen is going to happen.
Dossé-Via: Exactly. It's just being in tune with the cycles of life that have happened since the beginning of humanity. I identify as an evolutionary astrologer, and that helps us see that even the way we describe each sign on top of the fact that we're more than just our sun sign and our big three, which has a capacity to evolve. We're constantly evolving. Evolution is one of the most constant aspects of life. So there's so much we're still going to discover about science, spirituality, astrology, so to prescribe people in boxes, the danger of astrology, which is why I don't get mad when people tell me they don't believe in it, is because mainstream astrology does do this fear mongering and it becomes overly capitalistic, which is literally the opposite of what it's supposed to do. It's supposed to be a tool for collective and personal ascension. Not selling dreams, because I'll be very honest, when there are difficult transits, but explaining how even that challenging transit is here to help us grow, it is a very big value at KTZ.
How can understanding our birth chart help us work more efficiently and effectively?
Dossé-Via: One of the reasons that I created the Know the Zodiac app is because since people aren't always as familiar with things beyond their primal triad, their big three, they can get caught up in what society has told us like make every quarter the best one, work hard when actually, the way you work depends a lot on your Mars sign and Saturn sign. The way you attract opportunities has a lot to do with your Jupiter sign.
It took a while for me to accept, even as an astrologer, that my natal Mars sign in Cancer, is not the strongest of the positions, and I'm a Scorpio rising. So my chart is ruled by both Mars and Pluto. Thankfully, I have Pluto in Scorpio, but even that, it's in the first house. It's a lot of slow self-evolution. It's a lot of behind-the-scenes work. Once I accepted that my Mars in Cancer, which is in the 9th house of publishing, travel, and entrepreneurship, had to do with my emotional moods because the moon rules Cancer. So, if I put myself in a good state of being, I feel good, then I can be productive. If I don't feel good, I can't power through a Mars in Capricorn, a Mars in Leo, even a Mars in Scorpio.