Episode 2: The Astrology Of Conscious Change

Ryan, Lisa, and Alexander dig into the astrological story of 2026: a rare minor grand trine between Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, three outer planets that have all recently changed signs at the same time. They trace the history of each planet's discovery and the revolutions that followed, explore the Barbault Basket forming in July 2026, and discuss why this moment represents a 500-year marker in collective human evolution. The conversation also touches on the soul energies of the outer planets, the difference between prediction and conscious participation, indigenous wisdom as a counterweight to Western paradigms, and what it really means to be a humanistic astrologer. Curious, wide-ranging, and grounded in lived experience.

Transcript

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Ryan

Welcome to Astrology Off the Charts. We are three professional astrologers, friends, and lifelong students of the human experience exploring astrology through thoughtful conversation. We're glad you're here. I am Ryan Barrett.

Lisa

I am Lisa Hagenbuch.

Alexander

And I'm Alexander Mallon. We are very happy that you joined us today. We're going to jump into our second episode, the three of us together, to talk about what our podcast is essentially about, what's motivating us, and how we even came together. Isn't that what we were chatting about before we started recording?

Ryan

Exactly. Yeah.

Lisa

Yeah.

Ryan

And I think one of the interesting things for me in starting this was the fact that Lisa, you and Alexander had been working together on some different opportunities. And then you brought me in and said, I want to introduce you to Alexander. What's always fascinating to me is when you get a group of three people together, or a group of four, or any friends coming together, and what the dynamic is between that group. What was fascinating to me was that between the three of us, it just flows, and the feeling of that is always positive. I think that's reflective of maybe even the reason why we came together to do this podcast and what's happening in the sky right now.

Alexander

Yeah, indeed. We were observing a particular cycle that we all thought, wow, what a coincidence. And isn't that what astrology and looking at cycles is all about? We always move through phases or times in our lives, and as astrology students we look at the charts to think: what is happening, what is the collective umbrella under which we're all moving and growing? We found one thing in particular. Ryan, you may have a slide for us.

Ryan

Yeah, I'm going to go ahead and pull that up.

Alexander

So we were realizing, folks, that when Lisa, Ryan, and I came together, this particularly powerful configuration occurring right now in 2026 is kind of coincident with the substrate of what brought us together as individual practitioners. Not only how we each practice with our clients and students, but really the mindset and thrust of our work, which we all felt fell under the umbrella of humanistic astrology.

Ryan

Yeah, absolutely. I brought this book with me again. It's one of the things we looked into reading as a group, just to understand Michael Meyer's approach to this. I think we've also heard in the zeitgeist, since the 60s, that this is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, that there's this movement of Pluto into the sign of Aquarius that I think everybody is somewhat aware of. Astrology is a language, and I think that's something for us as astrologers to pay more attention to in how we're working with clients. The fact that these three planets are coming into a very special configuration is something worth noting, and the fact that we started our podcast at the same time feels like kismet in a lot of ways.

Alexander

I love that. It's a word you don't hear kicked around too often in this generation. Kismet. A fateful coincidence, a fateful happening.

Ryan

Yeah, definitely. Which is funny, because as humanistic astrologers I think the term fate means something very specific to us versus other types of astrology that may look at fate as meaning you are destined to experience certain things in your life because of your birth chart, because of the configuration. Where I think we've talked about having more influence over that in terms of how we think about our chart, how we approach it, the consciousness we bring to it. That's something I'm always very aware of as we're talking about this.

Alexander

Lisa, go ahead.

Lisa

I agree. And I think, as we're all three students of consciousness and use it in our client sessions, the fact that these three planets were discovered beyond Saturn is significant. Saturn was the structure. And then Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto came along and said, you can go beyond that. We can go beyond the belief systems we were raised in. The consciousness of the kids coming in now goes beyond what we've known, and we have to raise them differently than we were raised. It all speaks to this minor grand trine being fortunate timing for us to continue questioning our lives, how we want to live them, and where we want to go.

Alexander

Yes. We realized, folks, that when Lisa, Ryan, and I came together to do this podcast and broadcast on YouTube, to speak and teach about these cycles and the umbrella of humanistic astrology, we recognized that we were part of this upwelling cycle, this zeitgeist cycle. Almost within a day or two of when we launched our first taping, the Sun was entering the sign of Gemini, conjoining Uranus, one of the three planets in this trinity that is so important right now in 2026. And Lisa, you said something really important: these three planets broke the model of what astrologers had understood. For time immemorial, we could literally see the heavenly bodies, and therefore the astrological cycles were corollary to the planets we could observe, including Saturn, the most distant visible planet, which dealt with the collective at large. But until we discovered Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, we didn't have a frame of reference beyond what Saturn symbolizes, which is terra firma, the material social reality. Once we invented the telescope and turned it to the stars and found the first planet beyond Saturn, that broke the construct. Uranus was discovered in 1781, coinciding with the French Revolution, the American Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution. The invention of the telescope pointed to the stars, breakthrough of consciousness, revolution of society. So we have these three planets about breakthrough that are trans-Saturnian, beyond Saturn's orbit, beyond what can be seen with the naked eye. Though Uranus is actually visible to the naked eye during some apparitions if you know exactly where to look. It implies the coincidence: if we train our discerning mind, if we have a concept of intending to see and understand beyond what is Saturnian, beyond the normative, we can break into larger understandings. And that's really the idea of humanistic astrology.

Ryan

Absolutely. And doesn't the term planet mean wandering star?

Alexander

Indeed.

Ryan

So I think you brought up something interesting. Both Lisa and I studied under a woman, Barbara Junceau, who is no longer with us, unfortunately. She wrote a book, Life Journeys Creating Consciousness. One of the things she used to talk about all the time when she worked with us is that those trans-Saturnian planets, including the centaurs, which are planetoids or smaller bodies that move between the Kuiper belt and the outer planets, are essentially about the idea that we are incarnating as the consciousness of the planet we live on. Earth is conscious insofar as we bring awareness to our lives, to the earth, to everything around us. And those outer planets, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, describe consciousness in a higher state. She called them the soul energies. That's something that has always fascinated me. When we talk about these planets in astrology, we call them generational planets. And they are generational insofar as they move so slowly that an entire generation of people have that planet within the same sign, and large groups of people may share the same degree. When we look at the faster moving planets, we're more conscious of how they connect with our personality. But here we're not talking about personality, we're talking about awareness. How do we apply this to our lives, understanding that these planets touch on aspects of our higher awareness and maybe call us to be more aware of what's going on around us? More aware of how we're interacting with other people, what we stand for as a group or as an individual. What we're allowing to stay beneath the surface versus what we're pulling out into the open that needs to come to light in order to be dealt with. We're experiencing that as a country right now in the United States, coming up on our Pluto return of 248 years. There are a lot of things we haven't dealt with that we need to now. Different aspects between these three specific planets are points at which we can enter a conversation, bring our awareness to it, and have a conscious discussion about what we're doing differently, how we're acting in our environment differently than before. Because it's not just about the tribe or the family or the community anymore. The individual has come to the forefront, and how that individual is expressing themselves for the betterment of the group.

Alexander

Yeah. Lisa, you were sort of highlighting that, the idea of the collective.

Lisa

Yeah. I think it's really important because each of the slower moving planets have all recently changed signs. So that's another big marker. I always say to people, it's great to know where they are collectively, but plug them into your chart. Find out exactly where they are impacting you personally in your house life areas. Because if you're someone who does shadow work or internal work and really wants to dig into your consciousness, you can just take the reins and run with them. And even if you're not, even if you want to keep everything exactly the way it was, it's kind of impossible. They're going to knock on your consciousness too. They're going to spark events, situations, and changes. I think it's really fascinating. We'll probably get into this more in future episodes, plugging this minor grand trine into your chart, because it's so significant with some new beginnings in those areas for you to see how it's working in your life and how you want it to work, taking the reins.

Alexander

That's brilliant. It dovetails perfectly with the discovery of each of these three planets. Uranus in 1781, revolution. Neptune in 1846, ideological and informational. The mid-1800s brought Marconi, radio, communication, film, photography, mass communication, telephone, telegraph. We take it for granted, but all of that is coincident with the Neptune discovery. And then Pluto in 1930. What was happening in the 1930s? As a backyard astronomer and astrologer, something worth noting is that astrologers don't name the planets discovered. The astronomers govern that. It's the Saturnine body, the scientists, who determine the names given to newly discovered asteroids, centaur bodies, and planets, and whether we even call them planets at all. Pluto got demoted, as we all know. Astronomers name these bodies after Greco-Roman and other gods and goddesses, which astrologers then seize upon. What name did they use? What does that god govern or rule? There is an undeniable coincidence there. These three planets, as Lisa said, represent a whole new consciousness expansion beyond Saturn. What occurred in the 1700s with revolution was, for the US, one of the first times a nation could be born outside of a monarch. A nation born of the people, by the people, for the people. That's unheard of. That's revolutionary. That's what Uranus represents: breakthrough. So we're at a phase of human consciousness, evolution, and shift that is a radical departure. Each of these three planets, at their very discovery, coincided with some radical new breakthrough into greater consciousness, revolution of mass consciousness, communication, and in Pluto's case, energy. We think of plutonium, nuclear power, the modern space age. Each of these planets together, all changing signs at the same time, is another extraordinary rarity in this alignment we're having in 2026.

Ryan

Yeah. And I think personalizing that is just understanding how it's affecting each of us, though even that word may be a misnomer. It's not affecting you so much as the coincidence of what's happening plays into the energies associated with each of these planets, and how that's representative of what's happening with individuals in terms of how their awareness is expanding. Or it's creating so much friction that they need to push into different areas. When we're talking with clients, we're always aware of the tone and tenor of these different bodies and what they represent and how that is touching the individual, because that's an entry point to a conversation. Again, bringing more awareness to the situation. We can say Pluto might be going over your Sun, conjunct your Sun. What does that mean? The energy of Pluto and the energy of the Sun, the identity of the individual and what they identify with in this lifetime, as some astrologers would point out. Pluto moving through that means a total transformation of that identity into something different, something new. But when you look at that, it's not just a moment in time, it's a cycle. Even this minor grand trine is the culmination of something that's been happening for a very long time, for millennia. And so it gives us insight into what that looks like. Understanding what we associate with each of these planets and how they're interacting with one another, as a minor grand trine we're talking about a trine between two of the planets and two sextiles between those and the focal point of the configuration. In plain terms, these are flowing, helpful, smooth energies. That doesn't mean they'll always play out that way. If we're not aware of it, if we're not applying it consciously, then it becomes something we may struggle through. So I want to point out that when we say these planets affect things, it's not cause and effect. It's more about the awareness it brings, the moment when we are able to make conscious choices about whether we want to continue as we always have, or whether it's calling us to change our thoughts, patterns, and habits in a way that aligns a little better with this energy.

Lisa

Yeah. So the sextile, just for people who may or may not be as familiar with astrology, represents opportunities. Taking advantage of opportunities that may come forth in awareness or innovation with Uranus, and with Neptune, creation energy, creativity, spirituality, developing your intuition, and then with Pluto, stepping into empowerment and letting go of control. Standing in your empowerment if you feel like circumstances are controlling you, and trying to transcend and rebirth yourself. And then the trine is a luck aspect. So we're talking about opportunities and luck. With the trine, sometimes you can feel like it's okay, things are going to work out, everything's going to come to me. But when you decide your course of action, when you decide how you want to direct your life and you work with the trine, the expansion is phenomenal. I also want to point out that the first time this minor grand trine configuration happened was at one degree. So for those of you who know your chart, if you have anything around the one degree mark of any sign, but particularly with Uranus in Gemini, Neptune in Aries, and Pluto in Aquarius, then you can really dig into the energies in your consciousness that you want to explore. It's really about taking the reins and seeing what you can do with it, putting it on your list of expansion and letting the universe co-create with you.

Alexander

Ryan, you mentioned that this has been happening for millennia. But specifically, for modern humans, it's been since the 1700s that these planets were investigated, discovered, and their relevance to our solar system understood. These three planets describe modern humanity: the industrial age, the age of communications, the age of the airwaves, the age of microwaves, the age of technologies. Everything has been moving rapidly, as we know. One astrologer, Dr. Peter Lanzalotta, coined the term the transcendental trine for this configuration. Neptune is at its epicenter, and Neptune is about transcendence. So we have revolution with Uranus, transcendence with Neptune, and rebirth with Pluto. Those are the symbolizations of these three planets, and they are exactly the coincidental things that happen societally and systemically during these periods. These three together are like a huge trinity about transcendent thought, a radical departure from thousands, even tens of thousands, of years of collective societal structure, what we could still liken to Saturn. The societal operative dynamic, including operating under a monarchy, is what this radically departs from. It's about individuation. As we were saying when we were prepping for this, we now have kids and grandkids who are developing friendships at age four, five, six, and seven across the globe, from the US to Tokyo. That is otherworldly for grandparents and great-grandparents. It's an expansion of consciousness, of co-influence and co-connection. And Lisa, you were saying it's an expansion of social systems as well.

Ryan

Yeah. I think one of the things that I've thought about a lot lately is that as astrologers, if you're listening to the chatter within the community or watching other podcasts, people are very quick to predict the outcomes of what these patterns mean. And if there's one thing I learned from my mentor, it's that you have to approach this with curiosity. You're not going to be able to divine exactly what's going to happen. You'll find evidence for your theories around what this particular configuration means, both from a societal standpoint and what's happening in the world today with different governments and how that's breaking down. What I think is most important is understanding the energies behind the planets and what they represent, and then having conscious dialogue around how that might be affecting us, or how our country or other countries might be experiencing that. The point is not to say this is going to happen on this date, therefore be prepared for X. The most important thing about this is getting us to think beyond the limitations of our own minds, beyond the paradigms and restrictions that our tribe has put upon us. That's one of the key points of these three planets in particular: getting us to look beyond and see something bigger than ourselves and have some curiosity about it. Don't quickly, in the Saturn mind, say this is what it means. I think there's a missed opportunity in that. You'll find enough evidence all day long for what you think it means, but that's not the point. I want to flip the listener's thinking on this and say: don't come to any conclusions. This is more about expanding your mind and being put in a position where you understand you don't have the answers. As they say, the more you learn, the more you understand that you don't know. That's the point of these particular configurations.

Lisa

Yeah. And just to understand, we're conscious creators, so it's kind of like improv. Yes, and. This is happening, but we can mold it even better, we can continue to work with it.

Alexander

That is exactly right, Lisa. That is what each of these three planets, at their times of discovery, represent: the principle, the symbol of individuality, individual creativity, individual spontaneity, individual self-governance. The idea of a government of the people, by the people, for the people when Uranus was discovered in 1776 and 1781 were radical ideas of individuation. And these planets coincide in an individual's chart with that individuation, that coming into consciousness. There is, briefly, a branch of mundane political astrology that looks at nation charts, politics, and geopolitics, and we could look retrospectively at what these planets have meant. But the three of them together, every 500 years, come into some powerful alignment. We're in another 500-year marker right now, another radical transformation societally and globally. This particular trinity, with Neptune at the peak at zero degrees Aries, last happened around 4600 BC, or about 6,000 years ago. Future episodes will get into the exact timing and data more deeply, but the point is that these three together are defining individuation and psychosocial ideas. Psychology itself didn't exist until the 1920s and 1930s. So Western astrologers generally...

Ryan

Well, the three of us consider ourselves humanistic astrologers. The idea that we co-create, that the individual co-creates not just what's happening around us but what we do with it.

Alexander

Yeah. Individuation, creation, and transformation. Those represent Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. Those are great terms for all three of them.

Ryan

I think one of the things I want to bring up here too is one of the tenets I practice by: astrological symbols are neutral. They're not good, they're not bad. The ancients had a greater malefic and a greater benefic, but I want to be careful with that, because there are shadow sides to each of these planets as well. And with that, I want to bring up this configuration: the Barbault Basket. If you add Jupiter to this configuration, it creates a basket shape within a chart. That's happening around July 20th of this year. André Barbault was a French astrologer who first identified this. He predicted the major restructuring of the Soviet Union around 1989, and he also flagged this period of collective crisis around 2020. And what happened in 2020? The world blew up. A lot of astrologers are talking about this particular configuration as the opening of a utopian society, and that could happen. But I think there are also shadow sides to this, and the point is understanding how human consciousness is applied to this. What is the quality with which we approach this energy, and how do we bring our best selves to it? If we do that, there's a great opportunity to have more of a society that takes care of one another, that appreciates and holds the individual high while collectively caring for one another as well, that really surfaces the things we need to pull out of the dark in order to address some pretty awful things in our history. That's an opportunity. If we do that, there's a feeling of progression and we might be able to move into more of a utopian society or world. But we know we're humans and we know that we always bring our stuff to the table. So the opportunity will be there, but will we take it? That's the question. One of my favorite authors, Whitley Strieber, I don't know if you follow him at all, he wrote Communion and has been very focused on the visitor track of things, which is very Uranian and Plutonian by the way.

Alexander

When you say visitor, you mean...

Ryan

Not border crossing, no. Totally different. And I think the idea behind a lot of his writing is that there is a new world available to all of us if we can take it. That last part of the phrase is something very powerful: can we step up to the plate? Do we have inside us what it takes to move into what is possible? It won't be perfect, but can we at least start pushing in that direction? My hope with this configuration is that we have the opportunity to do that. Do we have it within us? Can we take it?

Lisa

And speaking geopolitically, it's a democracy if you can keep it. And that's the Pluto return the US is experiencing.

Ryan

And just to go to that real quick, with a trine there's luck behind it, but there's also laziness. So are we going to be complacent and just think that everything's going to happen for us, or do we need to really put our own will behind it? It'll be very interesting to see what happens when Mars, the planet of will, hits this configuration and what that brings.

Lisa

And I think also from a Neptunian perspective, we talk about the concept, as Dolores Cannon discussed, of the two Earths. Are we going to stay stuck in our fear, or are we going to transcend into our creation?

Alexander

Yeah. These three planets coinciding with psychology, philosophical ideas, the idea of philosophy itself becoming societally normative. But there's another thing that just struck me too. While all this unfolds in the Western world, over the last 30, 40, 50 years we've been sort of remembering and honoring cultures that we might call third world or fourth world, communities in Amazonia or Papua New Guinea or elsewhere, cultures that by 21st century standards we might consider primitive but that are still living in profound connection with the sky and the land. We've got this growing awareness to preserve culture broadly, not just Western civilized culture but humanity in general. And that's another thing about the transcendental trine: what is a society? What is a functional society? Are so-called primitive societies the primitive ones? That calls into question some of those ideas.

Ryan

Yeah. One of the things I think is interesting too with these three planets is this idea of personal responsibility, which you'd think would be more of a Saturnian concept, but I really associate it with Pluto.

Alexander

I do too.

Ryan

There's this idea of personal power and how it's applied, and a karmic tie-in with Pluto. There's this wound that's looking to be healed, or if someone's more unconscious, put on full display so it can take over the individual in some respect, depending on how it's placed. I think we're getting an opportunity here to collectively heal some of the wounds we have inflicted upon ourselves and upon our brothers and sisters on this planet. As you were saying, Alexander, there are societies of people who have lived so closely to the land in indigenous cultures, and how have we sidelined them when there is so much wisdom there for us to learn? I think these three planets are giving us an opportunity to really look at that and understand how we might need to revisit the ideas those cultures have around being stewards of the earth, giving back, and understanding that what we do has repercussions in the world around us rather than just doing what we want and thinking everything will be fine.

Alexander

So I'm thinking about your background, Lisa. One of your greater gifts as a practitioner is in family constellation therapy. Maybe you could speak to that, and I'll add evolutionary astrology.

Lisa

Yeah. I was just thinking about that. Family constellation doesn't really have anything to do with astrology, although I pair it with it. It has to do with orders within families. And the reason it works so beautifully, and I've seen it work magic, is that those principles were based on Zulu society, which we might consider very primitive. But it's not about throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It's about understanding that certain structures are great to hold the container, even as we work with it in our consciousness a little differently. It does create a sense of structure and order. You don't want to lose the strengths of our history. It's a matter of transforming it into how society functions now. It can be a tricky line to balance, but I think it's important.

Alexander

We've also seen the embrace, over the last 30 to 40 years, of indigenous cultures: their art, their food, and, with eight billion of us now, their medicines and their indigenous knowledge about plants. The need for an ecosystem that harbors these plants and unknown agents, whether plant or mushroom or otherwise. There are all sorts of things that indigenous cultures have known, often passed down through oral tradition rather than written. There's an awareness to preserve these cultures for many important reasons, not least medicinal ones for the Western world. But it's also the health of the psyche. A lot of indigenous cultures would ask: how can you live in these boxes? How can you live without sunlight? How do people work at night? How is there balance in their life? We have a lot to explore. Definitely. So this might be a good time to wrap up this episode. I think we've touched on a lot of tangents that we can go down in future episodes.

Ryan

Yeah. Go ahead, please. Next time we can explore, and Ryan, I think you have a slide you brought up, the Barbault Basket. Maybe you want to throw it up as a teaser.

Alexander

I will. Because I was just thinking, Lisa, you were talking about the container that holds this, and I'm wondering if the Barbault Basket is in many ways a container for consciousness. The fact that Jupiter is aligning itself with this configuration around July 19th and 20th really does change the pattern. It brings in one of the greater benefics, as traditional astrologers would say, where there's really an opportunity to expand even further. The function of Jupiter is expansion. What do we need to expand and learn, to experience outside of ourselves, to know and understand? So I think there's a really great opportunity for this to hold and be a container for consciousness as we start to usher in whatever this new world is. We'll pick up with this chart and these ideas in our next episode and expand on it a little bit. And perhaps we can also clarify what it means to be a self-named humanistic astrologer versus an astrologer who focuses on prediction or forecasting or envisioning what's coming. Both Lisa and Ryan, when we were gathering ourselves for the program, touched on this idea of invoking. It's happening inside us, not just externally. How are we happening to it? Because as we change ourselves, we change the society, the collective, the planet, and beyond. So yeah, thank you everyone. We really appreciate your time, and hopefully we've expanded your minds a little bit too. We look forward to seeing you again.

Ryan

Thank you.

Lisa

Thank you.

Alexander

Thanks, folks. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you, Ryan.