5 Ways to Make Astrology Work Better for You in 2021, According to Astrologer Chani Nicholas

Whether you have a vague inclination as to what your sun sign means or you have committed your birth chart to memory, chances are good you’ve consulted a horoscope at least once in your life. A 2017 survey by Pew Research Center found that 29 percent of respondents believe in astrology, and it’s easier than ever to channel that energy: The days of checking your daily horoscope in the newspaper have since evolved to a world of Instagram memes, apps, and plenty of decor options. All of that information can sometimes be overwhelming — especially if your horoscope for the day feels particularly bleak.

That doesn’t necessarily mean you should cancel all your plans and hide under the covers if you feel challenged by your horoscope. Instead, astrologer and CHANI app founder and president Chani Nicholas hopes you use your horoscope as a “great jumping-off point, but it’s never supposed to be the be-all, end-all of your week or daily life.”

To bust my own paranoia about what planetary shifts can mean — as well as to set the stage for healthier astrology habits in 2021 — I turned to Nicholas for advice. Here’s what she had to say:

You might be used to checking your horoscope at the beginning of the week or month, or even at the start of every day. All of these pathways might be right for your practice, because it’s yours alone.

“Astrology as a system has no opinion about how we work with it,” Nicholas said. “It’s up to us to engage with it in a way that has integrity, supports our agency, and enriches our relationship with ourselves in our lives.” That could mean reading your horoscope at the start of every week, or perhaps breaking listening to Nicholas’ podcast about the week ahead in pieces for each day. “You can also listen to the podcast in retrospect on Saturday night and see how the astrology landed for you during the week,” she said.

Nicholas also noted that people might feel drawn to astrology in stops and starts, too. “We can go into it every day for a year and learn so much, and then leave it alone for five years, or we could be with it every single day for our whole life, or we could pick it up every couple of months,” she said. “It’s all about what you need and what helps you strengthen your relationship to life.”

That 50-word blurb in the newspaper is definitely digestible, but it might not give you a comprehensive look at how all of your planetary placements are interacting at any given moment. As Nicholas explained, “Horoscopes, in as much as something written for your [sun] sign or rising sign, are only supposed to be fairly general.”

That’s why her team worked with the software-development company AnnieCannons to create an app that features both a breakdown of the planetary placements at the time and place of your birth, as well as a space that analyzes what current transits mean in relationship to that birth chart. “It’s a thousand times more detailed and nuanced than just reading your horoscope,” she said.

“My aim is always to remind you that ultimately you have agency and power, and all I’m doing is giving you a type of weather report this week,” Nicholas said. “It’s about how to be prepared and not be paranoid about how you’re working with the astrology.” She also cautions against being “superstitious about how you’re using the astrology” — if it gets in the way of your own self-improvement, that might be a red flag to explore.

“Don’t use it to quarantine yourself or pigeonhole yourself or your week, or anybody else,” Nicholas stresses. In other words, it’s up to you to take what you need, and perhaps assess when you feel burdened by astrology or its teachings.

“Just because there’s really challenging astrology happening, it doesn’t mean it’s happening for you personally,” Nicholas said. We talked in the first week of January, a few days after white supremacists staged an insurrection in Washington, D.C., and Nicholas nodded to that as a valid cause of personal pain, even if it wasn’t necessarily about you. “This week was really challenging for us collectively, and then therefore personally, but it might not have been about something in my personal life,” she said. “It might have been about my personal response to the collective crisis that we’re in.”

The distinction is important to remember, especially as you reflect on certain planetary squares, retrogrades or other transits as they relate to your chart. “I don’t have an interest in approaching anything unless I think it’s going to actually be healing,” Nicholas said, adding that she believes it can be “a resource for our healing and for self-development and self-awareness. That’s always where I’m coming from.”

“I think that, from whatever position we hold with whatever privilege we have and with whatever resources we have, it’s in each of our best interests to make sure that resources get evenly distributed amongst us,” Nicholas says. For her, this work is baked right into the CHANI app: Five percent of the app’s proceeds go to the nonprofit organization FreeFrom, where the funds will support Black, Indigenous, Latinx, queer, and/or trans survivors of gender-based violence.

“It was very important for us to not only have the app be built by survivors [through AnnieCannon], but to have a certain part of it go back and try to complete the cycle of also supporting survivors,” Nicholas said.

How you make a difference might vary based on where you are in your life, and it might even shift as time goes on. What matters most, however, is that you contribute when and how you can. “To whatever degree that it is possible in whatever person’s life, I think that should be our number one agenda,” Nicholas said. “Because when all of our basic needs and human rights are met, we will then have a safer, more prosperous, more abundant, more joyful community [and] world to live in.”