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At My Altar with Dr. Trenda Lee is a podcast that explores the ways everyday people practice their spirituality. Join Trenda and her guests for honest conversations about their pathways to the divine and discover what that might look like for you. Someone else’s story might be your next spiritual practice.
Do you want to feel more connected to the divine? However, you define that maybe your old practices don't fit anymore, or maybe you've always felt spiritual, but never built a practice around it. I'm Trenda Lee, and I'm talking with everyday people about their spiritual practices. I invite you to join me as we explore Pathways to the Divine at my altar. Welcome back to another episode of at my altar.
Trenda:I'm really happy you're here. May you find whatever is on offer for you in this episode and may you enjoy my guest today as much as I enjoyed interviewing her. Before we talk to her though, I want to share a story about when I drowned at age 11. Obviously, I'm alive, but I did also drone. It was back in the 1970s during the summer.
Trenda:It was really popular to cross over into Wisconsin and go tubing down the Apple River. And when I say tubing, mean floating down the river on your individual rubber inner tube. So I'm with a school group and three or four of my friends are in our individual tubes. We're thinking we're very cool. So we're hooking arm in arm and floating down the Apple River.
Trenda:I had a slight disadvantage because I didn't know how to swim. And in true nineteen seventies form, no one has a life jacket on. We are just free flowing. So we're floating down the river and ahead of us we start hearing people shouting, watch out for the tree, watch out for the tree. And as we start to approach, we see a large tree with branches has fallen from the riverbank and is stretching from the bank into the middle of the river.
Trenda:There's plenty of room for people to steer around it, but it was causing a lot of currents underneath the water. And the warning came to my group of friends just a little too late for us to unlock our arms and get ourselves around that tree. So we just floated right into it. And within seconds, I was sucked down through the middle of my tube into the current and it was swirling me to the bottom of the river. Mind you, this is a very deep river.
Trenda:After I went a ways down, I instinctively opened my eyes to orient myself. I could see the water was really light above me where the sun was shining on the river and dark below me. So I knew which way was up and I started pushing my way up towards the top of the water. But I'm not getting anywhere because the current is trying to suck me further down. At this point, I am completely out of breath and I'm desperate to take in a big gulp of air.
Trenda:So what do I do? I take in a deep breath of air and that's exactly what happened. I breathed in air. It allowed me to make my way to the top of the water and I have no idea how long I was under. But when I came up, I remember I wasn't panicked and I wasn't afraid, but I did know something powerful had happened.
Trenda:I was too young to understand exactly what that was, let alone the ramifications around the question, why? On today's episode, my guest helps me understand why that moment stayed with me and what it means to live like your life still has assignments left. Here's the interview. I am so excited today to welcome my guest, astrologer extraordinaire Moon Rabbit. Moon Rabbit has been practicing astrology professionally since 1977, finding it to be a deep source of cosmic knowledge, inspiration, and connection to the divine.
Trenda:Welcome to my altar, Moon Rabbit.
Moon Rabbit:I'm delighted to be here with you today, Trenda.
Trenda:You know, one of my daughters saw you and had a reading. She said to me, You need to do this, mother. Like, it's a must. And I was like, Okay, I'm going to give this a try. What ended up happening for me was so profound.
Trenda:I almost felt like I found a spiritual guide in you and through you. It helped me feel like I was connected to the universe in a way that just helped me feel grounded, helped me feel both bigger than myself and smaller than myself. Do you feel divinely inspired around this?
Moon Rabbit:I love the question. This is now almost fifty years of being deeply immersed in this profound study of what I think of as the universe and universal energy. Over the years, I learned that things sometimes come to me. And when they do, I must tell people, you know, I think of them as deeply intuitive ways of knowing things. But it's always been within the framework of understanding these astrological energies that are so archetypal and universal in a way beyond our day to day way of thinking or understanding.
Trenda:One of the things that I said earlier was this idea that you felt like a spiritual guide. Sometimes it was hard for me to actually hear what you were reading and sharing with me because I don't think I was quite ready to hear it. And at the same time, I felt so held in all of our moments and even beyond that, because I would go back to my notes and you always give the recordings of the session. There's a way to keep going back to say, Oh, maybe now I'm ready to hear it. I'm wondering if that's true for you.
Trenda:So if you understand all these astrological energies and for fifty years you've been studying the universe and the cosmos. Can you hear what the universe has on offer for you?
Moon Rabbit:So initially, I think part of me was drawn to astrology because I was very anxious about life and the future. And for the first decade, I was anxiously involved with astrology until it pushed me in a way to accepting that I wasn't really in control in the way that I thought. Even if I knew the energy that was coming my way, I had to surrender and work with it that I couldn't really control it. So now I don't keep track of my daily, like, what's happening to my charge. But I know where everything is up in the heavens, and I know what's coming.
Moon Rabbit:But I feel this kind of acceptance that, Oh, okay, well, what's coming might make me a little uncomfortable, but every single time it actually has in some ways expanded my experience of being alive. So I might as well lean into it. I might not like it, but I might as well lean into it.
Trenda:Gosh, that is exactly how I have felt in some of the things you have shared with me, whether that is sharing that my chart would read, Hey, you've come through a very difficult period where all these forces are tough, tough, tough, but there's an opening. It's two years from now,
savana:but there will be an opening.
Trenda:It just helped me say, This is where I am supposed to be right now. So be open to all the emotions that come with life. It just helped me at a time when I really was needing my spirituality to show up. I needed myself to acknowledge and surrender to my own divinity. And I know you have had some deep losses in your life that impacted your life's work in astrology.
Moon Rabbit:I was talking to you about the role that astrology has played in my life. One of the prime example was back in 2005. I had been noticing that my chart was talking about a major separation and a primary relationship. And I was just sitting with that. And then my identical twin sister called me from the hospital saying that she'd been diagnosed with ovarian cancer and all of the pieces fit into place.
Moon Rabbit:This is who I would be separated from. And because of that foreknowledge, I basically put my work on hold because I just wanted to be with my twin. And it only took five months for her to pass to the other side. So talk about feeling grateful that I didn't put anything off. And on the other side of that, because I was with her when she died, I looked at the time, and it took a little while before I could start to study this map of the heavens for the moment of her death.
Moon Rabbit:But as I studied that, I saw that she had fulfilled her purpose in life. So I wanted her to be around, but she basically was done. It really clearly gave me this message, it took me probably five or six years to muddle my way through the grief to see the picture of the energy so clearly that she was done. Then I decided because that helped me so much, I had to study this as much as I could because maybe it could help other people. Since 2015, I've been doing readings publicly for people who are going through loss.
Moon Rabbit:Bringing this, what I think of as illumination, to a potential kind of opportunity for growth that lies sometimes very deeply buried in every loss we experience.
Trenda:That's so beautiful. I'm really impacted by this idea that she served her purpose and it was her time to, as you said, cross over to the other side. As a child, I drowned and am alive, but I did drown and clearly it wasn't my time to go. So I am really resonating with this idea of death charts and helping others understand what is happening in the universe around that person's crossing over. Thank you for sharing it.
Moon Rabbit:Oh, and what is happening for them at that point in time that they're experiencing this kind of loss and separation and grief? You know, part of me really wants to reframe the suffering and bring a little opportunity for growth or some different kind of divinity into that experience. I mean, the suffering is necessary. You can't get to the other side without the suffering. It doesn't have to be the only thing.
Trenda:So beautiful. You're such a gift. So Thank
Moon Rabbit:you, Trenda.
Trenda:Let's talk about your spirituality for a minute. I mean, for somebody who really guides so many people in what is probably their spiritual path or understanding of their life's experiences, what does spirituality mean to you?
Moon Rabbit:Well, I grew up in a very conservative Jewish family. And I went to Hebrew school for ten years and I was immersed in Judaism, which in Minnesota is very unusual. So I had the synagogue group, but I was the only kid in all of my school classes who would talk about Hanukkah while everybody was celebrating Christmas. But I loved being Jewish because it was full of ritual and was connected to food. And I was a really devout teenager.
Moon Rabbit:And then when I was 17, my mom died. And I had been praying as a young person can pray because I knew my mom had cancer. I thought God was all powerful. And if I was good enough and I prayed hard enough that my mom would live well. Obviously, I don't think that way anymore, but it was very, very difficult then to feel this kind of abandonment from what had felt like this very spiritual part of my life.
Moon Rabbit:I was 17 then and then I went to college. And when I was in college, I knew somebody who knew somebody who was practicing to be an astrologer. And she was looking for people to practice on. I thought, Okay, I'll give it a whirl. So we met and she looked at my chart and she said something about when you were 17 or 18.
Moon Rabbit:There was this big shadow of darkness in your life, which of course was when my mom died. And I was completely blown away. I was like, how could this person possibly know this? So I went to the Minneapolis Public Library to find books on astrology. I think that the year was '68, maybe.
Moon Rabbit:There was one book in the library. And a few years later, I found a metaphysical bookstore. So I started teaching myself astrology. And back in the day, you had to use a slide rule. There were no computers.
Moon Rabbit:Right? So it was big time math, calculations galore. But from the get go, when I started studying astrology, I felt like I was remembering something that I already know. When you study astrology, you're immediately understanding that you're part of something greater than what you might think. And so I reclaimed Judaism later on in my life, but astrology has been this mainstay for me.
Moon Rabbit:I think of it as that we're all energy. If you break everything down, what are we? We're energy. And everything around us, including the planets, are all vibration. They're all energy too.
Moon Rabbit:And so we come into these different energy fields of the vibrations of the planets, which are changing every day. So the true theme from astrology, nothing stays the same. Everything changes. And so once you become immersed in the fact that there's all these big patterns that are constantly unfolding, they never repeat. You can't get hung up in a problem and it's gonna last forever because it can't.
Moon Rabbit:It'll change. Things are terrible, but that can't last forever either. So that's my worldview. And I can now, within some degree of certainty, look at the cycles and tell you when it'll change, which is very reassuring, isn't it?
Trenda:Yeah. It is actually.
Moon Rabbit:It is for me too.
Trenda:So do you have any practices in your life or rituals that are part of how you communicate to the divine? Or you said you have reclaimed your Judaism. Tell me a little bit about your spiritual practices or rituals.
Moon Rabbit:Well, I do clearing and grounding. It used to take a long time. Now it's pretty fast before I do every reading. And in that clearing and grounding, I connect to my ancestors. And then I put out a little universal intention that the interchange is gonna serve the person that I'm dealing with.
Moon Rabbit:And then when the reading's over, I do another little clearing and grounding. Because I do readings almost every day, that's become my daily practice. The other thing I do is I like to follow the sign of the moon and the phase of the moon. So every twenty eight days, we're gonna go through the entire zodiac. The moon will move through all of the signs.
Moon Rabbit:And there's an energy I associate with each one of those, and I like to see how it's playing out around me. I tell people who wanna understand astrology. This is a really kind of day to day way to have a real life experience. Those are my main things. Then now I go to the synagogue on Zoom every Friday night.
Moon Rabbit:So
savana:Good old Zoom. Good old Even spiritually, we are connected to
Trenda:the Internet. I've talked to a few practitioners of different types who their spirituality shows up in their work. It's interesting how they talk about having to cleanse and clear, but also that it becomes their spiritual practice, and it's almost interchangeable.
Moon Rabbit:I really feel that way.
Trenda:Okay, I have one more curiosity. You use the term crossover and that we are all energy. You also talk about you're reading the heavens. Can you help me understand your language?
Moon Rabbit:Well, let me talk about that we're all energy. One of the things that the physicists have proven now is that energy can't be destroyed. It can only be transformed, which leads me to believe very profoundly that when people die, they're just transformed into a different kind of energy. After my twin died, there was a period of emptiness. I thought because of what I did and who I was that we would be connected immediately.
Moon Rabbit:It took a really long time, but then I had a dream about a year after she died. And in the dream, the door opened and she came out. I was like sobbing and she was like, fine. And then these seven beams of light came out into the room and they all started chanting. And she turned into a being of light and put her hands on my head and they all chanted.
Moon Rabbit:In the dream, I connected with them energetically and I got a healing. And I woke up and I thought, this is incredible. She knew what I needed and she sent it to me through this dream. So that confirmed my thought that we're all energy. And ever since that dream, she's been with me.
Moon Rabbit:Sometimes we're really lucky and we could get a clear night and we can look up to the sky. And there they are, the Milky Way. Sometimes Jupiter and Venus are out. This is part of our world, but we're so small in our way of thinking about things. When I look at a birth chart fifty years into the game, I can see so many patterns about the lessons that soul stepped into.
Moon Rabbit:I mean, people want to know when their house will sell. They want to know when they're going to fall in love. And yeah, okay, that's fine. But I think as a spiritual seeker, when people come to me and they say, okay, I'm looking for this deep soul purpose in my life. I love that level of astrology because it's there.
Moon Rabbit:It's profound. Let's tap into it. The world would be such a different place, wouldn't it?
Trenda:Amen. So beautiful. You are such a gift to me, to others, to this world.
Moon Rabbit:Thank you,
Trenda:Trenda. Just adore you. Thank you so much for being at my life.
Moon Rabbit:My pleasure, Trenda. Thank you so much for having me.
Trenda:Boy, am I grateful to have Moon Rabbit in my life. If you've never done an astrological reading as part of your spiritual wellness, I really encourage it. I'm not sure what will come forward for you, but for me, it always grounds me in both my human and spiritual existence. And it gets me feeling so connected to the divine. I can't wait to talk to my daughter Savannah about Moon Rabbit.
Trenda:Let's give her a call. Hi, Savannah. Hello. How are you doing on this cold winter night? I am doing okay.
Trenda:How about you? Trying to stay warm for sure. It's below zero here in
savana:I know.
Trenda:It's been a cold spell in the last couple of weeks.
savana:I miss the polar vortexes when I lived out of the state, but I am embracing it as best as I can.
Trenda:Yes, we are tough people. We can handle a lot of cold. Been here
savana:my whole life.
Trenda:I am going to talk to you about my interview with Moon Rabbit. She has been such an important spiritual guide for me. She's so good at what she does and she's been doing it for so many decades. So one of the things that happened to her is she had a twin sister who died and Moon Rabbit shared the story of her grief and how she decided to do what is called a death chart, not a chart based on birth, but a chart based on her sister's death, like the time, the date, the place. And she said it was so healing for her because what she had realized is her sister completed her purpose in life.
Trenda:It was time for her sister to die. And while she was grieving and all of those things, there was some level of comfort in that. And so now she does death charts for people who are grieving to bring them some level of comfort. How powerful is that? Wow.
Trenda:And it just made me think about you and how you work with the elderly many times at the end of their life. And wondering if your work has influenced you on your spirituality or how you are thinking about death. Wow. Just gonna interject too.
Moon Rabbit:Yeah. At your age. Yeah.
savana:At your age.
Trenda:You're still a very young person. So at age 33, we tend not to be thinking about death that much. But at the same time, you're working with people who are dying every day.
savana:Well, the first thing I'll share is I remember when I was younger, let's say in my preteens or teenage years where a lot of my friends were babysitting and I was ever that person that loved hanging out with kids. But I always really enjoyed older people. I just wanted to learn much from them. When I think about spirituality, oftentimes, think about just being present and just listening and being in tune and aware of what I'm thinking and feeling and how that connects to our greater beings and energies. And I feel like I get to do that all the time when I work with older people.
savana:I work with people with neurological or neurodegenerative diseases, oftentimes terminal. And I have to give really hard diagnoses, but I have to say a lot of the time we end up laughing together. I find that older people can take a lot in stride. They're so tough. Like, they've lived a long life to that point where they're just less afraid.
savana:And I also find that older people oftentimes say they are worried about their diagnosis or dying and what that means. They often feel like they're burdening others. They really are quite selfless and thinking about how is this situation going to impact my loved ones or impact my children and my grandchildren. And often we spend a lot of time talking about their legacy, not necessarily them being afraid of dying. I think if you have the privilege of growing old, you become less afraid because you witness more people dying around you.
savana:So I think what you're sharing about Moon Rabbit and her doing death charts, I think, is just so beautiful because often it's the younger people that are afraid and older adults tend to have a lot more peace and acceptance with death.
Trenda:Are you afraid?
Moon Rabbit:Oh.
savana:Yeah. I used to be, like, petrified. I would keep me up at night because I'd worry about, like, what if I don't get up in the morning? Again, part of the gift of working with older folks, and then I will note also not older folks. I also had a number of young people that have terminal cancer or something.
savana:That's of course harder because I would want everybody. I wanna live a long healthy life. But I also really appreciate what you said about our time on Earth or I can't recall exactly Our what is you complete. We've completed our purpose. I can see how that could be really comforting.
savana:It makes sense. I skirted around your question. I can't deny and say that I'm not afraid to die, and I'm actively searching for what would make me feel comfortable with death. And I think that knowing that the life I have lived has been meaningful, my legacy is meaningful, but also that wherever I go next, will be at peace.
Trenda:You're in a unique position to be so close to people when they are so close to crossing over and at a young age. It'll be fun to watch how that impacts and shapes your way in which you walk your time on earth right now and prepare for the next rebirth, however we think about it.
savana:Yeah, for sure.
Trenda:Eyes and ears wide open. A gift. A Okay, enough about death.
savana:As she says in her pink, she's like, Your outfit screams, I am alive. I am very alive right now. Knocked on wood. I'm burning a candle as we speak. I have called in our ancestors and I'm letting them know I'm not
Trenda:ready to be one quite yet.
savana:Okay. Okay. I love you so much, mom.
Moon Rabbit:I love
savana:you too, mom.
Trenda:I am so happy to spend every day I have with you this And I will be a good ancestor to you in the time that I cross over.
savana:I know you will be, thank you. Okay,
Trenda:talk to you later. Okay, Bye. Practice and a reading with her is exactly what I need. I also loved the idea of following the moon for a month. Heck yeah, let's do it.
Trenda:If you're inspired to try some of these practices or read her books, you can find more information about Moon Rabbit within the show notes or go to her website astrologybymoonrabbit.com. You can also find all my episodes, ideas for spiritual practices, and download my free guide at my website at myaltar.love. At My Altar is hosted by me Trenda Lee with producers Cecilia Stanton Adams, Charlie Mitchell, and me Trenda Lee. Original music by Charlie Mitchell and website photos and logo design by Irina Toponte at Toponte studios. Special thanks to my beautiful daughter Savannah, At My Altar with Trenda Lee can be found anywhere you listen to podcasts.
Trenda:If you've always felt spiritual and want to find more pathways to the divine, join me for another episode of At My Altar with Trenda Lee. Until then, I'll see you on the love grid.