Podcast Summary

We Can Do Hard Things

Episode: Astrology for (Former) Skeptics: Sonya Renee Taylor Takes Us Further

Date: December 18, 2025

Host: Glennon Doyle, with Abby Wambach, Amanda Doyle

Guest: Sonya Renee Taylor

Episode Overview

In this powerful and deeply personal episode, Glennon, Abby, and Amanda—joined by writer, activist, and astrologer Sonya Renee Taylor—explore astrology as a framework for self-discovery, healing, and collective transformation. The episode centers on Sonya reading Amanda Doyle’s astrological chart, sparking profound reflections on resource, worthiness, individuality, and the tension between collective belonging and personal sovereignty. The conversation moves fluidly from chart interpretation to honest group processing about what it means to feel "enough" and the ongoing work of aligning one’s life to reduce suffering—both personal and global.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Promise and Challenge of Astrology (00:00–02:00)

• Glennon and the crew highlight that this conversation was so “full of magic” it became its own episode.
• Sonya is introduced as someone whose spiritual practice and personal healing are deeply informed by astrology.

Notable quote (Glennon, 01:57):
“I was a non believer before this. Now I'm like, me too.”

2. Sonya Reads Amanda’s Astrological Chart (02:14–19:21)

Amanda’s Sun, Moon, and Rising: A Study in Contrasts

• Sun in Aries (Second House):
  • Aries: energy of initiation, beginning anew, vitality, self-starting.
  • Second house: resources—may signal recurring journeys regarding resources, starting over, or multiple career chapter beginnings.
  • There is an ongoing “tug of war” in Amanda’s chart with other energies that counteract this Aries drive.

Sonya, 02:41:
“You have a fantastic superpower chart full of fantastic things. [...] That Aries energy is beginner energy. It is self initiation energy.”

• Moon in Taurus (Third House):

  • Taurus moon: seeks comfort, beauty, ease, security, and a slow process—contrasts Aries’s impatience.
  • Amanda “stews” a long time before moving into action.
  • Third house: governs communication.

• Chiron (Wounded Healer) Conjunct Moon:

  • Chiron represents a central wound that—when tended to—becomes a gift for others.
  • Amanda’s Chiron is close to her Moon, producing internal conflict: the desire for comfort and the simultaneous disbelief it’s possible.
  • Sonya explains that Amanda must interrogate her belief that comfort and ease are “not for her.”

Sonya, 08:28:
“Chiron is sitting next to your moon that wants nothing but comfort, […] and then the part of you that says, I don't believe it, I can't trust it, no, it's not safe, I don't believe it.”

• Rising Sign in Pisces + Heavy Pisces Stellium:
  • Pisces is about merging with collective consciousness, dissolution of boundaries, being receptive and empathetic.
  • Amanda has five planetary placements in Pisces—she easily merges with the emotional needs of others.
  • The challenge is to balance merging with the collective and honoring her individuality (the “two fish” of Pisces).
  • The "other fish" (the individual) needs to swim; Amanda is here to learn sovereign personhood, not just dissolve into others’ needs.

Sonya, 08:50:
“This is what is so important about this duality placement of Pisces, these two fish. One fish is collective consciousness. […] The other fish is the individual.”

Astrological Patterns and Their Life Implications

• Overcompensations:

  • Amanda’s chart is heavily loaded in the first house (sense of self), yet she “overcompensates for the other” rather than herself.

• Saturn Retrograde in the Seventh House:

  • Indicative of learning lessons about healthy boundaries, sovereignty, and reinterpreting work and effort.
  • Amanda is challenged to “reinterpret” her story about what she can have, to include pleasure and ease.

• Venus in the First House (at 1 degree):

  • Both Amanda and Abby have this “preschool class” Venus—learning new lessons about value, pleasure, and beginnings together.

3. Personal Reaction & Processing (19:21–28:00)

Amanda’s Immediate Reaction:

• Amanda describes the reading as “wildly on the nose,” especially around her self-imposed limitations and long-held belief that certain positive experiences aren’t accessible to her.

Amanda, 19:33:
“It feels like impossible to get. But at the same time, knowing that, it's like a self imposed prison at the same time.”

• She wonders about the sovereignty theme: is it about marriage, partnership with Glennon, motherhood, or all of the above?

Sonya’s Core Teaching:

• The recurring theme of dualistic thinking (either/or); Amanda’s soul work is to recognize that her individual journey is not separate from the collective.

• “There is no energy of challenge in our charts where there is not a pathway towards its ease. We are not here to suffer. We are here to come in alignment.” (Sonya, 22:53)

• Sonya explains suffering as the gap between soul and personality—the work is to align the two.

Sonya, 23:56:
“So here is our souls and here is our personalities and the space in between is called suffering. And the goal of our evolutionary journey on this planet, both inside of ourselves and in the collective, is to reduce suffering. And the way we do that is by becoming in alignment with our souls.”

4. Collective Reflection & Group Processing (29:32–58:56)

Abby’s Reflections (29:57–37:53)

• Abby shares her lifelong drive for “external relevance” and worth, and the potential for a paradigm shift around “enoughness.”
• She realizes that “acquiring more” is often a strategy to avoid self-love and being present with herself.

Abby, 34:10:
“Yeah, the next dopamine hit. I think that that is all tied up with the enoughness component… maybe the enoughness is in me and maybe I just need to focus on myself and the mothering of me, my own spirit.”

• Abby sees the mothering of herself as her “final frontier”—the foundation for loving and caring for others.

Glennon’s Reflections (36:18–37:53)

• Glennon expresses suspicion about future-oriented “dreaming,” feeling she already has all she could ever have wanted.
• She recognizes that chasing new goals can be a distraction from feeling “enough” in the present.

Glennon, 37:53:
“Whatever the thing is, what does it represent that we could give ourselves now that is not tied to trading more bullshit.”

Amanda on Present vs. Future, Resource, and the Metaphor of the Coat (39:25–58:56)

• Amanda references Audre Lorde: “Look closely at the present you are constructing. It should look a lot like the future you are dreaming.”
• She shares about learning to value her own resource—not just money, but health, time, and relationships—and to make decisions based on a balanced sense of what she truly values.

Amanda, 44:09:
“We have four sets of resources in our lives... Money and material resources, health, time, and relationship. This goes to Abby conversation. Like, if you think resources, money, then you're going to spend your time, your health, and your relationships making it. [...] So deciding what resources seems to be a super fucking important thing, because then you decide what is the most important resource.”

• Amanda’s metaphor of the thrifted gold silk coat—kept for 26 years before wearing—evokes themes from her chart: loving beauty, savoring without taking, and the stories she tells about what is and isn’t “for her.”

Amanda, 42:49:
“That’s the first time I've worn that coat. [...] Maybe I just love beautiful things. And maybe [ease is] something that I could have if just. I re. I told a different story if just. I changed my idea of Resource.”

• Glennon reframes resource as the divine internal voice—that “this, not this” intuition—which Amanda wonders if she’s still learning to access.

5. Broader Societal Lessons and Widening the Lens (49:07–58:56)

• The hosts reflect on how their internal struggles with resource, suffering, and enoughness mirror social systems that value power, money, and productivity at the expense of relational and planetary wellbeing.
• Glennon frames the work of reordering one’s inner life as a small-scale revolution necessary for global change:
  “How do I reorder everything in my life? So I am not recreating that bullshit. So I am living in a different way than what I'm seeing and criticizing. It's like man in the mirror shit.” (Glennon, 51:41)
• Sonya's message about personal and planetary healing echoes throughout: reducing personal suffering is inseparable from collective healing.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “For every struggle in your chart, there is a gift of ease that is also in your chart. And aligning those two is your path.”
  — Amanda, summarizing Sonya, (01:40)

• “Chiron represents where we feel insecurity and uncertainty and instability in our lives. [...] But when we learn to work with it, it becomes a profound gift for others.”
  — Sonya Renee Taylor (07:30)

• “We cannot build externally that which we have not built internally, that which we desire to see in the world. We must first be the template of.”
  — Sonya Renee Taylor (24:44)

• “There’s a full story there. There is no energy of challenge in our charts where there is not a pathway towards its ease. We are not here to suffer. We are here to come in alignment.”
  — Sonya Renee Taylor (22:53)

• “Look closely at the present you are constructing. It should look a lot like the future you are dreaming.”
  — Audre Lorde, quoted by Amanda (39:25)

• “How do I reorder everything in my life? So I am not recreating that bullshit. So I am living in a different way than what I'm seeing and criticizing. It's like man in the mirror shit.”
  — Glennon (51:41)

Important Timestamps

• 02:14 – Sonya introduces Amanda’s chart; Aries Sun and its implications.
• 04:25 – Taurus Moon, Chiron, and the wound/tenderness around comfort and resource.
• 08:37 – The dynamics of Pisces Rising and the duality of the “two fish.”
• 15:37 – Description of Amanda’s Pisces stellium and what it means for self/other balance.
• 19:33 – Amanda’s raw processing post-chart reading.
• 23:56 – Sonya’s paradigm for suffering as the gap between soul and personality.
• 29:57 – Abby’s personal processing around “enoughness” and self-mothering.
• 42:49 – Amanda’s story of the gold thrift-store coat as a metaphor for resource and beauty.
• 44:09 – Amanda on the different types of resources: money, health, time, relationships.
• 49:07 – Reflections on micro and macro systems of resource, suffering, and world-building.

Overall Tone and Takeaways

• The tone is deeply personal, raw, and compassionate, with moments of humor, vulnerability, and philosophical musing.
• Sonya’s teaching style is poetic and mythic, weaving storytelling and astrology to offer listeners a compassionate lens for self-examination.
• The group’s processing is unrehearsed, intimate, and honest, making space for existential doubt as well as hope.
• The episode leaves listeners with the challenge and comfort of knowing that for every pain or struggle in their chart (and in life), there is a potential gift of ease, and an invitation to align with both for personal and collective healing.

Listener Takeaway

Even for skeptics, the intimate exploration of astrology in this episode serves as a springboard for contemplating how we define resource, sufficiency, and our relationship to self and community. It encourages us to look at our own patterns—astrological or otherwise—and ask not only what wounds we carry, but what paths of ease and sovereignty are waiting for us to claim, both for ourselves and for the world we hope to create.