Frequently Asked Questions

Totem Astrology is not the same as the Chinese Astrology we are all familiar with from visiting Chinese cultural sites like restaurants and museums or even China itself. I myself even lived in China and traveled all over it for most of the year 2012. While I was inspired by the Chinese Four Pillars system in the beginning, this Totem Astrology system has grown over the past two decades into something completely different and quite distinct from the Chinese Astrology of its foundation, hence the new name! :)

This system is a tool for helping us to understand ourselves and our relationships with others, rather than a fortune teller product predicting our fates and determining which years we’ll have good luck or get married and the many other divination tools that the BaZi Chinese Four Pillars system has traditionally been used for throughout the millennia of its existence. Totem Astrology is brand new and personally refined by me, even though its roots are ancient and based in systems that have been around for much longer than any of us. I take personal responsibility for it, and it is still a living thing that is growing all the time and evolving more with all the new people that participate in it :)

I have updated the names of the animals in keeping with my interpretations of the spirit of their characters as described in the Eastern Zodiac. You are welcome to take to whatever you find relevant to you and discard anything that does not resonate. No strings attached! This is all meant to be fun! I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I have, and I hope that you get to see the people around you through a new lens of understanding as I have by applying this system of animal guides to yourself and your loved ones. It really has transformed my way of looking at the world and how I relate to myself on the inside, and I am eager to share that with all of you :)

Yes, it just takes a little fiddling! This one can be tricky — what I usually do for clients is first have them search any records like a birth certificate to see if the information was logged there. Next I ask them to reach out to relatives (starting with mom!) to see if anybody else can help them pin down their exact time of birth. Finally, if we’ve got a certain window of time to work within — for example: “My mom says she thinks I was born in the morning sometime not too long after sunrise but definitely before lunch,” then we can start looking at all the possible body animals in that window of time and see which one resonates the most with the person.

I can usually help with this as long as I can see the person visually because I’ve met quite literally thousands of people on six continents with each of the 12 different body animal guides, so by now I’ve picked up a few tricks for identifying which one someone is working with. I can still make mistakes just like anyone, but I’ve been right enough times to have pretty strong confidence in my perceptive abilities here — once I even had someone call me back the next day after they were sure I was wrong only to find out that they’d misread the AM/PM on their birth certificate and I was right! :)

These are fun little moments of vindication, but it’s also important to remember at all times that every part of this is meant to be a helpful guide, not a strict determiner of fate! If something doesn’t sit right with you or doesn’t resonate, chuck it out right away! I’m not here to tell anyone how they must live their lives, I’m only here to offer advice if it’s desired and help you figure out some of the stuff you’re stuck on when and where I can. Astrology in general is supposed to be fun and insightful, not to be a prison sentence that dictates how your life is going to go or a straitjacket that limits your options. Totem Astrology in particular has been designed by me specifically as a tool to help you better understand yourself and others, so the minute it feels like it’s not doing that, set it aside! We’re here to grow, not to be stifled or to stifle others.

A final big helper is the Nepal Time Zone shift, which often means for clients in the West that if they were born in the morning, they’ll have a different DAY (Heart) animal as well than if they were born in the evening. So if these two neighboring animals are quite different in character, like say, the Horse and the Snake, or the Dragon and the Cat, then we can usually nail down at least that part of a person’s birth time even if we have no other definite information at all — Cat Hearts behave very differently than Dragon Hearts, and most people will instantly know if it’s one or the other :)

So these are all good questions to bring up in a reading — even if your parents have passed away and your birth certificate was lost in a flood, we can check out the possible Heart and Body animal guide combinations and narrow it down to something that feels right to you and also checks out with the people who know you best. In other types of astrology this would be called “rectifying your birth chart”, and it is definitely something I can help you with. We’ll use my Totem Astrology system as well as the more common Western aka Tropical Zodiac which I am very well versed in, and even the Vedic aka Sidereal Zodiac which I have only begun studying in recent years but have gained a basic grasp of. Again, these are all meant to be tools for helping you on your journey to illuminate yourself and others, so let’s have fun with this and learn together!

Absolutely not! For starters, all this system is meant to do is tell you what your inner tendencies are, and those of your partner too in this case. What you do with those tendencies is still totally up to you — free will, remember? :) So just because your partner’s Mind animal guide doesn’t speak the same language as yours or align perfectly with you on every issue, guess what? That’s completely normal! We’re all here to learn. People are complicated, relationships are even more complicated, and even if you had perfect astrological compatibility there would still be moments of disagreement where you don’t see eye to eye. You still have to show up for yourself, and you still have to show up for your partner.

Totem Astrology is here to help you learn to speak each other’s value languages better and to understand when you seem to want different things but might lack the vocabulary to talk about those differences. If a Monkey is trying to get a Buffalo to climb a tree, the Buffalo probably won’t love the criticism and the Monkey’s constant insistence that “it’s easy! Anybody can do it!” Since we’re people, and these are just our animal guides, it can be helpful to notice where we might be getting clashing advice from different guides within ourselves, as well as the differences between our guides and those of our loved ones.

Using this astrological system’s language, we can talk about those differences in a way that makes them seem less personal because we have animal symbols to lean on for understanding. Then the person with a Monkey guide can sit back and go “gotcha, your Buffalo doesn’t like being upside down, that makes total sense,” and just let it go. At its best, Totem Astrology helps us not only cut each other some slack for being different, but to actually celebrate those differences and learn where they come from so we don’t have to be so judgmental all the time!

It also helps us see how the good parts of others are connected to the parts we might see as flaws — for example, a friend of yours might be late to appointments quite often, seeming like they have their head in the clouds. Maybe they’ve got the Cat or the Deer as one of their guides, so that tardiness comes bundled together with a healthy dose of dreamy creativity! Or perhaps one of their guides is a Tiger or a Horse, and their frequent lateness for scheduled appointments comes bundled with a readiness to boldly spring into action at a moment’s notice! These aren’t excuses for disrespectful behavior, but they are windows into what may be going on inside of yourself or another person — with the goal always being to correct any inner deficiencies and be gracious along the way with the shortcomings of others.

These animal guides are a gift, not a punishment! So go easy on yourself, and go easy on those around you. We’re all here in this loony bin doing the best we can, and if we fall down today, we can pick ourselves up again tomorrow. Better yet, we can help pick each other up, especially when we know more about what we each might need and where we’re coming from. A lot of the work I’ve done with families runs along precisely these lines — helping parents understand just what the heck is going on in their kids’ brains, and helping the kids understand where their parents’ standards are coming from.

That Dragon is going to be demanding respect (and better be giving it in return!), and that Cat is going to be appreciating your respect of her space without always having to check in, and in turn she’ll likely be blessing you with unexpectedly wonderful surprises when the loving mood strikes. If there’s one thing we can learn from this system, it’s how to be patient with one another, to look deeper and try to see what’s motivating that alternate take on reality besides the default “you’re an idiot!” We’re better than that, and we can treat each other better than that, and hopefully my system helps give you some extra language to do that with. Enjoy! :)

Well you can think of the animals like cards you were dealt at the beginning of a game of poker. You may both have a 7 of Hearts and a Jack of Diamonds, but how you play them in the game is up to you and it may look very different from the outside, even though you have some of the same cards. Or you can think about it like great books that you’ve read. Two different people can read the same four books and then give a speech tomorrow about them and they’ll be two very different speeches, albeit on the same theme of those four books. That’s how the animals work: they’re there as an encyclopedia for you to draw upon throughout your life, not some magic trick telling you who you are or who you have to be. Just information you have about some of the gifts you’ve been given.

And Totem Astrology isn’t all there is to the world, just like any other part of your identity that you may hold dear isn’t your full self either: your race, your religion, the country you’re from, these may all be important parts of ourselves, and more important at some times than at others, and more important to some people than to some others. Same thing with Totem Astrology — maybe it matters tremendously in your dealings today, maybe it doesn’t! Take it with a grain of salt, it’s meant to inform and entertain — rather than a burden or a curse, it’s meant to be a blessing! So enjoy it :)