2025-2027 Living Astrologies Practitioner Program

The Hermes-Hestia Center for Living Astrologies is founded and taught by Jason Holley and affiliated faculty. The purpose of all the classes and programs offered are to support students in developing proficiency in astrological practice that facilitates a living experience of astrological symbolism. The 2024-2026 Practitioner Program cohort is now in progress. The 2025-2027 cohort of the program will begin online in November 2025. Note: Program Announcements are made exclusively through the mailing list. If you are interested in applying for the next cohort, please contact hermeshestiacenter@gmail.com expressing your interest. Each cohort is limited to 20 participants.

Program Dates

November 2025 - June 2027

Tentative One-Week Intensive Dates (Dates Will Be Finalized by July 2025):

March 22-28, 2026
October 4-10, 2026
June 6-12, 2027

Program Purpose

The Practitioner Program exists to empower students with astrological fluency to deepen and develop their capacities as practitioners facilitating individuals and groups to have living experiences of astrological symbolism; to engage in a full-self way with the living sky and psyche.

The skills and capacities you will develop and deepen in this program are described in detail below under “Curriculum Focus Areas”, in three broad areas:

Mythic-Imaginal: immerses students in the mythic context of astrology and enables students to creatively recognize, engage, and work with symbolism, myth, and mythic figures in their own lives and the lives of others.

Relational-Psychological: supports students in developing astrologically-grounded and psychologically-sophisticated relational models of practice, including multiple modes of case conceptualization and ways of understanding and working with the interpersonal field as a locus of archetypal expression.

Embodied-Experiential: prepares students to facilitate living experiences of astrology for people in individual and group settings - including astrodrama and action methods, dreamwork, embodiment and movement, art and making, play, ceremony and ritual.

The program is grounded in personal and direct experience of living astrology. You will be asked to make your own life and experiences the laboratory of astrological learning. You will have, beginning in the second month of the program, multiple opportunities to experience practices and approaches from both ‘client’ and ‘practitioner’ roles — so that the learning is taking place in an action-based way, not only theory. And you will develop communities of practice with other astrologers working this way around the world.

Educational Philosophy

Our educational approach holds that the primary instrument of meaningful astrology is the whole-self consciousness of the astrologer and their capacity to engage with astrological symbolism, fellow human beings, and all our relations in mythic-imaginative, relational-psychological, and embodied-experiential ways.

Our approach recognizes astrological technique as the beginning rather than the end of astrological practice. Each student will enter with technical knowledge from various astrological disciplines, bringing diverse ways of orienting to the symbolic sky. The focus in this program is the development of a living relationship with sky and psyche; if we are anchored in imagination, relatedness, and body, we will naturally learn, grow, and work with the help of the technical models that are most alive to us and best suited to the place, the moment, and the webs of relations in which we are situated.

Astrological theory and technique practiced from this place take on deeper dimension, assisting us in connecting more profoundly with symbols and cycles, life and all creatures, allowing us to do our astrological feeling, sensing, thinking, and sharing with our relations, so that our human talents for language and concept do not separate us but rather weave us and those we work with into creative, life-enhancing connection within and around us. The techniques and theories themselves then also naturally evolve and change as they are brought into deeper levels of service to symbol, self, and world.

Curriculum Focus Areas

The curriculum builds practitioner capacity in several competencies. This list is not exhaustive nor mutually-exclusive. The areas overlap and cannot cover all the ways the work operates.

Symbolic-Imaginal

Skills and practices in this area enable students to creatively recognize, engage, and work with symbolism and archetype in their own lives and the lives of others, and to bring imaginal consciousness — critically and relationally inflected — to all experiences of life and astrological practice.

Custodial and Reciprocal Ways with Stars and Stories: Practitioners develop themselves in a custodial and reciprocal relation with the fields of astrology, myth, and story.

Recognition and Tracking of Astrological Symbolism: Practitioners deepen their tracking capacities relative to the planets, signs, houses, and aspects in astrology and consciousness through cultivation of their own knowledge base of myth, story, ad tradition, and through the deepening of felt-sense awareness of symbolic signatures.

Hermeneutics and Symbolic Process: Practitioners develop working models of symbolic process, divination, and the capacity to facilitate, educate, and engage this process with clients and students.

Diachronic Awareness: Practitioners study the history and development of astrological symbols, technique, and story, and develop a habit and capacity of situating these in the context of the natural and cultural environments in which they have taken place.

Story-hearing and Story-telling: Practitioners develop their capacity to think and experience in story, as well as to track story-threads in narrative and events and to weave these threads in creative and invocative storytelling.

Facilitation of the Reflective Symbolic Function: Practitioners actively build the capacity of themselves and their clients to enter into symbolic modes of consciousness and to make use of full spectrum of consciousness and experience (somatic, sensuous, relational, emotional, mental, languaging, spiritual) to facilitate symbolic encounter.

Embedding Technique in Imagination: Practitioners actively situate astrological techniques, frameworks, and diagrams in dynamic relation to imaginative, sensuous participation with life, and develop the capacity to track when story and technique bring greater or lesser connection.

Cultivation of Reflective Presence: Practitioners actively practice states of consciousness which support symbolic engagement: awe, mystery, wonder, curiosity, openness. Practitioners train patience, open-endedness, and receptiveness in symbolic work to allow astrology to speak.

Relational-Psychological

This focus area enables to students to deepen their understanding and capacity to engage with psychological complexity in self and others, as well as with the ecological and relational fields in which astrological practice and human connection are embedded. The lenses, models, practices and skills offer ways of seeing and navigating intrapsychic and interpersonal dynamics, to work creatively and respectfully with the interpersonal field as a locus of archetypal expression.

Students are supported in developing the following capacities and competencies:

Empathy, Attunement, Resonance: Practitioners develop capacities in tracking emotional, somatic, spiritual, and relational process and states of people they will work with.

Setting and Tending the Relational-Archetypal Field: Practitioners develop skills in creating “secured symbolizing fields” for experiential work, rooted in care, boundary, and relatedness.

Interface of Personal, Relational, and Archetypal: Practitioners track and work with the interpersonal and archetypal field using a wide range of lenses and models.

Self-as-Ecosystem and Intrapsychic Complexity: Practitioners develop multiple models of imagining the human experience drawn from multiple cosmologies and cultures, and develop their capacity to track states of self and self-organization in clients and students.

Self-Awareness and the Use of Self: Practitioners develop a deeper fluency in their own psychic self-organization, vulnerabilities, and develop the capacity to self-track during experiential work with clients, and to make use of this information in work with others.

Ecological-Relational Perception: Practitioners develop their awareness of the deep embeddedness of individuals in webs of relations, social and cultural backgrounds,

Dyadic Field Dynamics: Practitioners develop modes of perceiving and participating effectively in one-to-one dynamics with clients and students.

Group Field Dynamics: Practitioners develop modes of perceiving and tracking group process, as well as developing capacity to facilitate group dynamics in service of experiential astrology.

Experiential-Embodied

This focus area empowers students to facilitate living experiences of astrology for themselves and others in settings ranging from individual consultations to group settings.

Land-Based and Place-Based Practice: Practitioners develop attentional practices and attitudes to the development of relatedness with Place, Land, and the webs of relations in which they are situated, as well as capacities to facilitate this experience of embeddedness for others.

Ceremony, Ritual, Play: Practitioners develop skills in understanding, creating, and facilitating spontaneous and structured modes of ceremonial, ritual, and play; including the engagement of ancestors, spiritual sense-perception, altered states, and connection with the more-than-human world.

Art-Making and Creative Expression: Practitioners develop skills in designing and facilitating craft and art as a means of invocation, participation with, and representation of, astrological archetypes.

Somatic and Sensuous Ways of Knowing: Practitioners develop skills in facilitating sensuous and full-bodied experience of astrological symbolism in themselves and others.

Dance, Movement, Kinesthesia: Practitioners develop skills in engaging movement and rhythms as a means of astrological engagement and revelation.

Desire, Sex, Eroticism: Practitioners develop skills in recognizing and working with desire, sexuality, and the erotic as modes of astrological engagement and revelation.

Astrodrama and Action Methods: Practitioners develop skills in creative enactment of astrological symbolism.

Modes of Mediation: Practitioners develop a sophisticated understanding of how archetypal content arises and can be engaged; as well as the ability to step-up and step-down engagement by clients and students in the service of experiential astrology.

Eliciting the Maker-Author-Player-Lover: Practitioners develop skills and practices to assist students and clients in accessing their own creativity, personal authority, and confidence in engaging with astrological symbolism.

Ethical Awareness and Inquiry: Practitioners develop heuristic models for evolving ethical standards of practice suited to the nature of their experiential modalities; as well as cultivate a lifelong orientation to ongoing ethical inquiry and consultation with communities of practice.

Program Structure

The 18-month program is a hybrid of online and on-land courses, with 220 hours of class and consultation time as outlined below; as well as 30 hours of client contact in a practicum project.

3 One-Week Full Cohort Intensives (40 hours each = 120 hours)

Intensive One: Immersive Experiential Astrology Retreat
Intensive Two: Hands-On Facilitation Practice and Shared Learning
Intensive Three: Hands-On Facilitation Practice and Shared Learning

40 Biweekly Online Small Group Sessions (2 hours each = 80 hours)

Discussion and experiential engagement with assigned readings and core concepts drawn from a wide range of sources including psychology, archetypal studies, cultural studies, ecology, and the astrological corpus
Group consultation from participant practice
Practicum design and consultation
Small Group is 6-8 people (approximately 1/3 of the full cohort)
The 40 groups are comprised of 4 series of 10 groups each:

Series One: Hestia/Vesta: Cultivating the Secured Symbolizing Field
Series Two: Hermes/Mercury: Fluency and Practice in Experiential Process
Series Three: Chiron: Developing the Client-Practitioner Relationship
Series Four: Demeter/Ceres: Modes of Transformative Engagement

6 Full-Cohort Online Sessions (2.5 hours each = 15 hours)

Before and After each in-person Intensive

3 One-to-One Meetings with Program Director (1.5 hours each = 5 hours)

Custom mentoring, practicum design, feedback

Practicum Project (30 hours direct client contact)

Designed by practitioner in consultation with program director and cohort during first half of the program
Examples: providing individual experiential consultation using specific methods developed by the practitioner; facilitating a three-month astrodrama group offered locally; creating and sharing an astrological art exhibition; developing an astrological history-writing collective; developing an online experiential astrology course; and so on).
Presented at Case Colloquium in final in-person intensive

Application and Participation Requirements

The program is limited to 20 participants each cohort.

Application may be made through emailing hermeshestiacenter@gmail.com to inform us of your interest. Applications are on a rolling basis as they are received. The process is not competitive: applicants are not compared to one another but rather are assessed according to whether or not they meet the program criteria by the deadline for admission. Applicants to the program must satisfy the following criteria:

40 hours class time in online or in-person experiential astrology courses/groups led by an approved practitioner (20 of these may be completed concurrently with the program)
Intermediate Astrological Fluency

Planets, Signs, Houses, Aspects
Some depth in specific cosmology (Mythic, Hellenistic, Evolutionary, Psychological, Other)

Interview to assess:

Astrological comfort and capacity
Support, resources, community
Program fit and readiness
Level of interest in practicing and sharing the work

Financial Arrangements

The total cost of the Program is $5995. Payment plans may be structured and approved through consultation with Hermes-Hestia Center. The general payment outline for the 2025-2027 cohort is: three payments of $1995 at time of enrollment; June 2026; and November 2026.

Additional Program Benefits

While students are enrolled in the program, they are eligible for 20-25% discounts for participation in other programs of the Hermes-Hestia Center such as the “Living the Signs of the Zodiac” series taught by Jason Holley; the “Planets as Living Symbols” course taught by Jason Holley and Gray Crawford; and courses and webinars offered by Jason and associated faculty on topics in psychological astrology, ancient Greek epic and drama, and experiential astrology.

Practitioners who complete the program are also eligible for ongoing courses, workshops, and retreats designed to support continuous practice and development, as well as the pleasure and helpfulness of being with a committed community of practice.

About Jason Holley

Jason Holley (he/they) has been a practicing astrologer for over 30 years and was a psychotherapist (LPCC) for 18 years. Jason has facilitated several thousand hours of living and embodied experiences of astrology for individuals and groups in Australia, North America, South America, and Europe. His work is grounded in long study and practice of mythological storytelling, archetypal psychology, psychodrama and action methods, meditation and ceremony, and ecopsychology and relational-somatic therapies. He has spoken and led workshops and courses at most astrological conferences and organizations in the US, UK, and Australia, including NORWAC, Astrology University, ISAR, AFAN, UAC, the School of Evolutionary Astrology, FAA, APA, CPA-MISPA, CAMS, and Kepler College.

Jason’s work in education includes 10 years as a faculty and board member at Southwestern College in Santa Fe, an experientially-grounded and accredited graduate school for counseling and art therapy whose experiential teaching philosophy he helped to develop. Jason taught in the school’s signature Psychology of Consciousness program, and designed and taught courses in Addictions, Career and Life Development, Human Sexuality, all of which included the integration of astrology in psychotherapy. Prior to this Jason worked several years at the Advisory Board Company in Washington DC developing and teaching experiential courses in leadership for healthcare providers across North America.

Jason grew up in astrology, through mothers and grandmothers stretching back to his great-great-grandmother, who was a tea leaf reader in West Virginia where he was born. For the past 20 years he has lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is currently completing two books: Living in the Circle of Animals, an invitation to an ecological mode of astrology rooted in dream and myth; and Constellations of Meaning, a psychological exploration of Greek, Roman, and Mesopotamian stories of the twelve zodiacal constellations, following on his Myth and Psyche course offered through Astrology University. Jason is also the convener of the first Living Astrologies Conference being held in Santa Fe in October 2025.

2025-2027 Living Astrologies Practitioner Program

Program Dates

November 2025 - June 2027

Tentative One-Week Intensive Dates (Dates Will Be Finalized by July 2025):

March 22-28, 2026

October 4-10, 2026

June 6-12, 2027

Program Purpose

The Practitioner Program exists to empower students with astrological fluency to deepen and develop their capacities as practitioners facilitating individuals and groups to have living experiences of astrological symbolism; to engage in a full-self way with the living sky and psyche.

The skills and capacities you will develop and deepen in this program are described in detail below under “Curriculum Focus Areas”, in three broad areas:

Mythic-Imaginal: immerses students in the mythic context of astrology and enables students to creatively recognize, engage, and work with symbolism, myth, and mythic figures in their own lives and the lives of others.

Embodied-Experiential: prepares students to facilitate living experiences of astrology for people in individual and group settings - including astrodrama and action methods, dreamwork, embodiment and movement, art and making, play, ceremony and ritual.

Educational Philosophy

Curriculum Focus Areas

The curriculum builds practitioner capacity in several competencies. This list is not exhaustive nor mutually-exclusive. The areas overlap and cannot cover all the ways the work operates.

Symbolic-Imaginal

Custodial and Reciprocal Ways with Stars and Stories: Practitioners develop themselves in a custodial and reciprocal relation with the fields of astrology, myth, and story.

Hermeneutics and Symbolic Process: Practitioners develop working models of symbolic process, divination, and the capacity to facilitate, educate, and engage this process with clients and students.

Diachronic Awareness: Practitioners study the history and development of astrological symbols, technique, and story, and develop a habit and capacity of situating these in the context of the natural and cultural environments in which they have taken place.

Story-hearing and Story-telling: Practitioners develop their capacity to think and experience in story, as well as to track story-threads in narrative and events and to weave these threads in creative and invocative storytelling.

Embedding Technique in Imagination: Practitioners actively situate astrological techniques, frameworks, and diagrams in dynamic relation to imaginative, sensuous participation with life, and develop the capacity to track when story and technique bring greater or lesser connection.

Cultivation of Reflective Presence: Practitioners actively practice states of consciousness which support symbolic engagement: awe, mystery, wonder, curiosity, openness. Practitioners train patience, open-endedness, and receptiveness in symbolic work to allow astrology to speak.

Relational-Psychological

Students are supported in developing the following capacities and competencies:

Empathy, Attunement, Resonance: Practitioners develop capacities in tracking emotional, somatic, spiritual, and relational process and states of people they will work with.

Setting and Tending the Relational-Archetypal Field: Practitioners develop skills in creating “secured symbolizing fields” for experiential work, rooted in care, boundary, and relatedness.

Interface of Personal, Relational, and Archetypal: Practitioners track and work with the interpersonal and archetypal field using a wide range of lenses and models.

Self-as-Ecosystem and Intrapsychic Complexity: Practitioners develop multiple models of imagining the human experience drawn from multiple cosmologies and cultures, and develop their capacity to track states of self and self-organization in clients and students.

Self-Awareness and the Use of Self: Practitioners develop a deeper fluency in their own psychic self-organization, vulnerabilities, and develop the capacity to self-track during experiential work with clients, and to make use of this information in work with others.

Ecological-Relational Perception: Practitioners develop their awareness of the deep embeddedness of individuals in webs of relations, social and cultural backgrounds,

Dyadic Field Dynamics: Practitioners develop modes of perceiving and participating effectively in one-to-one dynamics with clients and students.

Group Field Dynamics: Practitioners develop modes of perceiving and tracking group process, as well as developing capacity to facilitate group dynamics in service of experiential astrology.

Experiential-Embodied

This focus area empowers students to facilitate living experiences of astrology for themselves and others in settings ranging from individual consultations to group settings.

Land-Based and Place-Based Practice: Practitioners develop attentional practices and attitudes to the development of relatedness with Place, Land, and the webs of relations in which they are situated, as well as capacities to facilitate this experience of embeddedness for others.

Ceremony, Ritual, Play: Practitioners develop skills in understanding, creating, and facilitating spontaneous and structured modes of ceremonial, ritual, and play; including the engagement of ancestors, spiritual sense-perception, altered states, and connection with the more-than-human world.

Art-Making and Creative Expression: Practitioners develop skills in designing and facilitating craft and art as a means of invocation, participation with, and representation of, astrological archetypes.

Somatic and Sensuous Ways of Knowing: Practitioners develop skills in facilitating sensuous and full-bodied experience of astrological symbolism in themselves and others.

Dance, Movement, Kinesthesia: Practitioners develop skills in engaging movement and rhythms as a means of astrological engagement and revelation.

Desire, Sex, Eroticism: Practitioners develop skills in recognizing and working with desire, sexuality, and the erotic as modes of astrological engagement and revelation.

Astrodrama and Action Methods: Practitioners develop skills in creative enactment of astrological symbolism.

Modes of Mediation: Practitioners develop a sophisticated understanding of how archetypal content arises and can be engaged; as well as the ability to step-up and step-down engagement by clients and students in the service of experiential astrology.

Eliciting the Maker-Author-Player-Lover: Practitioners develop skills and practices to assist students and clients in accessing their own creativity, personal authority, and confidence in engaging with astrological symbolism.

Ethical Awareness and Inquiry: Practitioners develop heuristic models for evolving ethical standards of practice suited to the nature of their experiential modalities; as well as cultivate a lifelong orientation to ongoing ethical inquiry and consultation with communities of practice.

Program Structure

The 18-month program is a hybrid of online and on-land courses, with 220 hours of class and consultation time as outlined below; as well as 30 hours of client contact in a practicum project.

3 One-Week Full Cohort Intensives (40 hours each = 120 hours)

Intensive One: Immersive Experiential Astrology Retreat

Intensive Two: Hands-On Facilitation Practice and Shared Learning

Intensive Three: Hands-On Facilitation Practice and Shared Learning

40 Biweekly Online Small Group Sessions (2 hours each = 80 hours)

Discussion and experiential engagement with assigned readings and core concepts drawn from a wide range of sources including psychology, archetypal studies, cultural studies, ecology, and the astrological corpus

Group consultation from participant practice

Practicum design and consultation

Small Group is 6-8 people (approximately 1/3 of the full cohort)

The 40 groups are comprised of 4 series of 10 groups each:

Series One: Hestia/Vesta: Cultivating the Secured Symbolizing Field

Series Two: Hermes/Mercury: Fluency and Practice in Experiential Process

Series Three: Chiron: Developing the Client-Practitioner Relationship

Series Four: Demeter/Ceres: Modes of Transformative Engagement

6 Full-Cohort Online Sessions (2.5 hours each = 15 hours)

Before and After each in-person Intensive

3 One-to-One Meetings with Program Director (1.5 hours each = 5 hours)

Custom mentoring, practicum design, feedback

Practicum Project (30 hours direct client contact)

Designed by practitioner in consultation with program director and cohort during first half of the program

Presented at Case Colloquium in final in-person intensive

Application and Participation Requirements

The program is limited to 20 participants each cohort.

40 hours class time in online or in-person experiential astrology courses/groups led by an approved practitioner (20 of these may be completed concurrently with the program)

Intermediate Astrological Fluency

Planets, Signs, Houses, Aspects

Some depth in specific cosmology (Mythic, Hellenistic, Evolutionary, Psychological, Other)

Interview to assess:

Astrological comfort and capacity

Support, resources, community

Program fit and readiness

Level of interest in practicing and sharing the work

Financial Arrangements

The total cost of the Program is $5995. Payment plans may be structured and approved through consultation with Hermes-Hestia Center. The general payment outline for the 2025-2027 cohort is: three payments of $1995 at time of enrollment; June 2026; and November 2026.