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Join me on Lush Love as I welcome Nicola Smuts Allsop of Fertility Astrology, a consulting astrologer specializing in fertility and reproductive issues. Nicola combines medieval astrology with modern fertility treatments to help couples conceive, offering insights into relationship dynamics and sexual well-being. In this episode, we discuss astrological signatures, the interconnectedness of fertility and intimacy, and how astrology can inform couples on the best times to try. We also explore navigating relationship challenges during IVF and rediscovering yourself after treatment.
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Meet our guest:
Nicola Smuts Allsop
Nicola Smuts Allsop is a consulting astrologer specializing in fertility and reproductive issues. She has become a sought after expert in using astrology to help couples conceive.
The Wessex Astrologer Ltd published her book "Fertility Astrology, A Modern Medieval Textbook" in April 2018.
For more, visit Fertility Astrology.
Meet your host:
Andrea Balboni
Andrea is a certified Sex, Love and Relationships Coach at Lush Coaching.
Her mission is to help people experience as much pleasure and fulfillment in their personal intimate lives as they desire.
Let’s continue the conversation
Sacred Timing: How Astrology Guides Modern Fertility, IVF and Intimacy with Nicola Smuts Allsop
Andrea: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to Lush Love the podcast. I'm your host, Andrea Balboni. And in this podcast, I explore the nuance and complexity of intimate relationships with thought leaders, teachers, and guides of all kinds so that we can navigate through the intensity of intimacy, the highs and lows of love, the joy and pain of desire, the promises and despair of relationships more easily.
And allow ourselves to be nourished by deep, meaningful connection, passion, and pleasure in all its forms.
Today's conversation is with Nicola Smuts Allsop, a consulting astrologer specializing in fertility and reproductive issues. [00:01:00] With a master's degree in myth, cosmology, and the sacred, she has become a sought after expert in using astrology to help couples conceive. Her unique approach combines medieval astrology techniques with modern fertility treatments like IVF.
In addition, Nicola offers insights into relationship dynamics, erotic connection, and sexual well being, with a purpose in helping her clients to conceive. Through her app, Nicola continues to make her specialized astrology services available and accessible to a wider audience, empowering couples worldwide to make decisions around the best times to conceive.
to try and formed by their astrological chart. Her work has been featured in major UK publication and on national television in South Africa, making her a respected figure in her field. In this episode, [00:02:00] we cover what an astrological signature is and how knowing yours and your partners, Can support you in connecting with one another more easily.
Fertility, sex, and intimate relationships are indeed separate. Yet often interconnected. And how the distinction between them shows up in the stars. How astrology's gift is timing. informing couples on the best time to try and how fertility astrology together with modern medicine and IVF can give you the best chance of conception.
We also discuss how to best be with the challenges that rise up in your relationship and in the bedroom when trying to conceive. And finally, how to find yourself again after a period of IVF treatment, including connecting with your body, yourself, and pleasure and play in whole new ways. [00:03:00] And now here's our conversation on astrology, fertility, and the erotic with Nicola Smuts Allsop.
Nicola: Every question that you can ever imagine to ask about anybody, you can ask of the chart and the chart will have something to say about it. So that's the first thing about astrology is that a skilled astrologer will be able to take whatever thing that you're asking and be able to find a way to interpret it according to the planetary alignment that they're looking at.
And that's also important. Thank you. to note is that it's a lot easier to look at the planetary alignment than it is to make anything up in astrology. So when people say, you know, what, but it's just an interpretation, you know, what is the pitfalls are, you know, is it transference? I just want to say astrology is so rich that it's just, it's all, usually it's all there.
You don't need to even think about it. I suppose, you know, when I was thinking about this question, I don't get asked specifically a lot [00:04:00] about people's sexual relationship when they come to me for fertility, but inevitably it comes up in some form. And it's usually, it comes up, I usually bring it up, um, because I would like people to have less treatment and more success.
So I don't want people having 11 IVFs and potentially ruining their, their marriage and their sexual relationship. And likewise, we have, we've Lots of myths around what sexual relationships should look like, and we have lots of myths around what a marriage should look like, and in IVF it's, it's, it's, it's exactly that.
There's so many fantasies that people have about how you should approach it. For instance, just a small example, A lot of people believe that if we're doing this together, we must do everything together. So the man must come to the appointment or the female partner must come to the appointment with you and experience everything that you are experiencing at the same time, because we are doing this together.
They kind of want to keep it as well. We will, if we did it naturally would be having sex together. So now we're going to go through this whole [00:05:00] path together, together. And for some people, it's an unbearable pressure. And for some partners, it's excruciating to see that their, their loved ones in. pain or discomfort.
And there is a certain amount of pain and discomfort. And I think it's about kind of approaching this process by saying, what are we capable of? What is the best way to do this? And how can I retain a little bit of mystery around this very sensitive issue while still having the support that I might need from my partner and understanding.
But astrology, interestingly enough, puts sex and marriage relationship in two different places in the chart, because astrology realizes that they don't always happen in the same place or with the same people. So there's kind of like this inbuilt split anyway, which I find interesting. So the things that would come up in fertility are very much more physical, very much more people asking on a soulful question, like, is the reason why we're not having children because we are not soulmates.
is the reason we're not having children because we're not going [00:06:00] to be good parents. Like much more deeper kind of questions along those lines, whereas if somebody were to be conducting an interview about their relationship and their sexual relationship in particular, the first planet, for instance, I would go to is not necessarily Venus and Mars, although those are the two principal planets we would look at in astrology for sexuality.
It would be Mercury, which is a planet of communication, because As you know, you are very adept at this, um, communication is everything and understanding your partner's love language and understanding your own without judgment is key. And again, we carry with us all these myths and fantasies about what it should look like, but our partners have got a completely different love language to, to a movie version.
And so I first start unpacking, okay, how do we talk? How do we kind of communicate? And then it's very interesting. And once you. Demonstrate to a couple that this is the way you communicate and it's not because you're not trying hard enough to understand the other person. You just can't understand the person [00:07:00] on that level.
And once we remove all of that blame and the judgment and they realize, okay, this is what I'm dealing with. And so I'm going to must be on the lookout for that kind of languaging, or I must understand that if I want. a buy in, I've got to appeal to their sense of fairness, so I've got to appeal to their sense, you know, it's something you've got to hook in, then you can create a better avenue, I think, for not having personal slights and resentments start being part, even part of the foreplay before we've even gotten down to having actual sex.
So, That for me is interesting. And yeah, and that some people need a longer warm up than others. Those aquariums are like light switches and, you know, the Librans need romance and, you know, so there's, it's just understanding who you are, what you need, how you communicate, but you can find every question, every detailed question will be there in the chart.
Andrea: Where I want to go a little bit deeper with you right now is on this very interesting split between in the, in the charts, as you've described it, if I understood it accurately between fertility [00:08:00] and, um, having babies, let's say, and sex and what that is, and then relation, intimate relationship we'll say, so a partnership, and just to be super crystal clear, and that those three different Phases or spaces in our lives show up in very different places in the chart.
And that distinction, I think, is really interesting because what happens is we make meaning that begins to merge and mesh and get really messy between those three, uh, different, different spaces. And so what I'm kind of like jumping to is maybe astrology helps people get clear on what's happening over here, how it may relate to, or not relate at all to what's happening here.
And then also to that third place of relationships. So the fertility space, the sex space, and then the relationality space. And it's fascinating to me because I do sex and relationships. And many relational, [00:09:00] uh, many relationship therapists and coaches will only do one or the other, or they'll do definitely relationships, but you go to your expert on sex and intimacy.
And so for me, it's always interesting that dance between in that space in between, because I'm very much interested in how that all relates. And then in the work and speaking that I've done with people who are trying to conceive, It's a whole other dimension that gets brought into the relationship, beginning there, and then with children, of course, it changes again.
And then all, so it's kind of like these three different moving parts that are interrelated, but I think it's very important to also keep them. Separate whilst inter, whilst understanding interrelationship. I mean, that's how I'm seeing one of the powers that you might have with working with someone's chart and being able to help people get clear on that interrelationship, but also the separateness and what's happening in [00:10:00] those spaces with the individuals and then also with the configuration of the couple.
Because it may be a heterosexual couple, It may be a non binary couple. It may be a couple that's working with a surrogate. And so they're all, one of the things I loved about how you speak to this work as well, is that there can be all these different configurations of relationship, of family that want to be considered as well.
And that one of your, your gifts and the power of astrology through you is that you help people also unpack and unravel and get clear on what's happening and how and why. I'm not sure if I've, if I've kind of understood it accurately, if there's anything.
Nicola: No, you have, you've understood it perfectly. I think what's really interesting about astrology is that it, because it is so particular, you know, we take the date of the person and the time that they are born.
And the time that they are born kind of arranges their own particular bespokeness about their chart. So yes, many people born on that same day are quite [00:11:00] similar, but the intricacy of time kind of gives your chart its uniqueness. That's for starters. So every chart is unique. But then there's also this thing that astrology understands, and that is we are contradictory human beings.
We can't be the same in this place as we are in that place, and we all, we've got a quirk, we've got a like, there's glitches in our matrix, there's just things where we can't all have this beautiful holistic wholeness and this predictability and certainty of outcomes. It's like we are really unique in that way, and astrology is able to describe that.
So later on as part of the conversation, I'm very happy to do a chart for you and show you What I would be looking at and how I would unpack the differences in what is sex, What is sexual reproduction for fertility? What is intimate relationship? What does marriage mean to this person? You know, these are very different things and people have children for different reasons and i'm not here to judge For some people, it is for those people who live in cultures like in India, for instance, it is a [00:12:00] social necessity.
In fact, it's a survival. If you don't have children, your, your partner can divorce you. So, um, for them, this is critical. Um, for other people, having children means it's taking the relationship to the next level. And they feel like if they can't take the relationship to the next level, then they can't have children.
What does that mean for their relationship? For other people, it's a way of cementing something. So the people often talk about cementing our relationship and our family without really realizing that If cracks are there before cementing over, it's not necessarily going to be the thing. And, you know, we need to maybe sometimes talk about what cracks that they are trying to paper over.
And it gives me an opportunity to get in there, maybe talk about that while still not judging their reason to have the children. I've got a, um, a particular belief and that is, you know, we can, as astrologers predict when it's, um, quite likely that people will conceive. But, um, no one, no medical doctor even has been able to, we can create an embryo, we can [00:13:00] give a woman hormones, we can put that embryo back into the uterus, but nobody has been able to force a conception.
So it's kind of like there's still the space for something else to speak. So, um, That's why I have no particular problem in helping people get pregnant because I know that if it's not meant to be, it's not meant to be. There's nothing you can do about it. I think when people also come to have children, they kind of put their intimate sexual, by the time they see me, they've usually put their intimate sexual hierarchy or priorities kind of to one side.
And they are already understanding. So they are already feeling a bit tired and a bit exhausted because they're doing that whole day counting thing. And it's day 14 and you must come home early from work because my temperature is just right. And they've already had a lot of pressure and they've also starting to feel a bit of shame around not being able to, to conceive and what's with us.
Um, and so it's kind of help. Is [00:14:00] there something wrong with us? And are we not meant to have children or are we compatible? Is this the charts or the universe saying that we shouldn't have children? And then it is around, okay, now what do we do? How are we going to navigate this? Because these are our limitations.
So a lot of people have financial limitations. I can only afford three IVF. Some people have no money for IVF and then they really are reaching and other people are not allowed to have IVF, but they really want to. One partner wants IVF, the other partner doesn't. So then we have to do the practicality thing.
And it's only really, I would say towards the end of the consultation, once I've given them the times, people don't really want to hear much until I've gone through, okay, here are your times. Now they know they've got the notes. They can refer to them later. It's always, I just want to ask one last question.
And that's the question that is always like on a deeper connectivity level where it's like, okay, once we pregnant or once this has happened, where to now? Because. I don't know how to relate [00:15:00] on a normal level or my libido is gone or I hate my body. I'm so fat after all of these drugs that I've been taking.
I feel disgusted with myself and I don't understand how I'm going to get back into being a sexual being again. But again, those questions only come right at the end. Sadly, not when I'm able to have. Another hour with him, but yeah, they do come up and there's always an opportunity to confront it for them.
Andrea: Yeah, I can imagine that in that moment, like you say, they've just been through it, you've been through it and back and they're coming to you really wanting to know, okay, this is it, let us know what we can do to optimize our opportunity. For this actually happen, and everything else has gotten pushed aside and the everything else that gets pushed aside will likely surface again at some point.
And so I can also really understand and have complete compassion for. You know, a couple or people [00:16:00] in that situation. And then also knowing that that's, it will come back again. And the deeper underlying questions, the meaning that we make, I think is really interesting. So if this isn't happening with us, does it mean that our relationship isn't meant to be, or does it mean that we're going to not be fit parents?
Does it mean that Maybe this just isn't part of my, my destiny and need to be going to a bit of magical thinking mode and, um, so I guess my is, yeah, around, I love your approach with how you work because it is very pragmatic and quite practical. And oftentimes, when people think of astrology, they don't think about it as either pragmatic or very practical.
They kind of go into this, you know, our idea, at least culturally, for the most part, maybe it's changing, has been that astrology is a bit woo woo, it's a bit out there. I would love for you to help people understand how timing in [00:17:00] astrology is such a powerful tool that can be, can be leveraged and how exactly it works enough for people to understand that there's gravitas here.
Your work has spanned now decades, if I'm not mistaken, it's a couple decades now. And so you've seen this firsthand and you've worked with it in a very methodical development methodology. And you've had great results. And so I'm sure for you that you've You're grounded in that. And I would love for you to share where and how you got here and what people can understand about the rootedness, the pragmatism, and the practicality of the work that you do.
Nicola: As a personal comment, um, I became an astrologer when I was about 35. And so I'd already had two children in my early twenties. I was divorced. I was married to a second husband and we had, we had two children. tried to have children and it hadn't worked out for us. I wasn't specifically looking to become a [00:18:00] fertility astrologer.
I was studying with somebody who was an amazing teacher in, in Cape town. And by coincidence, it just happened that his, uh, where he taught us physically in those days, we didn't have online. He taught us in a room that was used for. an antenatal clinic just before we came in. So literally like the big pregnant ladies walked out and we went and sat in their warm seats and learned our astrology with pictures of baby anatomy all over the walls.
So I don't know if that had anything to do with it, but it was a very steep learning curve, very quick. Um, I eventually did three years of study in two because I just couldn't get enough of it. And because I'm sometimes overconfident, I started doing charts, um, Way before I was really qualified to do it.
And I think I entered a very interesting space and that is a space where you have complete belief and you have a naivety of a practice, if you like, which is sort of uncontaminated by over editing and overthinking and all of that. So I started predicting [00:19:00] pregnancies to the day, like one of my first pregnancies is the first chapter of my book, Amanda, and it was a very, um, unusual story.
And it was so bizarre that it was impossible to kind of ignore. So basically, when I was studying astrology, I was thinking to myself, what I wanted for myself was thinking this astrology works so well. I wish that I could have in my life as a practicing astrologer, maybe not now when I'm really good thinking 30 years down the track, I wish I could have one prediction that I could attribute to my expertise so that I would know I had it.
predicted that that was my work. All I wanted to see was my work manifest, but I wanted it to be something good. I don't want to predict the death or car crash of somebody. I wanted it to be something nice, but I had no words. I didn't understand what I was asking for at the time. And when I started practicing, a woman came to me at a cocktail party through a friend and she said, Oh, you're an astrologer.
I want to come see you. I said, that's fine. Fantastic. She came to see me and she was very peripheral around business. When's this going to happen? [00:20:00] When's that going to happen? I told her you'll get a bonus here. You might get a promotion there. And she came back and said about two months later, you were correct.
And I'm very impressed. But now I want to ask you the real question that I didn't want to ask you before, and that is I'm the CEO of a Lister company. I am 43 years old. I want to adopt. And. The adoption agency are going to have to interview my shareholders and my, my, the people that I work with. And it's very, um, uncomfortable for me.
And before I make myself this vulnerable, I want to know is it going to happen? So I went, Ooh, okay, here we go. And I went back, I did a chart and we had our consultation and I said to her, you know what? I said, I think that you are going to go and visit your ex husband on January the eighth and you'll have a baby on the 26th of September.
I mean, who does that? Who, I mean, it's just like other astrologers go, Oh my, like, what were you doing? I'm like, it's that naivety of, of being, you know, sort of [00:21:00] unseasoned. So I told her that, and she said, No, I don't think you were listening to me. That ex husband and I tried for four years. He has dodgy sperm.
We couldn't achieve it. I then went on to use donor sperm for years. It still didn't happen. So I don't think that that's going to happen. And I just said to her, you know what? I don't have another story for you. So maybe come back in a month or two. Maybe I can get off my story and I can find you another one.
She goes, okay, fine. About six weeks later, she phones me. She says, guess what? She says, my husband found out that my sister is emigrating to Israel and he was feeling rather sad on my behalf and he said, come visit me. He now lives in another country. That's another obstacle. Come visit me in this other country on the weekend of January the 8th.
She said, what must I do? I said, pack your bags. So she said, but he might have a girlfriend. I said, just make yourself available, pack your bags. So she, um, and we had this discussion about how it is actually easier to have sex with a stranger than it is to actually initiate sex with an ex. And that this was really like quite, quite a challenge.
But I said, no, [00:22:00] like, Like come pack your bags or she went and she came home after that weekend saying within 20 minutes She knew it was on and they had sex that weekend I said and and she says i'm still waiting for the two weeks for the test So we both sat biting our nails and of course, she was pregnant And I then had to support her during the next time because now it was um a case of you know When you're an older mother, there are a few challenges and amniocentesis being one of them But She got to the end and she, her baby was born on the 23rd of September, not the 26th, a bit of sloppy astrology, but it was one of those seminal miracle moments that actually was meant to be for me to set me on my path.
And that kind of was deeply satisfying, but Also very frustrating because it happened so soon in my career that I have spent the rest of my career trying to find reasons why that happened, to research it more, being terribly nervous that it was a fluke and that I could never do it again. So a lovely [00:23:00] story.
And that's basically how I started.
Andrea: That’s an amazing story. And what I've understood is that subsequent to that, you have had many, many success stories.
Nicola: Yeah.
Andrea: So maybe I'm guessing. You don't necessarily predict date, day to the day, but you are able to give people a very good sense of timing. and windows when, um, that are opportune for them and helping them to understand what you see in their charts that gives you the clues that tells you things are, it's a good time, or it's not such a great time other times.
Nicola: So let's talk more to the timing thing. And also I want to talk more to some of the signatures in the charts that kind of are most common in infertility and that are not easy to solve, but they, once people understand. I've had several people say they had a paradigm shift whenever I've articulated this notion and they've been able to get pregnant after that.
So if I have to, and I have run this through sort of an algorithm to find out the [00:24:00] most common signature in astrology is a hard aspect between the moon and Saturn. So if your Saturn and your moon are conjunct opposite or square one another, which are astrological terms natally. So 45 degrees away, 180 degrees away will occupy the same.
It means for us astrologers, and the way in which I have paraphrased it is, I would say to people, you carry with you the narrative of not enough. And that means that you feel like you don't have enough time, money, emotional resources, expertise, whatever you think you need in order to do the things that you want to do.
And that's like a meta narrative that you carry in your life, not only pertaining to children, but when it pertains to children, you honestly might feel all of those things and the extrapolation and where we end with that is that you don't feel like you deserve children because of those things, not expert enough, not good enough, not enough.
You get to, I don't deserve. And it's, it's, it's amazing [00:25:00] because people with moon Saturn, they recognize it immediately. This feeling of inadequacy in some area, or sometimes all of those areas of their lives. And they are able to go, Oh, I was born with that. I didn't bring it on myself. It's not because I'm doing something wrong.
Then I say, but it means also physically that the moon is the eggs in the chart and Saturn is a limiting planet. It's a planet that takes away. It's got obstacles and restrictions. It means you possibly are a candidate for low ovarian reserve. So that means that you're not producing enough eggs. So everything's about not enough.
So we think of all the symptoms emotionally as not enough and all the symptoms physically as not enough. And if you are in your thirties, you're able to do something about it. You can investigate it. You can find out where you are on the scale. If you are older, there's not a lot you can do about it, but it can make other decisions such as moving to donor egg a lot easier and a lot more efficient.
having, you know, known about that. And then there will be relief. So when we are born, there's a, and I'll show you a chart in a moment, there's a, [00:26:00] we take a snapshot of the night of the night sky and all the planets are there. And obviously the planets don't stand still just because you're born, they continue to move.
And it's where those planets then cycle back around and they either return to their original position or they touch the position of other planets. It's what gives us astrologers the ability to say there's a change in the quality of time. So that's all that we are looking for. And there are short cycles, like the moon is a really short cycle and there are longer cycles, like Saturn's a really longer cycle, but the main planets that we are looking for is we're looking for Jupiter, um, to the angles or to the moon or the sun, or in fact, one planet that we will call Jupiter.
the individual planet of pregnancy because every chart has one. So the moon and Venus are not the only planets that mean anything about fertility in a woman's chart. There is an algorithm that we do that will pop up any planet such as even Mars or Saturn can be the all mutant of pregnancy is what we call it.
So that can be calculated by your individual birth [00:27:00] time. That's why we do need an accurate birth time. And then we can make. More precise pronouncements about which planets are at play and when they are triggered in your chart. I also want to talk about big relationship signatures. So some men i've noticed who have fertility issues and and funny enough they represent as It's a pluto venus opposition or square and they often present medically with a varicoseal Which is where the tiny little tube gets a little kink in it and seminal flirt, that's the flirt with the sperm in it, can't reach the ejaculate.
So they can ejaculate, but there's just no sperm. And often they often have a little optus to, to fix that. But those particular men also seem to, in my research, have a very similar emotional profile, and that is they carry with them, either themselves or their parental patterning, feelings of possessiveness or jealousy.
And when you see a man with, with a moon Pluto, which is an [00:28:00] intensity of, of, of emotions, you almost need to, as I believe as a fertility astrologer alert them to the fact that if this incoming child is going to be a boy, that both that the couple needs to be cogent of the fact that this partner has got a compulsive sexual connection with his partner that needs to be addressed.
Otherwise, his feelings of validation and affirmation in the relationship are going to be threatened. And so, it's something that it's not his fault, and there doesn't need to be any social pressure on her. People just need to understand that this is not just a shallow demand. That this is, uh, Uh, for him, it's a like living and breathing.
It's not that easy to just push aside. But I also have to reframe that for the partner and say, you must also understand that your partner's whole body has been changed and the furniture down there has been rearranged. And things are different. And so communication is key, but [00:29:00] I try and get a commitment from the gestational partner to at least try and get child care or to get, obviously later when she's, you know, physically able and capable.
To make special time so that there's a feeling of validation and it's particularly sensitive when the baby is a boy. I had a couple and when I asked him about it, he said, funny, you should say that I've always known that I am possessive. I've always known that this is not an issue, but I've been aware of it, but I experienced it in my own family because my father divorced my mother because he was jealous for me.
So whether it's that person who actually perpetrates it or does it, or whether it's something that's just carried in the family. So astrological signatures are sometimes like DNA, where they get, it's repeated patterning that comes down. And, um, he had very, a very real experience with his parents. So he was able to kind of confront it and do something about it.
Andrea: So as a coach, as a therapeutic coach, let's say, I'm curious from my [00:30:00] own Um, for me, but also personally, also professionally for people who then begin like the woman who had this signature, not sure if you'd call it an astrological signature of not enoughness, and then going into deserving this and then a lot of people show up with self worth.
Stuff and all different forms and ways and then also with this man who comes to okay in his signature There's a lot of possession and jealousy how much is it working with those signatures and understanding them and making modifications adjustments and Adaptations maybe so that there's compassion and kindness around it And you work with it.
And how much is it? Okay, now it's even if it's familial, if it's been passed down through generations, I would like to not pass this down to my kids. Can I just be the one who stops that fire from moving through the entire forest from now until forever after? And [00:31:00] maybe this is a bigger question. I'm not sure if it's one that either of us can really answer.
I'm just sort of sitting with the sitting with the question of, is that narration or is that story here for us to understand shift and change? Hmm. That's one question. Is it here for us to be with and understand, create compassion, space around, and then maybe make adjustments, modifications in our lives to, to be with it more easily.
Part of me wants to answer, well, it's part of our evolution. In understanding ourselves more and understanding the nature of humanity and universe and our bigger kind of, maybe I'm making meaning, right? The meaning of why we're here to understand more and evolve, I guess, in this way. So I wasn't sure if from what you've seen from your perspective, and maybe there are different answers to it, how people have worked with this understanding of the narrative or the story.
If it's people have worked to shift it, to work with it, what's felt like it's been most beneficial. Now, what maybe even what it means.
Nicola: [00:32:00] So, I'm very clear that I want to be a predictive astrologer and not necessarily a therapist or somebody who sees clients regularly in terms of coaching or psychology.
Because I feel that the process for me to become that person and the education process would limit my ability to professionally practice. That is the key thing here is that, It would edit out all of my predictive abilities. So I'm very clear that I want to be here. So when I identify these signatures in the chart, I can explore them in the moment to the best of my ability and time constraints, but I do refer them to other people.
So I say, if you want to take this further, if you feel that this is a big stumbling block, if you feel like I've just offered you a pot of gold that you really want to go and, you know, dig into, please take this to your normal or regular therapist and explore more there. I think. When we talk about the moon, Saturn, which is the not enoughness, what is really interesting is that the moon is also our emotional center.
It's a subconscious. It's our desires. It's everything. And this is why I say sometimes these are the things that [00:33:00] can't change. So I don't know that people fix this thing in their lifetime in that. astrology has taught me that it's not linear. So we don't get done with something. We just revisit it again in another form or from another perspective.
And yes, if we've done the work, then we looking at it like from a completely different light. And we are able to get much, much more and go much, much deeper as we age. And as we, we experience ourselves on a, on a, on a deeper level, the, the one person in my mind, the one client that I'm thinking of who said that she had this.
And I think that's a huge paradigm shift when I spoke this not enoughness story through with her also physically to the moon is, is that the eggs in the chart and when you've got. restrictions and you've got limitations. It is people who often have eggs that have got a hard outer lining that prevent fertilization from happening altogether.
And they need ICSI, which is when they actually forcibly put the sperm into the egg. So the egg doesn't open to let the sperm in. So if we think about that in psychological terms, obviously it's like somebody who's over, [00:34:00] overbound read emotionally. Somebody who keeps their emotions under wraps. Doesn't really talk about them.
Doesn't really share them. They're afraid to be vulnerable. They're afraid to be vulnerable because their life experience has maybe taught them that their emotions are not always made by the outside world, that they don't have enough of the nurturing that they need, they've had to do it themselves.
They're very adept at doing themselves and they're fine. Thank you very much. Just leave me alone. So there's like, and they get stuck in that. They have perfectly. Functional marriages and relationships because they're not making it their partner's responsibility. They're like lovely low maintenance people to be in relationship with.
However, there is a lack of um, Uh, not a lack of connection But there could be a deeper connection and this woman wants and she is a clinical psychologist herself once This was spoken out loud. It's almost as if it's now on the table and, and, and we can, we can deal with it. She then went and decided to deliberately make herself more vulnerable and to emotionally put something out every day as a practice, as [00:35:00] part of a ritual to actually say to your partner, I'm feeling this today, whether he was aware of it or not, she decided to use a much more sort of emotional register kind of clock in with him and.
They were pregnant within three months and she felt that she let some guard down. She said, I felt like I was making myself available on a level that I hadn't been. So, you know, we can't attribute it only to that. We don't know what else was going on at the time, but it just seemed to me like she acknowledged that she'd made this big leap forward.
Andrea: Yeah, it feels to me like there's not a I'm saying amazing and I also want to retract it a little bit because I wouldn't want to impose on someone the necessity to do the work like that woman did if they didn't feel like they were ready for it or it was right for them or they wanted to. And so I feel like part of the power of what I respect of your work is that you stay lasered focused on the reason why people have come to you.
And that is [00:36:00] to conceive. And then as other things come up, you work with them to the, let's say, breadth that they will affect the outcome that they've come to you for. And when it goes beyond that, then you will refer on if you feel like that's the right thing to do. Yeah. So I just wanted to really maybe just state that it's not an imperative, but then someone goes and works on something that comes up on a psycho.
Or emotional level, uh, to then have that be the answer why, you know, okay, this is why I'm not, it's not, I'm not conceiving or I'm stuck. There are other ways that you can work with what's come up that are, it's not, um, it's not a judgment call because it can feel, it can start to feel quite judgy. Oh, you should work on this emotional signature thing or this way that you are in the world.
And when you fix it and get better, then the thing will happen.
Nicola: Yeah, there's no fixing and she's going to stay moonsighted for the rest of her [00:37:00] life. So she will probably beat herself up about not being a good enough mom. The not good enough doesn't go away. It's the letting go of the expectation of being perfect.
It's the being okay with being good enough. It's the being okay with this is an imperfect world. We don't ever get it right. And we are contradictory. So we can be both a really good husband and a really bad father or a really good father and a bad husband. And it doesn't really, you know, we can't be everything.
There's no tick box. And I think somebody had to say, what is the biggest cause of unhappiness in people in my practice that they want life to be certain and life can't be certain. There is no certainty, but it's something that people crave. And it's amazing how much they crave it in that they almost want me to say, you're destined never to have children.
I'm often invited to say, they say, please tell me if I'm destined never to have children, then I'll be happy because I'll know one way or the other. And I find that quite sad, this necessity to be so exact and certain about everything.
Andrea: It's a very, very deep question. Like, where do we get a sense of safety and security in a world that is continually feeling threatening and more and more uncertain.
Nicola: I want to [00:38:00] talk about some of the things that are not easy to fix, but some of the things that are kind of remedial. The first thing I ask when couples come and see me is, have you had a sperm test? Because that is the most obvious and cheapest and quickest investigation. And we know that like 35 percent of the time there is a sperm problem.
So basically we find that out before we actually waste another year of trying or before we waste, you know, more resources on, on, on other treatments. And one of the things that's really interesting is that when I see a chart with, um, a male chart with, um, so Mars is kind of in the male chart, your sexuality, your virility, and your ideas about masculinity and how you put your energy out into the world.
And when Mars is in a hard. Which means square or conjunct the moon. The moon is your genetic material, but it's also your mother and it's also other women and your wife in the chart. And so we can say about men with uh, a moon mar conjunction. We can say a few things and I'll just say all the light things first.
So it's, oh, [00:39:00] you attract feisty woman. Um, your mother might have been quite feisty, so it's got activism, energy. And we could say you like competitive women, and so we often see this in people involved in sports, women's sports, they're often just involved anywhere in sport. But then if we take that competitive edge, that Mars edge, and we say, okay, like, where's the final interpretation that we could take it to?
It is, um, you know, you, the woman around you could be emasculating. And when we have a situation when a 14 year old gets caught masturbating and mom just walks into the bedroom without knocking, it's not that she maybe had a judgment about anything. It's just that she got a fright and the expression on her face said it all.
She closed the door and then she probably thought to herself, Oh, I wish I'd done that better. But. I was just surprised. And so nobody really talks about it. And the boy gets a bit embarrassed for a few days, but then it kind of goes away. He's swept under the carpet and then everything's fine. Able to have functional sexual relationships with women, able to marry.
Everything's fine. Until the wife one day [00:40:00] turns around and says, I want to become a mom. And all he hears is I want to become your mom. And then there's this like sudden like moment of, Oh, okay. We, we hear. And. Often those men come with, um, it's a particular type of diagnosis. So there are three things that affect sperm.
One is count. That's how many you have. The other is motility. That's how fast and how well they move. And the other is morphology. And morphology is shape. And the men with the have problems with shape. And it means that the head of the sperm Is misshapen to the point that the cap can't come off to produce the enzyme that needs to soften the egg on the outside.
So it seems to kind of lack a proper respect contact. Say, may I come in? That's how I kind of say, may I come in? Can't do that. So fertilization is really, really difficult. So the might have good swimmers might have a good count, but if you've got bad morphology, it's still, you know, very difficult to happen.
So. The other thing that I was realizing [00:41:00] at the time is that sperm gets reproduced fresh every 72 days. And the other interesting fact about this is that for a period of time in the night sky, the, the major, um, Egyptian big star Sirius goes missing from the night sky for 72 days. And Sirius is often associated with the Sirius and the male sort of, um, principle.
So I went, okay, that's quite interesting. So I like to see couples, but I also, sometimes when I see a chart with a moon Mars, I'm really relieved when I see a woman on her own, because I say, okay, I can see what we're dealing with here. And it's a lot, it is a lot for people to undergo psychological therapy at the same time that they're doing IVF.
So I often say to, you know, a way to confront this. Just to like remove it from the board, if you like, just to kind of like clear it, is to just lie in bed and say, You know what, if we were to have a boy, I wonder if you could help me because I know nothing about penises and I wouldn't want to upset his sexuality in any way.
You'd have to [00:42:00] coach me and tell me what's required. In that moment, you're telling your husband, not only are you restricting him, of his male sexuality, and you could even ask the question, how did your mother deal with it? It gives him the opportunity for him to talk it through, and it gives him the opportunity to realize that you are not about to become his mom, that you have already differentiated yourself from that process.
And I must say that I've got five couples that I can think of offhand that have all had that chat and then had, um, A remarkably different sperm result three months later, and I've gone on to have perfectly healthy babies. And even if that isn't physically the problem, and even if you think astrology is not a science, it's still a worthwhile conversation to have.
It's still a really good way of clearing the decks and removing any obstacle that might be there. And if astrology led you to do that, well, great.
Andrea: Yeah. What I find really interesting is that, uh, the way that you work with doctors as well, doctors who are open minded about it, and that it can be a collaborative approach.
So it [00:43:00] can be working with, I like to say, working with all of, all the wisdom, like everything that we know, the whole, the whole human, and all that we know in the world from Western medicine, as well as from, Astrology and other, and other practices. So it just is more, it feels like more tools, more information, more knowledge and equipping yourself with the best possible chance for the outcome that you desire.
And so a little bit to how you work with doctors and the ones that are willing and how that's been.
Nicola: So the one thing that astrology does is that, um, it addresses the issue of time. So any medical treatment for IVF only addresses the mechanical. And obviously science doesn't have a way of, of dealing with time.
The way in which I started working really closely with doctors was I started going to the London Olympia exhibitions. I had fertility exhibitions and I would arrive with my stand fertility astrology. com and I had a fair amount of [00:44:00] insults levelled at me and a fair amount of really. You know, get out of our space.
You're a bit of a new age flake, a snake oil salesman, all of that. But when I then went on to do my master's and I wrote my dissertation in astrology as a narrative construct that can be seen as a very sophisticated placebo as defined by the medical fraternity, then things changed because doctors realized that I wasn't positioning astrology as a science, but I was saying, I can do something that you can't.
And by the time you get my people, my people, you don't have to have the God talk with them. You don't have to have any talks. They come to you with a bit of paper and they say, I want my treatment on this date, this date, and this date. I can guarantee you it'll be under 10 minutes. And I've already prepped them, they know what to expect, they know how it's going to work, they know what it's going to cost, so they work a lot easier.
And once I had about, there were about five doctors in London who quickly understood that a happy patient is a successful patient. And that in the area of infertility, you feel so out of control, that to [00:45:00] have one tiny little arena where you get to choose the time that you have your treatment. feels so empowering and it feels so like that you are taking some control back and that you are not a passenger in the process that the doctors quickly figured out that these patients were taking charge and, and positively and taking steps towards their path to parenthood.
And it didn't match to the doctors when they had the treatment. It's just that they did have it. And at what time wasn't material. I now have doctors that will. Stimulate people hormonally in order for them to catch up with a good time or in order for them to tweak when they can have their treatments to facilitate it because they're going to give them a hormonal treatment anyway.
It doesn't really matter if they give it sooner, earlier, later. So it's been a very, um, joyful thing to actually work with people who appreciate that. And I think my patients also are very grateful that I have doctors who are also willing to treat women who are older than 45, people who have, um, wonderful requirements.
I [00:46:00] deal with people who deal in surrogacy, some of my people who require eggs to donor eggs. I'm able to ask those clinics for the donor egg charts. So I can match people's eggs astrologically to the recipient which is always one more little tick box that makes people happy You know when you're a young mother to be and you have to choose your potential egg And you only have to choose it off a 72 word paragraph and a picture of somebody as a baby It's overwhelming and the pressure to choose the right one or is this How will I feel?
But I'm able to look at the charts of those donors and I can say, you've got artistic eggs and that person's also got artistic eggs. And so there's a match more on personality, if you like, or astrological DNA. I think that's a lot more supportive of that process. And again, it makes the choosing. You know, I'm all about making the couple feel like I don't mind if the astrology is wrong, and if I chose the wrong time, they can blame me.
But if somebody in the couple chooses the time and the time doesn't work out, then [00:47:00] there can be potential for blame between the couple. So I would like to see myself in an ombuds position where it's, blame me, don't blame one another. You guys stick together as a team. And, you know, we can work this out, but let's try and keep it kind of as impartial if you like, or as, you know, uh, stress free.
On those levels. So yes, doctors like my people, they come prepared.
Andrea: That leads me on to a question I did have about surrogacy and how, how it works and how you work with the charts then, and for a couple who does work with a surrogate, how do you work with three charts potentially, or how does that work?
Nicola: So, there are always, I say usually, cause there are, I think a few legal thropples in the USA who have children, but there Usually there are two guardians and two official parents. And those charts are the most important because they've made the Saturnian commitment to, to have those children and to raise them and bring them up.
So I focus and concentrate on [00:48:00] those two charts in terms of when you are likely to have children and when Jupiter is coming around to bless you with a child, how the child arrives in your arms is not the point. It's just who's going to have the child. Um, if there are Issues. And obviously I'm not dealing with um, uh, people who, who can carry a baby and there is going to be a surrogate involved.
I will then look at the surrogates chart in order to time when she gets the implantation of whatever embryo. So her body needs to be receptive. So I'll look at her chart and I'll see, okay, this is when you are most likely to get pregnant, because I also want to minimize the expenditure of the couple, because let's face it, it happens more often than not that people get pregnant at an astrologically fertile time.
We do know that medical science can trump astrology and people have gotten pregnant at a non astrologically fertile time. It's just not that common. So I just want to reduce that, um, that issue for people and have the surrogate be ready at the right astrological time. But then with gay men, they often are using two embryos and often it's kind of one with his sperm, [00:49:00] one with his sperm.
Um, so it's kind of like. I can't do like a normal situation where, where it's kind of only two people. So I don't look at that. I look at whether those two guys are going to get pregnant. Her chart is just for timing and then we can, we compare them. So then I run their combined chart against her one chart and I pick the best times between those.
Andrea: It's fascinating. Thank you for that.
Nicola: And it works that way with women as well. So in, in lesbian relationships, there is, you know, one or the other will choose to be the gestational partner. They do often switch if they can, which is, I think gives you better chances. And again, it's choosing whose eggs are often the gestational carrier will be carrying the eggs of the other partner and a sperm donor.
I don't even look at the sperm donors chart. It's irrelevant in those cases, those two women and the gestational carrier are the most important.
Andrea: Got it. Thank you. We've spoken a lot about when there's been success and when things have gone really well. How do you work with couples or families where it doesn't actually work [00:50:00] out?
So even if they have a medical go ahead and the astrological go ahead, if for some reason it doesn't work for them, how then do, do we manage?
Nicola: That's a really tough one because, so the other thing to say is that, you know, I do the charts and I give them three years ahead because I believe that three years is like, you know, they don't need to be coming to see me a lot.
They just need the timing and the timing is like a bus timetable. It doesn't change. So I gave them a lot of time ahead because I know things change, like stuff happens, things need to be delayed, people need to earn some more money for another IVF. So I gave a lot of chances, but I'm like you've said before, I'm very pragmatic and very practical.
And I always, and I know what the statistics are. So when I see somebody at 42, I have that chat with them in the hopes that they understand properly that they have a less than 0. 1 percent chance of falling pregnant with their own eggs, even if they have three IVFs. And I say to them, do you understand what you're asking for?
You know, that [00:51:00] this is going to be really difficult. So we first confront that this is difficult, what you're asking for. So when it happens, it really is something special and incredible, incredible, but it's not a given. So that's the first thing that I have to say. Also, It's I might tell you when it's more likely, but if you don't step up and do the stuff, so if you don't go and have IVF, when I've told you, you need IVF, then it might not happen.
You know what I'm saying? You can't, you can't go to an astrologer, get the timing and then do nothing about it. So there's, they're very different levels of like, why, Things don't work out, why people don't get pregnant, why they don't have that. I'm not necessarily in charge of, and I give them the times for three years and they disappear.
Now I might never hear from them again. So I'm probably not the person that ends up dealing with a fallout of, we tried for three years and then nothing happened, although occasionally they do come back to me as clients in another form, asking for work or whatever, and then we. obviously [00:52:00] discuss it and where did they get to.
I think when you've done three IVFs and you've been through that medical cycle, and you've spoken to doctors and doctors after the third IVF cycle are obliged to kind of give you another statistical update, you, You are fairly intelligent enough to work out that this is maybe not going to happen. So it's just about taking the time to accept it and then moving on.
Because my focus, like I said, is not necessarily about repairing or maintaining that close sexual relationship, which is very different. I don't get that opportunity to See how they fix that. Although in the conversation around the potential for unsuccessful outcomes, I have mentioned to people that there is a point, you know, when you have unexplained infertility, there is a point at which you need to draw a line under it.
So what happens is something can happen like this. Say you have two children, you get divorced, you get married again, you're trying for a third and nothing's working. You've [00:53:00] had two or three IVFs, still nothing's working, but you know that you're still ovulating and you know that there's nothing wrong with your husband's sperm.
You then, even though it's not a critical thing, every month that you get your period, you are disappointed. You're not gutted because you've got two children, but you're really disappointed. But it's not that earth shattering enough for you to have a little meltdown, but it starts wearing you down. And when you stay in that space of kind of counting your days for over a year, you get pushed into like a very low grade depression, where you just basically become a grumpy bitch.
Ask me. I was that person. And then you realize I caught myself being a grumpy bitch. And I just thought I'm grumpy because I think I'm depressed because I've let this go on so long and I'm still living in some kind of tiny little hope. And it's just when it doesn't work out, it just makes me tired. So I think what I'll do is I just went straight back on the pill.
And once I'd gone straight back on the pill, I'd stopped focusing about trying to catch my husband's attention or focus on day 14. [00:54:00] And I kind of allowed my body, ironically, even though I was on the pill to connect with my own sort of natural libido rhythm and to kind of like, just be in that space for that reason only that there was no baby.
There was only sexual connection. And once I kind of retrained my mind to do that. And my body, that was easy. And then it was amazing. The difference in my personality and the way I felt about life was really, you know, so I always tell people that story when I feel like they're at the end of the journey, or when I feel like this might not happen, but it's unexplained infertility.
I always said, please, in your mind, draw a line, give yourself a two year kind of breather to get back to normal, then go off the pull again. If you don't like being on contraception or whatever it is, but just understand that you might need that sort of detox.
Andrea: To reconnect with yourself and your body in a whole new way.
You'll be a different person than you were before and pleasure will show up. It changes and shifts over the life or the span of our lifetimes. [00:55:00] How it shows up in our bodies, how it shows up in our being, how we feel about it. How we think about it, how we consider it, and then in relation with the person that we're with, if we're with someone, or if we're even on our own, all of it shifts and changes, and that's okay.
It does take a minute of pausing and reconnecting, and so That I feel like what you've shared is a beautiful thing, because if you can draw that line when it feels like, okay, I've done this, I've tried, and I've allowed, and I've opened, and it hasn't happened, I'm going to draw that line so that I can reclaim the parts of myself that maybe have gotten pushed aside, or, um, or have shifted and changed in ways I'm not even aware of, because I've been so separate from that part of me, to come back into yourself.
And a whole new way and start from a different space and place and new phase in life and in relationship likely as well. And that feels like a healthy, a really healthy new [00:56:00] beginning. And it also feels full of richness and wisdom that wasn't there before. And maybe not for everyone, but oftentimes.
Having experienced a certain thing in life, one can pause and integrate and then, okay, step back into who we are now to be somewhere different. We have a whole new depth of understanding and compassion and learning and love, oftentimes, for ourselves and what we've been through and the people that are around us.
So, um, not always, but often.
Nicola: One of the sadnesses about IVF that, that I've always found so tragic is that couples say to me, you know, that in the process of the IVF, there are some couples, look, it's not everybody, by the time you're having IVF, your sexual connection is very weird. But some couples still say that the man's got to like, basically save himself for like a couple of days for better quality sperm.
And they report, some couples report that it's really hard that like in their normal relationship, they would want to make love. But now he's got, he's thinking in four days time, I've got to produce a really good [00:57:00] sample. So I can't. In their normal relationship, they would want to make love, but now he's got, he's thinking in four days time, I've got to produce a really good sample.
So I can't, it sounds like not a big deal. Hashtag IVF problems, but it's like when you repeatedly are having to deny your sexual experience with your partner because of something like the medical intervention, it does start affecting you. It starts affecting everything. And they feel like, Oh, we've just had an implantation.
So we can't have sex because we don't know what that's going to do. And we're too shy to ask our doctors. And the doctors don't take time to think about proactively talking about that. So I find myself probably needing more of your expertise than I do have, but it's very, I find myself having to like say, no, no, it's okay to have sex.
You're not going to disturb anything. And sperm samples, why don't you collect a whole lot of samples and only use frozen samples? Then it doesn't matter like how, so then you can kind of swerve and get other ways around it. But I do find it terribly sad that in the middle of all of this, people are denying themselves that very intimate connection.
At the most intimate [00:58:00] sort of sacred time.
Andrea: Yeah. And one of the things that I in all pretty much all sex coaches and therapists teach is how to connect intimately without having to have it be a certain way. So sex with penetration, or be the way that maybe you're accustomed to or used to. And so there's an opportunity.
Obviously, there's an opportunity with every kind of What feels like a setback or a limitation, the opportunity to be more creative with how we connect sensually, how we connect sexually, how we connect erotically with our partner. And that could be, it can be a gateway into whole new levels of experience of intimacy.
I've seen it through the work that I do when we step back from that performance based must look like this in a certain way at a certain time into what could it be if it was a playground. If it were a playground where you could explore. And I'm also very understanding of the fact that when you're in the middle of a process like IVF, there's so much pressure and so [00:59:00] much physical, so many changes and things happening that it is a very tender space too.
So, yeah.
Nicola: It’s amazing how people forget about playful sex when they're trying to have a baby. It's almost like there's only one way of sanctioned sex that is going to guarantee a pregnancy. And that is, you know, Man on top, that's the way, you know, it's like very missionary or nothing else. It's like they revert to some kind of very rigid typecast.
Andrea: Like a sex ed. book or something. This is what happened.
Nicola: No. No, no. It's like, it's like a biology text book. Exactly. It’s like, it’s rigid, either that or a terribly religious one. So we can't have anything that's borderline, you know, different. Um, because. that's not, you know, the way it should be. So I'm struck by that about how it's very much, if we can't have that kind of sex, well, then it's not, that's not the kind of sex that gets you a baby spiritually.
The conception is not going to happen because the sex wasn't right. Yeah. I’m noticing that. Thank you for that.
Andrea: Yeah.
Nicola: But I'm very happy to do a chat with you. I'm very happy to do a chart with an existing [01:00:00] patient of yours so that you know that patient really well, and we can do it anonymously. I don't need their name. You know, I just need their birth details, and that might be quite fun.
Andrea: Yeah, definitely. I was going to say I'm going to call you to have, have, have a reading with you, but, after this is over. Yeah, if you, if you do come, I would love to have reading with you.
Nicola: Yeah.
Andrea: Yeah. So thank you so much for coming on as a guest today. It's been a pleasure to connect with you, as always. I just find your work so rich and beautiful and sacred and practical and applicable as well. And I hope that people who listen are walking away with something themselves, and if they’d love to connect with you more, what's the best way for them to learn more about you and your work and what you do?
Nicola: Well, thank you so much for having me. I love talking about my work. People can find me, either Google my name, Nicola Smuts Allsop, with a hyphen astrologer. Or you could go to my website, which is fertilityastrology.com.
Andrea: Great. And I know you've [01:01:00] got a book that's out and an app as well. So what I wanted ask, is the app as effective as working with you directly?
Nicola: Obviously it's an app. It's only a 10 pound app. So it's kind of astrology light. It doesn't have the nuance, it doesn't have the dialog, it doesn't have the ability for people to give me their history of, their medical history and their personal history. So it is light, but it is surprisingly accurate.
Andrea: Amazing. Okay, great. So, in many ways, into you in your work are benefiting from this. The wisdom of fertility astrology. Thank you so much and I can't wait to speak with you again.
Nicola: Thank you
Andrea: Bye.
Thank you for listening. Share this podcast with anyone you feel would benefit from its message. If you love what you heard, rate and review us wherever you listen. And if you feel that you could use some support, connect with me, Andrea Balboni, [01:02:00] through my website, lushcoaching.com. That’s l u s h c o a c h i n g .com.
A special thanks to Nicholas Singer for the musical score, and Dion Knight for editing and production.