We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jonathan Koe a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Jonathan, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?

Thank you for inviting me to share my story!

The first thing that came to my mind when you asked the question was launching my first astrology course, Astrology as Praxis.

Astrology as Praxis was a year-long immersion into both the analytical and the mystical sides of astrology. At the time, the idea to create a year-long course didn’t feel too risky to me and my collaborator, Britten LaRue. After all, I had taken a number of year-long courses. Also, Britten and I had collaborated before on course offerings and we loved being inspired by one another’s thoughts and perspectives.

In hindsight, I don’t think I really understood what it would be like to facilitate a course that runs for one full year until I did it! It was a pretty significant investment of time, energy, and resources for all involved – including our students.

We also took the risk of teaching astrology in ways that were pretty…unconventional, I would say. The course wasn’t only focused on imparting technical astrological knowledge that one could find in a book. While we made sure to teach the foundations of the system of astrology, we also encouraged our students to forge their own intuitive connections with the Cosmic Body through self-inquiry, meditative practices, and somatic attunement.

Personally, this course also felt like a risk because this wasn’t how I was taught to learn astrology. I learned through the books and through listening to other astrologers’ takes on things. That being said, integrating the skills I learned from my energy healing and Akashic practices into my astrological work have been so crucial to my practice with 1:1 clients. So, I felt like it was important to take the risk to teach this approach to others.

In addition, our culture tends to reinforce the binary between our intuitive and analytical faculties. To me, the two are not separate. They are part of a continuum. Learning to engage them simultaneously is where the magic happens. But this is a pretty hard skill to learn and it can take many years before we notice some sort of integration happening. Introducing a way of learning astrology that honors both equally, that commits to not pushing one away in favor of the other, is deeply challenging because the divide is so ingrained within many of us.

Ultimately, I believe that we all learned a lot from the experience and I wouldn’t trade it for anything else. Last Thursday, we had our last meeting as a group in the course and I had full body chills. It’s one thing to fantasize or theorize about teaching others the art of approaching astrology mystically. It’s another to see our students fully embody and practice this art in their own lives, with their clients, and in their own unique ways. That was probably one of the highlights of my existence.

Jonathan, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Sure, I’d love to. My name is Jonathan Koe. I don’t feel super attached to labels, but if I have to pick some it would be that I’m a human, an artist, and a mystic.

These days, I’m focused on building my practice – where I weave the languages of music, astrology, tarot, energy work, statistics, and the Akashic perspective to create offerings that help people to cultivate a better sense of kinship – towards themselves, others, and the greater web of life.

I work with clients 1:1, I teach, and I also have a podcast called Healing The Spirit, where I share my contemplations on the energy and the astrology of the coming week, as well as conversations with friends, fellow practitioners, and humans I find interesting.

The story of how I got here was full of trial and error, and burning bridges. I grew up in Jakarta, Indonesia, then moved to New York at the age of 17 to attend Manhattan School of Music, where I majored in classical piano. Towards the end of my studies, I remembered that my childhood dream was actually to be a singer songwriter. At the same time, I got accepted for a Master’s program to study Economics at Columbia University. I started working as a data scientist for my day job.

In 2019, I released my first singer songwriter album. It was a beautiful experience, but I felt like something was missing. I started doing Transcendental Meditation and experimenting with various spiritual modalities. One night, I had a dream of hanging out with my grandmother, who has passed away. She told me to get a reading with an astrologer.

When I woke up, I started researching different astrologers and found the work of Britten LaRue, who became the first astrologer who gave me a reading. She was also my first astrology teacher and we now teach astrology together.

In my 1:1 work, I aim to guide folks to a more embodied sense of their own truth and creative agency. The majority of my clients are fellow creatives, artists, dreamers, and queer-identified folks. Our work together tends to revolve around finding and creating the middle path. We discuss the ways that practices like astrology, energy healing, and tarot can assist us in befriending the paradoxes of our lives.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

Hmm, I think the most rewarding aspect of being a creative is that we get to explore the in-between spaces. Our culture in the so-called West is so fixated on duality and polarity. We built our whole identities on these either/or: you’re either a man or a woman, black or white, privileged or oppressed, Democrat or Republican.

The truth is many of us contain multitudes. And in artistic practices, we get to explore all these different sides in ways that feel playful, interesting, and profound.

Let me first clarify what I personally mean by the word ‘art.’ To me, an artistic orientation is one where we get to play with the strangeness of life and turn it into something that inspires us, that tickles our curiosity, that stirs our aliveness. I don’t see art as confined to conventional, society-sanctioned forms like a dance, a painting, a piece of music, or a novel. I believe that you can approach everything in your life with an artistic orientation: an accountant who approached their job with curiosity, meticulousness, and an openness to being surprised is as much an artist as a poet who channels poetry from the ether with attentiveness.

And so, we get to create our own artistic practices. Maybe your artistic practice is sipping your coffee every morning while watching the birds outside your window. Maybe your artistic practice is sitting with your partner or your child or your pet at the end of the day to listen to one another attentively, gifting one another your full presence. Maybe your artistic practice is turning off your phone 30 minutes before going to bed so that you can allow your nervous system to settle into rest.

For me, knowing that I get to playfully create my own practices is deeply rewarding. For a long while, I questioned if being an astrologer or a mystic qualified me as a creative. Now, I believe that as long as I orient towards honoring my inherent creativity, I will always be a creative, no matter what my current job title is.

I’ve always been a voracious, insatiable student, so there’s nothing I love more than taking classes, learning new techniques, and listening to the thoughts of various teachers, colleagues, and friends. That being said, it is important for me to remind myself that ultimately, there are no grades here. The right practices are the ones I end up doing. The right practices are the ones that feel good in my system. The right practices are the ones I get to be devoted to for as long as it feels aligned for me.

To exercise my creativity, I need to be authentic and I need to practice radical honesty with myself. To be authentic and radically honest, I need to release (or at least relax) my attachment to the labels that society has put on me and approach my life as a beginner. When I do so, I get to be constantly surprised, inspired, and I get to honor my aliveness. I get to create a world and I get to invite others into that world.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

First of all, I question the idea that any living being is not creative. To exist on this earth is to engage in a constant cycle of creation and destruction. The cells in our bodies continue to regenerate and degenerate, to transform from one shape to another. The rocks may operate on a different, much slower timelines than the plants and the animals, but they, too, get to experience death and rebirth. To be alive is to be inherently creative.

That being said, some people are more in touch with the part they play in this creative process. These are the people who are more likely to identify with being creatives.

I think people who don’t identify with being creatives often have a harder time understanding how much energy goes into the process of conscious creation. The cycle of creation often involves times or periods where nothing is happening externally. This can seem like rumination, procrastination, or even failure.

There’s this idea floating around that an artist or a creative needs to practice creating to hone their craft, and that this practice looks like showing up daily to the task of being with their craft. That the writer needs to write 30 mins each day, or the pianist needs to practice 8 hours a day. I’m not contesting that. I think there’s truth in that. However, I also think we underestimate the power of ‘doing nothing.’

Again, there may be a bit of a misconception here. What does it mean to ‘do nothing?’ After all, even the carcasses of a whale continues to actively decompose after death, providing nutrients for the rest of the ocean ecosystem. Are we ever doing ‘nothing?’

There are periods of the creative cycle that happen on a subconscious level. These periods are challenging for the artist because their conscious mind can’t always make sense that something is actually happening. During these periods, the artist or the creative may seem lost, distracted, or even a little bit depressed. To me, this is actually a sign that there’s a significant energetic expenditure going on here. This energetic expenditure isn’t showing in the final product, at least not yet. This energetic expenditure may not even look like practicing.

These periods are deeply vulnerable for the creative. What’s needed during these times is often support. If someone in your life identifies as a creative and they seem to be going through a slump, the best thing you can do is to remind them that rest is also creative. To rest is to go into the void. The void is the mother of inspiration. This is not a new idea. This is something that the Daodejing has said thousands of years ago.

As a whole, our society thrives when we allow artists and creatives to do the work of bringing down the visions in their imaginal realms into our reality. After all, what would our current world look like without the iPhone, dreamed of by one of the creative geniuses of our time, Steve Jobs? Or without the works of Yayoi Kusama or Miles Davis? Creatives are those who continually find inspiration in the space between what was and what’s to come. Another name we often call this space is ‘uncertainty.’ In supporting creatives, you may find that you, too, begin cultivating a deeper relationship with this uncertainty.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.jonathankoe.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jonathankoeofficial/
• Other: Healing The Spirit Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/healing-the-spirit-astrology-archetypes-artmaking/id1610376555 Spotify – Jonathan Koe: https://open.spotify.com/artist/0kaifScPAqT1UO7Avn58cy?si=yjvWhZXbShqIpG0zM5celw Spotify – Nate Qi: https://open.spotify.com/artist/603D17MGez30dIjeJV3Sj3?si=TIFNyvcaQGmyPUfdXnjR9A

Image Credits
Bao Ngo Steve Levy Emma Mead