About Jenna

Who I am

Hi there. I’m Jenna Zagoren and I am an existentially tortured, 12th house dwelling ephemeral faery anomaly with one foot in another dimension. Just kidding! Sort of.

I am a functional-medicine based nutritional clinician, a grower of plants, an integrative health educator, a coach, an artist, a designer, a yoga teacher, an astrologist and writer. I am a scientist, a researcher and foremost: an endlessly curious, eternal truth-seeking student of life.

There are infinite different schools of thought and systems of information to study: I am raptured by them all. As the eternal (Gemini Rising) student of life that I am, watching for the universal, repeated expressions of the same rules, tenets, themes and messages across seemingly disparate fields is especially awe inspiring and gratifying to me. Because of this I wear many hats and have formally and informally studied everything from the yoga sutras and tarot to pathophysiology, abnormal psychology and health statistics.

In my great hermetic quest for learning, I’ve diligently developed equal proficiency in the scientific as well as the elusive, symbolic language of faith and soul that I grew up with (see below). Thus, you find me, someone who has a graduate degree in the sciences, yet studies the stars and the spirit along side them. For in the end, I believe we will find that there is no difference between these fields at all. They are just two (of many) different forms for understanding the same mountain called Existence.

How I was introduced to astrology

I was born to two hippie devotees of what was essentially a Hindu cult - who hung out in circles with Ram Dass, and were in something called The Guru Blanket Band (see pics). Meditation, chanting and group prayer were what I was literally born into: my three sisters and I were all birthed at home in a disintegrating Victorian Cambridge house built in 1880, into a room where a singing circle of fellow spiritual devotees chanted sanskrit, each time one of us four Zagoren girls arrived into this plane of existence.

What a way to land Earth side.

Growing up amongst guru worshiping spiritual-seekers on a great journey toward the ecstatic expansion and transcendence of consciousness exposed me to some very interesting people, philosophies and practices: instruction to bow in submission to receive precious, coveted guru blessings bestowed via peacock feathers, the playing of harmoniums and sitars in our in-house meditation room used for daily practice by both my parents, and family car trips to out of state ashrams for Darshan (the Hindi word for those peacock feather blessings). My parent’s best friend’s were Sufi dancing psychotherapists, an astrologer and a clown named Rolo (in addition to all this liveliness, my father was a professional clown, but that’s another story entirely, and one not for me to tell - don’t worry, he’s writing an autobiography, I’ll be sure to post a link when it’s published).

Yet of all these many teachings and practices, it was the astrology that always lit me up and fascinated me most fiercely.

And if you’re comprehending what I’ve written so far, you’ll understand that that is quite a statement. As the menu of exposures was colorful to say the least.

As time passed the Hindu cult fell apart and disbanded, the way cults often do.

My parents soon divorced, the way parents often do.

The band broke up.

The sitar and harmonium are (tragically) gathering dust in the no longer used meditation room, next to some wilted 40 year old peacock feathers.

But the astrology stuck

(my father is still clowning, but no longer for hire).

My training and approach:

After growing up with and studying Astrology informally over the course of a couple decades, I finally decided to study formally. In 2015, I’d somehow accidentally stumbled into the email subscription of an incredible astrologist and teacher. After a few years of reading his content every day, I discovered he was offering a year long in depth program studying Ancient Hellenistic Astrology. I decided to go for it - and completed the certification course at the same time as attending graduate school for a master of science degree in Nutrition and Integrative Health (see that clinical practice here if you’re interested). Nothing like learning about the physiology of cellular respiration and the biochemistry of micronutrients by day and memorizing essential dignities and planetary sect by night.

At the conclusion of my formal training, I was at long last able to take my previous experience and understanding of astrology and integrate it into the elaborate, highly disciplined and deeply historic context of traditional, ancient Hellenistic astrology.

I finally understood where this information that I’d been dazzled by since childhood comes from and how profound, structured, and artful the ancient form of this practice irrefutably is.

A lifetime of fierce study (the only way I study anything is: with burning voraciousness. Gemini Mars, what can I say) and practice on my own, combined along side formal training and certification in Hellenistic ancient astrology has birthed a hybrid knowledge of this practice, one that is on one hand deeply intuitive yet also informed by the detailed, prolifically comprehensive systems involved in ancient astrological practice.

Like poetry, there is an art, and there is an extremely clear structure to follow as well. There is the Venus of it all, and there is the Saturn of it all.

My ten plus years of experience and background in yogic philosophy and asana, Buddhist studies and meditation practice, studies in the fields of Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Depth Psychology and Parapsychology - along with my extensive work in the plant and integrative health worlds - all come together to influence my interpretations and style of readings.

All of this combines to give me a particular and quite unique flavor in my approach.

I see this beautiful, formidable, ancient symbolic language of astrology as an expression of a great, humbling, cohesive universal source. A movement and dance of whatever it is that birthed all of this into being. It is The Speaking Universe. What a staggeringly beautiful and generous thing for this Universe to have gifted us: a language of the stars.

And what an astoundingly, incredulously, enormously sacred and awesome thing – to be able to study and understand that language.

In gratitude, curiosity and grand awe,

Jenna