By: Haley Bosselman By: Haley Bosselman | September 27, 2021 | Lifestyle, Feature,
A few years ago, celebrity astrologer Aliza Kelly had an epiphany: it would be virtually impossible for her to meet with each person who wanted an astrology session.
Her solution was her new book This Is Your Destiny: Using Astrology to Manifest Your Best Life, out Sept. 28.
“I really wanted to sort of synthesize all of the work that I had done throughout my career and create some sort of a tool for people to use to be able to catalyze that transformation and growth independently in their own individual journeys, wherever they were,” Kelly tells Modern Luxury.
This Is Your Destiny marks Kelly’s third venture in publishing, after 2018’s The Mixology of Astrology: Cosmic Cocktails for Every Sign and 2019’s Starring You: A Guided Journey Through Astrology. However, at her core Kelly is an astrologer known for her practical approach to modern mysticism. She’s built an international following through her steady publication of horoscopes, columns and astrology-pop culture podcast Stars Like Us, or you’ve perhaps seen her as a recurring guest on The Drew Barrymore Show. Her clients over the years have included Sarah Hyland, Yara Shahidi, Aidy Bryant and Lana Condor.
“I see astrology as a tool for self awareness, for self discovery and for self compassion,” she says. “When we can see ourselves in totality and we can see all of these different nuances as valid, then we give ourselves permission to really be ourselves. And then when we become ourselves, we can start to bring things into our life that are truly aligned with what we desire.”
Writing This is Your Destiny was its own journey. Kelly wrote what she believed was going to be her new book, and then the pandemic hit. Her first draft was due, but suddenly the world was a very different place and she wasn’t so sure what she had would be relevant. Kelly approached her rewrite with the guiding question, “How can you make this something that is applicable to your reality, regardless of where you are?”
“I ended up throwing out a lot of it, rewriting a lot of it, reimagining a lot of it,” Kelly explains. “This is something that can't just be ignored. I can't just finish writing this book as if this monumental once-in-a-lifetime experience isn’t happening outside of my window.”
Kelly is currently based in her native New York City, but it was right here in Los Angeles that her life collided with astrology. She headed west after graduating from college where she continued the effort to leave her past behind.
“I was trimming and snipping off important pieces of who I was and who I am and I was becoming this very fragmented, but fully whole version of myself,” Kelly recalls. “Astrology really gave me a language to be able to see myself holistically.”
Still, astrology wasn’t entirely new to Kelly’s life. While working on This Is Your Destiny, she stumbled upon old LiveJournal entries from when she was in middle school that talked about her and her crushes’ astrology. Ultimately, her career direction was a lifelong evolution, not a sudden shift.
“Los Angeles was new,” she reflects. “There is so much in that environment. There’s the entertainment industry. I talk about in the book this booming tech industry and there was a lot of money, a lot of opulence, also a lot of facade and a lot of fabrication. And I think that for me, [astrology] really was like a bright flashlight in the spaces that I had not integrated.”
As we approach the New Moon in Leo, remember that your narrative isn’t chronological.
— Aliza like Ibiza | Astrologer (@alizakelly) August 4, 2021
There’s still time to give your inner-child what it wants, needs, and deserves.
Part memoir, part resource, This Is Your Destiny is a guide that elevates astrology from horoscopes to self-actualization via vignettes of Kelly’s life. Typically someone comes to an astrologer to learn about themselves, so it was a bit of a challenge to get so personal. What’s more, Kelly explained that astrologers generally prefer to show their expertise via technical prowess, particularly in light of how their practice can be questioned and vilified.
And despite there not being much of a precedent for the narrative approach, Kelly came to see it as a responsibility to share her experiences. Already, it made Amazon’s bestseller list based on pre-orders alone. At its core, This Is Your Destiny is designed for everyone, no matter how long or short one’s journey with astrology and manifestation is. And for those of us who are in the latter group, Kelly offered insight about their connection.
“Astrology is the interpretation of the stars and planets and points as it relates to personality, preferences and timing. Manifestation, at least the way that I describe it, is moving wants, hopes, desires, aspirations from the non-physical plane into the physical plane,” she says. “The relationship between these is that astrology allows us to see ourselves as whole to understand ourselves better, to really have this big picture thinking about how we relate to self, how we relate to others, how we relate to the world. And once we have this much more comprehensive understanding of who we are, we can use that as one of our tools to help bring our hopes and wants and wishes into the physical plane.”
After the 2016 election, Kelly saw a surge of interest in astrology. She sees it as a space for solace in times of destabilization, which only heightened in 2020.
“Since the dawn of civilization, I think that it is almost intrinsically human to look up to the stars to the planets, the moon to these macrocosm cycles during times of uncertainty.”
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Photography by: Sofia Szamosi