[ Note: the copy below is a real first draft — please edit names, dates, and specifics so it's accurate to you. ]
I started reading charts the way most people do — for myself, and then for whoever would sit still long enough. Twenty years later, I still do both: a steady private practice in Vedic and Western tropical astrology, and a long-running research project that started as a hunch and grew into something I now teach.
The hunch was about the nakshatras — the 27 lunar mansions used in Vedic astrology — and whether they were originally anchored to the tropical zodiac rather than the sidereal one most modern practitioners assume. I've spent years mapping all 27 against their tropical positions, tracking the drift, and following the mythological thread that runs underneath. It's the kind of question that doesn't resolve quickly, which is exactly why I'm still asking it.
That same instinct — go one layer deeper than the textbook — is what led me to focus so much of my practice on decans: the three ten-degree subdivisions inside every sign, each one quietly run by a different planetary ruler. Most charts I read in a session turn out to have at least one decan doing more work than the sign itself gets credit for.
These days my work lives in three places: private readings, where we go through your chart together in real time; a six-week course for people who want to learn to read decans and rulers on their own; and writing, where I try to explain all of this without the jargon getting in the way.