So, you see that title? “How to read Daniel Whelland Dowd’s Pisces weekly chart.” Sounds nice and simple, doesn’t it? Like three easy bullet points and you’re done. Trust me, I wish it was. I dove into this mess because I was stuck, utterly and completely stuck, and my life was just as much of a hot mess as that tech stack in the example I told you about a while back. This chart looked like another one of those things that promised structure but was actually just a whole lot of colorful static.
I started this whole thing last winter. Not because I’m some starry-eyed believer in the stars—hell no—but because my partner, bless her heart, kept telling me I needed to stop just reacting to life and start looking at the “cosmic flow.” I scoffed, obviously. My “cosmic flow” was the constant flow of bills and the busted pipe in the basement. But one cold Saturday, she shoved a printout of this Dowd guy’s Pisces chart right in front of me.
My Real Simple Steps for Dealing with the Dowd Chart Jumble
My first move wasn’t reading; it was skipping. I immediately noticed that the chart was full of what I call “flavor text.” You know, stuff like “Venus trine Saturn in the seventh house of interdimensional connection.” I decided straight up that 90% of that jargon was fluff. If Bilibili’s back end is a thousand different things, this chart is even worse—it’s a thousand different feelings you’re supposed to parse. I don’t have time for feelings.
Here’s what I actually did. Follow along if you’re as skeptical and practical as I am:
- First, I zeroed in on the money and career paragraph. I ignored everything else. Dowd’s charts usually break down life areas. I scanned for the big, bold words. Was it “Expansion” or was it “Caution”? I underlined those two words, ignoring the fancy sentences around them. That’s the core message.
- Next, I hunted for the “Action” word. Every chart has one. It’s the verb that tells you what to do. “Meditate,” “Wait,” “Communicate,” or God forbid, “Confront.” I picked out that single verb and stuck it on a Post-it note.
- Finally, I cross-referenced the ruling planet. For Pisces, it’s Jupiter/Neptune. I didn’t look up what that means astrologically. I just checked what general mood Jupiter was in that week, according to Dowd’s summary. Was it happy? Was it grumpy? I translated the astro-speak into a simple, kindergarten emotion: Good, Bad, or So-So.
That’s it. Three simple actions. I took a huge, complex astrological chart and squeezed it down to one mood, one action, and one direction (Up or Down). It was the only way to manage the information overload, just like I had to figure out how to manage my own life overload a few years back.
The Real Reason I Bothered to Learn This Crap
See, I wouldn’t have looked at this chart if things weren’t already sideways. I got into this whole blogging thing and sharing my “systems” because I needed a system to survive. I left my old stable job because the whole place went toxic, pulling the same sort of childish blame games I see in big, fragmented companies. I was canned, not nicely, but straight-up deleted from the internal system, just like that story I told. It was a brutal gut punch. My paycheck stopped cold. I watched my savings evaporate faster than water on a stovetop.
I spent three months doing whatever I could just to keep the lights on. Applied for jobs I was ridiculously overqualified for. Took on freelance work that paid pennies. Felt like I was completely adrift, a real textbook Pisces, but not in a cool, spiritual way—in a drowning way. And that feeling of ‘no control’ is what eventually pushed me to finally look at that Dowd chart.
I didn’t believe the stars would fix my financial ruin. But what happened was this: Breaking down the chart, forcing myself to extract three practical data points, made me apply that same brutal simplification to my own immediate problems. I started to see that my own life advice was just as scattered as Bilibili’s tech, or Dowd’s paragraphs. I was trying to do everything at once.
The chart for that first week simply screamed “CAUTION” and “COMMUNICATE.” Did it save my life? No. But it gave me permission to stop trying to expand my business and instead just talk honestly with a few key people about my situation. That simple action unlocked a new opportunity I wasn’t even looking for. Realizing the simplicity hidden in the complexity—that’s the true practice, whether you’re reading a chart or building a career. I continue to check that silly chart now, not for the future, but just to re-confirm my current, simple, practical mission for the week.
