Madeline Gerwick-Brodeur
Photo by Ritzy Ryciak
January 2006 | Feature Story
Astrology, business plans and your money
By Ritzy Ryciak
Astrology, business plans and your money
She was 25 years old and working as a waitress. One day a man came into her restaurant, watched her for 10 minutes and told her, “I bet you are a Virgo.”
Most astrological pick-up lines begin with, so what’s your sign? This man chose a different tactic, scored on the Virgo guess and apparently the planets lined up in his favor.
“I ended up going out on a date with this guy,” admits the laughing Madeline Gerwick-Brodeur, an astrologer for more than 25 years and nationally and internationally known for The Good Timing Guide, an astrological business planner.
On their first date, “zodiac man” brought a copy of Heaven Knows, an introductory astrology book, and opened Gerwick-Brodeur’s the world of stars and planets. She found the book somewhat scary.
“Frankly it freaked me out,” she says still laughing. “I had to know how anything could be that specific and accurate.”
A few decades later, Gerwick-Brodeur has made it her business to be that specific and accurate. She is the founder of Polaris Business Guides LLC, a national business consulting firm and author of The Good Timing Guide, a general guideline for common business activities based on astrological cycles. The Guide is published annually and has loyal users on nearly every continent.
“Most people don’t realize that there really is an order in the universe,” explains Gerwick-Brodeur. “There are cycles that are impacting our daily work and it is helpful to know what they are rather than just spitting into the wind or throwing darts out there without knowing what the target is.”
One cycle that The Good Timing Guide (Guide) highlights and is famous for is “Time-Out” periods, which technically refer to the period of time when the moon is not making any aspects or angles to other planets.
According the Gerwick-Brodeur, the moon has “talked to or moved past all of the other planets.” There is nothing going on and it is time to rest, regenerate and renew.
“I often notice that time-outs feel like the earth just let out this big sigh and the energy level drops,” says Gerwick-Brodeur, who also provides business and personal astrology services as well as prosperity training (check out www.astro-cycles.com).
Time-Out periods are relevant to business because in addition to offering a time for relaxation and reflection they are also, according to Gerwick-Brodeur, a terrible time to start anything new.
“Time has qualities and not all days are created equal,” she says.
Gerwick-Brodeur included on the cover of her Guide that the Wall Street Journal reported that 1,400 businesses, which all started under the same Time-Out astrological cycle, went bankrupt.
“It is nice when people can know what the cycles are so that they know it is not personal,” she continues. “The cycles are happening to everybody. It makes life a lot easier. There is a Time-Out and oh well, we will get past that and do something different tomorrow. It is not a crisis because it is not about you.”
Many of her clients couldn’t agree more.
James Kreider, a retired aerospace engineer at Boeing, has used Guide in his small technical consulting business (aerospace and defense) for the past there years.
“[The Guide] has great graphical layouts that are quick to scan and see the good-bad-indifferent ratings for the various days,” says Kreider, who has studied astrology and its relationship to personality. “I don’t have a‘scientific’ explanation for why astrology works. But I have seen enough situations which have been explained by it that I feel that there is something to it.”
Kreider says skeptics about astrology can take lesson from physics, of all sciences. He explains that when he was in high school he was told the basic components of an atom were electrons, protons and neutrons. The atoms were little hard balls with a certain mass and electrical charge.
When he went to college, James was told electrons were much fuzzier in shape and there was a “probability” of finding the fuzzy little things somewhere in a geometric orbit around the nucleus of the atom.
Finally, in graduate school and beyond, James was told the components of an atom are made up of even more basic particles called sub-atomic particles. Sub-atomic particles behave in ways that quantum mechanics describe.
“Just as you would have been laughed at in 1955 for saying that the electron, proton and neutron were composed of sub-atomic particles, some people laugh at astrology today,” says James. “It just means that we don’t know why it works. The fault is not in the astrology, but in our limited understanding of how the planets affect our lives and activities.”
www.polarisbusinessguides.com
Ritzy Ryciak is a regular contributor to Conscious Choice.
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