I have always been more comfortable with things I can explain.
Data. Logic. Evidence. Cause and effect.
And yet, over the last few years, I have found myself surrounded by people who talk about Zodiac signs, astral charts, manifestation, energy, intuition and the universe as casually as I talk about communications strategies.
I mostly listened. Sometimes I laughed. Sometimes I pushed back.
And then, slowly, I started asking more questions.
This article is not really about astrology – although there is quite a lot of it. It is about spirituality more broadly, and what happens when someone who has always approached these things with a healthy dose of scepticism starts becoming genuinely curious.
About why we look for meaning in things we cannot completely explain. About manifestation and visualisation. About intuition. About whether what we project shapes what comes back to us. And about whether believing that things happen for a reason can actually make us more resilient when they do not go the way we hoped.
I still do not know exactly what I believe.
When I Stopped Laughing It Off
Since we moved to Sitges, astrology has become the background music of my social life. I will be at dinner and someone will ask for my Zodiac sign with no preamble at all, like it's the most ordinary question in the world – and within minutes, three people are explaining my own personality.
I have pushed back on it before. My husband is a Virgo too, and we couldn't be more different – so how much can really be written into one sign?
Nobody ever misses a beat with the answer: "That is because you have a different ascendant, Cris. Tell me your birth day, time – as precise as possible – and place, I'll check right now."
And out comes the phone, ready to run it through Claude on the spot, like finding your astral chart is the most normal thing in the world in a diner with friends while you are enjoying your coulant.
So I'm a Virgo. Organised, detail-obsessed, quietly stubborn about getting things right – apparently that's not personality, that is placement.
I laughed it off the first few times. At some point, though, I stopped laughing it off completely, and started actually listening.
And then, a few days ago, my mother – who has always ignored all of this completely, and has never believed in any of it – told me something, and I could hear her almost defending herself as she said it.
"Cris, you know I don't believe in zodiac signs," she said. "I believe in science."
Almost like she needed to justify the fact that she had looked at it at all. But she had found out, a few days earlier, that she is Capricorn – same as my brother – and she recognised herself in it immediately.
That was not what actually surprised her the most, though. What surprised her was looking up mine. She read what Virgo is supposed to be and found it unsettlingly accurate – for me.
I think she felt a kind of relief reading it. Like it gave her an explanation she did not know she needed – for the stubbornness, the relentless attention to detail, the refusal to let something go until it is actually right.
Not something she did wrong raising me. Not something either of us has to take personal credit or blame for. Just something that is part of who I am.
And that got me thinking. Why did it feel so accurate to her?
Part of me wonders if it was not really the stars at all. My birthday lands in late August, and this summer I was completely bombarded, on every Instagram feed, with posts about what Virgos do, feel and react to. Maybe she was not reading my chart so much as absorbing, secondhand, the same content I had been swimming in and reposting for weeks.
Which does not make her wrong. It just makes me wonder which one of us actually did the convincing. And more broadly: when did this get so sharp?
Has astrology genuinely become more precise in the way it is interpreted and talked about? Or are we simply paying closer attention, doing more of our own quiet self-analysis because we need language for things we do, patterns we cannot otherwise explain and – if we are parents – behaviours we watch showing up in our kids before we have had much chance to shape them ourselves?
I do not know if it is a way of justifying who we already are, or a way of becoming better equipped to understand it – in ourselves and in the small, specific people we are raising, who arrived with personalities stubbornly their own.
Maybe both. And maybe it does not matter which, if either one leaves you a little more patient with yourself and with the people you love.
The Entrepreneur Thing
That same thought keeps coming back to me because I am surrounded by entrepreneurs, and many of them believe in things I never used to take particularly seriously.
That during a full moon, people make worse decisions, as if things are more likely to get out of hand. That certain days are not for signing anything important. That cards can tell you whether an investment that looks good on paper is actually one you should make. That you can feel, physically, when the timing is off, even when the numbers on the page say otherwise. That some spaces hold bad energy and need to be cleared before anything good can happen in them – and that once they are, they can attract good things back.
I used to find some of it a little much.
Now I just notice it, and I understand it more than I used to.
Building something that does not exist yet – a company, a project, a career – means believing in an outcome you have no proof will arrive. You cannot always run that on logic alone. At some point, you need something to hold the gap between the plan and the not-yet-real.
For many of the people building things from nothing around me, spirituality seems to help hold that space.
And I can understand why.
I used to think passion was enough on its own – passion, patience, or simply the willingness to keep jumping, frog-like, from one attempt to the next until something finally landed.
Maybe that is still true.
But I have started noticing something else in the entrepreneurs around me: when they do that same jumping with the quiet relief of believing they are not doing it alone, it seems to make them sturdier. Less hard on themselves when things do not go the way they wanted.
None of them claim spirituality fixes anything or guarantees the outcome.
What they say, more or less, is that it does not hurt – that it lets you hold the journey with more peace, and sit with frustration and failure differently.
The learning is still there either way. You still have to face what went wrong. You still have to do the work.
But it does not completely flatten you while you do.
Put that plainly, and it stops sounding naive to me. It starts sounding like another way of building resilience – which is not a bad trade at all.
Manifesting It, Out Loud
And then there is manifestation.
We went on holiday to Ibiza – sunny Ibiza, or so the brochure promised. The day we arrived, it was raining.
We had a table booked at a beach restaurant for the local speciality: lobster with fried eggs and potatoes, the kind of meal you plan a whole trip around.
My friend looked at the sky and said, "Let us manifest it. Let us say it out loud – if we do not, it will not happen."
So we did. The whole way there, out loud, half-laughing at ourselves.
The rain was still falling when we set off.
By the time we arrived, it had stopped.
We got our sunny afternoon and our lobster, and it was every bit as good as promised.
Weather, coincidence, or something else – I genuinely do not know.
But there was something about saying it together, out loud, half as a joke and half as a dare to the universe. It did not feel like wishful thinking while we were doing it. It felt like we were participating in something, not just hoping for it. And it brought a completely different energy to the moment – a positive one. Instead of giving up, accepting that the weather had ruined our plans and looking for another option, we just kept manifesting. We kept believing that somehow, it would work out.
And perhaps that is why I realised I already have my own version of it.
When I visualise something, it is not vague. I picture an actual scene, not a feeling in the abstract: walking into a specific room on a specific morning, the quality of the light, the first sentence I say in a new team's first meeting and the tone I say it in – steady, curious, not performing confidence but actually holding it.
I picture my own shoulders dropping, the particular way they do when a room finally feels like the right fit.
That specificity is the whole point, and it is also where the discipline is.
You cannot visualise a place you refuse to believe exists.
It has helped me manage frustration, in my career and outside it, more than once – not by pretending things are fine, but by giving me somewhere specific to aim while they are not yet.
Maybe manifesting is the loud version and visualising is the quiet one.
Maybe they are the same instinct wearing different clothes – both of them a refusal to simply accept the weather as it is, and a way of asking ourselves whether saying, picturing and believing in something different changes how we move towards it.
Lo Que Sucede, Conviene
Which brings me to the phrase I keep coming back to.
There is a saying in Spanish: lo que sucede, conviene.
Roughly – what happens, happens for a reason. If something is for you, it will happen. If it is not, perhaps something better is coming.
I want to believe that completely.
I am being tested on it right now.
There was a role I let myself get excited about – genuinely excited. I told people about it. I pictured myself in it.
But somewhere underneath that excitement, much quieter, there was also a feeling that perhaps it was not quite the right match.
And when it did not happen, alongside the disappointment there was also a strange kind of recognition.
It made me wonder: how much of what we think shapes what we eventually deliver?
Not necessarily in a mystical sense – in a completely practical one.
If you walk into a conversation with a tiny part of you questioning whether something is quite right, does that leak into your tone? Your energy? The question you do not quite ask with full conviction?
Does the other side feel it, even if neither of you could name what happened?
I think about this in ordinary moments too, not just the big ones.
There is a version of "what you project is what you attract" that belongs on a poster in a yoga studio, and there is another version that is simply true, in a very unglamorous way.
If you are generous, people tend to be more generous back.
If you are genuinely curious about someone, they often open up further than they would with someone just going through the motions.
If you are passionate about the work, other passionate people tend to gravitate towards it.
None of that is magic. It is closer to a feedback loop.
But from the inside, sometimes it can feel a little like magic.
So perhaps that is my half-formed answer.
I do not think I manifested an opportunity away. I think sometimes we know things before we are ready to articulate them, and that knowledge can come through in a hundred small, unconscious ways.
Maybe that is not the universe deciding our fate.
Maybe it is intuition.
Maybe it is self-awareness.
Maybe it is our own behaviour quietly moving us towards – or away from – what fits.
Or maybe there is something else going on that I still do not fully understand.
And that is where I am right now: somewhere between scepticism, curiosity and a growing willingness not to dismiss something simply because I cannot explain it.
When Rationality Meets Spirituality
And then, because curiosity always gets the better of me, I did the one thing I probably should have done much earlier: I looked at my actual astral chart.
Not because I needed more proof of anything. I just wanted to see it.
So I asked Claude to calculate it. And looking at it felt like looking in a mirror.
Which immediately brought back a memory. Two years ago at work, we ran an exercise where everyone took the 16Personalities test and shared their type, so we could understand each other better – how we each prefer to work, communicate and make decisions – and use that understanding to collaborate more easily.
Mine came back ENFJ, "the Protagonist." Reading it felt exactly like reading my astral chart now: uncomfortably accurate.
The Protagonist: warm, idealistic, driven to help people become the best versions of themselves, quick to sense what someone else is feeling before they have said a word – and just as quick to speak up when something feels unjust, even when it is easier to stay quiet.
And that is where things got really interesting. Because when I put the two side by side, the overlap was hard to ignore.
"Warm, forthright" is the first line of the ENFJ description – and my ascendant is Sagittarius, associated with directness and big-picture optimism, and with the first impression you make on people.
The leadership-through-visibility part, the willingness to stand up for what I believe in – that is sitting right on top of a stellium in Leo: Mercury, Venus and Mars all there, which is about as loud a signature for "expressive, warm, driven to lead out loud" as a chart can give you.
The humanitarian streak – caring about "the world," not just the person in the room – tracks with my Moon in Aquarius.
And the practical part, the "talk the talk and walk the walk" instead of just giving inspiring speeches, is Virgo: my Sun and my Midheaven both sit there, which is probably why my career and my core self have never felt like two separate things to reconcile.
Even the one caution in the ENFJ description – that pushing too hard can leave people feeling resentful – I recognise in the same Leo placements associated with the confidence and visibility in the first place.
Two completely different systems, developed in completely different contexts, somehow describing the same person from different directions.
And I find that fascinating.
Which makes me wonder: why do we find some frameworks for understanding ourselves perfectly normal, while others make us immediately sceptical?
I am not suggesting we replace personality tools with astral charts. But if either one prompts a useful conversation about how we communicate, make decisions or relate to others, perhaps the interesting part is not proving which one is "right." Maybe it is the questions they make us ask.
And I have to admit: two completely different approaches telling me so many of the same things about myself?
That definitely made my rational side stop and think.
So, Lo Que Sucede, Conviene?
I started writing this because I have been thinking a lot about that phrase lately.
Lo que sucede, conviene.
I still do not know whether everything happens for a reason. I do not know whether we manifest things, attract them, intuit them before they happen, or simply become better at recognising what was right for us once we have enough distance to look back.
And I definitely do not know whether the stars have anything to do with it.
But perhaps I do not need to know.
What I do know is that believing there is something ahead – another opportunity, another room I can already picture myself walking into, another thing that will make sense of the one that did not – makes me approach what comes next differently.
Not passively. Quite the opposite.
You still have to do the work. You still have to learn from what did not work. You still have to put yourself out there again. But maybe you can do all of that without treating every closed door as proof that you were heading in the wrong direction.
Maybe sometimes it was simply not your door.
And perhaps that is what lo que sucede, conviene means to me right now.
Not that everything happens for a reason.
But that I can choose to believe there is still something good on the other side of what happens.
And if that belief makes me more curious, more resilient and more willing to keep going, I am quite happy to leave a little room for the universe.
For now, at least.
What about you? Where do you sit on all of this – manifestation, astrology, energy, intuition, things happening for a reason?
Do you believe there is something more to it, or do you think we simply get very good at finding meaning afterwards?
I genuinely want to know.
P.S. For the astrology people who have made it this far and are now wondering: Virgo Sun – practical, analytical, detail-obsessed; Sagittarius rising – direct, optimistic, always looking at the bigger picture; Aquarius Moon – independent, analytical and humanitarian; with Mercury, Venus and Mars all in Leo – warm, expressive, passionate and apparently very comfortable leading out loud.
So yes, there is quite a lot to unpack there too.