I’ve always seen numbers in sequence. 111, 444, 1234, on clocks and receipts and license plates. I learned to call them angel numbers and spent years wondering what they meant. Eventually I stopped needing an answer. When I saw them, I’d notice what I was thinking and what was around me, and take it as a cue that everything was okay. I was where I should be. I could calm down. I didn’t have to be like anyone else. I only had to be myself, someone different, on a different path.

When I asked my mentor to help me understand numerology, she introduced me to the Pythagorean system, and I was hooked. The idea that who we are could be worked out with math delighted me, and I hated math. In true Chakramation fashion, I made it my own. I wanted it to work for anyone who can’t hold on to what they learn, or who knows their truth on the inside but has a hard time saying it out loud. So I gave each number, 1 through 9, its own flora and chakra. Look closely and the whole world relates.

Then I gave the numbers somewhere to live. Foundation, Seed, Reach, and Whole are mine, the four places in the Grove, because that’s how a life grows. You start rooted in what holds you. Something tender takes hold, and you tend it. You reach, and keep reaching. And one day you bloom, and realize the bloom was coming the whole time. The numbers are an old tradition. The Grove, the flora, and the way they fit together are Chakramation.

A Grove needed a plant at its center, and that’s where the turmeric came in. Most people have only ever seen the gold powder that comes from the root. Look up and there’s a flower, soft and warm, growing off something nobody thought to look past. I needed something sturdy enough to carry all four places and gentle enough to be worth looking at. It was the only real candidate.

I drew every flora in the Grove before I made a reading for anyone. Then I ran my own.

My Foundation is 8, Agave, the root that holds. My Seed is 6, Peony, the root that nurtures. My Reach is 7, Lavender, the part still growing. My Whole is 3, Sunflower, the bloom where everything underneath finds its way out. I had placed each of those plants for its own reasons, long before I knew they were mine. Seeing them together on my own page, I realized I had drawn a map without knowing I was in it.

Then the Seasons. My first two run on the same number: one current, no handover. The first stretch was for learning. The second was for realizing there was more I could do with what I’d learned. Chakramation arrived in the last few years of that second stretch, built from everything the first one handed me. It wasn’t a turn. It was the bloom coming up off a root that had been there all along.

My hope is that your reading does for you what mine did for me. That you notice more of what’s already around you, the small things that were always there and never asked for your attention. And that you see, the way I did, that your life has been you from the very beginning. If you’ve lost track of yourself somewhere along the way, this is a way back. It won’t tell you what will happen. It’s a way of seeing your life clearly enough to stop standing still and start looking forward to what could be.

— Joy