Above & Within Premieres: A Sedona Astrology Club Conversation on Looking Up Before You Look It Up

There's a particular kind of quiet that settles over Sedona once the sun drops behind the buttes and the sky opens up. For many who visit, that quiet is the whole point — a chance to actually see stars instead of just knowing about them. It's fitting, then, that this inaugural episode of Above & Within begins with a simple, almost radical suggestion: look up before you look it up.

The conversation brings together Claudette, founder of Skystrology and known to many as Granny Ishka, and writer-filmmaker Carson Coughlin. Together they trace a question that feels especially alive in a place like Sedona, where the sky itself is often treated as a character in the landscape: what happens when we build a direct relationship with the sky, rather than outsourcing that relationship entirely to apps, charts, and secondhand interpretation?

A New Kind of Sedona Astrology Club

Part of what makes this episode feel like the start of something is its tone. It isn't a lecture on astrology, nor is it a debunking session aimed at skeptics. It functions more like an open-air gathering — the sort of unhurried, sky-watching circle you might imagine forming naturally in a place like Sedona, where red rock silence invites long conversations. In that sense, Above & Within plays like a Sedona astrology club conversation: two practiced observers comparing notes on what they've actually seen overhead, not just what's been written about it.

Skystrology vs. Skystronomy

One of the episode's central threads is the distinction Claudette draws between Skystrology and Skystronomy. Where conventional astrology often relies on symbolic charts detached from the physical sky, and astronomy tends to measure and catalog without much room for meaning, Skystrology sits somewhere in between — rooted in direct, ongoing observation of the living sky, paired with the willingness to ask what that observation might mean for the observer.

Carson brings his own perspective as a writer and filmmaker who has spent real time skywatching, including extended stretches in Egypt, a landscape with its own long history of reading the heavens. The two swap stories from those nights — not tidy anecdotes, but the kind of slow-building recollections that come from actually sitting under open sky for years, not just studying it in theory.

Why Sedona Visitors Might Lean In

For anyone planning time in Sedona, this episode offers a useful frame before a night out under the stars. The area's reputation for dark skies and energetic vortex sites already draws people who want more than a passive glance upward. This conversation gives that impulse some grounding: a reminder that the sky rewards patience and direct attention, not just a quick photo or a five-minute horoscope check.

• It reframes stargazing as a relationship built over time, not a one-time bucket-list moment.
• It offers language — Skystrology versus Skystronomy — for two different ways of relating to the sky.
• It models a conversational pace that mirrors the unhurried rhythm many people seek out in Sedona itself.

Above & Within doesn't rush toward conclusions, and that restraint is arguably its biggest strength. It trusts the listener to sit with open questions the same way its hosts sit with open sky — curious, unhurried, and willing to notice what's actually there before reaching for an explanation.

If you're curious how this first conversation unfolds, and want to hear the full exchange between Claudette and Carson Coughlin, you can Watch the replay on humankind.