Hi, I’m Lee Saville-Iksic…
a musician, writer, astrologer, and rites of passage guide based in Pittsburgh, PA.
Since 1999, I’ve been a professional teacher empowering others with skills and insights to live more joyfully, beautifully, and authentically.
A bit about me…
While teaching music and theatre in the public schools, I became deeply curious about what it is we are expressing when we say we are being “expressive” as performers; and after much exploration, I concluded that expressing the essential nature of one’s life is just as important to any individual as it is to the work of an artist. In my late 20s, I began a dedicated study of the nature of the human psyche, selfhood, personality, play, creativity, emotions, and relationships — as well as how societal systems either engender or hinder self-expression — and this ongoing investigation has become the center of my work.
In my early- to mid-30s, dramatic upheaval in my personal and professional life led to my learning about ancestral rites of passage and the cosmologies and mythologies which give them shape. Seeing how modern society has inadvertently dispensed with much of the wisdom found in rites of passage, I found an explanation for my decade-long frustration that some hidden, yet more alive part of myself was waiting to come online. Because rites of passage are concerned with bringing the individual into a state of greater fullness – clarifying both the underlying story and aim of a person’s life, as well as their relationship to the greater whole – I found them to be an indispensable aspect of what it means to live expressively and authentically.
I discovered astrology “by accident” when my wife suggested we look up our birth charts on an idle New Year's night. It was 2020, and when I later discovered that astrology had helped practitioners describe what would become the COVID-19 pandemic months before it happened – including the timing of the lockdowns and the implementation of a vaccine – my mildly skeptical ignorance transformed into a driving urge to learn this ancient tradition. As I dug into my own chart, I found a map which could describe the landscape of my life; and when I realized that the most momentous events in my life corresponded with how the astrology of those times activated my personal chart, I found an energizing connection to and sense of belonging within Life’s mysterious inner workings.
As you can probably tell from reading this, my work has an undeniable spiritual dimension to it, which has been shaped by lifelong curiosity about the Divine, “the world behind the world”, and the underlying purpose of an individual’s life. A regular practice in meditation and dreamwork has been central to my spiritual path, and my influences in this realm include animism, Hermetic philosophy, Christian mysticism, and the works of figures such as Khalil Gibran, Michael Meade, Paul Foster Case, and C.G. Jung.
