CHARTED | Rachel Joy Barehl: Building a Life That Feels Connected and Alive
Rachel Joy Barehl has always been gathering people.
At eleven years old, she created a three-day summer camp for the neighborhood kids; an undertaking ambitious enough that her mom had to take time off work to supervise. She became senior class president, spent years dreaming about the person she would someday marry, and eventually opened her first conversation with her future husband by telling him, “I like your bun.”
Today, Rachel is a photographer, relationship architect, mentor, and community builder devoted to helping people create lives that feel connected and alive.
She photographs families and couples in ways that remind them what they love about one another. She creates gatherings that turn strangers into friends. She helps people navigate dating, deepen their relationships, and imagine more meaningful ways of being together.
Whether she is hosting a dinner, documenting a family’s legacy, dreaming up an immersive experience, or creating a group chat around a new idea, Rachel seems to instinctively understand that connection rarely happens by accident.
Someone has to create the space for it.
Someone has to extend the invitation.
Someone has to believe that a more beautiful way of relating is possible.
Rachel has spent much of her life being that person.
But beneath her instinct to care for others, her Matrix of Destiny reveals a deeper lesson: Rachel is not here to build connection by exhausting herself. She is here to lead from wholeness, create from overflow, and allow the structures she builds to support her, too.
The Inner Emperor: The Woman Behind the Gathering
Rachel’s inner self is represented by The Emperor, an archetype of leadership, responsibility, organization, and vision.
The Emperor does not simply have an idea. The Emperor wants to know how the idea will work.
What needs to happen first? Who needs to be involved? How can every available resource be used well?
How do we take something intangible and turn it into a structure people can actually enter?
Rachel immediately recognized herself in this energy.
She described renting a space for a weekend and, rather than allowing any of it to go unused, deciding she might as well host five different things. At home, she loves using every last ingredient and turning scraps into something useful. In her work, she does not merely dream about connection, she designs containers where connection can happen.
“I like to get shit done,” she said.
The Emperor gives Rachel the ability to see the entire ecosystem of an idea. She can imagine the beginning, the outcome, and the infrastructure required to move people from one to the other.
It is part of what makes her a natural leader.
However, leadership under The Emperor also comes with the temptation to become overly responsible for everything within the empire.
Rachel can feel compelled to intervene in the smallest processes, even when they may already be unfolding without her. Her care can become micromanagement. Her sense of responsibility can become overprotection. Her desire to deliver something meaningful can leave her afraid of promising more than she can sustainably provide.
This is the shadow of The Emperor: believing that being responsible means personally holding every piece.
Rachel’s work is not to abandon structure. Structure is one of her gifts.
Her work is to build structures that do not require her constant intervention in order to survive.
The Outer Justice: A Life Organized Around Reciprocity
While Rachel identifies internally with The Emperor, other people experience her through Justice.
Justice is the archetype of truth, fairness, reciprocity, accountability, and cause and effect.
People with Justice prominently placed in their Matrix often move through the world with an acute awareness of what is equitable and what is not. They notice when effort is not reciprocated. They question why people who cause harm do not always seem to experience consequences. They are instinctively interested in the invisible laws governing relationships.
Rachel thinks about reciprocity often.
She gives generously, to her clients, collaborators, friends, communities, and the people who enthusiastically say yes to her ideas. Because she values mutual investment so deeply, it can be painful when the response she receives does not seem equal to what she has offered.
At one point, while searching for matches for clients, Rachel believed her years of connecting people would make the process easy. She had given so much to her network that she trusted support would naturally return when she needed it.
When it did not happen that way, it affected her deeply.
“This is my turn to ask the world,” she remembered thinking. “I give a lot.”
Justice explains Rachel’s devotion to the early adopters: the people who immediately understand the vision, trust her, and jump in. She wants to reward the people willing to take the trust fall.
The challenge is remembering that not everyone arrives at the same pace. Someone requiring more explanation is not necessarily rejecting her. Someone learning through a difficult experience does not always need to be rescued. Someone choosing a different path is not automatically choosing the wrong one.
Justice can feel compelled to intervene whenever something appears unfair, misguided, or out of alignment.
But not every situation requires correction.
Sometimes the most loving choice is to allow another person to experience the natural consequences of their decisions.
Rachel is learning that she can care deeply without assuming responsibility for every outcome.
The Love Line: Passion, Pursuit, and a Relationship That Moves
Rachel’s love line begins with The Devil, moves through The Chariot, and evolves into The Wheel of Fortune.
The Devil carries the karmic memory of relationships that feel intense, magnetic, and emotionally charged. It is the energy of high highs and low lows; the kind of connection that can become all-consuming when it lacks grounding.
Rachel met her husband, Adam, relatively young and did not have an extensive history of relationships before him. Still, she could recognize moments in her past when attraction carried this kind of emotional intensity.
The medicine for The Devil is not the absence of passion. It is passion held by something steady.
Rachel described Adam as a strong, calm, grounded partner—the kind of person who can embrace her fire without becoming consumed by it.
Her present relationship energy is represented by The Chariot.
The Chariot wants love to go somewhere.
This is a relationship built around shared goals, mutual momentum, and a willingness to move through life as a team. Both people can lead, and both can hand over the reins when needed. The relationship becomes a vehicle through which each person grows more quickly than they might have alone.
The Chariot also describes pursuit.
Rachel and Adam met during a game night on Valentine’s Day in 2013. Rachel was intrigued, and she was the one who continued reaching out and inviting him into her world.
Her friends occasionally questioned his slower responses, but Rachel did not vilify him or build walls around herself. “He was worth waiting for,” she said.
Several months later, on the way to Yellow Springs, they stopped in a sunflower field and decided to make their relationship official. The next day at noon, they coordinated changing their Facebook profile pictures so the rest of the world would know.
Rachel, a natural oversharer, had already brought people into the story.
Adam had told his mom only minutes before the announcement.
Their aligned relationship is represented by The Wheel of Fortune.
The Wheel describes a partnership that understands life as cyclical. One person may have only ten percent to give while the other carries ninety. Later, the roles reverse. Neither season defines the entire relationship.
There is movement, flexibility, laughter, spontaneity, and a willingness to say yes to life together.
For Rachel and Adam, love is not a static destination. It is an adventure they continue choosing.
The Money Line: Abundance Through Transformation
Rachel’s money line contains The Hermit, Death, The Hierophant, and The Wheel of Fortune.
Together, these energies describe a financial path that is anything but conventional.
The Hermit: Receiving Without Deprivation
The Hermit represents Rachel’s money lock: the energy capable of opening or restricting her abundance.
Rachel was raised with strong awareness around money. Her mother lived beneath her means, teaching Rachel to avoid debt and create security. Her father, in contrast, sometimes gave so much to others that he struggled to take care of his own obligations. Rachel internalized both lessons.
She wants a financial buffer because she never wants generosity to destabilize her life.
At the same time, she understands how easy it is to give free support to people who are fully capable of paying for it.
The Hermit can restrict abundance through excessive frugality, self-neglect, isolation, or the belief that wanting material comfort is somehow less spiritual than serving others.
Rachel described herself as highly resourceful and utilitarian. She has not historically placed much importance on image or possessions. Only recently has she begun allowing herself to buy things simply because they bring her pleasure.
Her growth is not about abandoning discernment or becoming consumed with materialism.
It is about allowing herself to be supported by the material world.
The Hermit also warns against intellectual or spiritual pride: the quiet belief that because something is right for you, it should also be prescribed to everyone else.
Rachel is perceptive. She often sees patterns quickly and understands what may help someone move forward.
Her work is to offer that wisdom without assuming that her path is the only path.
Death: Let the Work Evolve
Under Death, financial prosperity is inseparable from transformation.
Rachel is not meant to cling to an offering, business model, title, or professional identity simply because she has already invested time in it.
When something no longer feels alive, she must be willing to release it.
At the time of our reading, Rachel was in the middle of a significant professional pivot.
She had created communities, cohorts, events, and experiences designed to support people in dating and relationships. She loved the people involved so much that she frequently continued creating for them after the paid container had ended.
Eventually, the work began to feel unsustainable.
“I care a lot,” she said, “but I have to care less.”
What she really meant was not that she wanted to become less loving. She needed to stop confusing love with unlimited access to her labor.
Death asks Rachel to end the version of her work that depends on overgiving so a more sustainable version can emerge.
Her ideas are not meant to disappear. They are meant to evolve.
She began imagining immersive relationship mentorship that could include dinners, gatherings, observation, personal guidance, and deeper one-on-one support. Instead of merely giving people information, she could create real-life environments where they practice connection while she helps them recognize what is unfolding.
This is deeply aligned with Death: guiding people through transitions, witnessing transformation, and creating a threshold between one way of living and another.
Rachel even described her work as carrying doula energy.
She helps people birth relationships, communities, and new versions of themselves.
The Hierophant: The Mentor
The Hierophant connects Rachel’s abundance to knowledge, tradition, teaching, and mentorship.
Money flows when wisdom flows.
Rachel is not meant to endlessly gather information while waiting to feel sufficiently prepared. She is meant to share what she already knows.
The word coach has never felt natural to her.
Mentor does.
Her guidance often does not resemble a formal curriculum. It may look like a group chat, a spontaneous invitation, a scrappy gathering, or a simple suggestion that helps someone create more whimsy and connection in their life.
Rachel teaches people how to bring people together because she has spent her entire life doing it.
She teaches people how to communicate care because she practices it.
She teaches people how to create meaningful experiences because she can turn an ordinary evening into a story people remember.
The Hierophant reminds her that knowledge does not become legitimate only after it is turned into a book, certification, or perfectly polished process.
Her lived experience is part of her authority.
Her photography also carries Hierophant energy. She documents families, relationships, and personal legacies. She preserves the evidence of who people were together.
She does not merely take photographs. She holds memory.
The Wheel of Fortune: Money Wants to Move
The Wheel of Fortune appears repeatedly throughout Rachel’s chart, including as the final energy of her money line.
The Wheel does not promise the same amount of money arriving at the same time every month.
It promises movement.
Rachel’s financial life may unfold in seasons, cycles, opportunities, collaborations, and unexpected openings. The more she tries to force herself into a rigid model that does not reflect her nature, the more restricted she may feel.
She needs structure, but not confinement.
The Emperor within her benefits from systems, plans, and sustainable foundations. The Wheel of Fortune needs flexibility, spaciousness, and the ability to follow what feels alive.
Her most supportive business may not be one that requires her to perform the same task every day.
It may be an ecosystem of work with enough structure to hold her and enough freedom to let her respond to inspiration.
The Wheel also encourages Rachel to speak her desires aloud.
When she shares an idea publicly (even as a dream or possibility) people may appear with the exact resources, invitations, or connections needed to bring it to life.
She is magnetic when she allows people to see what she is imagining.
Money spent on travel, celebrations, gatherings, education, creative tools, and experiences that generate genuine joy is rarely wasted for Rachel.
Her money wants to circulate through the same things her spirit values most:
Movement. Possibility. Connection.
The Talents: The Healer, the Lucky One, and the Rebuilder
Rachel’s natural talents are represented by The Hanged Man, The Wheel of Fortune, and The Tower.
The Hanged Man: Giving Form to Feeling
The Hanged Man is the healer and the seer.
This energy allows Rachel to sense what other people miss. She recognizes unspoken emotion, anticipates needs, and sees situations from perspectives that may not be immediately available to everyone else.
Her gifts are not necessarily loud.
They show up through care, presence, intuition, and the way people feel when she is with them.
Rachel is also a Reflector in Human Design, a rare type (only 1% of the population!) known for mirroring and sensing the health of the environments and communities around them. She immediately recognized the connection between her reflective nature and The Hanged Man’s ability to witness.
In her photography sessions, Rachel does more than arrange people and capture an attractive image.
She reminds people what they love about one another.
She creates interactions that help families and couples reconnect before they ever see the final photographs. The image simply becomes tangible evidence of a feeling she helped them access.
One of Rachel’s talents is giving form to feeling.
A photograph becomes love someone can hold.
A dinner becomes belonging someone can experience.
A conversation becomes an emotion someone finally has language for.
Her presence can feel therapeutic because she helps move energy between people.
The Wheel of Fortune: Recognizing the Opening
The Wheel of Fortune gives Rachel a talent for luck.
Luck, in this context, is not random good fortune.
It is the ability to recognize an opportunity and say yes before fear has time to explain why it might not work.
Rachel is adaptable, curious, social, and willing to move with life. She can change direction, enter a new environment, and find possibility in circumstances other people might resist.
Her life is meant to contain movement, events, travel, relationships, and unexpected turns.
With clear boundaries, a full life energizes her rather than burdens her.
The Tower: Building After the Collapse
The Tower gives Rachel resilience.
When something fails, ends, or falls apart, Rachel can eventually look at the ruins and ask what could be created there now.
She is a builder and a restorer.
She may experience disappointment, but she is unlikely to remain permanently defined by it. She looks for the lesson. She gathers the useful information. She imagines a stronger structure.
The Tower also intensifies Rachel’s instinct to protect the people around her. She is reliable, loyal, and highly conscious of her promises.
When Rachel says she is going to show up, she shows up.
Her lesson, once again, is remembering that being dependable does not mean preventing everyone she loves from experiencing difficulty.
Sometimes her role is not to hold the tower upright.
Sometimes her role is to help people discover what they can build after it falls.
The Mission: Serve From Strength, Not Sacrifice
The Hanged Man appears again as Rachel’s central mission.
Her soul came here to learn how to serve from strength rather than sacrifice.
Rachel is here to heal, uplift, guide, and connect; but never at the permanent cost of herself.
Life may repeatedly bring her situations in which her kindness is taken for granted, her generosity becomes expected, or her desire to please overshadows her own needs.
These are not signs that she should stop caring. They are invitations to care differently.
Rachel’s compassion becomes transformational when it is rooted in self-respect.
Her mission is to remember that saying no can be just as sacred as saying yes.
Her needs matter. Her capacity matters. Her energy matters.
Her desire to keep supporting people long after a paid container ends is evidence of how deeply she cares. But when her care becomes resentment, depletion, or unpaid responsibility, it is no longer serving anyone in the way she intends.
She is not here to disappear into other people’s needs. She is here to stand beside them as a whole person.
The Spiritual Task: The Empress and the Art of Sustainable Care
Rachel’s spiritual task is represented by The Empress.
The Empress is sacred nurturing, creativity, beauty, receptivity, and devotion to life.
She creates not only for herself, but for her entire community.
This energy can be expressed through parenting, mentoring, art, entrepreneurship, hospitality, photography, and every environment Rachel creates where people are invited to become more fully themselves.
The Empress teaches that nurturing is a form of leadership.
Holding space shapes the future.
Softness is not the opposite of power.
The spiritual questions Rachel is here to explore are:
Can you create beauty without losing yourself?
Can you love without controlling?
Can you lead without hardening?
Can you nurture others while allowing yourself to be nurtured, too?
Rachel carries both The Emperor and The Empress in her chart.
She contains structure and softness.
Direction and receptivity.
Leadership and care.
The Emperor helps her create the container. The Empress fills it with warmth, beauty, and life.
Together, they ask her to build environments that are both well designed and deeply human.
Rachel is not here to lead through dominance.
She is here to lead through emotional attunement.
Not by becoming the boss of everyone in the room, but by becoming the person capable of creating a room where people feel safe enough to connect.
The Fool Before Forty: Refusing the Box
Rachel’s purpose before the age of forty is represented by The Fool.
The Fool seeks freedom, joy, experimentation, adventure, and a life unconfined by conventional expectations.
Rachel is not meant to replicate the work of other photographers, matchmakers, mentors, doulas, or community builders.
She is meant to combine what she knows in a way only she would think to combine it.
Her path may look unusual because it is supposed to.
The first forty years of her life are about trying things, learning through experience, traveling lightly, laughing through difficulty, and releasing the belief that legitimacy requires conformity.
She is meant to keep her eyes on her own paper.
No one else may be creating immersive dating mentorship through dinner parties, photography, community building, observation, ritual, and relationship guidance.
That does not make the idea impractical. It may be the clearest evidence that the idea is hers.
Justice After Forty: Becoming the Lighthouse
After forty, Rachel’s purpose moves into Justice.
The experimentation of The Fool becomes embodied wisdom.
Her role expands into karmic leadership, accountability, conflict resolution, and guidance rooted in lived experience.
She is not here to preach an ideology.
She is here to become a living example of what she has practiced.
Rachel’s work after forty may ask her to teach more directly, mentor more intentionally, write, speak, or help others build healthier relationships and communities based on everything she learned through her own trial and error.
She becomes a mirror of truth.
A person who reminds others that real power is found not in controlling people, but in acting with integrity.
The Fool gathers the stories. Justice makes meaning from them.
The Current Chapter: The Devil and the Decision to Become More
Rachel is currently moving through a cycle influenced by The Devil, lasting until April 2027.
Devil years are periods of personal power, desire, ambition, honesty, and self-mastery.
They reveal the places where we believe we are trapped.
In the traditional imagery of The Devil, two people appear chained beneath him. At first glance, it seems that he is holding them captive. On closer inspection, their chains are loose. They could leave.
The card asks a confronting question:
Where are you still blaming the cage when the door is already open?
This cycle may bring Rachel face-to-face with desires she previously minimized. She may become more ambitious about her work, her income, her impact, or the scale of what she wants to build.
The Devil does not ask her to suppress those desires.
It asks her to become responsible for them.
Her previous cycle was ruled by The Empress, during which she experimented with creating a community. She designed multiple participation levels, helped people host events, created educational experiences, and tried to be present for nearly everything.
She eventually held what she called a funeral for the project.
The model asked her to nurture everyone while failing to nurture herself.
The ending was not proof that the vision was wrong.
It was proof that the container could not continue in that form.
The Devil cycle invites Rachel to build the next iteration without apologizing for what it needs to cost.
She began imagining an intimate, high-touch experience that could include private mentorship, immersive dinners, gatherings, and direct relational support.
The shift is significant.
She is no longer asking, “How cheaply can I make this so everyone can come?”
She is beginning to ask, “What would this need to look like for the work, and for me, to be fully supported?”
That may be one of the most important questions of her current era.
What Comes Next: The Sacred Pause
Beginning in April 2027, Rachel moves into a longer cycle under The Hanged Man, lasting until August 2028.
After the intensity and self-mastery of The Devil, The Hanged Man creates space for integration.
This does not mean nothing will happen.
It means the pace, perspective, and purpose of what happens may change.
Rachel may find herself writing, reflecting, deepening a spiritual practice, completing her breathwork training, or making meaning from everything the previous cycle taught her.
Delays may become divine repositioning.
What initially appears stagnant may actually be asking her to look at the situation from another angle.
Rachel wondered aloud whether this might be the season when she writes a book.
It would be perfectly aligned.
The Devil gathers power. The Hanged Man asks what that power means.
The Woman Who Creates the Room
Rachel Joy Barehl has always been the person creating the room.
The neighborhood camp.
The game night.
The dinner table.
The photograph.
The group chat.
The gathering that did not exist until she decided it should.
Her Matrix does not ask her to stop bringing people together.
It asks her to stop believing she must personally carry every person once they arrive.
Her work is not to love less.
It is to let love take a more sustainable form.
To build containers sturdy enough to hold people without consuming her.
To trust that mentorship does not require martyrdom.
To allow herself to receive the same care, beauty, investment, and belonging she so naturally creates for everyone else.
Rachel helps people build lives that feel connected and alive.
Her chart reminds her that the life she is building must feel connected and alive for her, too.