Tamira D. K. McGillivray
Astrologer, educator, researcher
Tamira McGillivray is a Canadian astrologer, educator and researcher whose work joins the sky to the ground: how the planets in a birth chart fall across a home, a landscape and a life, and what a person can do with that knowledge. She is the originator of Compass Astrology, a discipline that brings Local Space astrology together with BioGeometry, Vāstu, Feng Shui and somatic perception, and the author of The Living Compass: A Practitioner’s Guide to Local Space Astrology (Silverdisc Publications, 2026).
At Kepler College she developed the AstroMapping curriculum and served for several years as Education Coordinator for the certificate programs, teaching AstroMapping, Local Space Astrology and Mapping Remediation. She now works on special projects for the College, including its legacy project and the development of a new consulting centre. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in East West Astrology from Kepler College and a Postgraduate Certificate in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology from the University of Wales, and is currently a doctoral student at the California Institute for Human Science (CIHS), where her research centres on consciousness studies, non-human intelligence phenomenology and the practitioner as instrument.
She is an NCGR Level III astrologer, a certified Astro*Carto*Grapher and yoga instructor, and has been a Reiki Master since 1996, trained in the Usui, Karuna and Holy Fire lineages. She studied Quantum Healing Hypnosis Technique with Dolores Cannon and BioGeometry with Dr. Robert Gilbert of the Vesica Institute. She lives on a lake in Nova Scotia.
My story
I have carried a sense of magic since I was small, along with vivid dreams of other versions of myself living in other places. By thirteen I was reading alchemy and teaching myself astrology as a tool for self development, and practising what I learned in a small town with no one to compare notes with. In my late twenties I moved to a city on the West Coast of Canada to find my people, and I did: a community that pushed my studies further, a life partner, a home, and my first years of teaching the magical and healing arts.
It was there that Feng Shui found me. The idea that the Bagua, a grid of life areas laid over a room, could act as both a sounding board and a mirror for what we want from our lives never let go of me. When I later met Astro*Carto*Graphy, and then Local Space, I recognized the same instinct in Western astrology: that the chart is not only a description of who you are but a set of directions for where you are standing. Vāstu, BioGeometry and years of hands on remediation in my own homes turned that recognition into a method, and the method became Compass Astrology.
I am grateful for the teachers who shaped this path: Dolores Cannon, Lisette Hart, Barb Turgeon, William Rand, my mentor and friend Melinda Leal, and the faculty at Kepler College and the University of Wales.
What I teach now comes down to one conviction. A birth chart is a snapshot of a moment in time and space, and to live it well you need both intellect and intuition, the ancient methods and the modern ones, the sky overhead and the ground under your feet. Local Space, Feng Shui and intentional living tune us into instruments that can hear what our surroundings are saying. The book is my attempt to hand that instrument to anyone who wants it.
You can reach me at astro@tamira.ca.