Astrology can offer profound experiences of recognition, finding how your chart reflects how you experience yourself and your life.
 
And: astrology can also offer descriptions of your life that deviate from what you already know, inviting us to soften our certainties and direct our attention in potentially unexpected directions.
 
When I first started studying and practicing astrology, I was mesmerized by its uncanny capacity for correlation with my lived experiences, the remarkable consistency between what my chart describes and how I experience my own life. I still find this capacity remarkable—in my own life and in my work with clients.
 
However, over time, I have come to value even more the ways that astrology invites my attention in directions I maybe had not considered, gently disrupts the stories I tell myself by providing other possibilities for how I might perceive the story of my life, bringing parts of my lived experience into focus in ways that maybe would have remained imperceptible without astrology suggesting that I consider myself and my life from other points of view.
 
When I’m working with students, there can sometimes be a tendency to go first toward something like: does this resonate with my perspective of my own life or not?
I generally encourage moving away from binary perspectives of astrology—is it accurate or not?—which limits both how we understand astrology and what it does.
Rather, I move toward questions like:
How might this describe my experience?
What comes into focus when I consider my life from the perspective of these cycles, directions, qualities, and themes?
How does engaging with this astrology feel in my body?
 
As I’ve said many times before, approaching astrology with these kinds of questions situates astrology as more of an artistic practice.
We do not generally ask a dance, a poem, a painting, or a piece of music whether it is accurate or not. Instead, we consider how it affects us, how its particular composition generates a range of potential sensations and feelings, the ways that we sometimes recognize parts of ourselves in an artwork—as well as the ways artworks sometimes break open our perceptions and allow us to experience ourselves and the world in new ways.
 
Approaching astrology in these ways moves us beyond something like confirmation bias—looking to astrology to support or reinforce perceptions and perspectives that we already hold—and toward perceptions and perspectives that can expand our understanding of ourselves and our lives.
Whether we are interpreting a configuration of planets in your natal chart or qualities of time that are described by any number of timing techniques—transits, secondary progressions, annual profections, circumambulations, zodiacal releasing, etc.—astrology can become a practice of exploring what we do not yet know or understand, softening our conscious or unconscious investments in our existing reality as certain, complete, and final.
 
When we approach astrology in these ways, we open to the possibility that our lives—both the lives we have lived thus far as well as our lives that are still unfolding—are already more and other than we have known them to be.
 
Astrology can be a practice of shifting, disrupting, expanding, and even changing our perceptions, perspectives, and realities—rather than a practice of reiterating and reinforcing what we already think about ourselves and the world.
 
This is not to say that there is anything wrong with identifying with your rising sign or feeling recognized by the placements in your chart. Again, that capacity for meaningful correlation with our lived experiences is a significant part of why many of us are drawn to astrology in the first place.
However, the magic of astrology is not limited to this kind of identification or recognition.
Astrology is perhaps at its most magical when it supports change and transformation—coming into right relationship with change, shaping change, transforming ourselves and our world.
As Grace Lee Boggs taught us: we transform ourselves to transform the world. And astrology can be part of those processes.
 
If you would like to work together approaching astrology in these ways, my Bookings page is here.

Sometimes when I’m working with astrology clients, they tell me some version of:
I don’t like my sign.

Whether we are talking about the sign on the Ascendant, their Sun sign, or the sign of their Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn—or any of the other planets—sometimes people come to astrology with preconceived biases.
And to be clear: that’s not their fault.

Often times people have ideas about which signs are “good” or “bad” based on things they’ve read or heard on the internet, on social media, on podcasts, or even things that a friend or acquaintance who is really into astrology told them that one time.

People can internalize these fleeting pieces of information, whether they even know their chart or not.
And especially if they do not have the familiarity or training with which to critically consider the bases of these statements about the signs, these internalized biases can contribute to a sense that they aren’t good enough or that their chart describes some kind of personal deficiency.

Sometimes practicing astrology with clients involves doing repair work around wounds inflicted by things someone said about signs of the zodiac online.
[There’s a version of this post that twists toward our relationship with online media and critical thinking, but that’s not where we’re going today.]

Let’s start with the basics:
Everyone has every sign of the zodiac somewhere in their chart.
Signs of the zodiac are literally measurements of space, analogous to a system like longitude on the surface of the Earth.

The signs of the zodiac developed primarily as a system of reference for locating the planets.
The signs of what is called the tropical zodiac are not the same as the constellations that share their names, but are rather twelve equal divisions of a 360º circle called the ecliptic, which is the path of the Sun through our sky over the course of a year.
These signs are measured out from specific astronomical points that align with the equinoxes and solstices: for example, the first degree of Aries aligns with the spring equinox in the northern hemisphere, when the Sun crosses the celestial equator on its northward journey, when the length of night and day are equal and the hours of daylight begin to grow longer.
From that point, the sign of Aries is given 30º of the circle of the Sun’s path, with the remaining signs measured out from these points, creating the full circle of the twelve signs of the zodiac.
The signs of the zodiac primarily tell us where the planets are in space.

The signs are also given particular qualities based on their relationship to the cycle of the seasons and the planets that are said to rule each sign.
A sign’s modality—described as quadruplicity in ancient astrology—is determined by where it sits in relation to the seasons, defined by the equinoxes and solstices.
Cardinal signs come at the beginning of the season, fixed signs come at the middle of the season, and mutable signs come at the end of each season.
The signs are also assigned one of the four elements—fire, earth, air, or water.
And each sign has a planet that is considered to be the ruler of that sign based on an ancient doctrine called the Thema Mundi, which assigns each planet as a ruler of one or two signs based on their light, speed, and distance. So, the signs also describe which planets are responsible for different parts of our charts and lives.

The signs also form geometric relationships to one another and in turn can describe the relationships between planets placed throughout the signs.
These geometric relationships between the signs are the foundation of what are called aspects in the system of astrology.
Aspects can indicate easeful or supportive relationships between the planets in the signs, relationships that may be more tense or challenging, or where there is no direct relationship between the planets.

All of these factors are considered as part of the quality and condition of any planets in those signs.
In other words, way before we associate the signs of the zodiac with personality types, preferences, behavioral tendencies, or our exes, the signs are primarily a system for locating the planets and describing how planets might function in the story of a life.

The signs that have the potential to be the most personal for each person are the sign that is on the Ascendant—which describes the self—as well as sign in which the planet that rules the Ascendant is placed. The qualities of those signs may have more to offer in terms of someone’s personality or how they become who they are becoming.

From my view, it is much more useful to think of the signs as places or territories with specific qualities—like different landscapes or ecosystems—rather than types of people. Our social world is already burdened with too many systems for sorting people into different categories. We don’t need to use the signs of the zodiac—or astrology more broadly—to categorize people, let alone invent more ways to be prejudiced based on conditions beyond someone’s control—like where the planets were when they were born.

When we consider the signs as places or territories that inform how the planets function, every sign—which is also to say every part of the cycle of the season—brings something meaningful to the story of the life.
Our practice of astrology can become so much more nuanced, inclusive, and affirming when we consider how each sign contributes to the story of someone’s life, rather than ranking these measurements of space as “good” or “bad” or “better” or “worse.”

​If you would like to explore how the sign placements in your chart contribute to the story of your life, you can do so through the Bookings page.