ASTROLOGY TOWARD NEW PERSPECTIVES AND TRANSFORMATION

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.