My first introduction to Astrology came at a very low time in my life.  A man with whom I worked asked me if he could do my chart.  I was curious, although I did not really believe in it, so I said yes.  It was a day that forever changed my life.  The first reason was that I had spent many years in therapy trying to uncover and heal the problems that seemed to constantly plague my life.  We had made breakthroughs; yet, the resolution for each of them seemed connected to my parents.  I was encouraged to confront them in order to somehow fix myself.  However, confronting my mother only made my feelings of unworthiness increase because of her refusal to accept any responsibility for the things that were not working within me.

As I sat with this Astrologer watching him look at this circle with strange symbols on it I became amazed with the clarity and understanding that he seemed to find within this chart.  He began with describing my parents and the influence that they had on me.  He described my feelings of inadequacy.  He exposed the things that I knew about myself but did not readily share for fear of judgment.  There was, I remember one prediction in his reading which only alluded to the fact that in a few months, or rather by my next birthday the dark cloud that I felt hovering over my life would finally pass – nothing more detailed than that, but it was fine for me – even if it did not happen because something much greater had transpired than the illuminating of some future event.  My life, and the characters who played such major roles in it, were all neatly laid out in this map.  This map, which was created at the moment of my birth belonged to me and me alone.  It was, so to speak, the owner’s manual of my life.

No longer did I have to see myself as defective or my choices as wrong, or myself as simply jinxed, no, for some reason, one that I could discover, my life was unfolding according to plan, according to God’s plan.  And as it said in Genesis:

¹⁴And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: ¹⁵and let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. ¹⁶And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. ¹⁷And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, ¹⁸and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. ¹⁹And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

Like many Astronomers I questioned this portion of the Bible, it was just wrong.  The Sun is a star and it happens to be the star that the planets of our galaxy revolve around – including the earth.  So, literally – God just would not have said this.  But what if it were symbolic, spiritual and not literal?  After all, the astrology that has been used for tens of thousands of years is earth centered.  Just as described in Genesis, and the stars (lights) have been, since the beginning of time as we know it and probably before, used to divide the sky into signs . They do give light – the light of knowledge – upon the earth.  They do rule over the day and night, and divide our times of darkness from our times of light.  The Sun represents the day, what is visible, it lights our path in this lifetime while the moon represents our emotions, our feelings, our subconscious motivations that for us live in the darkness.  And God saw that it was good.  So, when I saw my chart and understood that the rejection of my mother, was there, written by God in the stars of my life.  I knew that it was all good.  My journey now was no longer to try to fix my parents, or gain my mother’s love or attention, no my journey was to understand what the purpose was for God to choose these experiences for me.  I was empowered.  I knew that ahead there would be difficult times as well as easy times but they would not depend on my making the right or wrong choices, they would be determined by the ‘seasons’ of my life.

By gazing at the stars and reading the signs, I may know what season I am in and do the best that I can do within that season, give the most that I can give and learn the most that I can learn.  I have been reading charts for many years since that first time I sat down before that wheel.  Each time that I do, I do not seek to tell a person’s fortune, other than, perhaps, ‘This too shall pass”.  No, the gift that I try to give each person that I read is the gift that I was given.  That is the truth that none of us are defective, nothing that we do is a mistake, we all have a spiritual purpose of being on the planet at this time and what we do, how we live, and what we learn all contributes to our gift to the world.  It is a spiritual tool for understanding why we have been chosen to take up this space on the earth, and where we will find our greatest joy while we are here.  Perhaps astronomically the Sun, Moon, and stars do not revolve around the earth, but spiritually, they do revolve around man.