Astrology:
A Personal, Healing Journey
When I was a child in the 1950’s, my
parents had a large picture book with artists’ renderings
of the planets’ surfaces. I would spend hours turning
the pages, imagining what it might feel like to be standing
on the planets. Pluto was fascinating, set against a background
of glittering stars and deep black space, its dark and alien
surface both distant and mysterious. I have Pluto within less
than a degree of my natal Sun and have always felt an affinity
with this planet.
When I was ten years old, I decided to be
an astronomer so I could study the planets. That was the first
career goal I ever had. For a 5th grade school science
fair, I designed the solar system with different objects for
the planets—a pea for Mercury, a basketball for Jupiter—and
wrote about each planet. I believe in re-incarnation and that,
to borrow from Wordsworth,
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come…
My interest in the planets must, I am sure,
have carried over from a previous lifetime. My science fair
display won no awards, and though my romance with the planets
was foreshadowed, I soon abandoned astronomy when I discovered
how much physics and math I would need to study.
In 1966, just out of high school, I moved
to
London
for a year to study acting. I hitchhiked around Europe and North
Africa, returned to California,
then moved to Hawaii and lived
on a hillside overlooking the Kona
Coast on the Big
Island.
I meditated, body surfed, practiced celibacy, and was a vegetarian.
In 1969, I moved to Los
Angeles to be closer to the spiritual
center of Paramahansa Yogananda’s Self-Realization Fellowship,
to which I had become devoted. A sister of a friend was studying
astrology and, when I gave her my birth time (which I had from
my mother), she told me my rising and Moon signs and a little
of what they meant. I was impressed, but did not have anything
to do with astrology again for 25 years.
(As a side note, I used this birth time—my
mother’s memory—for the first couple of years after
I later became intently interested in astrology. My mother was
anesthetized during my delivery, so her memory was somewhat
suspect. Finally, I sent away for my birth certificate. I thought
I already had a birth certificate—that is what it was
titled—but it was only a document my parents obtained
when I started kindergarten and it had no birth time. My actual
hospital birth certificate, when it arrived, showed that my
mother’s memory was forty minutes off. A stellium moved
from my 4th house to the 5th, although
my Ascendant sign stayed the same. Lesson: Whenever possible,
get a real hospital birth certificate).
I knew nothing about astrology, but while
Pluto exactly conjuncted my natal Virgo Moon, I became a Self-Realization
Fellowship monk, living first in Encinitas,
California, in the postulant
ashram, then at the Mount Washington
headquarters. Although I have a rather monastic bent, I was
not cut out for that life and left after three years.
I went back to college and became a
high school English teacher, got married, and had a daughter.
Then, in early 1994, as the Uranus-Neptune
conjunction began to wane, I went through a life crisis.
A series of family illnesses, and the slow death of my father-in-law
destabilized my life and made me think about my earthly purpose.
In addition, I had just moved with my wife and daughter to a
new community and had changed job sites. The fact that
Pluto was squaring my Sun-Mercury-Pluto-Saturn stellium at this
time may have had something to do with my turmoil. Plus, I’ve
got the Sun, Ascendant, and three other planets in fixed signs:
I like change—as long as it happens in inches, not miles.
My mother-in-law had always had an interest
in astrology and bought a book called The
Only Astrology Book You’ll Ever Need. I borrowed it,
read it, and became obsessed. It opened the door to astrology
for me.
On weekends, I would ride my bicycle to a
local cemetery and sit on a bench to meditate, looking out on
the pastoral scene and thinking about Taurus, which I now understood
was my rising sign. I felt a sense of loss when I understood
how the outer planets—all below the horizon in my horoscope—were
in 1994 in above-the-horizon signs. How was I to go from a natal
inner-directed conjunctions and sextiles person to an outer-directed
squares and oppositions person? The zodiac was tearing me apart.
I began to use astrology to work through the
pain in my life. I bought Tracy Marks’ books and did astrological
dream analysis, using it to chart a way through the pain I was
experiencing. I even wrote to Stephen Arroyo (through his publisher),
after I read his book Astrology,
Karma, and Transformation, to ask for help when I barely
knew what a transit was—and was astonished when he actually
replied!
Astrology is first and foremost, for me, a
healing journey of self-discovery. It is easy to lose sight
of this with the overwhelming amount of intricate knowledge
about astrology that is now available in books, magazines, classes,
and the Internet. I believe astrology saved my life and that
God acts through the planets to heal us, that prayer is communion
with God, and divining the planets is a form of prayer, of listening
to God.
