Astrology, Inquiry and Guidance — Your Own

Who can forget television shrink Dr. Phil’s diet book from a couple of years ago? The book’s bright red and white cover featured Dr. Phil looking about twenty-five pounds overweight. When I saw the tome I thought, this typifies the condition we’re in: Buying advice from folks who have no business dispensing it. Dr. Phil’s diet book was a bestseller!

We’ve turned giving and receiving advice into a national obsession. In many ways the epidemic has replaced our religious impulse. Each month finds a new method for self-improvement climbing the bestseller list. We’ve elevated our ‘experts’ into demigods. Why?

I think self-help books are like talismans that we set on our bedside table each night and then scan the cover of each morning. But rarely do we actually read them. The books are stand-ins for our effort, but generally we’re not dedicated to change, just the fantasy and notion. What could be more absurd than a book like The Secret where all you do is sit on your ass thinking about what it is you want and then waiting to receive it. Talk about entitlement — another epidemic that seems to be undermining our culture.

My experience indicates that people will only make efforts to change when their process of understanding is engaged. If you don’t understand something how can you make even a gesture to change it. Experience, as understanding, is the one quality books can not impart. (I’m going to write a book about it someday.)

Understanding is usually hard won for each of us. Your mom dies and then you start to have an understanding of what grieving is really about. Understanding can also spring from less traumatic events — from our engagement, curiosity and inquiry into why our life is experienced the way we experience it. Why we suffer. Why meaning seems exempt from many of the things we do. But this too involves engagement — volition mixed with our own insights. In the end the equation goes like this: We can read about strawberries forever, but until we actually taste a strawberry, the rest is all, well, books about dieting.

How Can Astrology Help?

An astrological session is a dynamic exchange that allows you to forge a connection with your understanding. Yes, it involves concepts and the application of ideas and techniques, but the contact, the alchemy of the exchange, can galvanize the psyche and initiate a kind of self-seeing that can become understanding.

Many astrological readings involve a reciprocal form of narcissism. The astrologer waxes and displays the mystique of their knowledge while the client sits back and listens to all of the different ways he is unique. This is usually how astrological readings play out. Sessions like this aren’t harmful, they just aren’t helpful.

I prefer to work with clients in a way that fosters their own inquiry and understanding, their own insights and breakthroughs. This is done by evoking a kind of guidance that springs from the dialectic of our exchange and attention to Being, the messages, if you will, that one’s Being displays through sensations, feelings, images and memories. Inquiry allows for this kind of happening. Inquiry involves stepping out of one’s ’spin,’ the discursive movement of the mind that regurgitates old knowledge, old ideas, old approaches and blocks the unfoldment of understanding.

Here’s how I work with clients specifically:

This is simple. I’ll ask you a question: “What is it that you would like to look at today?” The inquiry might be quick and to the point, or meandering — leading both of us into subjects that might not have been conscious. The aim is for us to remain open-ended, free of any agenda, and follow where the inquiry leads. This might take us to a recent dream, or a memory, or a set of images. It might be that an entirely different issue or question is pushing towards consciousness — should that be the case we will then work with that theme or issue. Throughout I will use your birth chart (horoscope) to anchor the session and return to as a touchstone.

Before you arrive for your session I will have spent some time with your astrological chart, and the event chart (set up for the arrival time of your session.) This is a bit like an architect studying blueprints, or a doctor studying the results of a series of tests. It doesn’t set anything in stone for me, but it does familiarize me with type, proclivities and how the current planetary design, put in comparison to your birth chart’s planetary mandala, shows tensions, blocks or flows in your present time experience. Both of these charts cue me in ways that help align my presence to your presence. And once that presence is established an opening of the field between us will become more creative.

Timing, Booking, Frequency

People require different ways of working with their questions. Sometimes a one-time session will provide the perfect insight for a particular issue. This can be conducted over the telephone, via email or in a private face-to-face consultation.

I’ve found that working with an individual in a series of person-to-person sessions, over time, is more effective in unraveling issues that are deep-rooted and multi-faceted. Series work allows for the dream field to become more active and established — and allows a consistent relationship to develop between you and the process of synthesizing the dream symbols. Prolonged work also establishes a kind of trust between us that supports deeper inquiry and more profound results.