Is Astrology too complicated?
Recently, I sent out a survey asking people for some general questions and concerns about learning astrology and one of my very favorite responses really summed up in beautiful language what astrology can broadly offer you in you day to day life.
So I’ll share that response for you in summary:
“The perfect tool would help me acknowledge my own nature and hopefully see the benefits of being what I am rather than wishing I was something else. It could assist me in making decisions and hopefully guide me on a path of evolution rather than the repetition of conditioned responses. It could help me find my strengths and be more tolerant of weaknesses and challenges. And finally it would help me feel more aligned and at peace with who I am in relation to others and to the universe. “
I think astrology can actually offer all those things and more to an individual who has really developed an intuitive and practical understanding of their own chart, as well as kind of a working relationship with astrology as an ongoing process.
I thought I'd address some of the more common concerns that people have today and the most frequent concern I hear is people are overwhelmed by the complexity of astrological information and it kind of stops them cold from going any further. It's important to realize that you don't have to have an encyclopedic understanding of all astrology. After 25 years there are tons of things I don't know. That’s one of the great things about astrology, it's breadth and it’s depth and all that that offers you.
You can have a good working relationship with astrology without being an expert astrologer; you don't have to understand everything to understand anything.
So astrology lends itself well to being a tool for self-understanding if all you do is grapple with your own natal or birth chart. The natal chart is a snapshot of the sky at the time of your birth and a snapshot of the conditions of things at the time you were born. It is the architect's plan, if you will, for things when you took your first breath and came into your body as a complete individual. If someone does nothing more than come to a good understanding of that architect’s plan and get skillful at using that as a tool for self-development, astrology has already proven itself very valuable.
Once the chart understanding is established there's a way to begin to understand that chart in the evolving process of the planets moving through the sky at any given time. The sky is always changing, the influences are always changing, and they're always activating different parts of our natal chart depending on how the two things line up.
That's sort of a step beyond an understanding of the natal chart, but it adds a vast richness and depth to working with the chart that is a possibility once the natal chart is understood and this is something that is completely accessible to people.