An article about Astrology as a tool for self discovery and how to get your chart.

I remember when I was a teenager, I would google things about astrology. About my zodiac signs and what they meant. I always knew I was a Scorpio (sun) and over time and in passing I learned to identify strongly with what I has heard that it meant.

I wish I could remember the timing and details of it all, but I know that at one point I got a hold of my chart and started to google some of the other things like … “what does Jupiter in Leo mean?” I wanted to understand it all and somehow I knew that the whole chart mattered, otherwise it would just be the Sun on there!

So what am I looking at when I am looking at an astrology chart? First I feel it is important to say what kind of chart I am looking at. I practice Natal Astrology at the moment, which is the branch of astrology that is focused on individuals through using a chart that is cast at the moment of a person’s birth.

Okay and the chart itself? Well basically it is a two dimensional map of our universe, drawn as a wheel (a circle) split into 12 slices like a pizza. Around the wheel are the zodiac signs and each slice of the pie corresponds to one zodiac sign and one house. Within each slice there are planets, points, nodes and sometimes asteroids and planetoids, depending on what you’re interested in looking at. Some slices are plain (empty) and some have toppings (planets, points, etc.)

The whole pie represents … well depending on who is looking at it, it can represent multiple things. My personal education has taught me that from a traditional Western Astrology perspective, the whole chart represents a person and their life’s journey and can include everything that will happen to that person throughout their life, including when and how they will die. Traditionally, astrology was used heavily as a predictive tool.

Fun fact: many people went to astrologers to find out if their lover was faithful or not and also to find out how they were going to die!

From a modern Western Astrology perspective, the chart is representative of you and different aspects of your psyche, soul, personality. A very well known modern Astrologer, Demetra George, believes that the purpose of natal astrology and the natal chart is to heal the soul.

So where do I fit in? I’ve been practicing for about 2 years now and I feel that I am somewhere in the middle. I utilize the chart as an introspective tool, to understand about a person’s gifts, challenges, life themes and I also use it to understand what might be happening in their life or what might have happened in the past to help a person make sense of things.

I am also actively studying and very open to all of this changing as I continue to develop my skills. I love using some traditional techniques to get to certain information that I feel goes under the surface a bit more. And there are certain modern techniques that really help me to share more about a person’s general demeanor which I love to start with. I am also actively keeping note of how accurate all of this is based off of what people are sharing with me.

I think it is important to be skeptical of any tool used for the purposes of discovery. Astrology is no different to me. What I love about it though, which makes it really fun to explore, is that it has been around for thousands of years.

It started out as a way for us to connect to the greater world outside of us, to tell time, to make sense of things and has since grown into a multifaceted realm that has been used to support many people, nations and areas of life.

As people sat back, thousands of years ago and looked up at the sky, they started to see big moving orbs, eventually called planets. The word planet comes from Greek and translates to wanderer because these were the ones that seemed to move independently of the stars which appeared fixed in the night sky.

Over time people started to correlate the planets’ movements and relationships to each other with specific events happening in their towns, villages and lands as well as their lives. The planets’ movements and relationships started to gain meaning.

These meanings have been continuously reinforced over time and are still used today by us astrologers in the modern day. I love that. There is tradition and history and some sort of consistency. However, there is also fable and fairytale and subjectivity. So for me, personally, I use this tool as a guide, as a key to unlock the doors within myself to discover what feels true for me. Not to take what any tool, including astrology, says as fact until I test it out and reflect on it in my own life.

I am still on a search for my personal astrologer because I want to work with someone who I can trust to support me using astrology as a tool and not as a rule. This tool can be extremely validating and also very illuminating. I personally have used it as an anchor point into my inquiry about myself, my life purpose, my family, my relationships, my sexuality, my passions and my career, to name a few. I may start to share some examples in the next articles to illustrate.

But today I wanted to share a great website and resource for generating your own chart.

Astro.com

Astro.com is a fantastic resource for all things astrology. I believe it is German and called Astrodeinst. I have been using it throughout my whole education and my career and it has been incredible.

I invite you to go to astro.com (https://www.astro.com/), where you can explore so many incredible things about astrology, but it can also be overwhelming. Would you like a suggestion?

What I recommend is to create a free account. When you do this, you then will be able to access all the free information and it will automatically populate relevant horoscopes with your birth information. In the top right corner you can click on My Astro and create an account.

Once you do that, you can then add Astro data to your account, which means your birth information, to create astrology charts.

To create your chart

You need a few pieces of information to create your chart. Your birth date, the month day and year, ie. December 20, 2022. You also need the location ie. New York, NY USA. And to get the most accurate and specific chart you need your birth time, to the exact minute ie. 2:23AM. You have the option to put in “unknown” in the birth time area, but there will be certain things you won’t be able to see with this. I may explain in future articles.

If you don’t have your exact birth time, I would not estimate. I would go with unknown. That’s my personal preference and when I meet with people I usually do that if the time they give me isn’t within minutes of when they were actually born. Every 4 minutes makes a difference to one of the major points of the chart, the Ascendant (I may explain this in later articles too!), and so you want to make sure you are as accurate as you can be.

Once you enter this information you can save your data and then run your chart. Welcome to your personal pizza haha!

Things I love about Astro.com

It is free. I love this so much because people can have access to some seriously high quality information.

You can also run different charts for different things, like events, or love or partners or other people etc. You can have up to 100 sets of Astro data so basically 100 charts at a time for free.

Free personal daily horoscopes. I love reading these. They are pulled from a book called Planets in Transit, written by a mammoth astrologer called Rob Hand. They are very fun to read each day. And on Thursday, the longer term transit descriptions are all free, so you don’t need a subscription to read them!

Ethics

There is a new organization formed around creating some sort of ethical practices around Astrology. I just learned about that as I was listening to a podcast episode about Neptune on The Astrology Podcast (https://theastrologypodcast.com/).

So what I will say is this. I personally practice in a way where I do not look at someone’s chart unless I have their permission. I believe the chart is very personal and so in some ways it feels a violation of someone’s privacy to pull their chart and analyze it without permission.

I understand that it may be exciting to look at partner charts or parent charts or friends or siblings etc. I also feel this way and have used it a lot for supporting my own self discovery. I remember pulling everyone’s chart that I could when I first learned. However this was before I entered into my education and I now feel that permission is key and so I have since deleted chart info of anyone whose permission I didn’t have.

A note about Astrology as a tool

When I meet with people, many of them have an idea that this is something they will do once and never again. As in, get their chart read one time and move on.

You can absolutely do this. You can absolutely get your chart read once and never again.

But what you can also do is have an astrologer on your team the same way you have a therapist, a nutritionist, a personal trainer, a hair stylist, a doctor, a dentist, you name it. Anyone you see on a regular basis for the purposes of maintaining your life and your overall wellness… an astrologer can be one of those people.

Your chart won’t change over your life time. (There is so much to discover within it though, that you can talk about it for hours!)

What does change though, are the planets in the sky. Constantly moving and constantly making relationships to your planets in your chart. So there is always something to talk about.

A planet, like Saturn, may be transiting where Saturn is in your chart. Saturn returns are a big plot line in our lives. Or maybe an outer planet, like Uranus, is now moving through your house of relationships and you may be experiencing unexpected relationships or unexpected starts and ends to relationships. The chart can be consulted at any moment in time to gain insight as a forecasting (looking ahead) or retrospecting (looking back) tool.

So if anyone were to ask me, I would recommend building a relationship with astrology or with an astrologer if you want support. It can be such a beautiful way lens through which to look at oneself and one’s life.

It is one of my greatest honors to sit with people and consult using their astrology chart as a guide and tool. I also recognize and appreciate that not everyone wants to get their own chart and learn about these things themselves. Which why people like me are here!

Are you looking for support with using astrology as a self discovery tool? I am accepting invitations to natal consultations. Visit biancapaigesmith.as.me to book.