Enjoy this interview I recorded for the Secrets of Master Astrologers summit with Suzanne Gerber
Transcript:
Suzanne Gerber: Hi, everybody, and welcome to the Secrets of Master Astrologers Summit. I’m your host Suzanne Gerber. And I’m so delighted that you’re going to be a part of this very exciting three-week series, in which I get to talk to some of my favorite astrologers out there. They’ll be sharing their wisdom and their insights with you and offering gifts. It’s an info packed summit. So grab a notebook, grab your water, get comfortable, and settle in for 20-something hours of astro inspiration. Today’s guest speaker Mark Jones is a brilliant evolutionary astrologer and psychosynthesis therapist and author who’s based in South Wales, and works with clients and students around the world. And is a regular speaker and workshop leader here in North America. He is an author of three highly acclaimed books. The first one is Healing the Soul – Pluto, Uranus and the Lunar Nodes. And it explains his approach to astrology and therapy. The second book, called The Soul Speaks – The Therapeutic Power of Astrology, explores the transformative power of the natal chart reading. And his latest book is called Planetary Nodes and Collective Evolution. If you already know Mark and his work, you know what kind of treat you’re in for today. And if you don’t know him, well, I predict you’re going to be very grateful for this introduction. Today, Mark is going to share his wisdom and perspective in a talk he’s calling Your Chart as a Vision Map. It is indeed an honor to welcome Mark Jones to the summit. Hi Mark!
Mark Jones: Hi, Suzanne, thank you for having me.
Suzanne: It really is a pleasure. And I just can’t wait. So I’m going to jump right in. When I thought about how to kick off the summit Mark, I really wanted you to be first because I’m such a huge fan of your entire take on astrology and how you blend it with a very wise and soulful approach to therapy and healing. And there’s other evolutionary astrologers on the summit, more and more people I think are gravitating in that direction. But your first point that I would impose on you to explain to people who might not be familiar with exactly what it means. When we talk about evolutionary astrology, how it’s different, what it what it’s really predicated on.
Mark: It’s really predicated on the soul. When we talk about evolution in astrology, in this sense, in evolutionary astrology, we’re talking about the soul’s evolution, we’re talking about the idea that inside you there is an eternal flame, or a diamond of truth, that becomes more condensed or brighter, potentially at least lifetime after lifetime. If you wanted to use that narrative through time, or maybe all of our experiences co-present in the face of the great mystery, but the idea of evolution and evolutionary astrology applies to soul. And this is not soul just in the sense of, hey, that’s soulful. Or how soulful this piece of music or this piece of art is. This is soul as a psychic being, as your psychic being, soul as subtle body, soul as your energy field, your inner truth. Evolutionary astrology effectively cuts through the prevarication of the modern world and its materialism and its scientific technical focus. And it says no, you are a living energy field. The grace of the sacred cosmos has bestowed this living reality of your inner truth upon you. And this living truth has the potential to evolve through your actions, through your moral decisions, through the development of wisdom, psychological, spiritual maturation. And so astrology in this sense in the natal chart becomes a potential guide or vision map to your soul’s potential in this given life. This incredibly exciting, almost magical sense of encountering something that’s symbolic of your energy field being like a flower that could open its petals to the reality of life through time, through your decisions, through your goodness, through your development. And this isn’t about soulful potential just as the success story. This is soulful present potential in the intimate details of your life. It might be becoming a more loving person or learning how to deal with a challenging family and yet still grow, still become a person, despite maybe disadvantages you had early on.
What we find when we really look into soul work, and I’ve been working with people on that level for 20 something years now, is the soul emerges in the most intimate details of people’s lives, their most intimate decisions, and the people they care about the most, and their secret world, their inner life. So astrology has this fantastic symbolic capacity to contemplate the evolution of your inner life, of your psychic being and of your soul’s potential to effectively manifest in the reality of your day to day life. So evolutionary astrology focuses explicitly, I would argue, on a spiritual potential within people. And at its best, it’s a guide to embracing that spiritual potential and actualizing it. And then in my world, I blend that evolutionary spiritual perspective, with the best of psychology or a spiritual orientation to psychology and psychological astrology could bring to that picture. Because once you’ve realized the soul is effectively shining through you into your life, you need help then working out the various obstacles that manifest to its radiation. And that’s where some of the more practical, nuanced, emotional, psychological dynamics come in. But bottom line, in my view, evolutionary astrology is a complete spiritual vision of astrology, based effectively on the idea of an eternal soul living within you, living through you. And I find that a beautiful and inspirational idea, and I find it a particularly poignant one. I don’t know about you, Suzanne, but the sheer number of people I’m exposed to in my practice who are anxious right now in the world or aware of the suffering in the world or concerned about war, or famine or environmental changes, and many of those people are more cast adrift than they ought to be, in a way they’ve been disenfranchised by a worldview that doesn’t allow them their soul, that doesn’t allow that to become a basis for their reality. And I think at its best astrology helps people, it helps people come back to soul, come back to that as the basis for reality.
Suzanne: So beautiful, and there’s so many directions to take that conversation. Mark, I love where you just landed, though, in your most recent newsletter. That was so brilliant. You talked about that very thing in your practice. And I definitely concur. And not only, there’s a lot of people living very joyful, meaningful lives of course but we don’t always tend to see them.
Mark: Exactly. I’m an ex-therapist helping people, mentoring people. When they’re feeling really joyful, they don’t tend to seek me out in the same way. So there’s a slight bias going on in that sense.
Suzanne: You wrote that you’re encountering so many people who are seeking meaning. Now people have always sought meaning in life. But yes, there’s some kind of irony about it, that we now live in a world where we’re connected to everything. We have access to more information than humans have ever had on this planet. The most advanced cultures didn’t have a fraction, thanks to the internet. And the research that people do and how we can all access it all. And not just research but wisdom teachings. But you’re saying, in spite of all of these, as you put it, brilliant technological advances, there’s a sense of meaninglessness. People don’t feel their place. It’s almost like and you know, stating the obvious here, instead of bringing us all together and making us more connected and more connected to our soul, we’re more alienated and isolated than ever.
Mark: Exactly, because quantity will not reach the soul dimension. The soul dimension is based on quality. It’s much more important the quality of your love, than say its duration through time. Imagine someone in the 18th century who may have only heard music a handful of times in their life. It was only played live a handful of times, but they hear Mozart, and that lives with them all their life. It’s like the soul is based on intensity and quality, not quantity and all these Google Books and all this information. The mind can’t take it in if it doesn’t have a center, and the soul is effectively the center. But what do you do if you give people all of this information without a center? You alienate them, and you create this feeling that they are small compared to the complexity of reality. And then we have the irony that we all have a cell phone that’s got more tech in it than the Apollo rocket. And yet we’re playing games on it, you know, little bricks, how to get them into a position or we’re checking WhatsApp and just messaging. It’s this curious situation. And I applaud those technologies. I mean, look how it enables our conversation today. I would never know you without these technologies, I celebrate them. But they can lead astray, especially with a philosophy that’s based on effectively scientific materialism.
You see, in a culture that, if we’re honest Suzanne, astrology doesn’t matter to the mainstream, does it? It’s not being taught in universities, that the Senate doesn’t meet and discuss the astrological conditions. Astrology has been relegated, it’s relegated as a kind of joke in some quarters. And yet in a culture that denies the sacred, what gets thrown away, is sometimes carrying hidden veins of gold. And I think that’s the position we’re in. It’s not that all astrology is like that. And we have to be very careful and very discriminating about how we utilize astrology. It has all sorts of issues with people making simplistic predictions or telling people how to live their lives based on a very limited understanding of them. And my view is that you have to anchor the symbolism of the charts or the reality of the person’s life, the individual, it makes it unique for every person. But at the same time, in a culture that’s forgotten sacred meaning, it’s in strange, freakish institutions like the astrological world where some of that sacred meaning gets left and can we find it? Can we find it and polish it and brighten it, and help encourage people back to a sense of purpose? Because life in every area has been challenging, hasn’t it? Life just is challenging, and there will be existential limits to the human condition. And yet we have that capacity when we rise inside from this sense of love and joy and capacity. We have this ability to make a difference, to share ourselves with life. Not by being famous, necessarily, or the leader of some cause. Just by how we live, our day to day lives, the buoyancy we bring to our friends, our loved ones, our coworkers. And I think astrology has the capacity to inspire a lot of people. I think people are drawn to it because they’re looking for that inspiration. They’re looking for that sense of meaning. They know they’ve lost something. And they’re starting to search in the stranger areas of town. You know, where might I find it?
Suzanne: You make a really good point that people are coming to it for meaning. And I think a lot of people kind of get funneled in the widest net that we cast, they come in for self-understanding, and they do want to know what’s coming up for them. But I think that when they start to work with more soul-based astrologers that they might not have even intended to, and we start to talk to them about bigger context of their life, not just what the outcome will be. Did you did you have that relationship? Did you get that job? Did you make this much money? I mean, these are this is the stuff of life of daily life.
But I think it only holds so much currency for a while and especially when we start to go through our midlife transits and crises, they don’t have to be crises at all. But starting in our late 30s, when we go through the outer planet transits and then into the Chiron return, the nodal return, the Saturn Return, that in our 50s we just really start to attune to different ways of thinking about the purpose of our life. Not just the what, but the why. And I think what I’m finding in my practice, it is so heartening that at younger and younger ages, I think people are really becoming interested in well, what is my purpose? Of course, I want to enjoy my life. I want to be in love. I want to do fulfilling work, but I know there’s more. And so I’m curious about you. When you are working with people, where do you start? We’re never judging, right? We’re always just keeping things like could be, may be because everything is an entire spectrum of possibilities contained within it based on our free will and our choices and our abilities. But where do you begin to talk to them about their soul, their meaning, their great gifts?
Mark: Great question. I always start every reading with the same question: How can I help today? Physicians, the service orientation, it encourages them to identify the presenting issue, because I’m taking the attitude, I cannot summarize your entire life in the 75 minutes we’re going to spend together. We’re going to focus the understanding of the chart into one or two key areas in your life so that we can actually take transformational steps. But I’m also then inviting them to talk about themselves in a way that in a sense, they begin to show me how they’ve lived their chart already. Some astrology and astrologers treat people as if they live in an abstract realm, and they haven’t lived their life already. Rudhyar points this out beautifully. People have already lived a section of their chart at whatever age even by 25 or 28, you’ve lived a chunk of your potential. By 45, 48, even more so. So I’m looking to identify where they are in that trajectory. And the point you make is very Jungian, that sense that by late 30s, early 40s, that massive change occurs. That’s how Jung saw it. Jung basically said, you don’t start really dynamically seeking meaning until that point in your life, or most people do not. So when you’re talking about purpose in a younger person, 20 something, early 30s, it’s invariably linked to how they will make their way in the world in a way. And that’s totally legitimate. There’s no selling out here by wanting to be successful and have a good life. That’s not selling out. That’s just human, that’s just natural, and a wanting to share one’s gift with society. That’s a healthy Saturn, recognizing that I can give something tangibly to the structure that already exists, and then receive something from it for that effort.
But yeah, that question, how can I help today? It’s so simple, but it’s so radical. It’s not accidental, that effectively in the myths of the Holy Grail, from various early sources, it’s the key question that the knight fails, when he first encounters the Grail. He doesn’t ask ‘what ails thee?’ to the wounded King, and basically returning many, many years later, after many dark travails through the forests and lonely times of not finding the Grail, this knight comes back and goes, ‘what ails thee?’ What’s going on? What’s wrong? It’s my version of that. Because when you ask, “how can I help today?” if someone’s honest in response with me and stays open, we will get somewhere powerful. We will go to into where they really are. The one thing that can stop that is if they themselves start to block it or become self-conscious of the power of the question. Because many people aren’t even really expecting that you can help them at all, that it’s a kind of radical thing. Sometimes I say to people, we’re aiming in this one conversation to transform your life. We may fall short, we may not quite achieve that. But at least we’ve fallen short doing something beautiful, daring to change, daring to try. And that, in the right space, excites people. And I think that for me, the best use of astrology is how all through thousands of years, people look to the sky for what? For that sense of larger purpose, that sense of cosmic reassurance, the twinkling glittering stars like magical gleaming eyes in some vast darkness. It’s what we’ve always looked to for this sense of cosmic interface.
And here we have this natal chart, this symbolism, the synchronous way that all these planets took a shape the very moment you were born. You know, something comes through and emerges. It’s magical, isn’t it? Now you can’t take it too far. As I say to astrology students, you can’t get too precious about the chart, because let’s say you were born in some hospital in Salt Lake City in Utah at a particular time. And maybe a bird was born in the outside window. Or even worse, a cockroach was born in the dark basement of the hospital or a rat. They’ve got the same chart as you if they were born in the same moment. It’s just a space-time moment. But once you link it to an individual unique human life, you have this symbolism of all of reality that’s lived through the infinity of the universe comes together at this one particular point in space-time, the point where you were born like a flower opening into light. And I remember at the magical moment I held my daughter for the first time, you can feel the soul force, this tiny little being pinned me down to the shoulder, this little Taurus was already solid, like a little meteor on my shoulder. Right from the first second, the first seconds. And there’s this is particular quality, I think about that emergence, everyone knows the magic, those who have witnessed childbirth or have been near just very young children, they can all feel the fact that they’re open, they’re trailing something, you can feel the quality like something new is coming in. And I think the chart’s the attempt to symbolize that, and the sensitive astrologer tries to read that symbolism, and give it back to the individual, not to read it to be clever, not to read it to get caught up in their theory or the latest book they’re working on. But to read it to give it back to the individual in a way, almost like the chart can help you connect to that original stream of being potential in the very first moments of your life.
Suzanne: I love when we have the privilege of looking at somebody’s chart, to look at it as a way to give them back to them. I think it behooves us to have done our own shadow work so that we’re not unintentionally projecting some of our limited beliefs and understandings, but also to hold the person in the highest regard and the highest potential for what all these things could mean, not to make them feel like they’re not living up to a potential, but to remind them, this is there, this is absolutely there, in spite of challenge this or that problem, or this thing that you are still processing in your own psyche. A lot of people have very challenging childhoods, very painful. A lot of their life path becomes about that self-healing work, but to reflect back to them what they’re capable of. Not in spite of what they went through, but because of that is very specifically. This can be a very tricky one, because people who don’t understand it could think that there’s blame involved, but there’s no blame. It’s just, this is what you came in as. And to work with, these are the tools you’ve chosen. And to just help them reframe it instead of a really sucky hand that they were dealt, but this is their opportunity to transcend. And this I think is such a critical point to get through to them that this is not an accident. This is very sacred. And this is back to your knight in the quest for the Holy Grail. This is their heroic journey.
Mark: I love that. And I think it’s the great affinity that you and I have, that we see the whole process itself as a sacred offering, effectively as a kind of blessing space that you try and live in. Not that you’re all precious, and every moment is like the relief when some clients we’re reading realize that I swear can sound just like a trooper, the relief when it’s a real existential conversation, when you can get involved with people, but the actual energetic place you’re coming from is ensouled. That’s what I mean by the blessing space. And I think you reveal that when you say not in spite of but because of. The people that come through the most profound wrestling with their inner trauma and their developmental challenges, come to a place where they realize what it gave them, where they realize you can come through frankly appalling conditions and circumstances. And you’re right, frequently a person’s whole life meaning is how to process and digest and come through those things and become the person that they are. That’s the kind of coal being squeezed to that diamond potential. But when people do commit to that, and they do go through that difficult and challenging work, they often realize not that they’re condoning the terrible things that happen to them or letting people off the hook. But they often realize what living through those challenges gave them in terms of their inner strength and empathy and understanding.
And I think it’s really beautifully put, not in spite of but because of, was such a lovely way of putting it. And to look for that not in spite of but because of moment is a crucial thing and healing to actually steer things towards that. So frequently for me chart readings are about validating what people have already done. I’m celebrating when we encounter a challenge in the chart, let’s say, a challenging childhood is symbolized by a Pluto-Saturn configuration to the Moon. And they’ve had a very challenging early childhood. And then they’ve taken these huge steps. They saw a therapist for a few years after college, and they’ve committed to more mature, taking responsibility in relationships after the initial shock of family experience. I’m like, wow, we see that Pluto and Saturn, the transformation (Pluto) that was needed, the maturation that was needed (Saturn) to take more responsibility in order to overcome the challenging origins. So I’m appreciating with them, I’m on the edge of my seat as they share the movie of their life. And I’m like, wow, you did it that! Look at it, you did what your chart was asking of you at that point. And that’s very rewarding sometimes I think for people to simply just share in a context where their inner achievement in a sense might be understood in that kind of way, is healing itself. Because the chart becomes validating, like you say. People come in sometimes with almost unbearable burdens, right from early on, terrible situations. I’ve worked with people whose parents were junkies, and one left and one died. And they were brought up by relatives or whatever, enormous challenges early on in your central developmental self, or people who’ve been through terrible abuse. And it’s not like you’re going yes, this chart shows abuse. No, charts show potential challenges. But when there has been abuse, or very challenging things, and then you can see those challenges in the chart, for people that’s incredibly validating. The fact that this symbolic map shows that there were these very real challenges, and then it took this very particular disastrous form in their life, can help people heal, because the disastrous thing already happened. You’re not looking for an out.
It’s something that can help them understand maybe some of this was written in, or there’s some way they can come to terms with it because what you’re trying to do when you’re trying to metabolize challenge, you’re trying to digest it, aren’t you? You’re trying to take difficult fate, and you’re trying to metabolize it into your destiny. You’re trying to make it meaningful. I think sometimes a very difficult childhood’s like trying to eat a plate of raw potatoes. You know, they’ve not been cooked, you can’t eat it, it’s too disgusting to take in, it’s too sickening. But over time you learn to metabolize it and the fire of metabolism, the fire of meaning helps cook it, helps cook the raw meal, and enable you to digest something of your own life. So some of the astrological work I do is very therapeutic in that sense. The chart is a helpful symbol to point us to the necessary work around acceptance, understanding and then letting go of very challenging experiences, or at least partially letting go the negative emotions attached to them. And that’s incredibly rewarding. I have to be honest, the person that takes a step to overcome a terrible early experience with you, that that finds a joy in childhood that had been missing since they were young and the terrible thing happened is heartwarming, to say the least. Heartbreaking in a joyful way really.
I just think of a lady that rang me once a lady in her late 50s at her second Saturn return, rang me riding a bicycle that she had stopped riding at six years old when she was attacked by a predator, for want of a better word, on the street. And her whole life changed. And she was on the phone call to me in the session, riding this bicycle, giggling with joy that she had written a bicycle again, that she had left behind for 50 something years. That’s soul, isn’t it? That’s another part of the soul coming back in where an obstacle knocked it out through grief, through other people’s darkness betraying the innocence of a child. And I find a lot of my deepest healing work with astrology points back towards the innocence of the child, because the chart is formed in the birth moment. So it’s like a thread that you can follow back to the earliest potential like you were saying, and you can reaffirm the innocence of that early potential, even despite the fact that maybe adults around that child failed them or challenging things happen. So in that sense, having been a spiritually orientated therapist, and being an evolutionary astrologer that focuses on the soul, the soul’s evolution. And for the soul to evolve, it has to first come in, it can’t be knocked out by challenging experiences. You have to invite it back in. So that blessing space you mentioned, to me that’s like going, ‘hi, good to meet you.’ You know, good to see you on a soul level. ‘Hi, welcome to this cosmos, welcome. You could come back in this space if you wanted to, if you wanted to be that real, I’ll go there with you.’
Suzanne: I love how you blend astrology with a very specific kind of therapy. In in my work, I started only doing astrology because I was absolutely obsessed with it. And I just thought, well, if you explain things to people, they’re just going to follow through and take the necessary steps and become happier, healthier, healed, and more whole. And then after doing it for a while, I realized nobody does anything. They might think about it, they might remember a few sentences, they might remember something that they took out of context, that sounded a little frightening. And they might get back to you and say I want to talk about that transit you saw coming up. Whoa. And that’s when I realized, for me to be effective with what really was my higher purpose – to help people wake up and take the responsibility for their own growth and ascension.
Mark: Yes, I love it.
Suzanne: We don’t control people. We don’t pull strings. So how can we do it? And I found that using a lot of different healing modalities, including some non-ordinary techniques like shamanic work has been very helpful. Because to me, astrology is a diagnostic tool. But for change to happen, we need to do work like what you do. So tell us a little bit about how you blend it. Do you do it with everybody? Is it just with people that you see on a repeated basis? How do you how do you work it in?
Mark: So before I go to that question, because I am using it even in the one off readings, but obviously when I work with people ongoingly you can you can bring more of that capacity in. To me, it’s such a crucial thing you’ve noticed. You put it rather gracefully and diplomatically. But if we put it a slightly different, more direct way, we’re basically saying astrology is not enough. I mean, a diagnostic tool is useful. I’ve worked with people in conferences, and they’ve gone ‘I had a reading with so and so X number of months ago,’ and I go, ‘oh, how was that? You know what stood out for you?’ ‘Oh, oh, oh, oh, I’ve got pages of notes.’ You know, it’s like that. It’s like all they did was take notes. And there’s no key thing. There’s no place they got to because it’s just been a description, or some astrologers and models of astrology think breaking down all your transits and progressions for the next five years is the thing to do, which is all effectively a series of abstractions on a not known future. So it’s leading people into a realm away from themselves in a way. Yes, agency, as you’ve noticed, does not come just through telling people things. In many ways, that’s the last thing. Imagine someone that grew up with a bullying father, who told them what to do all the time. And then you as the astrologer, and let’s position the astrologer here as an older man, with a younger person who had that bullying father, and the astrologer starts saying, ‘oh, with this transit, you should do this.’ We’ve gone straight into an echo chamber, haven’t we? So the therapy skills come in on that level, the understanding that real change happens when people self-discover.
So the chart can be used to create a symbolically rich meaning environment. But it can’t be used to create a list of things they ought to do. Every now and then it’s clear a person needs to do something, I won’t shy away from having that conversation. But clearly people tend to transform more when they’re involved in the process of discovery of meaning. And that’s the other thing when I say ‘how can I help today?’ I genuinely listen. Even if that person talks for 14 minutes on and off. I don’t go oh, you better stop talking about your life now and we better get back to some astrology. I don’t do that. Because I know that the agency in their life, I trust that the greater change will happen if they’ve been truly honest, and they’re truly present and it’s actually involving their real life. So that’s the main way I work and then in the ongoing work, what you can do over time, is begin to bring in certain condensed therapeutic principles, which I’ve learned through 20 years of working with people that I’m now teaching. That it’s a hard thing to bring in. But just for example, knowing how childhood developmental processes work, how that bullying father works, and how you might never listen to certain figures ever again, just because of the echo chamber. And then I’ll try and bring that up in the most gentle way possible. Hey, you know, effectively, without sounding like your bullying father, what would it be like if you could heal that space inside yourself? You might listen to people more because some of those people might not be bullying. They might be genuinely trying to tell you something like how to do this job, or how to succeed in some area in your life. And you’re losing out on that because of the effectively attachment to the past pain of this problematic figure.
So what I’ve done effectively, is try to develop the psychotherapeutic skills in more of a coaching space, more of an encouraging dynamic space. And I remember talking to a guy who ran a trauma clinic in Europe once and he said the ideal stance therapeutically is the concerned father, not the all-giving mother. But the guy who’s like, ‘yeah, I hear your concerns. But have you thought of it from the other guy’s point of view? Or have you tidied your room? Have you gone through it? Have you tried to do something about it yourself?’ He explained to me that the mother stance, whilst it might be really important in very extreme early deprivation, most of the time for client work, the kind of benevolent father stance was key, the kind of ‘I hear you, I hear your pain, and what are you going to do about it?’ Kind of like a little bit of agency, a little bit of how can we talk about how it might be different? And I use them the astrology to help them understand it. I treat the reading, and I know this is kind of radical, but I treat it as like, if you and I are doing the reading, you and I are discovering the chart together. I’m not just telling you the chart. In principle, we’re both discovering it. Now obviously, if they don’t know any astrology, I don’t mean that literally. But in principle, I still mean it, even if they don’t know. Because obviously, if you and I were looking at your chart, it really would be both of us discovering it, because you would also know a lot. But even someone who doesn’t know a lot, in a sense, I still treat it as both of us because I would say staring at Venus opposite Saturn. How does this work for this person? I may have encountered Venus opposite Saturn how many times? I may have taught classes on it, I probably have. How does it work here? It might not be exactly the same way. And it has all the unique connotations with their unique chart.
And so I keep it fresh that way. And I include the other. And by including the other, I’m hoping that they can have that sense of agency. So I’d rather they walk away from my reading, some people are a bit shocked, they’re like, where was the astrology? I’m hoping that they walk away with one, two, or three things which are going to be the kind of leading edge of their evolution in their life, or they just simply walk away with a new sense of validation about themselves. They walk out a little bit taller. I’ve learned that, I think like you, people can only cope with a few important things, really. Maybe even only one important thing, but two or three at most, in a short, intense space. And trying to do the whole thing, trying to interpret the whole chart over a whole lifetime, it’s just a fallacious path. It can’t ever be truthful, because it’s too hypothetical. So I try to bring it down. And in that sense, you could say I’m not a completest, because someone could have a different reading with me potentially a year later, after they’ve gone through some changes. But I think that’s more organic. I think that’s more truthful to life. Life is that complicated, and people do have the potential to change.
Suzanne: One of the things I find gets people stuck more than anything, you talked about their attachment to the past pain, and this is connects to what I’m about to say to you. I find that people because we don’t learn astrology in school and we don’t really learn healthy ways of interacting, and gaining agency and separating from some of our pain, we would take it on. Our culture reenforces it. It’s how people connect. It’s a kind of mystique of therapy and wounding. And I feel like a lot of people get stuck in their victimhood because of the benefits that they don’t consciously relish. Nobody walks around saying ‘wow, I get a lot more attention because of my painful past.’ But it’s in the unconscious somewhere. And I find that until we get to help them see that, they’re holding themselves back by hanging onto that. It’s like hanging onto something instead of taking the boat that will save them. They’re hanging to the anchor, it’s going to pull them down. How do you how do you work with that? How do you help people turn that?
Mark: Yeah, that’s a very astute observation again. And as you’ve worked out, people have payoffs, don’t they? People have not so secret payoffs, for their holding on to their pain. Yes, some of it is just the mammalian drama. I think people become addicted to the drama cycle. You think of a soap opera, you think of that whole process, the storyline, the dramatic conclusion, she falls in love, but he can’t be trusted, there’s a secret life. And then he’s involved in some gang. Everyone fear, lust, desire. Think of modern TV shows – The Wire, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, they’re all pushing these intense cycles of mammalian emotion, very often very negative. Because people need to process their mammal stuff, but it leads them deeper into it. It’s effectively feeding a sugar addiction. So I think it is concerning. And then on a deeper level, you could say, it’s back to that trauma therapist point. It’s the too much mother fantasy, isn’t it? That there will be this all perfect, all-embracing love that will respond to my hurt and make the world totally the way I need it to be in order to get through it. And we see the flight of Saturn in that sense, because Saturn, is the ultimate taking of psychological responsibility that would see the concept of victimhood change. For me, the victim stance is fundamentally a failed Saturn lesson, you have failed to accept the cross of your own burden that you’re going to carry in life. You’ve forgotten that you have to stand up and hold some of it. And therefore, because you don’t feel able to do that, you run this kind of excuse. It’s because such and such happened to me, it’s because the cards are stacked against me. It’s because of the way society is structured. It doesn’t work for people like me, whatever it is.
So we see that even genuine attempts to address inequities within society become psychologically problematic, because they’re utilized in this way that increases this pervasive victimization, which is, as you’ve understood, psychologically fundamentally unhealthy. You cannot get sufficient traction or agency in your life to truly become an autonomous human being if the whole time you’re just blaming XYZ person or thing for your life. You just can’t. So it’s a fundamental Saturn failure in many ways. And therefore fundamentally psychologically, immature, in a sense. The fundamental key of psychological maturation is to let go of that side of oneself to the best of one’s ability. And I help people do that, I guess. You cannot help people understand that by simply dismissing their concerns, because then you set yourself up as basically the agitant and they hold on to their victimization even more. You have to have sympathy and empathy for what created the hurt, what created the victimization. And you have to have a sort of realistic attitude to how that hurt might be softened in some way. But I do try to point to how the world would look different because in my view, Suzanne, most of the time people aren’t really seeing the world as it is. It’s almost impossible to see the world as it is. Jung frequently made this point. We’re seeing the world through all the filters we’ve placed on ourselves.
To go back to the original question, what is evolutionary astrology? If you are an eternal flame of a soul, and its radiance is shining from somewhere deep within you, through you, whatever you put in front of that shining, powerful light of the soul will start to create shapes and patterns in your life. And the secret belief you’re not good enough will come out somewhere. You’ll reveal that secret belief to the people that you’re close to, and then your life will collapse in some way or the part of you that hates yourself and hates others, suddenly down the line in a separation, in a divorce proceeding, you face the consequences of that despising of yourself and your partner that you harbored secretly for years. You see, in many ways people don’t realize how creatively powerful they are. They don’t realize how powerful the light of the soul is. And effectively what you place in front of it will have a certain amount of manifestation potential around you. We’ve forgotten our role as manifesters in a sense of our own life. Not that there aren’t limits, there are collective concerns. There are limits, but we are manifesters, powerful manifesters, and to deny that we create a world where we live like a powerful manifester who’s denying that power. And that’s a strange kind of life. And yet, we’d have to say that’s common. And it’s, it’s linked to the loss of soul.
It’s not a manifester, like you’re some superhero, you can see that the Marvel Universe and these things are attempts to fill in the blank. But it’s not the same thing. You’re not a manifester, because you’re this superhero who was hit by a point of radiation or bitten by a spider, or has been souped up by a nuclear power thing in your heart like Iron Man. But look at the symbolism by the way, material symbolism of the jewel in the heart that shines its soul light into the world. It’s a materialization of soul’s power. You’re not a manifester in a superhero type sense, which is people’s increasing fantasy of what they would like to be. In a world bereft of soul, we turn to whichever superhero to have this heroic ideal. But the hero’s journey is not a superhero journey. It’s not the same thing. So it’s really about stripping away the filters that you placed on that light. And allowing that light to come through in the natural human way that it exists. You’re not trying to transcend your humanity. You’re trying to actually relax back and actually experience it in its fullness rather than reach some point where you should be wearing a cape and wearing your pants on the outside of your trousers or as in America, your underwear on the outside of your trousers. I think that shows us as a culture, how lost we are. The Marvel Universe is the most successful film franchise right now. It’s showing us what we yearn for. And in showing us what we yearn for, it’s showing us directly what we’re missing.
Suzanne: That’s great. And now as we kind of toggle back and forth between astrology and then more therapeutic, modalities, let’s bring it back to the astrology if we can, because I think when we’re when we get kind of deep into the therapeutic approach with people, we’re still astrologers. And why not take advantage of this special way of decoding people? It’s such a great shortcut. I always feel like I’m saving people thousands of dollars of therapy. I will often send people for process work, because they really would benefit from looking at something and having someone in their life on a weekly basis. But there are these kind of shortcutty things that I think we can do with astrology, that can say things in pretty big ways that can inspire people. People love the positive qualities. And we do want to show them all this great potential. So when we’ve used the chart as a descriptive diagnostic tool, and then we kind of move into some kind of supportive, nurturing, listening, helping therapeutic role, then we come back to astrology. Where do you go with people? Because I know, Mark, people listening are going to be sitting there at their chart like, what can I look at? Because even though we’re talking about your soul and free will and choice and consciousness, there are clues in the chart. What can they look at? What are some of the things that are going to show them potential, whether it’s natal dispositions or transits?
Mark: So we come back to the idea of the diagnostic map, don’t we? Just because we can say that the diagnostic map is not the same as your actual life, it’s still a useful thing. You’d still rather have a diagnostic map. When your washing machine breaks down, you’d still rather have an instruction manual, or your car, your mechanic at the garage would have some kind of instruction manual or computer software that can read what’s wrong. So the diagnostic tool is incredibly important. So you have to understand that the power of astrology emerges when you realize what it’s not. It’s not your real life. It’s just a symbol. But as a symbol, it’s a fantastic diagnostic map. So the key when you’re looking at it at home is not to confuse the symbolism of your real life and the chart. You have to develop a more detached eye because the danger is that people don’t understand the challenges in their chart because they’re effectively too scared and cosmically paranoid. You know, when they look at the challenging aspects in their chart, they enter into cosmic paranoia. Or when they see Pluto’s in late Capricorn, going to go into early Aquarius and they have planets in late Cancer, or they have planets in early Leo or whatever it is that Pluto’s going to oppose, they get frightened of it. To me, you have to develop a slightly more detached vantage point to study the chart, because you’re only studying a diagnostic manual. It’s like you’re trying to repair your washing machine or your car. You have to learn some of the codes of how it works, and not just freak out. So the key thing is to keep calm, try to manage the cosmic paranoia, because we all had it. You know, when I was first studying astrology, I would literally sometimes wake up in the early hours of the morning, put the light on the reading lamp on and start going back to the astrology. But where I left off, because of some sense of how can I find out about my life and what’s triggered in me? So I understand it, but what you need is a detached understanding, because in a sense, you have to map out the challenging features in your chart. And for me, the great symbols to look at are the outer planets aspecting the inner planets. Only a modern spiritual astrologer would say that, but to me, the outer planets symbolize transpersonal influences beyond the personal influences. So that’s generational influences, but also spiritual influences. And when they intersect personal planets, it’s a sure sign of where the radiatory power of the soul is seeking you out in some way. And that’s a useful thing to get a handle on.
There’s the Saturn lesson, you understand your Saturn early on in life, even just get a basic handle on your Saturn, and therefore begin to take greater responsibility for your life and minimize the amount of victimization. You will profoundly change your life. The Moon’s nodes are an incredibly direct way. Because the Moon is such an incredible symbol of your personal self, and the way it evolved through your unique childhood and family. And then the Moon’s nodes show the arc of that personal self through time. So you can get a sense of your own direction, of evolution through time. And then planets conjunct or square the nodes become very important. Something conjunct the south node is like you paddling in your little canoe on that arc of development with this big boulder of Saturn or this big piece of Mars on that canoe. Whereas planets squaring the nodes, they’re like cross currents impacting your journey and potentially taking you off course. So there’s all these different ways of imagining it, you can look at the inner planets in a way like your team of people, your quality world. Your communicator (Mercury), the things you need to feel secure and safe (Moon), your values on a personal level (Venus), your sense of assertion or dynamism (Mars), how you might show up in a tennis match or something. So you can play with astrology. But to gain that sense of creative playfulness, you have to treat the chart to an extent as if it’s not your own. You have to learn to play with the symbolism of the chart, and not identify too closely with it personally. Otherwise, people are literally getting very upset because they have a difficult thing in their chart. Whereas that doesn’t really matter. It only matters if that translates as a difficult thing in your life. But I am talking to people sometimes who are weeping because of a chart placement, or not even just the chart placement, a one particular interpretation of the chart placement that’s very narrow.
An example springs to mind – someone who was very upset because they had south node in Libra in the seventh house. And they were interpreting the south node as the past that they had to somehow get over and become the north node. And the north node was in Aries in the first house. So that meant they shouldn’t have any relationships, but they wanted a relationship. So they were crying on the phone. And I was like, even if you accept that symbolism about the nodes, the past is not a bad thing. You take all sorts from your past into every new situation. Why would the past be a bad thing? In fact, if you didn’t have all the things you learned in the past, how would you ever understand any new situation? And then the other thing is, and this is a key turning point for me, and this is a slight technical point, but I did research on how all the planets have nodes through Dane Rudhyar’s work. And then that brought me back to the lunar nodes, which I’d always utilized. And I began to realize Rudyar’s late work, all this stuff that you heard about the nodes being formed as an arc of momentum of planetary motion and how you could never, ever separate them. So this idea that you could demonize one placement, and say you could never have that and then not take another is just fallacious. It’s just not truthful from Rudhyar’s point of view. And I realized to me at least, there are a small series of very high-quality astrologers that I go back to time and time again. And I don’t so much cast my eye around for every new thing. I just go deeper and deeper into certain people’s work. And someone like Dane Rudhyar’s thought just constantly refreshes me. I mean, there are there are some weaker books, he got paid per word a lot of the time. So it’s not like everything is brilliant, but the brilliant things are just so inspirational. And he called the chart your true name. That’s one of his phrases. And he’s again referring to the symbolic signature of your soul, that it is like your soul signing itself or something for the flourish or shape of your unique being.
Suzanne: That’s just beautiful. That’s a great image. Building on what you’re saying, one of the things that I really strive to do with people, whether it’s through actual classes or not, but I consider every reading a teaching moment. And even if people aren’t actively students of astrology, I think part of what I get to teach them, what I get to impart, is that every single thing has an entire spectrum from an unrealized, unacknowledged, shadowy, heavy, dense, path of least resistance kind of expression, right up through the more psychologically adaptive or look I’m working with this and this is this isn’t easy, but I see that if it doesn’t kill me, I’ll make me stronger kind of thing. Right up into the most aspirational qualities because everything, whether it’s a south node in Libra as a strong Libra, I tend not to think that is such a big problem. But you can see the danger of some astrologer who’s projecting, maybe they were in a codependent relationship. And they’re seeing things like you were talking about, seeing things through that lens. They’re projecting that and seeing all the possibilities. I say you get to set the dial, it’s like a GPS, where do you want to go with that? Yeah, you could run away, you could either do codependent or nothing. But that that feels pretty limiting. And of course, one of the great things as we learn more and more astrology is we learn more and more context. First thing I think of when you say that is where’s her Venus? What’s her Mars? Where’s the power? Where’s that dynamic?
Mark: Every placement has to be taken back to the whole chart, doesn’t it? You make a brilliant point, though. And I wanted to underline it, this idea of each evolving archetype. I’ve started to see it recently. I’m a student of Roberto Assagioli’s psychosynthesis. That’s the kind of therapy I trained in. And he has a model of the unconscious that’s lower, middle and higher. So he doesn’t have a static view of the unconscious. It has the lower unconscious, where you’re more trapped in the past, the early stuff, the drives, the archetype in its unrealized form. Then in the middle unconscious, you’re more conscious, you’re more aware of the psychology, you might you got more of a perspective on it. And then in the higher unconscious, there’s the potential for superconscious. There’s the potential for the actual, as it were spiritual ideal to shine down. And in a sense, that applies to all the archetypes. There’s Saturn as the buried grief of the past, Saturn as your conscious relationship to authority, or psychological maturation. And then an actual feeling of the inner authority, bestowed by the grace of your experience, the grace of the love or the loss you have or becoming a parent or taking on a position of responsibility at work or whatever it is that bestows to you this sense of inner elevated responsibility. So all archetypes are evolving. And I love the way you talk about that. I just think you’re intuitively a very canny astrologer, very practical for people in their actual psychological transformative dynamics. Because in many ways, that’s the key to point out to people – these things exist in stages. It’s all on a sliding scale or a dial. Where are you set?
And from Assagioli’s point of view, the great thing that motivates this potential shift through the lower, middle and higher unconscious is what he calls the act of will. The rising spiritual or psychological spiritual focus where you choose, you decide, your intention sets the tone, and you pick it up perfectly. Intuitively you’re right on the button with Roberto Assagioli actually. It’s beautiful to see. And I’m sure that’s incredibly helpful to people because I know how helpful that is to people. Imagine we’ll go back to that Pluto transit or that Saturn transit that scares people so much and instead of just saying Saturn equals loss from the past, Saturn equals psychological maturation. And you’ve just framed a scary transit for its meaning, haven’t you? Or Pluto, Pluto is not just loss, it’s transformation. So that could involve a loss if something changes. But what is the actual potential arc if that change? Then immediately you’re back to the astrology in a really dynamic way. The long Pluto transit you’ve got and remember, most Pluto transits are one or two years long, at least, because of the slowness of the orbit and then you start to frame well, what would that arc of transformation be under that Pluto transit? And that’s when you’re back in the therapy space or the transformational space, but you’ve linked it totally back to the astrology. You’re effectively in both worlds at the same time at that point. You’re just concerned about human healing. And you’re using every possible skill set to create a shared story with a person. I’m not just telling them a story. I mean, I might tell them some to inspire them. But I’m listening to their version of that story. So that they walk out with a story they told themselves as well.
Suzanne: One of the things I love to do with the planets that are considered maybe more adversarial or challenging Saturn and Pluto, of course, popping in many people’s minds, but I love to give them these keywords and we know the challenging words. But to remind them that it’s always in service of something higher. So Saturn, like you’re saying, it’s maturity, it’s also mastery. And it’s discipline and self-awareness, and Pluto is the soul’s transformation. It’s the phoenix bird and, and people know that image. And Saturn is the scaffolding on a building that’s being redone. And if you’re going through these transits, I’ll say to them, what do you want transformed, improved, upgraded in these areas of your life? Because if you’re attached to the status quo, you’re not going to be happy, you’re just not. You’re going to be kicking and screaming.
Mark: Well, that’s the fundamental challenge that people don’t often want to accept, that your comfort zone is, by definition, your prison in a sense. Because in some ways to live the most creative life, you would just train yourself to live outside of your comfort zone. And it’s understandable, we all have a need for security but it becomes the very thing that limits all the time. Because in asking them what they want, you’re engaging choice. Choice is the first step to the act of will. The other thing I do sometimes, and this came from a long sort of therapeutic listening, I begin to get a read on the kinds of things that are possible for people because I’ve worked with so many people over so many years. You know, I’ve worked with X number of divorces, and then X number of divorces in which the husband who seemed like a nice guy tried to hide the money from the wife and kids when they separated so he could set up with the new woman or whatever. So I start to get a read or a feel for what that transformational potential might be. And I might just gently feedback from that place, not trying to limit people or tell them what to expect exactly. But just to give them a sense of what feels like, it’s almost emerging in them and what their potential is, especially if they’re struggling. But I think you and I in that sense, we work in a different style but with the same intention in actually very similar ways. And I love some of the images you pick. I use that scaffolding one all the time. Because the scaffolding becomes a way of keeping a little bit of the comfort zone, because it’s keeping the kind of at least the structure of the old world, you’ve at least got something to hang on to for a while, whilst these bigger renovations potentially happen. Or maybe I use the model of like, it’s just renovating just one part of the house. And how to preserve the energy to make that part work.
And every now and then you can just feel it – some people’s house, the house of self, has this bomb site part. You know, one whole area is just a hole in the ground, the crater where something used to be. And then that’s more challenging, but I always try and be honest and real about that from my therapeutic-type experience. And I give them choices like you. One thing I really admire, you are so on in that regard, you recommend people to therapists or to process work. I mean, that’s the thing when you’re doing an astrology reading and you encounter the equivalent of the crater, the bomb site in the house. You have to have something, it used to be filofax, didn’t it? But whatever in your contacts list, you have to have that list stuff – bodyworkers, therapists, maybe a good psychic, you know, whatever. Because when people ask certain questions, or certain recommendations or just to also not be afraid to say, well, that’s not my expertise, or I’m not a therapist, or I’m not a psychic. Because people have weird expectations of astrologers, I think. And we shouldn’t be drawn into things that we’re not comfortable with. We shouldn’t be drawn beyond our capacity. I think sometimes astrologers end up saying things to people that that become limiting to those people. But the astrologers yes, they said them for good reasons. They said them because they wanted to help. But they were drawn into saying things that they didn’t really know. ‘Oh, it might be this, it might be that’ and then people hang on to it. And I think we have to be very careful to recognize when people feel hurt by life and insecure, we don’t need to just give astrological answers to that. We don’t have to go ‘oh, well, such and such is in such and such.’ We can just go ‘oh, yeah, I feel you.’ Or, ‘gosh, it is sad when your husband of many years passes away who you really loved,’ or talking to an older person, or this thing that’s happened to them that was so significant. You don’t have to leap straight to ‘oh, yeah, it was Pluto on your seventh house, cusp when that happened.’ You know, it’s tasteless, isn’t it? You can feel it straight away, how tasteless it is. You just want to be with people too. And I think that’s where for me, and I feel you agree with this, astrologers have to learn those other skills. You cannot if you want to work with people just be a research astrologer interested in ancient books or techniques. You have to come out, you have to be able to empathize, relate to people or have a different skill set, or be very prepared rapidly to point people towards those with those other skill sets.
Suzanne: 100% Mark, and I’m just going to turn that around for the people that are watching this or listening to this who maybe don’t read for other people. But I would say it’s very important to have the same kind of compassion and patience with yourself when you see it in your own chart. Yes, something that looks a little painful or wounded. And let’s face it, we’ve all got Chiron somewhere. We’ve all got some something in our chart that is our roadmap for the work that we’ve come in to do. And instead of coming at it with judgment, or a sense of not good enough-ness, or unworthiness, just assuming as you gain this awareness, start to approach your chart differently. What if this were your friend? What if this were a child? How would you approach it? How could you be more loving, patient, compassionate with the exact same set of symbols if it weren’t you that you are acting out of your own lack of…
Mark: That’s lovely. That’s absolutely beautiful. And it points to the critical issue on a technical level of dropping these terms that seem to have come back in – benefic, malefic. In my view, they’re not helpful to people. And just the regard that you pointed out, yes, what would it be like to approach your own chart as if an angel stood by your side, or as if you were empowered by some higher light or love, because indeed, that’s effectively what it actually is. It’s a kind of vision map of the soul trying to come in. And effectively, that’s actually what it is. It’s not just an exercise to feel that greater light or love it as a symbol of the soul’s potential. It is actually infused, at least potentially, with that light and love. I love your stance there. Cosmic paranoia, as I call it, personal and cosmic paranoia, cosmic paranoia on a personal level from your own chart, and then the world picture from collective event charts, is a huge problem in the field. And I’ve given talks in major conferences, and people have been really responsive to me pointing out that this kind of paranoia is damaging or is psychologically not very nuanced. We’re missing something when we literalize astrology in that way and imprison ourselves. And then they’ll come out and show in the break how they’re still doing it. Someone will literally come up and go, ‘oh, I haven’t seen you for ages, Jackie. How’s Bill?’ ‘Oh no, we split up.’ ‘Oh, my oh my gosh, what happened?’ ‘Oh, Pluto on my Venus.’ Now it’s partly true. That’s a subtle example. Because I can understand someone’s saying that because in a way in an astrology conference, you’re with your people, you feel you can speak your language and it’s code for something. But it’s amazing how often that code for something glosses over it what that really was. What did that Pluto-Venus mean? What did she suddenly feel a greater sense of value that Bill had never really been according her all these years? Bill had ignored her on that real level. Notice how even speaking astro talk amongst your beloved community avoids responsibility sometimes, avoids psychological depth, avoids giving the real, maybe more heartfelt reason of what happened with Jackie and Bill. Totally made up people, by the way, but god bless them and their suffering, but I made them up. But even in a fun way, astrology has this dangerous capacity to abstract away. You know, I would rather hear ‘well, me and Bill just reached this point. This is why, you know, you could see that Pluto was on my Venus, and that was doing something in his chart, you could see that we came to that initiatory moment when there could have been a transformation. And actually, the love failed at that moment. The transformation couldn’t be taken.’ That’s the way I’d frame it. Can people leave people when Pluto’s on their Venus? Sure, because they’re going through a radical transformation of value and if the relationship can’t keep up with that transformation, then maybe it becomes unnecessary. But all of that nuance is lost. And often astrologers sitting together and they’re going, ‘yeah, Pluto on my Venus’ or ‘yeah, Saturn on the Moon.’ And the other person just nods sagely as if they know exactly what that means. But they don’t always break it down, what it actually does mean. I love astrologers, I love astrology conferences, I have been embraced by the astrology community. I mean, it’s one of my great joys, but I do despair occasionally of the shop talk and the speech that denies the human heart its chance to be more real.
So for me, the language of astrology, astrology as a vision map is all about keeping it real in that human heart alive kind of way. So something about who you really are shines through, touches people as part of your expression of who you really are not getting lost in abstraction. And you know, from some of my work, I’m capable of being a complex astrologer or having understood abstractions, or technical capacities I’ve even developed a slightly new field that Rudhyar was working on the planetary nodes, so I’m capable of highly technical research. But that’s not my thing with people. That’s not because it doesn’t give me joy to lecture people in abstract ways. The joy for me is that we own who we really are. Because in some ways, once the soul’s light does start to shine through, you’re better off following that light. Use the chart as a vision map until you actually start to see who you really are, and then just be who you really are. It’s almost like astrology is a vision map up to a certain point, and then you just are being your own essence. And then in a way, you don’t need the abstraction of the chart that often. Once you’ve understood how the washing machine works, or the car, you don’t need the diagnostic guide all the time. The guide was there to get you to a certain point in your development, in your understanding.
Suzanne: I love that. One of the things that I say to people who are still maybe coming from a place of insecurity and they feel like they’ve got to talk themselves up or something, I say you don’t have to toot your own horn. Just go play it.
Mark: Yeah, the music itself. That’s my take on the meaning of life. There isn’t an answer to the meaning of life, the meaning of life is the tune. The meaning of life is living it. The meaning of life is living through it. And allowing yourself to be touched by the experience, touched and changed by the experience. I love that. Music is the great comparison. In a way astrology is a 12-note scale. And really, it’s just played in all different harmonics, but you can separate the notes themselves, and simplify them to their essence. And then you begin to learn the scale. And then it just layers. And what a thing to be a part of, isn’t it? I can sense the joy from you too and the conversations you’ve had with people. When you have those conversations with people about their transformational arc, it’s just so rewarding, isn’t it? Sometimes I walk out of multiple sessions, I may be tired but you feel like punching the air or you just feel like human agency, human transformation is possible. It might be challenging, might be hard to overcome certain things, but it is possible.
Suzanne: Yes, a thousand times over in that, Mark, I could just listen to you all day and I think we’re just going to have to stop. And this is a perfect place to end because that really is. That just speaks to all the potential that’s there. There may be people punching the air right now saying yes. And the people that aren’t there, hopefully, we’ve given them hope that they can get there. And it really does come from willingness, it comes from desire, and then willingness which go hand in hand. It’s a two-step process. Before, before we let you go, you have a gift for people that is a little bit more of this. Can you tell everybody about this?
Mark: Astrology and Your Place in the Universe. And I’ll be recording a 30-minute audio. It’s just an introduction to Rudhyar’s idea of the true name really, and this celestial inspiration. If you know how to ground it, if you believe in your real life, if you can take healing steps, then astrology can inspire you with this sense of the shape of you in the universe. That’s what the natal chart is, the shape that you could fill, that you could shine, the star that you could be in that night sky. That’s what my gift’s about. It’s about that shape of you. And that the natal chart is that unique drawing of that shape. And it’s an encouragement for all of us. Life isn’t about being famous and rich, and having interviews or whatever. It’s about how you live with the people you love. And centrally yourself as the person that you could love, that you could come out of the self-doubt and negativity about yourself. And the chart at its best is a complex living symbol, living because the sky continues to move around it and it moves within itself, of effectively your place in the tapestry of life. And I think it’s potentially an answer to some of the meaning crisis that we see around us and in some of the mental health and other crises. So I just wanted to encourage people. 30-minute audio, where I share with you certain quotes from Rudhyar, I reflect on them, and hope to inspire you about your role in the grand scheme of things. And that role is your life. Your life is in the grand scheme of things, by definition, because it’s made of the same thing that everything else is, which is life. It’s not about your position in the social hierarchy. It’s not about how apparently successful you are. It’s about how much life and love and meaning can flow through you.
Suzanne: Well, I personally can’t wait for you to record that. At the time of this conversation, you haven’t. But by the time people are watching or listening to this, they’ll be able to download it. The link is right on your speaker page that they’re launching this interview from and I really encourage everybody, go to Mark’s site, sign up for his newsletter. It is just full of inspiration and wisdom like this. So Mark, thank you so much.
Mark: Yeah, thank you.
Suzanne: Always a delight. And everybody will be downloading this and checking you out. And thank you to the audience for signing up tuning in and be sure to catch the rest of the interviews on Secrets of Master Astrologers Summit. I’m sure the others will be just as inspirational as this one. So thank you all.
Mark: Blessings everyone, blessings.
