A question is a departure point for a profound journey into meaning; a leap into the mystery of life’s meaning. This is how I like to see the natal chart. Too often though, a hurt or frightened part of us wants an answer – and if possible, straight away!
This need for answers, whilst legitimate in many practical situations – for instance, needing to find out what the mechanic thinks is wrong with our car – can be an expression of fear or hurt in our deeper life experience. As if all of our existential fragility and pain could be reduced to a single tangible piece of information. We believe that this information is somehow locked in our chart. If we just had the key…
It seems to me that often we astrologers pride ourselves in finding an answer. Years of study and much specialized knowledge goes into being able to predict an event or life change or to position an experience of the individual in some way only through using the chart. This is often the kind of material used to showcase or somehow prove or validate astrology.
Years of persecution in the mainstream leaves our profession prone to enjoying such “proof.” But much of the material gained this way could also be gathered if we simply reached out to the client, whose chart it is, and asked them more profound questions. In my thinking, we do not have to prove anything. We do need to engage the greater life of the individual who we serve through their horoscope.
In my first book Healing the Soul: Pluto, Uranus and the Lunar Nodes, I explored a method that allows us to ask powerful questions of the natal chart. In the resulting online foundation course, I developed this into a step-by-step method of asking the chart to reveal meaning. In seeing the chart as a series of profound questions I developed a method that sought to use the chart as a portal to the greater life of the individual soul, rather than an end in itself.
In my second book, The Soul Speaks: The Therapeutic Potential of Astrology, I explored the power of asking the client about themselves and their lives instead of trying to do it all through the horoscope. This includes the client in their own process of transformation, something much more empowering that speaking to them (from on high) about their chart. With our specialized astrological language and access to the “messages from the heavens” we are sometimes like strange priests. In such a context it is our responsibility to take great care in how we offer our gifts.
The question arises, can astrology serve the client rather than the astrologer? Can it rise beyond its critics and the insecurities of those who have been criticized and take its place as another great symbolic tool in the exploration of human understanding? Astrology has the potential to be a substantial tool for investigating the depths of the psyche. Even Carl Jung neglected other studies and profound personal connections just to begin to understand it. Can we take the powerful yearning and burning questions that led us to study astrology and transmute that into an openness to serve? To serve life. To serve our fellow human.
What a joy to hold profound questions in our heart and mind through astrology!
-Mark Jones
I am away now for 6 days in Majorca – seeing Igor Kufayev – here is a taster of him in action –