What I learned from years of relying on astrology and other systems
This is how you know everything is going to be ok
We all want to hear that everything is going to be ok. Things will flow. We will get what we want. Then, moved by this desire of self-soothing, we reach for external things to us: Tarot cards, systems, seers. Whoever and whatever can tell us: “It’s going to be ok.” But what I’ve found for myself is the exact opposite. Every time I reached for external reassurance, I was actually giving my power away.
The feel-good trap and the trade-off you don’t see coming
I was 21 when I went to my first astrology consultation. My friend had visited this guy and said it was “life changing.” He told me about things that happened in my past, which I confirmed. He told me about the energetic moment I was going through, and hinted at some things in a broad sense that would happen in my future.
I was impressed that he could identify things I had experienced in the past, so I assumed that he was right about my future, even though I had no idea of what that looked like. Nonetheless, I left that day feeling really good. As if I knew more about myself than before, as if I was better prepared to deal with life. Even though, absolutely nothing changed. I didn’t change. Circumstances stayed the same.
Then, some time later, my mom told me about this aura reading thing she did and how incredible it was. So, I went and tried it for myself. As I sat in front of the woman with her eyes closed, she hovered her hands around me and started talking about all the colors she saw, and the flowers around me. She told me about how I was an old soul, told me about a past life, and the purpose of my soul in this life. Wow. What an experience. I left that meeting feeling so great and energized, nobody had ever said such nice things about me. I felt seen. Someone actually could see through me. But unfortunately, I went back to my life. And nothing changed.
Years later, I was going through a phase where I felt really stuck and directionless about my professional path. I was completely burned out from a job I could not leave. I wanted to move out from my home city, but didn’t see how. I cried often from the pain of the moment, and uncertainty of the future. Then, one day an older friend I looked up to (she was in her 50s, when I was in my 20s) told me about this man. She had a medium-sized company and clothing factory, and she said she didn’t make any decision without consulting him. Maybe I should talk to him. And so I did. Because I really needed someone to tell me that I would be ok.
I scheduled the meeting and arrived at his place. It looked precarious, in a really poor neighborhood. I remember looking around and feeling really weird about the energy of the place. But I couldn’t trust my feelings. I felt powerless in the face of life. I needed someone to tell me I would be ok. So, I sat in the chair in front of him, and he takes cards, and numbers, and stuff I couldn’t make sense of. He starts talking, interpreting what’s for me from all those objects and what he sees. Until he opened his mouth and the next thing I heard made my soul detach from my body into a profound state of numbness and freeze. He said I wouldn’t find love. And he said that at a time when the only good thing I had in my life was a relationship with a boyfriend. And he said that to someone whose most profound trauma and fear was being unlovable. That night, I was having a panic attack in my boyfriend’s bedroom. And I was triggered into a depression I had just recovered from a little more than a year ago. I went looking for perspective, expansion, and to hear that things would be ok. I left hopeless about every aspect of my life.
It took me many years and therapists to recover from that day. To actually make sense of what had happened. I went to a complete stranger to tell me what I should do with my life. I didn’t feel good when I met him, and still I stayed. I was retraumatized at a moment when I was feeling the most vulnerable. And the reason why it had that impact on me was because if I need other people to tell me things will be ok, I cannot take my power back when they tell me it won’t.
You might think that was my last time reaching for external guidance from complete strangers. It wasn’t. Most times, it’s not one situation that makes us rethink and learn more about ourselves. Most often it’s a series of repeated situations that happen until we say “ok, that’s enough. This shit needs to change.”
Our need to make sense of things
I know that astrology, tarot, human design, and other things are becoming more and more popular. So, we are also living in a world of more and more uncertainty.
What I used to hear about these systems, and I used to also repeat myself, is that they help us to learn more about ourselves and know ourselves better. After at least 15 years of experiencing life since the first time I engaged with these things, I found that not to be true.
You can’t learn about yourself from someone else. Most often than not, you’re being fit into a stereotype. You are having characteristics about yourself validated, so that you “accept” more of yourself and earn the right to say “but this is who I am.”
The way we learn about ourselves and how we are is by knowing how to feel our feelings, validate our inner experiences, and then analyze them. Why do I feel this way? How am I perceiving things? Do I like how this happened, or don’t I? What do I need now? What would I like to be different? And so on. The way we learn about ourselves is through self-inquiry based on our experiences and experimenting with different behavior to test new outcomes.
But these are hard questions to sit with most of the time. Especially when we don’t have the answer straight away. Or when we don’t trust ourselves. Or when we never learned to validate who we are and what we feel. It’s easier to go to someone else hoping to hear “Everything is going to be ok,” so you can feel good. At least for a few hours.
The real problem is that you don’t trust yourself yet
I remember when, in my early 30s, I discovered human design, and I started praising it for how it had changed my life. I was again, once more, deeply unhappy at a job, burned out (Hello, my own patterns), and beating my own ass up every day for not doing better. Then I learned that because of my human design profile, I needed to rest in between sprints (not surprising, right?). And from that day onwards, I stopped beating myself up and gave myself permission to rest.
Human design didn’t tell me anything new I didn’t know about myself yet. It just revealed how little I trusted myself with my own perceptions, feelings, and experience. I needed something external to me to tell me what to do.
The problem is that when you reach for these types of external guidance, you give all your power over yourself and your life away. And maybe you don’t feel like you have power when everything feels out of control, or facing pain and uncertainty. I get that. But you do, and sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is just to sit with your feelings, and fear, and uncertainty, and breathe. Let the waves move through you, or through the season of life you’re going through, until you can see things more clearly.
Anyone telling you about you or your life is still just another human. Another human with pain, with fears, with traumas, with limited understanding of life. There’s nothing that is said by anyone that doesn’t pass through their own filter and interpretation. Which makes it even crazier that we would trust other strange people to tell us how our life should be.
Looking back at my life so far, I know one thing for sure: Things change. Everything passes. Repeated cycles of pain come from repeating the same behaviors (most of the time unconsciously). When you change the way you act, things around you change.
I went through moments when I felt stuck professionally. When I experienced heartbreak. When I felt alone. When I had existential crises. The only thing I can spot in common among all those situations regarding what made me move past them is this: action and patience.
Act, even when you’re unsure of the outcome. Try something different. Show up differently around people. Break your own patterns. You will see so much change in life. But for this, self-observation, self-inquiry, and being able to be present with your feelings, including painful feelings, are required. Therapy also helps.
Things will be ok. Not because other people are telling you so. But because you’ve got yourself.
But honestly, this is what really made the shift in me
I practiced and studied Buddhism for many years, so one day I was at the temple, and I asked the monk: What is the Buddhism view of astrology?
He told me that astrology used to be used in the past by masters to have a sense of the karma of a group or civilization. Not for individuals.
And by karma I want to clarify that it doesn’t mean destiny, and it doesn’t mean something good, or bad. It means tendencies according to your actions. A simplified example for clarity: if you eat loads of sugar every day, you have a tendency to experience diabetes. If you are frequently generous to people, you have a tendency of experiencing people wanting to give back to you.
In direct translation from Mahayana Buddhism, karma is defined as “intentional action of body, speech, or mind that creates future consequences.”
The whole purpose of the Buddhism philosophy and meditation practice is that we can gain more awareness, self-understanding, and power to change our actions, in other words, our karma. Because when we change ourselves, our reality changes.
Which contradicts entirely the point of reaching for systems that reinforce a certain way of being, or aim to predict how our future will unfold, to hear that everything will be ok, when the power of making things turn out okay is within us.
Curiously, Sadhguru, a famous Indian mystic, who is known for having experienced enlightenment (I’m not confirming, just reporting), said several times: “astrology is guidance for fools”.
In this video, he says “by predicting someone’s future you don’t bring any quality of life for them in any way. You lead them into more and more ignorance,” and “Any fool can make a prediction, and he will be right 50% of the time.”
He argues that people who accept predictions about their life refuse to use their own intelligence. “An intelligent person cannot easily be predicted because they may act creatively.“ Astrology and other systems may describe influences, but living according to predictions means giving up your own intelligence and self-responsibility in life.
Which turns out that life proves it right. Remember that older friend in her 50s I looked up to, who had a company and wouldn’t make a single decision without consulting her guy? I learned a few years ago that her company broke. She was in debt with multiple other businesses and suppliers. Doing her best to avoid paying her debts.
Well, it seems like she handed her decisions to someone else for years. And when things fell apart, there was no one to hand that back to. I guess she never learned to trust herself. Or take real responsibility in life.
I think about that sometimes.
Warmly,
Nat
Have you ever left a reading, consultation, or session feeling great, but nothing actually changed? What were you really looking for?
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Personally, I see astrology as a way to flow with the energies of nature around me, which is why I studied it and became my own personal astrologer. Knowing the archetypes of the zodiac signs and planets and the movements of the stars is part of human culture. I think you're criticizing a tool, but a tool only depends on the people who use it. You've certainly encountered dishonest people along the way, and astrology is probably not the right tool for you. Since studying it, I've found more power within me, not less. As often happens, the virtue of temperance can be helpful. I've never done or not done something I wanted because of Mercury retrograde, but I've learned to feel the energies of the universe around me and within me. Knowing my birth chart clarified some things about myself and helped me recognize patterns that I kept repeating, considerations that have been useful to me in therapy. I agree with you that it is not useful to become dependent on an astrologer, but astrology contains knowledge that I find interesting, inspiring and even useful, but it always depends only on us how we use this knowledge.
What you’re saying here is so true, and I think it’s a lesson that applies beyond astrology or tarot as well. It’s really easy to outsource our power to systems, tools, strategies, or other people instead of taking responsibility for our own choices. At the end of the day, we’re always the source. The tools are just mechanisms or mediums, not the authority. Where it gets sticky for me is that self-awareness and self-study are also somewhat limited by the fact that your understanding of yourself is always coming through your own perspective. There are parts of ourselves we just can’t see from the inside. That’s why outside reflection is important. Sometimes that comes through relationships that mirror things back to us, advice from people we trust, or even tools that help surface intuition that’s buried under a lot of conscious overthinking… like tarot cards.
Outsourcing your power to another person is obviously risky AF, because they’re filtering everything through their own lens too. But tools, when they’re used with discernment, can sometimes just help cut through the noise of the ego/conscious mind and let intuition come forward a little more clearly.
So I guess for me the distinction is agency vs tools. Agency is the choice, discernment, and responsibility. Everything else… self-reflection, advice, tarot cards, astrology, whatever… is just something in the toolbox.