birth chart controversy

Perhaps it’s controversial to say, but your birth chart is not an excuse for your behaviour, it is a roadmap for self betterment. Each sign has positive and negative traits, and the houses in your chart that host those signs represent the areas in your life where those traits show up. You are not simply your sun sign, living beings aren’t so simple. But, if you take the time to look through the different aspects of a full birth chart, you may be surprised at the amount of things that come to light about your personality, emotional responses, or even habits.

Think of it like this: You are a house that was built on your birthday. That house had a blueprint made up for it at the time of its construction, based on the environment (the stars & celestial bodies in this case). Living in the house over time you begin to realize that things are getting a bit cramped or the layout of the “house” just isn’t working for you. Perhaps you want to “Marie Kondo” some stuff to make for more space (get rid of bad habits or let go of things). Or you want to do some renos (make changes to your perspectives) so that the space is more functional and better suited to your life as you grow and your environment changes.

You may think about how much work it’ll take to figure out what to keep and what to let go of, or you may struggle to figure out how to rework a “room” (part of your life that's having problems) if you don’t know the wiring (root or influences of the issue). There is no better place to look than the blueprint!

So if you’re looking to do this metaphorical house flip, looking at your birth chart is actually a great way to get started. It gives you a rough layout of who you are or who you started out as. You may have made some small changes already without even realizing.

Back in 2020, when I had what seemed like all the time in the world due to lockdown, I got someone to analyze my birth chart for me. They sent me an extensive reflection document outlining the complexities of my chart, and they weren’t afraid to include the good and the bad that showed up in the stars for me. I know a little about how to read birth charts, but I don’t know if I would have ever gotten as much information as this reader did, so I would recommend getting a professional to review your chart with you.

It took me a while to read through it, I guess I was procrastinating getting to know myself, specifically my flaws. When I finally got to the right state of mind, however, I did sit down with my Book of Shadows and cut-and-paste each page of the analysis into it. Once I did that I went, page by page, and reviewed the information the reader had written down for me. I used three markers to highlight: purple for the positive things that did resonate with me; red for the things I needed to work on in myself; and green for the things I had intentionally or unintentionally already worked on.

Once I went through and highlighted those key things I went back and wrote a brief reflection in the margins to help me get the ball rolling on my self-reflection. I’ll admit, this took a couple days because there was a lot of information, and self-reflection can be an exhausting task, but when I finished, I felt I understood myself so much better. Suddenly things connected in a simple easy-to-follow format and I was able to sort it out in front of my very eyes.

The next steps I took may seem a bit repetitive, but I opened a document on my laptop and noted down what I had highlighted in red (including some notes I made in the margins). I organized the list into different sections which included: to eradicate or restructure; to set boundaries for; to work on; and to look out for. I placed key titles, traits, or my margin notes under each section title to sort things out and boil them down into more bite-size chunks of information. Once I had this documented list of the things I wanted to work on, the nitty-gritty shadow work began.

Whenever I had the energy in the days following, I would sit down and take a point under one of the titles (or a bundle of points if they overlapped), and I would sit and write for about a half hour. Within this half hour I would think about how the trait or whatever the point was had shown up throughout my life, how it had affected my outlook, and what the root cause for that behaviour might have been. Once I got writing, my stream-of-conscious journaling style took over, and suddenly I’d have a page of deep reflection. At the end of this journal entry I’d make a small note at the bottom of what I learned about myself, and clear steps to either correct the trait or behaviour in practice, or I’d write out a clear boundary I could communicate to people in my life.

As a super simplified example: I have a Taurus Mercury placement. Mercury is all about communication, and Taurus is a sign that is steady, diligent in their processing of information, and stubborn. Within me, as my chart reflects, I can be stubborn in my opinions when I’ve thought about something for a long time. If something I’ve done is criticized, my first response is reactive defensiveness, which usually causes tension in my relationships. This was something I had noticed in myself before-hand and I can’t begin to tell you how much it frustrated me. I knew I was the one making my relationships with others difficult just because I couldn’t get away from feeling like I was being attacked when they were just trying to give me advice. I didn’t know how to stop it. While I could have just shrugged it off saying, “Oh! It’s just because I’m a Taurus!” I knew I wanted to work on it.

Using this feeling of frustration as my starting point, and being equipped with a rough idea of the “why” for this behaviour as it became evident in my birth chart, I began my reflection. After about six paragraphs, (which I may share in another post in my Shadow Work Project), I came to the conclusion that I get defensive when I feel threatened, and I feel threatened when I am overwhelmed. As I explained before, the Taurus Mercury placement makes me diligent in the processing of information and that can take a lot of time. If I am working through something or sharing something with someone, odds are I’ve already spent a lot of time thinking about it in order to communicate. If someone delivers criticism, suddenly every tiny aspect of what I’ve thought about shifts slightly out of place in my head, and now I have to reprocess everything with this new criticism or suggestion. It can become even worse if the person giving me criticism thinks that I don’t understand them and tries to reword the criticism or continues to deliver it.

Working through all this helped me to understand my limitations and it showed me the areas I could set boundaries to make my life (and lives of those around me) a little easier. To make it brief and concise, I wrote to myself,

"Allow yourself time to process criticism, and let others know that you need that time to process what they’ve told you, and you may come back with questions for clarity. Not everything comes from a place of competition and challenge, and just because you may not be able to process something in the moment doesn’t mean you’re any lesser. You can become overwhelmed easily with new information that shifts your ideas and by the pressure you put on yourself that you perceive comes from others."

So, whether or not you fully believe in astrology or your birth chart, I think there are a lot of benefits to analyzing it. It’s like a personalized, free (well, aside from paying a professional for the initial reading) form of beginners therapy! Keep in mind, this method, nor any other type of shadow work truly replaces therapy.

The birth chart is the blueprint, like I said, but you’re the one living in the “house” and you get to figure out what works best for you. Sure, you can figure it out on your own over time, but if you have the tools available, why not use them, right?

Thank you for reading this segment of my Shadow Work Project series. Feel free to leave a tip if this piece resonated with you or there was something in this reflection that you needed to hear on your journey. I'll be posting regular entries over the coming months so check back on my profile if you'd like to follow along and write some of your own answers to the prompts.

Blessed be, moonlight angels.