This isn’t about fixing. It’s about deep listening, attending and emergent strategy. It’s about discovering what aspects of your self (what animals of the Zodiac) are perceiving a situation or defining a problem.

What might they each see or know?

How are they relating to one another?

What would evolve or emerge if they each had habitat within you, a space where they were able to hear their own instincts?

Once more of our wholeness is included, frame-shifts are more likely to occur that allow an embrace of compassion and liberation of both parent and child. Our experience of problems may shift under refreshed perception, leading to unforeseen ways through or bursts of creativity.

This also isn’t about parenting scripts. Scripts can be really helpful bridges to doing things differently than what was modeled to us by our own parents or society. But ultimately, the shift needed is internal and the most powerful words you can say are emergent from your own state of being.

The “right” words to say to your child are improvised, moment by moment, step by step. Myth and astrology offer you a thick, rich, living field that you can feel held within and take spontaneous action from. When you move from that assumption — that you are always inside of Soul, inside of an order or meaning felt but not-yet-seen — you can trust yourself to keep on moving through the uncertainty and wild unknown. You can better trust yourself to keep dancing, to keep being human, to keep living-learning-forgiving yourself as a parent. Embodied astrology is a way to tend the field and fall in love with the wild learning journey that we go on as parents, as this kind of learning is a path of surprise, wonder, awe and deep connection.

Parenthood is one of the deepest educations we can receive and participate in this life. And it is one of the most wildly nonlinear.

We are continuously flowing between playing the role of the Teacher and the Student in our relationship with our children.

And, to make things even more complex! We’re continuously being drawn into our own inner child, as we attempt to parent the child before us.

How do we support ourselves in this kind of dance? For such flexibility and availability, we need an actively tended connection to center and an actively tended container to really surrender and receive from this kind of dynamic education, where it truly relates to the Latin root of the word — educare — “to bring forth that which is within.”

As parents, we really are in this dance of discovering and bringing forth something within ourselves. As we dance with our own inner mysteries, and allow more Life to emerge — we create warm environment that welcomes more Life outside of us to show up. In other words, it invites more of our child’s multi-faceted nature to be revealed. Which then prompts the next turn in the spiral of our own becoming. And on it goes.

Trusting that this living field of myth and astrology is here, resourcing and orienting us, comes with an animist frame of mind. We are amidst myriad intelligences and astrology helps us navigate and negotiate with the many forces here, as well as receive support and resourcing from those we’ve forgotten — our ancestors, the plants, animals, stones and star beings.

You don’t need to believe in this field of intelligence to receive benefit from this work. You just need a willingness to play and practice witnessing what’s happening within and around you. This isn’t evidence-based research, but practice-based evidence. We practice taking action from a place of knowing that we’re always inside of some wider wholeness, perhaps not-yet-seen or yet-to-be-understood. We practice orienting ourselves to the rhythms of the Sky and accessing the wider contexts that astrology provides. Then, from this practice, we are more available to receiving the evidence or revelation that yes, indeed, this is true. We are always inside of, discovering and co-creating this bigger picture. We are both free in what perspective we inhabit, and responsible for what that perspective constellates in the field of relations. We are both wild and held.

We are beneficiaries of and co-creators within this living field. And it is what our children and future generations receive from us humans being here-now, giving our gift as storytellers, deep dreamers, and custodians of the mythic body.