Trusting our inner astrologer, accessing the living web of mycelium wisdom
& connecting our centers of inner knowing
“Creating a state of aloneness in the besieged everyday may be one of the bravest things individual men and women can do for themselves … to be besieged – but beautifully, because we have made a place to stand - in the people and the places and the perplexities we have grown to love, seeing them not now as enemies or forces laying siege, but as if for the first time, as participants in the drama, both familiar and strangely surprising.”
David Whyte, Consolations
Many of us go to astrologers to be reminded that we belong inside something larger than ourselves. We go to receive insight from those who can translate celestial patterns, drawing them into a meaningful context for the details of our “besieged everyday”. We go to astrologers to feel what is hard to hold, be held.
To re-member how our being, our purpose, is woven inside a living intelligence that’s vast and cosmological in scale.
To feel there is a place for us to stand. To recognize a deeper sense of ourselves amidst, and together with, all the perplexities of a human lived life.
The awe and softening this can afford our broken hearts and pained bodies is immense – that the mystery of existence includes us and our tiny lives within its vast imaginings. below above – every which way.
Yet, when such insight comes through someone else’s words, how long does it stay with us and guide us? To what extent does it empower us to participate in the world from a place of deeper attunement and authenticity?
This seems to depend on how much we’re engaged with the divinatory process. On whether the insight rises up and meets us from the depths of our own psyche, leaving us changed and refreshed.
If someone shares an insight while we are in a more passive mode of receiving external wisdom, we might be impressed by their oracular power but not feel our own inner oracle, diviner or storyteller empowered. We might feel touched and moved by the reminder that it is possible for one to directly connect to the unseen fabric of life — while not actually feeling that possibility alive for ourselves.
Oracle-Querent | Querent-Oracle
Experiential astrology helps develop our internal scaffolding to both receive symbolic revelation that comes through others, and to speak from the symbol ourselves. It loosens power dynamics within the oracle-querent structure where one person claims oracular power. It tends a relational field of astrological symbolism where revelation might come through either person in a dyadic astrology reading, or from any participant in a group container – regardless of whether they are technically wearing the hat of “astrologer” or “client”, “facilitator” or “participant.”
What comes through one’s own dreaming body and mind in this mutual context of knowledge co-creation seems to reach far beyond what’s possible inside a more uni-directional knowledge transmission from teacher-to-student.
The most common feedback from the Hermes-Hestia Center Experiential Astrology group courses is around how meaningful, encouraging and helpful it is to be able to hear and play with other participants in the group. To find oneself traveling on the same journey with others, while each person makes the journey their own. No person – including the teacher / facilitator – has the end-all-be-all correct interpretation of a myth or a sign. Instead, as each person offers their own rich contemplations, they feed the field and invite others to do the same.
As our astrological perception widens beyond the myopic point of view that astrological insight can only delivered through the select few who wear the mantle of professional astrologer, this in turn re-embeds us into a living relationship with sky, story, cycle and other-than-human allyship. We experience symbols rise up off the page from their one-dimensional definitions and become living creatures and living landscapes in our daily lives, who speak from a multiplicity of centers, tendrilling their messages into a wider, stabilised, relational wisdom.
We see each other “as if for the first time, as participants in the drama, both familiar and strangely surprising.”
It begins to matter less who gets credit for sharing the illuminative insight, and more how we are together tending a relational field that can receive a symbol’s appearance. How we are becoming more approachable to an archetypal creature, inviting it to be known again. How we are cultivating our many senses to re-cognize it.
Through this process, we learn to more deeply trust our inner knowing — our inner astrologer, oracle, diviner — and to share from this place. And we give permission for others to do the same.
Your Turn
The way in which knowledge constellates can nourish our embodied wisdom as much as the knowledge itself. Some ways of knowledge-creation reinforce our sense of separateness, while others help us deepen into the wonder of our inter-connection.
With the latter in mind, we invite you into a short practice of bibliomancy.
Invite a question or inquiry to come to your attention. It doesn’t have to be big; it can be simple.
As you hold this question in mind, your intentionality and focus cast a sacred space. Trust that everything appearing inside this circle is relevant.
Draw a book from the shelf. Let it fall open to a page. Trust what picture or sentences your eyes focus on.
Spend 15 minutes with this image. See where it takes you in your sensation, memory, emotion and desires, as well as what happens around you. How does it relate to and feed your inquiry?
The rest of the day, notice how the hidden mycelial web of wisdom fruits through your experiences, relationships, dreams, memories, synchronicities with respect to your question.
This is one way of casting a playground. It doesn’t have to be arduous! It’s as simple as setting an intention, and cultivating a reflective presence to how the symbols are speaking — otherwise known as symbolic vision.
To your inner oracle and the power of our oracular natures inter-woven,
Nicole & Amanda