Woven within: personal stories

“Life in my teenage years up until my Saturn return was torturous and torturing. Some part of me hung on by a thin thread while other parts were distraught, distressed and destructive. The edge was always close - an abyss looming beneath me ready to swallow, a moment to moment sense. Discovering I had 8th house planets square Pluto, that Ceres was conjunct my Moon re-cast these difficult, disturbing times with a solid sense of soul, that my experiences were within the depth of story and soul making. I was not left out of life but precisely and intricately deeply woven within my life’s fabric - calling, calling me to meet these terrors, these monsters and  their depths that were beckoning me to become. Rather than resist and reject I was able to slowly relate to these difficult dark states and recover the deeper knowing that lay within the cracks and fissures.” (Amanda)

“I remember the first time I participated in astrodrama. I was so nervous – afraid that I wouldn’t know what to say or do. When it came to role-taking, I didn’t know there was any other possibility than giving some variation of a ‘performance’. I thought that the sensations, emotions and thoughts coming up in me, were something to shoo away so that I could focus on making sense in my role. But as I was guided through the process, I quickly realized that my subjective experience was the gold – it was the symbol speaking. It was revealing something fresh about the role (archetype, planet, mythic character) that I was inside of. So, rather than focusing my storytelling around whether I was doing a “good job” or not, I became far more curious about what I (and we) might discover and learn about this creature, if I could let my experience be what and as it was. My curiosity and desire to connect became bigger than my desire to protect myself.” (Nicole) 

This reflex of honestly noticing and tracking what’s happening in our subjective experience, without trying to make it be any particular way, receiving it as the substance of soul-making rather than something interfering with life – helps let each thread of experience be and become a thread weaving through a much wider, wilder story. This living orientation has infused our lives with a greater sense of awe, wonder, mystery, delight and connection –  the living legacy, and possibility, of experiential astrology.  

Participation as perception

Astrology as a whole, and experiential astrology more specifically, can grow our mythic ways of perceiving – a mode of perception that penetrates into the depth, scope and gravitas of any lived life circumstance. Furthermore, in experiential astrology, we craft processes and enactments to support creative participation, helping us feel into and divine an insight that is relevant and resonant to the specific time – of life, of astrological moment, of cycle, of context – that, if any variable of given time-place-space-relation would shift, we would have to craft another way in. Hence we, as facilitators, have skin in the game too. We don’t just use cookie-cutter processes that could be applied anytime, anywhere; we have to ongoingly attune and adapt to what is in the field — now. Which is what makes it challenging to describe experiential astrology in practice, as the process of practice differs with each living encounter.

This specific, responsive and flexible relationship with astrology is to have our mythic sense intact, to feel and value our mythopoetic sensuality rather than letting rationality rule. Wherever we go, whoever we meet, whatever we encounter – this mythic consciousness gives layers of richness that release the grip of control shifting us into a state of awe — from separation to relationship, from an urgent need to understand to a more relaxed, reflective presence that allows awareness to dawn in its own way and own time. 

“And understanding is a handmaiden which can only wait upon, or clarify, that knowledge, deeply born. The erotic is the nurturer or nursemaid of all our deepest knowledge.”

-Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic