How Astrology and Human Design can Help us Love Life More
A Psychological and Experiential Approach to Astrology and Human Design
My approach is psychological and experiential rather than being predictive. While I, like many, like
Rather than trying to forsee the future and control our lives (which is impossible), I see these tools as being a great help in understanding our basic physical and psychological make up and in making sense of both the challenges and the opportunities present in our lives, from the moment of our conception and birth onward, as well as at any given moment throughout our life span.
When we understand ourselves and our deeply personal journeys better, we become not only more engaged and responsible for our lives in a loving way, but we evolve into ever more harmonious, fulfilled, empathic, collaborative and generally Beautiful expressions of Life.
When we are going through times of great loss, change and challenge, Astrology can be extremely helpful, as it offers a glimpse of the cyclical nature of experience, combined with insights regarding what we are being asked to understand and integrate into our consciousness.
For example, when someone close to us dies, such a loss can be heartbreaking … but from that heartbreak and emptiness, new understandings and insights can arise – eventually – that we would not have gained otherwise. Or when we lose a job that we depended on to live and that defined many aspects of our identities and daily activities, it can become an opportunity to dive deeper into our true interests and aspirations, and to shift into new avenues in our profession, in our relationship with money, and all kinds of things.
Oftentimes the things that hit us like catastrophes are openings to new levels of awareness and existence, and astrology in particular can be a huge help in understanding the deeper opportunities behind such life changing events, and can help us look at ourselves, our lives, and our place within our families and communities and within Life itself with new eyes.
Human Design, on the other hand, offers profound insights into the reality that human beings are not all the same, not only on the level of the personality, but in how our bodies and our subtle energies function in the world. It identifies 5 different energy types – Manifestors, Generators, Manifesting Generators, Projectors and Reflectors – and explains that each type’s energy works, within us as individuals and in the interactions we have with others and with the world at large.
Knowing your Human Design energy type can truly change the way you see yourself and those around you, and can bring insights and understanding to the differences you experience and observe in how humans function that you will find nowhere else.
What both of these disciplines do is dignify and amplify the importance of subjective experience. We all inhabit our own contained “reality” that plays out within our minds and our bodies, most of which is almost impossible to communicate to others. How we actually live within ourselves, what we feel and think first and foremost about ourselves, affects everything. And many of us, if not most, were certainly not raised to understand how unique we are, and how important and even precious our unique experiences and perspectives actually are.
Finding Relief from Trauma, Conditioning, and Mental, Emotional and Spiritual/Existential Suffering
We are raised to fit into our families and our societies in ways that are convenient and useful for those around us as well as for society itself, and while much of our conditioning is absolutely positive and necessary, and it teaches us to interact with others in ways that allow us to live mutually fulfilling lives and relationships, there is also much of it that forces us to stifle our true feelings, desires, talents and aspirations. Depending on who we are and on our early environment, the conditioning we receive can be either supportive of our authenticity, or it can damage it and sometimes even cripple us.
It is my belief, together with a growing number of practitioners from many different disciplines, that most, if not all, of our current many diagnoses of mental illness can be attributed to some form of trauma experienced in the early parts of our lives, beginning within the womb. Trauma is another word for negative conditioning, and it can affect us on a cellular level, inhibiting the expression of our true expression and purpose as individual humans in this lifetime.
Healing our trauma and negative conditioning is, therefore, essential if we to step out of the patterns of behavior and belief – patterns that have often been passed down through the generations – to be able to feel truly alive as OURSELVES, and yet connected to others in healthy, mutually supportive ways, and free to experience the beauty of Life.
Astrology and Human Design can be powerful tools to help us look beyond the fog of our wounds and of the conditioning we receive from our families and societies, and see ourselves for what and who we truly are: one-of-a-kind human beings, with completely personal ways of experiencing the world and with unique abilities, aspirations, and inner processes that we are actually here to understand, so we can both live better ourselves, and pass on our encouragement and insights to others.
The more we can truly See ourselves in our uniqueness, and love and care for ourselves in ways that feel right to us, the more we can interact with others in compassionate ways, while inspiring them to do the same. Can you imagine a world in which most people actually love themselves?
Thanks to the ever more extensive research being done by psychologists and social scientists all over the world, we understand better that the worst perpetrators among us are often emotionally abused and neglected children.
When we experience a lack of loving connection early in our lives – and often the worst wounds occur when we are still in our mothers’ wombs, for example when we are unwanted, for whatever reasons our mothers may have for not being happy about being pregnant – it can be extremely difficult for us to develop a deep connectedness within us, a feeling of being wanted, safe, and belonging. This essential lack can be at the root of all kinds of disturbances, such as excessive inner conflicts and mood swings, all kinds of physiological problems, and addictions to substances and behaviors that are destructive to self and others, including addictions to material comfort, monetary wealth, and power and control over others.
Instead, when we experience a deep sense of knowing that we have our unique place in life and are worthy of love, respect, dignity and care, we begin to live in ways that are not only caring and compassionate towards ourselves and those close to us, but we begin also to understand that our personal wellbeing is something that contributes in a powerful way to our families and our communities.
People who truly love and respect themselves have a deep respect for Life as well, for the greater Whole we are all a part of.
Such a vision is inclusive and fundamentally egalitarian. It can recognize the wonderful beauty of the diversity within not only the human species, but of all of Life on our extraordinary planet and beyond, and know that while we are all very different, no one is better than anyone else.
Even though we may sometimes have incredibly opposing ideas even about what life is all about, and extremely different levels of understanding about where we stand within it, EVERYONE BELONGS.
Such a world view not only allows us to live with increasing inner and outer freedom and enjoyment, but it stabilizes and energizes the collective environments we live in, from our most basic interpersonal relations such as the couple and the family, to our nations and the entire planet.
The Participatory Universe
Antonio Mercurio, the founder of Existential Personalistic and Cosmoartistic Anthropology, emphasized how our own individual transformation becomes a type of existential creativity that can fuel not only our individual ability to live purposeful lives and experience the kind of inner joy and beauty that makes life truly worth living, but it transforms our environment, just as a work of art infuses those who observe it with a kind of transformational “secondary beauty”.
And just as works of art inspires individuals and entire cultures to reflect on life and its deeper meanings, individual people who become capable of truly loving themselves and others inspire change, greater harmony and enjoyment of life in those around them.
This ties into the idea that we live in a participatory universe, first posited by the great physicist and philosopher John Wheeler, which in psychological and social terms means that the quality of our lives – both individually and collectively – depends on the meaning we give to it, and the decisions we make about how we think and act, just as much as (if not more than) to the external conditions that determine us and affect us.
We are not just our DNA, we are not simply the most recent product of our family’s history and mentality; we are not helpless victims of our trauma, doomed to live mired in our pain or overmedicated to escape it. We are not just our religious or national identity, tied to avenging the real or perceived wrongs perpetrated upon us, or to expiating the wrongs we have done to others.
We are evolving beings and we have the potential freedom to change how we think and act. We can begin to build a better life for ourselves and a better world for ourselves, our children and everyone, step by step, choice by choice, act of love by act of love, and as we do so, the circumstances around us shift and change with us.
When We Choose to Move in New Directions, Life Supports Us
The caveat is that these changes do not happen automatically. We must become willing to make an effort. We must become open to new ideas, new ways of seeing our own life experiences, of acting in our daily lives and interacting with others.
We must first of all become deeply aware of what is going on within ourselves, and why, and start changing how we think and feel about our own being. As we take ownership of the quality of our inner lives, we shift from remaining in helpless suffering that often began in our earliest years, to the realization that we are responsible for changes that we want to experience, first of all by learning to truly, deeply, love and honor ourselves and our own journeys, and take care of ourselves in new ways.
As we do so, we will begin to see incredible things happen. We will find support when we most need it, healing when we least expected it, and new directions open before us that we could have never imagined possible.
Many people have been experiencing these extraordinary leaps in consciousness and in quality of life over these last decades, which is adding to the increasing pool of available tools and systems put in place to help us grow, evolve, and thrive.
This evolving way of thinking and seeing the world encourages us to realize that not only can we change our own lives by changing our thinking and our decisions, but by doing so we contribute to brining in new ways of thinking, acting – of Being – into the world, which expands the universal consciousness as well.
It is gaining traction as the decades go by, and the astrologer Richard Tarnas captures this unfolding within the astrological community in this paper he wrote in 2011.
When we come to understand that we actually do have the power to improve our lives by learning to see our experiences through a new lens, we open to embracing new techniques, new ways of thinking and acting.
Astrology and Human Design are both exceptional tools to help us understand how we are shaped by both the forces we live within, including the complex energies and forces present within our solar system at any given time, and by our internal beliefs and thoughts.
The more we become conscious of these various, and often conflicting, energies and forces acting within us and upon us, the more we can become active creators and participants of the lives we are living and the experiences we are having.
We discover our ability to choose to embrace and take ownership of our place within the grander scheme of things while also knowing better what we can control and change, and what, instead, we need to bend with and accept.
As we become increasingly conscious co-creators of our lives – and it is a process that once it begins, has no end, not an event that creates a new, static reality – we can let go of old ideas of either victimhood and powerlessness or excessive power and control, and begin to Live with increasing joy, love of self and others, and profound fascination before the incredible journey of Life.
Go here to read more about my own journey with these disciplines and why I consider them an incredible added tool to anyone wanting to enhance their understanding of themselves, the world they live in, and how to best claim their place within it.
Go here for information on pricing and how my sessions are organized.
