Reflections One Year After Quitting Astrology

If the news of my departure from astrology is in fact news to you, I recommend watching the last videos I posted on YouTube.com/ninabastrology. I shared a lot about what I grew to understand and dislike about the spiritual industry, how I found some of the mindsets associated with new age spirituality harmed me, and the burn out associated with running an astrological practice. Over the past year I’ve spent a lot of time sitting with and turning over these complaints in my head more and more, now that I have less entanglement with the industry, not needing to rely on astrology to earn money, my negative feelings towards the spiritual industry have grown stronger. The core of my feelings remains the same though, so I don’t want to rehash them too much, but I inevitably will. However, today, I want to focus on the real, tangible effects that stepping away from astrology has had on me, and how I feel like I have learned more about myself in this past year than in all the years I looked to the stars to tell me who I am.

            Over the years that I practiced and shared about astrology, I mentioned all the time how this tool helped me and how I saw it help others. But I don’t think I ever shared how much my involvement with astrology around seventeen years old had to do with a significant loss I was coping with at the time. On New Year’s Day of 2015, I learned that a close friend of mine whom I knew to struggle with mental health had taken his own life the previous night. Grief and loss can prove difficult to cope with no matter the age or cause of death, but I quickly learned that losing someone to suicide held its own unique mental and emotional burden. There were several weeks where I thought of nothing else besides this loss, and the thoughts that I should have anticipatorily known and prevented my friend’s death, that I hadn’t done enough to help him while I had the chance, ate away at me. Astrology, which at that point had served as a fun exercise in exploring the human experience, became a fixation for me. It was something that had the power to explain things so cleanly, to create answers where there were none, that gave me a sense of understanding and control when I was struggling to make sense of things or find purpose in the darkness that sometimes exists in the world and within ourselves. Then, it became a tool that I found I could use to help others, a desire of mine that slowly became a personality fixture, that always existed, but that I think supercharged in the wake of my sense of failure to save my friend. Astrology then evolved from a bandaid I used in a time of crisis to a brand that honestly felt thrust upon me, with people asking me to read their charts, friends who began to look at me as their astrological mentor, and even an unexpected YouTube following. With the way that astrology enmeshed with my identity, the possibility of its invalidity became a real menace, and it was a belief system that I found the need to double down on at every sign of threat. Of course, the thought occurred to me periodically, that the sense of justification behind astrology could come from confirmation bias, but I always found myself countering: it isn’t, but even if it were, astrology still helps people. However in hindsight, I fear that the things that astrology taught me to believe about myself proved harmful to my burgeoning sense of self and self esteem at the delicate age of seventeen, and I shudder to think that I may have perpetuated something similar in others. Even if people mentioned to me how validated they felt that astrology could see and reflect their pain, it breaks my heart to think that because that sense of validation came from something so fixed as a birth chart, predetermined from the moment one emerges from the womb, they may have felt they had no agency in how they responded to and grew from their pain. I have the visceral urge to aggressively plant my face into my palm when I think about how resigned my birth chart made me feel to my incapacity to behave assertively, how I believed I was inherently meek, that my strengths were poetic more than intellectual, and worst of all, that I had compatibility with someone who seemed to have a mission to make me feel as small as my birth chart made me out to be. This year away from astrology, I’ve gotten back in touch with a version of myself I hadn’t really seen or nurtured for ten years. Someone intellectual, assertive, who contains multitudes, who can’t be summed up in a handful of phrases associated with certain archetypes that get circulated and bastardized through a giant game of telephone in the online astrological community. Nothing is as simple as astrology makes it seem; as how I wanted it to be when the world felt like it was crashing down around me at seventeen. And this past year has proved to test my impulse to cling to a sense of control, especially in situations where I have none. This was the first challenge I found in switching from reading birth charts to doing coaching. Sitting down at my laptop, yapping on for up to an hour about the chart I saw in front of me, which most people could not make any meaning from or grasp the vocabulary of, was so easy for me. Because in those sixty minutes I pretty much knew exactly what was going to happen. I was fully in control. But sitting across from someone with their own agenda, listening attentively, trusting them to arrive at their own epiphanies, allowing them to show you how their mind works instead of telling them how it should, according to the stars, that’s a real skill, infinitely more rewarding to cultivate and practice.

            In the videos I where I addressed why I was moving away from astrology, I never actually addressed the matter of my belief in it. Deciding not to practice astrology anymore is one thing, and something that I received a lot of kind supportive comments for. But the prospect of saying anything that might indicate that I don’t actually believe in astrology feels scary to a venue of people who sought me out and supported me because of this shared belief. However, like I said, things are never as simple as black and white, belief and non-belief. When it comes to my relationship with astrology, I cannot tell you whether it’s real or not. Certainly, after having spend a year in pursuit of my psychology degree, I can tell you that I see huge problems with the way I see people practice astrology and how information on it spreads. I think huge issues of confirmation bias interfere with the way astrological placements get interpreted, and I find it extremely frustrating this discipline seems to have zero consensus behind these interpretations. But is this all the case of something true and wise simply getting bastardized to the point of total lack of coherence? I don’t know. Is there some value in exploring your chart or your progressions so long as your internal compass is strong enough to be the ultimate decider of who you know yourself to be? Maybe. But nobody has any business thinking about astrology as much or as seriously as I used to. Clinging to it like a dogma can only give a false sense of control at best, and at worse can make one feel totally resigned to the stars. So right now, I know it is best for astrology to simply not act as a factor in my life. The release I’ve gotten from giving up the whole belief system is simply too sweet. To embrace the complexities, the unknown, the incoherence of myself, others, and the world that I may not have had the capacity to handle at seventeen, but that I can more than manage at twenty-seven.