Basic elements of an astrological chart.
Podcast Transcription:
Welcome to Dharma if you Dare. Today’s recording comes from a class on Astro Dharma during Doug Duncan and Catherine Pawasarat’s recent online course, Crazy Wisdom. In this talk, Catherine and Doug discussed some of the basic elements of our natal astrological charts and how they can be leveraged for our spiritual unfoldment. This excerpt from the talk is focused on the three most important parts of your chart. The study of dharmic Astrology obviously involves much more than this. You will hear, Catherine and Doug refer to other elements such as houses, for example, which are not explained in detail in this recording. If you like what you hear and would like to learn more, you can find some free resources and a self-study course at Planetdharma.com/astrodharma. The self-study course, Catharine’s intro to Astro dharma awakening through astrology covers all the major elements of dharma astrology in a way that builds from module to module all with the lens of empowering you to achieve spiritual breakthrough. A personal favorite are the exercises where you practice by analyzing the Dalai Lama’s natal chart. Visit Planetdharma.com/astrodharma to learn more.
And now, here’s today’s recording:
“Okay, so like everything we do, AstroDharmas’s objectives are greater consciousness, spiritual awakening, liberation from suffering, alleviation of suffering, and liberation from being subject to suffering and doing all this to benefit all beings.
“In the sense that the less you there is present if you can, the more non-me is present, the more useful you are for others. When you see through ‘me’, you see through a veil of your own story. And so your story is dominant when you’re talking to anybody else, but the more you can transcend the ‘me’ aspect, which is what astrology, dharma astrology is about, the more useful you can be to others because you’re hearing them in their own story – you don’t have that filter. So it’s very useful to them. As Sensei (Qapel) mentioned, at Clear Sky, it has been really useful if somebody or one of us is facing a particular challenge, if we feel especially stuck, sometimes around a meal, we keep a binder of astrological charts, and horoscopes right by our dining room table, so we’ll pull it out and have a look and see if we can use Astrodharma as a kind of diagnostic for the challenges that we’re facing, and also as a recommendation for different ways we might work through that. So that’s pretty cool.
In the West we’re raised as egos So everywhere, of course, has an ego, but in the West, we really treasure it. In the East. It’s more ‘we’ here it’s more an ‘I’. So when we start being raised this way we’re very aware of ‘me’ from a very early age, right. So there’s my needs, my health, my talents, my individuality, my creative expression, my career, it’s kind of me, me, me all day long – self fulfillment, my self-fulfillment My spiritual life. So we try to move from this glorified ‘me’, conditioned and almost worshipped, as Catherine said earlier to a non-me, but you shouldn’t think of a non-me as negation or annihilation, it’s really just a way of being that isn’t just self-referencing. So when you’re not self-referencing, for instance, maybe you’re working on a project and you lose the ‘me’ to do the project, that’s the non-me we’re talking about. We’re talking about the non-me that just gets it done, isn’t thinking about its story all the time So we’re not saying non-me is like a blank slate. We’re just talking about it, where it is not referenced back to my story and my story and my story. The transcendental non-me.
So for people who aren’t familiar with AstroDharma, just to give you some kind of context, generally speaking, we have some sort of familiarity with – as we mentioned – Venus is about the feminine side of relationships and sexuality and Mars is more representative of, of energy and masculinity and then Pluto, for example, is the god of the underworld. And so there’s something a little bit scary about Pluto although it’s a very important element both in Greco Roman myths and in our psyches, right? We need to get comfortable with the afterlife, with death. Moon is about feelings and intuition, and so on. So hopefully everybody is getting a feel like, “oh yeah, I kind of already knew that.” So like any wisdom tradition, astrology is a vast study and it can be kind of overwhelming but a little bit can go a long way. There are three things that if you know them can take you quite far. This is about your own chart, or someone else’s chart. So that would be the Sun, where the Sun is located, the Moon and the Ascendant. The Ascendant is determined by the time of our birth. When we say where these things are located, we mean by sign and by House and that’s determined by the time of your birth and location of your birth. And if you don’t know the time of your birth, there are ways to figure that out. I’d start by asking your family members, sometimes they’ll be “ oh I remember it was I heard a rooster crowing and the sun was just coming up” and then you can think about the time of year and figure out what time that was.
Okay, so let’s talk a little bit about each of these. The thing about the sun, you want to learn what sign and what house your sun is in. This is a cool thing about Astrodharma is we can – it’s not unusual for this will be a familiar story for many of us – we may have been raised in an environment where they’re encouraging us to live a certain life that actually doesn’t match what we ourselves are drawn to do in our life. So sometimes we can look at where our sun is, where we’re meant to shine and that can really be news to us. Oh, what? I shine in that area? I never really thought about it that way. And so it’s a great way to explore what that means, what the possibilities are, what it means to shine in that area. Okay, so about how our sun shines, I’ll use myself as an example. My sun is in the eighth house and the eighth house is related to Pluto. So it’s about going to dark, scary places and looking beneath the surface of things and being able to be fearless about that, exploring the shadow, and so on. And, my upbringing did not encourage that at all. However, my father was a surgeon, which is about getting beneath the surface of things and looking underneath the surface of things. So that’s a great example of being a surgeon. Being a surgeon was encouraged, kind of, until lawsuits got so popular in the States, but that is one manifestation of that Eighth House Plutonic kind of energy is going into the medical profession. But then another way to explore that is to be a dharma teacher who specializes in integrating the shadow. So when I first learned that my sun was in the eighth House, that my destiny was to shine by looking beneath the surface of things, I didn’t even really know what that meant. So this is one way that Astro Dharma can be really valuable. So that’s our sun is our vitality and this is where we shine so that we can just enjoy shining – when the sun is shining, it’s just a great feeling, but also so that we can be a light both unto ourselves and for other people. So that’s where we shine our light and everything else in the chart revolves around that. Shown by the placement of our sun. So the sun – everything revolves around that.
So the moon, just like the moon in the sky, is a bit more complex than that. The moon represents our feeling nature. This is shaped mostly by our primary relationship, our relationship with our mother. It represents our body which used to be our mother’s body. So it also represents our mother. It shows our feeling nature, and also again is related to our mother about nurturing in general, how we feel nurtured, how we nurture ourselves, how we nurture our body, and so on. I guess it can also represent the home. That’s right, as an extension of feeling nurtured and an extension of the body. So, in short, the moon represents how we care, on a personal level. So where our moon is, that’s going to be really different for different people and that is so important to know because – Duncan and I have a little joke – some of you are familiar with the Languages of Love. Before we studied the Languages of Love with Sensei, we didn’t know what our Languages of Love were and we’d be giving each other our own languages of love. So I’d give my language of love to Duncan and he wouldn’t even notice. I’d be like “Duncan, Good job. Thanks so much.” And he’d get really embarrassed because in England you don’t like compliments or you don’t acknowledge them. You don’t claim pride in what you’re good at, you’re supposed to be self-effacing. And this always used to hurt my feelings because I think Duncan thank you so much. And he would just turn around and walk away and I’d be like, why do you never say you’re welcome? And meanwhile, his language of love is touch, and he’d come up and he’d put his hand on my arm and I’d be like, you know, “Why are you doing that? Stop touching me,” right? Because it’s not my language or I’d just be surprised. So I don’t think you jump back. It’s dramatic. It’s something I have, something in Leo. So it’s really important to know what makes us feel nurtured and what makes other people feel nurtured because that’s a good example of if they don’t match, but we don’t know that, we give people something that doesn’t make them feel nurtured at all and it can backfire. Leo, as I said, is kind of flamboyant, it’s the sign of the creative. So, someone may feel nurtured by being the center of attention. For example, we don’t know anybody like that, do we? I don’t know who would you have in mind maybe? And someone with a moon in Aries, Aries is a really feisty independent sign. So they’re going to feel nurtured if you just let them do their own thing. So there are some really interesting inherent contradictions in our placements and we all have those when we find out about those like what, how am I gonna make this work? And that’s what makes life so interesting is we’ve got to sort that all out and again once more if you see it and you understand it and you under, in a sense, you relate to it through astrology, Astrodharma, then it’s not like, oh, I got this problem where I got this difficulty it’s kind of like, these forces are at work, it’s kind of like patterns of energy, patterns of forces. I’m kind of meeting these patterns of forces, meetings of energy, I don’t have to do a whole personal story on it, I don’t have to get into 10 years of psychotherapy, I can just say, ‘this is how this is working, and this is where my perspective is and this is kind of possible access or egress from being subject to the pattern and you can still get a kick out of having it.
That’s right, so again the Ascendant is the zodiac sign on the horizon when we are born. Sometimes people call it the sunglasses through which we see the world and so that can be really different. So the world can be a friendly place, or gladiator’s ring, a grand adventure… anybody has the grand adventure? Or a stage, how about a stage, a place to appear and demonstrate? The ascendant also reveals our perception of the world and it kind of casts a hue on our appearances. And this really dovetails nicely with Buddhist teachings of Buddhist philosophy which teach that we create our own reality and so it helps us to become aware of what we’re bringing to the world, right? If we expect to see something in the world, that’s probably what we’ll find. So this is why you can sometimes be confused if you’re only looking at the sun sign because while the sun sign is sort of your core, the Ascendant is kind of how you appear and how you manifest, so you might appear from your ascendant, but your core is where your sun is and if they’re opposite, like for me – my sun is in Cancer which is that feeling thing, mother the moon. But my ascendant is Capricorn, which is, you know, the goat and the practical – get it done. And the father. So you get the mother for my sun and the father for my ascendant. No wonder my moon is in Pisces – very sensitive, moon in Pisces is super, super sensitive. So be careful out there, super sensitive.”
We hope you enjoyed this episode. Please rate and review Dharma if you Dare on Apple podcasts to help more people find and benefit from these teachings and don’t forget to subscribe to get episodes and bonus content sent directly to your device. We’re only a couple of weeks away from Doug and Catherine’s next online course, The Diamond Realization – Clarity in an Unclear World, taking place over four weeks in January. This course can be joined live or via recordings, during that time. There are also optional master classes and an at-home weekend-long retreat available for a more immersive experience. You can learn more and register at planetdharma.com/diamond. See you next time and may all our efforts benefit all beings.
