One of the services I offer is a session called “How to Read Your Birth Chart”. This is a short session that won’t necessarily help you pick up anyone’s chart and make meaning of it right away, but it specifically focuses on how you can refer to your own birth chart over the course of your life and reflect on patterns that arise in you in different ways. I like teaching this way because I think it’s important that we are all able to rely on ourselves for contemplation and healing practices. An app like The Pattern, while fun, tool, and full of data mining delight, can be helpful for getting messages that speak to you right away, it can never know your life like you do, and the nuance of how something manifests in your life is always up to you to understand and work with.

So, how do we learn?

When I first started doing chart readings for friends I knew, I usually made the info-hog “mistake” of showing them the full chart because I wanted them to understand what patterns were emerging and how to spot them. I still think that’s important, but have since recognized that you can have a more productive reading by simply introducing themes, patterns, and the likely forms that can take without getting into the mechanics. Those are different things, and doing both at the same time is a little distracting. It’s hard to go introspective and nostalgic while someone is pointing at their laptop screen that looks like this:

Clearly there’s too much going on there to have a good heart to heart without forcing yourself to ignore it.

To work with reading your own chart, there are a handful of questions you should be able to explore, or at least be able to reflect on.

• What energies and pattern is naturally dominant in my life pattern?
• What influences over my mind, intuition, and perception am I predisposed to?
• Where do I find my power, and does that show up in the world the way I think it does, or does it actually appear to others differently?
• Where do some of my gifts cut into other assets I have?
• How can I work with these tendencies to find better day to day balance, or to regulate myself to turn up or turn down as most appropriate?

Once you start to get a handle on the signals in your birth chart that relate to these kinds of questions, you can start working with energetic transits (everything is moving after all) to reflect on how the current times interact with your predispositions, or to forecast what kinds of practices you might want to prioritize yourself to be best prepared for future opportunities.

Some say preparation and opportunity is what makes a person lucky.

If you’re interested in learning to work with your own chart online or in person, click here to book a session at the recommended rate, a supporter rate, or opt to pay what you want.