“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story.” - Maya Angelou

 When people ask me why I left the law to become a life coach who uses astrology, I tell them astrology helped me see my story for the first time in my life. 

We all have a story.

Our hunger and need  to be seen and for our story to be understood is a basic human drive. Story as a marketing device and story-telling in general are wildly popular because in our fast paced, tech driven world intimacy or the ability to be seen and validated is a rare commodity.

Despite all my year of self development work, including multiple stints at counseling, I was still looking for answers to my story. At an even deeper level I had an intense craving to be seen.

THIS is what astrology gave to me. Let me explain.

In the Summer of 2017, through Divine fate, I stumbled into a lecture on astrology (I tell people Astrology found me, not the other way around). I quickly became consumed by learning about my birth chart and from there the charts of friends and family.  The language of astrology is a language of symbols and it came to me very intuitively. 

Our birth charts show us the patterns of our life and who we were born to be not conditioned to be. This ability to piece together the puzzle of our life and then reverse engineer our life history is what I am able to do after spending enough time with a chart.

Astrology fed the analytical part of my brain with all the myriad of possibilities that arise the deeper you go. It’s like a tapestry of the individual emerges and it’s my job to see the possibilities and the patterns that can be woven together. I bought courses and completed them, and all the while my chart would whisper to me at night to go deeper, to understand more until nearly all the chapters of my story were laid out before me.

The process I used to learn my story is similar to the one I use with my clients.  Here is a sampling of the first few chapters that emerged for me and were some of the “evidence” I used to make the case that a new calling was awaiting me beyond the law.

 Chapter One: Your Life Purpose

The first chapter I discovered concerned my life purpose.  It was the Summer of the Great American Eclipse and my North Node in the twelfth house and the sign of Aquarius was being activated.  The North Node is your ultimate life purpose. Eclipses are a time of intense energy in which fated life events can occur up to six months afterward.  They are a time for starting over and new beginnings and that’s exactly what happened for me. 

I enjoyed my career as a lawyer.  I felt lucky  because I worked on compelling issues, protecting our water and the environment from pollution.  I had a variety of responsibilities, speaking and appearing in the media and later teaching and empowering nonprofit leaders how to advocate for the issues they cared about. 

As time went on and I experienced multiple and significant  life changes including the unexpected death of my father followed by the birth of my son and a divorce six years later, I gradually gave myself permission to think more expansively.  There  was a growing distaste for the never ending conflict, the demand for objectivity and the relative lack of appreciation for creativity.  I also began to crave freedom and autonomy, to be my own boss.

The key demand of my North Node was anethema to nearly every fiber of my being.  I was being asked to surrender and to let go of trying to analyze and control my way through life. Not an easy task for a lawyer. Instead I was being asked to lean into my intuition and  follow my heart and to work on behalf of a larger group cause (this part was also true of my work in the Nonprofit world).    There is a reason the North Node is considered by many astrologers to be “a good idea” because implementation truly stretches us. 

At the time of the eclipse, I had made a decision to invest substantially in working with a professional speaking coach to hone my skills and credentials as a paid speaker in the nonprofit world.  At the end of the 9 months, I made the decision to leave the law and the nonprofit world and focus exclusively on coaching women navigating life transitions using astrology. At the time I thought the money I spent on the coach had been wasted.  In hindsight I can see that it was the year long experience of being in a cohort of professional women that activated my desire to support women to pursue their professional and personal dreams. It was all part of the energy of the eclipse. 

As I immersed myself in understanding my birth chart, I began to connect the dots between the calling of my North Node and other parts of my personality

As a footnote to the skeptics who may be reading this,  I would be lying if I told you I thought that we only have one life purpose or that our life path is “pre-destined.”   I didn’t believe either before I discovered astrology and I definitely don’t believe either now.  But what I do know to be true, is that when we aren’t fully aligned with our soul’s purpose it’s hard to ignore. That nagging voice whispers to us until it will no longer be ignored. Our birth charts are powerful tools for awakening this voice and igniting a deeper level of curiosity.

 Chapter Two: Your Critical Life Lesson ( Indicated by a Cluster of Planets in the Same Sign)

 The second chapter in my story showed me that I was here to learn about change  through my relationship with others, and to use that experience to teach others about navigating change and using change to actually empower ourselves.

The “evidence,” for this was a stellium of cluster of planets in my eighth house. Whenever we have 3 of more planets in one house this is definitely a critical part of our life mission. I had four of my seven personal planets in the sign of Scorpio in the eighth house. Scorpio is the planet of transformation, ruled  by Pluto, the planet of death and rebirth, in the Eighth House, the most intense house which shows us our psychological lessons we are here to learn.  Yep, this was all making sense. Between a divorce, a remarriage and numerous shifting personal and professional titles in my life including mom, step mom, and 7 different jobs in a 20 plus year career change was definitely a lesson.

And of course in addition to the “evidence” I saw pointing me toward new possibilities, I saw plenty of other evidence that explained prominent patterns in my lie including why I never took the easy road and why despite a deep aversion to being alone, i had a wildly independent and rebellious streak.

The gift and of studying our birth charts is it’s like looking into a compassionate mirror that reflects back to us all the parts of ourselves without judgment, only illumination.