Astrology as Orientation, Not Sentencing

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the responsibility of interpretation.

Recently, I was preparing materials for a consultation with a young client. Before our Zoom session, I planned to send her a copy of her natal chart along with one of those automatically generated astrology reports. The kind produced by my pro software- Astro Gold.

I use them sometimes as a reference point or starting place. They can be useful structurally. Unfortunately, I always have to edit and cleanse them of harmful language or limiting statements and this takes time. But reading through this one, I found myself wincing. Realizing how important it is for me to edit these reports!! 

Not because the astrology itself was wrong exactly. The chart was beautiful.

But the language.

So much certainty. So much proclamation. So much:
“You ARE this.”
“You WILL experience that.”
“You struggle with…”
“You are likely to fail…”
“Beware of troublesome women.”

Ma’am.

A 22-year-old does not need rigid identity statements stamped onto her psyche by software prose masquerading as fate.

And this, to me, is one of the great ethical questions in astrology.

What are we actually doing when we interpret a chart?

Are we illuminating possibilities and patterns? Or are we handing someone a symbolic prison sentence they’ll spend years unconsciously living inside?

Because astrology is powerful language. Symbolic language. Archetypal language. And people are permeable to symbols, especially when they’re young, searching, sensitive, or in transition. It's why it took me so long after graduating with my astrology diploma from the CAAE to start actually giving astrology consults!

Over the years, I’ve become less and less interested in astrology as prediction or personality reduction, and more interested in it as orientation.

Not sentencing. Orientation.

A birth chart can describe tendencies, emotional weather patterns, strengths, tensions, blind spots, developmental themes, inherited dynamics, gifts waiting to mature. But I do not believe it removes free will. Nor do I believe an astrologer should position themselves as an all-knowing oracle delivering final verdicts from the mountaintop.

In fact, before every consultation, I do a short meditation.

I ask for help getting my ego out of the way so that I can listen deeply and be responsive to the client. 

I ask instead to become a conduit for something useful. Something clarifying. Something that may genuinely help the person sitting across from me.

Sometimes that means speaking directly about the chart itself. Sometimes it means sharing a story from my own life that suddenly rises into awareness during the session. Sometimes it’s a book I once read, a line of poetry, an image, or a seemingly unrelated anecdote.

When I was younger, I used to censor those moments. I worried they weren’t “professional” enough. Now I trust them more.

Because I’ve noticed that meaningful insight often arrives sideways.

And clients have reflected back to me that these moments are sometimes the very things that stay with them.

There’s a humility required in good astrology that I think can get lost when interpretation becomes overly performative or overly deterministic.

The older I get, the less interested I become in dazzling people with complexity.

Richard Idemon once spoke about the danger of turning a chart into “an unruly mandala” - every minor aspect, asteroid, fixed star, midpoint, Arabic Part, and symbolic system layered on top of one another until the chart stops speaking altogether.

I think about that often.

Because technically, yes, all of those things may add nuance.

But people do not leave consultations transformed because you mentioned 47 semisquares and a partridge in a pear tree.

They remember feeling accurately seen and whether or not they felt psychologically safe in your presence.

These days I keep things relatively streamlined, especially in first sessions.

The major aspects, core themes and the structural beams of the chart.

If someone returns over time and wants to explore more deeply, wonderful. Then perhaps we wander into the asteroids and subtler layers together.

Yesterday, a new client with astrological knowledge wanted me to focus on what would happen now that Juno had moved into her 12th house by transit. It was actually pretty juicy which is what the client intuited and I was happy to explore with her. 

But overall, I’ve come to believe that simplification is not superficiality.

Good synthesis actually requires restraint.

And maybe that’s part of why astrology seems to be re-emerging culturally right now, especially among younger generations.

When I was first studying astrology decades ago, it was something I more or less kept hidden from many people in my professional and social circles. There was often an assumption that anyone interested in astrology must be weak-minded, irrational, unserious, or unintelligent. 

Especially women.

Now I watch young people casually discussing birth charts over coffee:
“Oh, you’re a Cancer Moon?”
“That Mercury-Pluto makes so much sense.”

And honestly, I love that for them.

Not because I think astrology should replace critical thinking. Quite the opposite.

But because symbolic language, emotional reflection, archetypal thinking, and psychological curiosity are all finding their way back into the conversation.

Used ethically, astrology can become less about certainty and more about relationship.

Relationship to self, patterns, timing and to possibility.

Not fate carved in stone.

But a living dialogue with becoming. ❤️