I feel drawn to write this blog, but it is harder to know where to start. My healing journey has involved a range of approaches and therapies and it has been an amalgamation of all of these, and not down to just one. Astrology might seem the strangest as we associate it with the columns at the back of a newspaper that by and large are far too general to really relate to anyone, and it feels like pure chance when it does.
I stumbled onto astrology in 2004 when staying with a friend and reading a book on her shelf. So much seemed so accurate that I was hooked. Having studied astrology for many years now, there is so much in a chart that it is impossible to cover it all in one short blog post, so I am honing in on the most salient, to date, part of my chart.
It was around 2006/7, when the baby I lost would have been about 8 years old, everyone around was settling down and having their families and I didn’t have a partner or any other children, that I read Judy Hall’s book on karmic astrology. I should make clear that I don’t view karma as punishment, so much as things we are here to experience and learn from.
There was a section on bodily karma and the karma held in our bodies. The sixth house, being the house of health, was the area of the chart that Judy focussed on for this. In my chart Cancer (the sign of nurturing, mothering) is on the cusp. So my bodily karma was being expressed through issues surrounding being a mother. Cancer is ruled by the Moon, so to understand more I had to look at where the Moon was in my chart, which is in Libra conjunct Uranus in the eighth house. The Libra bit didn’t come to me straight away, but the conjunction with Uranus in the eighth house told the story. Uranus as a planet brings in unexpected events and changes. And the loss of my baby was unexpected, until that day the pregnancy had been progressing uneventfully. The eighth house is the house of birth, death and rebirth, so there it was, the unexpected death of my baby, and this all happened in October, under the sign of Libra.
How did that help? First and foremost, I think there is a necessity for information to arrive at a point when someone is able to receive it. In the early days if some-one had suggested this was part of my journey or karma, I would have had a lot of difficulty with that. Indeed, I found the platitude “It wasn’t meant to be” very painful, and patronising, particularly when it came from people who had children. This came at a point at which I was able to hear it.
No matter what anyone says, I think anyone else who has experienced a stillbirth or pregnancy loss will testify, there is a not always small part of you that believes that it was your fault. To understand that this was part of my journey, at a stage that I was able to take that on, helped enormously with the self-blame.
Before going any further I think I should make it clear, that while that was what that constellation meant for me, there are others born at the same time as me with the same constellation, who will have had different experiences relatable to it. A particular constellation does not mean that you are going to lose a baby, it was what it meant for me, but for a different person it could have manifest completely differently. For this reason, I do not try to predict the future using astrology, more to use it to gain insight and understanding of a particular event or situation.
What also in time helped me integrate this as part of something that was “going to happen for some reason” was the fact that I had a repeated dream of being pregnant, yet there being no baby. I had it for the first time when I was 9 or 10 years old, and while there could be years between repeat night time showings, I always recognised it as that dream again.
It was some time later when I looked at what my daughter’s birth chart would have been had she been a live birth that there was another uncanny fit. At the point she was born the Moon was again conjunct Uranus, but this time also conjunct my North Node. The Nodes of the Moon are not planets, but mathematical points in the sky, that are considered to be evolutionary. The North Node represents what we need to develop and grow. It isn’t always easy with the North Node, more often than not it presents a challenge. So this experience was and is part of my evolution. It happened to help me grow.
Another piece to the jigsaw was the pars fortuna. Again, not a planet, this is also a mathematically calculated point in the chart. It shows where your gifts are. Well my pars fortuna runs right next to my moon and Uranus in the eighth house in Libra. So how could this be a gift? It’s taken a lot of time for me to appreciate this, but often it is through our pain and losses that we gain our wisdom and become more sensitive to others. One of my favourite songs is Return to Innocence by Enigma, and one of the lines is “Don’t be afraid to be weak, don’t be proud to be strong” Going through this has given me a deep respect for the uncertainty of life and that nothing is a given. All any of us can do is appreciate what we have while we have it.
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