Spiritual Nutrition Astrology: My Approach to Astrology
For the longest time I’ve been curious about why we are here, and also curious about the stars and the sky and what’s beyond us. I’ve studied biological sciences, spiritual psychology, trauma-informed processes such as compassionate inquiry, countless meditation trainings, and so many experiences as a way to understand myself and how I fit within the world. Underpinning all of these different phases of my journey and trainings has been astrology.
This was especially true in my late twenties, early thirties when I was going through some big change and felt uncertain about my life and uncertain about who I was as a person. I studied a lot of meditation and biology and psychology, but honestly the framework and tool of Astrology really made everything feel even so much more practical for me.
Astrology is an ancient language, and when used correctly, can be extremely profound for spiritual and personal growth. Although astrology is widely known, how we each use it differs a lot. It’s a tool, and people can use tools differently. This is part of the magic of astrology somehow.
So here I would like to share with you my modern approach to astrology that I term as Spiritual Nutrition Astrology. For me this is an intersection of spiritual meditation and trauma informed psychology that link into astrology so that we can use astrology for spiritual and personal development. This methodology is more about a longer term use case for life navigation and guidance, rather than a short fortune telling reading.
Spiritual Nutrition Astrology is the way I work with astrology as a personal development tool, especially for navigating uncertainty with more self-agency and self-trust. I believe nobody knows more about your inner world than you do, and my approach to astrology is designed to strengthen that self-knowing, not override it.
I believe that astrology and the study of the planets is a mirror of what is happening for us in each given moment. I believe that if we use astrology simply as knowledge, it’s never really going to work as a personal development and spiritual growth tool.
When Astrology Can Harm
I’ve been interested in astrology since I was a young girl, noticing people’s sun signs when they mentioned their birthday, reading magazine horoscopes, and anything else which was available at the time, which to be honest was pretty limited. Some of my first readings I almost memorised, for better or for worse.
Those early readings I had often presented a specific idea of how each planet or archetype of the zodiac worked by the astrologer. It was very one-dimensional, and it was only later on when I started to study with teachers that I resonated with, that I came to learn that each archetype is actually extremely multifaceted.
I’d been told some things in my chart were quote unquote bad or limiting, and just the way that things were expressed, I had created self-limiting beliefs about myself that didn’t have to be true. And this is where I feel there can be bad astrology — if an astrologer is inferring things about our chart onto us, and especially when we’re young and impressionable, this can actually be quite harmful.
Often when we do see an astrologer, especially when we’re young, we’re talking about really profound and deeply personal topics, things such as romance, money, career, our deepest wounds, and limitations. So if we’re receiving information that is very one-dimensional or a projection of the astrologer, it’s not going to be helpful at all.
This is why my approach is centred on self-agency, nuance, and the understanding that every placement and transit has a spectrum of expression
My Approach to Astrology: From Fortune-Telling to Self-Agency
As I’ve deepened my love for astrology over decades, I have been able to sit with the other modalities that I learned along the way, such as meditation, spiritual psychology, and trauma-informed processes. It felt like I sat back until I had all of the tools, and then when I started to intersect them and work with astrology with myself for personal development and friends, I felt I started to have a really robust method where astrology wasn’t this fortune-telling thing at all, but rather an indispensable tool for personal development.
Inner Astrology and Trauma Informed Approach
A very important aspect in all of this is maintaining Self Agency and allowing the tools to work for you, rather than giving away any power to them. Sometimes people really lean too far into an Astrology Chart or Reading, they desperately want all the answers, when really the answers actually lie within them, and it’s a process of creating the right guidance and conditions for an individual to be able to connect with them. This is what I refer to as Inner Astrology. For me, Inner Astrology is about self-awareness or metacognition, as well as tapping into intuition, and also interoception so we can feel our inner compass of what is happening through our inner senses.
Leaning on decades of meditation experience, I had cultivated a connection with my inner self, my inner senses, my self-awareness, or metacognition, or just the observation of self, and how important that is when you see self-limiting beliefs pop up or a pattern pop up.
Then you feel that you have more control, I guess, over what’s happening. For example “Ah, I see this self-limiting belief. Oh, wow, I can align that with maybe a more shadowy expression of one of the aspects in my chart?” “I recognise here I have a choice that this part of my chart could be expressed in many, many different ways. So let me see if I can lean into that.”
Maybe some trauma-informed work would unearth why I’m moving into the more shadowy expression of this aspect of my chart. And let’s move into a different expression. Now with this, I don’t even want to make that anything is bad or good. It just depends on our experience at the time and how we want to navigate our life.
This takes away from the over dependence some people develop with Astrology, fantanstially checking their chart and the transits all the time. In Spiritual Nutrition Astrology we create a flow and balance between the Inner Astrology and Outer Astrology. I wrote about that here in reference the Shiva Sutras - Is knowledge a bondage? or is knowledge a liberation?"
Inner astrology is what keeps astrology grounded, it’s the part that helps you make choices instead of waiting for a chart to tell you who to be.
Astrology as Energetic Signatures and Archetypes
Another problem I see with some astrology and astrologers in the one-dimensional aspect that can be attributed to each archetype. Leos are show offs. Mars is anger. Taurus are stubborn. This is what makes people so sceptical about astrology and it’s not how it works at all. Each planetary placement, aspect, and transit does carry an archetypal theme, however within that theme there is multi-valance (multiple possible expressions) or we can also say a spectrum of expression. We could say a lower octave or shadowy expression all the way through to a higher octave or more healthily embodied expression.
Our goal, if we chose, is to grow into the highest expression of our placements in our chart. This is where astrology is a wonderful reflective tool to tune into how we are living out each part of our chart. We can also see our potentials and see the over all theme of our chart to give us some guidance.
We are constatnly growing and maturing into the potnetial our birth chart. We have the same chart our whole life, yet how we express it at age 5, 27, 55 or 89 changes. THIS is a huge part why my Spiritual Nutrition Astrology approach really works for personal development.
Why I Use the Term Spiritual Nutrition
Spiritual Nutrition to me means to nurture or encrich ourselves beyond just the material. When I was searching for meaning in life - astrology together with meditation and psychology personally gave me that nourishment.
Now, all these things are also “invisible”. I tend to think of Spiritual and invisible. I learnt a while back that our universe is 99.99999% invisible with frequency, thoughts, emotions, the superconscious, the subconscious, our intuitive senses, our essence, our being. And only 0.0000001% is matter or material.
In Astrolgoy we are working with feelings and energy that the planets are simply ‘mirroring’ as one way to explain it. We’re all swimming in the same universal song, the same divine energy is flowing through all of us and making our hearts beat and the planets spin.
So there’s something about going deep into meditation and ourselves and the universe to connect and feel enriched.
When we “nourish the invisible” our material world gets so much richer, and so this is the meaning I bring behind the name Spiritual Nutrition Astrology.
Trauma-Informed Astrology and Transits
My trauma-informed psychotherapeutic training really brought a lot of depth to astrology. Quite early on, I did realise that astrology goes really deep, really quickly with people and that needs care.
As I mentioned earlier, people are asking all sorts of really deep questions, romance, money, career and this can often bring up our deepest limiting beliefs. And so in this way, having those trauma-informed skills really helps people to be able to work through those things rather than gloss over them.
Because when we gloss over them, we tend to find that those situations or feelings within us just keep cycling around and coming back and back. And that can sometimes even be related to transits. And what we don’t do during one transit can just build up as the next.
The trauma informed work also works beautifully with teh archetpeal multliaplvance i spoke to earlier. It helps us to see where we might limit ourselves (a definition of trauma) and to see the endless potential in our chart should we choose to awaken it through our self agency and our choices.
Next I’ll share on transits as these are huge for trauma informed work and when things feel activated to work on, and also when we reach uncertain periods in our life and how to deal with those.
Transits as Initiations Across the Life Cycle
Transits are when the positions of the planets now, make an angle or aspect to the placement of your birth planets. The transits are what people often look to for “fortune telling”. Whilst we can definitely see themes that might come up or sense the types of opportunities or challenges that might arise, the details are not written in stone.
When I transit happens and it’s brinign an ‘opportunity’ or a ‘challenge’ that is also a time when our Inner Astrology kicks in to make the decsions that will guide us and define some of the finer details of that transit.
Ultimately I feel transtis are initatiors for growth and maturation. It’s like a new level is unlocked. We don’t stay the same all the time, and this is why. Every transit, whether challenging or harmonious, offers us an opportunity to expand our consciousness, or heal old wounds, or align more fully with our soul's purpose.
Understanding what transits we’re currently in, are coming up, or what we’ve just passed through can give incredible so much context. When I approach I transit now I know it’s for a limited amount of time and whatever it’s asking of me, it’s best to do now whilst the energy is there. Once the transit passes, the opportunity is not as potent anymore.
I wish someone had explained midlife transits to me in my late 30s, because when I entered them, everything felt shaky and I assumed something was wrong. Having the context of a transit can change everything, because it lets you recognise you’re in a real developmental phase, there’s a reason why everything suddenly feels different.
In modern culture, many of the old initiations into adulthood and midlife have been stripped away, so we’ve lost so much context and I’ve found astrology can help redefine the difference passages of life and hopefully we can bring more reverence back to them (Inside of just mid-life crisis!).
That’s where this approach comes into it’s own really, as it’s about being able to trust in the big picture of life, and to see where we might be self-sabotaging or have patterns blocking us is so beneficial.
Astro Weather: Seizing Opportunistic Moments
There is a saying “time and time wait for no man” and this is the same for Astrological Transits. When they come they come, and then they go and the opportinity or challelnge is gone (by the way i see “challenges” as opportunities for growth). In Spiritual Nurition Astrology when we approach our charts and transits from this perspective, we can reframe any challenges we encounter as opportunities for growth and transformation. Rather than succumbing to fear or resistance, we can embrace these initiations with courage and curiosity, knowing that they hold the keys to our evolution. If we’re in a transit that is clearly bringing opportunities, but we have a belief of I’m not ready right now” we may just find that “positive” transits pass us by. When we know “now” is the moment for something it can help give us courage to dive in. For me, astrology is less about certainty and more about timing, context, and self-agency
Spiritual Nutrition Astrology
To round thigns up Spiritual Nutrition Astrology, has been a journey of me combining Inner Astrology and meditation, Modern Astrology and Trauma informed psychotherapeutic practices such as Compassionate Inquiry. It’s recognizing the importance of integrating meditation and spiritual practices into our astrological journey for it to feel more complete. These tools collectively also anchor us FIRMLY in ourselves and our self agency and see that WE are our astrology, we are our living and breathing birth chart, and too not give too much power away to a paper chart, but rather see it as an incredible tool. It’s also seeing that if in any moment we are not liking an aspect of how we are thinking, feeling or behaving or how we approach challenges, there is information in our chart to help us reflect on that and see our choices in our we express the archetypes and aspects in our chart. I”m so grateful for meditation, astrology and the modern approach where we add trauma informed psychotherapy I litearlly can’t imagine trying to navigate my life without it and love how much it’s helped hundreds of clients of mine.
