Advice for Astrologers: Document Your Lives

One of the best pieces of advice that I could give to people who are just getting into the field of astrology, or to astrologers who are already in the field, is to document your lives.   Document your lives as extensively as possible.

Usually this means keeping a journal of some sort in which you record daily events in your life as they unfold.  The traditional method is obviously just to write it out on paper, although some might prefer to type it out on a computer, or perhaps record audio journals.

It doesn’t really matter what the format is, as long as you are keeping track of various developments that are occurring in your life on a regular basis.

The reason that this is important is because one of the greatest truisms in astrology is that the best case study that you will ever have is your own life and birth chart.  This is because you will never know anyone else’s life, in all of its subtleties and complexities, as well as you know your own.

Sure, most of the time you see astrologers using celebrity birth charts as examples in case studies, but a large part of the reason for this is that the lives of celebrities are often so well documented, whereas this isn’t the case for most average people.

Celebrity charts are not a sufficient source for all case studies though, because in using them there are often issues surrounding public perceptions of the celebrity being disconnected from who they really are as a person.

When it comes down to it you can only really have an outsider’s perspective on the life of a celebrity, no matter how well-documented their life is, and many of the details get lost when your subject is at that much of a distance.  In my opinion the loss of the details outweighs many of the benefits gained by the (questionable) sense of objectivity one gets from studying a public figure.

Contrast that with the alternate option.  All possible issues of bias and subjectivity aside, you have the unique ability to record on any given date the exact events, emotions and circumstances that are present in your life.   This is exactly the type of data that astrologers need when they are studying the application of various astrological techniques – techniques that are used to study the events, circumstances and internal states that individuals encounter during the course of their lives.

There is one catch though – you have to record everything, because most of the time the full significance of events is only apparent in retrospect, and sometimes seemingly minor events can have great astrological importance.  The chance meeting of some stranger, missing a bus that caused you to be late for work, suddenly having an idea about some concept, etc.  Even the smallest things can turn out to be very important, especially within the broader perspective of one’s chronology.

So, that is my exhortation to astrologers for the day:  document your lives, and do it as carefully as possible.  This is the single best thing that you can do in the long term for testing the techniques of astrology and coming to a better understanding of how it works in practice.