A Salarywoman Who Loved Astrology
Years ago, when I had a very different life before becoming an astrologer, I was a manager in a safety company – a conventional job, a regular salary, and traditional life goals.
I loved astrology, but it was mostly a hobby, something I did on-and-off for friends, and increasingly for paying clients, though doing this full-time was not on the plans for me then.
I wasn’t a starry-eyed believer (pun intended), more like a researcher – I wanted to study charts, find patterns, and truly understand how this complex profiling method worked, much like I still do today; I haven’t ever stopped researching astrology.
For this reason, unlike most hobbyists, I actually had very little interest in my own chart. I was more interested in amassing a large collection of charts, ranging from famous people with achievements in science, politics, entertainment, design, philosophy etc. to infamous people like criminals and serial killers to regular people I knew who came from Singapore and from as many cultures as I could find.
I had a large range of charts I could run theories through, and study repeated patterns to find co-relations between chart indicators and real-life manifestations.
The Self-Discovery
From this process, I developed lots of systems and frameworks for interpreting charts and one day, it finally occurred to me to apply those frameworks to interpreting my own chart.
I was in my mid-20s then and considered very successful for my age.
But I was feeling rather lost and confused.
Everything in my life was on the right track, at least according to normal society benchmarks. I had a number of high-profile projects and clients under my wing. I was very well-paid and highly valued by my employers. I owned private property (no mean feat for a Singaporean in my 20s!) and had a company-sponsored car.
What more could I want?
I just… wasn’t convinced that this was where I was meant to be. I did my job well, but I couldn’t see myself doing it for the rest of my life. I had a great relationship with my bosses, and even in my 20s, I was already occupying a position that allowed me a lot of autonomy at work, but I knew… that eventually, and soon, I wanted to run my own thing.
So, I figured, I would do for myself what I had been doing for so many friends and astro clients – I would read my own chart.
The planets were fun to read and gave me some amusing and useful tidbits about my abilities, even though I was very immature then, and didn’t understand the psychological implications of Saturn in the 2H affecting my relationship with money, and definitely did not understand how Moon in 4H and Sun in 8H described the role I was going to play. At that stage, I was just gathering interesting ‘personality traits’ trivia.
I also discovered that I was rather balanced in my elements, with Earth being the strongest. No surprise there – I was always naturally comfortable with managing resources, both in my personal life and at work, plus I was always a somewhat skeptical person with plenty of ‘cow sense’.
But I discovered a few things with my simple astro frameworks that had me pause and think about: Are my frameworks inaccurate, or was there something in myself I had been missing all these years?
Recognising the Authentic Self
When looking at my modes, I discovered that I was strongest in Cardinal signs. No surprise there, I was well known for my bossy and dominating personality. I was very weak in Mutable signs, but I knew that already, and so did my bosses – they stocked my office with plenty of assistants who dealt with all the tiny details I was rubbish with.
I also noticed I was weak in Water signs, which was no surprise too – I didn’t always understand emotional people and behaviour; I preferred doing things in the most practical way, with no emotions.
But at the same time, I realised I didn’t just want to only stick to what was easy and comfortable for myself. If I was going to grow, I wanted to explore things that reached into areas I didn’t naturally possess. I wanted to understand emotions and why emo people did things irrationally, and I knew that on my own I wasn’t wired to ever be able to understand this.
With Water element weak in my chart, astrology helped to compensate a little by providing a way for me to understand people. I liked that astrology allowed me, if not the experience, but at least the language descriptors to cognitively understand people who were very different from myself.
The Major Discovery
I had been developing a technique I called Dominant Archetype™. It came about as a way to address why so many people didn’t resonate with their Sun sign – simply because what most people knew as their ‘sign’ wasn’t their dominant trait at all.
I had been experimenting with this technique for people I was reading for, and it had pretty transformative results… it seemed to help those who had a different Dominant Archetype™ from their Sun Sign come to terms with who they really were.
And so I finally turned to my own chart… and discovered that I too, had a different Dominant Archetype™ from my Sun Sign.
I’m ostensibly a Taurus, based on my birthdate in May. However, my Dominant Archetype™ is Capricorn. In all my years of studying astrology I never really thought about being Capricorn, but once I started looking into it, I had to admit my personality was so much more Capricorn than I was Taurus.
I have a very ambitious, bossy personality, and a definite snooty side to my preferences. Most tellingly, I’m a pioneer type – I like beginning projects and spearheading stuff… completely unlike Taurus which is more comfortable working with existing setups.
Now I understood why I wasn’t satisfied just being a well-paid employee. I wanted to start and build, my own career trajectory. I wanted to build my own expertise and mastery in a craft (Capricorn trait), not sell someone else’s expertise in exchange for a steady salary (Taurus trait).
This one sole realisation led to me very quickly planning for my resignation and transition. I informed my bosses about my decision to leave well in advance and planned for a solid handover. I began structuring my astrology practice, fully embracing that there was no precedent in my country for the kind of practice I was setting up. I prepared for a long journey of building a business from scratch.
The rest, as they say, is history.
I cannot understate the power and value of actually just being who I am. In one moment of discovering that I’m primarily not Taurus, unlocked and validated my hunch that I wasn’t in the right place, and instead, with the clear astro descriptors of who I was, I could then redesign life, career and relationships to optimise for the person I was working with – me.
Astrology for Self-Discovery
Sure, astro can be used for cool predictions, but that’s not the most useful application of astrology. You can’t really change predictions, and knowing outcomes in advance doesn’t necessarily improve results.
The real value of astrology, IMHO (in my honest opinion), is allowing us to see ourselves for who we are.
Take away the educational background, the positions you’ve held professionally, the role you get cast into in your childhood and family dynamics.
Who are you? What have you got to offer? What projects and areas of life light you up? Who do you most want to impact?
In the 20 years since that I’ve practiced astrology, I’ve realised that most adults don’t know the answers to those questions.
They just show up at work, and they collect their salary at the end of the month, but they don’t really know why they’re there, apart from the paycheck. There isn’t a sense that what they do is aligned with their natural abilities, beliefs and inclinations, how they naturally contribute to society.
I hear a lot of apologies for certain traits they’ve got, mainly because it doesn’t fit 100% into that particular profession, role, gender, nationality, ethnicity, sexual orientation, traits that society had assigned arbitrarily that makes them feel like they need to suppress, hide or be ashamed of natural traits – astrology displays everything unapologetically, and you simply read it off the chart.
In a world where the conventional job is fast becoming an endangered species anyway, it’s as good a time as any to explore who you really are.
Join me as I take you through this self-discovery process in deeply understanding yourself. Objectively, identify what your natural traits are, what direction should you steer towards to effectively contribute to the work that you do and break past personal psychological obstacles that stand in the way for you to achieve what you want.
Click on the link here to find out more about how you can get started with applying astrology to your life.