Trees remind us that in order to grow tall and strong on the outside, we need to do just as much growing on the inside, underground. Without solid roots, there is no solid foundation to build on in the long run. This becomes relevant also in our human lives, with the roots of our family and ancestry forming the basis upon which we build also our own creations and legacy.
Our astrological charts form around two key sets of angles or polarities:
The ascendant (ASC) and descendant (DS) represent ‘the self’ and ‘the other’ respectively; our personal identities vs. our relationships.
The imum coeli (IC) and midheaven (MC), on the other hand, represent our home and roots, and our career and public aspirations (incl. our legacy) respectively.
These polarities are the backbone of each birth chart. I’ll dive into the IC-MC polarity specifically today: the roots that we use as foundation to grow our fruits on, whatever that means for each of us. No matter how independent we are in our lives, each of us is building on top of something - it’s very hard to imagine what would be a truly clean slate to start from. Whether it’s our upbringing, our education, an inheritance we receive, municipal infrastructure we utilize daily, not to mention humanity’s archetypal psychological building blocks that each of us consist of as our unique mix, we are all part of some interconnected web that existed before we came along and will continue to exist after we are no longer here.
Our relationships have the power to activate different things in us
I believe that souls make soul contracts containing life’s larger ‘brush strokes’ before incarnating, including especially our major relationships like those to our parents, potential children, romantic partners, and other people significant to us. Each relationship triggers and awakens different things in us, whether challenges, opportunities, inspiration, attraction, irritation, dislike, and so on, due to the unique synastry of energies between any two people. For especially our key relationships, it’s likely we’ve chosen others to both support and challenge our growth in meaningful ways - which doesn’t always look pretty. Some major relationships may be meant to be balancing and healing, while others may challenge us quite far out of our comfort zones to spur our growth.
Inquiring into the interplay of energies with family members especially, may help uncover the meaning of these relationships. Understanding connections and seeing events in a new light may in itself may bring deeper compassion and empathy towards each person involved. The symbolic language of astrology helps us to ‘map out’ the different parts of ourselves, our patterns of emotion, thought and action and our overall programming, so it also helps us to perceive the similarities and differences between us and others. Within a family lineage, inherited programming like specific gifts or family traumas can be seen in birth charts as recurring archetypal energies or patterns, for example.
Many core themes in our soul contracts may be continuation from previous lives, which can be one reason that certain situations seem ‘fated’, ‘destined’, ‘meant to be’, ‘unavoidable’, or ‘why does this always happen to me’ -esque. Or why the origin of certain patterns of feeling, thinking or acting can be hard to track based only on what’s happened in this life. Our relationships may simply be there to activate dynamics or challenges that are already familiar to our soul, to ensure we focus our energy on those relevant, chosen themes. This belief in our own soul’s choice, in any case, brings me much more peace and empowerment than believing that events just ‘happen to me’ randomly or without meaning.
In our current day and age, most of us have been taught to dive headfirst into reaching for achievements, accomplishments, growth, success, as a default. Nothing wrong with any of these per se, but the metaphor of the tree reminds us that the further up we try to reach, the further down our roots need to have been grown to support that growth outwards, otherwise it all falls apart eventually. An oft learned imbalance is also the focus on the external at the expense of healing work that requires us to ‘disappear from the world’ and go inward, whether into inherited or other programming, because the inward journey is ‘time away from productive accomplishments’.
What goes around, comes around
The old saying of ‘what goes around, comes around’ is on point. It is sound especially astrologically, since astrology deals with the quality of time, especially cycles of time. These cycles are symbolized by the planets’ orbits of varying length, from monthly, to annual, to the generational planets taking anywhere between 30 to 248 years to complete a cycle. These are the very cycles that symbolize generational shifts around innovation, sudden and incremental changes in society, collective dreams and fears, as well as deep psychological transformation. In a way, these archetypal cycles each bring back around the same quality of the previous time the planet was in the same phase of its cycle, even if it manifests slightly differently each time - but there is a familiar echo for sure. For example, Saturn returns every 29-30 years bring about checkpoints around our relationship with responsibility, authority and structures, and our experience with these checkpoints has a lot to do with how we’ve dealt with them and their theme in the past.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” - George Santayana
I would like to build on the above quote somewhat: In order to be able to go forward in life without repeating history in a way we don’t want to, it’s important to become properly conscious of what it actually is we don’t want to repeat - aka really understand the patterns (in the family line) that are at the root of individual events and behaviors. One example I’ve come across in my own family line, is a sensitivity in multiple generations of men - something that hasn’t been accepted let alone properly nurtured, leading to repeating cases of substance abuse as a coping mechanism. The easy interpretation has been to blame the men for the collateral damage caused by their behavior to their families, but this blaming hasn’t addressed the root cause of the pattern. And it really is stunning how much simply becoming conscious of patterns, shedding light on them, really already eases the need to blame, shame or name perpetrators. And therefore, it also takes away a bunch of the power of limiting beliefs, inherited or learned, and opens up the possibility of positive change.
I say that energy invested into healing one’s roots will for sure bear fruit manifold in the creations one is able to birth as a result, and leave as a legacy.
What do you think?
I’m of course biased, because this work is my passion and my mission. If this theme is one that draws you in, however, I warmly welcome you to join me on a healing deep dive into your roots and your family astrology for the “Your family’s legacy - your story” program! Limited openings are currently available for individuals wishing to engage with this process in the upcoming months.
My name is Saila and I have a passion for connecting the dots intergenerationally, interpreting meanings and weaving new, more heart-centered, holistic realities into being. Through studying my family astrology, I’ve learned a ton about, for example, how my inherited programming brings with it inner contradictions, and how to go about balancing my own inner masculine and feminine.
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