This is one of the core notions surrounding humanistic astrology, often ignored or misunderstood, nevertheless, it’s a really important notion to establish, if we really seek to fulfill our birth chart, to reach the utmost completeness on our path to Individuation.
Choosing to express your planetary energies
Studying your birth chart is useful in order to better understand yourself, to better determine your potentialities, your sub-personalities, and ultimately, your path of accomplishment.
Studying your astrological forecasting cycles amounts to determining the content of the cycles and their durations, specifying the nature of the accomplishment at the given time.
With these 2 approaches, you could sometimes tend to find yourself in a certain “static” mindset, being fatalistic, excessively predeterministic, questioning notions of free will (a complex notion which cannot be fully treated in this article, but which however holds many nuances in the affirmative as well as in the negative).
Keep in mind that there is also a “dynamic” and positive approach, the most evolutionary when considering any astrological study, it’s the step immediately following the understanding of the energies involved.
Finding a conscious expression to your planets actually amounts somehow to really bringing your birth chart to life, it allows you to haul off any repression, to reach a better completeness, to fight against your inhibitions.
Each planet of a birth chart has a story to tell, like a character from a play, it comes “alive”, having a passive (their Signs and Houses), friends, enemies (their Aspects), it has its own behavioural pattern (its integration with the rest of the chart as a whole, or sometimes its lack of integration that will make it express itself in a more compulsive way).
The whole point in astrology is that you get to understand all these patterns, all these links, you get awareness of “this presence”, but it’s also important to step ahead and dive in a little further, to bring it into existence, to cultivate it, to nurture it, as a gardener would do with a plant !
That’s the purpose of this article, it’s somewhat the conclusion of a conversation I had while in consultation, one person in particular had Neptune in 5th house, completely unaspected (Singleton), so the planet was acting in an unconscious mode, it lacked direct contacts and means of expression, yet the planet had a lot to say despite everything…
We had to wait for an important slow transit to activate this native planet by conjunction over several years for a great existential crisis to awaken and finally “force” the expression of this planet and this sector that had remained muzzled until then.
Astrologer Liz Greene has a lovely metaphor for this kind of case : imagine that you live in a house with a clandestine tenant in your basement whose existence you completely ignore (in this case Neptune), and one day that tenant gets angry, grabs an axe, breaks the floor and ends up right in the middle of your living room, just like Jack Nicholson in Shinning ! (a revealing slow transit) the astonishment and fear are justified, and yet the warning signs were obviously present in a more or less conscious way, but they couldn’t really be taken into consideration without some light pointed at them.
The aim of a humanistic analysis is precisely to find a conscious expression (I insist on this word and this notion) to all the birth chart elements. In the example presented here, it’s by finding an exteriorization, an activity, of one’s own free will, to this Neptune, that you avoid this planet suffering in the basement and having your floor destroyed after several years or decades (often as a result of a Depression), for example by expressing your artistic and imaginative side, creativity, cultivating compassion and devotion, even having a theatrical or charitable activity, or bonding with children, by developing gifts for care (heal the sick peoples), having an emotional partner who connects spirituality but also being wary of people who might abuse our trust and play the victim, etc etc.
Each planet obviously has its say according to its own symbolism, so Mars is the place where we will always find an energy reservoir to use and from which we will have to find an outlet (an activity that will allow us express that energy in our environment), Venus represents our affective and emotional dimension, our deep values and our value system, which we will have to care for globally, listening to our emotions, etc…
Mars is a crucial planet when you’re looking to find a conscious expression to the planets because it’s that planet which embodies action, it represents an active, dynamic, audacious principle, and it takes a certain credit as to how we will be able to initiate the exteriorization of each of the other planets, so it’s very important to pay very close attention to it.
And finding a conscious expression to the planetary energies does not stop at the birth chart but it also concerns the Transits and Progressions where what really matters is to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature and not in a permanent contradiction !
How many times have I had to explain, the celestial bodies accompany us, they are like the needle on the compass… If one planet valorises a particular sector, why would we want to “force” to another sector ? What’s the point of going in the other direction from the one indicated by the compass ?
Another example : if Saturn is approaching your 7th house this can often foreshadow a couple crisis or more generally a relational crisis (feelings of loneliness, emotional frustrations, confrontations with others, Saturnian Projections), but you can also consciously use this passage to better structure your couple, to build something more solid (to commit more firmly), to make a healthy sorting out in your relationships, to focus on intensity, to achieve quality rather than quantity in your environment, to find a mentor and gain in maturity, etc.
The same goes for fast personal planet transits, which will give a more regular rhythm to your daily life and your individual achievement, for example, another look at the important Mars representing a dynamic and telling us where we should invest our energy, there is no point in swimming against the tide, if the planet is approaching your 4th house, why not plan to do some work at home, schedule your relocation on these dates, explore your roots, or more generally work in one way or another to reinforce your emotional security ?
Often the planets that are not accompanied in their expression will tend to have a much more conflicting tone in their effects, they may conceal a form of violence, excessiveness, extremism, while the fact of accompanying them may act as a buffer, or some lightning rod by drawing and capturing the flow of energy, which then prevents it from causing too much inconvenience and other collateral damage.
Astrology allows us to have an understanding of things and it allows us to act consciously, with patience, as a gardener would do to guide a plant, you can consciously invest yourself in each natal position as in each actualization in transit, at least this is the path proposed by the humanistic approach of this branch.
Understood in this way, astrology can become a true calendar of accomplishment that guides us in our daily life, in the expression of the forces that animate us, in the contact with that which is greater than ourselves, in our quest for fundamental understanding…