On Astrological Healing

I was asked during my recent webinar whether I am going to teach some form of medical astrology. I keep thinking on how to better answer this question, and this post is a result of my thinking.

I am interested in astrological healing for decades (I even worked at some point as an astrological researcher in a medical institution in Moscow), and I have a number of ideas that might prove to be useful for others. But I also have a number of very important questions, for which I have no answers. I can’t teach this subject until I find answers to those crucial questions. All I can offer at the moment is to share my ideas, and I will start right here and right now.

First of all, astrology is a great approach to diagnostics. It can show you a problem, or multiple problems, in a person’s life. The basics are very simple but there are significantly more sophisticated methods available too. These are the basics:

1. Find planets in detriment or fall. Retrograde planets are important too. These planets cannot freely release their energy.
2. Find stressful aspects — mainly squares and oppositions, but other aspects can be stressful too. Closed configurations of stressful aspects are very important, like T-Square and Grand Cross. These stressful aspects are powerful sources of energy. The level of energy will be especially high and potentially harmful if there are no harmonic aspects (trines are the best) adjacent to the stressful ones.
3. Find if the problematic planets are participating in the stressful aspects you found. These are the focuses of unreleased energy, and that energy can manifest itself as some kind of problem in life. One possibility is a health problem, and in this case you can find where the problem manifests itself in the body. The simplest (but not the only one) approach is to use the correspondence between the signs of the zodiac and the areas of the body, where Aries corresponds to head and Pisces — to feet.

So let’s say, we found a problem in the birth chart. That is not healing yet, that is diagnostics, the first step. Also, this is a potential problem. We do have free will, and we can find a way to release that stagnated energy in one or another way. In this case, it might not even be a problem, it can be our strength, something we can do very well, something into which we invest a lot of our energy.
But in many, if not most cases, problematic configurations in the chart do show themselves as problems, and those can be, and usually are, health problems. So what do we do about them?

I’ve read quite a number of different books on ‘medical astrology’ and what they typically recommend is to go to your doctor and say: I suspect I have a problem in such and such part of my body, can you please check and do something about it? The doctor will then either cut-off the ailing part or try to suppress or destroy the problematic process. For me, this is the worst thing you can do with astrology.

The problematic energy is still there, nothing was done to release it, to solve the problem. Only the outlet, which that energy did manage to find, was destroyed. So the problem will have to find a different outlet, perhaps as a different health problem. This is how modern medicine works, yes, but astrologers should be wiser than that.

What astrological healing should do, ideally, is to find a way to release the problematic energy, to transform it from destructive to creative, to turn the problem into a gift. For me, a great example of such healing is the story told by Zipporah Dobyns in a workshop in Moscow, which I attended many years ago. I don’t know if this story was published somewhere. If you do know, please tell me. Zip had a client who suffered from alternating diarrhea and constipation, and no doctor could help him. She saw that problem in the client’s chart as related to his work situation. The man had two jobs, and his attitude to them reflected his health problem in an astonishing way. So Zip advised this client to change his job situation, and he did, and his health problem simply disappeared.

So astrological healing should be the art of understanding a person’s problem and releasing the energy of that problem in a constructive, creative way. This will heal not only the body of the client but his or her whole life. But doing something like this isn’t easy.

There are certain agents that can be helpful in astrological healing. These are natural substances that have clearly defined astrological signatures: plants, minerals. They can be used in the form of either homeopathic or spagyric remedy; essential oils can be helpful too. The problem is that, as far as I know, there is no consistent body of knowledge assigning astrological signatures to plants and minerals. (I am now aware of the work of Sajah Popham at evolutionaryherbalism.com and I am going to look into it when I’ll have time; thank you for telling me about this project, Irmgard!).

If we could manage to find a plant or a mineral that perfectly corresponds to the signature of the problem, this healing agent would unlock the problem as a key and somehow help to release the problematic energy. That could bring a relief. Let me show you an example of how it can work. Through my whole life, I have hayfever, which used to make every June a difficult time for me. Now I have a herbal remedy that works for me very well but many years ago I was suffering terribly. One day, in the 1990s, I was writing a piece of astrology while my whole face, nose and throat were itching like crazy. At some point this became intolerable, and I told myself: you, astrologer! Why can’t you figure out how to address this problem?! At that time, I was very interested in homeopathy and I saw in it, potentially, a perfect approach to astrological healing. So I started thinking: what in my natal chart could show this hayfever? The answer was quite easy: I have a square between the Moon and Mars that matches all the criteria for a problem in the chart I listed above. So I thought: the Moon is associated with silver, and to reflect the square of Mars the remedy should probably be some salt of silver. A salt is a result of the metal being attacked by an acid. I had a homeopathic remedy Argentum nitricum — a silver nitrate, a silver bitten by nitric acid, so in my desperation I took it. And I received an immediate relief. It worked like magic! :)

But not forever. Later, the annoying symptoms returned, and repeated doses of Argentum nitricum were not always helpful.

And here we are coming to a problem. We took our perfect remedy and managed to release the problematic energy. But then what? The person’s life, the person’s attitude didn’t change, and so the problem will return after a while. We can keep releasing the energy by continuously taking the remedy, and this is what healers typically do. But this is not a proper healing.

Ideally, we should somehow use that perfect remedy to channel the energy into a creative path. How? I don’t know. Maybe after taking the remedy the person will have some ideas, or some images or dreams coming that will show the path. Maybe some new people or situations will emerge in the person’s life. Somehow, the true remedy should help at a higher level, not just alleviate the symptoms temporarily.

This is not easy. This would be an art dealing with unique cases — definitely not a panacea. But this would be a proper astrological healing.

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