A Celebration of Our Every Day Gurus
Your Chart as a Field Guide
“Śraddhā (belief/faith) is not blind acceptance but initially a working hypothesis of trust in the guru’s teaching, and attitude to be cultivated along with prescribed practices, such as meditation and mantric repetition, which provide experience.”
— Devadatta Kālī, IN PRAISE OF THE GODDESS
Guru Purnima Today
Today, in the Vedic calendar, is Guru Purnima — a sacred full moon dedicated to honoring the teachers — living and ancestral, seen and unseen — who awaken us to truth. While it’s often framed around gurus, this day is ultimately a celebration of the search for self-knowledge, -acceptance, and -love itself: the questions we are born to discover the answers to, the people we encounter who make us aware of ourselves in ways we could not do alone, and the opportunities and challenges that awaken us to our essential nature as conduits of the divine.
Often the search for a guru or mentor is surrounded by mysticism, mystery, the need for some epic soul quest. As a tropical Leo Sun with Libra Rising and Libra Moon, I’m all for an epic, romantic, bigger than life quest any day — but, if we’re willing to recognize them, our gurus surround us every day in the most mundane of circumstances and plain vanilla of interactions. How to spot them? Your chart is your personal field guide as you adventure through your 24/7.
From the Outside In
Modern astrology often begins from the inside out, asking: What do I feel? What do I want? It’s like working with a Method Actor who draws from their own psychology to build a role — who asks me, as the director, to be the bridge between the script, the mine of their lived experiences and impressions that unearth which parts of them are needed to embody this fictional character.
However, other actors skin a role from the outside in — finding how the body moves dictated by circumstance and costume, being present with their scene partners and allowing them to elicit a response with the words they’re constrained to with the script, using the senses — whether it’s a cut onion held up to the eyes to bring forth tears or a psych-up song with immediate physical resonance or even — and, yes, I’ve worked with an actor that did this — drink a liter of water before a scene so that the urgency of having to go to the bathroom was a real physical stake driving the performance. Both ways get to where you need to go — the second one is a lot easier to hack.
When you start learning astrology — especially if you want to start applying it to your life right out of the box, take the second path. The birth chart is not only a static reflection of your personality. It is a living stage — your very own reality show, populated by planetary archetypes — each with their own motivations and domains of influence — that show up as actual people in your life.
Planets as People
How do you spot the planets as the individuals populating the story of your life? Here are some astrologically sourced suggestions that you can extrapolate from and use to start identifying them:
