My Karmic Story Revealed

If you watched Disney Fairy Tales growing up, you would have heard the resounding message that dreams come true. Sing a few songs and keep your spirits high and all will work out in the end. While the formula seems simple enough, there’s a lot that Disney didn’t cover. Those finer details are for the adults edition which I will be touching on here. Sooner or later, many of our ideals come up against “the brick wall of reality” where we find ourselves face to face with inconvenient truths and unavoidable delays on our path.  

Underneath the glossy overlay of wishful thinking and positive affirmations, there lies hidden complexes that present obstructions towards the life we were dreaming of.  Deep within the psyche, there lies the parts of self that want to see us fail and that are compelled towards recreating hardship. Of course not everyone has such strong inner narratives so please continue reading with discretion towards your own personal experience. We each have different karma we are working with - the weight of which only the individual can substantiate for himself. 

To understand the nature of my personal Karma, I turned to the study of Evolutionary Astrology where I was able to witness the footprints of unresolved karma in my present life.  With a south node in Virgo, the self-condemning inner voice has debilitated me in more ways I can describe. In true Virgo fashion, I have worked meticulously towards inviting softness and gestures of kindness in placement of the inner critic that stifled me from progressing in the ways I had imagined I would.  But just when I was ready to accept the mediocrity of my life, I had an experience that planted a seed for a new story to be born. 

In the last week of February, I began a 10 Day Vipassana Silent Retreat under the teachings of S.N Goenka. On the first day, it became very clear that what I was dreaming of wasn't a happy tale. I saw myself sitting on the sideline of life, watching everyone else living their dreams while I struggled to get by. Not one image that presented itself in my mind was to do with me and my life. Apparently, the subject of “me” wasn’t interesting enough. All the images were of other people - mostly people who I looked up to and who my mind clung to as I imagined what it would be like to live their lives, if only I weren’t stuck being me. 

I came to the conclusion that this life was a dud. Not all stories have happy endings and I thought my job was to suck it up and come to terms with my failed existence and wait it out until the next life when surely my positive karma would ripen. I doubted my ability to accomplish anything of substance and forever being a single, childless person who has piles of food coupons stacked up on the kitchen table. Okay, I didn’t go as far as the food coupons but you can see how the mind can get carried away! 

As an astrologer, I am constantly reviewing what is happening in the sky and how the celestial bodies are infusing with my energy body. During this time, the south node of Virgo was in an exact conjunction with my Ascendant opposing transiting Neptune in Pisces on the 7th house cusp. Neptune (the planet of dreams and altered states of consciousness) had been hovering over this sensitive point for a little over a year now with its transmissions emerging at a very subtle level. As it turns out, I was only able to receive the teachings of this long transit when the south node moved into an opposition with Neptune - right at the time I was deep in meditation. 

The 7th house is more traditionally known as the House of Marriage and reflects the type of person we might find ourselves coupled with. With Neptune resting here, I had numerous dreams of my long term partner from several years ago when I lived in Australia.  In my dreams, I saw the relationship with rose coloured glasses. My mind was replaying an illusion of how I wanted it to be rather than seeing things as they really were. That relationship had become stale long before it had ended and yet I was so inclined to forget these harder truths and uphold a glossy narrative that was completely contrived. 

A couple of days after finishing the meditation retreat, Pluto came into exact conjunction with my Natal Mercury at 3 degrees Aquarius. While Mercury deals with our thinking faculties and mental perceptions, Pluto deals with transformation and regeneration. As Pluto takes 250 years to orbit the sun, the chances of me finishing the retreat within two days of this exact conjunction is 1 in 91250 days! Needless to day, this was a very validating occurrence to my vocation of choice.  

Finally, transiting Uranus (the planet of awakening) was coming into close to a 2 degree orb with my natal Jupiter in the 8th house. Again, a 1 in 160 year transit that was stimulating my beliefs (Jupiter) in the 8th house (the house of shared psychology). 

Overall, I could see the many planetary junctions that were taking place and how they were coming to mark a predestined point in time - a time where I could stop investing my mental energy into watching other people live their lives and finally start investing in my own. 

But this revelation was only the tip of the iceberg. Naturally, it was important to me to understand why my mental orientation was so focused on the “other” in the first place. To understand the origins of this psychological predisposition, I turned to my natal chart to find the answers. With Juno conjunct my South Node in the 12th house, I saw a person who believed that her life amounted to nothing without a partner. 

Although by this time I was already aware that I came into this life with some pretty severe relationship karma, I was suddenly able to understand the specific nuances of my predicament with striking clarity. I was able to see for the first time the mental condition that was holding me captive and why I kept reaching for something that was hurting me. 

While my conscious mind was telling me that I needed a partner to succeed in life, my soul remembered the dangers of being in a partnership and was avidly trying to protect me from falling into the same trap that had stolen my happiness and denied me from living out my true dharma.  From these insights, I was able to see how all my attempts at forming partnerships were destined to fail because of the subconscious beliefs I held in relation to prospective partners. 

Everything was making sense. 

From the tried and tested techniques I learnt in astrology as well as trusting my own intuition, I could see that in a previous life I was stuck in a relationship that held me back in a big way. It was the sort of relationship that you become a slave to - where you get put down and made to believe that you will amount to nothing without them. The longer you stay in the relationship, the more you internalize this ungrounded criticism and let it define you. Your entire existence ends up revolving around meeting their needs that you end up feeling guilty for even thinking of your own wants and desires. Your self esteem becomes so eroded that you cannot imagine surviving without them. This mountain of self-doubt stops you from expressing yourself and if you do somehow muster up the courage to share your authentic truth, the response you get only causes further shame, humiliation and discouragement. So you die with this miserable sense of hopelessness and are reborn with the notion that you cannot survive in the world without nurturing the very thing that is destroying you. 

WELL, didn’t this story echo the truth of my experience, both in a familial context and in a romantic one! 

Now let’s rewind a few years ago when I did a Vision Quest in the Mexican Desert and “saw” a giant grey worm the size of my body laying beside me. Telepathically, I got the message that this entity had been living inside of me and was taking all my creative energy. Because it was inside of me, my maternal instincts to care for it were stronger than any other force. I was compelled to care for that which was killing me. This mystical experience made it abundantly clear the conundrum I was in, but it didn't tell me how to free myself from this bondage. As I would later discover, this piece of the puzzle would come through the oracle of my natal chart when the planets aligned to make this information available to me. 

Although the story of being held back in a relationship is not uncommon for most, I would like to add another dimension to the story by mentioning that this person being chained to a destructive relationship in a past life also possessed the qualities of a creative genius. I don't say this to toot my own horn, but to reflect honestly the information in my chart and the interplay of archetypal energies that were evident in my nodal analysis. For someone disinterested in developing their mind, a relationship of this nature may not be the worst thing in the world. But for someone who is naturally inclined to think in ways ahead of their time and is forced to throw a blanket over that inner flame, it's not too hard to see how the suffering would be exacerbated. 

From an evolutionary perspective, those latent talents that never saw the light of day are ACHING to be expressed. The longer they stay bottled up inside, the more the pressure builds. I can’t tell you how many times I have had surges of creative energy but my anxiety has become too overwhelming that I've had to put those ideas to the back burner just so I can tend to my nervous system that is freaking out! Let’s remember, if we strip back all the details of this story and zoom in on the essential message we are left with “ CREATIVITY/SELF EXPRESSION = DEATH.” Obviously there’s a big problem here. 

After 36 years, the return of my Lunar south node in Virgo (+ many other planetary alignments), marks a time where I can let this story go once and for all - not because I’m above it, but because I have understood it at the root level. 

While changing my mental habit patterns doesn't happen overnight, through the grace of this newfound awareness, I know I can begin to transform my South Node Story and start living from my North Node in Pisces. 

Gratitude to the contributions of S.N Goenka to help purify my mind and gratitude to Steven Forrest and all my teachers of Astrology that have given me the necessary tools to makes sense of my karma so that I can empower myself and others to live in alignment with who they were always meant to become. 

✏️ Luna Feyth