The Sky Speaks — 10 Reasons Why Astrologers Should Meditate

Hey everyone. This is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology [https://nightlightastrology.com/].

Happy Sunday, everyone. I've got a little bonus episode cooked up for you guys. Today I want to talk about why I think astrologers ought to meditate.

Now, I want to start this off by saying that one of the reasons I want to talk about this today is because we now offer seven day a week free meditation at Nightlight in the mornings, and I'll show you how you can find that at the end of today's episode. But I realized that a lot of people maybe have not heard me speak on why I think it's important that astrology be joined to a spiritual practice.

Now, meditation is just one of many potential spiritual practices that you could marry to your study or your path with astrology. So I want to be clear that the intention of this talk is not to be prescriptive. It's more to talk about why I think something like meditation in our morning group, which you can attend free anytime you want to, is something that can complement and enhance your relationship with astrology.

Why do I think astrologers ought to meditate? I'm going to tell you about that today. So that's what we're going to do.

Before we get into it, remember to like and subscribe, share your comments, your reflections. It's always good to hear from you. If you have had a spiritual practice or a meditation practice, I'd like to hear about it and what it has done to help you enhance your own relationship with astrology.

You can find transcripts of any of these daily talks on the website that is NightlightAstrology.com. I suppose what I'll do is I'll just briefly tell you where you can find more about the meditation group, because it's totally free. Go to the website, and you're going to click on Events. Go to community quiet. You'll see the schedule and the link to join us every day of the week for daily quiet time, daily meditation.

There's no doctrines or dogmas around the way that we do meditation. You could be a total agnostic or of any particular faith path, and my hope is that it will still be valuable to you. The way that I see it, sitting quietly, meditating, prayer, whatever we want to call it, is basically the same in many different traditions around the world. The value is very similar.

I want to tell you today 10 reasons why I think astrologers should meditate or consider it, and these are the benefits that I see as the most practical. This is what I have found to have enhanced my own path with astrology and the lives of the people that I've worked with. So this might also be a fun way of thinking about what are the benefits of meditation, and how do they enhance and dialogue with astrology in general.

Number one, at its roots, ancient astrology in the East and the West was practiced by groups who were religious slash spiritual in orientation. What I mean by that is to say that they believed that astrology was one facet of a spiritual approach to life. When I say spiritual approach to life, what I mean is the recognition that there is something going on about the universe, about reality, about the soul, about our existence that is bigger than just this individual lifetime. They had a transcendental perspective. They believed that we were spirit souls incarnated in bodies moving across many lifetimes, and that the soul was also in some process of enlightenment. The specifics may vary from one tradition to another, but that basic premise is embraced. Even for people like Stoics, who may not believe in transmigration and practice astrology, the idea of enlightenment was still central to this lifetime.

So the first reason that something like meditation, daily practice of sitting quietly, at Nightlight we keep it simple, just sit quietly. Your eyes could be open. Your eyes could be closed. Just put away your phone and sit quietly for 10 minutes, 15 minutes. Our morning practice is 20 minutes. Our Sunday practice is 30 sometimes. Once a month, we've been having midweek meetups for an hour. But whatever your practice is, just keep it consistent and sit quietly. Let's just call that meditation. Everything that happens when you just commit to sitting quietly is often exactly what people describe as meditation.

But the first reason to practice meditation is because this practice was joined to the lifestyle of many astrologers in the ancient world, specifically because astrology was not something that existed just on its own in a vacuum. It was part of a spiritual approach to life, and part of that spiritual approach to life includes the recognition: I am a spiritual being. I have a spiritual nature. I am on a spiritual journey across many lifetimes. It is easy to forget that if I stay constantly looped into the dramas and doings of life, and so I need to regularly drop into the being part where I'm not doing, I'm just being, I'm just sitting. And when we do that, when we step into that regularly, it's a little easier to remember that transcendental perspective. Then we can start to walk with that accompanying sense that I am a spirit soul, even as we're going through the adventures of a lifetime, and that is thought to be a more conscious approach to life that astrology should aid us in. It helps us recognize I'm a spirit soul experiencing things by virtue of the fact that it can mirror and lay it all out for us in terms of archetypes. Oh, these are all patterns of experience in the material world. Then I'm a spirit soul moving through them. So recognition of patterns of experience from astrology, recognition that I am a being who is spiritual in nature going through these experiences, also comes from the astrology and the sitting. So it's a spiritual practice, one great reason that we should consider it.

Number two, astrology is a listening practice. If you practice for other people, then you are a part of an ancient astral omen divinatory tradition. By that, what we mean is that part and parcel of reading a chart is not just knowing the objective features of the chart, the craft, the techniques, the methods, but it's also about listening. It's also about listening to that magical voice or presence of the oracle that presents itself during a reading and starts illuminating different pathways, different connections, different symbols and different organizational strategies for delivering a reading. We are people who entrain ourselves to the voice of an oracle and become interpretive mediums for it. You can't do that if you don't have a practice that helps you to listen, because you won't be able to tell the difference between the different kinds of voices, the different channels, the static versus the signal. But even if you don't practice for people, astrology is all about the art of being able to recognize the transcendental nature of experience itself by virtue of recognizing archetypes and archetypal patterns. That requires having a listening eye, a listening ear, and it's really hard to develop that if we're always doing and never just abiding. There's a lot of ways to abide. Some people do walks in the woods, dancing, but it's getting into a state of absorption. And often I think there are fewer tried and true paths than just sitting quietly.

Number three on my list is this is a relational practice. The ancient view of the cosmos was animistic, which means that we are meant to have a living, vibrant connection with each other, with life, with the elements of nature, with the planets, with the stars. Reality is alive. It's a being filled with beings. It's like one being and many beings that comprise the one being at the same time. That's an ancient view. Because this is an animistic ancient practice, it is one of relationship. It is very important that we have a relationship with ourselves, and it is so hard to do so if we don't sit down and give ourselves a chance to just listen and talk and hang out with ourselves. For most of us, that is going to require a period of time where we just sit. It's a great way to develop a relationship with yourself. The more you develop a relationship with yourself, the easier it is to relate to the world around us with deeper sensitivity and awareness.

Number four, being informs doing. A lot of us are caught up in endless activities that are about action and doing things, but doing is subtly informed by the quality of our beingness, which means the quality of our consciousness, the quality of our presence. It's not about getting it perfect or getting some gold medal in presence, but it is about recognizing, hey, unless I practice the art of being, it's going to be more and more cut off from the doing, which means that doing feels increasingly disappointing, hollow, frustrating and filled with suffering. So being informs doing, and doing informs being. They have to have a relationship with each other, back to relationships. It's really hard to do that if we don't have spaces in our lives every day where we just be.

Number five, self-care is part of the path for most of us. Sitting quietly is a way of processing and creating some nervous system self-care or regulation, as people like to use that phrase. It is hard to be on a spiritual path, especially with astrology, if all astrology is is looping us into constant cosmic drama. How is that self-care? Self-care in astrology comes when the cycles and patterns of the planets are not just endless drama cycles, endless bootstrap leaps to the next age, or the next great prophecy, or the next gauntlet of transformational crises. If we're caring for ourselves every day by just being, and it's so simple, what a deep and amazing form of self-care just sitting quietly is. If we do that, there's a way in which the drama of astrology subsides. It becomes subtler, deeper, quieter, but more powerful in its voicings.

Number six, karma has to be observed to be changed. People always talk about how to optimize transits, how to optimize planets. They have zero awareness of the karmic patterns behind what's creating the outcomes or results. They want an answer, but they're not interested in learning more about the problem. I can be like this myself too, so I don't mean to sound like I'm on a high horse. Karma has to be observed to be changed. You have to understand patterns and complex, subtle things that interact and create outcomes. If you want to understand how to create a more optimal environment for peace, you have to understand the subtle patterns, choices, and behaviors that cut away at it. I don't have this down, but I will tell you, there's nothing in my life that has helped me more than sitting quietly to help understand those patterns and to have some really aligned sense of what works and what doesn't for peace, for relative happiness. Right, nothing's perfect.

Number seven, processing takes time. Most of us will have at least a few experiences a day that are a lot. There's fear, there's a little bit of anxiety or trauma or sadness or uncertainty. There are harsh self voices going on inside. A lot of this needs to be processed. Processing doesn't happen for most of us unless we just sit down. There are other practices too that involve movement, so don't get me wrong, sitting down is not the only way, but for a lot of us, you'd be surprised how much can get done just sitting quietly for 20 minutes. It doesn't have to be a technique, a breath technique, a doctrine, a dogma. Literally, just sit down quietly. No distractions, just 20 minutes.

Number eight, archetypes speak when we listen. If you want to talk to the planets, you have to have a space where you can hear them talk. I know that we have experiences of the planets talking through experience itself. But you'd be surprised at how much more they talk when you sit down. And just to be totally frank, when all of us just sit down and shut up, it's that simple. It's like, sit down and shut up. On my little couch, I sit down, I empty out, and Saturn's like, finally, you shut up a little bit. I got some things I want to talk to you about. It's like we're in a room filled with people who want to talk, and by doing things all the time, we're not giving a chance for anyone else to talk. Our doing is doing all the talking. I'm of course just having a good sense of humor, I hope, about this, but when we sit down on our couch, our chair, our spot, wherever that you can find, or maybe you have a couple spots, and you just listen, and you ask meaningful questions to the planets in your chart, the transits happening in your chart, I promise you things will talk. The study of astrology was always paired with contemplative practices. The people who practiced astrology were thought of as priests and priestesses of the stars. We can't do this and hear the planets talk and teach and guide if we don't listen.

Number nine, attachment and detachment work together. In this world, we're in a karmic world that was described by ancient astrologers as one of attachment. We lose track of our transcendental sense of identity, the felt presence of consciousness, not Adam, but the consciousness that Adam is living off of like a battery. And eventually Adam will die because the battery will change, the battery's juice will run out in this form. Attachment is natural for me to be in a body and be attached to it, but detachment will come at the end of this lifetime. This body will release everything. This life works through cycles of attachment and detachment. No wonder we have attachment theories all around us right now, everyone talking about attachment theories. Attachment and detachment need a conscious relationship with one another in us. If they don't, then we tend to generate experiences of attachment and detachment that are very painful. They're going to happen no matter what, but our relationship with them will often be more unconscious and painful. Meditation, sitting quietly, allows us to develop a relationship with them as interacting facets of our experience. It's a great thing to do. In turn, when a Pluto transit comes through, you can have a long standing conversation about attachments and things that you might have to let go of. Then when that transit comes through, how much easier is it because you have been meditating in your heart on the relationship between attachment and detachment.

Number ten, peace and influence start with presence. If we're concerned that our astrology be part of making the world a better place, if we are concerned that our spiritual path not be an avoidant one but be an engaged one with others and with the world, peace and any real, lasting influence that comes from peace starts with presence. It starts with us. It starts with me individually. The rest of the world, I can't control. I don't have joysticks to move everyone else around, but I can generate deeper peace, quiet, acceptance, forgiveness, compassion, sensitivity. I can let go of anger. I can be with my anger. I can do all sorts of things inside of me. Then I cultivate this garden of soulfulness inside of me when I sit. Then I can be more aware of the influence that I actually have in every moment. That moment by moment awareness stemming from peace allows me to have radical influence. It's much more than we think it is, and it is not a luxury or an indulgence to let peace start with you.

So I thought that might be just a fun talk for the day, because I've been thinking a lot about how to tell people more about why we're doing daily meditation at Nightlight. Again, head over to the events page at the Nightlight website, and scroll down to community quiet. Click there, you'll see the calendar, the time zones, the link to join. It's all free. It's seven days a week. We have group sharing and processing on Sundays. It's easier to do this in community than by ourselves. So join our funny little cult. I'm kidding. Have a great day. We'll see you again tomorrow. Bye, everyone.