Your Secret Garden - Where Astrology and Spirituality Meet

What if I told you, there is an Undiscovered Secret Story Living Within You, and what if uncovering that story could open the portal to your ultimate fulfillment, understanding, and personal peace? Buckle your seatbelt, we are going on a Journey - a Hero’s journey to be exact - to find that elusive emancipation story living within you.  

Joseph Campbell was an author and a professor, most widely famous for his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, where he details the structure of the Hero’s Journey.    

There are three acts and 17 stages in the standard archetypical structure of the hero’s journey. Most of our biggest stories collectively are based around this storytelling narrative - a few examples - famously the Star Wars story of Luke Skywalker, Neo in the Matrix, and Frodo in the Lord of the Rings. 

In act one we find our hero in a situation where they need to leave their known world - but just before they do, the hero meets the mentor - this is stage 3. Stage 4 of the journey is to cross the threshold into the unknown. That’s where the journey begins - right after encountering the mentor.

I bet if you think about it right now, you can pull up your most influential teachers. Think about when you were young. What teacher comes up as your favorite? How about high school or college? 

Now, hold onto that person, or if you are lucky, those people in your mind for a minute and think about what made them your favorite, what made them a great teacher? 

Maybe they were engaging, knew their content well, they were patient, but most importantly, it is very likely that you felt they cared about you. They cared about what happened to you. They cared about you as an individual. 

The Mentor’s sole duty is to share what they know so you can go on more prepared in your journey in some way - they are a helper. 

One of these types of teachers is worth their weight in gold, and once we are out of the institutional bounds of required schooling, we have a chance to choose the people we learn from. 

Many years ago I decided to finally dig into learning astrology for myself, and I remember it was a big deal for me to pick a book, to buy my first astrology book, after I read a bunch of intros on Amazon Kindle previews, I felt certain that I’d found my first teacher. It was Steven Forrest, the very well-known evolutionary astrologer. I bought his first book, The Inner Sky. 

I found him witty, intelligent, and a master at making astrology accessible - not dumbed down, but translated into understandable normal language through examples and stories. 

Fast forward a few years after I figured out that my teacher was within driving distance of where I lived, and waited out the long 16 months between making my appointment with him, I found myself sitting in front of him in his home office in the desert of Borrego Springs for my first ever astrology reading - by this time I’d read all of his books, and was in seventh heaven getting to have this time with him. 

I left that meeting a few hours later a bit dazed but mostly in awe - I felt seen. Steven Forrest had translated my birth chart, he had interpreted it, he was the mentor with a message that I was deliberately made, that my birth chart was more than a random concoction of planetary placements connected to my random birth. Nope. This was a message just for me. It was my map. My Myth. My undiscovered story. My map. 

Then, I went off into the unknown with my map and a bindle into stage 4, found some other teachers along the way, and came to some deep understanding of myself and astrology.  

Fast forward to September 2023, I opened up my email and saw an email newsletter from my first teacher, Steven Forrest. Honestly, I don’t often open many of the newsletters I subscribe to, I think that’s pretty typical human behavior, but he got me this time. The topic of his letter was exploring the connection between spirituality and astrology. Those are two of my interests in one, so he got me there. In addition to his newsletter, he linked the talk he gave at a recent astrology convention, and it is here on YouTube - I’ll put a link to it in the description below - and I’ll highly recommend you give it a listen. He doesn’t disappoint here - he’s a great presenter. Listening to him again for the first time in many years, brought back so many memories, but also sparked a new line of thinking for me astrologically.  

In minute 7 of his talk, he talks about the Hindu concept of the Atman and the Bhraman. 

The Atman is your soul, and the Bhraman is infinite divinity. The idea is that these two things are one. He says, “The further you go, the bigger it gets until eventually, deep in the core of you is everything. The divine. All spiritual paths are suspicious of us being too identified with the ego as if it were the only reality. So much of astrology is about ‘you and your story, you and your version of life, you and your narrative and explanation of yourself.’

And that struck a chord with me. Heck, I went into my journey to astrology, starting with Mr. Forrest as my guide, wanting to understand myself, and that was real. Was it egotistical? 

There is a point of reductivist astrology that can lead to that answer being yes. Why did I need to focus on myself, my sign, my planets, my houses, and so on? I see how that can look self-obsessive, but conversely, if it is used properly it can become just the opposite. 

Most of our problems in society can also be reduced to a lack of real spiritual guidance and meaning. We have no real rituals, no real foundations, many of the seventeen steps are missing in our hero’s journey, or maybe we get caught up in one of the rough steps, like step six - the road of trials, and languish, with no real knowledge of how to get on with the trip. 

Socrates, of Bill and Ted’s excellent adventure fame, I’m just kidding of course - Socrates coined the axiom “Know thyself” and Aristotle followed that up with “Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” 

When we have few real spiritual guidance options to lean on, we can get pretty lost pretty fast. Many of us don’t know ourselves. Who we were as children in the undomesticated state is a good clue, but children grow up and have to conform for the most part to be accepted, follow the prescription of the expected scripts of life, and so on. Some of us who don’t easily conform, or who have been painfully abused and damaged, have an even harder time living in this world and finding a path back to ourselves.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite stories was The Secret Garden - it’s a story about a ten-year-old girl named Mary, who was born in India to wealthy parents who never wanted her and made an effort to ignore her. As a result, she’s cared for by native servants who allow her to be abusive to them, and demanding. Then a cholera outbreak wipes out her parents, and she has to go live in a big spooky version of Downton Abby, a large English country house called Misselthwaite Manor with Mr. Craven her hunchback Uncle by marriage who also does not want her. His wife, Mary’s aunt is dead. 

When she learns about her aunt’s secret garden, the very garden where her aunt fell out of a tree and met an untimely demise, Mary becomes a bit obsessed with trying to find it. 

Steven Forrest touches on the atman and the brahman in his talk, the intersection of the soul and the infinite divine as one, he says the further you go into yourself, there is something of an excavation. That’s when the secret garden analogy comes in. 

Imagine a thick stone wall, overgrown with unkempt greenery around our most true and deep selves, the door is hard to find as it has been blocked with debris and dirt. Just being open to the concept of your birth chart is akin to finding the hidden door, the entry point of your secret garden where you cross the threshold on the journey toward self-realization. Perhaps this garden has been abandoned, or neglected, maybe it is overrun, and overgrown, the trees have not been pruned or trimmed, thorny rose vines without flowers trail all over the place. It needs attention, in every way, in every area. You need a plan, and a place to start. This garden requires observation, understanding, and acceptance. Walkways are there, so step one, clear away the weeds so there is a path to move around more freely. This is continuous diligent concentrated work, it takes time to understand what each plant tree, and animal needs, even down to the health of the soil that supports all the other life growing from its nurturing underground treasures. 

You are the garden. The love and deliberate care you put into understanding the needs and framework of each thing leads to optimal holistic health. Imagine your garden is a succulent garden. It doesn’t need much water. If you keep drenching it in the water a tropical garden requires, you won’t have an optimal healthy succulent garden, you’ll have issues, and vice versa for the tropical garden - it needs lots of water baby. 

When the components are understood and properly cared for, the whole picture starts to reach clarity - and look around to find a thriving and healthy garden, no longer secret, but out and free to be shared in an authentic acceptance. 

You might have a succulent garden, and that is beautiful. It doesn’t need to be a tropical garden. You may like cactus. Or a Japanese zen garden with bonsai trees. Or maybe you prefer your garden unstructured, a bit wild, and free where there are no rules. Whatever kind of garden it is, it is yours. When your garden is understood and cared for, it becomes less of a burden, less confusing, and so much more pleasant to enjoy. Your healthy garden can be shared, it can give its gifts to others, cuttings, bushels of fruit, bouquets, nectar for the hummingbirds, pollen for the bees, and so on. In this stillness, in your healthy and well-known garden, you start to see that this is only the start. At its core, your garden is an expression of divinity - infinite divinity. 

Discovering your birth chart, to begin with, and the act of detangling and decoding the messages within it, is uncovering your mythos - the secret story living with you. This is spiritual potentiality, and it can only be fully attained through contemplating the archetypal stories powering your current incarnation. Understanding your story, your myth mosaic.

“Myth is the secret opening,” Campbell says, “through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep - boil up from the basic magic ring of myth. The images of myth are reflections of the spiritual potentialities in every one of us. Through contemplating these we evoke their powers in our lives.”  

Your natal chart can act as a key to opening your secret garden door. That’s only the start. With an intentional dedication to understanding and growth, your garden becomes lush - your garden becomes one of the beautiful things that radiates the highest vibrational attunement of the living universe, where myths can mingle. 

Twenty minutes into Steven Forrest’s talk about astrology and spirituality, he talks about the ancient connection we have to the stars, looking to the heavens and finding wonder. He says, “What if this world is not something to be transcended, but to be used as an abstract principle? What if we can say the same thing about our bodies and our human lives, and thus our birthcharts? They are vehicles for potential awakening. What if your birth chart may cast light on your nature and your fate, and what if it is so much more than that? What if it is your path home? What if it shows the path to the higher ground for you? Unlike religion, which will speak generically, but your particular path. Why do you have the chart you have is the question to ask.” 

I have the honor of getting to see people at a deep and intimate level in the work I do reading charts. This is the prima materia of their incarnation - the fingerprint of the great organizing and loving spirit upon them. This is the direct connection to a higher level of consciousness that is specifically individualized for each of us. 

“In this life, the criterion of achievement will be the courage to let go of the past, with its truths, its goals, its dogmas of meaning, and its gifts: to die to the world and to come to birth from within.” Joseph Campbell

To conclude, by understanding the deep purpose and mythic messages you have written into your life by the planets in the sky, you are doing your part, cleaning up your own little plot of land, and becoming a master of your own incarnation, which in return elevates the collective. You can share this knowledge, this peace, this beauty with others, living intentionally along the path toward your highest potential human expression.