My history with astrology

My grandma (my mother’s mom) was a gifted astrologer.

Growing up as a poor woman in India in the 1930’s, she didn’t have access to formal education. She was self-taught, with a knack for math – a skill that she used to determine planetary positions.

My grandma made natal charts by hand, something that amazes me to this day. Interpreting a computer-generated natal chart is hard enough, let alone drawing one from scratch.

If you don’t know what a natal chart looks like, look at the image for this blog post – natal charts require complex calculations.

She had small astrology books with blank pages in them. In these books, she would draw a person’s natal chart and then write down her interpretations, which focused on things that were important to Indian people: spousal relationship, number and health of children, level of education, likelihood of immigrating to the USA and likely cause and age of death.

I have always found the death thing disturbing but it’s perfectly acceptable in Indian culture to forecast these things.

My grandma made detailed astrology books for everyone in her immediate family, including for me and my sister. During a trip to India when I was 10, she read my book to me (I couldn’t read it because it wasn’t written in English).

According to my natal chart, I was going to drop out of high school and divorce twice. My first husband would be physically abusive and my second husband would marry me only for my money, as he was in love with someone else.

As a 10-year-old, I didn’t take this too seriously. But my mom did.

For the next seven years, she lived in a perpetual state of fear, believing that I would drop out of high school.

She drove me crazy, constantly asking me questions about how I was feeling, what I was doing, where I was going. It was exhausting.

After I graduated from high school (with top honors!), my mom knew something was up. So she examined my astrology book.

Turns out that my grandma made a mistake when she made my natal chart – I was the only person in our family that was born in the US and my grandma forgot to convert my US birth time to India time.

My mom told me that my grandma could make a new book for me, to which I quickly shouted “No!”

I didn’t want to know anything else about my future. More importantly, I didn’t want my mom to know anything else about my future ;)

For many years after that, I avoided astrology.

But in the past five years, I have realized that the science behind astrology makes so much sense.

Much like the quantum field, planets can influence us through their energetic fields – and those fields are massive.

In astrology, each planet is tied to a specific energetic force. This energy manifests in different ways, depending on which “house” of our chart it resides in.

More to come in my next post. For now, you can generate your own natal chart here.