Is astrology destiny? Of course not! Your birth chart does not foresee a future written in stone, and predictive astrology is just a parlor game. The original purpose of astrology was to help you tap into your inner wisdom, ask yourself the right questions, and find your own answers to life's challenges. Now this unconventional and refreshing guide helps you reconnect with the sea of intuition that flows through each of us - so you can discover your true purpose.

Based upon the author's nearly twenty years of experience as a professional astrologer, this amazing book gives you a secure orientation in the basic principles of astrology and teaches you highly effective techniques for identifying your talent, your passion, your spiritual support, and your connection to community.

• Clear instructions on technically reading the planets, signs, and houses in your birth chart as well as a primer on the meaning of each
• Easy-to-follow intuitive exercises to connect with your "cosmic database," a wellspring of creativity that encourages you to trust your potential and to love who you are in the present
• Helpful ways to trust your own limits and use them as inner teachers
• Twelve true life stories that illustrate the inspiring and uniquely brilliant way in which each of us can bring an astrological script to life

If you are drawn to astrology but are intimidated by its apparent complexities, this generous, comprehensive book is the book for you. It presents the basics of astrology with crystal clarity and prepares you to use them with a subtle, finely honed precision that no other source provides. Even if you're an experienced astrologer, you'll be enlightened and stimulated by Elizabeth Rose Campbell's affirmation: When you follow your best instincts, you follow the stars.

Chapter 1

The sacred is the emotional force which connects the parts to the whole.

- Author unknown

So profoundly does the ocean affect those who live near it that it follows them forever. I couldn't have been more than a few years old the first time I saw the ocean and went crazy with ecstasy, racing back and forth on the beach, splashing in the shallows. That ecstasy arrived every summer with our return to the ocean, to the same stretch of beach along the South Carolina coast, the town where great-grandparents were buried and their offspring still lived. It was a homecoming for my grandparents, but as I got older I began to understand it more clearly as a different sort of homecoming all my own. When I swam in the ocean, a strange thing happened: My sense of self dissolved and then resurfaced, bigger and emptier, but definitely better. I let go of who I thought I was and then remembered who I really was. It was as simple as that.

This phenomenon came into focus completely the summer I was ten. It was June, and though the sun was hot, the water was cold. I got used to the temperature of the water, moving farther and farther into the breakers. Beyond the breakers, with the water up to my chest, and my feet resting lightly on the ocean floor, my arms floated on either side; I turned my face to the sun and out to sea.

As I did this, I forgot my life story - age, gender, family, everything. As it evaporated, a deep happiness came over me and I lost gravity slightly, the salt water making my body buoyant and lighter, part of the sea. A self returned that knew its own nature, something without boundaries but focused in me. I was both empty and full.

I turned back to watch my grandfather and father fishing down the strand from where I floated in the sea. I could see the bucket of bait and my grandfather's black Labrador sitting on her haunches next to him. I watched my mother and grandmother and sister and cousins in their folding chairs on the beach, reading and laughing. A straw sun hat caught in the wind and blew down the beach. I watched them all and knew we belonged to one another, but for all the pull and strength of that belonging, I belonged even more to this larger self, this knowing, this inner atmosphere, which felt like an invisible companion with answers to questions I had not yet asked. It did not require that I do anything at all but witness it. As I did, it grew stronger, as if to say: Call upon me, anytime.

These spells of knowing that began in the sea informed me of my own deeper nature in a way nothing else could. They taught me about being in the flow. Eventually, I could find this knowing, this flow, anywhere, but it came most easily when I was around a body of water, whether a small creek or a filled bathtub. Water triggered this ability to forget myself and to return to some essential state that was both empty and full. That space allowed me to understand interrelationship, the exchange of energies between everything. And though I could not know enough to predict the outcome of these exchanges, I could feel their potential, as if they were part of my sea. It was like an extra natural sense, in addition to smell and taste. Much later, I would learn that there was a word for this: intuition.

This extra sense, this intuition, was an inner eye capable of accurately relating parts to a whole. Intuition originated in the heart, not the head. It offered no guarantees, no certain facts, but rather a knowing whose confidence was based upon its capacity to flow - flowing along a pathway with no falsehood in it at all.

Everyone is intuitive. Each of us has his or her own flow, depending on our focus. You may pick up totally different worlds of information from what your spouse or best friend may tune in to.

Each of us has a different method of letting go of who we think we are and remember ourselves as being. Music was my grandfather's sea of self-forgetting. Stravinsky or Strauss did for him what the ocean did for me. He'd listen to "The Blue Danube" and fall into a light sleep after dinner, and when he woke up, he'd often announce an intention: "Think I better cover those young tomatoes, we could have a cold snap tonight." His intuition and hunches were about planting and pruning and weather.

By my teens, I felt at least two rivers of intuition operating for me. The first was personal and based on what I cared most deeply about: my horse, my dogs, my family, my friends. The second was impersonal, as if my personal resonance had merged with a larger one and, as a consequence, I received impressions I hadn't asked for but were simply there. Both rivers of intuition required that I occupy a soft uncertainty - a not knowing - through which the knowing could come. Sometimes it arrived spontaneously, out of nowhere, when I was far from any thought related to the information that came.

For example, as I woke up one morning around age thirteen, I suddenly knew that my dog was down the hill behind our home barking at a poisonous snake that would bite her if I did not intervene. I didn't even put on shoes or stop to wonder if the impression was right. I leapt from my bed, raced down the hill barefoot in my pajamas, and there was my little terrier, barking fiercely at a snake coiled to strike. I called her to me in my most commanding voice, my heart pounding as she snapped at the snake. She didn't come, and I grabbed her from behind and carried her back up the hill to the house, leaving the snake to retreat on its own.

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Copyright © 2003 by Elizabeth Rose Campbell.

Tags: Astrology

About the Author

Graduated form the University of North Caroline at Chapel Hill with a degree in journalist. Though she initially worked as a writer for a literary magazine, The Sun: A Magazine of Ideas, Elizabeth was quickly drawn to the human potential movement and became a program coordinator for the Omega Institute of holistic Studies in 1982. Based on earlier astrological studies with Steve Forrest, she began giving informal astrological consultations to Omega staff and faculty. Elizabeth became the first astrologer invited to offer consultations to participants in their Wellness Center. More