If you have a nagging feeling that somehow your life has gotten off track, Discovering Your Soul Mission can help you create the most fulfilling life possible. Karmic astrologer and holistic teacher Linda Brady, along with coauthor Evan St. Lifer, shows how the desires of our personalities — what we think we want — clash with the needs of our souls — what will make us truly happy.

In order to pinpoint your soul mission, Brady uses the technique of karmic astrology, which — unlike the more familiar sun-sign astrology — delves into areas known previously only to the cognoscenti. With this easy-to-use method, you do not have to get an astrological chart. All the required information is provided to instantly discover the sign ruling your soul mission. You will learn your Soul Pattern sign, which governs old habits you need to let go, and your Soul Potential sign, which indicates your latent qualities and hidden talents that must be developed to follow your true path. Virgo perfectionism, for instance, can give way to Pisces intuition, Sagittarian procrastination to Gemini creativity.

Brady then offers numerous meditation, journaling, dreamwork, and other exercises to explore and incorporate your soul mission into your current life. Other planetary influences also shape the particular flavor of your mission. For example, the book includes tables to find out what sign rules your style of communication and shows you how to use that personal style to further enhance your mission. This lively, interactive handbook will set you on your true path.

When people come to me for a counseling session, they usually want answers to their life questions: "Should I change my career? Why can't I find the right relationship? Why am I unhappy? What is my purpose in life?" It doesn't take me long to help them realize the fundamental reason they've sought my help: to discover their soul's direction and align their personality with it in order to create harmony in their lives.

Through my use of karmic astrology, I serve as a soul translator, to remind them about what their soul has created for them in their life and why. I am not a predictive astrologer; I will not tell anyone's future. I will, however, use an astrological chart to gain information about their past, their relationships, and their soul mission. As a practicing astrologer for almost twenty years, I am constantly amazed at how perfectly an astrological chart captures the feelings, concerns, memories, hopes, and desires of the people I serve. As a commentator, I make no judgments and offer no advice that isn't already present in their chart.

Traditional astrology's value to us lies in its ability to help us understand ourselves. But the practice implies that our life choices are made by someone or something else. Traditional astrology maintains that our chart - with its houses, planets, and aspects - is the determining factor in our lives. This deterministic claim has led to astrology being mocked in recent times. But astrology - as a symbolic language - helps cultivate a deeper understanding of the connection between the inner and outer worlds - nature and the heavens. As Will Keepin, Ph.D, says, "Astrology [is ridiculed] because it bridges the implicate and explicate orders more clearly than any other esoteric science that I know of."

Karmic astrology is about making informed and expanded choices, on the assumption that our soul is the primary force behind us forging our destiny and is never-ending. While traditional astrology implies that we abdicate responsibility for what befalls us to the cosmos, karmic astrology equips us with the understanding to shape our life the way we want it to be.

Each of us has a personality with a corresponding road to travel and a destination to reach within our given lifetime. The journey will be filled with relationships, work, challenges and obstacles, trials and triumphs. Each of us also has a soul with its own destination and a road to follow, a road that began in the distant past and will continue forever. However, the soul has a plan, a purpose for our personality in this life. The soul's intention is to assist the personality in its life journey, to help it reach the destination that the soul intends for it.

Your soul provides you with a plan, revealing it to you through dreams, symbols, your unconscious mind, your relationships, and your experiences. The soul holds the reason for your personality to exist and grow. It is the essence of your spiritual core, the energy of truth and love unfettered by the external stimuli that affect your personality.

Your personality is the specific lens through which you see your current lifetime. Its lucidity and focus are constantly being adjusted almost instantaneously by your vast and varied experiences. Through this lens you react to the world and make judgments about it. It is the part of you that responds, often impulsively, to the ebbs and flows of life, at various turns fortified and scarred by the ups and downs of your emotions. Your personality is your social and emotional template, helping you distinguish who you are. It encompasses your thoughts, morality, feelings, senses, motivations, and dreams, and it carries the indelible stamp of your family history.

On an unconscious level, your personality links you to your seminal belief system learned from your parents; the hidden child within you; memories and pain not dealt with in your conscious life; and your night dreams, fears, and phobias. At this deep level, it also remembers personalities you've had from other lives and important information about who and what you have been. These memories of the thoughts, actions, and feelings of previous personalities share a common thread with you now, and they become the source of much of your unconscious motivation, impulse, angst, and relationship challenges. Unlike your soul, your personality does not transcend this life.

The contemporary surge in spirituality and New Age philosophy has ushered the term soul mate into our culture's lexicon primarily as a term of endearment. Some of us consider our soul mate to be a partner to whom we are bound by a love and understanding that transcends our material world: our ultimate relationship. I have a more in-depth explanation of what a soul mate is.

All the relationships we enter into — including those involving soul mates — are karmic. By initiating a relationship, we set in motion a soul contract with that soul to learn a lesson and resolve an issue from a previous life. A soul mate represents a karmic relationship that we have resolved: a deep conflict that has been set-tied, an obligation that has been fulfilled, and love that has replaced fear and anger. We recognize a soul mate by the supreme level of comfort and security we feel with that person. That doesn't mean that there aren't issues that remain to be ironed out. Rather, it means we know intuitively that we can resolve issues with our soul mate without losing his or her love and respect. When feelings of abandonment and betrayal arise with a soul mate, they do not last. Once soul mates achieve an ultimate level of symbiosis and serenity with each other, it remains forever.

Excerpted from Discovering Your Soul Mission by Linda Brady and Evan St. Lifer. Excerpted by permission of Three Rivers Press, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Tags: Astrology

About the Author

Linda Brady is an internationally recognized karmic astrologer and holistic teacher with clients in 32 states and five countries. She has been in practice for 25 years and is the founder of the Interna-tional Center for Creative Choices, a holistic educational center based in Baltimore, Maryland, where she has an ongoing intern training program. She also has active practices in Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, Ocean City, Maryland, and San Francisco. Her groundbreaking approach has helped more than 2,000 clients across the United States and abroad successfully navigate their own life paths. Linda has been a regular contributor on two Balti-more radio stations, WOLB and WCBM, providing her listeners with specific information about their astrological charts on the air.