A reader writes that her birthchart is giving her a lot of trouble and she would rather chuck it away in favor of her progressed chart. I wish it was that easy! The birthchart is where we find our inescapable fate. The planets and their configuration around the space of the universe that enfolds us form our destiny on Planet Earth, and it is our mission, whether we choose to accept it or not, to engage in a process of experience that maximizes the potential of this fate.

How we pursue this process is where our free will comes in. We can resist the hand that has been dealt to us, which in my experience is a losing battle. Or we can embrace it and learn how to find the gift that lies within the burden of our challenges.

Kat Starwolf has written a blindingly raw and open article about her own horrific early life that was filled with abuse of all kinds. I copied and opened the image of her chart which shows a twelfth house of Fate packed with six planets. Whenever I hear a history that is fraught with abuse I always think Pluto and sure enough, there he is on the exact degree of Kat’s ascendant, linking the dark side forever to Kat’s destiny. But there is another side to Pluto: Empowerment. Pluto sends us into the Underworld where we must face death, rage, abusive experiences, and ultimately we have to let go just as we do in death. But when he brings us out of the Underworld, Pluto bestows a mantle of true Power.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy is very Plutonian in nature. The Ring sends those that are faint of heart, such as Gollum, into that Underworld from which they often don’t emerge. But Frodo, who persists in his quest, emerges having saved the Middle Earth from destruction.

I took the liberty of progressing Kat’s chart to the present day, where Libra is now on the ascendant and her Sun, Venus, Mercury and Neptune are all in Libra in the first house. Her chart has gone from the darkness of the Karmic twelfth house where all of our influences lie in the subconscious, to the first house where we create an identity for ourselves and learn to express our will. Her progressed Ascendant is conjunct her progressed Sun, both in Libra, revealing a newly confident persona and an ability to reveal herself in relationship to others.

Her progressed Mars is now in the twelfth house where she is learning to become a warrior in the realm of the unconscious, and Pluto by transit has been making a trine to her natal Pluto/ascendant and helping her to complete the tranformation process. Her progressed Pluto is virtually in the same place as her natal Pluto (Pluto moves so slowly it often doesn’t change degrees by much during one lifetime) but it is now joined by Jupiter, adding a note of faith and optimism to the dark mix. The addition of Jupiter helps to enhance the empowerment process and enables understanding. Kat writes:

[I]nstinctively I knew, that if I were to be free of the anger and pain, to finally reach the state of peace that had eluded me for so long, I had to make a concerted effort to forgive those whom I believed were responsible for my pain, and – at a deep Soul level – integrate what I knew and what I had continued to learn in order to finally put to rest the demons that had continued to haunt me. . . .

What I had determined from my own experiences and extensive research into this and many other related subjects, is that this isn’t the only life our Soul lives, nor is this the only planet on which, or the only dimension in which we experience life. As Souls who are intrinsically one with the Divine Source, yet who have been sent forth to experience consciousness in various forms, we each continue to learn those lessons that will eventually (hopefully sooner than later) return us to that state of enlightenment or Divine Bliss from which we began.