I am a professional astrologer and to be even more precise I am what is known as an Evolutionary Astrologer.

What that means is when I look at someone’s birthchart I am viewing it through a particular lens. I am seeing each person I work with as an evolving soul on a long term journey of growth, healing, transformation and discovery.

I’m also assuming that this kind of growth and healing takes time. And usually a LOT of time. Which most often looks like a multitude of lifetimes. So I’m also assuming that the lifetime you are currently in is not your first time particpating in this Earth rodeo. And probably won’t be your last.

And what your birthchart shows you is where you are on this particular evolutionary journey. Every symbol in your chart reveals something about your soul. It gives you insight into your souls strengths, shadows, challenges and gifts as well as where it’s been, what it’s experienced and what it needs to learn to continue to grow.

While everything in your chart gives you some piece of information about your journey up until this point, there are two very powerful symbols that speak directly to this cosmic journey of awakening, and those two symbols are the South and North Nodes of the Moon.

The South Node is symbolic of who you were in your past life and gives you information regarding gifts that you have nurtured over many lives, modes of expression that are well developed and ways of being where you feel quite confident.

For example, my South Node is in the sign of Leo so I am very comfortable in the leadership role, I enjoy opportunities to be on stage and I have no trouble claiming myself as an artist and a creative person.

But the South Node also points to ways that we often find ourselves in a rut, endlessly repeating old patterns. And while I can enjoy the gifts I came in with and get a lot of satisfaction sharing these gifts with others, because those gifts are easy for me they’re also not places where I will experience my own greatest personal growth.

The South Node is also holds up a mirror to our psychological shadow, painful karmic patterns that replay themselves over and over again and unconscious beliefs, traumas and assumptions that run your life without you even realizing it.

One way to understand how this impacts you on a day to day level is through a useful psychological concept developed by Freud called the repetition compulsion. And it looks like this.

Say you are a child growing up in a family where your father was emotionally unavailable for any number of reasons. Maybe he traveled at lot for work, or he suffered from a health issue or your parents divorced and he stopped participating in your life, or he lost connection to his soul in some addictive process using alcohol or drugs.

And because of any of these circumstances you were left with a deep inner feeling of being abandoned, rejected and unworthy. You entered adulthood with a gaping father wound in your heart that you were desperate to fill because it was so incredibly devastating to not have a father that loved you.

Which often means that you spend much of your adult life trying to repair that wound and fill that hole. But you attempted that repair by getting involved, over and over again, with men who were essentially just like your father. Men who were damaged, or wounded or emotionally unavailable, and you keep trying to get them to love you.

The idea behind the repetition compulsion is that we unconsciously set up the SAME set of parameters as the ones that hurt us initially. But this time we are hoping that we can succeed where we failed as a young person. Part of us feels like we failed because there was something wrong with us. We believe that we are damaged and broken and unloveable. And we’re trying to figure out how to make ourselves better. Believing that if we can just crack that code then we can get the wounded unavailable father stand-in to finally love us back and heal the wound inside of us.

And of course it NEVER works because we were never the problem to begin with. We can never truly heal that hurt place until we learn to walk away from those wounded, unavailable, father substitutes ( as well as the compulsion to change the past) and instead choose someone who isn’t a rehashing of the old story.

Most people try to avoid facing this compulsion because the process of awakening always involves a painful period of grieving. We need to let ourselves feel the sadness and hurt of what we never had and what we couldn’t have because the person we were trying to get what we needed from, simply wasn’t capable of giving it.

Personally, I was a poster child for bad relationships earlier in my life. For a long time I was caught in the loop of trying to get my misogynistic, alcoholic father to finally love me by choosing men that were alcoholic and misogynistic. I had a definite type that I was drawn to and it was a type that always, without fail, broke my heart.

So when I met my husband Tim, and actually felt attracted to him, the first thing I recognized is that he wasn’t my “type”. At all. Which I celebrated as the win that it was. I had finally gotten tired of repeating the old pattern. And because I was willing to shift that pattern, I got to experience true love and healing with a man for the first time in my life. Being with him was a brand new world and our relationship gave me a sense of freedom, liberation and healing that I am still benefitting from today, 30 years later.

So this is the same process that is symbolized by the South Node of the Moon, except that what we end up repeating is based on a wound from our past life instead of our current incarnation. When we are born, our spiritual DNA is cluttered up with all kinds of unfinished business, ancient traumas, unhealed disappointments, deep betrayals and unprocessed grief that can come from any number of past life scenarios.

And these emotional injuries get expressed via some aspect of our life where we find ourselves unconsciously reenacting an all too familiar playbook… whether it’s around love or money or health or success or loss… where we feel frustrated and defeated because on some level we’re trying to redo the damage from the past and make it turn out better in this life.

But what always happens is that we just end up recreating the essence of that past life pain… what I like to call Spiritual Ground Hog Day… without understanding why we feel SO compelled to keep banging our head against the same wall, doing the same things over and over again. And never really healing or changing the script.

This South Node dance is just another version of the repetition compulsion. And the only way to heal the repetition compulsion is to first become aware of it and then to completely walk away from it.

And that’s where understanding the moons nodes comes in. The South Node gives us a clear picture of where and how we are stuck in some old story. And the North Node gives us the map for the way out of this past life dilemma because the North Node is ALWAYS radically different from the South Node. It’s the exact OPPOSITE of the South Node.

The North Node opens the door into a brand new world that we didn’t even know existed and can barely comprehend. It offers us freedom from the painfully unconscious and frustrating shackles of a life we can’t even remember but that still has a hold on us. And a portal into a whole new way of being that promises to be much more gratifying, satisfying, joyful and filled with opportunities to truly grow and heal.

If you would like to explore your own nodal story with some expert guidance and creative facilitation click on the image below to learn more about our upcoming Paint Your Stars workshop focusing exclusively on the Nodes Of The Moon.