Raye Mathis discusses why your birth chart is a valuable tool
Raye Mathis (she/her) is a noted astrologer, a professor of multiple disciplines at Atlantic University, and has a B.A. in Mathematics (magna cum laude) from Furman University, as well as her M.S.W. in Clinical Social Work from Norfolk State University
Raye teaches 4-week online astrology groups on learning how to work with your own chart. In addition, she has a 40-year ongoing astrology practice giving private astrological consultations and publishes a quarterly newsletter entitled "The Capricorn Times". She can be contacted at rayemathis22@gmail.com
Gretchen O'Neal is a spiritual accountability and empowerment coach. She owns and operates www.cometoyourself.com. Come To Yourself provides unbiased, easily accessible information from the top scholars in the fields of transpersonal psychology and consciousness studies, coupled with personal insights from successful artists, musicians, and business professionals, to anyone looking to start their spiritual journey to discover and serve their soul's mission in life
Gretchen:
So why would you recommend somebody have their chart done? Have the chart created?
Speaker 2:
Well, I think you can learn a lot about yourself. Um, and in particular, I know my clients, like the way when I work with cycles, in other words, the planets continued to move or our birth does not stop them from moving so
Gretchen:
Well, as much as we like to believe the earth stopped and were born,
Speaker 2:
Uh, they continue to move around the Zodiac. And then as they touch sensitive spots in a person's chart, uh, then whatever that archetype is, uh, at the moment, uh, comes up on top of the table and that comes to the person's attention. You know, suddenly they find out their partner is having an affair or a, you know, their child is doing drugs and ends up in jail, but something will happen. And it's not always that bad obviously to happen to, you can get a raise, you can. Um, so, um, but what, what happens is it's always interesting to look back at the last time that planet made an aspect with, with whatever is touching now. And the time before that, um, I've seen, um, sometimes you can see sometimes it's more difficult to see the correlation, but, um, you know, it's often, uh, I was just doing a chart, uh, day before yesterday where, um, the woman had, um, uh, started a career, um, at the first time this planet comes across and now she's already retired. And now what she's doing is trying to write a book about that whole time period. So it's kind of like, she started it then, and now it's time to put it into concrete materiality. I've seen things where somebody got married on the first one divorced the second time it came around. Uh, sometimes they're just those direct correlations, but it gives you, it starts to give you, um, a feeling for how cyclical these things are. And is it kind of, I think of life as a spiral. And so we spiral around and we come back to the same thing and then we come back to it again. Uh, and eventually I think if we learn things good enough, not that we ever totally learn anything, um, that this is where we start to, rather than have situations in our own lives. People start to be drawn to us who have the same issues and that we can then reach out and, and, and help them. So we become the wounded healer. It's kind of like we work on our wounds. Good enough, uh, that, uh, we're able to, at some point in life began to, to help others with, with those same issues. So,
Gretchen:
So with having your chart done, it almost seems like it's, you know, and this is the most basic characterization. It's kind of a way to give you like a personal heads up of, you know, some of the periods that are coming in your life, where you may either need to fortify yourself or pay particular attention to particular area of life. It's not necessarily predictive of what's going to happen, but that you should maybe be either prepared to focus or it's going to become the focus so that, you know, you're not necessarily super surprised or blindsided, you know, by events in life.
Speaker 2:
Yeah. And that's a good way to, that's a good way to describe it. Um, I know a lot of times I'll, I'll see, you know, some stressful things coming and, and I have no idea of what it's going to be. You know, I kind of can see the archetypal patterns and, and then when it hits, I'll say, Oh, okay, this is what it is. It helped for me. It helps me, um, accept whatever comes my way. Now, there are some people who, um, it scares the living daylights out of, and it's really hard for them not to be scared. And, um, and I think probably they should stay away from astrology because, um, there is, I do believe there's a thing called self fulfilling prophecy. Yes. Uh, and, uh, we don't want to make ourselves sick worrying about something that's going to come six months from now, but
Gretchen:
inadvertently manifesting something that might not have. Yeah,
Speaker 2:
Exactly. Somebody has to have a, a sense of the, of the symbolic life, what symbols are and, uh, and an appreciation of how, um, something can come along and it can really manifest in so many different ways. Um, uh, you know, a few, a few years ago, I, I was having, uh, a Pluto transit and Pluto was God of the underworld. And usually people don't look forward to Pluto. So I decided that I was going to do the hospice training and work in hospice during that time I thought, and this is, this is one of the things that I think is important is if you get a sense of the symbolism, you can actually provide a container. This is one of the ways I think we can, we can, we have a way to, to, um, turn something so that it it's like the energy wants to express itself. The gods want to speak and you have a way for them to speak. Uh, they're much happier than, you know, if they have to break the door down, they're not happy with, they have to break the door down and break in. But anyway, what happened, what happened with my Pluto thing is my mother developed Alzheimer's. And, uh, so I did spend eight years, but doing hospice work for her, uh, rather than doing it, you know, for the whole community. So, so sometimes you, can't always, you usually, you can't always control, but I think you can mitigate. And, you know, um, it's just that if you think, if you think about the idea that you have all these gods and goddesses inside your head and they're screaming at you and they want to say something, uh, you can give them a voice, keeping a journal during a really difficult time is a good way to give them a voice. Um, and they're, they're much happier if they can say what they want to say.
Gretchen:
Well, yeah. I mean, basically what you're describing is, is what I think most people can, um, ascribe to is just flow. You know, like we kind of know intuitively that you, it's more important and healthy and vital to let any energy flow versus stop it, you know, close it off. And this is just another way to do that is to, like you said, give it a voice, let it flow.