Living Soul Astrology: Your Personality Signs

Your Soul’s development is not something you usually have conscious awareness of, in your everyday experience.

Your everyday experience is shaped, received and perceived through the filters of your personality. The simplest definition of ‘ego-personality’ is ‘when your mind is thinking about itself’. It is how we experience ourselves and who we believe ourselves to be: our tendencies, pre-dispositions, habits, gifts, talents, urges, reactions, beliefs and opinions. It is our overall feeling of ‘there’s a ME in here’ (usually swiftly followed up by an ongoing story of what that ME is all about!).

It is the sum of all our learned behaviour, from this and past lives, our self-image and our self-concept. It is both the mask we show to the world, and the window through which we see and experience the world. All of this might feel very real to us now, yet it has all been picked up along the way and ‘added to’ our underlying true nature.

Our Soul is our underlying true nature, our Divine ‘pure’ essence (in the sense that it cannot be tainted by anything we have ‘collected’). To understand this let’s use water as an example. It is, by nature wet. We can add things to it: it can be cold water, hot water, colored water, salty water etc. However, nothing we add to it will ever change it’s essential wetness. Similarly, our Soul is, by nature goodness and love. Everything else we believe ourselves to be (our ego-personality) has been added to it and, although we experience it as ourselves, it is not our true Self. Our Soul vibration is our purest nature, and this is indicated by our Ascendant.

Your Personality Signs: Your Sun and Your Moon.
In Soul Astrology this collection of habits and reactions is symbolized by your Sun and Moon Signs. They represent your habitual (learned) ways of thinking and acting. The Sun is that aspect of our personality which we are aware of, conscious of: it is in the light. The Moon is that which we are unaware of. It is in the dark: our shadow personality. Our Moon Sign is at least of equal importance to our Sun Sign, if not more so. Because it is our shadow, it is more difficult for us to see, and therefore has a quaity of sneaking up on us and sabotaging our efforts. When we have reacted to somebody unconsciously, and then later regretted it, we have probably been overwhelmed by an emotional reaction that is in alignment with the qualities of our Moon sign.

The learned behavior of our Sun and Moon signs is so powerful, that we identify with it. We feel as though it is ‘who we are’. Our spiritual path involves dis-identifying from these personality traits and reactions by changing our behavior patterns. Recognizing that, while we might have those tendencies and abilities, we are so much more than that. In the case of our Sun Sign, while it is never easy to challenge habits, especially ones reinforced by strong ego-identification, it is made somewhat easier by the fact that these qualities are ‘out in the open’. It makes it easy to see what we are working with.

The Moon sign indicates our innate emotional state and who we become in relating with others. It is often others that recognize our Moon-sign traits, before we do, because it is when others push our buttons that we get to see our shadow-nature. It is revealed to us in our reactions to them. We then have the opportunity to heal these patterns, which is why relationships are such good ‘Soul-training’ grounds!

The Moon’s Nodes.
I read an excellent article recently on the Moon’s nodes – however the author kept referring to me as a Virgo Soul, because I have a Virgo North Node. I am a Cancer Ascendant so the reality is, I am a Cancer Soul, but with a Virgo option. Being more Virgo-like, and developing Virgoan qualities, will support my development as a Cancer Soul.

Your North Node is like a prescription for changing your past-life conditioning. Your Ascendant is your Soul Vibration, while your North Node indicates a possible pathway, that supports your Soul’s development by breaking the patterns of past-life conditioning (your South Node). Your North Node is not your Soul’s essence, but rather a spiritual path of choice.

In describing and defining yourself I invite you to consider using your Ascendant first, so it sounds something like this: “I’m a Cancer Soul with a Gemini/Leo personality” (Cancer Ascendant, Gemini Sun, Leo Moon.) This description sums up our individual spiritual path: the challenge to release identification with our personality traits, and lead with our Soul qualities.

Living Soul Astrology means using our horoscope as a living tool to support our spiritual journey. By thoroughly understanding all the energies at play in our natal chart, understanding what stage of development our Soul is at, and the challenges that our personality signs create, our Astrological profile becomes a valuable tool that supports our process of integrating personality and Soul.

Once we are fully conscious of our Sun and Moon sign behaviors, and are no longer identified with them, our Soul begins to use the qualities of those signs, in the expression of its’ purpose in this lifetime.