Astrology and Self-Awareness:
Astrology for Understanding the Instinctive Self
Desire, Avoidance, Instinct, and Suffering
Written By: Balraj Persaud
This article explores astrology and self-awareness through natal symbolism: a structured starting point for examining how desire, avoidance, and self-protection organize a person’s experience, especially under pressure and stress. When these instinctive patterns remain unnoticed, they can (continue to) produce recurring obstacles in particular domains of life (e.g., career, relationships, finances, health, etc.), effectively turning the search for security into a source of further suffering. Astrology and self-awareness do not eliminate difficulty, but can make possible a more deliberate response (and, as such, a more meaningful participation in life).
Astrology as Self-Awareness Tool:
The Importance of Discovering Your Instinctive Self
All too often, we avoid engaging with those things that trigger our unwanted thoughts and painful emotions (such as fear, shame, etc.). And we don’t often appreciate how many of our problems are a result of us avoiding our difficult thoughts and painful emotions (and avoiding the people/situations that produce these difficult thoughts and emotions). In short, our difficult thoughts and emotions are determining so much of our lives precisely because we avoid them.
Balraj’s astrological insights are not predictions about whether someone will one day have/do/become whatever they desire or fear. His approach begins with the recognition that, under pressure, a person’s perceiving, thinking, feeling, and acting can become organized around what feels most urgent to protect—e.g., status, competence, certainty, belonging, autonomy/self-sufficiency, security/safety, etc.
The natal chart’s symbols provide a structured starting point for inquiry, an initial orientation to a pressing situation that allows Balraj to form a hypothesis about any tensions, motivations, or (protective) strategies that may be shaping one’s response in/to their situation. The chart is not treated as a kind of “scientific” personality test, and/or a diagnosis, and certainly not as a map of fixed fate. The focus remains the situation itself producing/re-producing one’s challenges. A reading examines what happens when this situation recurs, including what becomes difficult to tolerate, what explanation becomes convincing, what actions are easier (and which are postponed), and what a person may be trying to secure/prevent. The objective is to make the patterns that are determining/organizing one’s engagement in/with a live problem more available to awareness, so that their next action is less dictated by the need for immediate security (that is, an unthinking return to habit without concern for consequence).
But your instinctive self is not just a repository of destructive and self-sabotaging habits. It is also the source of intrinsic motivations, values and strengths, but also needs and standards—and of the tensions that can arise when these pull us in different directions. Unacknowledged needs and impossible standards motivate us to fill up (or destroy) our sense of “inner lack” with something in the world, and so “inner lack” will likely be inscribed in whatever we manage to accomplish: we strive to add to our existence (status, achievement, fame, money) or subtract our deficiencies (weaknesses, trauma, sins, deficiencies)—hoping that if we add/subtract enough, we will finally be invulnerable to the unpredictable sources of discomfort and never have to feel particular feelings again (incompetence, shame, fear, etc.). But this desire to find permanent security actually reinforces the sense of incompleteness we are trying to eliminate.
However, our intrinsic motivations and strengths give us to a different possibility: meaningful engagement. This is an engagement with the world that isn’t based on self-aggrandizement or the desperate need to prove one’s existence. This type of engagement—especially a supported one—can filter and focus our attention and calls us beyond our personal compulsions, anxieties and rumination (i.e., beyond our self-obsession, our lack of self-worth, our need for permission, etc.) towards more connection, more direct presence, and more freedom. It is not about controlling the future—it is not motivated by a demand for certainty—but about participating fully in the present. It is the shift from trying to become self-sufficient to realizing you are irrevocably embedded in a world that exceeds you. (Read more about this in our 750-word summary of Yoga.)
But this capacity for engagement is narrowed when a situation is lived (i.e, experienced immediately as) threatening, exposing, or intolerable. Under pressure, familiar protective patterns arrive before reflective judgment: the impulse to control, appease, withdraw, avoid conflict, seek reassurance, etc.. This is one’s “instinctive self”, which is not fixed inner identity, but rather the way perception, thought, feeling, and action can become organized around immediate and unthinking self-protection. When this pattern becomes more visible, it is easier to work with oneself.
To be sure, “attention” isn’t simply one faculty among many that shapes your experience, but is the whole of your experience. What you attend to, moment to moment, is effectively what your life consists of. Most of the time, this attention is not something you’re choosing—it is, rather, habitually and automatically occupied, absorbed in/by recurring instinctive patterns (a need for security, a fear of exposure, a craving to be seen a certain way, etc.) that operate beneath conscious awareness and determine such things as what you notice, what you overlook, and what feels urgent—including whatever you [think you] “chose” to think about. The capacity to notice this—to see that your attention has been consumed by a particular pattern, rather than being unconsciously possessed by this pattern—is the shift that makes a different response possible. This differs from approaches that jump to [attempting to] install a new focus, narrative, or technique from the outside—which can often further obfuscate any underlying issues by reinforcing craving; in an awareness-based approach, nothing is added—what was already organizing your attention is simply made visible. Becoming aware of your attentional habits is not a technique added on top of your life, but a change in your relationship to what was already happening.
Of course, this—becoming aware of our instinctive self—is not very compelling to the person who believes their fulfillment will be the direct result of eliminating their inadequacies—that fulfillment is unavailable to their current [flawed] self, that their potential self is too much for their current self. While a drive born of the need for invulnerability can produce tremendous material results, the person motivated by a drive for invulnerability will feel that no success is ever enough. Expecting astrology to heal some situation in your life—or using it as an excuse for not taking action—only reinforces the problem of avoidance. But deepening your self-connection allows you to filter and focus your attention and energy on the things that make your life path most meaningful, without allowing fear and insecurity to dictate every response. In this way, attention and energy are less consumed by a need for things that you think will make you feel complete. Instead, you may begin to recognize how abandoning the pursuit of self-existence might lead to a more creative, connected, and meaningful life.
Balraj’s approach is phenomenological and interpretive rather than predictive. It does not depend on metaphysical claims about planetary energies, cosmic influence, etc. that determines a person’s character or future. No astrology jargon, cosmological (or ontological) commitment, or religious belief is required. The conversation concerns the person’s actual experience and the specific problem that motivated them to pursue a reading.
Astrology, in this approach, does not establish facts about personality or fate, and/or prove the source of a problem, and/or determine the “right” course of action. Rather, it can bring a different order of questions to a situation—particularly where a person’s usual account has become overly rehearsed, rationalized, or closed—and it can clarify a genuine tension in the situation and makes a more deliberate response possible. It is, of course, not therapy, crisis support, medical or mental-health diagnosis, legal or financial advice—or a substitute for personal judgment and responsibility.
And we don’t often appreciate how many of our problems are a result of us avoiding our difficult thoughts and painful emotions (and avoiding the people/situations that produce these difficult thoughts and emotions). In short, our difficult thoughts and emotions are determining so much of our lives precisely because we avoid them.
Astrology and Self-Awareness for Relationships: Self-Awareness for Stronger Relationships
Your Instinctive Self in Relationships
Improving the quality of your most intimate relationships might be the most difficult thing that you ever do. It requires that you open up to experiencing some of the most challenging aspects of yourself—and it requires meeting another person who may be unready or unwilling to be vulnerable when you are.
Your most intimate relationships are subject to the anxieties and compulsions of your instinctive self. They are also where tensions between intimacy and self-protection, dependence and control, or desire and fear can become especially difficult to ignore. In fact, your instinctive self affects your capacity for connection in all of your relationships (not just so-called “love” relationships). To be sure, this does not mean that relationship difficulty can be reduced to one partner’s patterns; a relationship is lived between two people: each person’s fears, demands, habits (around, say, withdrawal, defensiveness, or need for reassurance) bear on the relationship and on relationship conflict—and the compatibility of these instincts can reduce/exacerbate conflict.
You may very well recognize your past relationship mistakes and try to actively and consciously avoid them. Similarly, you may very well recognize the importance of (and try to create/strengthen) such aspects as commitment, communication, trust, emotional intelligence, paying attention to each other, eye contact, etc. However, trying to actively make yourself do any of these things is rarely successful. Our instinctive self is often much too strong—it arrives on the scene before we get there, so to speak, especially in times of relationship conflict—and we’re left regretting our actions again. We might even blame the other person (or look for more relationship advice) instead of developing self awareness and finally look at our own (habitual) selves and self-sabotaging behaviours in relationships.
The importance of self-awareness in relationships is profound. If the instinctive self arrives before our conscious self (as it usually does), the constructiveness of our conversation (and the life of our relationship) will be determined by our automatic thoughts, feelings, and behaviours (e.g., compulsions, anxieties, triggers, desires, etc.). Relationship conflict does not merely reveal an inner pattern that exists independently of the other person. Each person’s fear, demand, withdrawal, or defensiveness changes the situation to which the other responds. The relevant question is less, “What is wrong with me?”, or even, “Are we compatible?” but is something like, what pattern is being created between us, what is each person trying to secure or avoid, and what would it take to interrupt that pattern without abandoning the relationship—or oneself?
But change doesn’t require magic. It requires awareness of our situation and of our instinctive, habitual, “pre-reflective” self. Our habitual self strongly shape how we perceive and respond—for better or for worse—unless we become more aware of it. Becoming aware of it doesn’t mean destroying it, but rather being open to it and being able to sit with it without running to a destructive habit (to avoid the discomfort of looking at aspects of ourselves we’d rather repress). Awareness can create more room to notice and choose among possible responses; this gives us more opportunity to follow our inspirations (the things we “love” or about which we are abundantly curious) without the fear, doubt, insecurity, and self-sabotaging behavior.
In astrology, birth chart compatibility/synastry readings are often sought in the hope of determining whether two people are “compatible.” For Balraj, the charts of both partners are not used to arrive at a verdict on whether a relationship should continue, nor are they used as a substitute for observing how two people actually engage in responsibility, intimacy, conflict, repair, etc.. Rather, the symbols of an astrology chart can provide a structured starting point for examining the patterns each person may bring to this relationship (and to relationships in general). A reading cannot establish that two people are “destined” for harmony/conflict; rather, the value of a reading lies in whether it helps make visible the habitual strategies through which a relationship has become challenging.
In times of relationship conflict, if the instinctive self arrives before our conscious self (as it usually does), the constructiveness of our conversation (and the life of our relationship) will be determined by our automatic thoughts, feelings, and behaviours (e.g., compulsions, anxieties, triggers, desires, etc.).
Astrology, Self-Awareness, and our Search for Happiness and Fulfillment
“Suffering” and Self-Discovery in Eastern Philosophy
Our search for permanent peace is meant to remedy the basic problem of a gnawing sense of ‘incompleteness’, or emptiness/lack, et cetera. The basic sense of incompleteness produces a basic fear of being/becoming nothing and/or a sense of emptiness that weighs on the individual (“I’m not enough” or “there’s something missing/bad/shameful in me [that must be expelled]”).
In secular contexts, this search for permanent peace manifests in a number of quests, including (but not limited to) unassailable psychological health, romantic love, financial freedom, status/power, etc. The problem of suffering is produced and re-produced by this basic yearning for an unconditional sense of security that would relieve one of their suffering/anxiety. The independent sense of self is seeking a more “weighty” individual existence—more substance, more real-ness—to eliminate, once and for all, its unrelenting sense of vulnerability/incompleteness. This can appear as the hope that sufficient success, love, wealth, approval, psychological health, insight, or self-improvement will finally make vulnerability manageable.
In this quest for permanent relief, the self inherits and develops habits to avoid whatever produces feelings of vulnerability—painful emotions, unwanted thoughts, and the people/situations that produce these emotions/thoughts. These habits are rooted in self-interested motivations that operate beneath the level of our reflective awareness. These self-interested motivations affect what we perceive, think, feel, and how we act—whether we like it or not, thus closing off domains of possible experience. In other words, this basic yearning is the origin of habits that prevent full engagement in/with life.
Moderating this basic yearning and its attendant habits is essentially a process of re-habituation, un-doing, forgetting. Processes of re-habituation require awareness and courage—a willingness to actively turn toward one’s own lived experience and be open to noticing something new (without any commitments to what said noticing might/will look/feel/be like). It requires openness—an openness as close to ‘unconditional’ as possible.
But this task is not purely an intellectual one; studying the depths of your inner life/world alone is insufficient to live freely. Complete engagement in/with life requires confronting the anxious uncertainty of opening the heart, opening to those situations in one’s life/world that one is inclined to avoid. For this reason, classical eastern spiritual traditions provided practices for this primary re-habituation, practices that are centred on being able to sit with our troubling thoughts and emotions rather than compulsively trying to avoid them—and trying to remain in control of (and in possession of) our situation.
As we learn to sit with our disturbing thoughts and emotions, we become less compelled by them, less attached to them, and more free to creatively explore what had hitherto been concealed by them. As we learn to sit with our disturbing thoughts and emotions, our future is less bound to/by our past. And as we learn to sit with our disturbing thoughts and emotions, we can see our whole self.
This approach to astrology is not offered as an answer to suffering or as a path to permanent security. It is one symbolic means of bringing a person’s relation to a particular situation into clearer view. This approach to astrology is not concerned with mining a chart for already-established facts about the future or with prescribing magical “remedies” that promise to make difficulty disappear without a person’s participation. Rather, the chart provides a starting point for examining how a live situation may already be organized around the effort to secure oneself against uncertainty, shame, failure, loss, incompleteness, etc.. The point, in other words, is not to replace one form of control (the quest for invulnerability) with a more sophisticated explanation of oneself. It is to recognize when the search for (final) security has begun to narrow one’s life, and to help one return to concrete forms of participation through which a more meaningful freedom becomes possible.
Of course, while we always remain open to miracles, we don’t rely on them; if all we do is wait for a miracle, we run the risk of spending years feeling like we’ve not made any real progress or that we’ve simply been wasting time.
A private reading with Balraj begins with a pressing question or situation rather than a request for general chart description. The focus remains the person’s actual circumstances and the tensions that may be shaping how their pressing question or situation is being interpreted. Sometimes a reading brings a practical direction or next step into clearer view. At other times, it reveals a deeper tension, recurring pattern, or neglected possibility beneath the immediate concern—including what the situation may be asking of the person. In either case, the aim is not certainty or reassurance, but a more deliberate and meaningful response.
Private Astrology Readings Available
Beginning January 2027
A limited number of non-predictive, non-palliative private astrology readings are available for senior leaders and professionals seeking clarity in personal, professional, or spiritual inflection points.
Readings do not centre on the terms of the chart (e.g., sun sign, moon sign, 6th/10th house, Saturn transits, mercury retrograde, etc.), but focus directly on the situation at hand—outside of familiar narratives, rationalized justifications, and intellectual defences that may be obscuring underlying themes or patterns. The purpose is not generic chart interpretation, prediction, or reassurance, but a distinctive perspective that may clarify a deeper tension, a practical direction, or both.
Balraj’s readings offer a distinctive perspective on a pressing question, including the very instincts, attachments, and tensions that may be producing this question (and whether one’s attention is perhaps consumed by the kinds of concerns that more readily reproduce one’s frustrations rather than resolve them). A reading may bring a practical direction into focus, reveal a deeper pattern beneath the immediate concern, or both.
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