Your Ascendant: The Mask You Wear

This is the very first workshop in a series I’m creating called ‘Astrology for the People’. It’s astrology for people who don’t necessarily want to be astrologers but are astro curious. It’s astrology you can use to understand yourself better right now.

For this series I was drawn to begin at the very beginning ~ with your Ascendant, the beginning of your birth chart and the beginning of you. It’s an ambitious place to start but it’s an area of our birth chart that I’m so intrigued by and my clients are blown away by too. I can tell you that I was not at all excited to learn years ago during my first astrology class that I have a Capricorn Ascendant. It was a bit of a downer. But it actually now makes sense to me. I have four planets in Virgo, four very strong and intense energies, and after getting to know my Capricorn Ascendant I can see how my Ascendant looks after me and keeps me safe, probably more than I give it credit for.

I really hope that by the end of this workshop you’ll have a sense of how your Ascendant works for you, how it protects you, and how it props you up when you need a helping hand.

So, here goes…

Your First Taste of Life

Your Ascendant describes the astrological energy you were literally born into, where you ‘hatched’ into the world.

By using your exact birth time to create your birth chart we know which zodiac sign was at the easternmost point of the horizon when you were born. All of the planets and energies rise at this easternmost point of the horizon. The birth chart you received from me with your Ascendant underlined in green is the astrological energy that was ascending at the time you were born. This energy is your ‘ascending’ sign, the energy that was on the rise at the time of your birth. The energy that you are ‘rising’ towards for this lifetime. (The horizontal line that appears across the middle of your birth chart is the actual horizon.)

Your Filter

The zodiac sign on your Ascendant describes the energy you filter everything through, because it was your very first taste of life and it is what you ‘know’. And because what we ‘know’ is how we feel safe, it then becomes your protective mask and you draw from this energy source whenever you experience a new situation, begin a new task, meet new people, get a new offer ~ whenever you experience a ‘first’. It is not the version of ‘you’ that you share with people you know well but the version people experience when they first meet you and during the early stages of getting to know each other. It’s like a persona that you instinctively draw from when you’re not completely sure of yourself and ready to show your true colours.

After a little while as you get to know each other and you begin to develop trust, you will drop your ‘guard’ (your Ascendant!) little by little as you reveal your true Self. If we were to reveal our true Self at first meeting we would potentially burn each other (not literally, of course) because our Sun is very hot ~ our essence is very true ~ and we both need some protection at this point.

Unlike the Sun or the Moon, Mars, Venus etc, our Ascendant isn’t a planet ~ it’s an energy, like a vibration or a frequency. We’re so familiar with this vibration that it becomes both our safe place and our orientation for life. Other people feel this frequency too!

Interestingly, if we receive criticism about our Ascendant it doesn’t bother us too much. Not like it would if our Sun (our true Self) was criticised, or how it might hurt our feelings if our Moon (our emotional Self) wasn’t supported. The Ascendant is a part of us but it isn’t who we are ultimately here to be. We can learn to identify when our Ascendant is operating but we can’t really stop it from kicking in as it’s so instinctual. What we can do is respond to it and have awareness about it. When we use it to ‘armour up’ and when we use it to ‘Transformer’ up as the Brené Brown quote goes. I refer to this at the end of the recording. The quote goes like this:

Try to be aware of your armour…when you feel vulnerable try not to Transformer up… Very different things

Your Energetic Life Lens

Like a filter, our Ascendant becomes our life lens. The lens through which we perceive the world. All of our experiences are filtered through this lens. So for you does that lens look like rose-tinted glasses or Coke bottle lenses? Are you a glass half full or a glass half empty kind of person?

How does your life lens colour your world? What does it look out for? And how does it affect your decision-making? Do you throw yourself in with gusto at new experiences or do you need time to assimilate your perceptions? Perhaps you potentially shut yourself off from new experiences because they feel too hard (hello, Capricorn Ascendant!). There are so many ways to filter our experiences and respond to life.

The entirety of our birth chart will inform how we respond to all of our experiences, so just note that when I’m talking about the individual Ascendant signs in the workshop recording I am describing each Ascendant generally and your unique birth chart will add more information about how you and your Ascendant respond to the situations you encounter in your life.

Enjoy xxx