Understanding astrology as a psychospiritual tool
Astrological counselling combines traditional astrological symbolism with therapeutic conversation, self-reflection, and personal growth.
Rather than predicting the future or telling you who you are, astrology can provide a language for exploring patterns, strengths, challenges, relationships, and life transitions. Your birth chart becomes a starting point for curiosity rather than a set of rules you must follow.
Together, we explore how the themes reflected in your astrological chart connect with your lived experiences, helping you better understand yourself and the choices in front of you.
What is astrological counselling?
Astrological counselling can help with:
- Identity exploration
- Life transitions
- Relationship patterns
- Career planning
- Personal growth
- Meaning and purpose
- Major decisions
- Self-understanding
- Spiritual exploration
- Grief and life changes
- Creativity and self-expression
Many people seek astrological counselling when they find themselves asking:
- “Why do I keep repeating this pattern?”
- “What am I missing about myself?”
- “What direction am I moving toward?”
- “Why does this period of my life feel so challenging?”
- “What strengths am I overlooking?”
What happens in a session?
Sessions are collaborative, reflective, and conversational.
We begin with your questions, concerns, or areas of curiosity. Using your birth chart as a framework, we explore the themes, tensions, strengths, and opportunities that seem most relevant to your life right now.
Some sessions focus on a specific issue like relationships, career decisions, life transitions, family dynamics, or identity questions. Others focus on broader self-exploration and understanding.
After your first session, we can incorporate other techniques like transits, solar return charts, secondary progressions, asteroids, annual profections, zodiacal releasing, solar arc directions, or any other astrological technique that interests you.
You do not need any prior knowledge of astrology to benefit from the process, but astrologers, astrology students, and astrology enthusiasts are very welcome to benefit from incorporating astrology into their therapy!
Astrology as a tool for self-reflection:
I view astrology as a symbolic language rather than a system of absolute truths. Just as dreams, myths, stories, and metaphors can help us understand ourselves, astrological symbols can offer new perspectives on familiar struggles and strengths.
Sometimes a chart highlights tensions you’ve already noticed. Sometimes it provides language for experiences you’ve struggled to describe. Sometimes it invites questions you may not have considered before.
The value of astrological counselling isn’t just in the chart itself, but also from the conversation it opens up.
My approach to astrological counselling:
My approach to astrological counselling is grounded, collaborative, and trauma-informed.
Rather than making predictions or telling you what your future holds, I use astrology as a reflective tool that can support self-awareness, meaning-making, and personal growth.
This means:
- Honoring your lived experience above any interpretation
- Exploring possibilities rather than certainties
- Encouraging curiosity over rigid conclusions
- Integrating emotional insight and self-reflection
- Supporting your own intuition and decision-making
You remain the expert on your life!
What change can look like:
The biggest goal in astrological counselling is moving you toward spiritual wellness.
Spiritual wellness recognizes an appreciation for the depth and expanse of life and the natural forces that exist in the universe. It reflects one’s search for meaning and purpose, as well as the value of human existence in general.
I believe that it is important to ponder one’s purpose, to be open to the ideologies of others, and to live each day in a way that is consistent with one’s values and beliefs. An individual’s personal and deliberate search for meaning and purpose can be characterized by a peaceful harmony between their feelings, emotions, and the rough and rugged stretches of their spiritual wellness journey.
Through astrology, you might encounter feelings of curiosity, pleasure, joy, comfort, bliss, and happiness while simultaneously experiencing feelings of fear, doubt, confusion, concern, despair, disappointment, and even dislocation. This is
normal and natural; these feelings and emotions are all important components to one’s exploration of astrology (or whichever path toward spiritual wellness one chooses).
Astrological counselling can help you feel confident in your chosen beliefs, honor the choices of others, seek understanding, and recognize the multicultural, diverse nature of our planet. Your actions can become more consistently in alignment with your values, and you can develop a strong worldview.
Is astrological counselling right for me?
Astrological counselling may be a good fit if:
- You’re curious about astrology as a tool for self-exploration
- You’re navigating a major life transition
- You enjoy reflective, archetypal, and meaning-oriented conversations
- You’re interested in understanding recurring life patterns
- You’re looking for a different lens through which to view your experiences
You do not need to “believe” in astrology to find value in the process. Many people simply appreciate having another framework for exploring themselves and their lives.
Getting started.
Astrology can be like a roadmap to your life.
Astrological counselling offers a space to slow down, reflect, and explore the themes that are shaping your journey. Whether you’re facing a crossroads, seeking greater self-understanding, or simply curious about what your chart might reveal, this work can help you approach yourself with greater awareness and compassion.
If you’re interested in exploring your chart and your story together, I’d be happy to support you.
• How astrological counselling works •
The basics of what to expect.
1. Free Consult
A 20-minute video call. We get explicit consent to incorporate astrology into your sessions.
2. Intake
A full session to map your birth chart, history, current life, therapy goals, and what safety looks like for you.
3. Sessions
Weekly or biweekly sessions following your unique plan to connect deeply with your chart and life.
4. Reassess
We check in regularly about how your life is changing, and modify direction and pace to get you great results.
Resources and Tools.
Whether we’re doing counselling together or not, you may find these resources and tools valuable.
This worksheet is used in Nonviolent Communication (NVC) to help people better express a whole range of emotional states. They can also help people more easily connect to what they need in the moment.
Internationally recognized clinical psychologist, EMDR expert, and author Laurel Parnell, PhD demonstrates a simple bilateral tapping technique to calm yourself down when you feel anxious.
A long-form podcast discussion about incorporating astrology into psychotherapy, and explaining what it looks like to use astrology as a tool in a therapeutic context, with astrologers Shawna Marie McGrath and Chris Brennan.
Frequently asked questions.
What is a birth chart?
A birth chart is a 2D image of the sky at the moment you were born. To different people, it can represent your personality, the story of your life, or an important user manual to yourself.
The way I use astrology, the birth chart maps out the 12 tropical zodiac signs (Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pisces), the 7 traditional planets (Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn), the 3 modern planets (Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto), and the 4 directions (ascendant, descendant, midheaven, and imum coeli) using whole sign houses, for the moment of your birth.
You are welcome to request asteroids, other chart placements, timing techniques, and any house system you prefer. However, it is not require that you even know what any of this means!
Do I need to know my exact time of birth?
No, you are welcome to incorporate astrology into your personal spiritual practice and your therapy sessions with me, even if you do not know your exact birth time.
However, without the time of day you were born, we won’t be able to calculate your rising sign, descendant, midheaven, imum coeli, or house cusps. Still, there are a lot of techniques you can still use, like aspects, planets in signs, transits, and more.
When you let me know you are interested in astrological counselling, I will ask for your birthdate, time, and location, as well as send you an extra permission form to consent to astrological counselling.
Is astrology an evidence based practice?
Astrology is not an evidence based practice for psychotherapy, and as such, within psychological settings, it falls under the category of a spiritual practice. Therefore, the use of astrology within a psychotherapeutic setting is considered a form of spiritually integrated psychotherapy.
What is somatics?
Somatic therapy is a generic term for any therapy that prioritizes the body: how it feels, moves, and responds to emotions. If it’s the right fit for you, somatic therapy can support you with chronic pain and chronic pain, as well as anxiety, depression, CPTSD, or trauma.
Somatic therapy is a practice that can be incorporated into other therapy models, and honestly makes most therapy work better. That’s why I always bring in somatic resourcing tools to the treatment plan as early as possible.
You can learn more about somatics here.
How do you integrate nature?
I am trained as a Certified Forest & Nature Therapy Guide. This means that, if it’s a good fit for you, I love to take walk-and-talk sessions on good weather days. Being outside in a quiet, green area is naturally supportive to human healing.
I also offer intensives and community events which lead you through quiet nature invitations. These are amazing for slowing down and quieting the mind and body, and they are also joyful, connective, and fun to experience with family and friends. If you are interested in a nature therapy intensive, let me know during your treatment planning, or email me anytime at milo@therapywithmilo.com
How do you integrate personal spirituality?
Spirituality is intensely personal, and always something that is client-led in my therapy sessions. Many trauma survivors, especially those who have experienced religious trauma or cult abuse, have a lot of protection up around the idea of spirituality in general, and that makes so much sense! Spirituality is never mandatory, and atheists are extremely welcome in my practice.
At the same time, many people experience a lot of relief and transformation connecting to something “bigger” or something that can bring meaning to the pain that they have been through, and spiritual or cultural practices are one way this can be done.
Many of my clients identify as pagan, witches, astrologers, tarot readers, or mystics as part of their path toward reclaiming spiritual agency after a lifetime of abuse or neglect. Others connect to their cultural roots, folklore, ancestors, or spirits of the land. Still others dive deep into a large religious tradition like Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or Hinduism, whether or not it was the tradition they were raised in. I am trained in ways to utilize your personal spiritual beliefs as a powerful resource in your therapy, as well as support you in using them in session to make therapy more effective.
Feel free to ask me how we can adapt this practice to your needs.
What if I am in crisis right now?
If you are having thoughts of suicide or a huge emotional reaction that you are not sure how to respond to, call one of the numbers below. You can also call if you have a loved one who you think needs help, but aren’t sure what to do. Here are some options:
- Brite Line 1-844-702-7483. Edmonton’s LGBTQ+ mental health and wellness helpline, available 24/7. Answered by trained LGBTQ+ volunteers and allies. If a staff member is not available to answer, your call will be directed to the Edmonton Distress Line, 211 or 988 dependent on your needs.
- Distress Line: 780-482-4357. Trained volunteers respond to individuals needing emotional support, information, and/or referrals. Uses call tracing and will call 911 and/or police if caller is at high risk to imminently harm self or others.
- Alberta’s One Line for Sexual Violence: 1-866-403-8000. Talk, text, and chat service that provides emotional support, information, and referral to anyone who has experienced or been impacted by sexual violence. Uses call tracing and will call 911 and/or police if caller is at high risk to imminently harm self or others. Available 9am-9pm.
- Access 24/7: 780-424-2424. Run by Alberta Health Services, available 24/7. A central hub for urgent services and centralized intake for all AHS-funded mental health services. Available to concerned friends and family. Interactions with Access 24-7 appear on your health record. Collaborates with police if there is concern that a person requires hospitalization due to high, imminent risk to self or others.
Begin when you are ready.
A free 20-minute consultation is a chance to ask questions and see if we’re a fit. No pressure and no commitment.