Unleash your myth
Life is pretty intense. It moves quickly, sometimes quite erratically—with a notification here and an alert there. I admit, I often forget to stop and smell the roses.
Even as an astrologer, I sometimes forget to look up at the sky. Well...being in New York City doesn't make that easy. The buildings and lights of downtown Manhattan have become my cosmos, at least for now.
But I feel lucky. I first stepped into the astrological worldview while living in the dreamy landscape of Northern California. I remember the evening my skepticism about astrology began to dissolve. I was at a retreat with my graduate program in beautiful Big Sur, at the Esalen Institute. I was soaking in the hot springs on a cliff under a brilliant night sky, the Milky Way magnificently lit above me.
Even now, I get goosebumps remembering that moment—it was profoundly mythic. I felt that something deeper was unfolding beneath, above, and through me. In that instant, I knew the mystery of life was bigger than what my small brain could contain. How could I possibly declare, "Astrology is not real"? The rest, as they say, is history.
The gift astrology—specifically archetypal astrology—has given me is more than a rich vocabulary for understanding myself and the world. It's given me the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to unleash my myth.
But what do I mean by "myth"? A myth is both fact and fiction. It’s fictional in the sense that it’s expressed through symbolic stories and characters that may never have existed. But it's fact in the sense that it carries truths about human life that are as real now as they were thousands of years ago.
Those truths live in patterns we can trace across centuries and cultures. They appear in our art and literature, in the dreams we remember, and in the recurring themes of our own lives.
Your personal myth is the unique way these patterns take shape through you. Once you see it, you recognize yourself as the main character in a story that’s been unfolding since before you were born.
From there, the question isn’t if you’ll live your myth—it’s how boldly you’ll step into it.
In Mystery,
Somya Desai