Many people ask me when did I start learning astrology, where did I study, what astrologers guided me, so let me share with you how my journey looked like, and how my relationship with astrology flourished into what it is today, from the very beginning (this is going to be a long one!).
It started with a simple love for staring at the stars and at the moon - since I was a very little girl, the sky has simply put a spell on me. I couldn’t not admire the magic created by the stars, it felt like this is what I’ve been doing forever, like the sky was a forgotten home and all I could do to feel its warmth again was to look with a deep longing in my heart. Now that I've started working with past lives and I can identify what kind of longings are attachments from previous existences, I know that my love for the stars comes from years and years of studying them, decoding them, obsessing over their secrets.
I thought astronomy was my path. Astronomy is still something I'm very interested in, and it makes perfect sense - in the past, astrology and astronomy were one and the same. So, the little 12 years old Diana was sure she's going to be an astronomer who works probably at NASA. I took advanced classes, my crush was there as well (his dad was the director of the planetarium - how funny life is), I was preparing for the astro-physics olympics, and at some point I decided this is all too boring for me. It felt lifeless, story-less, magic-less. Something inside me knew there's so much more to study besides calculating trajectories and the gravity of hypothetical planets.
Astrology started to grab my focus after I let go of the pure scientific approach. I got very interested in studying the zodiac sings (mostly my sing - Aquarius), and somewhere before starting high school I've discovered there's a Moon Sign. Then an Ascendant. Then all the other planets. And it all felt so familiar. I was reading books, blogs, and I had the strange feeling that I'm not adding information to my brain, but I'm unlocking different rooms that already had that information there. I didn't need to read something twice, it didn't feel new, I was just remembering astrology.
During those high school years, I did not only study astrology, but got quite obsessed with all kinds of spiritual books explaining the dimensions of the universe, the levels of our auric bodies, reincarnation, the evolutionary steps. And I felt the same, that I'm not adding anything new, just remembering. But I didn't know how to connect all of them, I didn't know how to see this spiritual evolutionary journey in the chart. No one was talking about it, in any book - everything was personality based, "you are like this and like that", which felt off. In my years of self-study, all I found was a psychological approach to understand the personality of the individual and their tendencies. I knew it has to be more than that.
I started studying jungian psychoanalysis while in university, and, approximatively at the same time, I found a private astrology school with live classes in the same city (Helios School, Romania). I had no idea what I'm about to join, I just wanted some guidance. The 5-6 years of self-study left me quite confused, full of information, bits and pieces of knowledge that do not connect well, and no clear ideas of how to fully interpret a chart.
After I got out of my first class, I immediately called my mother and announced "I will become an astrologer". I was so full of confidence, like I carved those words in stone and there was nothing in this world that could stop me. There was no space left for any objection or debate about it. She ended up saying just that she will trust my sense of direction.
The astrologer that founded the Helios school (Zoltan Bartha) was practicing a blend of traditional astrology (very clear and well defined concepts, no modern nonsense, ancient techniques) but he was intensely working with past lives methods. He worked together with mediums who can sense the past life of others, and they made the connections between what the charts shows & what the real past life story is. And it's not just a placement here or there, it's the entire chart. The message of your birth chart is the story of your soul, of what happened before and what you want to continue doing.
Besides learning how to see the past lives in the chart & how to identify karma, it was incredibly satisfying for the information mess I had my brain to witness a teacher delivering the knowledge in an organized manner. It felt like someone taking all my random pieces and putting them in the right place, completing the image of the puzzle. Or like a librarian gathering all my books and arranging them on the shelves of my mind. I felt ready, so ready, to read for others and help them through the wisdom of the chart.
After 3-4 years of constantly attending classes and seminaries, I started to detach from his teachings. My own experience refined my understanding of astrology, I started to sense connections beyond what he taught me - I felt my teacher's limitations. I also felt a deep disappointment after a couple of my friends had readings with him and his interpretations were... the best way to put it is harmful. I would say that learning jungian psychoanalysis made me more aware of the unconscious mind and how it works, how it can be affected, how astrology truly digs inside it. He was a wonderful teacher regarding delivering concepts and techniques, but when you work with a soul, you need to be extremely careful with the ways in which you touch and reshape their unconscious mind.
Jung became the biggest influence in my studies. He was also passionate about astrology and used it in his work with clients. I would recommend to every single person interested in astrology to study Jung as well. Through his work I learned about the connection between our consciousness and divinity, how the minds functions, how we hide so much psychological content in our unconscious mind, how it creates tension there and rules us without us noticing, how our life is coded by that content. And then I just overlapped astrology to that, seeing the chart as a map of your unconscious mind, with pathways to individuation, to divinity.
I should mention that I was studying Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism as well, to understand better the concept of karma and how previous lives affect us, how memories are stores, and why all of this happens.
When someone asks me "where did you learn to see astrology like this?" I really don't know what to say, because all I did was to overlap the basics of astrology with all the other knowledge I gathered from philosophy and psychoanalysis. It all makes so much sense when you put it together!
The last influence I had was Human Design.
It destroyed a lot of what I thought to be true (ex: the mentality that we are here to become better, ascend our current state, evolve into something different), and added so much more (the unconscious chart, the gates, lines, connection between planets and our bodies, explanations for how the energy actually influences us etc). I know many astrologers are reluctant to work with HD because it is not ancient, but I felt its truth in my whole body and I could not ignore it. I do not remember how HD found me (sometime in 2019), it was a rabbit hole that caught my focus and kinda made me feel like I'm cheating on astrology, which is very silly - it literally contains astrology.
After 2 years of self-study I've enrolled in the International School of Human Design and completed the first two modules (third one coming soon). I barely scratched the surface of HD, but I know it's going to be a very important part of my work.
Now I feel I want to take this knowledge and combine it with something deeper, go into shamanic journeys inside the chart, meet the planetary forces themselves, build a relationship with them, connect with them in rituals. I am still not sure how I'll do all of this, but I don't have to. It goes beyond what the mind can understand.
Do you resonate with any part of my journey?
Have you walked a similar path?
I'd love to hear about your own relationship with astrology - feel free to write about it in the forum!
