Chart Synthesis  ✦  Dawn Bodrogi  ✦  The Inner Wheel

An interesting question has come up in my progressions classes: how do you tell a good progression from a bad one? Why is it that one person with Sun square Jupiter by progression wins an award, and another goes into rehab or gets arrested?

The answer is that you can’t view progressions in such a simplistic way. You can’t isolate an aspect. You have to look at the whole picture — houses, house rulerships, what the planets are doing natally, and what role they play in life. Take Saturn going over the Ascendant. It’s a drag, right? A squelching down of individuality, a need to buckle down and grow up. Well, not always. Not if you have a natal 10th house Saturn trine Venus and Mars. And not if Saturn by progression is conjunct Venus and square Jupiter. You just might be entering one of the most creative periods of your life.

The Rule of Three: Natal, Progressions, and Transits

Have you ever anticipated a big transit that fizzled out and did nothing? That’s because transits need to be supported by progressions. Otherwise, their effect will be immediate but fleeting. They aren’t likely to hit deeply into the consciousness unless that planet is crucial natally. The rule of thumb is natal first, progressions second, and transits third.

Transits trigger things in the natal chart — and they are also extremely powerful when they trigger the progressed chart. Many of my clients first come to me for advice when progressed angles are being transited by outer planets. Progressed angles are channels by which spirit and matter interact. An outer planet there can be overwhelming. It can leave us not knowing where to turn. We feel different, but we don’t know how to be different yet.

The Sun, Mars, the transiting Nodes, and even the transiting Moon can trigger something that has been set up and waiting in the progressed chart. If you have transiting Uranus sitting square your progressed Asc/Desc angle, the transiting Sun, Mars, or Nodes hitting Uranus can trigger that T-square for those days — Uranian upheaval in relationships will flare then, though the aspect itself is long-term. Watch and wait for the trigger planets. This tells you when flare-ups are likely to occur.

Beyond Good and Bad: The Non-Duality of Aspects

Is this action good or bad? This is where advanced astrology gets complicated. The thing we struggle through today is the thing that gives us strength tomorrow. Is that good or bad?

Astrologers learn very quickly that the supposedly good planets and aspects are not all they’re cracked up to be. Jupiter on the Descendant brings divorce as often as marriage. Progressed New Moons can bring relationships into our lives — but more often, they herald an unstable period where we don’t know what we’re doing from day to day. This happens because the energy we need to incorporate is too new and unfamiliar.

I’ve been working a lot with Ceres. By progression, she shows her other face: the Ceres of the scorched earth and the scythe. A far cry from the generous harvest goddess we’ve been taught about, Ceres is as prominent in death charts as she is in births and weddings. She often cuts us away from what is nurturing us in a very ruthless manner. In studying astrology, I’m often reminded of the Mark Twain quote: “The problem with most of us is we know too much that ain’t so.”

It’s human nature to want to separate what’s good from what’s bad — but in the end, it’s all a question of perspective. Is it what we need at the given time? We need to get out of the concept of duality and the sense of separation inherent in it. This includes the inner from the outer, the individual from the universal, and me in here versus you out there. The more conscious we are of our connectedness, the easier it becomes to negotiate our world.

The Power of Conscious Awareness

If we win an award under a progression/transit, will it make us happy? Will it open up the doors we desire? Or will it merely be a gift given to us at the culmination of a career? Life can go downhill or uphill afterward — as any number of Academy Award winners will tell you.

Sure, we look for Sun/Venus or Sun/Jupiter — those are usually great aspects. But if my Venus is square Neptune natally, the Sun will also square that Neptune. The Sun is literally a light. It sheds light on anything it touches in the chart. It makes us aware — but it also consolidates experience so that we have to deal with the issues that arise. Sometimes we can’t. Sun/Venus/Neptune may make us aware of our obsessions and addictions. It may also cause us to dig our heads further into the sand because we can’t face what we see.

At the beginning of my career, I practised an astrology that was more predictive. It was what I was taught, and people expected it then. I gave it up because I discovered after a time that it was completely hollow. What was the point of experiencing anything if you don’t understand the meaning behind why it happened?

It also became very clear to me that predictive astrology was most successful with people who were almost entirely unconscious — who lived in a surface way and waited for things to happen to them. Things did, as predicted. This makes us not more conscious, but less. We keep waiting for stuff to happen. We abdicate our responsibility.

Liz Greene writes about this in The Astrology of Fate — which everyone should read. She surmises that astrological predictions were so accurate in the medieval period because relatively few people were conscious of their interior lives. What we do not recognise within ourselves, we have to meet through the external world, through fate. And it’s still true now. The things that people may not get about themselves often meet them in real life form, either through others or through events. We often marry them.

Finding Meaning in Success and Failure

Success is the same challenge as failure — two sides of the same coin. Ask anyone who has become famous: life is still hard, it’s just a different kind of hard.

Plato said, “Time is the moving picture of eternity.” I feel this way about progressions. They are a snapshot, anchored in time and space, of the endless possibility implied in the natal. They are a map of our spiritual progress — where we have been and where we’re heading.

Plotinus, from the Enneads: “Every action has magic as its source, and the entire life of the practical man is bewitchment… a prayer is answered by the mere fact that one part and the other part are wrought into one tone, like a musical string which, plucked at one end, vibrates at the other.” Progressions show us where these vibrations are occurring and allow us to better orchestrate our further actions.

Keanu Reeves once said: “I didn’t used to have a plan… but you have to have a plan. Otherwise, you get caught up in someone else’s plan.” When we don’t act on our own accord, according to the dictates of our own soul’s progress, we get caught up in other people’s actions. We need to be aware. We need to have intention. We need to be conscious of our behaviour and our thoughts.

If there’s a Sun/Jupiter square in the progressed chart aspecting the MC, do we look for accolades to come to us? Or do we use the energy to expand our horizons, culturally and philosophically? Do we wait for the Moon/Venus opposition to bring us a partner? Or do we focus on appreciating ourselves more, and therefore deriving more pleasure from our daily existence? The more inner-directed we become, the more authentic we become — and the more we find we are able to direct our energies into the world at large.

Life itself is a complex negotiation between soaring and falling. The poet Rumi understood this — how freedom is achieved not by avoiding the fall, but by falling so completely that wings are given. Progressions show us where that falling is occurring. The rest is ours to navigate.

Go deeper

The Foundations Book by Dawn Bodrogi

For a deeper understanding of how progressions, transits, and the natal chart work together as a unified picture — Dawn’s Foundations Book is the essential companion.

→ The Foundations Book — all ebook retailers

What we do not recognise within ourselves, we have to meet through the external world — through fate.