Who gets to tell us who we are?
That's the question of this final week of the Sun in Leo. The last ten degrees of Leo bring us into questions of authority, challenge, and what it takes to hold our ground.
As I sit with that I wonder about personal authority: our authority over our own understanding of ourselves.
Because we are told who we are all the time. By our families. Our teachers. Our partners. Our culture. By diagnoses and personality systems. Even astrologers :-). And, increasingly, by AI.
Some of what we are told may be wrong. Some of it may be astonishingly accurate. But even the most brilliant interpretation has a limitation: someone else arrived at it.
We still have to discover whether it is true for us.
Know Thyself
The ancient injunction at Delphi feels particularly alive here.
Not because knowing ourselves means arriving at some final, fixed answer about who we are. Quite the opposite. The more honestly we inquire, the more willing we may need to be to question what we thought we knew.
This is one reason I keep moving more deeply toward experiential astrology. This week I got to approach it from two directions.
From the Symbol to the Personal
A few days ago, I gathered with a small group of fellow experiential astrology practitioners to try out some exercises exploring the Sun.
In the very first exercise, I asked a question. Everyone had an answer. Then I facilitated an experience that allowed them to embody that question. Every person reversed their answer.
Were they wrong the first time? Not necessarily. Their minds had offered one piece of information. Their bodies and present-moment experience offered another. Two instruments of knowing.
We continued from there, making room for experimentation, conversation, review, and deepening. It was fascinating—and deeply moving—to watch people honestly query their own experience, fearlessly reverse positions, and laugh at the very different directions their ways of knowing sometimes took them.
They weren’t only learning about their Suns. They were learning about how they know themselves.
From the Personal to the Symbol
Then yesterday, I gathered with several people who completed the Jupiter in Cancer Life Review I'd offered a couple of months ago. This time, we moved in the opposite direction: from the personal to the symbolic.
Instead of beginning with an astrological definition of Jupiter in Cancer and looking for evidence that it was true, we began with their lives: What actually happened? What did they experience? What patterns emerged when they looked back?
Then we asked their lives to teach us something about the astrological symbolism of Jupiter moving through Cancer in two different zodiacs.
Not: Here is what the astrology says. Where does your life fit?
But: What does your life show us? And what might that teach us about the astrology?
In one room, astrology became a doorway through which people could discover something about themselves.
In the other, their lived experience became a way of questioning and deepening the astrology itself.
That, to me, is experiential astrology, or living astrology.
An astrologer can offer language, symbols, possibilities, patterns, questions. We can help sift through the thousands of things we have been told we are and explore what the sky illuminates and reflects.
But our experience remains an integral part of the conversation.
Belonging to Ourselves
And perhaps this is where sovereignty begins: By becoming increasingly intimate with ourselves—learning how we know, questioning what we think we know, discovering what fits, and allowing what we discover to become embodied over time.
Then someone else’s interpretation does not have to threaten us. It can inform us. Challenge us. Even change us without separating us from ourselves.
Perhaps that is the question for these final days of Leo.
Not: How fiercely can we defend who we are?
But: How deeply can we know ourselves—so that when who we are is questioned, we still belong to ourselves?
If you’d like to explore your own chart this way—not simply receiving an interpretation, but using astrology as guided inquiry into your own life—you can book a session with me here: Book a Reading
With love,
Meghna
A note on sources: This week’s reflections on Leo III draw from Kira Ryberg's The 36 Decans, and Austin Coppock’s 36 Faces.
“Know thyself” is one of the Delphic maxims associated with the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.
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Living Astrology
Move beyond interpretation. Use astrology as guided inquiry and explore what the symbols reveal through your own lived experience.
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