Ziv: Hey, I’m Ziv and this is “On the Journey”. Every week “On the Journey” expose the intersections of wellness, spiritual inquiry, mental health, personal growth, and purposeful living through the eyes of the people we interview.

And today, I’m happy to host Dasha.

Dasha, tell us about your journey please.

Dasha: Sure, Ziv. And it’s nice to meet you, so I’m an astrologer and I’m also a mystical worker, and the way I approach astrology is — also has a very therapeutic bent. I myself come from Toronto, Canada, but originally I’m a Russian. The way my journey began is that, first of all, I was always interested in studying human nature, but the main focus for me and attraction was also relationships and the dynamics between men and women. The interesting dynamic that they formed together. And ever since I was quite young, I believe I was about 13 when I started getting interested in astrology.

Ziv: Wow.

Dasha: I wanted to yeah, I was quite young. You know, those professions where you just feel so passionate and drawn to something. I think that’s what happened to me.

Ziv: Do you remember what was there at 13 that attracted you to astrology?

Dasha: Yes, I do, actually. I remember, some of us therapists, we can be a little bit more of the introverted type. But behind the mind of an introvert, there’s always a very interesting investigative personality, a very high level of curiosity. So I think for me, as a teenager growing up, there was this interesting fusion between using the Internet and the power of technology and also using, the teenager’s sort of detective mentality where I wanted interesting and powerful answers to my questions.

And these answers, I noticed, were found when I looked at the different relationship forums and websites for astrology. So, I combine the curiosity of a teenager with this thirst for knowledge that you don’t always get from your environment. Because back in high school, sometimes the other peers and friends are more interested in who is popular or, less important activities like sports.

Yeah, but I think for the introvert type, it’s more interesting to go inside,  into the inner world and to really explore about what the dynamics between people, the relationships. I’m sure I wasn’t the only woman that was curious about this.

I’m sure other teenage girls that were also curious about how to make sense of relationship things. And I found that astrology had a very nice progressive and very sharp approach about relationships for sure.

Ziv: Ok, and then.

Dasha: For example, when I went to one of the websites, I discovered that you can classify, let’s say, a guy that you’re interested in. For example, you can classify them by the Western system of astrology. That’s the system I choose to be interested in. And what does it mean? They break it down into 12 different Zodiac types and it gets quite complicated.

But the main idea is that there are 12, let’s say, different sun signs, you know, like, for example, Cancer or a Scorpio. And these sun signs determine certain dynamics of that man’s personality. So for a woman, it’s quite interesting because it’s like a shortcut. I know what I’m interested in. And then I can go and use astrology as a tool to see what kind of personality would blend and get along with my personality.

Ziv: Interesting. So you find your stuff, your shortcut to find the right partner?

Dasha: Yes. Let’s say to use it as to find the right partner, but also aside from partners, to understand, for example, what kind of friends are the best types for me. Or astrology can also help you find what kind of career and profession is the natural fit for you as well.

Ziv: Ok, I feel we’ll take it to other worlds. It sounds like you use astrology, to uncover or analyze, not analyze but maybe to find the definition of personality, of who the person is, which is one part of fate, and then comes out other part of the intervention. Okay, so I can use all kinds of tests to analyze your personality and then comes an intervention. So what to do then? Okay, so you analyze me and you understand who I am and. What is the next step?

Dasha: Well, you see, because I also finished at university, I also finished a Bachelor of Psychology, so I like to use a combination approach. So when I do astrology now as an adult, no longer as a teenager, I also apply a very specific, intuitive skills,  intuitive therapist skills. So when we create an intervention, I like to go back to the well, the way I work is I like to go back to the person’s childhood. So my approach is a little bit of a Carl Jung as well as Freud type of approach.

I like to really go back to the childhood to see the relationship dynamics, the attachment style of that person and the lessons and sort of habits that they formed while growing up. And I also see, you know, I have a deep conversation with the client about the way their parents also brought them up and what kind of values and beliefs, you know.

Then I also check sometimes I work with heavy cases. Let’s say we are doing talk therapy for trauma or sometimes that goes deep into abuse cases and things like that. So in these types of cases, I already really have to investigate because I’m starting to ask questions like for example, what kind of early childhood experience. And to make a distinction when whenever it’s a clinical case, as astrologers have no right to do intense clinical case, that’s when we refer them back to you guys. That the clinical ones.

Ziv: I’m curious, what’s the difference? So, okay, so we have two parts. One is the diagnostic which again, does so many methods to do diagnostics and what’s the difference and what’s an advantage of astrology diagnostic versus other methods?

Dasha: Yeah, what makes us. Yeah, I understand. Efficient. See, I think the biggest advantage is really about time saving. And this is because when you look at a person’s blueprint, like their entire astrological chart, Western astrology, the way we believe is that we use, you know, kind of a Pythagorean theorem here. Because we believe that the planetary cosmic energies also reflect what’s going on inside the person.

So, we believe the big cosmos reflects what’s going on on the microcosmos. Now, the advantage sometimes over traditional therapy is simply timesaving, I would say, because instead of having several weeks of a session with an individual, we can just open their blueprint, like in a very futuristic kind of way, you know, like look at their actual birth chart.

And in the chart, you can actually see already patterns of abuse, the childhood personality habits. So you can see a lot of things from a child. But the only way for it to actually function and work because we use the software and we need very accurate information. And the reason for the accurate birth information is because we need to know exactly at what time that person was born so we can calculate the coordinates and also calculate what angles the planets were at the time of the person’s birth. So, we also ask what city? Because we need to know longitude and latitude.

Ziv:  I’m sorry. Just I’m too curious. So, is this a deterministic approach, which means, okay, so there I have a specific time, date and place where I was born. And then you can draw a map, which means that no matter what, in a way I did, or let’s say we are twins, rather, we were burning almost in the same minute and place. Are we going to have the same traumas in the same life? Not life events, but maybe personality?

Dasha: Yeah, it’s actually an interesting answer there, because astrology, the charts, it’s so specific to each person that it’s like a fingerprint. And sometimes I get cases with twins and they can be often very different people. So they are twins, but they still have very different personalities.

And that’s how astrology would explain this, because even if there’s a difference in a couple of seconds or in the few minutes already the planets are aligning in different positions, you see when the person is born. So there’s even a difference of two or three minutes like everyone’s karma in life and their lifespan becomes very different.

Ziv: The second question is a bit more like in a way. Many, especially, of course, psychologist, coaches what we say is that, you know, there’s so much in your hands, you can change things. We have a lot of things we can change, a lot of things we can’t. But the focus is about what you can change, but you can’t change the day to time and the place I was born in.

And if you can do a deep analysis diagnostic of who I am according to that, it means that not a lot is my using my hands because I got to come to you as a forty-six years old and you know so much about me from where I was born and the time I was born. So, how much influence do I have?

Dasha: Actually seeing is an interesting question to the way I think the way intelligent astrologers approach this question is that we always say there’s always a choice. So, there is actually quite a lot of influence that you do have. The area where you don’t have influence is that. It’s hard to explain.

But if personality’s flexible and very adaptive, the person can just look at other people’s example, look from, learn from other people’s examples, or they can use technology and astrology to correct their life lessons. So the way smart astrologers look at astrology is it’s only a tool that gives you intuitive answers.

So I think it depends on how open the client is to change or how open they are to adapt, or adjust themselves. And that’s where the word karma comes in. Because if the life lesson is very difficult to learn, then it will take longer or it will take several times to try before the client can overcome this challenge.

And there’s another interesting element, because I also do mystical work. Sometimes some lessons are very deeply embedded. They are very deeply anchored. And this can also come from the past lives. So when we are talking about spirituality, we not only have our DNA only in this life and our personality, but we also have elements that actually come from past life. And I had some cases, for example, where people had, let’s say, like a family curse. Right. And then there’s a section of their generation that’s not good, you know, and then you have to do a lot of mystical work to remove the negative part of this generation. Yeah. So it’s quite complicated.

Ziv: Yes, so many things. I guess we are complicated creatures and there’s so many complicated things. So, Dasha I think I learned a few new things today. So I would try to recap in a way for I guess maybe other astrologers would say something else.

But as far as you see things, you can use astrology as a shortcut to get to the diagnostic of the person, your client in front of you. And then you can choose the method of therapy, which can be classical psychology or any other method.

And sometimes you can include mythical methods to help with past life experiences, which are like DNA. But. It’s different.

Dasha: Yes, exactly, exactly.

Ziv: Dasha, thank you so much for sharing your experience, your knowledge for me. I’m so happy to learn new things. So it was a good experience. Thank you very much.

Dasha: Thank you as well. It was a pleasure and good luck.