Understanding Your North Node and South Node: Your Life Direction and Soul Purpose

"Understanding Your North Node and South Node: Your Life Direction and Soul Purpose."

It's got to sound a bit outrageous that anyone can help another person discover their soul purpose and life direction. And especially from information gained through an astrology chart—! But that is exactly what I do as an astrologer/therapist. I specialize in helping you understand the complex soul directive that is contained in your particular North and South Nodes.

This new book, “North Node Astrology” is a fairly large book, and about half of it helps you find and understand the Nodes based on your birthday and year. (You don’t need to know astrology or even have your chart for that—the book has a table in it where you can find all you need.) The other half of the book is about the life passages we all experience and ideas for navigating through these challenging “transits.” The book is personal— a writer speaking to a reader—and that conversational, accessible tone attempts to bridge the gap between Jungian and astrological ways of thinking.

So what are the Nodes? Readers of this blog know that the sign of your North Node describes the experiences and lessons your Soul wants to move towards in this life, whereas the South Node sign describes what your Soul has already brought into this life and what it wants to move away from. It’s your default pattern when all the chips are down, and although there may be “gold in the shadow of your South Node” you mostly want to move away from the negative tendencies of this sign.

Besides the signs of your Nodes, the areas or “houses” of your chart in which they are placed are crucial because they tell much more of the story---they describe in more detail the area of your life that needs emphasis.
And then it’s necessary to bring in the other “players”: the Sun, Moon, Saturn, Rising Sign, Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto to see how all they fit into the puzzle. The art of astrology is to know how to take the exquisite mandala of the chart apart and then put it back together—to synthesize and prioritize what is truly meaningful and what is not.

The South Node reflects not only past life karma and traits but also the patterns you are still getting stuck in! These are what the Jungian writer Jim Hollis calls “the swamplands of the Soul.” The same issues keep coming around in more and more sophisticated ways, but we’re still dealing with the same South Node problems. It’s good to know what to call it; to name our Shadow qualities.

For those who want to go deeper into the Nodal story, you also need to consider the rulers and aspects to the Nodes. Many people have what is called a “skipped step” or a piece of unfinished business that is reflected by a square aspect to the Nodes. A trine aspect represents people and situations that enabled you to live out your “default pattern.”

And finally we look to planets that aspect the Nodes. These tell us how this energy is “echoed” in the chart and in your life, and gives us hints as to how to elaborate upon what the Soul is up against, and what the Soul is yearning for this time around.

Yes, it’s simply a theory. But I like to know how this plays out in my life—of course, we all are wise to take our own intuitive wisdom as first priority, but looking at the transits and Nodes have certainly helped me know things about myself that I wouldn’t have considered. I’m sure a couple of years of good therapy would have brought up the same things, but then again, I like the easiness of knowing what good astrological insight can offer. The hard part is what to do with it all, and how to live it out. (c) Elizabeth Spring

Inquiries for readings at: www.elizabethspring.com or elizabethspring@aol.com