iVillage

My own interest in how relationships worked quickened when I began checking out heliocentric (Sun-centered) positions and charts. In the beginning, I approached heliocentrics like any other astrological technique. It was one more technique to be explored. But I soon found that it was markedly different than the astrology I had known up to that time. Not only did it provide for me much better results, but these results referred to another order of information entirely. In other words, the helio, or Sun-centered, chart is a different by nature view of the birth moment, not just another extension of Earth-centered astrology. I was getting a different order of information, something that I had long tried to extract from the traditional geocentric chart.

Of course it took me quite a while to believe this. I tested it again and again, using thousands and thousands of charts; but sure enough, here was a different kind of astrology.

And I tried all of the standard astrological techniques (aspects, transits, etc.) in this new Sun-centered dimension and, of course, they worked, just as they work in Earth-centered astrology. But there arose through this bag of techniques something that completely caught my attention, something I had never experienced before: Large-scale planetary patterns in the Sun-centered chart accurately described individuals as they knew themselves to be at their deepest levels.