Misadventures in Chinese Astrology

A sceptics eye and an open mind

So we’re going through a difficult time. I won’t go into detail but just trust me when I say it has been Difficult (with serious mental health issues).

So what do you do when you’re trapped in your home and don’t know how to escape?

You ask the stars.

As people who deeply value evidence-based medicine, the last person you'd think we'd go to is an astrologer. Things had gotten bad for us and the NHS is not giving us the help we need so... Why not? We’re pretty skeptical but our experiences in the world, in both private and NHS psychiatry has convinced us that we needed something different.

We found a ziwei doshu astrologer through substack and their writing seemed to be show an understanding of the world that we shared, for the most part. Initially I was going to promote them on this article but after a lot of reflection I don’t want to guide people to them. Their methods are questionable and I don’t want vulnerable people to be exploited by them (not suggesting that is what they did to us).

In our addled state we had given away plenty of personal information for them to work with. I am familiar with cold reads in theory but I have never had it actually had it practiced on me. As a result, the initial polestar astrology reading was deeply engaging, if a bit depressing. It blew us away with its accuracy and made sense of some of our on-going issues. It suggested that they are not going to decrease but we will increase our ability to cope. This explanation of why our life is a shitshow felt pretty liberating. It's not anything we are doing wrong, it's just our life. This is how it be.

The first session after the polestar reading was essentially breathing exercises and what I'm assuming was cats favorite stims. The feedback we gave regarding the exercises was not heard. There was this underlying assumption that what is pleasurable for them would be pleasurable for everyone. But we didn't like the juddering nature of the exercises they showed us. And we had adverse experiences when practicing them on our own. Random new pains were developing from the stress. Attempts at addressing the difficulties that arose were dismissed as excuses.

I will provide their words as written for fairness. I was accused many times of misunderstanding their words (which we do to people in our day-to-day anyway so accepted that unquestioningly). I had the sneaking suspicion we were being gaslit, though. We’ve had so much gas-lighting in our lives, our tether to reality is tenuous so I have copy-pasted their words exactly.

If healing isn't going to be enjoyable in some way, why would your system ally with it? if you can't find compassion-beyond-labels within yourself, how can you find that compassion in others?

- Brain fog is worsening. Idk if I can keep this up.

Brain fog isn't an excuse. Yes it sucks, but the exercises are easy enough, you just act. If you are suffering from mold infection and thats causing the brain fog, absolutely go to a naturopath or tcm doctor.

- ill try to get out of the flat but it's exhausting and i need that energy for meal-making

what is really exhausting you? Ask yourself that and fully investigate it.

You might have fungal/bacterial overgrowth that needs dealing with eventually but it can be dealt with. Yawning should give you more energy once you discharge the stagnant qi build up. Might take some time.

- I'm doing my best considering how much of my days i spend in distress

thats what the curriculum is for. Don't feed the stories of distress. Turn off the “radio”.

- it's okay if i become too sick to complete this to your satisfaction.

Its outside the scope of my practice but if you are really getting sicker (not sure what you actually mean by that) you should see a naturopath and a tcm doctor. If the symptoms are more physiologically based like digestion issues, sinus blockages, etc.

if the “sickness” is mental/emotional distress, well, that can be targeted via daoist hygiene which im helping you with.

Main thing is to not make exaggerated excuses and not to feed any stories about despair, low self worth, etc. “Feelings aren't facts.” A useful mantra

(fungal/bacterial infections are documented medical phenomena that cannot be addressed with psuedoscience, but Ajali couldn’t be bothered explaining that to someone who threw out personal jabs when we asked basic questions)

And they knew that this dismissal of our experience would result in us disengaging. It has happened to them many times before.

Over the years I have had many people with similar symptoms pop up in my emails asking for help, in various degrees of desperation. Only one of those people ever stuck around and did the work.

this is always why, in a case like yours, i get the money up front, because you/your ghosts spend all this energy arguing and fighting, rather than learning and practicing.

We didn’t ask ourselves until we broke ties with them, why are so many people fighting the person they are paying to help them?

I did not have a second session. They tried really hard to provide us with something we didn't ask for. A stripping back of our selves and our identities that we have long been clawing out of the hands of society and the state.

i dont have a plan for you. i have a view and method (as handed down by teachers/lineage) that requires people actually practice.

the plan is the same for everyone, because everyone is "plural", and integration in western terms doesn't mean what integration means in daoism. it means integrity. it means compound. as in every "thing" is compound.

this kind of initial defensive whatever is frankly, boring, but you might need it or think you do.

i would suggest actually humbling yourself, but you might take that the wrong way as well. it's just a measure of where your system is at.

There is absolutely no need to have a story, but until you get there, you will create a lot of stories. That's what people who are in deep distress and inability to manage intensity do (facets of possession, ancestral or otherwise).

if i continue spending time ultra-clarifying every. single. word. that doesn't guarantee anything.

it certainly isn't the same as practicing.

They did not explain how we were not being humble. I thought I was being very deferential to our new-found mentor. But a little while after breaking ties with them we learned from a friend that authoritarians consider the mere act of asking questions as a threat to their authority. And now this experience makes so much more sense. We were asking too many questions (even though we had also suppressed so many, only asked what we thought was important).

A mistaken assumption they made (I think) is that our ability to generate narratives is innate and that we are being imprisoned by our stories. But the opposite is true. Our ability to have a narrative is very recent. Our childhoods have been filled with dissociation, despair and hate with no narrative thread through it. We floated through our childhood and young adulthood with no stories at all. Events occured, a frame or two of which were stored. Gorgeous landscapes, fleeting aches. Quotes from various figures in our life. A general understanding that we attended school and funerals. Horrible events that I wont repeat. But that's all. The more we write, the more we learn how to produce stories, the more liberated we feel from our dim past. But now, this person wants us to suppress this new found ability to express ourselves, saying we need to learn to tell better stories? That we need to liberate ourselves from the past that we are only just starting to understand?

i am not interested in belief or faith or identity politics or whatever liberal politics du jour is on the table. none of that rectifies anything as borne out by years of working with people who cling to those things. having the "right words" does not release tension in the diaphragm, as one example.

We asked several times about whether they will do an intake, “take a history” so to speak. We know that our experiences would have been very different for theirs. I also suspect that our US sounding accent made them feel comfortable with their assumptions about our ignorance. We did not tell them of how we were taught qigong growing up (part of the dogma they worship which they don’t acknowledge as dogma or worship). Our history was not important (though what we did reveal was certainly used in the chart reading). They manipulated us into thinking they genuinely had secret knowledge to provide. Naive? Definitely. But we were desperate and had made the mistake of taking a leap of faith that fell flat.

I suspect a lot of our conflict was also in that we have similar charts. They might have over-identified with us and appeared frustrated when we did not fall in line and practice what they preached unquestioningly. It reminded me of skeptics who cling so hard to their dogma of rationality that they dismiss evidence that fall outside of their narrow US-centric worldview. When we brought up their frustration, it was dismissed.

your ghostly misinterpretation of my attitude is yours. im not being cranky, im being direct and un-emotional.

We value honesty deeply so encouraged their directness. We didn’t realise it was a cover for their fragile ego.

Whether you continue past your fears, resentments and anxieties is up to you. english doesn't have easy ways to speak in animism, but that shouldn't really matter all that much.

They didn’t offer to use any other language, though. It was unclear whether they wanted to.

One point that amused me is cat's worship of nonduality. But they have found their own form of dualism within the East and West divide. Cat worships the daoism/Confucianism that they have been taught, in opposition to the Protestantism they were raised in. But China is its own empire. And with that comes its own ego, flaws and shortcoming.

i don't have energy for complaining or for wallowing in self-pity and stories about how you're a victim. i don't feed that hell realm.

For context, this is another quote with us “complaining” and “wallowing in self-pity”

My anxiety and flashbacks and panic attacks are worse, that's what I mean by "I'm getting sicker". I can also say "I'm getting more disabled". I can also say "my demons are getting stronger". They are all just words for the same thing, I was trying to be concise because I am exhausted. If you want better words, too bad. The random hallucinations and random fucking pain I've experienced during the exercises are leaving me cranky too and reluctant to continue. And before you tell me I'm doing them wrong remember that you saw me doing them yourself.

Although our skepticism of astrology has been reinforced by this experience, the concept of “my life is a shitshow because of how traumatised by ancestors are” is one that we will carry forever. It makes sense of the lineages that we come from.

I find it odd that they talk so much of decolonising the mind, when their main philosophy is from a colonial power. I think this explains the unexpected authoritarianism. I expected them to be more critical of coloniser philosophy but they are a whitepassing USian after all... My hopes were too high.

I respect that they can teach how they like in whatever way saps their energy the least. Work is hard and conserving spoons is important. But this authoritarian "one size fits all" method just wasn't for us. And their intentional or unintentional cruelty masked as bluntness was a reflection of the dehumanisation we experience from humanity on a daily basis. This was the main reason for our isolation. I used to say that I'd rather experience overt racism rather than covert racism which is still true. But the depth of racism in this society is so vast, the overt racists just make the covert racists braver and I don't want that.

That isn't to say that this dehumanising experience was racism, there are a variety of reasons people will be shitty to us. And the ableism was more overt in this instance.

I can assure you that you don't understand my understanding of nature, plurality, integration etc, though your defenses make sense in terms of how stupid the overarching culture is.

you have to take responsibility at some point for how you allow the negative symptoms to run your worldview.
i have been in plenty of terrifying medical scenarios and this is what i have learned.

The push to seek psuedo-scientific cures for "parasites, mold, bacteria" were really off-putting too.

if you are infected with mold, parasites, fungus, etc, you may need herbal medicines at the same time that you practice daoist hygiene.

(all of these are real things whose treatment have been studied extensively, there is no need to find naturopathic cures when anti-parasitics exist)

Our worsening condition required no investigation. It was clear to us why we were getting worse. These exercises were bringing up memories of worse times and the exercises were not the pleasurable activities that they assumed. And we had just wasted a huge chunk of money that was meant to go towards healing. It was that simple. And yet it was treated as some big mystery to sink more money into because trust had already been so eroded between us. I wasn't willing to continue being vulnerable when it landed on ears that fundamentally did not care for our wellbeing. And this pushing to pour even more capital into a sector rife with exploitation was also a big red flag.

There is much that can be criticised about psychiatry since it was developed initially by those in the Imperial core. But I don't think it should be dismissed entirely. The scientific method remains the most robust way to develop medicine. And while the term ‘holistic’ has been poisoned by scammers, it is an important aspect of medicine that isn’t always practiced. But for the field to truly progress, we must accept other ways of knowing as valuable. Oral tradition may not be as rigorously tested, but it is a preservation of practices that stood the tests of time. Their application should be studied and not summarily dismissed as mysticism and pseudo-science.

Unsurprisingly for an ancient tradition, it is a bit gender-essentialist. This person insisted on knowing our birth assignment and dead name (the first red flag). From investigating how clicking male or female in an online calculator, it doesn't appear to have much of an effect on the output of ziwei doshu data. There isn't much reading I can find online on this topic (english or chinese), except some claims that being intersex or transgender makes you a holy representation of yinyang. Nothing on how to apply this to ziwei doshu. I’m sure this knowledge does exist somewhere but it can’t be found via DuckDuckGo. Being non-binary really threw a wrench in the idea this astrologer was providing us with "secret knowledge". And it's important to keep in mind these traditions were developed in imperial China so it comes from a colonial empire with its own sets of biases. But I believe there is something here that needs more investigation. And this wisdom is not one we can learn from this “teacher”.

Daoism is similar to many cultures based on living in harmony with the earth. It is fascinating and I hope to find the truth in what ziwei doshu can provide.

Regardless, the reason we were desperate for aid was our deteriorating mental health and this experience was disheartening and embarrassing. They did not wish to meet us where we are in our journey. They wanted us to follow the path they trod. But we do not bow to authoritarianism. And what we were searching for has been found. This experience helped us realise that help won't come in the form of strangers we put on the pedestal because of the beautiful words they write. It won’t come from extraction masked as reciprocity. Help is already here in the communities we're building and bonds we are forming. They give us strength to brave the world outside our walls. Despair is natural when wider society is this sick. Better worlds already exist, in them we have found our liberation.

What can we conclude from this experience? Don't trust anyone who seems to understand you better than you do. Learn to read the red flags. It taught us that this is exactly the kind of mentor we didn't want to be. We need to learn to cultivate a love for our students if we want them to thrive. We need to be humble and listen to them, otherwise they will disengage. Authoritarianism is fundamentally flawed and students can teach us so much. I am thankful that we had enough experience to bounce when we did, but wished we had not gone into so much debt for it.

If you wish to help us in repaying our debts, we would greatly appreciate it.

I have sent this article to them and they declined to comment.

~ Jo