Did you ever actually follow your heart?
Astro Observation
I got inspired to write this after reading The Midnight Library, and after some conversations i've been having lately. I though about regret. How would we ever understand what it actually is, and how to move past it.
We always wish we had chosen something different. made a different choice. walked a different path. but most of the time that doesn't mean the other path would have been better, or easier. everyone says we're made from all of our experiences, and here's where it gets interesting. even if that's true, even the hard parts, could we ever truly love them?
I don't believe so, some experiences i don't think it's possible to actually love. what's possible is to tolerate them. to tolerate them in a way that they stop hurting as much, to understand them, to understand what they brought us and how they shaped us. if you've ever wished you'd chosen something different, go read The Midnight Library by Matt Haig.
Now the next part, how do we learn to let go of regret, and how does that connect to spirituality and astrology. it's not as easy as it sounds. it's always easier to say something than to actually do it.
which brings me to destiny, and to fate. if we have free will, how does destiny even fit into that. don't the two contradict each other.
here's the thing though. they never actually did.
Even the ancient astrologers, the ones who obsessed over prediction more than almost anyone in history, built their whole system around two separate points in the chart. One for fate, one for choice. One for what happens to you, one for what you do with it. If the chart was meant to be a locked script, that second point wouldn't need to exist. So, somewhere in every single chart there has always been a place reserved for the part of you that chooses.
Fate gives you the terrain. Choice is how you walk it.
So, where does regret actually live in a chart. Usually in the tension between the south node and saturn. Old comfort zones pulling backward, saturn adding guilt or obligation on top, the feeling that you owe something to your own history. that's not one bad choice. That's the same choice circling back again and again until it's finally looked at.
And if you've ever felt like the same fork in the road kept showing up no matter how many times you thought you already chose. that's usually a placement sitting at 29 degrees, the very end of a sign. a threshold that won't stay resolved until it's actually resolved. not punishment. just unfinished business asking to be finished.
a few placements worth checking in your own chart, for anyone who wants to look closer:
Sun trine North Node. When your core identity flows easily with your evolutionary direction, choice and destiny stop competing. Following your heart here isn't rebellion against your path, it is the path. This is one of the more forgiving aspects on this list, because the alignment already exists, the work is just noticing it and using it.
Venus square Saturn. This is where free will gets earned, not given. Venus wants pleasure and connection without conditions. Saturn learned early that love has to be justified, that affection gets withdrawn or has to be paid for. Choosing your own desire here, out loud, without apologizing for it, is an act of will against a very old fear of rejection or scarcity.
Mars in the 1st house. Mars here is not a passenger. It's the engine. This placement suggests your will is the primary vehicle for whatever you're meant to build, and waiting passively for fate to hand you something actively works against the way this chart is built to move. Initiative isn't optional here. It's the mechanism.
Jupiter in the 9th house. One of the placements where fate seems to reward the leap before the leap is proven safe. Jupiter is at home here, and when the person aligns with their own honest moral compass rather than a borrowed one, doors tend to open with less resistance than expected. Luck, in this placement, tends to follow conviction rather than caution.
Moon square Pluto. This one is heavier. The Moon holds emotional need, Pluto holds inherited intensity, often tied to a parent who carried unprocessed pain the child absorbed without anyone naming it. Free will here looks like the slow, deliberate work of separating what you actually feel from what you learned to feel inside that household. It's one of the more demanding forms of free will on this list, because the enemy isn't external expectation, it's internalized emotional inheritance.
Mercury in the 12th house. The mind here absorbs the collective easily, moods, expectations, the emotional undercurrent of a room. Free will requires real solitude, not occasional quiet, but enough distance from other voices that your own thoughts stop sounding like an echo of someone else's.
Sun opposite Neptune. This is the placement most directly about mistaking someone else's dream for your own. Identity and idealization sit in tension here, and there's a real tendency to project unexpressed qualities of your own being onto other people, then chase what looks like inspiration but is actually a mirror. Following your heart with this aspect means stripping away the idealizing first, and standing in whatever plain, unglamorous clarity is left underneath.
Saturn in the 1st house. Fate tests self-reliance early and directly here, often before the person is ready for it. But the long arc of this placement is a self that no longer needs external permission to take up space. Free will, over time, becomes the quiet, earned authority of an identity that was built rather than given.
Venus conjunct Uranus. Authentic desire here doesn't fit inside conventional shapes, and trying to force it to fit is usually where the unhappiness comes from. Free will means choosing the unconventional expression on purpose, rather than editing yourself down to something more socially comfortable.
The Part of Fortune. This is the oldest of the placements on this list, older than most of the planetary aspects, going back to Valens and Dorotheus of Sidon before him. Fortune is calculated from the Ascendant, Sun, and Moon together, and it marks the point where personal joy, circumstance, and effort actually meet instead of pulling in three directions. It won't tell you what to do. It tells you where the friction stops.
Midheaven in Pisces. The calling here was never going to look like a ten year plan, and expecting it to is usually where the frustration comes from. This Midheaven evolves, sometimes even dissolves and reforms, and free will looks like surrendering the need for a fixed linear career story in favor of what actually feels true right now, even when right now contradicts what felt true five years ago.
but the harder question isn't about fate at all. it's this.
Did you actually follow your own heart? or did you follow what your parents wanted. what society approved of. what looked responsible on paper.
because there's a version of you that wanted things before anyone told you which parts were acceptable. That's venus, the fifth house, pleasure that exists for no audience. and there's the version of you built to be recognized, approved of, safe. that's saturn, the tenth house, and underneath it, the fourth house, the home you learned all of it in before you were old enough to question any of it.
Most people have some saturn wrapped around their venus. Some obligation braided into their desire. The work was never cutting saturn out completely, it's learning to tell the two voices apart when they're both talking at once.
Seneca said it best almost two thousand years ago. fate leads the willing, and drags along the reluctant.
The chart doesn't punish you for not knowing that sooner. It just keeps offering the same lesson in a different outfit until you're finally ready to look at it.
Look at your life right now. not what your parents wished for you. not what society told you to become. not what you were supposed to have achieved by now.
What do you actually see when none of that is in the frame?
and once you find the answer, it's worth checking your own chart to see exactly where that answer has been trying to reach you the whole time.
