My Path through the Night
or how I found sect <3
My Path to Sect
It was May 2016, just weeks from me graduating college and I had no fucking plan. Not for lack of trying— I had tried to find housing with friend but was met with roadblocks, scammy listings, and overpriced boxes. I had visited my school’s career center on my mother’s insistence and was pointed to the online job’s listing page, something I had been accessing for months. None of the jobs wanted me. I couldn’t imagine my future and it stressed me out to no end.
That spring was clarifying and hard. It felt lush in a lot of ways but also gloomy and heavy, like walking by cherry blossoms on a grey, chilly day. I completed one of the most challenging and rewarding tasks of my academic and intellectual life— writing my thesis— and felt satisfied closing the chapter on my undergraduate years, but what to do, where to go next, felt immeasurably out of reach.
Then one stretched-out, tear-stained afternoon, I remembered a promise. A promise I had made to myself years before that, upon graduation, I would return to the Zen Buddhist Monastery that had touched me in just a few short months and I would stay there for at least one year.
Of course. This is what I was going to do. I had attempted to let concerns about a clear, acceptable path get in the way of the simple intuition the mysteries had given me years ago. I didn’t know how I would swing the long stay then, but I didn’t need to: the path was cleared for me.
Of course, part of me felt scared and dumb in making this decision. I would not be making money living there, preparing myself for a viable career path or building my professional networks. The first few months I would wonder, as I circumambulated the zendo during silent retreats, what the heck I would do when it was time to leave, how I would integrate myself into the world of success, advancement and achievement.
I felt like I had exposed my fate to the elements, let it get out my hands but, hopefully, into a pair of wiser ones. I had no clue what my next step would be when I left, unsure of when I would even leave, and that scared me. But the thing about Zen practice is that it prepares you for contingency by reminding you that you can never escape it. My teacher used to summarize Zen as “having the rug pulled out from under you” and “turning on a dime”. Stay with the core practice of silent meditation, feeling the breath and the body, long enough, and you start to realize how loosely everything is stitched together, how quickly everything can change. But, on the flip side, you also become more skilled at adapting to impermanence.
“The best way to prepare for the future,” my teacher once said during a 10-day meditation retreat— “is to be in the present moment”. Again and again this proved to be true. Again and again, I could return to the breath, my hands, the gentle shimmering of everything around me, and find the next most beautiful step.
Though it did not win me a big job or a fancy accolade, my time at the monastery gave me something much harder to come by: an inner place of refuge, a renewing relationship to the truth, a continual turning towards compassion, the understanding of liberation. I am a happier, more well-rounded, probably more pleasant person to be around because my practice, cemented in my years enmeshed in it. I joined the White Plum Zen Lineage when I took Jukkai in 2017, being given the name Eisho, “eternal bloom”. Where else could my essence be so distilled?
But more than that, my time immersed in Zen gave me a way to actually manifest my deeply-held ideals. I had long wanted to be an artist and a writer but had terrible writer’s block. The first week I ever spent at the monastery, I was mediating alone in the zendo when, out of nowhere, my spine straightened, the light through the windows saturated, hit my face and a voice told me wearily, Chloe, just write poetry. By the time I left the monastery, two years after I had finished college, I was skilled not just in poetry but fiction and non fiction writing, ceramics, tarot, astrology and singing. The reason I am an astrologer at all is because of my experience at the monastery, a place built on a practice that likened itself to “a finger pointing at the Moon,” finally allowed me to walk the moonlit path, moving with the mystery, taking the next most beautiful step.
This is a story about the day and night, of sect.
You see, I am a night chart, fated to walk the mysterious, interdependent path, unsure of where my next step is taking me but following what feels right until I’m somewhere else. If I had tried to take the legible, practical path, not only would I not be following my satisfaction, a key piece of nocturnal success, I would probably fail at achieving the diurnal success too.
By embracing the mysteries and unsureness with taking the off-beaten, but intuitively correct path, I am now embodying my own version of success. Yes, I get to tell people I make a living working for myself, but I also feel immense gratitude to live my life on my terms, according to my schedule, following my own heart. That I can spend my days how the mystery dictates is a gift that comes when I act within the path of sect.
The Process
This simple distinction, as to whether you were born under the light of the Sun or the darkness of the Moon, is one of the most fundamental truths in astrology.
This distinction snakes through how we understand planets, signs, and houses; it tells us which path is ours to take, where the ease is, and how we balance the two ways of being into our own formula for the good life. In this story, I try to illustrate what happens when the world is preoccupied with making people follow one rigid way. The nature of the Sun is totalizing: who I am is legible and pervades all I do. The Sun is visible: he demonstrates what we are meant to do in public.
But when a certain ideology is meant to take the place of people’s individual agency or a state is run like an oppressive oligarchy, then the values of the dominant force supplant the individual’s flourishing.
Even day charts can’t be their full selves when the Sun Cult forces them to follow a single blueprint!
By studying sect, we can understand our path not just to success but to satisfaction and our version of the good life.
Written on the gates of the Temple of the Oracle of Delphi is the phrase “know thyself”. The first step doing anything in life, especially connecting to the divine, involves understanding your unique blueprint.
Sect, in my experience, is the foundation to knowing thyself.
The first step is to examine the sect of your chart. Are you journeying by the light of the day or under the cover of the night? This will tell you what methods, activities and places you will find your greatest satisfaction.
Next, we look at our in sect planets (Mars, the Moon and Venus for the night and Sun, Jupiter and Saturn for the night). They tell us our unique formula to walking our path and what areas of life will bring it in.
We then look to our out of sect planets to hear the secret story complementing and complicating the main narrative. They must adapt to a foreign terrain and use the tools of the opposite sect to achieve their aims.
We are not here to reduce your life to one strain but bring in its multiplicities.
Once you begin to understand your sect, you can use it to navigate a whole host of situations and understand how to approach the tasks of your life.
That’s why, in my forthcoming Sect Guidebook, I give you all the tools and information about sect you’ve been looking for but couldn’t find. I give you not just a step-by-step guide to delineating sect in your chart, I provide essays on the felt experience and path of sect, twilight + dawn charts, mixed sect conditions and even understanding how your life develops over time according to sect.
To give you a taste, I have created a free Master class to walk you through how I think about and use sect. It will be held on Wednesday April 30th at 9am pst, though there will be a replay for all who can’t make it live.
My work with sect is already impacting others.
Here are some testimonials about what my sect work can do:
Chloe’s work on sect has made me revisit this foundational astrological principle in such greater depth and it has been nothing short of mind blowing. I see sect in everything now — within astrology, but also in conversations with friends and everyday moments. Her insights are unmissable!
Kira Ryberg
i’ve literally learned so much about how to craft a nocturnal life from discussing sect with chloe in depth instead of trying to cram my very nocturnal chart into the diurnal box! it’s such a deceptively simple division that can often be overlooked she’s studied it in such depth
Shuly Rose
And as these testimonials point out, sect is not just found in the chart. It’s found in everything around us. It allows us to name and understand our experience, navigating with grace and ease.
Sign up for my sect class now and if you want the full picture, be ready for my Sect Guidebook, releasing at the same time.
Until next time,
Love,
Chloe