Posted by Ada Pembroke

https://www.adapembroke.com/blog/the-four-questions-in-narrative-astrology

As an astrologer, I attempt to tell validating stories, but my stories will not entirely resonate with you. They aren’t meant to. The stories I tell are my stories. They come from my mind and reflect the world I want to see. But you can take my stories and change them and make them your own. Using astrology to change our personal narratives is the core practice behind Narrative Astrology.

I would like to introduce you to one of the tools of Narrative Astrology: the Four Questions.

You know it’s time to use the Four Questions when you hear something that makes you feel emotional dissonance. For me, emotional dissonance is something I feel in my body. It’s like the churning in my belly when I smell food that isn’t quite right. Or the vertigo of going down the first hill of a rollercoaster. Emotional dissonance is like the squeaky sound the brakes on your car make when they’re wearing out. It’s a warning that the story you’re hearing is unstable, and something needs to change.

Maybe there’s something wrong with the story. There are times when you need to make like Thomas Jefferson and tear pages out of a sacred text, but sometimes the thing that needs to change is you. Sometimes, a story holds up a mirror and shows you something about yourself that needs care and attention, or maybe there’s a story you’ve been carrying around that has blocked in ways you don’t need to be.

When you’re emotionally fraught, the lesson in the emotional dissonance you’re feeling can become lost like your reflection in the ripples in a pond. The Four Questions help you to calm the ripples, so you can see yourself more clearly.

Question 1: How does this story make me feel?

We begin by going within. We are experiencing emotional dissonance. We know that stories run on drama, so the first step is to cut the emotional gas line and deprive the story of fuel. Emotionally disconnecting ourselves from the story is necessary to get enough distance to really understand it, but it’s important to recognize that this also kills the story.

Stories are living, breathing things. Killing a story to understand it has the same problems as killing a frog so you can dissect it. You might be able to understand the structure of the frog’s veins, but you’ll never get to the heart of what a frog is when it’s dead.

With a story, though, we cannot know it at all without detaching ourselves emotionally. We must disconnect to observe.

The problem: Stories are like parasites. They cannot exist without a host. They cannot exist without a brain to think about them, a heart and nervous system to be activated by them. They are the emotional ride they take us on.

So, we can’t just get cold and turn off our emotions when examining a story. The story disappears without them. The trick is to be in our feelings and observe them with as much clarity as possible, at the same time.

You may find that it helps to describe what is going on in your heart or in your body with words: My cheeks feel hot. My fingers feel numb. My lower back hurts. I feel angry. Eventually, you will feel yourself getting quiet or wandering away from your feelings about the story. You’ll find yourself saying things like: I smell my neighbor’s delicious curry. I see a child walk by the house with a red umbrella. You will feel peaceful and centered. (If you don’t find yourself wandering off like this, stop the exercise and try again later.)

When you feel peaceful, centered, clear-eyed, and safe, you have heard what the story needs you to say, and it’s time to move on to the next question.

Question 2: What does this story say about me and the world I live in?

In Question 2, we shift from observing our reaction to the story to analyzing the story itself. Our goal in Question 2 is to understand the story in its ecosystem. Stories cannot exist on their own. They need people to tell them, and they need to be in relationship with other stories. The alliances and conflicts between stories bind them together into political theories, philosophies, world views, and, ultimately, the collection of all these things that is the zeitgeist.

When we look critically at a story, we ask ourselves: What role does this story play in its ecosystem? What feeds it? What threatens it? What does it contribute? What is it keeping alive? What does it threaten?

You will likely find Question 2 easier and harder if you have a liberal arts degree. If your degree taught you critical thinking, you should be able to recognize cognitive distortions and fallacies in the things you read, which will help you disconnect from attempts to hijack your emotions and understand the biases and weaknesses in arguments. But you may have also gotten very good at labeling and categorizing things you read.That use of the Other must be a reference to de Beauvior, which means she must be a feminist with a romantic attachment to existentialism. It is easy for categorization to become a sophisticated form of disengagement. When something has been labeled, it’s easy to think that our work is done, and we don’t have to think about it anymore.

We don’t want to get emotionally entangled in the web of stories while we are working with the Four Questions, but we do want to go beyond labeling. Labeling is useful only if we are considering the implications of the label itself. What are we really saying when we talk about “feminism with a romantic attachment to existentialism.” What does that philosophy assume about the way the world works? The way it should work? What is that philosophy trying to accomplish? Do you agree with those assumptions? Do you also desire the world the story desires?

In some ways, going with the simplest reading makes things easier. A question like, “I think this person thinks that people like me are assholes” (and the questions that naturally follow, such as “Why?”) can be a rich and informative place to start.

Question 3: How can I make this story better?

Once you understand what the story is trying to do, you can start to think about whether or not you want the story to succeed.

In Question 3, we begin the process of revision: What changes can I make to this story to make it support a world I want to live in?

We aren’t talking about reality here. We aren’t trying to be pragmatic. Question 3 is all about desire. It’s about the world as you wish it was, so feel free to follow fiction in the direction of the absurd.

You know that you have finished with Question 3 when you feel hope.

Question 4: How can I make the good story true?

In Question 3, we put on our idealist hats.

In Question 4, we get to that pragmatism I asked you to put aside in Question 3.

You start asking yourself what needs to change in yourself and in the world if that revised story you’ve created is going to be able to exist.

It’s really easy to walk away when you reach Question 4, especially if you followed my advice and allowed yourself to get absurd. But Question 4 isn’t about becoming the emperor of everything and bending the world to your will. It’s about finding the next practical thing you can do to support the world you want to see. Probably something small, like finally putting that candy wrapper on your desk in the trash.

A version of this article appears in my ebook the Leo Risings Guide to World Domination.

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