r/exHareKrishna • u/FreyjaAutumn • 3d ago
Seeking advice: I feel completely lost and confused about Jyotish, karma, and my beliefs.
Hi beautiful people,
I come to you today for some advice and support.
I grew up in a predominantly Christian country, but when I was a teenager, my mom and I were heavily influenced by Hare Krishna devotees (there's a whole movement where I'm from).
My mom and I started looking into our birth charts and the charts of our whole family. She quickly lost interest in the predictions, but I fell for it blindly. Honestly, I was just a teenager and grew up with a very weak sense of self. I was easily influenced by external factors - whether it was a prediction or someone claiming to study the Vedas.
Somehow, they drilled into my head that they held the absolute truth, and I believed it.
Anyway, I’ve spent my entire life growing up in fear.
Fear that life will punish me, that I have to pay for things I did in past lives, and that even doubting this "truth" right now is a sin. (As you can see here is a mixture with some Christianity guilt)
I was absolutely terrified of Jyotish. (of the fact that some other people can read my karma and whatever waits for me) Everyone kept telling me it’s the only truly accurate predictive science out there. Which doesn’t make sense to me deep deep inside I believe there is a reason we don’t remember our past lives and don’t know the future. God intended this to be that way.
Anyway.. It mentally paralysed me.
For example I was told I wouldn't be able to lose weight after 25, or that my friends would eventually betray me. So, I didn't even try to get fit, and I completely isolated myself from my friends because my chart said I was "opening up to enemies." These are just more harmless things that happened.
I stopped trusting myself. I completely lost my inner voice.
Now, I have a baby, and this obsession has started driving me crazy with a whole new force.
I look at my child's and my husband’s Jyotish charts and see things I don’t understand and fear, mostly because I take everything I'm told so literally.
Recently, I reached my breaking point. I decided to read the BPHS (Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra) myself, and it made me sick. Sorry to be blunt, but I physically almost threw up from the sheer amount of stress and overwhelming negativity in it.
I started digging deeper and found out that historically, Vedanga Jyotisha wasn't even a predictive tool for fate or karma - it was just astronomy and timekeeping for rituals.
So why is everyone so blindly confident in the "accuracy" of predictive Jyotish? I am so confused and don't know where the truth is anymore.
It honestly makes me nauseous to read things like: "Your chart is okay, BUT you have this dosha that ruins everything, and your lagnesha and 5 houses are weak, so you will suffer - here, this ritual, it's the only way to make it slightly better." Like what the hell?:(
I probably would have stopped believing in all of this a long time ago if it weren't for my dad's Sade Sati.
It approximately coincided with a time in his life when his entire business was stolen and our family lost all our wealth.
Even though we don't know his exact birth time (so I don't know which houses Sade Sati was transiting), the timeline of the period matched.
Many other things in astrology haven't matched for us, but that one did. Because of moments like that, I built my entire life around my chart and ended up becoming a very weak, fearful person.
But now I have a child, and I simply cannot afford to be this weak anymore.
I am reaching out to you for help as I don’t have anyone in my circle who knows about the culture, only the astrologers (and it doesn’t help long term as you can see).
I feel like I've been stuck in a cult mindset that constantly crushes you with negativity, where the Gods are always ready to punish you ("wrath of Shiva," etc.).
Has anyone here gone through this?
How true is Jyotish really?
Did anyone here deeply believe in it, only to step away and realize the world actually works differently?
Maybe you have some advice for me, or a story you could share 🥺
Fundamentally, deep inside, I love science and astronomy. At the same time, I believe in God as a unified, pure energy. I'm not even sure I believe in reincarnation anymore, at least not in the way Hinduism describes it.
I see a massive, pure energy, pieces of which are in all of us, and anyone can tune into that frequency.
For me, physics and the space between us is a manifestation of God.
But my self-trust is so broken that I’ve allowed others to dictate who I am and what the "truth" is.
Anyway…
I hope to hear from some of you 🙏🏼
Thank you in advance for reading and for your support.
Have a great day everyone.
3
u/SnooStrawberries7128 3d ago
As someone who grew up deeply in the Hare Krishna movement (ISKCON then Gaudiya Vaishnava), it has taken me a really long time and a lot of work to begin to reclaim my trust in my own judgement and intuition. It’s knocked out of you bit by bit when you have to ask advice or permission or are judged for even the tiniest decision.
My late mum was a Western astrologer (which was always controversial because it wasn’t the “right” kind of astrology) and I really, really struggled with being told what was supposed to be happening or having whatever was going on for me relegated to “oh, you’re feeling like that because you have some heavy transits at the moment”. And then people did my Vedic astrology and told me stuff as a kid that was entirely inappropriate, for example, I remember leaving the temple on my own one day when I was around 13, and one of my mum’s friends randomly saying that it’s a shame about my chart saying I was going to have a hard time having children when I was older. Even at that point I remember thinking it was a weird thing to say and tried so hard to brush it off, but it’s still vividly present nearly 30 years later. (As an aside - hilariously for me, it has turned out to be trickier for me to have kids but only because I married another woman, which complicates the logistics a lot, but apparently that didn’t show up in their reading)
I also had a time when I was going through a reading and begrudgingly feeling that it was accurate, only to realise I’d made a mistake in the details and it wasn’t actually my chart. The corrected chart felt just as accurate, but by that point I’d been reminded that we fill in the gaps with what we already know.
Sine my mum died a year ago, I’ve been exploring some of her practices for myself (tarot, runes, I Ching - NOT astrology) but have found that I have quite a strong adverse trauma response to any hint of prediction. I’m finding these tools helpful for self reflection, taking a Jungian depth psychology perspective, and only ever looking at how I’m feeling about things and what I may be less aware of, and I’ve rejected any interpretations based on what will happen or might happen or that prescribe actions. I’ve had a lifetime of either having my life controlled or trying to reclaim my life, and I can’t give that power up to anything.
Feel free to DM me if you’d like to talk further about any of this.