2022 Essay Contest Winner: Second Prize

New Horizons

When I told my mother about my Jyotish reading with Renay, and how it had given me peace, she told me she also had been questioning herself. What she could have done, or not done, to prevent my developing this disease. I hope my reading helped her, too.

I’m fine. Really, I am very healthy and feel lucky to be alive and able to actively explore the beautiful planet we live on. I had many very dark months about four years ago, when debilitating vertigo made it difficult to walk and sometimes even to sit up. Time, yoga practice, medication, and diet tweaks have kept me vertigo-free for several years now. I am permanently nearly deaf in one ear from the episodes of fluid pressure in that ear that caused the nerve damage and led to the vertigo. But as I remind myself and others, I still have one ear left. So far, anyway.

This medical condition was a contributing factor to losing out on a personal and professional dream opportunity in 2021. The loss sent me into a spiral of questions about my direction and purpose, and led me to seek out Jyotisha for insight. Why had this happened to me? What could I have done or could I do to prevent or reverse it? Although our medical establishment in the US could slap a name on what was happening and could prescribe medication to react to it, no one could tell me why it was happening to me. In some ways the inner workings of the human body remain as mysterious as other worlds. In some ways this question of “why” is something Western medicine is not equipped to address.

At first it was a shock to learn from Renay that planetary alignments from my time of birth had made this dark period in my life perfectly predictable and inevitable, results of the eddies in the fluid dynamics of cosmic energy. I was born, I lived my life, I came to this bend in the river, it crashed over me. What I heard in that message was: what else would I have been able to do? The forces of nature were greater than me.

What I did was I swim through that dark period, and now I get to explore the downstream opportunities. Reflecting on my reading, it has freed me from remaining mired in the sucking mud of regret. Now I can accept that whether or or not it was truly inevitable, it happened. Rather than remaining stuck in one place on on one version of a dream, my reading suggested new destinations that inspire me to work my way towards them. Redefining my horizons by moving past one dream has not meant limiting those horizons, but actually expanding them.

In the year since my visit to Renay, my horizons have expanded as I began a new job that has challenged me to learn entire new fields of science and business. Moreover that new position has given me the financial and temporal freedom to learn to literally fly, another longtime dream. Surfing the currents of the wind on a paraglider physically expands your Earthly horizons, with the wind in your face and the birds below and beside you, connecting you to the essential air element of our beautiful planet without doing harm through burning jet fuel, and growing your mind and body to move in three dimensions at once.

Perhaps if the insight from one Jyotish reading can expand my horizons this much, further insight from study and consultations can do even more. Or perhaps not. In everything, I am learning (and relearning and relearning) there is a balance, and there may be elements of my charts I wish not to know. But if nothing else, it is a new way of perceiving the world that may expand not just my external, but my internal, horizons.