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How Your Birth Chart Can Change Depending on Where You Are

by Tara Ciccone

Have you ever been on vacation and thought to yourself, ‘Wow, I’m having much better luck here?’, whether it’s with relationships, work, or your health? Have you expressed this to friends and family members and they just chalked it up to rose colored vacation glasses? Well, they may be extremely wrong. Relocation Astrology, in simple terms, is the relocation of your birth chart to a new location at the exact same moment in time. It’s a helpful little tool when deciding a new place to live, where to vacation, and why. 

Alice Bell is a former Vogue Fashion assistant who, while navigating the fashion world, studied astrology on the side. “I had been introduced to my birth chart by my therapist in 2016, but I didn’t get super into it myself until the beginning of 2018. After teaching myself how to read my own birth chart, I felt like it validated a lot of my personality traits and emotions. I saw that there was a purpose to why I acted a certain way, why I was born into a specific family, and why I had an easy time with work but a super difficult time with dating,” says Bell. 

She goes on to say that there are multiple ways to go about Relocation Astrology, “First, there is a relocation chart, which takes your birth chart and adjusts it based on the new longitude and latitude of the new city. So you might see certain planets shift houses, or you may even get an entirely new rising sign based on what city you set it to. This is why you might get a more positive vibe in certain cities while you may encounter greater challenges in another. For example, if in your birth chart you have a 6th house Saturn, but then you move to a different city, the Saturn might shift up to the 7th house. This would take the stress off work and health, but add it to relationships.”

Relocation Astrology can also be determined with Astrocartography. “Astrocartography is a map of the world, with prominent planetary lines running through it. The different lines essentially show where you have the strongest energy across the world, either easy or difficult,” says Bell. Alice continues, “so an orange [ascendant] sun line through a city means that the sun in your chart has been moved to your ascendant line. This might be a city where you undergo a lot of self discovery and initiate a lot of projects independently. You might overall feel more confident. Meanwhile, a purple [Midheaven] Neptune line through a place means that Neptune has been adjusted to touch your Midheaven, or career, line. So you may at first feel confused about work and lack direction with your career. Or you could encounter more mistreatment in the workplace. The purpose of living on this sort of line would be to find greater spiritual fulfillment through your work or switch to a job that gives back to other people,” says Bell.

Another aspect of Relocation Astrology is your Solar Return Chart, the chart that resets every year on your birthday and predicts what will happen and how you’ll feel for the coming year. “ If you move cities, the solar return chart will change. So technically, if you see a difficult year coming up in New York, you could move to L.A. and get a completely different chart,” says Bell.

You should not, however, base your permanent location on the easiest route, Alice says, “Sometimes, you happen to be drawn to a more difficult line to learn something about yourself and come out stronger. Easy lines are often just better for vacation.” 

Astrology is helpful when in the pursuit of changes, but you cannot always outrun your problems. “If you’re going through a challenging square or opposition in your transit chart, then that’s going to remain the same no matter where you go.”

Image via Christina M Garcia for Vogue

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