Last month, I was watching a recent episode of Call Her Daddy featuring psychotherapist and relationship expert, Esther Perel, and one thing she said stopped me in my tracks.
She spoke about how we’ve turned the uncertainty of dating into something threatening.
Instead of letting the unknown be part of the adventure, we’ve learned to fear it. We seek reassurance before experience. We look for certainty before connection. We want to know if someone is right for us before we allow ourselves to find out.
And the more I sat with that, the more I realized how deeply familiar that impulse is.
Because I have done this. I have looked for certainty everywhere.
In astrology charts. In personality tests. In attachment styles. In “signs.” In the subtle language of spiritual compatibility.
I told myself I was being discerning. Intentional. Self-aware.
But if I’m honest, I was often trying to protect myself from the discomfort of uncertainty. I wanted guarantees before vulnerability. I wanted the answer before the experience.
I wanted tools that could help me determine whether it was safe to proceed—whether someone was “aligned,” whether the connection was “meant to be,” whether the stars supported it.
These frameworks can be beautiful. They can offer language, insight, reflection. But I began to notice how I was using them.
Not as tools for curiosity, but as tools for control. Not to deepen the experience of knowing another person, but to avoid the risk of not knowing.
Always seeking something outside of myself to tell me you’re safe, this is the right decision to make, correct answer.
And that realization opened the door to a much deeper shadow, because the moment I saw it in myself, I recognized it somewhere else.
My dad.
My father has always clung tightly to religious certainty.
To the Bible. To church doctrine. To the belief that life is understandable when interpreted through the right spiritual lens.
There is safety in that kind of certainty. Structure. Meaning. Order. For a long time, I saw my spirituality as the opposite of his religion.
He had dogma, I had freedom. He had rigid beliefs, I had openness. He had rules, I had intuition.
But the deeper I looked, the more I saw that we were not opposites at all. We were mirrors.
Because I had simply built my own version of certainty. Where he relied on scripture, I relied on spiritual ideology. Where he interpreted life through doctrine, I interpreted it through “alignment.” Where he used religion to explain pain, I used spirituality to transcend it.
And in both cases, the underlying impulse was the same: to make the unknown feel safe.
That was a hard truth to face, because I wanted to believe my spirituality was expansive. But much of what I had embraced was not expansion—it was refinement of control.
It was “high vibe only” thinking. It was trying to rise above messy human feelings. It was assigning meaning too quickly so I didn’t have to sit in ambiguity.
It was bypassing. And more than that, it carried a kind of subtle elitism.
An unspoken hierarchy where some emotions were “lower” and some perspectives were “more evolved.”
I thought I was pursuing enlightenment, but often I was just rejecting humanity. Rejecting grief. Rejecting uncertainty. Rejecting the humbling truth that life is not always going to make sense, no matter how much I try to make sense of it.
The shadow of spirituality is not belief itself. The shadow is the need for belief to protect us from the unknown.
And this is exactly where Sagittarius’ shadow lives.
Sagittarius governs belief, philosophy, meaning-making, and truth. At its highest expression, Sagittarius expands us. It invites exploration, curiosity, and a willingness to remain open.
But in its shadow, Sagittarius can become dogmatic, rigid, certain, and attached to “truth” as a way to stabilize fear.
This can happen in religion. It can happen in spirituality. It can happen in dating.
Any time we cling to systems, labels, philosophies, or beliefs to avoid the vulnerability of direct experience, Sagittarius shadow is at work.
We use certainty as a shield. We create rules to protect ourselves from surprise. We seek answers before we allow ourselves to be changed by the question.
And what we lose in that process is whimsy, magick, and wonder. Because wonder requires uncertainty, and intimacy requires uncertainty.
Faith—real faith—requires uncertainty. The higher expression of Sagittarius is not certainty. It is curiosity.
It’s not about convincing yourself that you know the answers when you don’t.
It’s the willingness to meet life as an unfolding mystery. To allow someone to reveal themselves over time. To let an experience be unresolved. To resist the urge to force meaning before meaning is ready to emerge. To marvel at the world’s unpredictability instead of trying to dominate it.
This kind of openness is not passive. It is courageous, and perhaps the most enlightened way to be. That’s the paradox.
The more you surrender to the Unknown—releasing your need to cling to the narrative that you’ve manufactured in order to manufacture predictability and perceived safety—the more you surrender the illusion of knowing to enter the adventure without guarantees.
And maybe that is the invitation of this Sagittarius Full Moon—to notice where we have replaced wonder with doctrine, where our beliefs have become defenses, and where certainty has cost us intimacy—with others, with life, with ourselves.
This month’s Shadow Work Through Tarot & Poetry will be exploring the shadow of Sagittarius through writing, tarot, and reflection THIS Wednesday, May 27 at 8pm in Burbank, Calif.
Together, we’ll look at the beliefs we cling to, the truths we’ve inherited, and the places where certainty has become a form of self-protection.
Because life becomes far more alive when we stop trying to predict it, and perhaps the deepest spiritual practice is not having the answer, but remaining open to the mystery.
Xo