Construct a Stable Timeline and Conquer Your Past Like the Hero You Are.

    Just about every school of astrology understands the first and most important chart to study on the path to a deep wisdom of the stars and timing is your own natal chart.  One has to check all astrological theory they learn against their own life before assessing its value and then applying it to their family and friends in concentric circles of closeness and in depth understanding of the life living that chart.  The memory will tend to serve just fine for the first portions of this process, but once one starts to study timing techniques, one will need to have constructed a robust and thorough timeline of one's own life. 
   I cannot stress this enough, you need to start building a timeline NOW.  It shocks and amazes me how many astrological enthusiasts have never done this and feel it is too much work to accomplish.  Your understanding of the art, and your own life will always be sub-par until this crucial task is accomplished and studied.  The purpose and utilization of this document is manifold.

   For starters, you will need this document to learn the meaning of transits and how they tend to play out, the shifts in mood and action from the beginning phase leading up to the transit, as the transit perfects, and the fallout after the transit.  This learning process requires a timeline.  The archetypal resonance of any combination of planets in any given combination of signs and houses will reveal themselves to you in understanding the exact timings within your life.  The shockingly literal nature of astrology will become apparent.  
   Much more than learning about how transits work, learning about how your LIFE works is even more important.  You will start to discover patterns of behaviour surrounding specific planetary transits, this will assist you in understanding how future transits from the same planets are likely to impact your life, and even more crucially, develop a plan to mitigate these actions and reactions before the transits perfect.  This is the true power of astrology.  In the process of mapping out your entire life with transits, you will also discover the meaning of some of the most difficult things that happened to you.  The meanings and domains of the transitting (and progressed) planets causing (or correlating with, if you prefer), the circumstances in life will show how you grew from them, and what other, potentially more positive events they brought about later in life.  Your life story becomes a mythic tale of the Hero's Journey with you as the imperfect protagonist, fumbling and bumbling through time, and hopefully growing into a more powerful and helpful human being.  After all, you wouldn't be studying astrology if this were not the case!
    A key benefit of having this timeline constructed is that you can check to see if transits to your angles seem to consistently happen a bit before or a bit after they perfect on your angles.  Transits in general do not necessarily peak in activity as they hit the 0 degree, 0 minute aspect, but are coaxed out by the combination of aspects coming from all the other planets, including (and perhaps most importantly) triggered by the fast moving Moon, who will bring about the latent potential of a given alignment when she joins the show.  Despite this, if there is a consistent push or pull on the timing to your angles, you can be fairly certain you have a case to make for a time rectification.  This can then be confirmed via continued monitoring in the moment as you go along through life.  I will tell you for certain that the universe wants exact natal times known, and will toss some very obtuse hints out to you if you are earnestly working to discover them. 
   The next most important factor in having constructed this timeline is that you now have it for life.  Every time you come across some new timing technique you want to learn, you have it handy to measure against the mechanisms of the new technique you want to test to see how well it works for you.  With your timeline handy you will learn the mechanations of any new timing concepts at a breakneck pace.  You will not regret doing this work.
    In the process of constructing your timeline, getting it accurate to the month is good enough.  Of course anything you have an exact date for you should absolutely plug in there, if it is timed even better.  Studying the standalone chart of an event in your life can be instructive on its own to begin with, but getting even the month OR EVEN THE SEASON in there to start will be extremely helpful.  If your Mother kept a baby book, this is crucial to dig up.  As happened to me, reading the birth time in my baby book, written on the day of my birth, changed the time my Mom had rounded up to by 2 minutes, shifting my rising sign and causing my chart fall into a logical and resonant sense.  Everything dated and timed in your baby book can begin the construction of your timeline. 
   From there, for those of us blessed to have kept a dated journal, time travel and give your past self a hug, you just discovered the cheat code to learning astrology!  If you have any workbooks from school, most of that will be dated, and can place you back in your body in that time and start to align things.  Remembering specific birthdays, Christmasses, and other yearly celebrations will help to start placing things in time for you that you don't have dates for.  Reaching out to friends and family, (especially any with prominent Virgo placements, they just became your greatest ally!) will help to start timing things you forgot about.  Dig up photo albums.  Many of which will have dates on the backs of the pictures, PULL EVERY ONE OUT AND CHECK!  
   Next up, once we get into the digital age, we have a coruncopia of timing resources.  Your email records (for those of us who are lax at deleting them) just became a treasure trove of digitized memory.  Likewise with digging through social media.  If you use a computer actively, the past few decades should be a cinch to reconstruct.  
   Now that I've made my case for why and how to construct this timeline, it's up to you to get on it.  There is no time like the present, because the past is always with us.... lingering with its painful messages to bring about a better future.   I know that many people have had traumatic life experiences which are too painful to relive, but to become an astrologer requires one to address the entirety of their life to mine for astrological insights.  The more traumatic the experience, the more powerful the astrological knowledge and wisdom to be gained there will be.  Just constructing this timeline, and placing it safely within a solid and resolute astrological framework can be an immensely healing journey.  By fully cataloguing your past, you can take a certain amount of control over it.  It is now your story to tell and use to the betterment of your future, and anyone you choose to help with your incredible astrological wisdom.  This is the core meaning of the Chironian Journey.
   You will note that as you construct this timeline the gaps will start to fill in.  You'll place your life within a structure that will send out fibrous networks from every firm date and start to reconstruct your life into a stable and reliable shape.  From here, you can move forward as the learned hero of your own story, placing your past within the proper astro setting of meaning and applicable purpose.