Divisions of Life Periods (Dasha Systems)

There are different time periods in everyone’s life and they are ruled by the different time periods and cycles of each of the planets. Considering whenever someone was born, they are going to be at a different place within that cycle, an example of this is the Vimstottari dasha (timing system) which starts from your Moon Nakshatra that is individual to you and will differ from others.

When looking at someones chart the astrologer can see what time period they’re in and what planet is ruling that time period. Like mentioned in the previous post about planets being malefic and benefic, each planet has a different energy, function, and availability to what we can explore, what desires we will have, what things we are going to experience and what will come into our life. That’s what we’re looking at when we look at someone’s chart.

Sometimes when people have a huge change or all of a sudden a big difference in interest and desires it’s a shift from one planet to another, they are moving foreward within the vimstottari dasha cycle.

Vimstottari is a fancy word in sanskrit but what it actually means is 120. Vimstottari dasha is the time period stemming a hundred and twenty years. It is said that if a person was living a happy and healthy enlightened life that our regular life span would be 120 years long. Basically this cycle of a hundred and twenty years encompasses if you were to live (knock on wood) to the ripe old age of 120 you would have encountered every single planetary combination or cycle and subcycle; the whole spectrum, the whole gamut.

The actual calculation point which is a little bit technical starts from a persons moon which is their feelings, their emotions, although that point which is called the shuta can shift depending on other placements in your chart so bottom line is there are many ways of calculating how this dasha is used. An astrologer might see a person going through a Jupiter period and understand that although they will experience it completely differently to another because of their individual chart and placements, there will be some commonalities. Expansive, growth, inspiration, teachers, Jupiter is the natural indicator of children and husband as well so all of these themes become prevalent during a major Jupiter period.

This time period (dasha) is divided into sub periods and sub sub periods, these shifts from one period to another are what we call sundi points. They can create situations in life where familiarity moves to change and now we have to get used to the new reality and our brain has difficulty adjusting - that’s truly a good time to see an astrologer when you’re experiencing a shift on that level.

Vimstottari for everyone will always be relevant and at the same time there are certain combinations within peoples charts individually which will be grounds for them having a conditional dasha. That’s if someone has a certain placement or requirement within their chart we’ll look at different timing systems along with vimstottari.

Within the lineage I study within it’s important to understand how to read multiple different dashas rather than just one. Depending on your chart say if you have the lagna lord in the 7th house this constitutes for a conditional dasha. This implies that the 7th house, partnership, is predominant in this persons life therefore a secondary dasha system to look at would be one indicating/starting from that area of life.

It’s beautiful because sometimes people will say “what dasha system do you use?” As a vedic astrologer even the corpus of vedic astrology that I use and study is from the sage parasara who sort of compiled all these aphorisms and taught them to his student that’s sort of recorded in the brhat parasara hora sastra. Vimstottari is the prime essence in terms of applicability to everyone so we can see all these shifts, however parasara does talk about conditional dasha schemes, there are planetary dasha, and then there are sign based dashas so when we’re looking at the signs that these planets are in that’s really the environment that we’re living in so our desires and everything are represented by the planets but the environment is represent by sign based dashas so you have like Narayan dasha and then there are regular periods that everyone has in our lives.

Naisargika dasha we have natural periods of life like you have a child who is just born, they’re not going to experience reality on the same level as a 45 year old person so everything for the astrologer is in context related to that person and their life. The astrologers goal is really to parse through this and layer that information when looking at these overall life periods and see how that’s showing up for you.