The meditation app is still on your phone, with the counter stopped on day twelve. Your grandmother's rosary is in a drawer. There was the weekend tarot course, the crystal book read halfway through, the retreat where everyone cried except you. And what's left is a line you repeat half-laughing, half-sad: "I don't think I'm a spiritual person".

Almost always the problem lies elsewhere. You tried practices that worked for other people, recommended with enthusiasm by those who love them, and they didn't speak your language. The friend who meditates at six in the morning talks about it with her eyes lit up. For you, twenty minutes standing still with your eyes closed turn into a shopping list.

And some people give up going the opposite way: they grew up in a religion full of rules, left it with relief, and were left with an emptiness that no new practice fills. This person often thinks they have to choose between going back and having nothing at all. The chart tends to show a third way, one that sometimes keeps the old gesture and only changes its meaning.

Each person has a door into the sacred, and it tends to be drawn quite clearly in the chart. For some it's study, for others the body, dreams, ritual, nature, the oracle. Whoever finds their own door tends to be surprised at how easily the thing finally clicks.

House 9 is the house of the search for meaning: philosophy, faith, study, travel, the big whys. When it is strong in the birth chart, with planets inside or with the ruler well placed, spirituality tends to arrive through the head before it arrives through the heart.

This is the person who can only pray once she understands the history of the prayer. Who reads the old texts, compares traditions, wants to know where each gesture came from. For her, studying astrology, Kabbalah or theology is real spiritual practice, and a good study group is worth more than any guided meditation.

Jupiter speaks to this house. It describes faith, the confidence that life has some meaning, and the kind of teacher or teaching that makes you grow. Jupiter in Sagittarius tends to look for meaning on the road, in pilgrimage, in other cultures. In Virgo, it looks for it in service and in daily practice done with care. In Pisces, in devotion and surrender. With Jupiter in the 9th house, which is its own house by nature, this search tends to shape an entire life.

People with this emphasis who are sent to a purely physical practice tend to come away frustrated. The question was missing. With it, the same gesture takes on a different weight.

House 12 has a bad reputation in the old books, which called it the house of hidden enemies and imprisonment. My reading of it is kinder: it is the house of withdrawal, of the unconscious, of everything that happens far from view and sometimes far from our own attention.

People with planets there tend to need time alone in a way others find excessive. They need an afternoon with no one around, a room of their own, a retreat, the sea. Without it they turn irritable, confused, full of other people's stuff stuck to their skin. With it, they come back whole.

The Moon in house 12, for instance, tends to feel the mood of a place before anyone says a word, and wears out in crowded settings. For this person, withdrawing is the basic spiritual practice, prior to any technique. Teaching her a complicated meditation method without first securing a corner to retreat to is building the house from the roof down.

It is the part of the psyche that speaks through images and dreams, and it tends to ask for practices that let it speak: writing down dreams on waking, drawing with no goal, praying without asking for anything, spending time near water.

Everyone has intuition. What changes is the channel it comes through, and a lot of people distrust their own because they expected it to arrive some other way.

Neptune describes imagination, sensitivity, the capacity to notice what nobody said. When it is strong, intuition tends to arrive as an image, a dream, the song stuck in your head on the day something is about to change. The Moon describes the other half: what nourishes you and how your body registers things. For some, intuition is a knot in the stomach. For others, it is a quiet certainty that turns up while washing the dishes.

A person with Neptune in aspect to Mercury may receive intuition in words, whole sentences that appear ready-formed in the mind, and tends to do well with a journal, free writing and oracles that speak through symbols, such as tarot and Cigano cards. With Neptune in aspect to Mars, intuition tends to arrive through movement: dancing, walking, in the middle of a workout.

Recognising your channel changes your relationship with intuition. You stop waiting for a voice that never comes and start paying attention to the knot, the dream, or the sentence that were always there.

Dreams deserve a note of their own. People with Neptune or the Moon linked to house 12 tend to dream a lot and remember well, and for this person a notebook by the bed can be the most fruitful practice of all. Write it down for a month, without interpreting, then read it back. The symbols that repeat tell you more about where she is than most books.

This is where the most practical point of all comes in. The elements in the birth chart, especially the element of the Moon and of the planets in houses 9 and 12, give clues about the kind of practice that tends to stick.

• People with a lot of Earth tend to connect through their hands and senses: an altar set with chosen objects, the garden, herbs, a candle lit at a set time, cooking as ritual.
• People with a lot of Fire need movement and intensity: dance, chant, pilgrimage on foot, ritual with real fire.
• People with a lot of Air connect through word and idea: study, spoken prayer, the journal, oracles that talk back to the person, such as tarot and runes.
• People with a lot of Water go through feeling: baths, music, recording dreams, devotion, ancestor worship.

These are possibilities, and the whole chart always adjusts things. Someone with a lot of Water and a strong Saturn may need structure, a fixed schedule, a tradition with rules, so the sensitivity has something to lean on. For some charts, witchcraft, working with altars and spells, or magic with symbols are natural paths, and deserve the same respect as Mass or a terreiro. Choosing the time for a ritual is a different matter, explained in astrological magic.

What I see most often is Fire people trying to meditate sitting still, and Earth people trying a spirituality made only of ideas. Both give up thinking the flaw was theirs, when all they needed was a different door.

Not all spirituality begins in a search. For a lot of people it begins in a loss: a grief, an illness, an ending that turned life inside out. Anyone who has gone through it knows they came out different, and sometimes only finds the words for what changed years later.

House 8 and Pluto describe this path: transformation that arrives through crisis, forced letting go, the capacity to regenerate. People with this emphasis tend to have little patience for decorative spirituality and a lot of interest in what runs deep: death, cycles, mysteries, work with one's own shadow.

The North Node and Chiron complete the picture. The North Node points to the direction that costs and makes you grow; Chiron shows the old wound that, once tended, tends to become the capacity to care for others. Many people who work caring for someone recognise their own story in their Chiron.

A serious reading looks at all of this together, without turning pain into merit. No one needs to suffer to be spiritual. But when suffering came, the chart helps make sense of what it opened up.

A practice that only exists on a weekend retreat disappears in the first busy week. The question that matters most, and the one asked least, is how spirituality fits into an ordinary Tuesday, with a meeting, traffic and a child running a fever.

The chart helps here too. People with the Moon in an Earth sign tend to do well with small, repeated gestures: lighting the same candle every night, watering the plants with attention, a short prayer before bed. People with Jupiter or house 9 in the spotlight need food for the mind, and a chapter read on the bus counts as practice. People with an emphasis on house 12 need to protect ten minutes alone a day with the same care they protect their lunch hour.

The practice that lasts is the one that fits your real week, and it tends to be much smaller than imagined. Ten minutes you actually do are worth more than the hour you promise yourself.

This reading does not confirm mediumship, psychic powers or supernatural gifts. The chart can show sensitivity, an affinity with the symbolic and with certain practices. What you make of that belongs to your own experience and to the tradition that welcomes you.

It does not make a spiritual diagnosis. No position in the chart means a spirit attachment, an obsession, an attack or a spiritual debt, and a reading that uses the sky to frighten you is doing the opposite of what it should.

It does not tell you which religion is the right one and does not ask you to give up your own. A devout Catholic and a practising witch can have similar charts, and the chart respects both.

And it does not replace psychological care. If you see or hear things that frighten you, if spirituality has become a source of distress, if there is suffering that will not pass, see a mental health professional. Asking for that help takes nothing away from your faith.

Finally, nothing can be concluded from a single position. A strong Neptune on its own says little; the full picture appears when house 12, the Moon, Jupiter and the rest of the chart point the same way.

The idea that each temperament calls for a different practice is an old one. In 1489, the Florentine Marsilio Ficino, a priest and translator of Plato, published a book on how to care for the life of a scholar, and in it he recommended different things for each planet: music, colours, walks, scents, timing. The melancholic, which he linked to Saturn, needed sun, singing and company; others needed withdrawal.

More than four centuries later, in 1911, Carl Jung wrote to Freud saying he spent his nights calculating birth charts to find clues about the psyche. For Jung, the planets were living images in everyone's unconscious, and the chart showed which of them were more awake in each person.

The two ideas meet in a spiritual reading today. The chart works as a symbolic language, able to show why one person finds the sacred in the garden and another in a book of philosophy.

So, before giving up for good, make a list of the three times in your life when you felt something bigger than you. Where you were, what you were doing, who was with you. It is quite likely that the three have something in common, and that something tends to be your door in.

And the questions that come up most on this subject, with the short answer: