Lighting up

Here's some astrology that I hope is pretty accessible to everyone: if you have your birth information and have looked at your own chart*, you can see that your chart is divided up into 12 houses, beginning at 9 o'clock (if you were looking at a clock) and going counter-clockwise around the circle, so the 12th house begins at 10 o'clock. Then you can get fancy and input the charts of your nearest and dearest—all you need is a birthday, but having their birth time is a good bonus—and do what's called a chart comparison, layering their chart around the outside of your chart. Then all you have to do with your eyes is look around your own chart at where their energy lights up your houses.

So you want to look mainly for 3 things: their sun, their moon, and their ascendant (if you have a birth time for them), and where those are relative to *your* chart. Look at what is where and apply critical thinking skills. Here's a list of house definitions that mostly matches up with how your chart will look.

• Their ascendant will be where this person will primarily effect you: when they are around you, concerns of this house automatically come up for you.

• Their sun will be an area of very obvious and easy rapport.

• Their moon should also be a place of easy rapport, though in some cases, it won't be one of much conversation, since the moon isn't really a verbal planet. It might be where the other person just kind of *gets* you without needing to talk much about it. 

• Bonus: their north node (if you can find it—it looks like a horseshoe—is a place where they influence you for the better, and their south node, which is a U shape and will be 180° opposite the north node, is a place where they influence you for the worse).

Again, apply critical thinking skills, and your relationships will make a lot more sense to you.

Now: do not despair if your significant other's sun falls somewhere weird. People get disheartened if their significant other's sun is not in their 7th house of relationships. (It doesn't happen as often as you might think it would.) If their sun is in your 6th house and they're overly concerned about your health and diet, well, that's actually kind of a productive 6th house function. Or if their sun is in your 3rd house: do you talk all the time? Do you have easy conversations? Do you like going on road trips together? That's a perfect manifestation of the 3rd house. The point here is to have a more solid understanding about what their energy does to help make you tick, or if you're curious about them, how it works in the other direction (relative to their chart), though if you look at their chart and your energy, I'd encourage you to ask them open-ended questions about how they perceive you, rather than assuming you know exactly how they experience you.

You can do this for everyone whose birth information you have. It's fun and simple and easy (really!).

I bring this up because I've been spending time with people who have strong Pisces energy, which lights up my 12th house. The 12th house is the hardest to understand, and even if you do understand it, it's weird as hell. Everyone has a 12th house, and it's the most subconscious house, and *probably* the most psychic, though that's up for debate (the 8th is a strong contender). The 12th house gets a bad rap because it also oversees the topics of secret enemies and self-undoing: do you have enemies you don't know about? (Maybe! I don't know!) Do you self-immolate for reasons you don't fully understand? I hope not, but if you do, that's a 12th house matter. Anyway, here's my point: you can't hide much from people whose energy lights up your 12th house. This might make you uncomfortable if you're hiding a lot, but if you don't have much to hide, anyway, people with energy in your 12th are beneficial because they just *get* you without you having to write a dissertation on why you are the way you are. Do you enjoy acceptance from someone who understands what makes you tick? Well, this is a benefit of people with energy in your 12th house. People aren't always comfortable being seen this deeply, though, and the only way to know what's what is to look up other people's energy and think about how comfortable or uncomfortable they make you feel if they have something significant in your 12th.

Anyway, my time with the Pisces people has had me talking too much, and mostly about old shit from the past I told myself I wouldn't talk about anymore. And guess what? The 12th house is one of those psychic closets where you shove things you don't particularly want to deal with, or even know what to do with. Let's say (in a fully fake example) the neighborhood kids ganged up on you when you were 6 and you spent 1st grade feeling like a social outcast until you switched schools in 2nd grade: that problem is long forgotten by conscious you, so it might be forgotten in houses 1 - 11, but not in 12. That's the main idea. So I found myself talking about old shit, and then wondering both why and where (the hell) this was coming from, only to remember, duh: the Pisces people light up your 12th house, so you wind up describing in detail your 1st grade trauma while they nod sympathetically, and when you're away from them you snap out of it and wonder what your problem is. The light was just on in your psychic closet: that's what happened. But now that you know something's there, maybe deal with it? (And, uh, maybe if life is sending you a LOT of people with energy in your 12th house, take a hint and heal some stuff.)

Word to the wise: if you live with such a person, you really can't hide much from them, so I wouldn't bother trying. The good thing is that they *see* you, but that can also work against you if you'd prefer to keep certain things private. Because you CAN'T with this subset of the population. I've lived with someone like this, back when it was in my interest to hide things (think: moody teenager), and hiding stuff from them was a freaking fool's errand.

*astro.com is a resource for this

P.S. You have officially survived this round of Venus retrograde.