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Eclipses carry the signature of change, and in these areas of life we will be asked to grow beyond what we’ve previously known. That room has become too small, cramped or tight and during eclipse season we’re ready to experience a rapid infusion of new awareness here.

All eclipses fall in pairs into two rooms, or houses, of our birth chart. The flickering lights of the Sun and Moon act like light bulbs and as they turn on and off they can bring issues that have quietly existed in the shadows up until now out into the light of day. Via periods of intensity or crisis (during the 4-6 weeks surrounding an eclipse pair) our attention is mobilized in these areas of our life. Yet just because eclipse season is over doesn’t mean we stop growing here; the Nodes are transiting through this house over a longer 18-24 month period. You’ll get to integrate the eclipse information during the six months between eclipse pairs- until the next set begins, adding another layer to your personal eclipse story. To identify the house in which an eclipse falls, locate that eclipse degree in your birth chart. Note* 2011-12 Eclipse degrees are given at the bottom of this page.

Axis of Self-Identity and Partnering. The 1st/7th House or Aries-Libra eclipse axis wants you to grow beyond the familiar four walls of identity and partnership. You’re ready to express a new way of being in the world and experience the evolutionary impact of at least one new (or changing) significant partnership in your life. This is the axis of self and other; independence and interdependence, of how to go my own way and co-exist all in the same sentence. How you see your self versus how others see you is at issue here and if one is at odds with the other you’ll reconcile the difference during this eclipse season. You may ask yourself: does my personal style and approach to life fully reflect who I am? Are my relationships keeping pace with who I am today? New styles will be tried on, identities and/or relationships pursued and as a consequence new agreements may need to be negotiated in relationship. Aries empowers courageous acts of moxie and bold moves on behalf of oneself; Libra, empowers the desire to be beholden to another. Classic Aries-Libra dilemmas: Is there room for an I in We? or Are you the right one for me? or Can we be happy together forever?

Here’s how it might play out:

-You’ve decided to pursue a career as an artist and you feel your straight-laced clothes may be giving off the wrong impression to people you meet. You change your appearance and begin dressing like an artist (because you are one) to more fully embody an identity. This throws your accountant boyfriend into a tailspin while simultaneously drawing new arts-y folks into your orbit.

-You have the shocking realization that your self-image, and your friends, are completely tied into your partnership. You make this harrowing discovery when your lover leaves and you no longer recognize your self.

-You unconsciously see your self as an eternal bachelor or bachelorette. You discover this when you meet someone you want to spend more time with and they challenge your footloose, fancy free self-image by asking you to settle down.

-You’re in a stable partnership and your partner develops new interests outside of the home. Now you have more time on your hands. This free time stimulates you to ‘do something’. Suddenly you’re off and running in a new direction of self-discovery.

Axis of Adaptation & Retreat*. The 6th/12th House or Virgo-Pisces axis asks you to grow beyond the four familiar walls of your habitual physical and daily work routines. Embrace a season of adapting to a new set of circumstances. You may discover you need a new set of on the job skills to just ‘keep up.’ You may finally face and conquer self-defeating psychological and health habits. Or you may reach a crisis point in your self-care. This axis works prescriptively: if there are more demands at work (Sixth House), you can take more time to just stare at the ceiling – it is enough to just be (Twelfth House). Virgo empowers keeping the body/mind/spirit temple in working psychological and physical order; Pisces empowers the need for integrating fantasy, letting go, and quiet contemplation into the overall picture of your life. There’s a time for fixing what can be fixed; there’s a time for surrendering what we can’t control, a time for giving up to God.

Here’s how it might play out:

-You’re swamped at work and in need of rest you never seem to get. Then a co-worker quits and you have even more responsibility than you had before. You know if you can survive this fallow period of grunt work, you’ll be rewarded with a promotion down the road but in order to survive, you’ll need to do more yoga, make healthier eating choices and take care of your most precious instrument – your body.

-You have a seasonal job and it’s low season. You find your self watching a lot of television and maybe even using some recreational drugs to bide the long expanse of time you now have available. You’ve neglected housework, bills and this is having repercussions in your partnership. You need to make new choices about how you manage your day to day along with examining how drug use affects your productivity.

-Your doctor notices a suspicious looking lesion. You get it biopsied and it’s cancerous. This experience, although not life-threatening forces you to take time off, slow down and re-evaluate your priorities. This facilitates an interest in exploring your spirituality and years down the road you’re teaching invaluable classes on facing one’s own death. This all happened because you were stopped in your tracks.

-You adopt a pet. Coming home everyday to, feeding, walking and serving the needs of this pet definitely changes your daily routines but you also find that your connection is a spiritual one. You are nourished by this creature connection. Caring for this pet relieves other stressors in your life; you feel better physically and spiritually.

-You are feeling insecure and confused about your life direction, and you wish someone could help you. You get a mentor who helps you with skills you want to develop, or find a therapist who can help you make sense of your fears and lead you toward greater self-acceptance. A cycle of apprenticeship is initiated whereby eventually you become your own best expert.

*the 6th-12th axis phrase ‘adaptation and retreat’ respectfully borrowed from April Elliott Kent.

Axis of Authenticity and Creative Contribution. When eclipses transit your 5th/11th House or Leo-Aquarius axis, step outside your familiar four walls of creative self-expression and life dreams. You’re ready to claim and express your most authentic self. You may find your self making long-term future plans for the first time in your life, or drafting your five and ten year life goals. You may download a personal dream or vision that also happens to fit into a collective current. Networks of friends and social groups play a role in reaching your dreams. Personal limelights are featured now. Creative energy and romance takes new focus and expression. Leo empowers creative births, including children, the claiming of talents, and the revitalizing need for joy and pleasure in one’s life; Aquarius empowers radical acts of self-authenticity, claiming of a personal truth-along with those fears of being rejected by our social network or tribe for making that choice.

Here’s how it might play out:

-You’ve recently conquered an addiction to drink, but your friends still drink. They still invite you to social functions where everyone drinks, and you find you have less and less in common with them. Your facing the fact that your lifelong friends no longer reflect the person you’ve become. Yet the friendships you strike up in your AA meetings do.

-You’ve been a performer in other people’s shows. An event coordinator calls you up and asks you to choreograph your own piece and perform solo. This seems like a huge risk to you – you’ve never performed alone, at least in public. You take the leap and are met with roaring success.

-You’re noticing people who are at the level you want to be at and frankly you’re a little jealous. You wonder: how did they get there? What do they have that you don’t? Instead of feeding your insecurity, you risk your self by reaching out to them – giving them a compliment on their work, and to your surprise – they embrace you.

-You’ve never had friends in your field of work and feel like a bit of a lone wolf. You surprise your self one day by bringing your banjo to a company talent show where you discover a group of people who regularly get together to pick ‘n play. Suddenly, through sharing your hobby with others, you’ve discovered people you genuinely like to be around.

-You’ve found a great love, something that makes you feel passionately alive – piano. You spend every spare moment developing this hobby, spending weekends at specialty music stores, and a staff member at this particular store is very knowledgeable about classical piano. He invites you on a date. You two develop a love affair, inspired by your mutual muse.

Axis of Mission & Soul Essence Memory. The 4th/10th House or Cancer/Capricorn axis represents the most intimate structures of our lives – family, personal mission and how we parent our self. We all want to be recognized in the world (Tenth House), to essentially get paid for being our self (Fourth House). During this season you’ll attempt to marry your soul essence with the purposeful destiny you’ve chosen. We may have meaningful encounters with who we are, remember our legacy, discover a buried treasure from the past. We may be recognized on a whole new professional level. Cancer needs to connect to the soul essence, the deeper nature behind purpose; Capricorn needs to find a meaningful place in society which perfectly expresses that essence. An idyllic view of home, family, or the perfect career may now change because it no longer fits reality, or the person you truly are. Classic Cancer-Capricorn dilemmas: Follow your heart and the money will follow; I’ve never felt ‘at home’ in my town – should I move?; My job leaves me no room for a personal life.

Here’s how it might play out:

-You’ve been chronically dissatisfied with your job for as long as you can remember. Then your boss promotes you. This forces you to reconcile and heal who you always wanted to be with who you’re known as in the professional world. You realize that your parents never liked their jobs, either, and how this has influenced you.

-Your love life is in perpetual upheaval and now you’re starting to feel strongly about starting a family. This heart longing brings up buried memories of being abandoned by your mother or father which, you realize, explains a lot about your love life. You begin the work of parenting your self, and your inner child.

-You want to have children. You visit an astrologer to see if they can see whether children are ‘in the stars’ for you two. The astrologer gives you some dates you might conceive. You get pregnant (5th/11th eclipses) and start a family (4th/10th eclipses).

-A parent dies, and as you grieve them you wonder about your psychological and personal inheritance from them – the legacy they have left you. Some parts of their life you don’t identify with, but some parts, you do, like their un-lived talents & dreams. You discover that you want to further an inherited gift in some way.

-Your home life has been crumbling and now reveals itself as a wreck. You and your partner are ‘staying together for the family’ but now, because your children are having behavior problems and the family house is infested with mold so you’re going to have to move, that’s no longer working. Your eyes have been opened to the changes you need to make.

Axis of Perception & Expansive Growth. During the eclipse of the 3rd/9th House or Gemini/Sagittarius axis, it’s time to expand beyond the familiar four walls of your mind. Imagine that your way of seeing your world has a thin layer of grime clouding over your perception. Gemini/Sagittarius is the axis of learning and expansion. Why you think the way you do & why you believe what you believe needs to be examined. These eclipses will shake up your mental circuitry; your perceptions and/or your worldview needs to change. Your old ways of thinking aren’t getting you where you need to be. You may need to work on communicating more effectively. To ‘make the eclipse Gods of the 3rd/9th work for you’ invite new ways of believing and thinking into your world: step outside your door and say hello to your neighbors, or neighboring country. Take a class. Learn. Teach. This axis contains your education, your beliefs, spirituality and religion.

Here’s how it might play out:

-You have always wanted to visit India. You synchronously have a conversation with a friendly native who offers you the opportunity to visit and stay at his place. It’ll be risky (you’ve never been to India!) but saying no is simply not an option. So you say yes and have the time of your life.

-You’ve been journalling about your exceptional childhood growing up in the Middle East. A writer acquaintance comes across a call for essays about growing up in Islam and encourages you to submit a piece. You do. In so doing, a whole new world opens up to you. Eventually you start earning money as a writer (that’s next, during the 2nd/8th house eclipses).

-You’re a specialist in your field and you’re interviewed in a local news article. From out of the blue someone from a University contacts you asking if you’d be a guest lecturer. You’ve never taught before. You discover that you enjoy the stimulating environment, and the students who are hungry for knowledge so much. That visiting appointment eventually extends into a semi-permanent position.

-You need some more tools in your career toolkit. You feel you just can’t accomplish the visions you have in your head without adding to your knowledge base. You go back to school.

-You visit a local meditation center. After sitting, there you have an encounter with a person from another country and spirituality whose backgrounds and beliefs are so diversely different from yours, you’re having fascinating conversations over coffee. This encounter connects you to your spirituality in a whole new way. Eventually, because of their influence on you, you take up studying a particular form of Buddhism.

Axis of Security & Mystery. The 2nd/8th House or Taurus/Scorpio axis asks you to question the solidity of the stuff you keep between your four walls. Stuff is an illusion. The only constant in life is change. Does that scare you? Insecurity goads you to examine the deeper questions about being an immaterial being in a material world. With this axis we’re coming to terms with the fact that nothing is solid or permanent in this world. Given that: what is unshakable and undying and confident within you? This eclipse cycle rifles through your attachments to: money, earning power, your possessions, your sexuality, your body image and certain people. Psychological and/or sexual intimacy is featured as the psychological shadow stuff of your self and others. The alchemical processes of the Eighth House allows for the honest stripping down of what’s inessential in order to discover what’s lasting and true. Death and dying is a theme in this mysterious alchemical and transformative terrain; there’s great potential for a shamanic magical or mystical journey to be had.

Here’s how it might play out:

-A dear friend commits suicide, leaving you with many questions and even more chaos in your soul where you experience a ‘dark night’. You question the value of a single life and wonder who will remember you when you’re gone. Your vulnerable questioning temporarily isolates you then makes you tender, forging deeper bonds to the temporary nature of life, to the people you love.

-You reconnect with an old lover and end up sleeping together. You feel terrible about yourself in the morning, experiencing the old familiar sexual hangover yet again -a feeling of diminished self-worth. You’ve given away your pearls to swine and today you call your self on it. You begin to address the deeper issues behind your patterns of sexual intimacy.

-You realize you aren’t feeling fairly compensated for your craft and never have been. You’re selling your work at far below market value, and a friend asks whether you value your own gifts and talents. You start to do spiritual work on scarcity, and discover a new sense of spiritual security arising in you. Because you did the spiritual-magical work, when you raise your rates people are happy to pay them.

-Your partner has always financially supported you – the eventuality was that you’d find your direction, find a job and start contributing to the household income but that day hasn’t come. You wonder if money is the only measure of a person’s value, and start adding up the gifts you bring to the table, like being a supportive partner and parent which can’t be measured in dollars. You’re reconciling the difference between money and self-worth.

-You loan money to a cousin who just lost a job. She promises to repay you, but doesn’t. You wrestle with your emotions around this and with growing resentment and anger realize you your animosity will cost you this dearest relationship. You forgive her. You’re learning important lessons around spiritual generosity.

2011-12 Eclipse Dates* & Signs:

December 10, 2011 18’11? Gemini Full Moon Lunar Eclipse
May 20, 2012 0’21? Gemini New Moon Solar Eclipse
June 4, 2012 14’14 Sagittarius Full Moon Lunar Eclipse
November 13, 2012 21’57′ Scorpio New Moon Solar Eclipse (new Taurus-Scorpio set begins)
November 28, 2012 6’46? Gemini Full Moon Lunar Eclipse

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Comments

One Response to “Eclipses By House & Sign”

ktduke on July 10th, 2010 5:07 pm

Wow, the eclipse is in my 11th house. Gotta say….. just had a major realization/shift with a longterm girlfriend. Realized that we no longer have anything in common and I feel like I have to carry our conversations. Nobody did anything wrong, we just outgrew each other. Doesn’t make me care for her less, just in a different way.

Amazing.

Thanks chica.

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