Thursday 4 February 2010

Your Transits Are Not Just About You!

When we first learn astrology and get to know our own natal charts, it’s fascinating to follow our transits and see how they are reflected in our lives. This is how we learn, not just about astrology, but about ourselves and about the bigger picture of our life’s journey.

However, even when we’re more experienced at reading the symbols, it’s sometimes easy to forget that whatever we are going through affects, on some level, everyone else around us. No man (or woman) is an island, after all.

There are a number of ways to see how your ‘stuff’ affects someone else. For example, you could do a chart comparison to see how your transits fit into their chart and vice versa, or you could do run a composite chart and look at the transits to that.

However, there is another method borrowed from traditional astrology called turning the chart which is a very simple technique which only requires you to look at your own chart.

The first step is to work out which house in your chart represents the person in question. Any good book on the houses in astrology will give you this information and you will probably be able to pull up a decent list from a Google search. To get you started, here are the most obvious ones: your significant other falls in your 7th house; your boss in your 10th; your co-workers in your 6th; your kids in the 5th; parents in the 4th and the 10th and your social buddies in the 11th.

Then, to turn the chart, you count the house in your chart that belongs to the other person as their first house. Next, you count around the houses from there (counter-clockwise), until you get to the house where your transiting planet or transited planet sits. Once you’ve got there, you can apply the art of interpretation and bingo, you have a simple way of seeing how your transit affects them! If that doesn’t make much sense, don’t worry, this is a technique that is easier to do than it is to explain, so here are a few examples of how it works.

Vikki has transiting Saturn conjunct her 8th house Sun. Her partner Tom is out of work so they are paying the mortgage and all the bills out of her salary alone. They are managing to make ends meet, but Vikki is stressed and anxious, worried that if this situation goes on much longer she’s going to have to dip into her savings to pay the bills. But how is this situation affecting Tom? Obviously they are talking about it between them and working out ways to save costs, but underneath, how is Tom feeling?

In Vikki’s chart Tom falls in her 7th house, so we count her 7th house as Tom’s 1st house. The 8th house, the scene of Vikki’s Saturn transit, is therefore Tom’s derived 2nd house. The second house is where you get your money from and currently, with Saturn moving through Tom’s derived 2nd house, money is in short supply and he’s being supported by Vikki. So far so good, this is a very literal and accurate interpretation of the situation. But we can go further with this and give Vikki more insight into the situation by looking at the psychological meaning of the 2nd house. At this level, his derived 2nd house speaks of his self esteem and how he values himself. A proud man, his confidence and ego has taken a knock by losing his job and having to be supported. Understanding this has helped Vikki to support Tom emotionally as well as financially, avoiding the blame game and actually helping them to grow closer during these difficult times.

Cherie is a well educated young woman in her mid-twenties who feels ready to take the next step in her career. She feels that she is not getting the respect she needs from her boss and that despite her efforts to prove she is ready to move up, she is being blocked. With transiting Saturn on her 10th house cusp (the house of bosses), this makes the 10th the derived 1st house for her boss.


With the 1st house representing the image we present to the world, perhaps this is part of the problem for Cherie? Therefore, we discussed how she could work on improving her image in the eyes of the boss, to prove that she was ready for promotion. While she was adamant that the quality of her work was more than good enough, she did accept that she could work on behaving in a more professional manner in client meetings and in the way she presented her work and ideas to her boss. Because the higher level of job she wants involves gaining the respect of important clients, she could also see how the boss might be wary of putting his own reputation on the line if Cherie was promoted before she was ready. She also accepted that she might need to be patient and persistent in her efforts, because due to the circumstances of the company, if a promotion is on the cards, it might not happen quickly.

Jack has transiting Neptune moving through his 7th house, opposing his first house Moon. He has recently developed strong feelings for a female friend, Natalie, and would like their friendship to develop into something more intimate. However, when he mentioned his feelings to her, she said that while she is starting to feel the same way about him, she felt that this wasn’t the right time for her to start a new relationship. Naturally, Jack was confused by these mixed messages.

As a friend, Natalie falls in Jack’s 11th house, so the 11th becomes Natalie’s derived 1st house. The two houses affected by the Neptune transit in Jack’s chart are the 1st and 7th house, the relationship axis. By turning the chart, we find that Jack’s 1st house is Natalie’s derived 3rd house and Jack’s 7th house is Natalie’s derived 9th house.

The 3rd-9th is the axis of study, learning, travel and communication and with Neptune affecting these houses it’s clear that communication between them is confusing him. For Neptune transits, something is always other than it seems and this is true here because Natalie later revealed that she is thinking of moving abroad to study for a few months. Neptune’s message here for Jack is that Natalie is probably not clear in her mind about what it is she wants right now. While she is trying to broaden her horizons by maybe studying abroad, it’s difficult for to make a rational decision and she must rely on her intuition to decide what to do. Added to that, she may even be over-impressionable at this time. Knowing this, Jack decided not to pressure her to make a decision and tell her that if she did go abroad, he would like to stay in touch and then see how they both feel once she gets home again and once the emotional fogginess of the Neptune transit has passed.

I think the general conclusion here is that it’s always useful to try and see things from someone else’s perspective. This is how good relationships of mutual trust, sharing, compassion and respect take seed.

[Please note that names and particulars of circumstance have been changed in all the above examples]

Mandi
www.mandilockley.com

2 comments:

  1. Ah! Derived houses.

    Great post, by the way!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yes, it took me a while to get used to the idea, but now I find it such a great tool. Thanks for your comment and I hope you have a lovely weekend.
    Mandi

    ReplyDelete

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