Cleaning House

A room-by-room walk through the birth chart, one House at a time

Photo by Alicia Christin Gerald on Unsplash

I’m writing this surrounded by moving boxes, piles of clothing, and stacks of personal items, as I’m preparing to move across the country in less than a week. While I’ve been getting my literal house in order, I’ve decided to embark on a journey to get my metaphorical Houses in order too.

I’m starting a new monthly series, exploring each of the Twelve Houses in the natal chart, one House and one month at a time, for one full year. Twelve Houses, twelve months, one complete cycle of becoming.

I recently had my annual “Resurrection Day,” the day of the year when the Sun crosses my Ascendant and enters the First House of my natal chart. This happens every year, but this year feels especially significant after all the dying and letting go I did over the course of the prior year.

Last year, I left my marriage, my home, my source of income, and the only family I had in California since moving here in 2019. Old friendships dissolved and I’ve stepped away from communities I’d been a part of for years. Even hobbies I once loved no longer had appeal. It was time for a total, complete reset of my life.

I moved into a tiny studio apartment near the beach with my two cats, and spent most of the past year healing, doing deep inner work, and strengthening my spiritual practice. I went all in on astrology, launched my professional practice late last year, and started writing about all of it here on Substack.

While making some progress on rebuilding a functional life, the work of the last year has mainly been an inside job. I knew on some level I was still only a half-baked pie. Not quite ready to come out of the oven just yet.

This year, something noticeably shifted after the Sun crossed into the First House of my natal chart. The inescapable heaviness of the last year has lifted.

Now I’m ready. I can’t fully explain it, but I can feel it. I could elaborate on the transits of what was happening and why, but I’ll save the astrological analyses for the article series itself.

Much of what lies ahead for me is still very unknown, but I plan to use astrology to help me navigate it in new ways. This is a personal challenge to not just know my own chart more deeply, but to live it well.

At the core of my astrology practice is the concept of “living astrology” because I believe it’s helpful to understand our charts intellectually, but it’s life changing to apply its wisdom and embody the lessons about who we are and what we came here to do.

This series will be one part personal reflection, one part educational, and one part experimental.

How this is going to work

Each month I’ll take one House through the same four-part lens: what the House is all about, the sign on the cusp, the ruling planet, and any planets sitting inside the House. I’ll open my own chart as the case study, explore what’s there for me, what it’s been like to live it, and where I might want to make some adjustments.

After that, I’ll break down what the sign on your own House cusp suggests, so you can follow along and work with your own chart one House at a time.

What’s coming next

Have your own chart ready so you can follow along. If you don’t already have a copy of your natal chart, you can use any free chart calculator website or app you prefer. I like www.astro.com and I made this short video tutorial walking you through the steps to create your free natal chart.

I’ll be starting the series with the First House, the house of self. It’s also the House I happen to be living through right now. The First House is where the chart begins, the same way this series begins with me sitting in an empty apartment, deciding who I get to be next.

So we start here, in the House of becoming.