Life After the 8th House
The eighth house in astrology is complex, and there is no way around that. Historically called the Idle House, it represented death and monetary gain via inheritance. In the 20th century, sex and mental health were added into the mix. Simply put, it contains everything we don’t want to acknowledge or admit, let alone talk openly about. Think of subject matter that is secret, stigmatized, and/or taboo and you’ve got it. But we all experience it at some point, whether by personal planets placed there in our birth charts or by periodic planetary transits through our eighth house.
Because the 8th house is 150° to the 1st house containing the ascendant, we do not directly observe its contents unless we make an effort to do so. And often the need to deal with it is presented by circumstances beyond our control forcing us to surrender much like a Pluto transit.
We may experience horrendous things, but we survive them, move through them, and onto the other side. Personally, I’ve found so much healing there, in the liminal space—between no longer and not yet. And therein lies an opportunity.
My initiation into my own 8th house experience happened before I had comprehension of the language of astrology to describe it. And without that skill, I ascribed a lot of what was happening to me was because I was flawed somehow, rather than just plain human.
What happened that was so awful? Essentially, I gave all of my love to the wrong person.
So deeply with all of my being. I couldn’t see it at the time but I had abandoned myself in the process. When the relationship ended, I was devastated. I had built my whole future with this person and now it was gone along with my self-worth. (Side note: little did I know that transiting Pluto was squaring my natal Pluto at the time.)
Through that process, I made a commitment to never abandon myself again. I lived alone and began to heal my “othered” parts. And you know what? All that love I had given another that I thought was lost, just wasted, came back to me like a boomerang.
I will never forget the day my own love hit me: standing in the kitchen of my tiny rented studio on a farm in the middle of nowhere, cleaning up after another meal-for-one. It struck me down like a tidal wave; a tsunami of love. I dropped to my knees and just sobbed, letting the ocean of my tears take me under. And I saw just how deep the bottom of my own love was; it was unfathomable.
Fast forward to now, and I am pleased to be offering a recorded lecture and presentation for Britten LaRue’s CAVE SPACE, a curated course kicking off this Scorpio season. It is called, “Life After the 8th House: Healing, miracles, and other riches of the unseen realms.” I will be sharing strategies for working with the “mysterious dark” as an ongoing practice utilizing one’s natal chart as a catalyst for co-creating one’s desires.
In the meantime, you can listen to Britten and I discuss 8th house astrology, 8th house natal placements, and my 8th house stellium here on episode 72 of Moon to Moon podcast.
If you’d like assistance in unpacking your own 8th house, I’d be happy to help. Book an Enchanted Signatures astrology reading with me and indicate that is the topic you’d like to focus on during our time together.
