I'm making a new series to go over one of my favorite astrological timing techniques. I like it because it's so simple.

I also like it because I think that it helps people who are just starting to learn about astrology understand the twelve houses. People get really tripped up about the houses in astrology because, by the time they learn the planets and the signs, the houses just feel like another layer that you can't figure out how to handle.

The best way to think about the twelve astrological houses is by time.

The first house, the second house, and the twelfth house are the three houses in your natal chart which describe your childhood and your youth. Together, they tell a story about what it means to become yourself.

The First House

The first house is angular and angular houses declare a purpose. As the angular house of the three houses which describe childhood, the first house describes the primary way that your childhood impacts you—you are born, you go from being somewhere between five to twelve pounds, and you grow physically until you reach your mature size and weight. The first house is the house of the body. You are first incarnated at the beginning of your childhood. You learn to be yourself, to move in this body, to hold and grip, to crawl and roll, to walk and talk. You learn to see with your eyes and make with your hands. By doing those things, you learn your perspective and how to change it.

How long do you stay in a state of youngness? When do you stop being a youth?

The astrological answer is: when your body reaches its limit and stops growing so dang fast. At some point, you reach the height that you're going to be. Your brain stops growing larger which doesn't help with new memory routes but certainly helps you feel like your emotions are more manageable. Sure, your body never stops changing. Your feet can get bigger, your teeth slip and slide around, but you do stop the kind of super fast growth that children and youth experience at some point.

Remember being in the sixth grade and getting a head taller in just one school year? That doesn't really happen after you hit thirty.

Remember being in seventh grade and suddenly growing new body parts? That changed your whole identity.

Remember being in ninth grade and feeling like your brain hole just got blown wide open because of one book you read? You felt like that because your brain literally grew larger as you were reading that book. By the time you finished, you were able to comprehend things that you were not able to comprehend when you were first starting.

The first house is the primary house that impacts you in your childhood and youth. You forget about this when you get older but, when you are in early life, the primary thing that you explore the world and learn through is your changing and growing body.

The Second House

The second house is a succedent house which means that it works by supporting the angular house that it is next to. Planets in the succedent houses fall into the angular house that they sit beside. That means that, if the first house is your growing body, then the second house is what supports you in your growth.

You know what helps you grow, right? It's food. Nuts and fish help your brain grow, grains give you energy, and soybeans and meat helps you repair your muscles as you use them so you can get stronger. The minerals that you eat give you long bones and green leaves help your body produce blood.

Primarily, the second house describes your relationship to nutrition.

The second house is your relationship to resourcing. It describes how secure you feel about the nutrition you need to survive and how consistently you ate in your childhood. The second house describes your fears and worries about having enough, about needing too much. Your second house was formed by learning how to share meals with your family, competing with siblings or cousins if you have any, budgeting and choosing according to your values.

Learning to eat taught you certain values about the world and about yourself in the world. If you were always given a smaller meal than your siblings due to unfairness or gender, then you internalize something about what you are allowed to deserve or ask for. Whether you learned to waste food, whether you learned to savor it, whether you learned to hoard food out of insecurity until said food goes rotten—you learned something about what a resource means and what it means to be worthy.

The lessons that you learned about food, resources, and support in childhood follow you in life because they're physical. You find them in your body later, in a disgruntled stomach that can't digest or a hungry throat that always craves meat. You see it in your stature because nutrition makes people get tall. The second house is a succedent house. It works by supporting an angle and the first house is where you see the consequences of the second.

The twelfth house

The twelfth house is the trickiest house of the three houses which describe your childhood because the twelfth house describes what you were taught to deny.

There's a theory about the twelfth house, one that I sometimes buy and sometimes don't because it's one of those psychological theories that seem a little misogynist. The theory about the twelfth house is that it describes what your mother had to repress or sacrifice in order to go through the physically taxing labor of pregnancy in order to birth you. While I don't doubt that the task of giving birth is taxing, I also know that all parents make sacrifices for their kids not during the nine months of pregnancy but during the entire upbringing. I'd actually just go ahead and apply this theory about the birthing mother to any and all parents. I'd say that the twelfth house describes what your caregivers or parents had to neglect or decided to give up in order to nurture you.

I know that we don't like to think about our parents in this way, that they gave up entire parts of themselves or lost whole skills that they used to enjoy, because they either chose to or ended up raising us. But they did. They fostered new life using pieces of their own.

Your parents gave things up to raise you. They gave up relationships, parts of their bones, income, and dreams to make room for you and, even if they chose to give those things up because they wanted you more, you feel and absorb those sacrifices in your body as a child because you can sense what your parents grieve.

The twelfth house is a cadent house. Planets which move into the first house fall away from that angular house when they enter the twelfth. As the cadent house of the three houses which describe childhood, the twelfth house tells you about what was sacrificed so that you could emerge. It describes what your childhood may have taught you to deny, about the choices that your parents had to make, and what your parents may expect you to continue to deny because part of them feels like resurrecting what was lost will defeat the weight of their sacrifice.