This is part two of a four part series about the twelve houses of astrology. I've noticed that the houses are pretty hard to learn for people who are new to astrology. By the time you learn about the planets and the signs, a lot of people struggle to fit the twelve houses into how they think of the chart because the houses just feel like an extra layer.

That's why a lot of people actually start to confuse the signs and the houses, applying the scheme of natural houses (comparing Aries with the first house and so on) where natural houses don't apply. I would discourage using natural houses where natural houses don't apply and, instead, encourage people to think of houses using this one rule:

Houses show your orientation to the world over time.

In the first part of this series, we took a look at houses one, two, and twelve as the angular, succedent, and cadent houses which describe your early life. These three houses of your chart describe your childhood and youth. In the second part of this series, we're going to take a look at the three houses which describe your maturity: houses ten, eleven, and nine.

The tenth house

The tenth house is the angular house of the three houses which represent your adulthood. As the angular house, the tenth house declares the primary issues that affect you as you become and live as your own person, impacting the society you live in and producing history. The tenth house happens to be the house that represents your mother.

No, it's not your father. It's your mother—traditionally at least. A lot of people get the significance of the fourth and tenth houses confused because, currently, too many people abbreviate the houses by turning to natural houses. People associate the zodiac sign of Capricorn with patriarchal authority and the tenth house. To properly learn the astrological houses, I want you to get rid of this confusion and forget natural houses for a moment.

The tenth house is not about patriarchal authority. The tenth house is about the future that you make for yourself. It represents your decisiveness and, most of all, discipline. Discipline does not grow out of authority. Discipline is rooted in nurture.

The tenth house traditionally represents the mother and, in contemporary life, can represent both parents or any caregivers in your life because the tenth house describes the way that you were taught to nurture your life and your future into existence. It describes the people who educated, advised, and shaped you and, as you grow, represents the ways that you impact the larger world that you are a part of. The tenth house describes discipline as an expression of trust—trusting yourself, your structures, and your habits.

What affirms your trust in your own decisions? How coherent does your vision of the future feel? How consistently are you able to tend to that vision?

These are discipline questions but they are also self care questions, self care being about your ability to nurture and protect the integrity of who you are. As a house, the tenth house is about the future that you are making with your day to day actions. Before you are an adult, you aren't expected to nurture yet because it's not your responsibility yet. Children can't take care of themselves. Once you become an adult, you start to not just give but to impart and shape. You start to take care of yourself and the people around you.

The tenth house, the angular house of the three houses which describe adulthood, tells us that adulthood is mostly about becoming someone who can take care of yourself and others—not just other people but the living world that nurtured you. That is the primary shift that you make when you go from being a youth to being grown.

The eleventh house

The eleventh house is often called the house of friendship. It is the succedent house of the three houses which describe your maturity in your natal chart. As the succedent house, we need to think of the eleventh house as the house which affirms and supports the issues of the tenth house. That eleventh house is called a succedent house because it's the successor of the tenth. Planets which are in the eleventh house are moving into the tenth.

The eleventh house is called the house of friendship because it actually represents something that we tend to learn first in friendship. The eleventh house is the house of generosity.

Actually, the eleventh house represents more than just your immediate circle of friends. It describes movements and the political community that inspires generosity in you. It also describes your income. A lot of people think that income is the second house. That's not altogether correct because the second house describes the stuff that you already have. The eleventh house describes the income you get from work and the resources that feed your agency and your future. It describes the friends who help you, the help you give your friends, the income that you make from your work, and the way that you use what you have to plan and create your future.

When we mature in life, we typically come into different roles around sharing, receiving, and giving. We learn to step up. We give money, time, and labor to our elders and young people after we start to make a paycheck or make choices about our work and time. We learn how to pool money with friends so that more is possible. We contribute to our communities and, when we start to do that, we are given more say and power within our society.

We inherit different ethics about when we should give and when we should not. Where I come from, we're not supposed to give money to people older than us or take money from people younger than us. The person with the most power is supposed to take care of the group and older people are given more power. In some cultures, relations are more fluid. The ethics around when to give and receive are more flexible because power is more circumstantial.

Yes, the eleventh house is still the house of friendship in the same way that the tenth house of the house of the mother. In the same way that we learn how to nurture ourselves and the world around us from our caregivers, we learn how to share first in friendship. We learn how to take care of younger friends and how to let older friends take care of us. We learn when it's right to give, when it's not, and when receptivity is a form of generosity because being willing to receive is often the giving of trust. The eleventh house does not stay the house of friendship the same way the tenth house does not limit itself to describing your mother in your life. The tenth house becomes your impact on the world when you step into the role of being a nurturer. The eleventh house becomes the ethics around giving and receiving that shape your social life when you grow into the position of being a giver.

The ninth house

The ninth house is the cadent house of the three houses which describe your maturity. A cadent house is a house that comes directly after an angular house. It's where planets that come into the angles of the chart depart or leave into.

A lot of people tend to associate the ninth house with Sagittarius because of that thing where people use natural houses where natural houses doesn't apply. Get rid of that association. The ninth house is not the house of learning because it's associated with Sagittarius. Sagittarius is a sign and the ninth house is a house. The ninth house is the house of learning because, as the cadent house from the tenth, it describes the things that you do not know.

The first rule of learning is that you have to not know what you're learning before you learn it. If you already know it, then you're not learning. You're just affirming your own assumptions.

When you're young, you think that you know everything there is to know about the world. When you mature, you accept that there's just things that you don't know yet. You get there by fucking up, by making plans that don't account for reality, and by letting life teach you what your delusions are. That's just part of growing up. You have to train yourself into learning by accepting the idea that you don't know everything and tolerating the humility that gives you.

The ninth house isn't the house of institutional learning. It's the house of learning from life, from experience. It's the house of fucking up and retracing your steps.

What's funny about the ninth house is that it's also the house of teaching. Again, this is about maturing into a place where you can give instead of only taking the way young people are supposed to do. We tend to teach about the things that we didn't get right the first time because those are the things that we actually learned to do. Teaching is a profoundly generous action because, when we teach, we suffer for the next generation in their place. We take something that we had to suffer to learn and we give it away from our own lives into someone else's mind.