#1 - Know Yourself

We look at the importance of self-understanding, identity and how it relates to your astrology chart. The 1st House is the house of identity, and the success and happiness of your life begins here. "Know Yourself" was the first rule in Greek philosophy that led you to a meaningful life. Join, Dr. Craig, and learn more about how self-discovery is the first key to a flex life.

Transcript

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Welcome to the Sage of Stars podcast. Today's topic is going to be knowing yourself, know yourself, who are you, what is your identity. It's the starting point for everything about your astrological chart. And that's why I feel it's the most important place in the chart. The rising sign is actually what establishes this part of your chart. Your identity is actually built around the rising sign. But that's something for another chat. You can go and you can find your rising sign pretty easily at a lot of websites online. So know yourself. Who are you in the world? Who do you believe you are? This is not something philosophical. This is actually something very practical because everything else in your life is going to be built around who you think you are. If you don't have a clearly defined sense of your identity, then you're going to have, right, identity confusion. Sometimes people can have what's called an identity crisis because they reach points in their life where they're like, oh my God, my mother wanted me to become a medical doctor, but I actually really don't like this. So who am I really? So understanding the self is very important for moving through our life because if we have that well established in our personality, then everything else is going to flow more easily. So this episode, know yourself, is actually where your life begins to organize itself because everything after that, what you value, the way you establish money, the way you create relationships, the way you build a home, the friendships you have, the career you choose, all of those things are going to be a part of who you believe you are. So identity is the starting point, right? It it's you, right? Your life doesn't really give you the meaning. It's you that gives your life the meaning. So the first house is what we're talking about right now. It's the first house in astrology. For those of you who are new to astrology, the chart is divided up into 12 houses. I thought it would be a good idea to start with the first house. And since that's the beginning, we have to know that this is where what matters to you originates from, right? This is where your experience of life becomes personal. So quite literally, your identity is established the minute the doctor that delivered you cut the cord from your mother, right? You became a separate individual. Your mother was no longer eating and breathing for you, right? You became separated from her at that moment. That establishes your rising sign, right? Because it's your birth time. And from there, you actually needed to eat and breathe on your own. Like your mother had been doing that for you. And now all of a sudden you became a unique, independent individual. That is certainly a critical moment that establishes your identity. What happens from there, from an astrological point of view, is that a rising sign emerges, which in my belief system you chose, but it's the lens that you're viewing the world through. I I like thinking of it really as like your your hardware, the part of your chart that's actually the foundational um origin of who am I, right? Who am I? Right now, all of a sudden you really have to think about that. You're no longer connected to your mother, you're no longer hearing her heartbeat, you're independent, you're separate, and the rising sign actually defines that. So I give you an example, right? Let's say that you're born with Aries rising. It's going to give you a very strong personality. Bold, self-starting, very creative, right? If you have Taurus Rising, you're going to be more grounded, more practical, more involved with things like beauty. If you have Gemini rising, you're going to be certainly more talkative, more communicative. Cancer rising will be more sensitive. Leo rising will be more of a star. Virgo rising will be concerned with service and details. Libra rising will be very relationship-oriented. I think Libra risings come out of the womb planning their wedding. Scorpio rising is very intense. I have Scorpio rising. Sagittarius rising is going to be that big truth seeker. Capricorn rising is going to be very about the bottom line and the practicalities of life. Aquarius rising has a ton of friends. And Pisces Rising is really the selfless person that's always willing to be there and help. So this is like the definition of sort of the easy one-step rising sign. That's what your rising sign is. But more than the sun sign, more even than your birthday, right? When we say what's your sign, we mean sun sign. Where was the sun when you were born? More than the sun sign, the rising sign actually has to do with the establishment of your identity because it's the establishment of the first house. So the first house, it's where we begin and it governs who am I? My identity. So, you know, every room that you walk into, every moment of your life, you enter it in a certain way, right? That entrance will set the tone for everything that follows, right? So the rising sign and your identity is the role you walk with. I kind of like that language because it says, this is the wave that's preceding me. This is what it is that I allow people to see about me, right? If again, if it's Gemini rising, you walk in, you're lighthearted, you walk into a room, you tell jokes, you make people smile, you make people laugh. But if you have Scorpio rising, you stand there and you evaluate and you look at people and you can figure out quite easily, like, you know, basically who's being honest and who's not being honest. If you're Pisces rising, you know who's hurting and who's in pain and who's not in pain, right? If you're Leo rising, you know how to be warm-hearted and and um make the room feel inviting and generous and alive. So the rising sign in your identity is something that you carry with you into everything that you know you do. So there are certain things about identity that if they're not set firmly, then for instance, the direction that you're moving in your life might feel scattered, or your communication style will feel off, or your values will feel inconsistent. And why is that? Those are those other facets. And for the purposes of our uh podcast today and the beginning of this podcast, our first 12 episodes are gonna be about the 12 houses. So we're gonna be talking about these facets of living, but if we don't have the very first one, identity, nailed down, then the rest of them are gonna be confusing, right? It's not because life will be unclear, it's because you are unclear about the starting point, about that role you have, about who you are, and about the way in which you're approaching every facet of your life, particularly relationships, your home, and your career, right? The biggies. All of those originate from who you believe you are. Now, here's a key thing, too, which we certainly can't really define, you know, on the podcast, but the rising sign establishes your ruling planet because the ruling planet rules the rising sign. So, uh, like I said before, I have Scorpio rising. So Pluto is my ruler. I have Pluto in Virgo in the 10th house, and it means that I have a sort of transformational career objective where I work as a counselor or a teacher, and I help transform people, and through Virgo, through service, through detail-oriented conversation, I help people discover who they are and what they need to do, right? So the chart explains that about me, and it is important to know what your ruling planet is, I think. But you don't need to. You can learn a lot about yourself just by knowing the rising sign, just by knowing what your sun sign is, and we can begin there, right? What are the um shadow sides of our identity can be overcompensation, right? Forcing our identity on someone, right? The Gemini rising person who can't shut up, the Leo rising person who thinks they're better than other people, the Scorpio rising person who thinks that they are um too intense and and um and and too judgmental, or the Virgo rising person that's that way. So there's a lot of um uh I think possibilities for a misalignment with the identity, but you know, most people I think are searching for who they are. So anyway, becoming aware of who we are and how we show up in the world is the starting point for the success and happiness of your life. I think that one of the reasons that the rising sign is so important, meaning your personal identity in the first house, is that if you do know who you are, then everything else seems to fall in place from there. If you look back at Greek mythology, there was a place called Delphi, and there was an oracle there, uh like a seer, a prophetess, someone who would sit and people would sit before her and she would predict your future and stuff like that. But there was a big sign carved above the entrance to the oracle of Delphi, and that sign actually said know thyself, and then underneath that it said to thy own self be true. And those were like the two commandments of beginning to live a life that had meaning. Know thyself and to thy own self be true, meaning once you know who you are, be true to that, have some integrity with who you are. So launching our podcast today and having this conversation, being know thyself, know yourself is the essential point in being a a a true person in the world, right? A lot of people come to me and they want to know their future, they want me to do some prediction for them. And I always say, well, we have to spend some time looking at who you are first, right? Because how can we know where we're headed if we don't know where we are right now? How can we determine the way in which we'll be able to use the trend of energy and the way in which it's moving in our lives if we don't have a sense of who we are? Only by beginning with who we are can we establish where we want to go or even understand the energies that uh life presents us with, right? We would call that like predictive energies, right? If you look at your chart and you want to do prediction, it's all based about energy. But if you don't know really who you want to be, you're not going to know, let's say they're the positive things, let's say they're positive predictions. How are you going to capitalize on those things if you don't know how you want to integrate them into your identity? And how are you going to minimize difficult energy, energies that could be more challenging, likewise, if you don't know how to use them to help create who you are or reinforce the foundation. So knowing yourself is the stabilizing of the foundation of who you are, right? Everything else in life is going to be built on that first point of contact, right? So identity is an invitation, right? Notice how you enter a room or a situation, right? Begin to understand how your rising sign energy is integrated with that. Notice how you initiate, right? Notice what feels automatic to you or what you might feel you've chosen, right? Because identity is the foundation, but it is the beginning of a much larger unfolding. I'm Craig Morton, and this has been the Sage of Stars podcast. We'll talk to you again soon. Hope you have a great day.