#4 Shaped by Feelings

Now we're moving into powerful territory. Shaped by Feelings, Episode #4 is where we discover why and how we accept ourselves or not! It's the foundation of our ability to be successful and happy in life. Join Dr Craig and find out how this segment of development encourages or discourages you to be you!

Transcript

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Hello, and welcome to the Sage of Stars podcast. This is episode number four, Shaped by Feelings. So, as many of you have been listening to the show know, we're going in order of the houses in astrology. And now that we're at the fourth house, we're at someplace that's pretty deep. I think the fourth house is one of the most difficult, really, to understand. Um, it's definitely the house where you are modified, shaped, molded by your family environment. Traditional interpretations of the fourth house are like, well, it's your family home, your home of origin, where you were born, and then it's also the home where you live now. So, like when we grow up and we become an adult, we move into a house and we live there too. But really, what the fourth house is about is the way in which the emotional environment of the family home modified you and um reinforced who you actually really are or didn't, and then from there you are able to create a successful home life for yourself or not. It's a very interesting, complicated process. The house is ruled by the sun sign cancer, which is ruled by the moon. So the idea that the fluctuation of the emotional environment of your home guided you, for better or worse, into being a very accurate or somewhat repressed and modified version of yourself. So let's roll it back a little bit. The first house was your identity, who you are, who you believe you are. The second house was uh what you value, what actually matters to you, and we can figure that out based on what it is that we want to hold on to. Um, and then the third house was how we express what we value and who we are in the world. What's interesting about the fourth house process is that by the time we learn to speak, which is very much the third house, we truly start interacting with the household environment, our parents, in a very unique and different way because we start to express our beliefs. We start to either push back, we learn like the magic word no, and the way in which our parents interact with that and their beliefs about who we should be as an individual strongly mold us into that individual, even though we're already coming into life with a specific personality, right? So we do arrive in life with our own unique personality. That's the first house, that's Aries. And then through that personality, right, when we're very little before we even speak, we don't like broccoli, but we do like uh carrots, we don't like tuna fish, but we do like hamburger or whatever it is, right? We we start to develop a value system based on our experience of life. Eventually we start to be able to express that in language, and then there comes an emotional interaction within the family. That is what happens to us as a person when we enter into this emotional environment, right? The home is where our sensitivity meets with reality. So at first you're just there, right? You're a baby, you're sleeping most of the time. They're not really imposing anything on you, and that would be your parents, brothers and sisters, and anybody else that's in the immediate environment. But then something happens because you begin to feel the response from the environment around you. Are you welcomed? Are you ignored? Are you shut down? Are you embraced, right? There's the positive side of it, not just the negative side. And as language develops, all of those experiences start to begin to organize, not intellectually, but emotionally. The fourth house is the first uh water sign house, and water signs rule emotional uh sensitivity and emotional reactivity. So I'm gonna give you an example now. So let's say, for instance, our fourth house is Aries. We may be conditioned, it's likely that we will be conditioned by the family environment to be independent, right? Because Aries is on the fourth house cusp. Now, if you're let's say more emotionally needy, but the parental environment is going to be stop that, you need to be independent, then there's going to be some kind of a conflict. But let's say that you already are fundamentally an independent person, then the family environment is going to reinforce that. In astrology, whether it's working out well and easily, or whether there's more difficulty with the emotional environment, that's all seen in the chart, right? So planets that are in the fourth house, are they well aspected? Are they more difficultly aspected? The complexities of discovering um whether your childhood reinforced a natural thing in you or whether it pushed back against it? Yes, those are the things for a good astrology reading and a good therapy session, right? So that combination can help us to uncover is who I naturally believe that I am in conflict with my emotional experience of the world? Has the world been rejecting that or accepting it? So the reason that I call this episode shaped by feelings is that I think it's important to understand that we have these reactions, our reaction, right, to that response, that outside response, and that shapes us through the way in which we experience the feelings, right? Because if it's I feel safe, I feel loved, I feel accepted, I feel embraced, then the way in which we feel about ourselves emotionally is going to shape us into continuing to express that. If it's I don't feel safe, I feel threatened, I feel rejected, then we're going to respond to that. This is natural, right? None of us like those experiences of having the family environment say, you're too strong, you're too sensitive, you're too loud, you're too needy, you're too bold, you're too aggressive, whatever it is that the family reacts to. So the emotional patterning, and that's what we're talking about here, conditioning, patterning begins very early, right after we learn how to speak, and perhaps even prior to that. The interaction is happening after it's sort of a post-third house, and since the third house is about language and communication, right there. I mean, most of us are learning to speak between one and two years old, and then all of a sudden the parents are responding with a specific kind of um approval or disapproval of what it is that we are. So the heart of the uh fourth house has to do with it, with how is the how easy is it for us to be ourselves? How easy is it for you to be yourself? Because where you feel natural and supported in who you are is truly what was reinforced at a very early age. And where your personality feels risky or unsafe is where it wasn't supported. And the strange thing is about the fourth house and why it's why it is so complex is that we don't really even remember that. A lot of, you know, what happens when we're little, that little, we don't really remember, right? Do when we walk into the house and um let's say we're covered in dirt because we've been playing in the yard, did someone say, you know, oh, what did you discover? That's so interesting. Or did someone say, Oh my god, you're so dirty, right? Like that's the way in which we're going to react to the experience because clearly you were someone who wanted to go out and play in the yard, right? Maybe you were looking for bugs, or you were looking at the way that rainwater was flowing through the soil. I don't know, whatever. It's an example, and that's a natural occurrence in a child, and yet the environment pushes back on that in a positive or negative way and then shapes you. That is expressed in the fourth house in astrology. Do you feel seen? Do you feel safe? Do you develop confidence as a result of all of that? Or do you need to adapt? Do you need to protect? Do you need to reshape who you are in order to just belong inside of the family and be loved and feel loved? So none of this is random, right? You could say that like the environment met you in a very specific way. And obviously, we could have a deeper conversation about a soul contract that we have with the family and who we are as a soul-based individual. And I think that that's all a part of it. But beyond that, you are who you are, you're coming into life, and you're ending up in this family, right? I don't believe that it's random, but the experience brings into awareness the contrast between who you naturally are and the environment that you chose to become a part of. Or if you don't believe it, if you think it's random, that's fine too. It's still happening, right? Who you think you are and the meeting, the pushback of that the individuals inside the house, it could be grandparents, it could be friends of the family, it could be extended family, cousins, aunts, uncles, whoever it is, are they supporting who you're bringing forward as you, or are they not? So I think that's interesting because what happens in in astrology, then when we say, well, it rules the family of origin home, the fourth house, and then it rules the house that you live in now. It's crazy how we recreate, we recreate the that that outer home that we grew up in out inside of us, the way in which we react, the expectations that we have, the emotional reflexes that we um uh, you know, uh, bring upon the environment because we were conditioned in a specific way. That is a pattern, and there's a continuity to it. It's very difficult to break that pattern until you really become conscious of it because it was unconsciously created by an emotional acceptance or rejection. I know it's completely fascinating and mind-blowing, especially if you're into psychology. This is where astrology actually gets incredibly deep because the wheel, the astrological wheel, is revealing all of this information about us. If we have well-aspected planets in the fourth house, then we're well received and you know, well responded to and all of that. If we don't, if we have affliction in the fourth house, then there's naturally some kind of pushback between those people in that family environment and the way in which we were received emotionally. So the internal environment then is going to get expressed in the home environment that you choose as an adult. Internal conflicts are going to continue to show up in the home that you choose, in the people that you invite over, in the person that you pick as a spouse, etc. etc. So resolution of childhood conditioned conflict is super important, but that's not actually what today's episode is about, although you can be rest assured that I will um find a guest for an episode about how do we resolve conditioned trauma or actually even deal with conditioned excess. There is the there is the place where you grow up in a parental environment where you can do no wrong. That's also not good, right? Because the parents that are always like, oh my god, it's never Timmy's fault, it's always the teacher's fault. You know, Timmy can do no wrong. That's also not a good conditioned environment to grow up in, because then of course you can grow up believing that you can do no wrong. And we know the people that are like that are difficult to be around. So the first house, you know, this is who I am. The second house, this is what matters to me. The third house, this is how I express that, who I am and what matters to me. And finally, the fourth house, this is how I learned to respond, how I learned to react to the world based on how it felt to express what mattered to me and who I am. It's huge. Once you see that, you no longer just react automatically to the world. You start to act, you start to ask, is this response that I'm having true to me, right? Is this reaction that I'm having still necessary? Is this actually me? Because I think the goal of the fourth fourth house is not to like erase your past, it's to recognize what was shaped and what was always you. Is there some layer of the emotional conditioning that pushed you into a distortion of who you are where you're not exactly who you would be if you hadn't received negative feedback? So this house is really deep, this house is really beautiful, the fourth house is complex and astounding because it's the first emotional layer. And when we fulfill the um work that we need to do surrounding the fourth house, and we become clear about how we are reacting to the world emotionally, then the real magic starts to happen. Then we can take our identity and our values and the way in which we communicate with our mind, right? Very magician, key one from the tarot, and we can integrate it with the way in which we feel. High Priestess, Key Two from the Tarot, and that's when magic happens. I'm Craig Martin. You've been listening to the Sage of Stars podcast. I'm always glad to have you here, and I'll look forward to talking to you again soon. Bye bye.