#7 - Common Ground

This episode is all about relationships and how they continue our transformation through others. The 7th house is connected to marriage, business partnership, and people in our lives that we trust to be "partnered" with. This is where things get deep because now, we essentially need other people for our continued development. Join Dr Craig for this episode and learn how our relationships become the next vehicle for the journey of self!

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to the Sage of Stars podcast. This is episode number seven, Common Ground. So, in our continuing conversation about the houses of astrology, we've now reached the seventh house, which is very different from the first six houses for a couple of reasons. In the first six houses, we developed our identity, our values, the way in which we expressed those values, the emotional foundation or how we feel about life and ourselves, the way we self-express, and then how we can work on that self-expression and find a really great version of ourselves, right? That is all self-development and self-reflective. For those of you who do know a little bit about the way the chart is constructed, in the seventh house, we're going to go above the horizon. The first six houses were all below the horizon, so they're all very personal and very inner. Now we're going to go above the horizon, and everything is going to be about outward, moving outward now into the world. So what does that include that's really truly radically different in the seventh? Another person. And not just another person, but the way in which we are going to discover ourselves now through discovering others, because relationships are not passive. Yes, they're all mirrors of ourselves, they're all um individuals that we bring into our lives who are there for us to navigate and negotiate and try and find that common ground with. They're not passive, they talk back. They are mirrors, but they react, they challenge, they reject, they negotiate. So the seventh house is the moment where the self realizes I'm not alone in reality. And it can come as a shock to a lot of people, and navigating the way in which we compromise and make commitment, set up terms between each other is what the seventh house is all about. So we're moving into what is ruled by Libra, right? What rules Libra? Libra rules the seventh house, and we know a little bit about Libra, they're very relationship-oriented, they're very compromising, right? What is Libra associated with? Partnership, marriage, negotiating, diplomacy for sure, the ability to get along with another person. Not because relationships are just sort of automatically easy to do, but because another person now exists in our world who has needs and opinions, and they have reactions and they have boundaries. So the self in the seventh house must now learn how to coexist. It's fascinating, right? Up until the this the seventh house, it's been very independent, very self-organized, very this is who I am, this is how I'm going to approach the world. I haven't really had to consider anybody else, and now I'm going to have to coexist. So the mirror that talks back is what the seventh house is. Not just reflections of ourself, but the fact that other individuals are going to give us a uh a response to what it is. Partners that will say, Oh, that hurt me, or I think I need something different, or I disagree with you, or I love this about you, or I actually can't tolerate this behavior, right? The seventh house becomes more than the sixth, more than just a self-reflective feedback loop that's going on in your own mind. Oh, how can I modify, remember, Thanksgiving dinner to make it better next year? This is now coming back literally from the relationships, and it's why relationships, this is so um important. Why relationships accelerate self-awareness? I'm gonna take one second to plug my book, Elemental Love Styles, which did come out about 10 years ago, but it was published by a Simon and Schuster imprint Atria Books, and I'm kind of proud of it. Elemental Love Styles Find Compatibility and Create a Lasting Relationship is the book, and it talks a lot about this. It's one of the places where I really started the um communication that I wanted to do with everybody, which was relationships are so important to us all. What are they really all about? And they're really all about that dynamic feedback that helps us to gain self-awareness. We help our partner also gain self-awareness by doing the same thing for them, but we enter into relationships so that we can navigate, negotiate, and compromise and find the common ground that will help us both to grow. So other people reveal in us blind spots where we're not even conscious of what we're doing, patterns, right? Defensiveness, insecurities, but also strengths, gifts, and the way in which we create habits out of our relationships. So it reveals the self through interactions with other people because they are there actually talking back to us and telling us what's going on for them. So unlike the fifth house, which is simply just an audience, the seventh house is not just applauding or rejecting us. They're engaging. And the relationships of the seventh house are very important. It's marriages, business partnerships, the relationship that you have with a therapist or an astrologer or a spiritual counselor, the relationship that you have with a doctor or some other professional who's giving you advice. This is people who you trust to say to you things that you would never normally hear from the general public, that you would never normally hear from a neighbor or just the cashier at the grocery store. These are the people that you allow to become mirrors for you. It deepens connection tremendously, and we are drawn to people for reasons that are often unconscious. This is something very spiritual, right? We seek balance, familiarity, healing, perhaps validation, or perhaps challenge. Perhaps we're looking for someone to challenge us so that we can grow. Often we carry qualities that have been suppressed or that we don't want to look at or that have been neglected. This is why projection is also a central part of the seventh house. We experience another person as everything I need, right? Everything I need. This person is is, and it's what we need in ourselves, not necessarily what we need from them. So relationships reveal perhaps and often something that's unfinished within ourselves. Relationships externalize aspects of the self through the attraction that we have. It's no coincidence that Venus rules Libra and Venus is part of that attraction. So I know I could probably spend an entire podcast on that, and I will. One of them, one crucial one that we can mention now, is that sometimes we continue to pick people in a pattern simply to revalidate a negative belief that we have about ourselves, right? If you think that you're rejected or you think that you're dispensable or something like that, you will continue to attract people that reject you and dispense with you. It becomes a part of the self-fulfilling belief system that we have. More on that on another date. But unlike Taurus, which is also ruled by Libra, this is not just about our values, but the way in which we adjust to relationships. How do I maintain who I am while I'm trying to relate, right? Am I going to compromise myself and completely disappear? How do I listen? How do I negotiate my differences? How am I fair with other people? This is where we begin learning things like cooperation and reciprocity and equality, that if we're going to be in a business partnership, real business partnership with somebody, what each person's bringing to the table might be different, but we might be equal. If we're going to marry someone, it would certainly be good if we entered into that relationship believing that we were equal, and in what way are we going to cooperate, and what are we each going to bring to the table? The real deep fundamental part of the seventh house is the way we can learn how to give someone what it is that they need from us in order for them to be able to grow, and how we can ask for from that person what it is that we need. A lot of times in marriage relationships, which start off as romance, there's almost like an expectation that the person is going to give us what we need. Many of the reasons why um marriages fail is because they start off as romantic attractions and they don't convert over into relationships of mutual cooperation. Oh well, this is what I thought our marriage was going to look like. I thought that, you know, you were going to be doing the garbage, I was going to be raising the kids, you were going to be bringing home the money. I thought you were going to help with the kids. Oh, well, we never really navigated that. All of those back and forth cooperative conversations can sometimes in a marriage, in a marital relationship, be overlooked before you sign the marriage license. And truthfully, they really shouldn't be, because I think if we were to enter into a business relationship, like a business partnership, we would have a deeper conversation about what are you bringing to the table and what am I bringing to the table. A lot of times, marriage creates more expectations or things that we imagine are going to be a part of the agreement, and then after marriage, we find out that that perhaps is not what the other person was thinking. Shadow aspects, then, of the seventh house can include, you know, inabilities to compromise or being controlling, not being able to really hear what the other person has said, um, having an imagined idea of what the agreement was about, but then finding out that that's not really what the other person was thinking, um, creating things like defensiveness, right? On a personal, on a personal level, what the shadow aspect of the seventh house is definitely like dependency, uh, projection, people pleasing, uh, losing our identity, avoiding conflict at all costs. One of the strong Libra qualities that's on the more shadow side is that they want so much for relationships to work out, but relationships are not working out if the Libra person is doing 100% of the work. It can look like, oh, this relationship works, but that's only if it's only working because they're doing all the work, then that's not really a relationship. So there can be idealization, avoidance of conflict, and also I think also a constant comparison, like comparing ourselves to others, uh, putting ourselves and other people on that scale, that scale of Libra in a marriage, you know, who's winning a fight? It's not about winning, it's about the truth, it's about finding out have I fully made the self-reflective agreement with you? Am I being honest with myself about what is fair? That's the seventh house. So the seventh house does indeed change everything, right? The self, we are no longer in isolation. It becomes now dialogue, reflection, attraction, negotiation, encountering other people. The first six houses developed us. The seventh house is the moment where the other speaks back to us and we get a reflection of who we are from outside of us. I'm Craig Martin. You've been listening to the Sage of Stars podcast. If you'd like to work with me or you want to know more information about my work, you can go to SageFstars.com. I hope you have a fantastic day, and I look forward to our next episode.