#10 - A Dedicated Life

Things get real in the 10th house. What are you willing to dedicate your life too? That's the big question we're thinking about in this episode. Join Dr Craig as we look at the most consequential aspects of our lives. What will we make commitments too because they are important to us? This is the 10th episode in the continuing conversation about the houses in astrology.

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to episode 10, a dedicated life. I think we're about to get very real because we're all living in the physical plane, and the tenth house is the house of Capricorn. Capricorn is ruled by Saturn, and Saturn rules structure, meaning basically everything that is solid, physical matter, concrete, tangible, you can touch it. That's Saturn, that's Capricorn, and ultimately that's the tenth house. Before I get into some of the deeper meanings of it, I want to be able to define for you what did I mean by a dedicated life. Okay, dedicated is an adjective describing a person who is dedication, right? It's like they're a dedicated person, has dedication, has made a certain kind of commitment. So what does dedication really mean? Let's get that out of the way here, because the whole episode is really about that. Dedication is what you commit yourself to over time because you believe it's important or it's meaningful or it's valuable or it's worthy or you know, it just means something to you. So you're willing to continue to put sustained commitment into it. It is not momentary enthusiasm, right? Okay. Dedication implies that we're putting in effort, persistence, perhaps some amount of sacrifice, but definitely loyalty to a purpose or a goal or a person or a craft or some type of principle. It is a sustained investment of your energy and time and attention to something that is important to you. This is the foundational idea behind the 10th house. And traditional meanings of the 10th house are, of course, your career and social status and your reputation. But the truth is, is that in order to have a career, you have to dedicate yourself to something. You have to choose that something is worthy for you to dedicate yourself to it. Dedicated people show up consistently, they're engaged over time, they continue on despite obstacles, and they organize their efforts around some kind of purpose. They, a dedicated teacher, for instance, continues to teach because they believe that education matters, right? That comes from their ninth house, what had meaning. A dedicated parent continues to show up because family matters, or an artist continues to create because art matters. And to those individuals, they dedicate their lives to something and then produce a reputation and a social status and a career that is that comes to be defined by what it is that they dedicated themselves to. Okay. So in the ninth house, we searched for meaning and we looked for that through experiences or going to college or philosophy or faith or expanded awareness, because those meanings, the meaningful part of our life, what means something to us, came from the emotional experiences that we went through, whether it was college, whether it was someone we fell in love with, whether it was relationships with parents or friendships or what we studied, or a specific teacher, or a therapist, or someone that really moved us, meaning was created out of that, and now we say, What am I going to do with all of that? What am I going to do with what it is that I learned? Because the 10th house is where meaning meets reality, and that's why I started off talking about structure, because the 10th is the final earth sign and the way in which we relate to society in an earth-based way, practical, dependable, reliable way. That is largely defined by our career, but it's other things too, because going back to the idea of dedication, you could have a reputation for being a um really great um PTA leader, right? That's not your career, but it's something that you do for the school, let's say, that you work for. That comes from the fact that helping the kids is meaningful to you and you do it over time. No one is just PTA leader for a day or a week, and then, oh my God, everyone's fawning all over you and telling you what an amazing help you are to the community. You have to do that in a consistent way in order to be able to earn the recognition. And that's one thing that many people glance over when they think about what it is that they want to do with their lives or what it is that they're going to need to put effort into in order to be able to what create an income, even create a living. So the 10th house is where meaning encounters reality, as I said, because the 10th house is very real. And it's where our understanding of what we believe in, right? Those those uh things that are meaningful to us, we believe in them. It's where those things become commitments and where responsibility enters into the equation because they need to be repeated in order to be sustained. So who am I going to become in the world? This is the tenth house. It's at the top of the chart because it's the most public, and it's opposite the fourth house, which we've already discussed in great detail, which is the home and the home life, which is our most private self. So, core themes of you know, dedication and those traditional keywords are about career and reputation. Ask what is worthy of my dedication. It's not saying what interests us, it's saying what deserves sustained effort. Because what interests us can be a hobby. But if you say, like I did, I want to become a professional astrologer, then you have to study. It has to have moved me at some point in my life, which it did greatly. It made a huge impact on my understanding of myself and others. It created meaning for me because, as an esoteric body of knowledge, meaning not necessarily easily understood, but if you study it, you can understand it. I could become an astrologer if I was to sustain that effort in the world. So I decided that astrology and helping others with astrology was worthy of my dedication. What are you willing to build over time? Are you willing to build a business? Are you willing to build a family? Are you willing to build your reputation as a charitable person, a socialite, somebody that is um, you know, collects money for charity? It doesn't have to necessarily be a career in the sense of we think of like a job, like, oh, I'm a lawyer or I'm a doctor, I'm an engineer. That's not all the 10th house is about. Many times when people have a transit in the 10th house, they get married or they get divorced. So those things are also a part of our reputation, right? Because if we're married and we're married for a long time, and then we have a 25th wedding anniversary party, that's very 10th house. But that doesn't happen 25 years married, unless you're actually dedicated to a 25-year marriage. And likewise, if we do end up realizing along the way that this is not the right person for us, and we're not dedicated to this marriage, and we end up getting divorced, that also becomes a part of your 10th house, your reputation in the world. So Saturn, as I had mentioned before, has a has a role in the 10th house because Saturn rules Capricorn. And what do we know about Saturn? Well, Saturn in mythology, right, old man Kronos and the keeper of time, and he's got a long beard, and he's very, very, very old. Because why? Saturn rules time, and time for us humans is limited and we know it. So because time is limited, the choices that we make matter. The priorities that we make matter. All of our efforts matter, our commitments matter. Nobody wants to think that they spent years and years wasting their time on something. So the the things that we choose do matter. Of course, when we're younger, when we're in our 20s, we're still supposed to be figuring things out. We may not have a very defined idea of what we want to dedicate our life to. So that's fine. You explore multiple different choices, and one will eventually emerge. But Saturn is continually saying, do I think that this will matter to me tomorrow or 10 years from now? Is it really going to be worth my investment of time, my life, and the time of my life, which is completely precious? So the tenth house is where we be we we begin to measure our lives against time itself. And that means that we come up against reality. So, meaning, again, the ninth house, what we discovered, something important. We've discovered something important. It's the ninth house. Um, fidelity is important, loyalty is important, hard work is important, commitment is important, right? These things that we discover in the um in the eighth house. Um loving someone is important, working things out with people is important. These big things that we discover through life's crises, as we said before when we did the eighth, and through things like intimacy, honesty, sexual experience, and um death and loss in general. So those things which transform us, it could be falling in love, right? Falling in love is an eighth house experience. I discovered something important, right? Love required me to drop my ego. I couldn't fall in love unless I discovered that I was willing to place another person before me, at least some of the time, right? That's an important thing to discover. And you say, okay, that's important to me. I discovered that through the experience of falling in love, but now I must live it. That's the 10th house. It's not an esoteric conceptual belief system. Wasn't that a nice word, Salad? It wasn't, wasn't it? Wasn't a conceptual, esoteric belief system. Something that was like, oh, love is beautiful and I will sublimate my ego for the lover. Yeah, that's great, but not if you're not doing it, not if you're not living it, not if those beliefs don't become actions and your values don't become real and the understandings that you've learned don't become structure. It's not what do I believe anymore? It's how will my life reflect what I believe. So the 10th house, yes, it's about authority and mastery and responsibility and leadership and and you know, as you've put so much long-term dedication into something, right? I've built this. The 10th house is very much about that. I dedicated myself to this and I built this thing, and now I have this reputation for being what a community leader, or um a good businessman, an honest businessman, um somebody that's helpful in the community, or somebody that's generous in the community. All of these things fit into the 10th. But the 10th house, interestingly, has one of the heaviest shadow sides of any of the houses, because achievement can become disconnected from meaning, right? We can want to climb the mountain just for the sake of climbing it, and the um the like status, like wanting to have a reputation replaces purpose or power, or we measure our worth based on accomplishments, and not really saying to ourselves, you know, how high can I get with without ever asking, why am I even climbing? The opportunism of the 10th house, advancement at any cost, um, the ends justify the means, you know, the in this climbing up the social ladder, the identification with status. I am my accomplishments, you know, I am what other people think of me. There can be a really great fall when we identify with our status. It can create rigidity, Capricorn, classic Saturn thing, excessive control, fear of failure, clinging to structures that have long stopped serving the purpose in your life, or just worshiping productivity, um, you know, feeling guilty when you want to rest, or performing, performing to create the, you know, what you're worthy, or not just being and existing and enjoying a moment, but having to always be doing or always be achieving. So things like workaholism or using other people to climb the ladder or fear of failure or a public image replacing an authentic self, that can also be a full-on shadow side of the tenth house. But ultimately, we're not really living there, not us in this community. We're really looking for the light side of these things, but there's always cautions for any part of um our development in the world, and certainly as we go out into the world, and there are lots of different hooks and distractions that we have. Um, I would say false teachings that are encouraging us to um go for certain goals and achievements that maybe we wouldn't choose for ourselves, but we feel that they'll create a sense of self-importance. Um, that's not what really the 10th house is is about, because if we do end up going for those things, we will hit a wall at some point. We'll realize that we didn't really create any meaning for our lives. So creating meaning, being able to manifest meaning, be able to materialize it and externalize it and turn it into an offering that you bring to society. This is the very tenth house, the mid-heaven is another name for that. Um, and what it is that we offer to others, not what we do on a day-to-day basis. If you decide to be a medical doctor, eventually you'll start off as an intern. Maybe you'll work at an in an emergency room or something like that. And that's the sixth house. Your doctoring will be improved by the repetition of being a doctor, showing up, meeting patients, finding out what works, finding out what doesn't work, and gaining all of that experience. That's the sixth, the repetition that produces the better you. The tenth is just always being able to go out into the world and say, Yes, that's what I am. I'm a doctor. And all of what that does for you socially because that creates a reputation of who you are. So the tenth house is ultimately what is worthy of my dedication, and my achievement is dedication made visible. What it is that I produce, what it is that I offer, is the visibility of my years of dedication to what it is that I have developed as a mastery as a craft. I'm Craig Martin. You've been listening to Sage of Stars. If you'd like to study astrology, you can find us at Los Angeles Astrology School.com. If you'd like to find out more about me, Sage of Stars.com. I hope you have a nice day.