Welcome to Ghost of a Podcast. I’m your host, Jessica Lanyadoo. I’m an astrologer, psychic medium, and animal communicator, and I’m going to give you your weekly horoscope and no bullshit, mystical advice for living your very best life.

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Hello, my darlings, and welcome back to Ghost of a Podcast, Astrology Hot Takes times. So this week, I am going to circle back to a topic that I’ve actually addressed in several question and answers and also on episode 145, back in September of 2020. And it’s the damn twelfth house. 

I have been getting so many questions and comments from people who are acknowledging their twelfth house planets and freaking out because they read somewhere on the intranet that they are destined for misery and unhappiness. You know, it’s simply not true. 

However, when you do a simple Google search, which I did a search in an incognito window on my computer because I wanted to see what would come up. And I saw things like, this is the house of the unseen realm of sorrow and shadow and invisible enemies. This thing of like this is the house of undoing. This is the house of invisible enemies and incarceration and all these kinds of things that you can absolutely read about on the intranet. If you’re looking to freak yourself out, you know, they’re all there. It’s all there, sure, but it’s not true, in my view. 

This is one of those things—I’m going to unpack the twelfth house for you—but let me just say what astrology does is it describes your nature, your circumstances, your resources, and lack thereof. It describes what you’re kind of working with. And within that, you have choice; you have free will. And within that, you get to choose to make the most or the least of your situation. 

And something that I noticed on social media when I posted that there was no such thing as bad charts is how fucking how many of you were like, “Ah, that’s not true. My chart’s bad.” And I just, I wonder what do we get out of insisting that we have bad charts? There’s no value in it, honestly. 

And I know that there’s probably a lot of astrology content online and even individual astrologers that tell you yes, you have a bad chart in this way or whatever. Or maybe I’ve said something that makes you feel like that’s what I meant when I said it. I don’t know. I hope not, but it’s all possible. 

Here’s the thing, every single person has struggles. Every single person has struggles. Every single person has a twelfth house. Every single person has Saturn and Pluto and all the hard hitters, right. Life is not meant to be easy, and no one has a completely easy ride—that’s just not how it goes. 

That said, when we start to understand that our nature through, let’s say, the lens of astrology, we can cultivate self-acceptance. And when you cultivate self-acceptance, you can be like, “Oh, shit. I can work with what I’ve got to create the best that is possible for me.” That might look like, oh, I don’t know, “I live in Montreal, and it’s December. I’m cold. I don’t live in Los Angeles in December where I might be warm.” We can only make choices from where we’re at. And if you make choices from where you’re at, and you’re like, “Oh, hey, I don’t want to be in Montreal in December,” then you can take steps. It may take you days or weeks or years, but you can take steps to get your ass to L.A. for December. It’s a metaphor, but I’m going to say it’s a strong one. 

Okay. So the twelfth house, what is it about? The twelfth house in the birth chart is the place where we find subconscious or unconscious content. Does that mean that planets that fall in the twelfth house are unconscious to you? No, that’s not what it means. It means that this is personal, private, internal content. 

The twelfth house is ruled by, in the OG system, Neptune, the planet Neptune and the sign Pieces. These are both very sensy, very spiritual elements, right. When we look at your individual birth chart, we’re going to see a different sign on the house cusp. I mean, I don’t know, maybe you have Pieces on the house cusp of the twelfth, but most people don’t, so you would layer the information of whatever sign you have on that house cusp, and then you would consider the planets themselves. 

So here’s the thing, when we’re talking about planets in the twelfth house of your birth chart natally, what we’re talking about is planets that are deeply connected to your heredity. When we have planets in the twelfth, we have shit with our family of origin. And if you’re adopted or not raised by your birth parents, it could include both your birth family and also the people that raised you.

So when we’re talking about the twelfth house, we’re looking at conditions that occurred before the age of seven as having set the stage of that twelfth house, okay. And this is, of course, all according to moi. Different astrologers have different takes on things, and you can listen to different astrologers that have different takes and come up with your own. 

That said, quick and very important point to make, there’s something going on in the world where I’m getting tons of questions about traditional astrology, and I am not a traditional astrologer. That is not the kind of astrology I practice. I identify as a humanist or humanistic astrologer, which is more closely related to psychological astrology, not traditional astrology. The astrology I practice is very, very different than traditional astrology. And I love lots of people who are traditional astrologers, but we are not using the same form of astrology. 

And so, if you are learning astrology, and you are ping-ponging between traditional ideas and traditional study and then more psychological or humanistic study, you’re going to have a lot of confusion because there’s differences; they’re not the same. So I wanted to throw that in the mix because I think that’s an important thing, especially when we’re talking about something like the twelfth house. My take on it is very much from the background of my psychological or humanistic use of astrology, right. That’s my approach. That’s what I do. And that’s what you’re learning from me. 

Okay, cool. So let’s talk about planets in the twelfth house, negative and positive. First of all, when we see a planet that falls in the twelfth house, it’s important to acknowledge that their external presentation is uncomfortable. So in other words, it may be difficult for you to be comfortable with that planet being seen by others, and there is a reason for that. The reason is because it is hard to have boundaries when you have planets in the twelfth. So that doesn’t mean that you are destined to a life of misery because you have shitty boundaries. That means you have lessons to learn around having boundaries, right.

So if we have a planet in the twelfth house—think of the twelfth house, think of Neptune and Pisces, they’re all kind of interchangeable but uniquely different—as having a really loofah spongey style of energy boundaries, just full of holes, super absorbent. Another way I like to describe the twelfth house is kind of like a cloak of black velvet in a room full of long haired, white cats. Everything sticks to you. You know what I mean? You are so sensitive. 

So what that requires is being willing to take the time to sit with yourself. Generally speaking, when we have planets in the twelfth, we have issues around self-care, and that’s because we are meant—in the style and manor of those planets—to actually cultivate greater self-care. 

So if we are talking about something like Mercury in the twelfth house, what we are talking about is the need to sit with your thoughts, right. Mercury is thoughts. It’s communication. It’s listening. It’s taking stock of what you think, maybe writing in a journal, externalizing your thought process so that you can kind of keep track of it. And being intentional about what kind of friends you let into your life, what kind of people you talk to.

If we are talking about something, let’s say, like the Moon in the twelfth house, what we are talking about is a person who is really emotionally sensitive and needs to do a great deal of work to manage and promote self-care around other people but also the self. When we have great sensitivities, we also have a great responsibility, and that responsibility is to protect ourselves. 

Often times, people with planets in the twelfth house will end up struggling with addiction issues. That addiction may be to substances, or it might be to TV shows—like watching TV shows on a loop or listening to the same song or only wearing one color for years at a time. It’s just a kind of an obsessive-compulsive habit.

The twelfth house can kind of indicate that there are obsessive habits because it’s kind of associated with some version of magical thinking. It’s like, I had a really good time—a really good day that time I wore that blue sweatshirt, so now I always wear blue sweatshirts because I feel like it’s a special kind of thing. It can kind of get us in that mode. 

Now, I will just pull back for a moment to say, if you want to know my take on each planet through the houses, pick up my book, Astrology for Real Relationships wherever books are sold—ideally at your local, small, independent bookstore—and I delineate every single planet through the houses in the context of many different kinds of relationships. So it’s a really good resource and tool, IMO.

But staying more broad for the purposes of this Hot Take, I want to say that the planets that we find in the twelfth house are always representative of energies that one or more of our parents or guardians were unable to embody and express in themselves anywhere a year before birth until about seven years old. And so, there’s a lot that’s interesting about that—I mean, there’s a ton that’s interesting about that. And I can mention here that I actually have a class for sale—you can get the audio or video version—of inherited conditions in the birth chart. It’s on my website at lovelanyadoo.com.

But more than this being interesting, right, because it is fascinating to be able to see into our parents or guardians lives when we were too young to really track it or before we were even born. But separate from how interesting that is, what’s important about this information is that it describes inherited conditions. It describes conditions that were modelled by our parents or guardians as not being safe to embody, right. And when that occurs, it teaches us, by way of being modelled this way, it teaches us to not embody in public these energies. 

And so, we tend to have compulsion to either to model them in ways that make us uncomfortable at the end of the day or to repress the energies of that planet. And what I can tell you about this is that just means it takes more patience and time and understanding from you to cultivate ownership of those energies and then to give yourself permission to embody them in a way that works for you. You do not need to be like everyone else. You don’t. You need to be whole. That’s it. That’s it. 

Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsie Day is on February 28th at the Convergence of Black and Women’s History Months. They were three of the eleven woman who were experimented on without consent or anesthesia by the father of gynecology, J. Marion Sims. Join I Am More Than in Montgomery, Alabama to shine a light on their stories and acknowledge that we must first reckon with our history to change the narrative. 

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When we have planets in the twelfth house our path can be circular—our path can be really different than that of our peers or what we would prefer it to be. The key is to cultivate spiritual self-acceptance foundational to our nature and to do that around the planets in question. So if you don’t have any planets in the twelfth house, we would look to the ruling planet of the zodiac sign on your twelfth house cusp. 

But this is especially important information for people who have planets in the twelfth house in their birth chart because you are likely to have read lots of things online telling you that you are doomed in some way. And this brings me to another really important point about planets in the twelfth house in the birth chart, and that is around happiness. 

Because the permeability, the energetic permeability that is inherent to the twelfth house, people are sensitive to collective energies in regards to whatever planet or planets are in that house. And the collective is not super happy. The collective is full of struggle and pain and injustice and strife, right. That’s kind of the collective vibes. It’s not the only collective vibes, but it’s for sure the collective vibes. 

There is a way that your planets in the twelfth house can resonate with collective suffering, and this feels exhausting. This feels really fucking exhausting. It can be draining. It can be something that—let’s say, you have Pluto in the twelfth house, people with this placement will often have really bad dreams or really violent dreams, again, channeling collective energies. People who have more of those personal planets—Sun, Moon Mercury, Venus, Mars—in the twelfth house will just get really tapped, exhausted, and drained by other people when they haven’t been taking care of themselves. 

So you can lament that all you like. You can compare yourself to people who have only planets in the tenth and first all you like, but at the end of the day, if you can accept, oh shit, I need—in the style of the planet in the twelfth house—I need to actually manage my energy. I need to sleep a certain amount. I need to eat certain kinds of foods. I need to make sure that I’m taking care of myself in these manor of ways, so that the ways that I am sensitive, I can be like, oh shit, I can be sensitive to them and then, therefore, take care of myself around them. That’s the move, my friends. That’s the damn move. 

Now, I have another word, an important word to drop here for anyone who is a parent to a child with twelfth house planets. Because every time I drop an episode about a difficult placement, I get concerned emails from parents being like, “Oh, shit. My kid has this thing in their chart; does this mean I have failed them?” No, it doesn’t. I mean, I don’t know, maybe, maybe you failed your child spectacularly. Maybe you haven’t yet but you’re going to. That’s possible. That’s totally possible. 

However, there’s no way to evade or escape inherited issues or difficulties—there just isn’t. So what is important to do if you see my child has planets in the twelfth house? It’s not to then go into an anxiety cycle about what it means and how you failed them because then you’re focusing on yourself. Instead, what you want to do is be like, okay, so my child has planets in the twelfth house; how can I support them around that? Not how can I make it about me? Not how can I figure out what I did to fuck up my kid? Because that, in fact, is the very thing that fucks up your kid. 

Instead, what you want to do—and, of course, as I have said in many other episodes, I do not encourage anyone to look at their child’s chart. I don’t. I just patently don’t. If you are an expert seasoned astrologer with decades and decades and decades of experience, I still think it’s tricky business. But if you’re still in the collection phase of your ten thousand hours, if you’re not yet an expert, for sure, don’t do it because it’s really not possible to separate yourself from your child’s chart because it’s literally not possible. So it’s hard to see it clearly. If we can’t be objective, then we are subjective. And when we are looking at our children’s charts, we are literally a subject of that chart. So it’s better to consult a professional. 

That said, when you see that a child or children have twelfth house planets, you want to support them in cultivating healthy boundaries, in understanding that they have a right to healthy boundaries and supporting them in creating the space and time to identify what their feelings are or their thoughts are, or whatever it is given the planet in the twelfth house, and to determine their needs from there. That’s all we need to do. And to understand that the only way that anyone—an adult or a child—gets a twelfth house planet is through inheritance, and that’s cool. 

I mean, that could be fucked up. That could be sad. I mean, it depends on who you’re related to and all that. But it’s really cool because we are interconnected. We are interconnected, and that is a beautiful, fascinating thing. And your twelfth house chart may be the embodiment of the end of a broken cycle—maybe the embodiment of the end of a cycle that serves no one. It may be the embodiment of spiritual gifts or creative gifts that are hard to put your finger on. 

I personally am a huge fan of the twelfth house, which makes sense for me because I have three planets in it. I love the twelfth house. I am obsessed with the twelfth house. And I want to say really emphatically, whether you have planets in the twelfth or your child or loved one has planets in the twelfth, it is not a sentence to misery. It is not a sentence to isolation or lack of happiness; it is simply a predisposition. And all predispositions can be worked with, maybe not easily, maybe not quickly, but we can work with all of it. 

So when you find yourself being judgy or falling into any kind of fear based investigations and panic, that’s the time to pull back from astrology and to recognize it’s not helping you, right. And instead to just focus on getting present because, honestly, that’s what the twelfth house wants. The twelfth house wants us to manage and care for our spiritual wellness. That’s the move. 

And by doing that we inevitably are soothing our hearts which allows our psychology room to start to really step up and take greater care of the rest of ourselves. And then we can pair all of that—the spiritual, emotional, mental wellness—with physical behaviors, with activities that support our mental health, our emotional health, and our spiritual health, and now you have satiated and pleased the twelfth house. Look at you, doing things right, just like I knew you would.

My loves, this was a very Hot Take of the twelfth house. As always, I thank you for joining me here at Ghost of a Podcast and invite you to send me your questions over at ghostofapodcast.com. And stay tuned for my very exciting astrology app that I’m going to be dropping soon. Who knows when? I don’t know when. Do you know when? It’s the twelfth house; we will sit in the unknowing together.