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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Darlings, darlings, darlings, last week I talked to you in the Hot Take about the twelfth house. And this week I’m going to go buck wild and talk to you about the sixth house. The sixth house in astrology is another, I think, kind of like gets a bad rep, maybe is misunderstood kind of house. It’s easy to want to talk about the seventh and the first, you know, relationships and identity. Those are really kind of easy to talk about. The angles in general are. 

But let me start with this, when we look at opposing houses—so very briefly, if you’re new to astrology, the first house and the seventh house are opposite each other, the second and the eighth, the third and the ninth, the fourth and the tenth, the fifth and the eleventh, and then, of course, the sixth and the twelfth. It’s really—it’s not too complicated. Don’t over think it. It’s just out of twelve signs there’s six on one half of the wheel and six on the other. 

So when we look at these opposing houses, and a kind of useful way of thinking about this is they are heads and tails of a coin. The energies in opposing houses are very similar to each other whilst being somewhat opposite. Identity versus relationships, that’s one through seven. And then when it comes to something like the second house is related to your personal finances, and the eighth house is taxes and inheritances, right. This is very broadly speaking—these are just a couple of key words. 

But when we talked about the twelfth house last week, and this week I will remind you that we’re going through lots of Piscean and Neptunian energy, which is very twelfth house. So if you haven’t already listened to the last two episodes of the podcast, you know, budda bing, budda boom [sp]—get it done because it will be helpful to you. When we talk about the sixth house, we are talking about the other side of that twelfth house energy. 

The sixth house in astrology, people will often say it’s boring. ’Tis not at all boring, IMO, and I’m not even a Virgo. The sixth house is governed by Virgo and Mercury. The sixth house is the place where we find material reality. Now, there’s a few different places we can find material reality, and it will always be in an earth house. And so, if you’re kind of like, “Wait a minute. Wait, what?” you want to go back to episode 97 of the podcast, “Elements and Qualities.” But the earth sign houses tend to be concerned with material reality. That’s the second, the sixth, and the tenth. And, specifically, with the sixth house, this is where we see our mundane reality. 

So the word mundane is used a lot in astrology, and it’s used in different ways. So there’s mundane astrology, which is the astrology of events, and then there’s mundane issues or mundane life, and that is within the birth chart, okay. So I know I use those two words in very different ways, but welcome to the world of astrology. 

Okay, so the sixth house is associated with mundane life, which is to say your habits. It’s like the things you do. It’s your material lifestyle. The sixth house is I woke up this morning. I grabbed my phone. I made some coffee. I checked emails. You see where I’m going, right? It’s kind of the minutia; it’s the things we do, especially the things we do ritualistically or habitually. 

And this is where I want you to get really interested because you can be woo and talk about ritual, and you can be more kind of like material or physical about it and talk about habit or routine. But when we consider the connection or the interconnection between the twelfth and the sixth, what we really see is that anything that we do in a routine way is ritual. And ritual somehow comes from and also goes back to and feeds the subconscious, the spirit, the twelfth house. 

So the sixth house is a place where we bring our conscious and our unconscious and we throw them into actions or, as the case may be, inaction. Because inactivity or not doing anything is its own action—depending on the situation, more so or less so. So when we look to the sixth house in a birth chart, what we are looking at is your habits and the rituals that you pursue in your life. It’s your job. 

So I want to be really clear, in astrology we are looking to the sixth house for your job, the thing that you do all the time, every day and the tenth house for your career. So as an astrologer, my career, my midheaven might be doing healing work, but my sixth house, my job is answering hella emails and recording and editing podcast episodes, right. The sixth house is essential to supporting that midheaven or tenth house career or aspiration. 

The sixth house is not an aspirational location of the birth chart. It’s where we find the physical body and the habits that we employ to support or negate it. The way that we manage our physical health and the way that we relate to the labor we perform, the work we do, that’s the sixth house. And this is, again, where people get hella bored. They’re just like, “I don’t think that sounds exciting at all. That doesn’t sound fun. What a bummer that I have all these planets in the sixth house.” This is not boring. This is not boring. We all have a sixth house because if you’re in a body, you are running the sixth house. If you work, if you organize your days and hours through this thing called the body or time, you are working your sixth house. 

The key with the sixth is to understand how it is related to service. So the ruling sign to the sixth house is Virgo, and the ruling planet is Mercury. So when we talk about service, we can think of it in a lot of different ways. We can think about the foods you eat as being a function of the service you perform to your body. We can think about the labor you perform to, I don’t know, keep a damn job and pay the bills as the service you perform for yourself, so that you can stay afloat, and if you have family or people that you financially support or live with, as a way to be self-sufficient so that they don’t have to take care of you in that particular way. 

When we look at the function of the sixth house service, what we see is the potential for it feeling really shitty and feeling like it’s a slog, and everything I do, I have to do it, and I don’t want to, and it feels like something I really just feel distracted by or judgmental towards myself or my circumstances around—Virgo shit, right—or it can be an act of love. It can be an act of investment. Again, it’s not just your habits; it’s your rituals. 

It is easy to ignore the connection between the opposing houses, but it’s not wise because then you lose out on these layers of data. The sixth house is the place where our vision becomes manifest. It’s the place where we get to take our ideals out of the clouds and bring them down into actions. And those actions are meant, again, to be in service to something greater, and that something greater we can find often in the twelfth house. 

The role of how we take care of our bodies is a really big part of the sixth, and I will get into planets in your birth chart in the sixth versus transits through your sixth, okay. We’ll do that in a moment, but first let me just say, your meat suit, your beautiful, weird, creepy meat suit is—it’s the ship that you’re the captain of in this lifetime, whether it’s a clunker or a beauty—doesn’t matter; it’s your ship. And the attitude that we have towards our bodies and our physical health can be found in many places in the birth chart. And I will always say, medical astrology is an advanced topic. If you are not a pro, I don’t encourage you to play with medical astrology. 

But the sixth house, foundationally, is related to your body. It’s related to how you relate to your body and how you treat your body and what you do with it. And so, it is a very important thing to consider when you’re looking at your chart that the body is spirit made material. It’s kind of fancy, right? It’s kind of fancy. 

When we look at the ways in which we starve ourselves to make ourselves smaller for other people, we stuff our emotions or shove things down, the ways in which we prioritize ease over quality in our self-care, these things can all be found in the sixth house. And, again, they can be found in multiple places, but the sixth house, that one is a biggy, my friends. That one is a damn biggy. 

What we find in the sixth house requires adaptability. It’s a house of Mercury, and so it requires adaptability. It requires our willingness to adjust based on new information. In that information, ideally speaking, when we have a really integrated birth chart—which, honestly, nobody does all the damn time because we’re all human—but when we have a really kind of integrated birth chart what can happen is the inspiration and insight and close relationship that we have with ourselves spiritually speaking gets funneled into the relationship we have to our bodies and to our actions on a daily or ritualistic level. You capiche? I feel like you capiche. 

Okay, now to the birth chart. So let’s say you’re listening to all this, and you don’t have any planets in the sixth house. Yes, I guess, technically, it is an empty house, but in astrology nothing is empty. Nothing is empty. What you do is you look at the sign on the sixth house cusp, so we are looking at the zodiac sign on the sixth house cusp. Let’s say it’s Leo, then you would think, hmm, what’s the ruling planet to Leo? Oh, I know, it’s the damn Sun. Then you would look at the Sun in your birth chart, look at the placement, look at the aspects to it to gain more information about all of the themes of the sixth house. 

There’s no such thing as an empty house, okay? Don’t freak out—you have a body, you work; you’re fine, and you will always experience transits moving through your sixth house. So not all the damn time, but you will. Because of the very slow speed of a few planets—Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto—we are not all going to experience those particular planets moving through all of the houses of our birth chart. But from Saturn through the Sun, so Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury, and the Moon, they’re all moving through our birth charts. So in the case of the Moon, it’s monthly, and in the case of Mars, it’s a couple of years, but that’s max—couple of years. 

Now, let’s say, you have planets in the sixth house. Depending on what those planets are and how they are aspected, you are going to have a meaningful relationship to your habits and to work, to like your jobedy [sp] job. So, again, that’s the emails and the editing as opposed to the healing. Although the sixth house is a place where we can often find medical practitioners, so either physical illness or a kind of commitment to physical wellness—often those two things come hand in hand, I’ve found—or medical practitioners. So the sixth house can be a place where we find all this kind of stuff. 

When we have planets in the sixth house, it is essential, regardless of the planets and regardless of the aspects, that we ritualistically take time to consider what we’re doing. And not in a big picture way, but like day to day, hour to hour, month to month, what are you doing? Because whatever it is that you’re repetitively doing is prayer and that prayer lives in your body, and it manifests. So checking in to make sure that these actions you’re ritualistically pursuing reflect the best interests and needs of the planets in that house based on all the variable factors, like the sign it’s in and the aspects to the planet, that’s where you get to really kind of use astrology to your own best interest. 

Now, when we look at planets moving through your sixth house, this is another issue altogether. Because regardless of whether you have an empty sixth house or you have a fully stacked sixth house, what happens when planets move in real time through your sixth house is they stimulate the energies that are just sitting around waiting to get stimulated. That sounds way more exciting than it usually is. The length of time any individual planet will spend in any given house—including, but not limited to your sixth house—depends on a variety of factors. The first one is the speed of the planet, right. Pluto moves so slowly—so slowly, and the Moon is so quick. So it really does depend on the speed of the planet. 

The other thing that is depends on is the size of the house. If you’re using whole sign houses or equal houses, then it’s kind of a little bit of a clockwork thing, but you know me; I don’t fuck with those houses. I use Campanus houses, which gives you really wonky, oddly shaped houses. So you may have a really tiny sixth house using Campanus system, or you might have a really wide, big sixth house. I don’t know. I don’t know you. I don’t know your chart. But to give you a sense of how different it can be depending on your house system. Anyways, I digress. 

Let’s say you have a planet—let’s say Jupiter moving through your sixth house. Jupiter is a planet that if you do a little Google search, you will be told it’s like lucky and easy and chill. So Jupiter moving through the sixth, you’ll read a lot of interpretations that say this is a time for good luck and your health improving. And that can be true. 

Jupiter, as an example, moving through your sixth house can become a time when you activate and mobilize to follow through on your kind of wellness or good health habits. It can be a time where you really commit yourself to work that you care about and that is inspiring to you and you follow through. Very exciting. 

It can also be a time where it expands the things that you were already doing. So if you were perpetrating some sort of self-destructive or inappropriate thing to your sweet, sweet body, you may find yourself in a position where you’re just doing more of that. It can be a time where if you have, let’s say, a drinking issue—you just drink and drink and drink, and it’s so much fun, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t long term consequences. It can be that you get a promotion or a raise at a job that you don’t like. 

So what Jupiter does is it expands. And the sixth house is your work. It’s your habits. It’s your health. It expands. So what I want to say, and I don’t want to get distracted by the Jupiter piece, per say, but what you want to note is that when a planet moves through a house, it just stimulates the issues and the energies that live in that house. And that’s really cool. I mean, sometimes it’s a real pain in your ass because it’s a difficult transit, and other times it is a beautiful thing because you get that promotion, or you finally use that StairMaster that’s been collecting dust in your house. Are StairMasters even a thing anymore? Nobody knows. Peloton—that’s what the people use. I wouldn’t, but the people do. 

Okay, it can go any number of ways, but what it does is it lights up the issues of that house. So here’s the good news, when transits occur to any house, we have the opportunity to become more activated and aware with those issues. And just because you weren’t super activated or super aware of them before doesn’t mean they weren’t dormant—just hanging out waiting for you to pay attention. 

So while transits can feel really like, “Oh, shit, I got this thing going on; it sucks”—and there’s a level on which that is absolutely just facts—the other thing is healing is a process, and life is a journey of healing. And, in fact, if we’re talking about that sixth/twelfth house polarity, it is a journey of healing towards a state of wholeness, and that state of wholeness includes and encompasses duality. That right there is some sixth, slash, twelfth house shit. 

When we embrace where we are, when we accept where we are—not just spiritually but physically and not just physically but spiritually—what we are doing is we are creating more balance and flow in the birth chart in this axis: the sixth/twelfth axis. And this is really supportive because the sixth house is so integral to everything we do. It’s our fucking habits. It’s literally all the damn things we’re doing. It’s a place—it’s kind of like—think of it as a busy subway station that has like connections to all over town. You kind of use it to access all these other points in your chart. Inevitably, talk about romance, talk about sex, talk about creativity, talk about work, talk about taxes, I mean, it all kind of runs through your habits and your body. So be interested in that sixth house. Don’t call it boring. Don’t shit upon this subway station called your body and your work life. Instead, ritualize it. Embrace it. Be interested in it. And in that way, you can cultivate adaptability so that your life can become more effective and healthy. 

Now, my loves, I thank you once again for joining me for Ghost of a Podcast. As always, if you get value from what you hear here on the show, please subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts. And if you’re down for writing five-star reviews, may I invite you to write me a five-star review. 

And, of course, if you want to know more about astrology, and you’re really trying to learn, cycle back through my past astrology Hot Takes, these mid-week episodes and grab my damn book, Astrology For Real Relationships: Understanding You, Me, and, How, We All Get Along. Bye.