Master’s Musings, January 2026

In November 2025, I published a newsletter about Mars Returns on my personal website,  forrestastrology.com. There, I invited readers to submit suggestions for future newsletter topics. There was enough response to keep me busy for a long time. Astrologer Jenny Yates offered a particularly interesting suggestion. Here are her slightly-edited words:

Self-awareness and sense of identity, as connected to the Ascendant and the Midheaven – which are more about the way people see you, and which are more about how you see yourself?

Let’s dive in and try to unpack this extremely slippery question. I say “slippery” because it’s  premised on assuming the duality of what’s inside us versus what’s outside, which is to say accepting that we are truly separate from everything else. Are we? That’s one of those eternal questions. As all astrologers know from their daily experience of synchronicity, there are mysterious links between what we are encountering deep inside ourselves and what we bump into “by chance” in our lives around the same time. To me, one of the most helpful concepts in Buddhism is that there are ultimate truths and relative truths – and I think believing in this inside/outside duality is a relative one. The great thing about relative truths is that they let us talk to each other, while the ultimate ones are always beyond the scope of language. 

So let’s talk! 

WHAT YOU LOOK LIKE

Let’s start with the shaky assumption that your skin marks a definitive boundary between your inner world and the world “out there.” Using that idea as our launching pad leads me to a basic insight about both the Ascendant and the Midheaven: 

• Each one of these “Angles” in the chart reveals what you look like from a distance. The only difference between the Ascendant and the Midheaven is how far away from you the person making the judgment is standing. 

Let me focus that idea a bit more clearly. The Ascendant reflects your personal style. It’s your affect, how you present yourself socially. Call it your vibes. Do you make eye contact? How do you dress? Are you easy to get to know or more elusive? The point is that in order to see those dimensions of anyone’s character, you need to be standing near them. You have to be in their physical presence – or, nowadays, at least Zooming.

The Midheaven, on the other hand, is about the hat you wear in the world. It’s what you look like to people who don’t really know you. The word “reputation” is tied to it. So is “status.” With the 10th house in general in modern practical astrology, we tend to focus on a person’s career. That’s valid – but if someone gets married, or gets single, we often also see Midheaven involvement via transits or progressions. Ditto with the birth of a first child. None of those developments are about anyone’s career per se, but they will certainly impact how people who don’t really know you file you away in their minds. 

Note that none of those life events or status questions imply anything specifically about a person’s vibes – Midheaven-fashion, they’re only about what we appear to be from a social distance.

• “Jane works seven days a week.” Is she an introvert or an extrovert? Feel how your mind freezes? We can’t answer. The problem is that we made a Midheaven statement, then asked an Ascendant question. 

• “Jason is a meticulous, cautious guy. Do you think he might have a future in politics?” That’s the same thing, only backwards – we gave Ascendant information, then asked a Midheaven question.

Maybe you meet a public figure – say, a star in the realm of film or sports. You arrive in their presence with an already-established sense of who they are and you are surprised to find that they are very different from what you expected. That’s not a rare experience. 

• Again, you know them through their Midheavens and you’re surprised when you meet their Ascendants. 

Those observations basically echo everything that we’ve been exploring all along, but let’s follow this trail of breadcrumbs a bit further into the deep dark forest of the human psyche . . . 

THE FIRST DATE

Say that you have a date with someone. You click right away. Your styles work well together. You feel easy and natural in each other’s presence. Your values are in harmony and you have similar senses of humor. Welcome to Ascendant heaven. Naturally you’re eager to see each other again. 

So far in this little dating episode, much is still primarily about people’s surfaces meeting. In any relationship, that’s how everything has to start. It’s pure Ascendant material. Still, as any relationship deepens we might begin to glimpse the Ascendant in a more sophisticated fashion. That’s because the Ascendant doesn’t really operate in a vacuum unless we’re talking about extremely formal, shallow social situations – those are typically all about surfaces. 

When it comes to the early stages of truly getting to know another human being, my favorite metaphor for the Ascendant is that it is like stained glass. That’s because the rest of the chart shines through it and is given a certain tint by it. Ultimately you can’t separate your planets from the Ascendant – like stained glass, it simply colors their expression as their energies are translated into actual social behavior. 

• Put a Cancer Ascendant on a Gemini and it’ll look very different than that same Cancer Ascendant on a Scorpio. 

With two people “getting to know each other,” that ancient process always starts with their Ascendants, but it soon pulls them toward deeper waters. In fact, right from the beginning, something in our vibes is already hinting at those deeper waters. They glimmer through the Ascendant, attracting and intriguing us.

Despite their auspicious first date, maybe things don’t work out for Jane and Jason. Maybe you’re pals with Jason. Maybe you hear him saying, “I feel like Jane just doesn’t really understand me.” This is far from the world’s most original relationship complaint, but it may be completely valid. There are parts of each one of us that are so deep that even we don’t understand them. And yet those core soul places inside us all are longing to be seen, acknowledged, and loved.

Put poor Jason’s romantic plight on the back burner for a few moments. We’ll soon get back to it.

Think of the point opposite the Midheaven: the astrological nadir, also known as the cusp of the 4th house. If the Midheaven is how we relate to the outer world, the astrological nadir is how we relate to the inner one. It’s where we keep our hearts. In introducing the 4th house to a client, here’s a line I’ll often use: “Sleep with someone in a spirit of loving affection for ten years or so and thus begin to get to know them.” This is where we keep our deepest personal essence. Naturally, it feels vulnerable and therefore, quite opposite the Ascendant or Midheaven, it’s cautious about revealing itself. 

The 4th house, along with the sign Cancer and the Moon that rules them both – these symbols represent the secret world that lives inside every one of us. Some of us are fortunate enough to find someone with whom we can share that inner realm. That’s the essence of true intimacy. In some ways, the 4th house is the true “house of marriage.”

To that list of lunar “inner realm” symbols, we can add the Pluto family (Scorpio; the 8th house) and the Neptune family (Pisces; the 12th house.) They also point our attention inward. If the Ascendant and the Midheaven are the north pole, welcome to Antarctica. These “Water family” symbols underlie everything we show to the world. To use Jenny Yates wording, they’re how we see ourselves, as opposed to how the world sees us. 

THE KEY TO HAPPINESS

One major key to happiness in life lies in figuring out good ways to express our deeper selves through our Ascendants. Remember Jason? He may be right that Jane doesn’t understand him, but quite possibly that might be more his fault than hers. His inner life, by definition, is invisible to her unless he expresses it. Sometimes that isn’t easy. 

Say Jason has Libra rising. Say his Mars squares it from Capricorn and the 4th house. Add that Jane, being human, has a habit or two that annoy him. Maybe his frustration about her behavior lurks undetected underneath the more conciliatory style implied by his Libran Ascendant. Behind his smiling face, he’s perhaps starting to go off the deep end: “Jane does that stuff just to annoy me. It’s micro-aggression. She’s got unresolved issues with her father and she’s projecting them onto me. She’s really not capable of intimacy . . .”

And yet if Jason had only said, “Dammit Jane, please quit doing that,” they might have lived happily ever after . . . or something like that. The point is that it is possible to integrate Mars energy with a Libran Ascendant. In plain English, you can let someone know that they’ve hurt you and that you are feeling angry with them about it without violating your basic sense of connection with them. In fact, such honesty actually enhances the connection.

In intimate situations – coupling love, healthy families, friendships – we want our souls to be seen and known. Conveying that information about our secret world clearly to our loved ones is the job of the Ascendant. It’s what stands between your inner world and the outer one. It’s the bridge. It’s the gatekeeper. It’s where consciousness and cosmos meet. To call it the “surface of the character” is only true up to a point, and if we leave it there, we’re in trouble. Once again, think of it as the bridge or the gatekeeper – or the translator.

A full understanding of how the Ascendant functions in a given person involves more than knowing what sign was rising when they were born. Are there planets in the 1st house? Where is the planet that rules the Ascendant? But everything else being equal, if you’ve got a Sagittarian Ascendant, you may have to work hard on learning how to express tenderness or personal insecurities in a way that really conveys those feelings to your loved ones. A Cancer Ascendant might present precisely the opposite challenges – Cancer doesn’t easily channel Sagittarian-style humor, bravado, and spunk, even though you might be feeling them strongly inside yourself.

No matter what your Ascendant, sometimes you’re going to feel like you’re hammering a nail with a fish or trying to set fire to a bucket of water. Still, you’ve got to try. The prize is your ability to feel truly, deeply, connected with anyone. It’s all about authentically translating the realities of your inner world into the language of actual human behavior.

WHAT ABOUT AT WORK?

With the Midheaven, it’s a somewhat different story. Do you really want your co-workers to know what you’re thinking? How about your boss? The Midheaven relates us to the larger community. Boundaries and some degree of distance are often appropriate there. That’s why most of us call our physician “doctor” rather than Doug or Camille. How wise is it to share your feelings about the speeding ticket with the cop who stopped you? There’s a certain comfort for everyone in playing their appropriate Midheaven roles. Not all relationships are meant to be intimate.

Still, ideally you want your job to have some connection with your soul’s purpose in the world. You want your lifestyle – which is another good Midheaven word – to have something to do with your actual nature and values. So once again, the great art here lies in aligning the Midheaven with the deeper, more interior, dimensions of your chart. How you look from a great social distance – Midheaven territory – should offer some clues about who you actually are in your core. There’s got to be some connection, otherwise life feels robotic and pointless.

As always, what we are aiming for in both astrological practice and in life is synthesis and integration. I began this essay with a brief bow in the general direction of a larger metaphysical framework. I referred to the understanding that ultimately, behind all the apparent fragmentation of life, there is a basic unity. Oneness is the highest truth. That’s the ultimate synthesis. 

Given a few lifetimes meditating in a Himalayan cave, we might actually begin to understand that. Meanwhile, we can make a good start by pressing toward a unity of our inner world and our outer one. We can accomplish that by helping mold our Ascendants and our Midheavens into clear windowpanes through which our souls can shine into the world with as little distortion as possible. 

Like any window, you’re inside looking out through them. Hopefully, people on the outside are looking in too, and seeing at least the silhouette of your soul.