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.

“There’s nothing in my 7th house. Does that mean I will never get married?” I’d love to have a dollar for every time I’ve heard that question. As your own practice unfolds, I guarantee that you’ll hear it a lot too. If you sit with clients, empty houses are one of those issues that come up over and over again. That’s inevitable – for starters, unless we start flooding our charts with countless asteroids, everybody in the world has at least two of them. There are ten planets and twelve houses. You can do the math. 

So what do they mean? Are empty houses truly “dead zones” in a person’s life? That’s sort of true sometimes, but often not. The question is actually fairly complicated. Let’s explore it, starting with one stand-out fact:

AIN’T NO SUCH THING AS AN EMPTY HOUSE 

Planets definitely activate a house in a big way, but they are not the only astrological factor that can accomplish that feat. Signs represent energy too. Every house has a sign on its cusp. That sign sets the tone for our experience in that department of life even if there are no planets there. Lacking a planet, the house fades somewhat in importance, but it is still part of life. Everyone has all twelve houses and we can’t be fully human without some experience connected with each one of them. 

• Margot Robbie of Barbie fame has an empty 10th house, but her Midheaven is in Taurus, which is ruled by Venus in Gemini and the 11th house. Venus of course is the “goddess of the arts,” and so when it comes to career, a Venus path naturally opened up before her. She’s talented and beautiful, skilled with language (Gemini) and good at working in teams and joint projects – there’s the 11th house.

• Stormy Daniels was not famous for her chastity. One might expect her to have a highly activated 5th house, and yet it’s empty. Taurus to the rescue again – that’s the sign on her 5th house cusp, so once again we see the Venus rulership. Her Venus meanwhile is in Aquarius and squared by Uranus in Scorpio: lots of edgy, rule-breaking symbolism there, all related in clear ways to her 5th house experience. 

• Another person not famous for chastity but also born with an empty 5th house is Donald Trump. He’s got Sagittarius on the cusp and it’s ruled by his 2nd house Jupiter and squared by his 11th house Venus and Saturn, both in Cancer. I’m reminded of Oscar Wilde’s famous line: “I can resist anything except temptation.”

Obviously in each of these three cases, I’m not diving into a deep astrological analysis. The point is simply that I could – and you could too. The symbolism is all there to be read and from what we actually know of these people’s lives, it fits. These “empty houses” are activated in ways we can understand astrologically. In each case, we could even go deeper and offer them counsel about how to optimize their responses to each of these houses based solely on sign information.

Let me add two more points. Even if a house is empty in the natal chart, sooner or later its underlying pattern of sign energy will be triggered into activation by transits, progressions, or solar arcs. Then there’s love or any of its variations: if a partner’s planets fall in one of your “empty” houses, as long as you are together the experiences of that house will figure in your life. A classic example is what happens when a childless person falls in love with someone who has kids. Suddenly that childless person has kids too – and probably a partner who drops a planet into his or her 5th house. 

Once again, the takeaway is that there is really no such thing as a truly empty house. All twelve are energized at least to some extent in every one of us.

THREE WAYS TO SAY EVERYTHING

Astrology is really three interlocking symbol systems: planets, signs, and houses. For every plain-English concept that we use in our work, there is a planet, a sign, and a house to represent it. They are not exactly interchangeable, but they’re close. For example, how do we understand partnerships from an astrological perspective – do we use Venus, or Libra, or the 7th house? In practice, in any particular partnership situation, any one of those three symbols could be in the spotlight. 

This leads us to perhaps our most fundamental insight into “empty” houses – they might very well mislead us. What if you have nothing in your 7th house, but Venus is conjunct your Ascendant in Libra? Are relationships likely to be a low-energy issue in your life? All astrologers know better.

• When faced with an empty house, before diminishing the importance of that area of life,  remember to check for the condition of the corresponding sign and the ruling planet. For every issue in life, there are three astrological ways in which it can be activated. Houses are only one of them.

Let’s look at the chart of the late, great spiritual teacher, Ram Dass. December 22 marks the sixth anniversary of his passing, but he lives on in the hearts of many of us. My band Silkworm was scheduled to open for him in North Carolina back in the late 1970s. We were there in the auditorium doing our afternoon sound check when he walked in. I’ll always remember how utterly human and unpretentious he was – like any true spiritual teacher, he wasn’t busy impressing us with his wisdom, yet his presence itself was a blessing.

Other than the famous words “Be Here Now” from the title of Ram Dass’s best-known book, perhaps his second-most quoted line is “love, serve, remember.” And he walked his talk – Ram Dass seemed to live to serve people. Yet his 6th house – the house of service – is empty. This absence is particularly striking because another dimension of the 6th house is mentoring and initiation. He was utterly devoted to Neem Karoli Baba, his guru – and of course he himself initiated and mentored many people in the course of his life, including me. 

So why no planets in his 6th house? What it symbolizes was clearly a huge area of his life. He was, after all, part of a lineage. 

Jupiter rules Ram Dass’s 6th house from the mystical 12th house. It’s in the nurturing sign, Cancer. All of that tells us something that’s relevant. But what is the sixth sign of the zodiac? Virgo is of course the answer, and there we find his Neptune in his 3rd house. He served (Virgo) by teaching (3rd house) spiritual matters (Neptune.) 

In practical astrology the word “work” can relate to either the 6th house or, more commonly, to the 10th. The two houses aren’t exactly interchangeable, but they do overlap a lot in practice. In simple terms, the 10th house is “the hat we wear in the world,” while the 6th house feels more like “Monday morning.” It’s where we actually develop and practice our craft. Ram Dass has a packed 10th house, so there’s no way we could do a meaningful interpretation of his chart without being pedal-to-the-metal about his mission in the world. And what sign lies on the cusp of his 10th house? Pisces – which, via rulership, brings us right back to that 3rd house Neptune in “6th sign” Virgo.

The point is that even though Ram Dass’s 6th house contains no planets, by the time we translate the related symbolism into English, we’ve pretty well covered the “6th house” base. That’s all because of the underlying principle that there is more than one way to say the same thing astrologically. Always, when you’re faced with an empty house, remember to look at the condition of the related sign and planet – and pay some attention to the sign on that house cusp and to the planet that rules it.

Again, empty houses are not as empty as they look.

WHAT IF ALL THREE SYMBOLS ARE QUIET?

Sometimes it happens that a house is devoid of planets, the corresponding sign is empty, and the related planets are hiding out in a corner. What do we do then? Start by remembering that there is always a sign on the cusp of that empty house. Based on it, you can always find something meaningful to say. 

• Keep perspective though – the message of the chart, at least from the evolutionary point of view, is that in this lifetime this particular area of life is of diminished importance for the person in question. That’s really the bottom line.

Imagine a person with an empty 7th house, nothing in Libra, and Venus not playing a very central role in the chart. It would still very likely be a major blunder to announce to that person that “relationships don’t mean anything to you.” Start with a little common sense – relationships are significant to basically everybody. Add the technical realities of astrology – as we have seen, people everywhere have Venus in their charts – and even if it’s a quiet one, it is still Venus. Everyone has some Libran energy even if there are no planets there. Everyone has a 7th house and it’s flavored with sign energy. 

No one’s chart contains zero relationship symbolism. That is simply not possible.

We also need to recognize that astrological symbolism speaks of relationships in a variety of ways. 4th house symbolism can indicate family. The 5th house can point to children or romances. The 6th can indicate mentoring relationships that are of enormous importance. The 8th house can point to the mysteries of coupling and sexual bonding. If those houses are activated, that’s the language we would use in talking about relationships – and, guaranteed, it would be meaningful to the client.

If all of those “arc of intimacy” houses are empty and the rest of the symbolism is quiet, in practice a working astrologer would focus on other areas of life. If the client were to ask about relationships, we could respond based on the techniques I’ve been describing – but we would also assure the client that from the deepest evolutionary perspective, in this incarnation they were not truly “majoring” in those intimate areas. Other developments were simply more pressing.

Whenever a part of life is relatively inactive in that sense, in my experience with clients, they often register a certain relief as they hear it. At some deep level, it rings true for them.

So these are my thoughts about empty houses: 

• First, there really aren’t any! 

• Second, the basic human ideas connected with houses that lack planets are often activated in other ways via related signs and rulerships. 

• Third, sometimes an entire area of life is de-emphasized in a person’s chart. If so, as astrologers, we should de-emphasize it too.

I was happy to learn that many students and community members in our school have discovered LILA (which is pronounced LEE-la, by the way.) In case you don’t know, it’s a cell phone based astrology app that I’ve been working on for almost eight years now. I’ve written most of the text and the astrological approach is mostly mine while I’ve depended on other people’s skills for the marketing and technical side of the project. The whole idea for LILA originated with two people who have become dear friends: Linnea Miron and Ricky Williams. (For those of you who follow NFL football, yes, it’s THAT Ricky Williams.)

Central to the app is the idea that everyone has “a strongest planet.” I’ve heard that questions are emerging in our FCEA community about how to integrate that concept into the astrological approach that we teach. That’s what I want to try to clarify in this edition of Master’s Musings. 

(In case you have no idea what I am talking about, go to the Apple Store or the Google Play store and enter “Lila Astrology.” Alternatively, check out our website at lilaverse.app. In the app stores, you can download a simple, stripped down version of LILA for free or pay $9.49 a month for the full version.)

THE BACK STORY

For most of my professional life, I’ve been my own boss. With the advent of the LILA project and our school, both happening in 2018, all that changed. Suddenly I was faced with something I’d never had to deal with before: teamwork! (Unsurprisingly, the Moon was progressing through my 11th house.) Mostly, that’s been a great experience for me. All of you know how lucky I am with our wise and wonderful FCEA team. The LILA tribe is extensive and it has been good to me too even though what we are doing is very different. 

Anyone who knows my work will recognize my voice and my approach to astrology throughout much of the writing in LILA – with one exception: the strongest planet. That was 100% Ricky’s idea. I didn’t disapprove of it, but it never would have crossed my mind to include it. As all of you know, I put a lot of emphasis on what I call the primal triad of Sun, Moon, and Ascendant. Now, in LILA, there’s reference to the primal quad, where we add the strongest planet to the mixture, pretty much as the fourth leg of the table. I know that’s confusing some of our FCEA students.

I have a lot of positive things to say about the strongest planet concept, and it’s definitely deep in LILA’s DNA. Still, at this point, we have no plans to integrate it into the FCEA curriculum. The system we teach works fine as it is, plus adding the strongest planet would involve completely re-doing all of our teaching materials from the ground up. As you know, we’ve never presented the FCEA approach as “everything in astrology.” Instead, the FCEA method is a lean machine that gets you as quickly and efficiently as possible to the heart of the matter with a client. Other approaches to astrology work too, but when we try to integrate them into our FCEA methodology, they only tend to muddy the water, create redundancies, or simply take up time that would be better spent going more deeply into the core material. 

Cutting to the chase, as I mentioned I’ve been learning a lot about teamwork. Some of that is about learning new things from different people. But naturally, a big part of that process lies in learning how to compromise. LILA’s strongest planet function covers both of those bases – it’s a powerful technique that I am still learning about, and it’s also a bit of a compromise on my part.

Let me tell you a little more about how the strongest planet works in LILA.

ASTRODYNES

The Church of Light was incorporated in Los Angeles on November 2, 1932. It was an extension of the Brotherhood of Light, which dates back to 1915. Its purpose was to preserve and promote the spiritually-oriented astrological work of C.C. Zain (a.k.a, Elbert Benjamine, a.k.a, Benjamin Parker Williams.) Zain created a weighted system for determining the relative strengths of the planets in a chart. He called the system astrodynes. Ricky got interested in Zain’s work and began his efforts to incorporate it into LILA – with mixed results, at least initially.

From my perspective, Zain’s astrodynes simply did not work reliably. For example, they gave Jupiter as my own strongest planet. That felt plausible to me – it’s conjunct my Sun, so it’s in a strong position and I do identify myself as a “Jupiter type.” But then there was my partner, Michelle, for whom the Moon emerged as her most powerful astrodyne. That didn’t feel right to either one of us – but for me the real corker was how the astrodyne system gave Venus as Michelle’s weakest planet. That was simply crazy. She’s been a successful professional painter all her professional life, plus she has a Libra Ascendent, which makes Venus the ruler of her chart! 

Like the rest of us, Michelle is a complicated human being, but anyone who knows her, along with knowing anything about astrology, is going to quickly think of Venus when they think of her. 

Ricky agrees. We both knew that there was something to astrodynes, but we also knew that we could do better. He and I have begun tweaking Zain’s original astrodyne algorithms, putting more emphasis on rulerships, which his system mysteriously ignores. Eventually we expect to have a system that works better than the original. I want to be clear that we are not there yet. I’m writing these words in late October 2025. I’ll be meeting with Ricky and Linnea again in a month in order to implement some major changes to C.C. Zain’s astrodynes for LILA purposes. I want to be clear that what’s currently “under the hood” in LILA is Zain’s system, not mine or Ricky’s. It works – but not for everybody all the time. 

At the outset of this little essay, I mentioned that I was learning a new skill: teamwork. In all honesty, I would not have implemented the strongest planet algorithm into the public version of LILA yet. I don’t feel that it’s ready for Prime Time. I think it will be soon. If your current alleged “strongest planet” doesn’t feel right to you, I can almost guarantee that you’re right. Check again in a few weeks, and it will probably have changed – and ring a lot more true for you.

Meanwhile, Ricky and I decided to add a pair of new dimensions to the system, something that apparently C.C. Zain never considered.

ADDING SIGNS AND HOUSES

Let’s go back for a moment to Michelle hearing that the Moon was her strongest planet. By most conventional lunar standards, that statement is a real dud – she’s never had kids, she’s not a moody person, plus I do most of the cooking! But when I add that her Moon is in Aquarius, everything lines up better with who she actually is. I’d still not call her “a Moon person,” but Aquarius at least rings many of the right bells. An Aquarian Moon is of course an entirely different beast than one in Cancer or Taurus. That led us to a critical insight. In LILA – once your strongest planet is determined, it’s helpful to remember what sign and house it’s in. It may still feel off to you, but it will make more sense that way.

Ricky and I have taken that idea one step further for LILA. Just as we can weigh the planets to see which ones are dominant for you, we can do the same with your signs and houses. In adding those two additional pieces to the puzzle, we’ve left the realm of traditional astrodynes behind. You might, for example, find that Saturn is your strongest planet, but what if we then put Saturn in your strongest sign? (That might not be the sign that it actually occupies in your chart.) What if we do the same with your strongest house – we put Saturn there too? What you’ll get is a planet-sign-house combo that works pretty well as a super-quick summary of your chart as a whole.

Adding the strongest sign and house to the mixture is fresh territory. With no preexisting C.C. Zain formulas to muddy the water, Ricky and I set out to determine the relative weights of each sign and house in your chart. That’s all implemented in the current version of LILA and we think it’s working really well.

EXAMPLE

LILA founder Linnea Miron currently has Mercury as her strongest planet, as you can see in this graphic LILA screen:

Notice how Linnea’s Moon is a close second. That’s worth noting too. It gives you a more nuanced sense of things. Her mental focus (Mercury) has a lot of feeling, caring energy (Moon) animating it. And of course, there’s the question of whether Mercury will remain as her strongest planet once we tweak the planetary algorithm.

What about signs? Here are the relative strengths of all twelve signs in Linnea’s chart:

Pisces comes out on top, beating second place Capricorn by a wide margin. Now, putting two and two together, we’re thinking “Mercury in Pisces.” Let’s add the houses. Here‘s Linnea’s LILA screen:

With Linnea’s houses, we see it’s an almost three-way tie among the first, the second, and the tenth, with the first house “winning by a nose.” It’s helpful to take those second and third place symbols into account, but the bottom line is that LILA would summarize Linnea as “a Piscean Mercury in the first house.” 

And who is Linnea in real life? A leader in a spiritually-oriented information industry. 

WHAT ABOUT THE WEAKEST PLANET?

I’ve made no secret about my reservations regarding Lila’s strongest planet algorithm. In my opinion, it’s still a work in progress. As I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, what really triggered my biggest doubts was my Libra-rising artist-partner Michelle coming out with Venus as her weakest planet. To me, it was painfully obvious that by the simplest of astrological standards Lila was way off target there.

Here’s another example that makes the same point: me! Lila gives Mars as my weakest planet. Yet Mars co-rules my Scorpio Ascendant and is the dispositor of my Aries Moon! From the evolutionary point of view, it’s also the co-ruler of my Scorpio south node. My weakest planet? Give me a break, Lila!

There is a pattern underlying both of these examples: it’s the way Lila’s algorithm ignores the tremendous importance of planetary rulerships. There was a lot that was right in C.C. Zain’s thinking about astrodynes, but rulership was his blind spot.

As Ricky Williams and I meet to rework Lila’s strongest planet system, we’re hoping to correct that glaring problem. Once again, stay tuned – and if any of Lila’s pronouncements about your strongest or weakest planets feel wrong, trust your feelings!

THE BIG PICTURE

In doing astrology, we are constantly battling to stay on top of a massive flood of information. If we set out to describe “everything” in someone’s chart, we would have to stay wide-eyed and yacking for weeks. That obviously won’t work. Strategic simplification is an essential part of our craft. Faced with mountains of astrological complexity, the mind longs for core statements that spotlight a person’s essence. Those kinds of root insights keep us on track. They help us maintain perspective. The most familiar way for astrologers to do that is with Sun signs – “she’s a Gemini.” That’s lightyears away from full power astrology, but that reduction is actually its main advantage, not a liability. Sun signs focus our attention on something pretty close to the heart of the matter and they telegraph it to us in just a few syllables.

LILA’s strongest planet system does almost exactly the same thing – or it will, once we get the planet scales up to the same standards as the ones for signs and houses. Sun signs divide humanity into twelve types. The strongest planet system divides us into ten. They both make a stab at answering the same question: if you could only know one thing about this person, what would it be? 

In the “primal triad” system I first introduced in The Inner Sky, a Virgo with the Moon in Aries and Pisces rising could be called “the helper with the soul of a warrior wearing the mask of the mystic.” Once again, in that single sentence a whole lot of astrological information is conveyed simply and clearly. This time it’s much more granular than any Sun sign – there are 1728 possible combinations of Sun, Moon, and Ascendant.

If we place the strongest planet in the context of a person’s strongest sign and strongest house, we do something very similar – in this case, there are 1440 possible combinations.  By using all three astrological dimensions, we are making a vastly more individualized statement about a person than if we just say “her strongest planet is Uranus.”

When Ricky first proposed adding the strongest planet function to LILA, his argument was that currently most of the astrological “typing” of people was sign-based – you’re such a Scorpio! That language works fine, but why not try a planet-based system? You’re so Plutonian! That works too. 

• And that’s really the heart of the matter. A planet-centered astrological system can complement a sign-based system. Each just highlights a different dimension of a person’s character and destiny. Often they overlap considerably too.

HOW TO WORK WITH THE STRONGEST PLANET

I have a fantasy. I hop in my time machine and set the controls for 1963 when I was just fourteen years old. There was no Internet back then, so I print everything that LILA would say to me about my strongest planet, I leave it somewhere where young Steve will stumble across it, and I quickly head back to hide out in the 21st century. (That’s Jupiter in Capricorn and the 2nd house, by the way.)

When my fourteen-year-old self learns that I have a potential for embodying Jupiter’s “star quality,” I would have snorted in disbelief. I was a shy, misanthropic kid. I knew I was smart, but otherwise I had very little confidence in myself. But then I poke a little deeper into that LILA material and I learn that none of that alleged star quality pops up automatically without effort on my part. With Jupiter in the 2nd house, I was going to have to prove myself to myself in order to earn that kind of confidence and maybe generate a little charisma. With Capricorn in the formula, that process would take hard work. It would depend on self-discipline, on me keeping my eye on the prize. 

Via my strongest planet, LILA would have given me the formula that I needed in order to rise to that “star quality” that seemed so unreachable to me back then. That information would have helped me, and helping people is always the point.

I’ve often said that no one really needs astrology. That’s easily proven – plenty of people live good lives without it, end of story. Astrology assists us though! No one needs weather reports, but they’re helpful too. When I was fourteen, I got my teeth into astrology and I never let go. A couple of decades later, LILA’s prophecy came true: I became something like a “star” in the field. 

Even without LILA to guide me, I did what LILA would have suggested and it turned out as LILA would have predicted.

The deeper point is that at several forks in the road I nearly derailed my life in various ways, almost taking paths that were not really mine. I got lucky or angels saved me or something like that. Again, we can all live just fine without astrology – but we live better with it! I would have been more sure-footed in finding the path to my destiny if I had known about my strongest planet and let it guide me.

That’s true for us all. That’s why I am happy to see the strongest planet system built into LILA even though here in late 2025 it is still a work in progress. Like everything else in our field, it can help you become your best self. It can fill you in about the gift that you can offer your community and your loved ones. It reminds you of who you truly are. 

And that’s why we do what we do.

Ride the waves of your imagination back to Balboa Park in San Diego, California, one hundred years ago. The year is 1925. A woman sits in a parked car. She is engaged in an intense private conversation with a man. They are both in their thirties. He draws a 3” x 5” index card at random from a large stack and places it face down. On the card, and unseen by either one of them, is the notation “Aries 4.” An image forms in her mind. She says, two lovers are strolling through a secluded walk. He jots it down, shuffles the cards, and draws another, this one is for “Libra 13.” The woman says, Children blowing soap bubbles.

So it goes. Over several sessions, astrologer Marc Edmund Jones and psychic Elsie May Wheeler covered the entire zodiac. To each degree an evocative image was assigned. Thus began the long, complicated birth of what came eventually to be known as the Sabian Symbols. 

Elsie Wheeler passed away in 1938 at age fifty-one. She had spent her entire life in a wheelchair, suffering from crippling arthritis. As psychics and mediums go, astrologically she looks like the real deal. Here’s her A-rated chart. Note her Moon in the last degree of mystical Pisces along with Neptune conjunct her Ascendant. If anyone was in touch with the Spirit world, it was her.

I found a photo of her by searching online. It’s rights-protected so I can’t share it here without risking getting us into legal trouble. If you’re interested, you can Google it yourself. I don’t know how you will feel, but for me it was love at first sight. Her eyes go back forever. 

For all the usual sad reasons, when people speak of the Sabian Symbols, the name that is generally associated with them is that of astrologer Marc Edmund Jones. Meanwhile, poor Elsie May Wheeler is often forgotten. I want to celebrate her here, especially now that we have reached the one hundredth anniversary of the time she brought these images from the next world into this one. The Sabian Symbols would not exist without her.

None of this is meant to discredit Marc Edmund Jones. The symbols would not exist without him either. He was also one of the most productive and creative of the mid-20th century astrologers, probably best known for his work with aspect patterns – buckets, bowls, see-saws, and so on. 

Jones continued to work with the Sabian Symbols for years after Elsie Wheeler’s passing, changing a few of them, writing little paragraphs of explanation for each of them. He initially published them for his students in mimeographed form. Eventually, astrologer Dane Rudhyar became interested in them too. He published a modified version in his monumental 1936 work, The Astrology of Personality, thus ensuring their place in astrological history. Jones himself published The Sabian Symbols in Astrology in 1953. Twenty years later, Rudhyar devoted an entire book to them. It was called An Astrological Mandala. 

In 2004, Martin Goldsmith published a massive research project about the symbols and actually rejected some of Wheeler’s imagery, replacing it with fresh images that seemed to resonate better with the actual lives of people born with planets in those degrees. His book is titled, The Zodiac By Degrees. I suspect that purists frown on it because of his deletion of some of Wheeler’s images, but I found Goldsmith’s work impressive. For example, the original symbol for my own natal Sun’s position in 16 Capricorn is school grounds filled with boys and girls in gymnasium suits. I’m not an athlete. When I was growing up, gym was mostly about boredom and humiliation. It’s a stretch to make Wheeler’s original image for my Sun’s degree speak to me in a way that I can relate to. Meanwhile, here is Goldsmith’s new wording for that same mid-Capricorn degree: Turbaned guru explains a path to higher awareness, while his assistant walks among the meditating disciples and prods them into the correct posture. 

When I first read those words, I had to laugh out loud. I’m no guru, but obviously Goldsmith’s imagery relates much more obviously to the actual realities of my life than anything about a gymnasium. Reading it put a smile of recognition on my face – and as students and community members in the FCEA, I bet it put smiles on your faces too. I can’t help but think of our team of devoted tutors “prodding you into the correct posture.”   

Again, Martin Goldsmith derived these new images from meticulous biographical studies of the actual lives of people born with planets in these degrees. He only replaced Elsie Wheeler’s originals where it seemed appropriate and necessary.

• By the way, if you are drawn to work with the Sabian Symbols, here is a point that needs to be 100% clear. In working with them, the first degree of Aries starts at 0 Aries and ends at 1 degree of Aries. If, in other words, your natal Mars is in 0 Aries 38’, you read Aries 1, if it’s in 1 Aries 08’, you read Aries 2, and so on. 

WHAT TO MAKE OF THE SABIAN SYMBOLS

So here we are, having arrived at the Centennial of the birth of the Sabian Symbols. It seems appropriate to mark it. Unfortunately no exact date was recorded for when Jones and Wheeler sat together in that park in San Diego. All we know is that it happened over several days in 1925. 

In any case, a hundred years have passed, and all 360 of the symbols are still alive and kicking in one form or another in the world of contemporary astrology. At this point, they’ve been around far too long for anyone to dismiss them as a fad. Still, they’re not actually used very widely – saying that they have a “cult following” is closer to the truth. The sorts of highly intuitive astrologers who might also be drawn to Tarot cards or dream interpretation do well with them. Meanwhile, more linear thinkers tend to shrug their shoulders. But only a fool would reject them entirely. Like astrology itself, give them a chance and they will prove themselves to you.

Australian astrologer Lynda Hill is probably their most prominent current advocate. Her website is fun and impressive: https://sabiansymbols.com. Hit that link, ask a question, click the nebula, and – boom – a Sabian Symbol appears “at random,” often casting light on the question you asked. Obviously, that kind of divinatory process is more like Tarot cards or the I Ching than astrology – but those systems work too.

I’ve played with the Sabian Symbols myself for years. I find them intriguing and delightful. I mean, who can read rabbits in faultless human attire parade with dignity without smiling? That’s Cancer 8, by the way. In the early years of my astrological practice, I occasionally used them with clients, with mixed results. Once again, my more intuitive, Neptunian clients could relate to them more easily than my more “Earth-toned” ones. I no longer use the Sabian symbols in my practice. But I still find them fascinating.

Maybe you will too.

Stories and metaphors build the bridge that connects you to your client’s heart. Without them, an astrological session can feel abstract and “heady.” Even the most shopworn figures of speech can enliven a session. “You’ll be up the creek without a paddle” might mean exactly the same thing as “you will encounter difficulty.” It just says it in a way that sinks in a little deeper. 

As I am sure you figured out immediately, “up the creek without a paddle” is a familiar cliché. You won’t win the Pulitzer Prize for using it. The point is that it works and it adds a hint of color to what you are saying. But maybe you can be a little more creative. Try this: “you’ll feel like you’ve arrived at the airport without your passport.” Or this: “You’ll step into the spotlight only to realize that you’ve totally blanked out on your lines.”

Pulitzer Prize for Poetry? Still no, but at least those words are a bit more original.

Do you have to be verbally creative – an artist with words – in order to be a successful astrologer? Putting it in such extreme terms probably goes a bridge too far. But creativity really helps!  Presenting a lively astrological picture to a client requires technical skill, truth, and sincerity – but it also benefits from a large dollop of performance art. Boring astrologers tend not to see many repeat clients – and that’s true even if their work is accurate and sound. A professional reading typically takes an hour or two. If you actually want to hold someone’s attention for that long, you can’t just drone on as if you were reading from a computer manual. Your language has to be interesting, engaging, and colorful. That’s simply part of the skill-set that animates our craft.

TEACHING CREATIVITY

Can creativity be taught? Talk about a fraught subject! Obviously, it would be unrealistic to imagine that we could all become as dramatic and eloquent as William Butler Yeats or Maya Angelou. Still, Ms. Angelou has some good advice for us. She once said, “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” 

Practice, practice, practice, in other words. 

And don’t be shy! Remember, from an astrological perspective, creativity is in the domain of the 5th house, the “house of children.” To be successful at it, you’ve got to loosen up. You’ve got to feel like a kid faced with building blocks. As poet Sylvia Plath said, “The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” To that, I might add “self-consciousness.” So while you’re experimenting with turning your words into images, metaphors, and stories, remember to have some fun with the process. Be like a child. With creativity, fun is actually part of the method. The more fun you are having, the more you are cooperating with your own unconscious mind. And that’s the mysterious source of all inspiration anyway. The more you dance with it, the better you’ll get at surrendering to it. 

An added bonus is that when an impactful image pops unexpectedly out of your mouth, you’ll remember it. Soon you’ll have a treasure house of imagery in your head ready to be rolled out even if you’re not feeling particularly creative that day.

What I want to attempt now is something I am not even sure is possible. Creativity is so personal that it’s not something I can teach, at least not in the same way as I might teach astrological theory. But given the very precise strictures which underlie all astrological thinking, I believe that I can offer you a structural template for creating your own arsenal of original images. You can think of what follows the same way that you thought of a coloring book when you were kid. I’ll help you create the outlines, then I encourage you to grab your crayons and take it from there.

THE TEMPLATE

In every astrological situation, we naturally have at least a planet, a sign, and a house. Each one serves its own purpose and also flavors the whole. Making the three of them dance together is the heart of our craft. We know that one possibility is that they wind up cooperating with each other and thus fulfill some higher purpose – but they can also stomp on each others’ toes and create an embarrassing, pointless mess. Any honest, effective story we tell our clients has to cover both of those bases.

Here’s the structural template:

Step One: What part of your life – what basic needs and drives – are we talking about?

(Look to the planet)

Step Two: What exactly does that planet want? What does it need?

(Look to the sign)

Step Three: Where is it happening? How should the planet act in order to get its needs met?

(Look to the house)

Step Four: How might you make a mess of it?  

(Look to the dark side of planet and sign)

Step Five: What would that mistake look like? Where would we see it? 

(Look to the dark side of house)

In applying this basic template, everything initially depends on your academic knowledge of the astrological symbols. It’s with those abstract ideas that we create your “coloring book,” making sure that all the outlines are in the right places. After that, you get out your crayons and let the fun begin.

ROLL THE DICE

Out come my trusty, if somewhat battle-scarred, astro dice. I roll them and I see Venus in Pisces in the 4th house. Let’s plug that configuration into our template. 

As you know, all the symbols in astrology are multidimensional. To keep us safe from being overwhelmed intellectually (and thus slaughtering our creativity), we can focus on one set of basics, then later move on to another set of basics if we feel like it. With Venus, let’s start with relationships – those are something that pretty much everyone is interested in. (With an artist, you might follow the same template, but with a focus on artistic inspiration. That’s Venus too. At a deeper level, we might explore the optimal pathways to peace and relief from stress. There are many Venusian possibilities, in other words. Pick one, and off we go. In this case, let’s choose love.) 

Step One: So what basic needs and drives does Venus represent? It’s about who to love and how to love. How to recognize a natural partner. How to make relationships work.

Step Two: With Venus in Pisces, for any of that to truly blossom, there is a driving need for a strong sense of a spiritual connection. With such a person, we may talk, but we don’t always need words in order to communicate. When we look into each other’s eyes, there is a feeling of unguarded openness. I sense that my soul is seeing your soul and vice versa. I also know that we both know that.

Step Three: In the 4th house, we are looking for a kind of “family feeling.” Houses are always about behaviors, and in this case it’s the behavior of relationships that last – ones that are characterized by mutual commitment to “the long, shared story.” The 4th house also implies sharing our “psychological selves” – our dreams and our feelings. Think of people trusting each other with their vulnerabilities, then ask yourself: what does that look like behaviorally?

Step Four: Here we enter the darker side of the equation. Venus often makes messes by focusing so much on maintaining a relationship with the other person that it forgets about its relationship with itself. Pisces makes messes by losing track of reality and slipping into fantasy-land or into patterns of escapism.

Step Five: Assuming we slip into the errors in Step Four, the dark 4th house result would be self-protective emotional withdrawal, a soul “going underground,” at least for a while. Maybe we go back into therapy after a heartbreaking relationship failure – and while that’s far from a dysfunctional response, it’s hardly the happiest one. Remember: what we were shooting for was something more like living happily ever after.

TURNING IT INTO A STORY

Here’s the bull’s eye. Having absorbed those five technical steps, let your human wisdom and experience kick in. Feel the meaning of all those words we just said. Make them human. What might all of this look like in real life? The trick to nailing this alchemy is actually pretty easy, but students often get so caught up in the technical side of astrology that they miss it. You’ve got to feel what the symbols are telling you. Plug them into your experience. It’s like turning them into a person, almost as if you are writing a novel. Turn them into an imaginary friend if you want – that’s a trick I do all the time.  

Over and over again in our 306 Master Class, I’ve seen students tackle a configuration by correctly stating all the theoretical material that they’ve memorized about it. That’s terrific and necessary. They’re off to a good start. But it’s when I press them with a specific question or situation that brings the configuration down to earth that they often light up. I see them cross the line from rote memorization into true creative helpfulness. 

If you know no astrology at all, but a friend pours her heart out to you about some complicated situation in her life, you very probably do a fine job of supporting her. That wisdom is already there inside you. The heart of this whole process lies in building a bridge between that innate wisdom and the astrological symbols. The symbols become a person to you, and you speak to that person – with a bit of supernatural guidance from your hard-won knowledge of astrological theory.

When it comes to creating the story that illuminates all of this, there’s no one single right answer, so don’t worry about finding it. Throughout human history, one out of every 144 people has had Venus in Pisces in the 4th house (twelve signs times twelve houses). Each one of them has lived it in his or her own way. Color within those established lines, but feel free to color creatively – just make sure that you don’t add any major lines that aren’t actually there!

Here’s another hint: you’re really going to need two stories here, not just one. The first is about getting it right and the second one is the cautionary tale about getting it wrong.

• Keep it as simple and direct as possible. 

A classic rookie mistake is feeling as if you have to be Leo Tolstoy writing War and Peace. You don’t! Don’t overdo it. Don’t write a novel. Cut to the chase. You just need to make the point in vivid terms that cut right through to the human heart of your client. Because there are so many configurations in any chart, in a full reading you’ll need a lot of imagery. Being too windy about each individual one would make the session too draining, both for you and for your client.

VOILÀ!

So, putting it all together,  with Venus in Pisces in the 4th house, here’s an example of what you might say:

Their eyes met in the candlelight. There were no words. No words were possible. They’d not known each for very long – or had they already known each other for a thousand years? Months later they were married, but to the two of them, that was the moment in which their souls were married. They had found each other again across the stormy seas of birth and death.

Boom. In those sixty-seven romantic words, we see the high side of Venus in Pisces in the 4th house expressed quickly in telegraphic, evocative language. I timed myself. It only took me twenty-seven seconds to say them out loud. And to the client with that configuration, those words will sink into their heart like a stone and stay there forever. You’ve given that person more of a feeling for Venus in Pisces in the 4th house than he or she would ever get by attending a tedious lecture about attachment theory at an academic astrology conference.

Eyes meeting wordlessly in candlelight – what could be more resonant with a Piscean Venus? We could almost leave it at that. The rest of the mystical, romantic language just amplifies that point. The references to marriage highlight the 4th house dimension of the configuration, so they are important too. The point is that, while in those sixty-seven words there’s not a single astrological term, you can easily see the fingerprints of Venus, Pisces, and the 4th house. You know they are there – but to your astrologically-naive client, these are the words that actually hit the target. Astrological jargon alone can never do that unless we’ve studied it ourselves – then it’s the richest language in the world. But most of our clients haven’t studied it, at least not in depth.

What about the cautionary story? What about translating Steps Four and Five into a warning? That is naturally an important part of our work, but it has to be handled mindfully. Here’s one way to spell c-a-t-a-s-t-r-o-p-h-e: leaving the client with the impression that with this darker story you’ve just made a prediction. It’s not a prediction, it’s a warning! Make sure that point is as clear as a bell before you launch into the tale. After you’ve carefully set the tone that way, here one path such a story might take:

Everything was always so perfect with her lover Rowan that Avery never wanted to ruin things by polluting their pure spiritual connection with any negativity. Why bother with petty, ego-driven expressions of need or discomfort? They’d made a silent soul-contract to keep that kind of poison out of their relationship. They’d vowed to live on the higher ground for the rest of eternity. Three months later, Rowan was in love with someone else. Meanwhile Avery was looking for a very positive, supportive psychotherapist with a truly spiritual orientation – ideally someone with a Pisces Moon who would accentuate the positive side of things. 

Tell that second tale and there’s a good chance that your client will chortle a bit when you get to those last words. Avery apparently hadn’t learned the lesson that the relationship with Rowan offered: even with Venus in Pisces, you’ve got to do the Pluto-work that sustains genuine intimacy.

With these words, what you have done as an astrological counselor however is quite deft – “Avery” is, of course, the doppelganger of your client’s own shadow-side. You’ve said what needs to be said in terms of cautionary counsel, but you’ve skillfully side-stepped any direct assault on your client’s pride, dignity, and related defense mechanisms. He or she is far more likely to get the message when it’s aimed at a safer, less triggering target. That’s why you created “Avery” in the first place.

THE LAST WORD

Our five steps are basic astrological theory. All the creativity in the world won’t make you a competent astrologer if you lack that academic knowledge. In our quest for the right story, we always start there. By breaking our understanding down into this simple template and using it as your foundation, you can get your story launched on the correct foot. 

As you find your own way in our craft, a good practice is to use this template in order to formally lay out any configuration that you are analyzing. Do it step by step. Jot down notes if that helps, just as I did above under the “Roll the Dice” heading. Do all that and you’ll have a solid foundation under you as you move toward actually creating a story.

• Digest Steps One, Two, and Three and turn them into a simple, human situation that shines a light on the evolutionary intention of that planet, sign, and house combination.

• Digest Steps Four and Five to help you create the balancing, “tale of the dark side.”

Above all, remember Maya Angelou’s wise words: “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” Practice, practice, practice! And take heart from Sylvia Plath: “The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” Sylvia Plath’s words bring us right back to the 5th house: in the end, we’ve all got to trust our inner children. Give them the coloring book, but let them choose the crayons. Then stand back. 

Astrology is profoundly serious work and astrology is fun too. There’s no opposition or paradox there. The two ideas are interdependent, and every successful counseling astrologer embodies both of them.