morning feels like an earthquake is rumbling just below the floorboards as they get out of bed. Maybe you can be the strong shoulder they need to rely on; the practical, caring person they can both literally or metaphorically lean on. Your rock-solid strength, reliability and common sense can provide a secure lynchpin to help stabilize the chaos. Just don’t wait to be invited. This is a lifetime for putting yourself out there and offering your support. Win/win outcomes can happen for everyone involved: for you, because you get to experience your own strength and recognize that you have everything it takes to provide your own safety and security; for others, because of the help you can give them in trying times. And don’t let yourself get distracted by suggestions move at anything but your own pace.

 

A look back to your Seventh House South Node in the sign of Scorpio reminds us that you’ve come into this lifetime with a karmic history of passion and drama and intensity in the partnership arena. This can get easily stirred in this lifetime if you’re not on the alert. If it does, and you succumb to the intoxicating high of living on some kind of intense, emotional, larger-than-life relationship roller coaster, the effect can be disruptive and unsettling, and distract you from this lifetime’s business.

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Look for the signals. The Universe will let you know if you’re stalled on the journey North, most likely using a Seventh House partner-type person as the messenger. If you find yourself in chaotic relationships involving “drama queens” of either gender, it’s probably time to step back and take a personal inventory. Are they trying to tell you something about yourself?

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Good job!

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HOUSE 2: Values 

A double “Welcome Home” to you, dear voyager. Taurus, the earthiest of the earth signs, is very much at home in its own part of the chart, so the message and call of your North Node is particularly loud and clear: “Follow your bliss.” You’ll have to flesh it out in the detail, but bliss for you is especially likely to come in the form of things that you can buy. Possessions and money in the bank help you feel safe and secure, though it must be said that making time and place in your life for the calming, grounding influence of indulging your senses is also likely to contend for room near the top of your priority list. So is spending time outdoors, working the earth or building something. Go ahead, put up a gazebo in the garden; develop a line of natural herbal-based cosmetics; make that massage a weekly event. As long as you’re doing it yourself, giving yourself what you need helps you learn just how safe and secure you can be, which is exactly what the Second House North Node assignment is all about.

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The North Node journey is always a challenge, and for you with the doubled-up opportunity, the challenge side of the coin is double-thick as well. To begin with, once you make some real progress and discover how good you’re starting to feel, it might be a short step to getting stuck in the pleasurable quicksand of self-indulgent gratification. When is enough, enough? Just how much money in the bank will make you feel secure? Could you be moving into Midas territory? Those massages feel great, but is the weekly tab making you a little late on the credit card payments? With this nodal placement, it’s extremely important to pay attention to the “enough is enough” question.

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The next big challenge takes us to your Eighth House South Node in Scorpio. It tells us that in the karmic past you’ve had doubled-up opportunities to learn about how sharing deeply with another materially, emotionally, and/or sexually can be a great source of security. This history can help you with the “enough is enough” question by reminding you that once you feel secure by taking care of yourself, it’s okay to share some of the wealth with another. But the passion and drama of South Node relationships can be particularly magnetic, causing you to fall back into past life patterns of looking to someone else to provide your security and safety, which in this lifetime would put you 180° off-course. If that happens, the price would be very high, billed in the coin of the security that comes out of confidence in your ability to take care of your own self.

Stay the course. Follow your bliss.

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HOUSE 3: The Mind​

The Taurus energy you’re learning about in this lifetime resonates strongly to the old saying “What you see is what you get.” Actually, let’s tweak that phrase a little to read “What you see – and touch – and can use – is what you want to get.” That really nails down the kind of information that Taurus is best at accumulating and sharing. Not for you lots of high-fallutin’ theoretical pie-in-the-sky mumbo jumbo. The world needs that kind of thinking, but it’s someone else’s department. It also needs your kind of thinking: “how to” ideas; practical ideas; concrete, realistic and reliable ideas; useful ideas.

 

Here’s one Taurus North Node in the Third House example. Let’s say you spent your professional life as a project manager for a construction company that specializes in residential building. Although you never went to college, by the time you retired you acquired invaluable hands-on knowledge about what can go right and what can go wrong that rivals any top-notch architect’s grasp of the situation. Six months of vacations, fixing up the house, and building the long-awaited gazebo in the back yard, and retirement is starting to feel like a big fat ton of idle-time bricks on your back. So you join up with the local volunteer house-building initiative and, without even thinking about it, find just the audience that can benefit from what took you thirty-five years to learn. Who knows? You might even pick up a few pointers yourself!

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With your Ninth House South Node in the sign of Scorpio, you’ve spent lifetimes grappling with deep philosophical questions, diving into the core of life’s meaning, intently focused on what lay below the surface of existence. It was hard to come up out of those waters long enough to bring what you found to light and have it have any useful application in the “real” world. If you’re not careful, the pull of that karmic past can be strong enough to and keep you swimming in those dark circles in this lifetime, when what you can see and touch and experience and use is the real order of business.

What you see is what you get. And give.

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HOUSE 4: Home​

Come right on in – you’re going to like it here, I promise. There’s nothing that the solid, earthy Taurus energy you’re learning about likes better than to put down deep strong roots, and that’s just what this North Node assignment is all about. In this lifetime, you’re asked to discover how strong and solid and grounded you are by connecting to the love and support of family and clan.

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It wouldn’t be surprising if, in order to learn about this, you were asked to support a family member through difficult times in their own lives, times when every morning feels like an earthquake is rumbling just below the floorboards as they get out of bed. Maybe you can be the strong shoulder they rely on, the practical, caring person they can both literally and metaphorically lean on for as long as they need to. Or maybe the situation will be reversed. Let’s say you lose your job and your first child is due in two months. You might have an opportunity to learn that you can return with your spouse to your old room on the third floor of the house you grew up in and not be made to feel a failure as you regroup. Then, four months later, when you leave with a babe in arms, heading for an exciting new position three states away, it’s with the knowledge that there’s always a place to come home to, even if you never have to literally do it again.

 

As you start to make progress toward your North Node, don’t be surprised if you begin to yearn for a house with a big backyard, or a stake in a shared urban garden. Taurus is the earthiest of earth signs, and in this North Node in the Fourth House lifetime, the barometer of forward motion can be a desire to work the soil. Flowers appeal to the Taurus sense of beauty; vegetables to the nurturance of home. You can’t lose either way: Plant both!

This is a North Node assignment, however, and that means challenge is part of the deal. Your Tenth House South Node in Scorpio reminds us that you’ve come into this lifetime with a karmic history of drama and intensity out in the world that probably played out in some public way. Falling back to that excitement can become an addictive “high,” and bringing that disruptive, larger-than-life energy home in this lifetime can mean that you’ll never find your way to the security you came to find.

 

The other challenge is dead opposite: that once you get in touch with the strong qualities of your Taurus energy, its caution and love of what’s known could cause you to lock the door and throw the key away, and never cross over the family threshold out into your own life. Look around. If everybody seems content to be sitting in the real or metaphorical equivalent of the well-worn recliner, with the TV remote control welded into their fists, it’s probably a message from the Universal Life Coach. What are those media-stunned people trying to tell you about yourself?

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Get the shovel out of the shed: It’s time to cultivate the garden.

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HOUSE 5: Creativity​

Find a flower, set your gaze on it, close your eyes, and breathe deeply. Grab the hand of your lover, squeeze tightly, then rub your thumb over the back of that hand. Sit under a tree and rock a baby to sleep in your arms. Feels good, doesn’t it? Those are the kinds of feelings you’re going for in this lifetime, feelings that can stir something in you that you want to bring forth and express. For the Taurus energy you’re learning about, whatever that expression may be, you’re going to want to be able to see it and touch it and feel it in a very tangible way, like planting a fragrant and colorful garden, or building a beautiful bench for the garden you already have, or taking that lover to a faraway spa for a weekend of sensuous pleasure.

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It’s starting to sound like you’ve hit the karmic jackpot, and in some ways you probably have. Of course, once you get into the groove, you’ll probably have to go back and read the “Don’t go overboard” section in Chapter 20 (The House of Creativity) of Perfect Together and commit it to memory, because that solid Taurus nature will find it hard not to linger too long in whatever pleasurable world it finds itself in.

Then there’s the matter of your Scorpio South Node, back there in the Eleventh House. It speaks of a karmic history of super-intense involvement in deeply-bonded group environments. In the extreme, we might even be talking of cultish or sectarian situations where strict compliance to the group’s culture and values was enforced, and deviation from the norm came at the expense of dramatic and wounding expulsion. The pull of that South Node experience can be unconscious and powerful, making it hard, if not impossible, to step in the direction of celebrating and expressing who and what you are as an individual in this lifetime. This is why it’s simply excellent that the Taurus energy you’re learning about is so strong itself.

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Smell the roses. Follow the scent North.

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HOUSE 6: Service​

Welcome! You’ve knocked at the door of one of the earthiest houses in the astrological neighborhood and the solid, practical Taurus energy you’re learning about is going to feel right at home in very short order. This is a lifetime of helping others move forward in their own lives by sharing your skills and competence, and Taurus likes nothing better than to deliver tangible, common-sense results in the observable world of the here and now. The Sixth House asks you to do just that: too help someone get a better report card; to repair an appliance or fix a flat tire; to help finish off the attic as a nursery for an imminent blessed event.

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Now this is a North Node assignment and you know that means it comes fully equipped with genuine challenge. For starters, let’s glance back to your powerful Scorpio South Node in the Twelfth House. There’s no question that the legacy of Scorpio’s deep transformative power can be invaluable in the effort to help others live better lives, but that legacy comes with significant price tags attached. Scorpio thrives on intensity and life-or-death crisis management and could easily disrupt this lifetime’s environment with situations that not only distract you from the work at hand, but profoundly rattle the safety and calm that Taurus yearns for and needs in order to thrive and produce. And Scorpio’s privacy is a natural fit with the unconscious Twelfth House, which more than doubles up the magnetism that could pull you back to the South Node without you even beginning to realize what’s going on. Rattled by disruption and chaos, even Taurus’ strength could be tested by the challenge.

 

This takes us to another issue. The more you get in touch with Taurus energy, the harder it may become to get yourself going on the assignment. That which is known is what feels safe, and safety and security are prime motivators for the gentle bull, who’s most comfortable grazing in the pasture amid the wildflowers. Instead of calling on that Scorpio South Node to detonate a neutron bomb for motivation, try setting up routines for your day. These Sixth House processes can get you started, and their comforting regularity can be a place from which you can safely move forward.

 

A new day is dawning. Time to put the coffee on and get going.

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HOUSE 7: Partnership​

Welcome to a lifetime of learning about your own strengths and security by participating in the experience of true partnership; to the joys of sharing and mutual support; to the challenge of taking care of yourself and taking care of another. It wouldn’t be surprising if, in order to learn all this, you were asked to step to the plate and support that all-important partner in a journey through difficult times in their own life, times when it feels like an earthquake is rumbling just below the floorboards as they get out of bed. Maybe you can be the strong shoulder they rely on, the practical, caring person they literally and metaphorically lean on as long as they need to. Or maybe the situation will be reversed: shaky times for you, and the discovery that although you can get through them with your own strong reserves, the support of a partner eases the way. And if the partnership is a personal one, you get to share all kinds of earthly pleasures: touchy-feely affection and sensuality; just the right music in the air as you light the candles on the dinner table set outdoors under a harvest moon; hand-holding walks at the ocean. Welcome to discovering that in this lifetime, you can be strong and still not have to go it alone.

 

There’s no question that the heat and passion of the Scorpio energy that you integrated into your First House South Node personality in the karmic past can add juice and excitement to a relationship. In the right circumstances this can be a very good thing, and high that comes from it all can be exciting and intoxicating. But it reminds us that you’ve come into this lifetime with a history of drama and intensity that can be disruptive, unsettling, and isolating. If you don’t manage and contain it, it can really rock the relationship boat you’re supposed to be sailing on. If you start getting feedback, especially partnership-type-feedback, that you’ve been something of a “drama queen” lately, it’s likely to be a message from the Universal Life Coach that you’ve veered off the path on your journey North and that it’s time to regroup.

 

Don’t forget to pick up some nice bath oil or that soft silk shirt you’ve had your eye on. Either one could soothe and smooth the trip North.

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HOUSE 8: Transformation​

Welcome to the challenge of learning how you have everything you need always within you to make you feel safe and secure, and then leaving what feels safe and secure to venture into the mysterious unknown to claim even more power. Welcome to the complexity of pulling this off in an arena where taking those hard-won resources and sharing them with another is fundamental to the karmic assignment. Welcome, in other words, to the paradoxical, exciting and phenomenally rewarding terrain of the karmic “switcheroo,” the situation where the themes of this lifetime’s assignment bear a striking resemblance to the experiences of the karmic past.

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Taurus, the sign of your North Node, is naturally associated with themes of security, safety, and calm, and with the uncomplicated, earthly pleasures of the physical world. But that North Node is in the deep, turbulent waters of the Eighth House, which vibrates instead with Scorpio’s intensity and passion. And vice versa: your intense and powerful Scorpio South Node is staked in the soothing earthiness of the Second House where calm, safety, and security are the goals of the day. In this lifetime, it’s going to be hard to know if you’ve moving forward to the North Node or back to the South. In fact, there could even be times when you literally won’t know whether to spend the day at a full-service spa or at a psychodrama intensive.

 

This is certainly a challenging assignment, but it need not be daunting because you have everything it takes to reach the goal. The Scorpio South Node part of you knows about the courage of going deep and claiming your power, and you can call on that legacy as you take on thislifetime’s assignment. In the do-it-yourself Second House past you had to go it alone and learned how to be self-sufficient, but in this lifetime you get to have company, at least for part of the journey. Yes, you will have to reach out and trust someone, with all the risks that that involves at every level, but companionship is a priceless asset, and if the partnership is a personal one, you will have the opportunity to combine Taurus’ sensuality and affection with Scorpio’s legacy of passion and heat. However, the courage and power of your Scorpio South Node also brings privacy, susceptibility to jealousy and possessiveness, and to using its power to control. These are challenging qualities when it comes to building relationship. And the Second House’s lessons of security and safety can come wrapped in the cloak of the “Midas Touch” preoccupation with materialism, which can be so appealing to the Taurus energy you’re learning about in this lifetime.

 

Go easy on yourself: you’re learning a complicated lesson. Just keep the most positive qualities of your North Node sign and house in the forefront of your consciousness as much as you can. When you have the reversed sign and house situation, it’s often an indication that you’re working on an issue that takes more than a single lifetime to master.

 

Remember the phoenix.

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HOUSE 9: Expanding Horizons

You know how good it feels when you get up in the morning and take a long, slow stretch? How your arms feel longer – your back stronger – how everything inside and outside just loosens up? Well, that’s just what this assignment is asking you to do. You see, the Taurus energy you’re learning about is solid and earthy and practical. It likes goals to be tangible, something that can be touched and felt. Taurus seeks security, and once it has it, doesn’t want to let it go. But you’ve knocked here at the door of the Ninth House, and that means you’re ready for that big stretch. This piece of astrological real estate is all about adventure, expansion, and the quest for meaning, but the more you get in touch with Taurusenergy the more you might be tempted to concretize your beliefs and stay put. It can become a huge, paradoxical challenge to keep yourself open to new information and experience that can broaden your outlook, and not become stuck in the safety and security of conservative, even dogmatic, views and beliefs.

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Your Scorpio South Node in the Third House brings the legacy of a probing nature and the knowledge of how to support this lifetime’s evolving vision and philosophy with information that you learned to gather and share in the karmic past. But we look back to that South Node through a negative lens and see challenge. It is rumbling with Scorpio intensity that stirs buried memories of unsettling, even traumatic, experiences that could have occurred in the context of learning, or sharing what you learned and knew. All this can threaten upheaval in this lifetime, and make you cling only tighter to the safety of a well-defined, even rigid world view. You can use the Scorpio power you acquired in the past to help keep you moving forward in a Northerly direction now.

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Just remember how good that early morning stretch feels.

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HOUSE 10: Authority​

Welcome to using the strong, solid Taurus energy you’re learning about to build a public identity; to putting yourself where a lot of people who don’t really know you personally can see what you can do and recognize your success. One example: You’re brought in to take charge of a corporate scandal where fraud and deceit have rocked the foundations of a company’s reputation and threaten its demise. Taurus’ rock-solid strength, reliability, and common sense could provide a secure lynchpin to stabilize the chaos and steady the public’s response. The sign of Taurus is also associated with aesthetics, so the situation could involve an element of beauty or earthiness – landscape designer to the stars is one possibility, prominent environmental activist another.

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Now this is a North Node assignment and that means that challenge is simply part of the deal. For starters, the issue of “too much of a good thing” looms large. Taurus likes the good life in all kinds of ways, and Tenth House success is likely to bring you lots of it, so if you’re not careful, the external, material trappings of success could become all too important. The four bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath colonial on an acre of land that was just right for your 4-member family suddenly pales in comparison to the MacMansion in the prestigious exurb only twenty additional commuting miles away. And to make that commute, you’re entitled to the comforts of the trade-up to a $75 K-plus foreign road machine, aren’t you? How hard will you have to work for the new perks? And at what cost to your personal life? These kinds of questions will become increasingly important and increasing complex as you move forward.

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The next challenge takes us to your Fourth House South Node in the sign of Scorpio. It reminds us that you’ve come into this lifetime with a karmic history of drama and intensity on the home front, a history that can make any domestic crisis an opportunity for a South Node back-slide. If unending dramas of your gifted daughter’s failing grades, or your son’s third speeding ticket in 18 months – or worse – greet you as you cross the threshold at the end of the day, it may well be a message from the Universal Life Coach that it’s time to bring the situation under control, regroup and reorient yourself in a Northerly direction.

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Get that ladder out of the garage. You’re climbing to the top!

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HOUSE 11: Goals & Groups

Welcome! We can sure use some of that solid, reliable, earthy Taurus energy you’re learning about to help us move toward the accomplishment of something real. You see, one of the pitfalls of the Eleventh House terrain is that sometimes the vision of what we’re trying to pull off is so lofty and large-scaled that it may not even be attainable. But you’re just the person who can give those kinds of ideas rock-solid form. Of course Taurus likes to move at its own slow pace and the group might want to move at a higher MPH than you’d be comfortable with, but that’s part of the give and take from both sides, so we should be able to work it out. The bottom line is that you can make a great contribution by helping us all rally toward a goal that is meaningful and attainable, so come right on in.

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But here’s the thing. The magnetic Scorpio energy coming at you from that Fifth House South Node can be a huge challenge. To begin with, we have the sign of passionate bonding in the piece of astrological real estate having to do with love affairs – how compelling is that? And Scorpio’s taste for drama and upheaval can really heat up the energy of change and disruption that is a natural part of the Eleventh House environment to begin with. The resulting chaos, intensity, and unrest could make it even harder to stay focused on this lifetime’s assignment. With magnetic Scorpio energy infusing the unconscious South Node, you could easily stay lashed to that “been there, done that” place for a lifetime if you’re not careful.

 

The gentle bull knows how to pay attention and stand its ground. Face yourself in the Northerly direction and stand your ground.

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HOUSE 12: Spirit

Well, you’ve knocked on the door to a place that I think you’re going to like quite a bit. The Taurus energy you’re learning about is most happy when it’s safe, secure, and comfortable, and connecting with Spirit in the soothing, deep waters of the Twelfth House can bring you all of that, so step on in and let’s get going.

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One of the ways you can start to really resonate with Twelfth House energies is to shut the door behind you once you cross the threshold. The comforts of solitude and quiet are just the environment where you can pursue the kinds of earthy activities that you enjoy and let the voice of Spirit be heard. Maybe you’d like to mold a statue out of clay; or trim up the garden; or paint a picture. Whatever it is, do it alone. Get lost in the pursuit, and Spirit and intuition will take it from there.

 

But there’s lots of noise coming at you from the Sixth House. In fact, the decibel level can amp up to ear-splitting proportions if you give it a chance. The Scorpio energy in the South Node speaks to a karmic history of acquiring great power to make positive transformations in the lives of others and to bring about real healing at all kinds of levels. But Scorpio thrives on pressure and chaos and crisis, and we can surmise that some of that may have become an end in itself. It’s no surprise that your biggest challenge with this assignment might be that you could get totally caught up in Sixth House traumas and dramas and find yourself lashed to the “been there done that” node before you even realized what has happened.

 

Is that door closed behind you? Good!

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