12th House Profection and What I’ve Learned So Far

Late last night I was flipping through one of my journals I used to carry around with me in the beginning of last year. I was originally looking for a recipe I had written down and intermixed between my random daily ramblings to myself, grocery lists, and quotes from books I had documented as keepsakes, I found a whole page where I wrote down what I needed to mentally prepare myself for before entering into my 12th House Profection year. I started my 12th House year in late July 2022 and am now currently just past the halfway point so I figured what better time than now to write down some of my thoughts and experiences of it so far while I’m still very much in the thick of it.

For those that are not familiar, the 12th House tends to be described in a very scary and almost fear-mongering way sometimes within the astrology community. It’s the house of isolation, imprisonment, our subconscious, the shadow of ourselves, our traumas, and the things that are hidden from us. In my journal I have written down “prepare to be lonely as fuck!!” underlined twice for emphasis. Looking back I can see how I sort of fell into that doom-and-gloom aspect of the 12th House that so many astrologers love to fall back on. Knowing what I know now, I feel as if I did myself a grave disservice entering into it with this kind of mindset and vague wariness.

One of the major lessons I’ve learned so far in the last 8 months is that there is a critical difference between being “lonely” and “in isolation”. The 12th House is here to remind us all that we can never truly escape ourselves no matter how hard we try. It shines a bright and incredibly harsh light onto the things we try to mentally avoid and the sides of ourselves we like to make excuses for. The only way to truly come to terms with all the edges and fractured points of who we are deep down is by isolating ourselves and doing the brutal task of self-evaluation and self-love. I will not lie — these last few months have been possibly the most time I have ever spent in complete solitude and have had my world shrunken down to essentially the four walls of my home. I haven’t traveled, my husband is usually gone for days or weeks at a time due to his career, and I can’t remember the last time I have seen any of my best friends face-to-face. Despite all of this, I have never truly felt like I was lonely or as if I needed to feel sorry for myself. As Picasso once said, “without great solitude, no serious work is possible” and I took this to heart and made it a point to not allow my solitude to be seen as some kind of personal defeat but rather an opportunity that was not to be taken for granted. So instead of trying to be fearful of it, I used my knowledge of astrology and came to a turning point sometime in early September where I decided to just embrace it and to actively treat this as the life lesson I knew the universe was telling me I needed to learn from.

So far everything I had written down in my journal seems to be going exactly how I interpreted it and the biggest lesson I have had to learn was definitely the one surrounding my career. For me personally, this 12H Profection year is being ruled by the planet Saturn which is natally in my 10th house of career and reputation. I have a “night chart” as well so Saturn is my Malefic planet so I knew I was in for some kind of significant reality check. The 12th House tends to deal a lot with life-long health issues as well which is another aspect I had written down. “Be prepared for either a major health issue or life-long ordeal to crop up and affect your career,” is exactly what I wrote to myself and in October of 2022 I essentially had to stop working completely overnight due to several health issues revolving around a flare-up with my POTS condition. As of today, I have yet to return to work.

Since then I have been mentally grappling with the possibility of changing careers which I never thought I would ever have to do. Being a flight attendant has been my dream ever since I can remember and I worked so hard to get to where I am right now with a company I knew could offer me the flexibility and dependability I knew I would need until I could retire. Before this year, I never thought I would have to be making such an impossible decision but the 12th House has shown me otherwise. It has shown me that no matter how much work and determination I put forth towards something, that doesn’t mean it will last forever. It has shown me that nothing is as important and vital than taking care of one’s self and your own physical and mental health. It has not been uncommon for me to go days at a time without seeing a single person in the last several months, only having my 10 year old cat as company. It was very easy for me at times to allow my mind to go numb and to feel claustrophobic and pinned down underneath the weight of all the uncertainty I was experiencing but the 12th House doesn’t tend to give us the luxury of just giving up and accepting our fate. It represents dreams, our intuitions, and knowing how to let go of the things that no longer serve you.

With my natal Sun and Venus in the 5th House of Cancer and my Moon in the 4th House of Gemini, I have taken this opportunity to focus on the hobbies that bring me the most joy within my home while still trying to be open about my emotions rather than keeping it all trapped inside. I have tried to rediscover what defines who I am outside of what I do for a living or the material possessions I own and instead nurture and care for the sides of myself I have always tried to avoid or felt weren’t important enough to devote energy to. A lot of it has been dedicated towards healing — everything from current health issues to even past traumas I packed away in neat little boxes in the back of my subconscious hoping to avoid indefinitely. There are good days with lots of progress and then there are those that are more difficult and so emotionally taxing it takes me days to recover. It has not been a smooth or comfortable journey so far at all but I also know it never was meant to be in the first place. My 12th House year was never meant to be about exuberance or having any sense of ease. It is meant to be about the importance of sitting with myself and all the mess that comes along with it and picking apart the knots I have within me that have been wound too tightly for too long. It has shown me where my true passions hide and the endurance needed when you occupy a body that is slightly broken and consistently unreliable. It has shown me that with every ending there is a new and better beginning — even if that new beginning isn’t fully realized just yet.

I still have about four months left before I enter into my 1st House Profection year — the year of the self, our purpose, and how we fully express the inner core of our being. But as I have learned so far, the 12th House is most likely not done with me yet and that each day will be uncertain and impossible to predict. I do have more learning to do, more things to unpack within myself that will be arduous and painful but I trust that as I enter into the final stretches of spring into the heavy humidity and warmth of summer right before my next birthday that I will be able to look back on my 12th House year knowing I experienced a year that was both self-defining and absolutely vital.

One day you will look back on this season

and know that you are truly blessed,

and not because things were perfect

but because you found perfect grace

in the worst of it. — Morgan Harper Nichols