All About The Sun
The Sun, in astrology, is as vital to our soul in our chart as it is vital to our physical life here on earth. The Sun, in astrology, is our center of gravity, what everything else in our chart swirls around. We always feel and act out our Sun, it is the King to which all other planets are ruled under. When we feed our moon, we feel happy. When we feed our Venus, we feel loved and calm. When we feed our Sun, we simply feel sane, whole, ourselves. The Sun is our foundation. It represents who we are and how we build a sense of identity. It is our 'ego' in the sense that we have sense of who we are and who we're not, that we have a well defined and boundaried "container for our soul" as a friend of mine once phrased it.
The sign, house, and aspects to the Sun are therefore of primary importance, as they can tell us where and of what nature our 'center of gravity' is. What activities we should undertake and attitudes we must express to feel vitalized and alive. The average person has at least heard what their 'sign' is, even if they don't know what that means. The Sun sign has long been considered the most important, and that is the most popular cultural carryover from astrology. That is not to say that it is complete on its own, our whole chart must be considered to get a real picture of us. Much is left out when we only rely on the information about the Sun to examine ourselves, but it is of prime importance.
Without the sun's light, we die. If we try to cover up our Sun, shove it in a corner, reject its needs and its gifts (and flaws), we die. Our light starts to dim and go out. Our vitality is sucked away. We don't shine and we don't seem to be seen by others, or even ourselves. We start to go insane, feeling not ourselves. That is how vital the Sun is.
We have a delicate balance with the Sun on this planet. It is just close enough and just far enough away that it allows life without burning it up. Imagine if the Sun were to get too big for our planet, it could destroy us. If it becomes too big, it burns us. That is what can happen when the Sun in our chart gets too big for our life. The Sun is important, but it is not all. When we are giving our Sun a little too much power in our lives, we start to assume too much about our importance. We can start to assume that everything revolves around us, and when we start acting as such, the King starts to get tyrannical with others, trying to rule lands that are not his.
Here's a small and imperfect Sun 'cookbook'. Find your Sun sign and house for a snippet about your natal chart. If you don't know where your Sun is, you can create a free chart here and find out! Remember, anything taken out of context of the entire blend of your natal chart is like an ingredient in a dish without the other ingredients to add nuance and complexity. Digest these ingredients with a grain of salt, so to speak!
Sun in Aries
Your center of gravity is based on strength and courage. Your light is brighter when you take risks that develop courage in you, situations that encourage you to get in touch with your own power and that require you to use it. In some ways, you are born to test yourself. In the face of fear, you must be bold. Your light dims when you avoid the struggle or the conflict out of fear. Even if you are a person who doesn’t enjoy conflict, there is somethingin you that comes alive when you don’t run from it. You burn yourself and others, though, when you go looking for a fight, something to prove which can lead to running people over whose only crime was to be in the wrong place at the right time.
Sun in Taurus
Your center of gravity is based at the pit of your stomach., where you carry the peace of silence. It is in your nature to do things at a measured pace, not to fight the current or to rush it or make things more complicated than they need to be. Your light is brighter when you are meeting the simple needs in life, indulging your senses in the smell of the air or the touch of an animal. Your light dims by constant harried activity or over complex situations. You burn yourself and others, though, when you become so grounded that you find you have grown roots and cannot move or change at all. Comfort can quickly turn to complacency and then to rigidity, unable to change.
Sun in Gemini
Your center of gravity is always moving! At least, the one thing that never changes for you is that life must be an ongoing experience. Your light is brighter when you are in a state of discovery, when you are open to all possibilities. Your light dims when you are in a situation that inspires boredom or stagnancy in you, then you become restless and dissatisfied. You burn yourself and others, though, when you get too caught up in proving your point that you twist any fact to your own pleasure. You can prove anything with facts and sometimes that is a disadvantage, talking yourself in circles and, if not careful, brow beating others with your endless barrage of facts, drawing them into a debate that they might not enjoy as much as you do. Another possibility is burn out. Living two lifetimes is exhausting; you are actually only one person. When you burn out, you become too scattered and chaotic, even for yourself.
Sun in Cancer
Your center of gravity is your heart. You live in a deep world of imagination and feeling, and for you to feel sane, you need to have enough privacy and safety to go inside that realm often. Your heart is big and all who need love and care are welcome in it. Your light is brighter when you are with those you love and trust, preferably in your own home or some kind of home base that feels secure to you. Your light dims when you have no place to call your own, inside or outside of you, no ability to have a moment to yourself or you feel unsafe. You burn yourself and others, though, when you love and care for others more than you open yourself up to that love and care in return. Then you find yourself exhausted, resentful and lonely, the great mother whose children don’t know her.
Sun in Leo
Your center of gravity is a relaxed and spontaneous soul. Your light is brighter when you express yourself in an uninhibited way, when you feel free to relax into life and let the moment carry you wherever it will. Live as freely as a child does, and learn how to do that even with the cares and concerns of an adult. Your light dims when you don’t allow yourself to be seen or heard for fear of rejection. You burn yourself and others, though, when your pride gets out of control, keeping others from seeing who you really are. Then your fears of rejection actually come to pass, in your attempt to avoid rejection in the first place.
Sun in Virgo
Your center of gravity is based on the assumption that one must always strive to be better than they are now. Your light is brighter when you feel you are of use to someone, that you serve some purpose, aid someone in some way. You are someone who wants to perfect yourself through skill and hard work. Your light dims when your natural humility goes too far, chastising yourself for not being more than human. You burn yourself and others, though, when you allow that reproachful voice inside your head start coming out through your mouth, criticizing others as ruthlessly as you do yourself. When nothing and no one can please you, you need to find out what’s really eating you.
Sun in Libra
Your center of gravity is based on achieving balance. While your opposite sign, Aries, may thrive on conflict, you thrive on interpersonal harmony. You achieve that harmony best through understanding your opponent’s point of view and creating a bridge of understanding. To you it is about coming together, not polarizing or fighting against. Your light is brighter when you feel at peace in your world, with others and within yourself, and perhaps when you are able to help others come to peaceful terms as well. Your light dims when there is too much chaos or conflict in your world. You burn yourself and others, though, when you allow that tension between two sides to freeze you in indecision or avoidance. The tension of conflict is not usually resolved by its avoidance, but by it’s resolution. Striving for the outer appearance of harmony while not accomplishing the true inner harmony will not save you while the true tension continues to build and take you over.
Sun in Scorpio
Your center of gravity is very deep. You are a truth seeker, someone who is very aware of the undercurrents of the ‘lie’ of daily life — jobs, marriage, friends, parties, to do list. Most people ignore those realities, keeping them in their unconscious, but you are committed to knowing yourself, even when you discover painful or frightening information. Your light is brighter when you allow yourself to feel your way through life, even when it carries you down into the dark. Your light dims when you suppress your feelings, pretending you don’t see what you see. You burn yourself and others, though, when the dark that you see becomes disproportional. It can come as backlash from suppressing or by swimming in the dark too much . Either way, the side effect is collapsing into morose moodiness, feeling a pointlessness to life, as if nothing matters.
Sun in Sagittarius
Your center of gravity is always expanding. For you, life is one long quest, one long adventure, at least, your light is brighter when you look at it that way. There is a gypsy philosopher in you that needs to be fed by new experiences and an ever changing world view. You are a person who needs a great deal of freedom and independence, always free to move, to learn, free to go on your next adventure whenever you find it calling to you. Sagittarians are known to love travel as this is one of the grandest adventures, but anything that expands your mind through experience qualifies as fulfilling. Ever the philosopher, you seek meaning in your experiences, gathering pieces of lives and cultures as you put together your ideas of life. Your light dims when you feel restrained, in mind and/or body. You burn yourself and others, though, when your philosophybecomes an institution, your principles are written in stone, and you become ‘certain’ about right and wrong. This keeps you, and those you try to convert, prisoners.
Sun in Capricorn
Your center of gravity is integrity. Many people think of honesty when they think of integrity, someone who is an ‘upstanding citizen.’ This is accurate, but incomplete. The other meanings of integrity, besides incorruptibility, are soundness, completeness, the state of being unimpaired and undivided. Not only does your light shine more brightly when you are solid in purpose, but when you, yourself, are whole, when your actions reflect your intentions. You thrive on being self-sufficient, and find reward in times of solitude. This is not to say that you don’t love and are not loved in return, only to say that you find richness when you are not dependent on another, but only on yourself. Your light dims when situations require you to act in an abrupt or impractical manner — brashness and impulsivity don’t serve you as well as for some. You burn yourself and others, though, when you allow your ability to control yourself completely take over and squeeze your heart. Your actions are fit for you to control, but they must reflect who you are, your intentions, and your heart. The heart is not to be controlled in the same manner.
Sun in Aquarius
Your center of gravity is also, truth, but you are a truth seeker different from Scorpio. While Scorpio seeks to see underneath everything and everyone, you are only interested in looking one person honestly in the face: you. You need to find what your truth is, not what your parents tell you, or church, or society. Society is based on many ‘accepted’ truths, telling us what is appropriate and what formulas work. For you, they are useless as a measure of what you need and who you are. Your light is brighter when you walk on your own path and listen to that part of you that knows that you are going the right way. Your light dims when you succumb to fitting in or following rules that don’t work for you. The point is not anarchy, but individuality. Individuality isn’t always convenient or harmonious with the group, and sometimes rebelling is necessary, but it’s a side effect, not the end point. You burn yourself and others, though, when you forget that, stubbornly choosing the opposite of what others choose, not out of meaning, but of spite. Then you may find your aloofness leads to playing the role of the outcast a little too well.
Sun in Pisces
Your center of gravity is very delicate, as it is connected deeply to every other living thing on this planet. Your spirit’s boundaries are the most open and fluid and permeable of any sign. Many people would call this empathy and/or intuition, which is just the product of being able to drop these boundaries and feel another person or people. You are aware of the human family and how we are all connected, possibly too well. Seeing the ‘supernatural’ may not be as uncommon for you as it is for some. Your light is brighter when you feel safe to acknowledge the magic that truly is all around us, not just in our minds, but a kind of fairy glamour that permeates the air when others choose to see and believe as well. But not all choose to see this, and you are very susceptible to the moods of others, bringing you down or up in rhythm with them. You have to be very careful about the people and places you expose yourself to, as your spirit is easily overwhelmed. Your light dims when you are surrounded with banality and cruelty. You burn yourself and others, though, when you do not ground your sensitivity in something solid occasionally. If you do not, it leads to oversensitivity and exaggerating the motives of others. If you allow yourself to be overwhelmed by this too much, you may feel the temptation to lay your will down in front of what is overwhelming you and give yourself up in martyrdom, which very often helps no one.
Sun in 1st house
A primary focus in your life is self-actualization. What do you want? Who are you? It’s imperative for you to discover who you are, which can be a challenge in a world that just wants to know what you can do for it. You are going to need to appear selfish sometimes in order to find that out. It’s about applying your will to your life, making discovery of yourself the project. When you do this in a way that works for you, you feel powerful in your life, that you have a sense of direction and clarity, even if you don’t know what the end goal is. When you are going about it in a way that doesn’t work for you, you may feel the impulse to control and direct others to detract from the feeling that you can’t control and direct your own life.
Sun in 2nd house
A central area of focus in your life are questions of worth and value. What do you value? What do you find important? What are you worth? Taking risks on yourself is your job, trusting that you are most valuable asset to surviving this world and getting strong. Prove yourself to you, let your insecurity drive you forth to prove you can do it and dispel those thoughts. Then you will slowly be unable to tell yourself that you can’t do it or that you won’t survive it, because you’ll have a list of experiences behind you that prove that you can believe in yourself and survive. When you are doing this in a way that doesn’t work for you, you may feel compelled to hide or cover up whatever it is that leaves you feeling insecure or weak by outer material security, instead of inner strength.
Sun in 3rd house
A central area of focus in your life is learning through observation. Not necessarily by having things explained to you, but by seeing it yourself, observing what happens, and letting no information be shut out or rejected just because it doesn’t make sense at first. In this house we open ourselves up to pure perception, seeing and learning without bias as much as possible. With the Sun here, you must open up the question of identity. Who you are is a very big question for you and you must allow all possible answers to come to your attention, explore yourself. Ask questions and be willing to hear the answers, from everywhere, even when they seem to contradict each other. When you are doing this in a way that doesn’t work for you, you might find it difficult to let go of certain ideas about yourself, good or bad. We are always changing, and your sense of identity must be fluid like information. What we know changes all the time, and that doesn’t make the previous knowledge false, only enhanced.
Sun in 4th house
A central area of focus in your life is your feeling of home. Not just your childhood home, or even your adult home–these are all arenas where questions of this nature can come up and be worked out, but they are a side effect of the real issue, which is that it is of primary importance for you to explore your heart deeply, and to do that you need a safe place to call home, to center, to find peace and privacy. Find a haven. Have those inner dialogues with yourself. These inner dialogues may often take you back to childhood, because in the 4th house we are dealing with what shaped us, from the beginning. There can be a feeling of safety and rooted-ness that you carry inside of you, available for you to visit any time you find a quiet moment. When you are doing this in a way that doesn’t work for you, you may have trouble finding a sense of belonging or a place that helps you feel settled, even if it’s only in your own heart that you need it.
Sun in 5th house
A central area of focus in your life is creativity. This is not the strict kind of creativity where you put paint on a brush or clay on a wheel, this is the broad creativity — where you let your heart be lifted and engaged by something you are creating. Your vitality grows when you engage in activities that make you feel alive and happy, that create pleasure for your soul, not just your body. Have a good time and renew yourself through that spontaneous play, that letting go. In this life you are here to soften something in you, opening yourself and your heart through expression. Avoid pleasures that only numb you though and don’t vitalize you. They will appear to make you happy but are only skin deep, and can be very addicting, while emptying your heart.
Sun in 6th house
A central area of focus in your life is work. The term work applies here only as a method of doing things that need to be done: working on yourself, working at a job, developing skills that you feel are worthwhile, even our daily to do lists and organizing ourselves is the realm of the 6th house — where daily life takes place. Your sun sign can tell you about the nature of your needed daily rhythm. Choosing the work you do is an important matter, for you could be someone who can get carried away with work and its importance. You can have a sense of your contribution and work meaning something, proud of your skills and your investment. When you are doing this in a way that doesn’t work for you, you may find yourself feeling like a slave, doing work that has no meaning. Also take care you don’t hide behind your responsibilities. It can feel good, in a strange way, to say and feel you are carrying the weight of the world on your back, but that’s not the way to shine your light. Remember you have a responsibility to yourself, too.
Sun in 7th house
A central area of focus in your life is the dynamic of partnerships. You are learning the balance between understanding yourself and what you want, and understanding other people in your life. How to see another person’s perspective and still stay rooted in your own, where you compromise healthily and don’t demand too much or acquiesce too much. It is necessary that others impact you greatly in your life, relationship is a growth intensive area for you, and not just romantically. Any relationship needs to find an appropriate balance of give and take. You must find yourself in relationships that can maintain a balance, where both of you are of equal importance and have a healthy interdependency, neither one feeling too drained or responsible for the other. When you are doing this in a way that doesn’t work for you, fear of dependency or too much dependency, fear of commitment or rushing into commitments may keep you constantly off balance.
Sun in 8th house
A central area of focus is personal transformation. Your nature is that of the phoenix — your natural process of self-discovery is deep and completely changes you. You must explore the realm of your subconscious. Denial is not your friend, you are someone who needs sometimes brutal honesty from yourself and from others that you are close to in your life. A big part of your life is dealing with the part of you that is crazy and needs to be healed, needs to be brought into the light and acknowledged. Then you can feel in touch with yourself, your own heat, your source of truth, and not running from yourself. When you are doing this in a way that doesn’t work for you, you may either become obsessed with stamping out denial so much that you crash through others’ subconscious barriers as well, or perhaps just so overwhelmed by the darkness of that it’s all you can see.
Sun in 9th house
A central area of focus in your life is a sense of adventure. Adventures take many shapes, and they are not just only of the body, but also of the mind. Fundamental for you is the necessity to explore, learn, question, and put together your own philosophies about life and the world. Keep it moving, don’t allow yourself to be dogmatically convinced of anything as law. Even though you may learn a great many things, life lived as an adventure, a quest, and not a rigid plan or viewed in terms of right and wrong paths will help you break up routines and keep things new and fresh. There is always something different to see, something new to learn, and that is where your vitality truly is, in that flexibility of movement. You can then embrace the sense that life does have meaning and purpose, for you will be able to see the common threads of the universe through all your different experiences. When you are doing this in a way that doesn’t work for you, you may find yourself too concerned with getting down what you’ve learned in stone. Stone is very inflexible.
Sun in 10th house
A central area of focus in your life is likely to become a stronger focus and more clear in your life as you grow older. It is a sense of fulfilling your destiny, finding your place in the world. Fundamental to your nature is discovering who you are meant to become and what gift you are to give to your community (however defined). Planets, and the sign they’re in, in the 10th house can tell us the qualities that we need to work on developing, which will lead us to the work that we were meant to do. We develop those qualities in ourselves and our purpose finds us. With the Sun in the 10th house, the qualities you need to develop are identity. There is something profound that you are meant to do, the sign your sun is in can give you further clues as to what the nature of that work is. When you are doing this in a way that doesn’t work for you, you may find that the importance of your role in your community is still heightened, but you don’t know what your part is in it. You may find that the appearance of importance may take over, where you play a role that makes you look important, but really is rather empty for you as a person.
Sun in 11th house
A central area of focus in your life is your future. You are someone who benefits from thinking about what you want in the future, getting your priorities straight as you go through life. Of course we all can, but for you, it’s important that your future goals play a big part in shaping your present. The terrain of the 11th house and the planets in it, often represent parts of us that develop over time, there is a sense of that part of us coming to fruition as we mature. With the Sun here, you will discover most of what and who you are as you mature and times goes on, perhaps uncovering your goals and priorities later in life as you get more in touch with your identity. You may also find that you benefit from finding people that seem to have the same kind of goals you do, ‘finding your tribe’ in a sense. This is not just family or friends, but groups of people that are moving in the same direction as you and have the same objectives (for instance, new parents joining a parenting group, that sort of thing). When you are doing this in a way that doesn’t work for you, you may have trouble keeping yourself in the present while you plan for the future. The present is where we live, the future is what we move toward. If you live too much in the future, no plans can be made — dreams are created but not followed through on. You may find that you just drift or get involved with people who aren’t helping you go anywhere.
Sun in 12th house
A central area of focus in your life is your spirituality. You benefit from experiences that help you know a sense of peace and a sense of the bigger picture — more like transcending the pettiness of life rather than getting caught up in small things that don’t matter. Experiences that can only be poorly described by our English language, using words such as mystical or psychic, can feed you, but I don’t mean that to sound as though you need to lock yourself in a closet and chant. Whatever you can do, that helps you enter a meditative state (literally or figuratively), this is healing and vitalizing for you. You are more susceptible to the wear and tear of the brutality in life, and need to infuse yourself with compassion and spirit to keep yourself strong and your identity clear. Aiding others can do the same thing, spreading a sense of peace and joy and expanding your focus on more than yourself. When you are doing this in a way that doesn’t work for you, that meditative need is still there, but you might find less useful ways to enter that state, through some form of escapism. Escapism can be through serious means, such as drugs, or it can be as simple as zoning out on the TV just a little too much. Escapism is a distraction that won’t fill you up, but empty you instead.