The 4th house is one of the most important houses in our natal chart as it colours, and rules, our entire life, and is the foundations, and soils, of which we then shape and experience everything. As an astrologer I often start my analysis from a client’s natal Moon, while paying close attention to their 4th house. In many ways, it is the place from where a person’s life starts to align – so if someone feels confused, unfulfilled, unhappy, unstable, and has an overall feeling of not belonging, not connecting or not being on their right path, the secret is to balance their 4th house.
The 4th house holds the key to our happiness – it is the home of our heart and our soul.
There are three moksha houses in our chart: the 4th, 8th and 12th. Moksha is our spiritual liberation and is what we all strive to achieve in life; and all these houses are water houses – the 4th is ruled by Cancer, the 8th is ruled by Scorpio and the 12th is ruled by Pisces. Being ruled by water, we see the connection of emotions towards spiritual liberation – as water is about healing, emotional balance, the ability to feel and to love. Actually according to healers and doctors, many people who struggle internally do not drink enough water leading to dehydration; so drinking a lot of water and staying hydrated is one of the signs that a person is healing or healed. Water is also about emotional fulfillment and balance, and the ability to love and connect to the heart; it is about nurturing and the ability to nurture, it is about intuition, spiritual growth and the ability to expand and to be aligned and to flow. The heart is the initiatory pathway towards higher consciousness, and spiritual evolution, so we need to connect to the heart, heal the emotional body, learn to love, and be generous and giving through our open heart. This is the way towards moksha.
What makes the 4th house most important though, is that it is a kendra house, meaning that it is angular. Angular houses are the structures that make our bones and spinal cord; they are our foundations in life and rule crucial aspects of our development and life’s path. There are four angles – as it takes four walls to build a house: we have a roof, foundations, front door and back doors, and walls all around. And as it sits at the bottom of our chart, the 4th house is our very foundation and sense of belonging. Without it, we cannot build anything – it is our roots and sense of stability. Stability not of bricks and concrete, stability of emotions, heart and belonging.
It is our heart, our church within, it is where God resides, because God resides in our heart.
The 4th house is the house of our deepest, most inner self. It represents our childhood, our past lives, our upbringing and family life, our subconscious, our intimacy, our nurturing and nourishment, our mother and lineage, our heart’s land and desires; it is our home and church of skin. It is the unique emotional and spiritual wild lands of our body, and the hearth of flames where our heart settles for peace and comfort at night. It is the love that returns us to love.
The 4th house relates our heart health and our emotional body. Just as it is a “storage” house, we too store everything in our emotional body, all the way from early childhood including unhealed wounds, experiences, emotions, shame, guilt, and traumas. Healing our emotional body is crucial for our health and wellness as over eighty-five percent of physical ailments can be traced to emotional causes.
At its core, the 4th house is our journey from the womb to the end of our life – from the moment we are born until we become again all five elements. It is the entirety of our life, and our inner experience of it. As such, the 4th house is the essence of our life.
The 4th house is ruled by the sign of Cancer and so the significator of the 4th house is the Moon, thought in some astrology schools, it is also Venus as Venus rules the heart chakra while the Moon rules the crown chakra. Many people may associate the 5th house as the heart but it is actually the 4th house, though both of these houses are related to the heart.
Our human heart has two chambers: one receives blood, and the second pumps out blood. This is how we are alive. The 4th house is our first heart chamber – we receive blood, we receive life, we receive nurturing. And so our 4th house becomes our ability to love and to nurture. Without the 4th house, we cannot love and nothing else in our life will make sense nor ever align in its natural path.
The 5th house is the second chamber of our heart – our ability to pump out love in all of its forms and shapes towards other people and the world. The 5th house is our creativity, children, joy and heart’s expressions. We can only give what we already have within us, so the flow between the 4th and 5th house is essentially the flow of life energy. It is precisely this flow of love that aligns us on our path.
The 4th house is also about the lineage of our soul, which is also seen through our Moon sign. It is our mother’s prayers when she spoke with voice her wish to have us; it is our own voice from a time before time beyond time; it is our soul’s desire to be born so that we fulfill our life’s purpose through our human lips, hands and feet.
The 4th house is also the karma or work of our relationships and marriage, because it sits 10th from the 7th. This means that the higher purpose of marriage is devotion, loyalty, integrity and protecting the sacredness and privacy of your bond; it is building a home of heart and supporting each other’s unique paths in life.
Being connected to Venus, the 4th house shows us the need to practice gentleness, tenderness, beauty and compassion in our approach towards our partner, and all of our family, and the need for grace and forgiveness. This is how you change your karma – grace and forgiveness.
Forgiveness doesn’t mean accepting behaviours that aren’t right, or even continuing with people who disrespects and hurt you – no, never. What it means is that we give ourselves the peace within, we open our palms so that we release our own selves from the pains of betrayals. Cosmic justice will do the rest. Forgiveness is a path we walk on our own, and in our own timing. It is not about someone telling you “just get over it”, no, we don’t just get over things; so give yourself the time you need, and walk along its twists and turns until you reach the fountain or the lake or river deep into the forest. In many ways, we know forgiveness has become or already happened when crying comes. It is at the time when we no longer feel anger towards the situation or person, but when we feel compassion and even sadness for them; it is at the time when there is nothing more to say about the thing, topic or person, but there is only some quietness.
The 4th house is about our early childhood upbringing, and with that will come some experiences we may not want to forgive. But the truth is that unless you forgive, and unless you come into some peace with your family and parents, little less will work out in your life.
I once met someone who said “when will my parents become self-aware and realize their behaviours?” But who’s to say who is aware and who isn’t? Are you? Am I? Perhaps they weren’t meant to be as aware as you wanted them. When your foot hurts and you go to a doctor, you don’t get your entire body and organs operated in surgery, right?
Some people incarnate with only a few things to work through in life, and actually none of us are here to get everything “fixed or evolved”. Sure they made mistakes, we all make mistakes. But outside of their role as our parents in this life, they are only human – they are people who have their own struggles, their own childhoods, their own wounds onto them. They did what they could. One of our greatest spiritual lessons in this life is that every person does the best they can with what they have at every moment of their life. Perhaps this can give you some peace.
The 4th house is also connected to Jupiter, because Jupiter is exalted in the sign of Cancer. Exalted Jupiter shows us that we need to embody and awaken our spiritual wisdom and knowledge, and apply it towards our human relationships. Through the twists and turns that life and relationships inevitably are, we are allowed an opportunity for a deepening and for an inner alchemy to occur. We can only meet another as deeply as we’ve met ourselves. And through more self-awareness and self-knowledge, we will be able to see, appreciate and experience things in a more meaningful and deeper way. We have to treat relationships as if we are entering a temple, a church, a cathedral. Have a set of higher values that you hold yourself to. Stay true to your word, infuse intention in your gestures. Have responsibility towards your bonds. Respect each other. This is how, if you believe in karma, you will balance it all out; but perhaps more than anything, this is how you will fall deeper into love, into life, into all of your soul’s growth.
The 4th house holds the key to our happiness. It is our ability to love and our sense of stability in the world.
When someone wants to weaken someone else, or an entire society, they begin by destabilizing their sense of foundations in life. For us as human beings, our stability comes from home, family, relationships, and the emotional foundations of connecting and belonging. This is all the 4th house, which also rules our deep psychology and inner selves including our mental health and emotional balance. It is also the house of roots, and when people no longer feel connection to their roots they feel destabilized.
It is also about connection, and even though in our modern world we think we are connecting because of social media – we aren’t really connecting. We are avoiding, we are masking, faking, we are wearing filters and fillers, and living in perpetual shallowness and ambiguity. People are more separated than ever before, and more incapable of creating true intimacy. People swipe human faces on screens dehumanizing one another further, as if we are all yet another brick in the wall or replaceable bottles in a supermarket. That’s not love, that’s not connection, that’s not humanness. There is no heart in this.
Even further, we’ve seen the family unit destroyed and family values disintegrating. In the last few decades we’ve seen the attacks on family, healthy relationships, women and the mother’s involvement in her children’s lives while they are young, traditions of the ancestors, and loving one’s roots and lore. Women who are stay at home moms are constantly shamed that they aren’t making money or having careers; and this whole women’s empowerment movement has become infiltrated as it is now a brand rather than real empowerment. A child needs its mother presence and nurturing at home, and a woman cannot do a hundred things at once, she needs a real man beside her to offer support and stability. Everything starts from childhood; this is not “outdated”, it is basic psychology.
So when a society destroys someone’s 4th house, the person will feel destabilized, unloved, unhappy, unfulfilled. Whatever needs healing, heal it. It all starts with our family but I promise you life changes entirely once you heal those relationships and settle into inner peace. If you need to work through something do not hesitate to work with a therapist, a spiritual counselor, or a psychologist or with family constellations for deeper childhood issues – whatever you feel is the way for you to work through things, seek that and invest in your wellness.
There is no greater gift than the gift of self-awareness, which is why I love what I do as an astrologer and spiritual counselor – it gives me so much happiness to be able to help people. You need to settle your inner world and family dynamics into peace because otherwise it will all continue to repeat throughout your life and colour all your relationships – because the 4th house is a house where things never end, they continue and perpetuate and circle around, unless we change the course and clarity of the water.
Find the stability within you, settle into your heart, develop self-awareness and wisdom, protect and nurture your relationships, care lovingly for your family, and pour the waters of compassion, forgiveness and tenderness towards you, your family and across the soils of your soul.
The 4th house is our home, family and love, and this is all that truly matters.
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