North Node in Libra/South Node in Aries - This Nodal position requires much learning about self-sacrifice and the needs of other people. All the lifetimes of work spent on building self-confidence and esteem must now be transferred to others. The Libra North Node keeps the individual from adding to his sense of self-identity any further. He must guard against strong ego influencing his current life actions. His long standing me-first attitude now brings him sharp and painful experiences as he is learning the lessons of cooperation. He must slow down and make sure that all he works for is meaningful, in his marriage and close partnerships as well as all his relations with others. He has to learn to take the sharp edges out of his life and start to balance. While the center road seems less attractive to him, it is still the only path he can have towards happiness. Ultimately he must learn the very subtle lesson that his strong pioneering individualism isn't actually meant for himself at all, but rather to equip him better so that he can provide other with a more harmonious life. Many individuals with these Nodes have a tendency to be contrary. The experience of listening to other people is a new one which they find objectionable when they feel it hampers their forward motion. In past incarnations, progress was all important, and getting there first was part of the highly competitive Arien drive. This carries over into a definite closed-mindedness which the Libra North Node will ultimately open, showing to the individual the other side of the coin which he had never before thought was important enough to recognize. Selfishness and vanity of all sorts must be curbed unless the individual wishes to find himself alone. Usually he feels himself being driven towards something, yet he doesn't understand what or why. Through the Libra North Node he is now to reconsider his goals and objectives so that his Arien energy is put to some useful purpose. He changes his mind often and allegiance to a single cause is not one of his finer attributes. Past incarnations have made him accustomed to a constant impatient restlessness that still has a tendency to keep him on the move. He knows that he is to give rather than to receive in the current life, yet he finds it difficult to cope with such karma with his full heart. The Martian quality of the South Node impatiently pushes him in new directions. Upon arrival at each destination, however, he finds the gossamer cloud of Libra in the middle of the seesaw, and is surprised to see that the goal was not the goal at all, nor was the destination the end of the journey. Puzzled and confused, he sits in the middle, trying to evaluate the circumstances which he hopes will point the way towards his next successful drive. And yet each goal, each ambition, each sprint of running and striving brings him to Libra -- the half-way point! Finally, out of sheer exhaustion he makes the amazing realization that the second half of the journey involves other people. He has to learn the karmic lesson that he is not alone. Until he learns to share, something always comes up to put the brakes on his efforts. Eventually he is brought to the realization that winning or losing the game is much less important than the fairness with which it is played.

Many individuals with these Nodes are highly opinionated as a result of selfish or bigoted past-life attitudes. Now it is time for the shoe to be worn on the other foot. Much of the current life's events are painful blows to the ego. The individual has to guard against becoming embittered as he sees many of his own wants and desires being taken away from him and given to others. At first his natural tendency is to be jealous. He wants to fight back for all those things he feels he has lost; yet the more he fights the more he loses. Eventually, drained of much of his inner resources, he must surrender his selfish ego and accept living in a world built on sharing. Until he overcomes his South Node, his biggest frustration is the witnessing of other people receiving all that he himself has wished for. He doesn't quite yet understand how this works, and is puzzled at why all the things he has ever wanted are coming to people around him and yet not to himself. He hardly realizes that all his desires, wants and wishes are actually designed for others. He is mentally energizing the wishes of people around him so that he can ultimately be an instrument for their fulfillment. In actuality he is earning himself a new place in the world by living through the karma of selflessness. Still, the insistent urges of the South Node keep pulling him backward, often making him feel that this is a lesson he would rather not yet learn. He must try to resist past-life tendencies to make waves for he is now capable of witnessing disharmonies between people without taking sides. Often he is thrown into the position of referee, whereby in helping others to become more objective, he in fact helps himself. The more he can get others to cooperate, the more he can learn to do it himself. Underneath all the hustle and bustle, this individual is learning to see the consequences of his actions before taking them. In effect, he must learn to look before he leaps! For many with this Nodal position, there is a deep-seated anger coming out of the past-life memories of frustrations which block the self-expression. In this life, there is usually a very pleasing physical appearance, which is part of the karmic lesson in vanity that the aries South Node is here to overcome. Any narcissistic residue also causes difficulty in marriage as this is the battleground where the war between love of another and needs of the self must be fought. The balance between Aries/Mars and Libra/Venus is a difficult one to achieve. The Aries South Node constantly seeks to assert its needs, while the Libra North Node seeks nothing for itself but to love others, regardless of their demands. This individual can feel love for others best only after his own needs are fulfilled. Until the desires of past incarnations are left behind, the incessant pulling of his subconscious demands continues to be so strong that he has a tendency to drain energy from other people, actually putting them to sleep. In effect he is a walking anaesthetic, constantly wondering why people avoid talking with him for more than a few minutes. He would like to talk for hours, if only to continue the focus of attention on himself. But in his private moments, he is deeply saddened by a sense of loneliness and the knowledge that his relationships with others are so far short of what he would like them to be. There is nothing subtle about this Nodal polarity. Happiness comes only after he is forced to re-evaluate his desires and truly discovers that they involve other people. The ego-self must be abandoned and with it a heightened sensitivity to the needs of others acquired. The Libra North Node is one of the most difficult to achieve because the Aries self-love looms as such a large hurdle to overcome. Still the individual must overcome if there is to be a new cycle for him, and he will find the key to this new cycle as he begins to reflect back upon himself through the eyes of others.

The house position of the South Node indicates the area where insatiable desires of past incarnations are still demanding priority. The house position of the North Node shows how fulfillment can be reached through self-sacrifice, cooperation and the expression of unselfish love to others.

from: Schulman, Martin, Karmic Astrology - Volume 1, 1975, Samuel Weiser, Inc., New York

North Node in the 6th House/South Node in the 12th House -- This individual spends most of his time in deep thought. He likes to be left alone so that uninterrupted by others he can let his inner reflections sift through the karmic memories of all his past incarnations. This is not to say that he doesn’t like company, or that he’s even aware of what he’s doing. The fact is that he goes so deep as to become totally oblivious to anything he is thinking about! He loses himself in himself. Always the conscious reason for going inward is based on logical intention, but the individual tends to reach the point where all logic eludes him. The Neptunian subtlety of the depths he reaches remains a mystery even to him! One of his greatest problems is that while he stays inside himself he is preventing others from stabilizing his mental journeys. As a result, he accumulates enormous past-life fears, having no idea whether they are real or imagined, or just a compressed collection of the mental scenery on his inward journeys. Still the basis of his outward life is built on fear and imagination, and regardless of how strong the rest of the chart is, he keeps having moments of not being able to find confidence in himself. He is like the turtle constantly peeking out of his shell. People close to him see his life as a tendency to avoid all that seems real. He spends most of his time watching others from behind a see-through mirror. Ultimately he comes to believe that the rest of the world is viewing him with the same scrutiny. There is a latent paranoia built into this nodal position. In areas of work he is an unusually poor organizer, leaving many scattered ends behind him and always feeling that there are not enough hours in the day to complete his chores. His problem is that he doesn’t know how to budget his time, and as a result he is constantly trying to catch up to the present. Much like the rabbit with the clock in Alice in Wonderland, he keeps throwing himself into the position of having to rush to avoid being late. Part of his life will at one time be involved with hospitals, institutions or organizations which demand him to structure his ways. He needs this in order to come out of his inner self. The big karmic lesson is for him to learn responsibility instead of feeling sorry for all the woes that seem to beset him. More than any other house in the zodiac, he cries at the slightest hurt either real or imagined. Sometimes the crying is inward, but always it is there for on the very deepest levels he feels that the love he has to give goes unnoticed and unappreciated. Because he thinks this way, he becomes his own creator of gloom; and woe to the person who tries to pull him out for then he will have a receptive ear for all the past-life hurts, fears and worries he has not yet even verbalized! Underneath all else, he is a bottomless well of fretting, with not enough deep faith in the positive outcome of events. He must work on building trust so that he can have the strength to come out of his shell. Once he does, he is one of the most compassionate, beautiful and useful people in the zodiac.

His sixth house North Node gives him great pleasure in helping others, but he cannot do this well until he realizes and accepts the fact that in this incarnation he has chosen a life of sacrifice. He must learn how to organize his thoughts, his work and his diet, for he is a natural-born healer, capable of defying the limits of practical medicine with his own more mystical methods of curing. But a talent is not a talent until it is developed, and an individual is no more than he thinks he is. Ultimately he will come to learn that his greatest gift is faith. But he will work long and hard to reach that awareness. Part of the current life will be spent nursing or coping with physical or mental illness, either in himself or others close to him. His major growth occurs when he realizes that all illness is no more than a disharmony in the body reflecting a disharmony in thought. Something inside himself is constantly trying to tell him this, and he must learn not to allow his past-life fears to block what is now being opened for him. Many with these Nodes go through experiences of illnesses that miraculously disappear, to the amazement of medical doctors, dentists and other professional practitioners. The karmic lesson here is to learn the higher reason why, for as soon as understanding is reached, the new-born faith starts to heal. Once he becomes aware of the power of his faith, he becomes a veritable dynamo. As he builds in more positive thought currents, he automatically learns not to criticize others for the lack of perfection he sees in them. His outlook on life remains clinical: scrutinizing and diagnosing all he comes in contact with. Of all the Nodal positions, this is the most difficult one to open up to past incarnations. The twelfth house South Node has completed a karmic path, the details of which are to remain forever sealed in past times, even though the subtle Akashic essence still remains. Lifetimes of escaping from inner torment have been completed, The individual must come to realize that most of his inner negativity is not related to the current life, but only exists through his continuing to think along a track which has already ended. He still has inner feelings of being persecuted which he must learn to bury once and for all for the more he allows himself to dwell in such thoughts, the more he will inadvertently recreate such circumstances. He should learn to realize the past for exactly what it is: no more than a memory, and no more real than a photograph in his mind, which he now has the free choice of holding on to for the sake of misery or discarding so that he may step out into a productive new world. Once he can put his entire state of consciousness into a positive and productive outlook on life, he will be able to start experiencing a new meaning to his existence.

The sign which contains the South Node indicates the ways in which the individual blocks his current-life advancement by withdrawing into karma he has already completed. The sign which contains the North Node shows the ways in which he can develop a fruitful life through service.

from: Schulman, Martin, Karmic Astrology - Volume 1, 1975, Samuel Weiser, Inc., New York