Pluto’s house in the birth chart shows in what areas of life a person’s empowerment journey is taking place. A house is “where action takes place,” and all parts of life fit into one of the 12 sites of action or houses.
The house in which you find Pluto represents the areas of life that hold the greatest growth and empowerment possibilities … but also the deepest resistance and fear. Parts of life to do with this house have at times been the vehicles for an incredible source of confidence and strength at times and, at other times, a vivid and rich source of disaster, dread, fear, pain, and suffering.
By default, many people live in a state doing all they can to keep Plutonian echoes from deep under the surface at bay. We don’t want to feel overwhelmed by negativity, and we’re often not sure how to deal with the facts of pain, regret, guilt, shame, depressiveness, anger, and other unpleasant and taxing emotional states.
To access the potential for Plutonian empowerment, you must face your fears, shadows, and/or negative and painful emotions and emerge on the other side of them with the knowledge that you can survive. Pluto issues can relate to fears of death and annihilation, and on the level of the depths of the emotional body, memories of deaths in your soul’s other lives. I counsel people in Plutonian times, whether transits and progressions involving Pluto or activation of their natal Pluto configurations, to decide daily that they are stronger than the pain, fear, and anger that might be coming up and seeming to threaten to take over.
Here are two useful questions for working with the house in which you find Pluto:
- “What areas of life does this person need to face and transform his or her relationship to fear in order to develop the deepest sort of self-confidence and inner strength but that hurts?”
- “What does this person absolutely need to do in order to feel that life is worth living, yet he or she may be unreasonably or irrationally afraid to do?”
Pluto in the 1st House
With Pluto in the 1st, your multilife empowerment path involves choosing independence, going it alone, developing self-confidence and pursuing personal freedom, and owning the power of choice. Painful issues in many lifetimes include being singled out (fairly or not) or forced to go it alone, making choices that don’t work out and confronting a sense of failure/inadequacy, being projected upon/scapegoated (and carrying guilt, shame, regret, and self-hatred as a result), and more.
If you have this placement, you stand out. How you deal with this fact is everything! If someone has something to prove, he or she might choose you to pick a fight with, even if you’re demurely sitting in a corner trying not get noticed. You’re carrying Pluto’s energy of power, and you must decide how you will embody it … because you don’t have a choice but to embody it. Will you fight and defend as others find you difficult to be around, or will you own the power of choice that you have and carry compassion that you’re triggering others’ Plutonian fears? If the latter, then you can become an agent of change in how you deal with fear, pain, depressiveness, and feelings of power and powerlessness, never letting your emotions get the better of you.
Pluto in the 2nd House
With Pluto in the 2nd, your multilife empowerment path includes developing and living according to your own value system, learning the true value of money and time, gathering skills and resources that you need to survive, and organizing your life and environment to ensure success. Painful issues in many lifetimes include not making your own money/having your own time and energy for your use, being overpowered by others’ values and how they expect you to live, equating money with power and losing both (not learning that self-knowledge and self-acceptance are the true path to empowerment), and chasing money and possessions as if they will provide you a sense of self-worth.
With this natal placement, you must live life on your own terms. It’s likely that you have attracted others into your life who either want you to live a certain way (putting pressure on you to live the life they’d have you live) or give you guidance about healthy ways to live a life. The bottom line is that you must learn to live in ways that create self-respect – you must like yourself in order to do the 2nd house well. Be aware of how resistant you might be to disappointing others if you create self-reliance (a main goal here), or how afraid of earning enough money and having a roof over your head you might be if you were to make certain major, self-respecting decisions. Very often money issues are the manifestation of 
fears about self-worth, so don’t let money and numbers distract you from the empowerment path of learning to like and respect yourself.
Pluto in the 3rd House
With Pluto in the 3rd, your path over many lifetimes is to become empowered through learning and communication. It’s also about perception, and asking questions and getting answers. Painful issues in many lifetimes include being denied education or the right to have a voice, being punished for telling/writing/publishing a truth, and seeking information and being damaged by not getting it or getting it.
This placement says that you have to learn to own the power of knowing and telling the truth, as well as cease expecting punishment or conflict for doing so. It’s likely that you have drawn others to you who model extremes of honesty and dishonesty, because you need to have other-life memories of power issues related to each triggered. In some lives you might be forced to lie and then carry guilt and shame, while in other lives you’re telling the truth and no one’s listening, both of which can be disempowering. You might have been punished at some point for being mistaken, so healing with Pluto here involves owning what you see and know, while also admitting what you haven’t yet seen and do not yet know. When you transform your relationship with the truth and with the fact that others don’t always want (or feel they can afford to hear) it, then you can move through the world being an agent of change for gathering and presenting information in ways that help others get closer to the truth.
Pluto in the 4th House
Your empowerment journey over many lives centers upon home, family, and community issues – which are all about belonging and feeling safe, secure, and welcome. It’s also about dealing with your inner emotional landscape and owning and addressing emotional, psychological, and physical needs. Painful issues in many lifetimes can include rejection by family/home, needing to leave family/home to remain authentic or to survive, power over-power under dynamics with loved ones at home so that you don’t feel safe and loved, adoption and being orphaned, and betrayal, abuse, and abandonment by family.
This placement says that you need to get to know how you really tick on the inside and meet your own safety, security, and validation needs. The soul’s journey with Pluto in this house often manifests as feeling unloved and unsupported by family and others close to you, but the soul’s intention is that you learn how to establish your own inner emotional roots so that you are at home anywhere you go, no matter who you spend time or live with. We learn how to deal with our emotions and needs from family when young, and with Pluto in the 4th house we can know for certain that some Plutonian issues were in the air in the home you were born into. Your task now is to learn to deal with all the intense Plutonian feelings you may have at times (or all the time!) in constructive ways that honor them while you learn to work through them. It’s likely that part of you doesn’t feel safe anywhere with anyone, and it’s your job to bring love and light to that part of you so you’re always at home.
Pluto in the 5th House
Your empowerment path over numerous lifetimes is rooted in expressing yourself, taking up space, developing and sharing creativity, and being seen as a unique individual. This has something to do with a healthy ego structure, as you have to have confidence if you’re going to be willing to shine. Painful parts of the journey include having your voice or creativity stifled or ignored, and your unique contribution and voice made into grounds by others to compete with you. The worst things that can happen include being told you’re irrelevant and finding others coming out of the woodwork to make you feel in some way not at all special.
This path is one of learning to enjoy the self and letting others off the hook for validating you. Whatever you do, do it for yourself. Don’t view your creativity or opinions as playgrounds to prove that you’re better than others or that you’re not worth less than others — this may have been a trap in some lifetimes for you. You don’t need to complete in order to be or feel valid, yet you’re the only person in the world who can decide that you’re valid. If you’ve drawn others with strong, even controlling and/or overbearing, egos to you over the course of your life, realize that they are karmic teachers for you, offering you examples of ego gone wrong so you can make healthy choices. When you’re making a joyful noise in line with your own happiness, you’ll enjoy yourself without the drama of trying to prove that you’re worth love and support.
Pluto in the 6th House
Your empowerment journey over multiple lives is in learning to be of service and useful, and developing skills to improve things in the world around you. This is a journey of learning to put aside egoic concerns in order to function well on a team, as well as learning to be humble when you don’t know something and need to learn it. It’s also about navigating responsibility, duty, and obligation in healthy ways.
As the house of unequal relationships, Pluto here indicates that the path to empowerment has included
feeling “less than” in many lifetimes. Servitude, slavery, and other things that leave a person feeling boxed in, overcommitted, and perhaps hopeless about the future fit here. Worst-case scenarios including intense criticism and/or abuse for not being perfect, being late, getting good but not the best grades, “there’s still a spot on that floor,” and feeling that you didn’t measure up to expectations. The positives include being able to discern what’s wrong (in someone, a process, a paragraph, a spreadsheet, or the world) and being able to figure out how to fix it. Once imperfections are known, the issue is about making sure you don’t take on too much responsibility just because something isn’t working. The healing key is in making conscious choices about what you want to serve, how you will do it, and how long you will be available to do it. In many lifetimes you haven’t had the choice of how you use your time and energy, and it’s imperative that you reclaim this now through using your analysis and discernment skills in making choices about what you’re going to do and why.
Pluto in the 7th House
In many lifetimes, your empowerment path with Pluto here is all about relating to others. This is about how you show up, what you do and are for others, and if you learn to navigate the give-and-take dynamics of various kinds of relationships while showing up as an equal and not only being a chameleon to try to ensure that you’re liked, loved, considered attractive, and supported. Some of the more painful issues can be in not being heard or listened to by others, but you have to make sure that you believe you have the right to be treated as an equal. Sometimes this placement indicates strong, deep feelings and memories of repeated rejections, while you try to figure out what you did to “deserve” it.
This empowerment path requires cycling through projections of others (and those you may throw on others) so you can get to the place of true understanding and actually being on the same page with another. Along the way, you have drawn others with strong wills and egos who might have tried to control, dominate, or abuse you, or tell you who you are or are supposed to be. This would reflect the multilife need to overcome defining the self in terms of how others see you. A major key to healing with this placement is in realizing that you must own the power of self-respect and saying “yes, please” and “no, thank you” in relationship. You must evaluate what is and isn’t fair and learn to choose your relationships accordingly. There is work to be done with others with this placement, and you need to realize that your powerful Plutonian self is activated by powerful Plutonian others. You need to own this power and be honest about who you are while learning to evolve beyond fighting, control issues, and power-over/power-under dynamics that might in the past have left you feeling not deserving of love, support, and true partnership.
Pluto in the 8th House
Pluto in the 8th house of the birth chart indicates that trust, vulnerability, intimacy, and shared resources with others outline the path to your empowerment. All of these things involve relying on others and being exposed and opened to them in some way. In order to truly live in the 8th house of your chart, you have to open to another in the deepest ways, and so you’re more vulnerable to being hurt when you open. The power imbalances that have in many lifetimes caused much harm include betrayal, lying, stealing, power issues related to money and sexuality, domestic violence, abandonment, control related to inheritances, and others. A key to remember is that you need others to open you into your own depths, and these human experiences are the necessary kind of triggers to get you there. Whatever you find in yourself triggered by others related to these issues must be brought to the surface for you to be whole, and others who bring you activations–no matter how unpleasant–are teachers to help you learn more about your unconscious depths.
The empowerment path with this Pluto requires learning–and trusting–the truth that all things can be healed. The fact is that you will be hurt at times, and when you’re hurt it can cut extremely deep. The image of a mythological Plutonian creature fits here: The Phoenix rises from the ashes of its own destruction. It’s a great image, but we know that bird has just been burned alive! In all the ways that it hurts to live in the 8th house, you must decide that you are stronger than the deep pain that comes up surrounding trust, money, and intimacy with others in order to go through the transformation your 8th house Pluto calls for. You must process those deepest feelings of pain, honoring what you’ve experienced, and then find the compassion for self and other that leads to the empowerment of rising up from the ashes of what feels your own destruction. The use of your excellent radar for subtext going forward is a necessity, as you can sense the depths in others and must learn to be discerning about what you choose to open to.
Pluto in the 9th House
With Pluto here, you are learning over your multilife journey empowerment through seeking higher truth and allowing imagination and inspiration to flow. Whether through religion, travel and exploration, higher education, sitting at the feet of spiritual masters or gurus, or philosophical imagining, you are trying to figure what’s true and what’s worth believing in … if anything. Sometimes this path involves adhering to particular ideologies or belief systems, and sometimes it centers on exploring many or refusing all. All humans are guided by beliefs, but it’s rare that people have cause to evaluate the worth of those beliefs, or the appropriateness of the lens through which they see the world. Having a way of explaining the world, and why things happen, is the basis of life in the 9th house, as is upgrading that framework when it doesn’t answer of your questions about life and why things are the way they are. Imagination fits here as this is the house of opening to what’s possible, envisioning new possibilities, and learning to hold a vision of something better than you have in your life today.
You’ve been empowered and disempowered in many lives because of what you believe or don’t/can’t believe, or how open to possibility you are or are not. At times, you’ve had to fight for your beliefs and, even the right to think and pray the way that feels right to you. Disempowerment here can include being forced into following a religion that doesn’t offer you what feels true, finding out your religion has been outlawed, feeling let down by the belief system you’ve held and perhaps fought for, or finding out that what you have believed is capital-T True is far from truth. Healing with this Pluto revolves around being willing to evaluate your beliefs: Where did they come from? Are they true? Are they worth pursuing? But, more importantly, then upgrading them if they no longer feel true to you. Regarding imagination, if you are not open to possibilities, the source will be beliefs about yourself, others, the world–anything, really. Empowerment here is in being open to learning, finding, living according to, and upgrading when necessary what you hold to be true.
Pluto in the 10th House
Your empowerment journey in many lifetimes centers on creating and maintaining a place for yourself in the world. To many this looks to be about work and career, but more broadly it’s about bringing something of value into the world and offering it … whether you make a living from it or not. Pluto in this house says that you have been through the ringer with all the kinds of power dynamics people bring to work, career, ambition, and building the world. You’ve been on both sides of these power dynamics, which include competition between ambitious people, all “rat race” and power-seeking games, being promoted and demoted, being applauded and despised or resented for your efforts/work, and more. This in many lives will be about creating and maintaining, and at times rebuilding after a fall, reputation and your ability to bring to the world something that matters to you.
Part of your disempowerment in some lives might be doing things for work that don’t matter to you, then getting caught up in the ego games of ambition-related dominance patterns, then feeling empty because the particular work doesn’t matter anyway, then not changing course due to a fear of looking weak, “over the hill”, or “out of your league”. You might also have found yourself publicly shamed or humiliated, whether you deserved it or not, as part of a power play by others, or one you devised that backfired. For healing and empowerment, I ask 3 questions when it comes to 10th-house planets: 1. What do you want to see more of in the world? 2. Are you now, or could you become through hard work and sacrifice over the long-term, a person who can bring that to the world? 3. If yes, is that what you want? Regardless of what you’ve been through with Pluto here, working with and answering these questions honestly will help you develop a focused track to follow that will serve the deep need you have to create something meaningful and bring it forward for others to benefit from.
Pluto in the 11th House
Your empowerment path in many lifetimes with Pluto here involves identifying the right goals, choosing the kind of future you want for your life and for your community, and finding the right people to work with to make those things happen. A truth in the 11th house is that no one can create the future she wants to live in alone, and so like-minded others must be found for mutual support and encouragement. Quite often people find themselves in particular groups they didn’t choose and need to find new ones, and with Pluto in the 11th house this might be particularly fraught with fear, pain, and doubt due to experiences being part of and leading groups in many lifetimes. You’ve seen what happens when a group steals an individual’s idea, becomes a mob and loses its mind together, adopts tribal attitudes, pushes out certain people for certain reasons, and moves toward dangerous and destructive goals together (sometimes even intentionally). Disempowerment here also includes when the decisions or needs of a group, cause, or movement prevented or definitively squashed your personal goals.
This empowerment path in this life for you begins with you looking at your goals. If you don’t have them, make some decisions about what you want your future to look like. Then seek out and connect with others who do or might have similar goals or, at least, an interest in mutual support. At times, you will find you joined the wrong group or aligned with a cause you have been rethinking. The key to this empowerment path is changing your social context when you need to. Your goals change over time, as do groups of people. If you do have goals and have yet to find like-minded others, remember that fear, pain, and anger from many lifetimes might be sourced in feeling all alone in the world, and this will have to be worked through methodically. Finally, if you’ve been kicked out of a group or denied membership, it’s crucial that you accept that this is not the right group for you. Much multilife pain has come from feeling singled out and ostracized or shunned, but this can be healed now by finding the right tribe for you to live and work with going forward.
Pluto in the 12th House
The core transformative learning with Pluto in this house is that your ego is not the only thing in existence. You are challenged to become willing to surrender to something greater than yourself. In many lives, this may have seemed a threat to your ego, which interprets surrender as a threat to its survival. You are disempowered through interpreting what invites you to surrender to a higher truth as defeat, punishment, or an invalidation of your existence. In the 12th house, we encounter what’s larger than ourselves. In many lives, you might have gigantic goals that seem impossible for any number of reasons, including that the Universe or God/Goddess itself isn’t supporting you. This can come through loss of all kinds, which is really an invitation to learn to give things up that you’re attached to as part of learning to identify as more than your egoic self.
Part of the empowerment process involves learning about how things really work here on this plane/planet, as you are an energetic being and not simply a mind with a body or a body with a mind. Learning about energy, how intentions create reality, the ins and outs of intentional manifestation, and more are paths to explore. Spiritual pursuits may help with your transformation, as can creativity and nature in all forms that allow for getting lost in the moment and carried away by something nurturing and/or beautiful. The transformation you seek is from feeling and defining yourself as powerless, small, defeated, and wounded into learning how to intentionally manage your consciousness in ways that allow for pain and anger stemming from loss to come up and be processed as you remain focused on manifesting what feels most to true to you and matters to you most. Your empowerment path involves learning to see beyond details and your ego’s attachment to them (and its tendencies toward negative self-definition/-labeling) by focusing on who you are that is, already, beyond the limitations of ego.
Karmic Story Pages
Pluto
-Natal Pluto Houses
–Natal Pluto Signs
–Natal Pluto Aspects
Nodes of the Moon
SN Ruler by Sign