I was born with a lone Jupiter in my third quadrant. By Placidus, Pluto is there as well. In any case, the first transits to my midheaven I would have experienced were Jupiter first, when I was a toddler, and Pluto second, when I was five going on six.

Each time I experienced a transit to my midheaven, I moved. The first time, it was for my parents’ work. Pluto coincided with us immigrating to the United States. My midheaven is special to me because I share it with my grandfather.

I don’t work with people and their midheavens a ton. Doing so takes a lot of backtracking and family information. It’s a whole session. It takes a lot of research from a client themselves. It’s almost impossible to talk about midheaven, except vaguely and in passing, without the client doing an incredible amount of preparation beforehand.

In passing—midheaven is how you respond to your environment. Sure, that can include the following: work, future hopes, planning, and career. It must also include: your relationship to your location, land, people, and the things that you inherit from your lineage.

It’s not easy talking about midheaven with people. Often, we find that the sign the midheaven is in shows us signs or modalities or elements that are repeated in the family lineage. Often, we find that the sign references themes that seem to constrain or frustrate the family. I don’t take the house position of the midheaven into account. I know that some astrologers do. Your midheaven may be anywhere in houses seven through twelve depending on the distance between your birth place and the equator. To me, I don’t have the experience necessary to understand those distances.

Often, I talk to people who share midheaven with a parent or a grandparent. Transits to their midheaven affect their relationships with these family members. Often, I talk to people whose midheavens are in Cancer who are confused about belonging and people whose midheavens are in Scorpio who inherit debt. The IC, the sign opposite the midheaven, always shows up whenever we talk about the midheaven.

I never find a client whose midheaven somehow describes the type of work that they are doing. There’s a type of simplified vocational astrology out there which takes each sign and lists out a couple of careers or skills that represents each sign. I never see people choose careers in this way.

The reasons why people choose different types of work over others is complex. Sometimes, we end up in things after long periods of drifting. Other times, work is part of how we express grief. Sometimes, we do things that we really don’t want to do because we feel like we have to do it. People choose careers because they respond to community needs and because they respond to needs of self. The ways that work offers support is never perfect. Work often creates more problems than it solves but, sometimes, it feels good to have different problems than the ones we are used to. People almost never have access to all types of work and most people do not have access to a career.

So—can the midheaven describe the type of work that you do? Sure it can. I see several people who suddenly break away from jobs or types of labor when Saturn transits the midheaven. But the midheaven is not limited to work. The midheaven is a response to your environment and the storage of your lineage. The midheaven might show up in your work but it will inevitably show up in your relationships, your feelings of safety, and your impressions of your body.

When working with the midheaven, when a client requests that we talk about the midheaven, it is always more helpful to start with the family than with the aspiration. Starting with the family means that you start with the whole picture. From there, you are able to figure out, with the client, how inheritances show up in their present day lives. Responses to the environment are not always hopeful or aspirational. Sometimes, they are anxious. Other times, they are jaded. Before understanding what a client’s relationship to their midheaven looks like and how it might be changing due to transits, it is important to have a longer discussion with them about how their midheaven has changed at least throughout their remembered generations while keeping in mind that unremembered generations are just as present.

This is what the midheaven is—it’s an angle. Like the ascendent, the angle of the midheaven fixes you into this world. Like your ascendent, your midheaven orients you to the world. However, unlike the ascendent, which describes the conditions of your birth, the midheaven hangs over your head. There is a vertical component to the midheaven. It describes conditions that are “over.” Conditions that “over” are not truly over—you anticipate them, you confront them, and you respond to them.