The North Node is a mysterious thing. It comes when we are ready to awaken something new.

South Node can give us a very satisfying life where everything is familiar and known, so why even look for a new way. Just because we’re good at something—or it comes quickly to us—that it’s what we should “do” with our lives. Sometimes, the easy way doesn’t feel spiritually satisfying.

The Nodes work as an axis: they stimulate one another
. We become tired of what is familiar. We long for new experiences, new directions, a new perception.

When a transit or progression stimulate the South Node, a situation comes up, – and our intuition says we need an adjustment. South Node past experiences could be beneficial and supportive, as we become aware of talents and gifts of knowledge we have forgotten. But sometimes, it brings us back to a vicious circle that we need to break.

And a great deal of the time, our relations with others get us to the other side of the axis. The Nodes are about the soli-lunar dynamic and reflect our relationships. Our Nodes are about the way our internal momentum reflects in our external relation to the world.

Contacts to the North Node from another’s chart are equally intense but very different. The feeling of familiarity is not there to comfort us. In fact, that particular planetary energy from that particular person may seem entirely alien.

Contacts to the North Node are often accompanied by adjustments and difficulties, and it usually isn’t a smooth ride. But it often will bring something very new into our lives.

To continue with the Venus example, another’s Venus on our North Node may show us ways of loving that never occurred to us before. They may appreciate us for things that seem completely strange to us. They may bring new things into our lives that we learn to love, things that expand our previously limited horizon. They may inspire us, through loving us, to be a completely different person, someone who has different reactions, different habits, different values. They will take us out of what we were. The North Node, once tapped, has that kind of power. We can become utterly changed.

We don’t need to leave our South Nodes, as we need to open ourselves up to the opposite orientation of the North Node.

Two Nodes must be balanced, but ‘balance’, and the scales aren’t always stable. A little thing, a breeze, can tilt them this way or that. Especially at the beginning, when we’re young, we desperately cling to the South Node, because that’s where our safety is.

We are in need to alter and create our lives through our conscious awareness.

The events around the influences of Nodes are when we can feel very strongly that we need to adjust our lives, our mindset, and we seem to have a hard time.

Sometimes we go hassling in all directions, rather desperately, and nothing works, and we don’t know why. There is a lot of fear involved; a fear is diffused and non-specific. We often feel that something is ‘wrong’ with our way of being, of our way of relating to the world, but we don’t know what or why. This is not a Saturn fear with its emphasis on responsibility and doing the right thing. Saturn practically insists reins of our lives, and we just make clear-cut decisions to make and a clear way forward. Whereas the Nodal influences are slippery, it’s often about feeling as if we aren’t living up to our expectations; that we aren’t committed enough to our growth

. We may feel that we might as well give up because that new orientation that’s nagging at us probably isn’t really who we are anyway (or so we tell ourselves). Our reaction to our North Node direction at this time depends a great deal on aspects to our North Node and its ruler.

A North Node ruler always is capable of helping to reach out towards what we must become. When the North Node ruler is not so well aspected, our lessons will be harsh, and we might be unwilling to do the right thing–and run away from our progress.

The lessons of Nodes will be more fierce and intense each time we ignore to act in the coming situations. Our lives will become more difficult. We often won’t understand why our way forward is blocked.

The North Node ruler operates in a way that can be completely unconscious (this also true for the planets that conjunct the North Node, or square the Nodes).

The North Node has a bit of a built-in haze around it.

Our North Node rulers often point the way to our greatest blind spots and self-deception, as well as to the place we can best access our spiritual growth.

If we have a cluster of planets on the North Node that force us into awareness, accessing our North Node will be easier, but it may not necessarily be more conscious (ask anyone with Pluto on the North Node).

For most of us, our North Node energy can only be tapped into through awareness, instinct, and trial and error. The more conscious we are of where we need to be, the easier it is to get there. (The Sun and Moon relations also can say about how we process our nodal experience).

The ruler of the North Node is a guiding star, as long as we keep our eyes open. And always, we need to remember that there is no ‘end’ to integrating the Nodes, it is our spiritual discovery forever and after.

The rewards for the struggle are many. The North Node, once accessed, holds our greatest gift—a spiritual strength and an integration of consciousness that can’t be altered or destroyed by anything in the external world. We build an indestructible bridge between our inner knowledge and our external reality so that our mind/soul and the life we live is fully integrated. We become one with the world, no longer under the illusion of separation. In doing so, we become ourselves entirely.

And if you date, marry or join forces with someone 9-10 years older or younger than you, there’s a good chance you will have the opposite nodes. (For example, your south node is Virgo, and their north node is Virgo). This can be a powerful but polarizing pairing—you’ve both mastered what the other one has come here to learn. If you combine your natural skills, you can be unstoppable.