Neptune Transits: 11th House

When Neptune transits the 11th house your need for transcendence and imagination influences your friendships, long-term goals and relationship to society. Neptune inspires new dreams and dissolves old structures and represents your need to spiritualise and refine this area of your life.

When Neptune transits the 11th house you may experience inspiration and confusion with your friends and group associations, your social networks and community, and your long-term goals, aspirations and hopes.

Your friends may inspire you to explore new ideas and possibilities that change your life, or you may be alone and unable to find others who share your ideals or worldview. You could meet new friends who are Neptunian, such as musicians, artists, healers, and mystics, as well as alcoholics and drug addicts, or those who are evasive or mysterious, or struggling with mental or emotional instability.

You may need to be careful of the people you’re drawn to because you’re vulnerable to being dragged into the undertow or caught in dubious situations. You could fall in with the wrong crowd and end up in a bad place, so remember to be discerning. You could become disillusioned by the whole concept of friendship and need to re-examine your expectations of others.

You may want to join creative groups where you can explore your imagination, or get involved in a spiritual group or church, or work in the community helping those who are less fortunate than you. You may have a utopian vision of society and want to join humanitarian causes or social justice movements to promote the rights of individuals and the natural world.

But you could also lose yourself in a group and become evangelical and irrational about pushing their agenda. Your ego could become inflated with the certainty of your cause leading to criminal acts that bring you crashing back to reality. You may end up feeling misled or exploited by a group that behaves more like a cult and could become disillusioned with the ideals you’re involved with.

This will then allow you to examine your ideals and develop a more emotionally mature or responsible approach to making them real. Changing the world isn’t such an easy thing and you may need to do more inner work and growth before you can effectively serve humanity.

Not all of your goals or hopes for the future will be possible or realistic and you may need to let some of them go. You may feel confused or lost because you don’t know where your life is heading or what you want to believe in. But this uncertainty encourages you to explore your options and find new goals that may be better suited to who you are. You could receive a vision that takes your life in a completely new direction.

Possibilities with Neptune transiting the 11th House:

Making friends with Neptunian types
Sharing your inspiration with friends
Exploring your creativity in a group
Joining a new church or spiritual community
Expressing your compassion through social causes
Inspired by a new vision of your future life

Watch out for:

Loss of friends
Being betrayed or led astray by friends
Sacrificing too much for your friends
Joining a cult
Overzealous commitment to a cause
Disillusionment with your long-term goals

My notes:

Neptune transited my 11th house from 1981 to 1990, from age 10 to 20, and coincided with my early schooling and then leaving to work for a year before going off to attend college. This was when my music obsession really kicked in and took over and I became lost in music! My entire childhood and young adult life was taken up with music. All my friends and the groups that I was involved with were musicians and this continued through the whole transit.

I was already playing the piano at the start of this transit and as Neptune crossed between the 10th and 11th houses, I began playing the flute too. My piano teacher lived with her boyfriend who was a flautist and this had inspired me. I remember badgering my parents to buy me a flute because I was convinced it was the instrument for me – I simply had to have it!

It turns out I was correct and the flute quickly became my favourite and I achieved my Grade 8 with distinction within 5 years of starting. In the meantime, I joined several orchestras, including the Brighton Junior Youth Orchestra and the East Sussex Youth Concert Band. We had great fun touring Europe in the summer holidays during the 80s – two coachloads of kids driving around Germany, Belgium and Holland playing concerts, drinking too much and misbehaving.

Later I began to play the alto saxophone and attended the Guildhall Summer School in London several years in a row where I played in multiple groups and met a variety of interesting people – all musicians.

After leaving school I worked for a year to save money before going off to college to study music. My first job was at Asda working on the checkouts and I lasted 9 days before walking out – it wasn’t for me! I ended up at the Virgin Megastore where I had fun sharing my knowledge of music and making new friends. These friends weren’t musicians but they did love music which was good enough for me.

During this time I was writing songs with an old school friend and we hired a studio to record the tracks. This inspired my new dream of becoming a sound engineer that wouldn’t be realised until much later when Neptune was in my 12th house.

As this transit came to an end, I left home and moved to Newcastle in 1989 to study on the Graduate Diploma course for jazz and popular music, one of the few performing arts courses in those days (it’s a BMus (Hons) course now). It started well and I was living my dream of doing music.

But as Neptune approached my 12th house, things started to unravel. Suddenly I was surrounded by musicians who were better than me and I had a crisis of confidence – made worse by the boozing – and started to doubt myself and what I was doing…