This is the Astrological view and an explanation of common life crises that might occur two or three times per average life, especially during the early 30’s or late 50’s. A helpful guide written by Chiron, our in house Astrologer.
Before we start on this, it is important to clear up one particular issue. Astrology is an Art, which believes that all of us have free will. A horoscope is calculated for a particular person, to analyse a map of their strengths and their weaknesses , to explain which ones are the strongest and most useful and how they can use them for their benefit.
Astrology is very often mistaken for fortune telling, and that is very far from the truth. The horoscope is analysed to inform a person about their best traits and how they can use them to combat their potential flaws. It is not definitive and is created specifically aiming to put the person in the driving seat. It does not believe in ‘bad’ or ‘good’ horoscopes and most astrologers never come across anything they would brand as that. In fact, most things within a horoscope that Astrologers would consider potentially ‘bad’ are the ones which are potentially making everything way too easy. They are branded ‘bad’ because their owners lack character due to their overly easy life. So, now we have this clear you can read on.
In nearly thirty years of professional astrological work, I have come across so many people in their late 20’s and early 30s, or in their late 50’s, who were tearing their hair out, stricken with what they believed to be unbelievable sudden bad luck. None of these people had ever heard of the term ” Saturn return”, and when I mentioned it to them, they just looked at me with a blank look on their face, as if I was talking some non-understandable language. Which of course I was!
So, what is it, and how does it relate to the situation in hand?
Let me first give you a few pieces of information, which you can use to quickly calculate when this potentially turbulent period approaches in your own life, as nobody can really fully escape it. Saturn is a planet Astrologers use as a guide to examine the life lesson for each person, by analysing its placement in one’s chart.
At the time of a child’s birth, the sky looks in a particular way. Various heavenly bodies sit up there in every corner of the sky, some more astrologically important than others. All celestial bodies present at that moment, which are used in Astrology, are placed on the chart and this is called the Natal chart. Natal chart is a map that applies to the whole life, and covers every minute the baby is going to live for the rest of their life. Astrologers use this to analyse everything from personality to intellectual, financial and romantic potential of a person.
However, that is a picture, which shows only the map of the sky at the time of birth. As time goes on, the picture of the actual sky changes, as planets continue to move after we are born. This movement of planets still affects our chart, as we are not separate to the Universe around us. If we see our neighbourhood as our immediate environment, we can presume that transiting planets in the sky are our immediate surroundings in an astrological sense. This means that every transiting planet affects us in the same way every passer-by, or person who knocks on our door, or our lovers, friends and family affect us in our “Earthly” life.
This is how planets transiting over our chart affect our astrological influences. As we, in our daily life, take a certain amount of time to return home from work, return to the place where we started our journey this morning, this is how planets in our chart take time to come back to the same place where they were when we were born. As their orbits are different they all take a different time to do this. To return! This is how we come to the term “return”.
Some of them are so slow that they never come back in one lifetime, whereas some come back once a year, or two years or fourteen years and so on. The influence and meaning of each return is different in importance as much as in the nature of its consequences. Saturn return has a very bad reputation in both cases. Almost completely unjust and untrue. Well, even the most popular get bad press from time to time, as far as it goes Saturn gets it all the time. This is exactly why we should know more about it.
Saturn takes approximately twenty- nine years to return to its original place in our Natal chart. As he looks at himself face to face for the first time since we were born, this is exactly what we are doing in our own life, down here on Earth. Depending on which house in our chart he resides in, this will be the very area of life that will be examined first, or shall we say the most. The chart is divided into twelve houses, or areas, which cover everything from inner self, to finance, love life, children, inheritance, career, home, parents, health and so on… Considering that in each house there are a few different areas of life, grouped in clusters, the whole cluster will be affected and each and every part of the chart which has any connection with it. This can be very interconnected and complicated at times. This is why people have a feeling there is a whole streak of bad luck affecting many areas of their life. Why is it always bad? Does it have to be? No and no.
Let’s make an experiment. Have a walk around your home. It is not important how long you have been living there. Have a look around and answer a few simple questions. Do you like the placement of some content as much as you liked it when you originally placed it there? Is there anything in your home that you have already wanted to move, remove or replace but just have not managed to do it as yet? Is there anything that is irritating you on a daily basis, you just have no time or money to get rid of it or buy a replacement? Or is there someone who lives with you who doesn’t agree to that change? Would they leave your home if you made some radical changes to make yourself happy and comfortable? Have you answered yes to any of these questions? Either way, this shows your attitude to your own happiness, in a microcosm sort of way. It shows how you deal with your life in general. Now, Saturn will make you do this with your whole life, and especially within the area of your chart where it sits. Are you ready? Most of us are not. Most of us even don’t know he is doing it. So what can we do?
This, we can apply back to our home situation again. If you can imagine that you have not replaced that chair for so long, purely due to the fact you could not be bothered. One day you arrive home tired, sit on it and it breaks underneath you! What can happen? You can have a good laugh at best or injure yourself at worst. Either way, you will have to buy a new chair or you will have no chair to sit on, so to speak.
This is how it is in life with Saturn return. You simply have to change things. Anything that is too old, outlived, anything that bothers you and stops you from growing as an individual it will have to go, or it will break. When a chair breaks, it’s a bit different compared to when a relationship breaks down, but if you really look at it you will find out that it broke a long time ago, you just had no courage to change it. How many times have I heard these sentences: ” I have done everything possible to save this relationship! I have lost all my friends over it and it still does not work. I have even fallen out with my family in order to please. Now I have no life, no home, no friends, what am I going to do? ” Sound familiar? Read on. Saturn did not take this person’s friends, partner and family away, Saturn only pointed out that there is no more left to give. No more room for growth, personal growth. So, the relationship had to go. To make room for something better, something less destructive and limiting. So all those lovely people who actually love you for who you are can come back into your life. And of course another, better, lovelier and supportive person can come into your life.
Another common situation is when people lose their job. Nine out of ten times, once asked about the job in more detail, clients confess that they have either hated the job itself, or have been badly treated and under-appreciated in their working environment. Once they think about it, they admit that if there was something else available they would have taken it long ago. Ten out of ten times they never even looked for something else. Was it supposed to turn up on their doorstep of it’s own accord?
Most people ask how can they avoid this happening to them, is it at all possible? It is, to a very large extent. But avoidance might not be exactly the right word.
First of all, we have to see a Saturn return for what it really is. Is it a time in life when some bad, evil planet is going to bring bad luck and take all the necessities away? If we see it that way and just sit there helplessly, doing nothing, this just might be what it is going to turn out to be. Luckily not for too long, as very often, once a person is made redundant, as if by magic, the ideal job they never dreamed of having, appears out of thin air, and they cannot believe their luck. This does not happen immediately, as Saturn is a relatively a slow moving planet but it does come eventually. This time, Saturn’s lesson has shown us to look for things we do like and will take us to the path of making solid foundations to a life we really want to live. So, thirty-somethings out there, don’t despair, it will all make sense, eventually…
What Saturn return really is, is a time in human life when individuals are going through their first real rebellious phase. Remember teen years, spots and tantrums? That was just a rehearsal. Saturn return is the real thing.
As humans , we rebelled against the authority of our parents, teachers and society and its formalities then, now we are rebelling against anything that we have personally created in our lives, while we were still guided by our upbringing. As teenagers, we did it while confused about our identity, this time we have enough life experience to know what we really want. Only problem here is this time we have our own choices to rebel against. This is hard. It is as if we first have to admit to ourselves that we have already failed in what we have done so far. Wrong job at age thirty? Wrong marriage with two kids? What a disaster. Really? Don’t forget that Saturn will make another trip in another twenty-nine and a half years, for your second Saturn return and then you will be fifty- eight. How about that for a disaster? This is why it is so important to get your first one right. It is much easier to change your life in your early 30’s than in your late 50’s. This is common sense. However this is easier said than done.
There is certainly a need to explain this theme of failure in the context of a Saturn return. Failure and fear of failure are “Saturnian” characteristics in its negative aspect. According to Astrology, as humans, during Saturn return we are not really admitting to ourselves that we have failed in our choices, even if it feels like that. What we are admitting is that our needs and wants have changed from what they were before. There is a difference. While we liked things, situations or people we brought in to our lives before thirty years of age, often this was what we thought we were meant to be doing. The life we were meant to be living, as our parents did, in the way that meant we were continuing our family values as a group. Now, we are becoming an individual in our own right, which might find all the values with which we were brought up, irrelevant to our personal happiness. This results in conflict with the environment, which inevitably brings feeling of failure and not fitting within society. This is only an illusion. Maybe so, but it feels so real in life that it stops people attempting any change at all until it is very late, sometimes too late.
Very often I suggest to an individual to have their year horoscope analysed for their 29th or 30th birthday. The yearly horoscope should tell them what is the area of life most affected, how this can influence areas from other houses/areas of activity, predict timings and how to deal with it. In reality, people have all this done and often they go home and still do nothing about it. They are back six months later, in the middle of some kind of disaster and asking for help. An astrologer cannot help more than to give relevant information, the rest is up to the person themselves. Otherwise it’s pointless.
I have realised from my clients’ experience, and also from my own Saturn return, that the reason for this behaviour is a huge fear, previously unknown to a person until this time occurs in their life. It is not just the intensity of it, but the quality of it. It is feeling as if someone is stripping every inch of their innermost self and throwing it all away. It is psychological nakedness. Even worse, it is the fact that one resists change with all their might, but at the same time feels annoyingly desperate to change their life with such unbearable urgency. It is this contradiction that is the hardest part. This also eats precious time in which to act on the problem.
Everyone makes a few wrong choices, so what? That’s life. It is what they are going to do about it that Saturn is concerned with. Many people find out that if they don’t go with the flow, and don’t admit to themselves that they are not happy in a certain situation, the whole thing falls apart at this time anyway. In this case they have much less control over it, as they have waited unprepared until it has actually happened. Saturn is very generous with his influence. He will, and this is a fact, give a plenty of warnings.
It all starts with becoming more aware of all the areas in life which are not working for the best, feeling it much more than usual. Feelings of dissatisfaction and restlessness are another common warning sign. It is important to look at the cause of these feelings and then act on it. Saturn is a wise teacher, he is known as the ‘God of time’ and he doesn’t like hasty decisions. This is why he will give anyone plenty of time to gather their thoughts and make their decisions. He has never hurried anyone, therefore unfortunately, people during this transit behave more like “Saturnian” types, they also take their time to act on it in fear of making the wrong decision, sometimes too long.
A bit of a vicious circle? Well, yes, but if you are aware of all this, then it all comes much easier, not that I use the word lightly. Of all the people that I have seen going through their Saturn return, the ones that had the least ties in their life were the ones that lived through it with the least problems. The reason for this is that anything that ties us down at this time can feel like a burden. Anything that limits our choices and anyone else we have to take in consideration while making them can feel like we have been tied down. This is yet another tool Saturn’s given to us to move on, on the way to freedom and a happy life in which we can be true to ourselves.
This is when we come back to your home picture. Do you think you want to have another look? Do you still like that vase on the top shelf? The one, which you cannot really see as it is rather hidden. The one that looks like it is going to fall down because it sits in the darkest corner at the very edge. It was a rather expensive Christmas present two years ago, and it is still there only because it came from your mother in law. But really, you never want to look at it. If you hate it, get rid of it. It will only fall on someone’s head one day, most likely yours. And yes, do it now.
By Chiron the Skywatcher
If you wish to contact Chiron or have your horoscope analysed please email :
horoscope@berkshirewoman.com
horoscopes@berkshirewoman.com