TheSaturnReturns.Com: Saturn in Leo and Saturn in the Fifth House

TheSaturnReturns.Com: Saturn in Leo and Saturn in the Fifth House: Saturn in Leo or in the fifth house, hungers for love. But no one else’s love will ever fulfill that hunger except our own love and self-re...

TheSaturnReturns.Com: Saturn in Scorpio, Saturn in the Eighth House

TheSaturnReturns.Com: Saturn in Scorpio, Saturn in the Eighth House: Saturn in Scorpio or in the Eighth house, by birth or transit, brings up issues around money, sex, inheritance, and attempting to control o...

TheSaturnReturns.Com: Saturn in Libra, Saturn in the Seventh House

TheSaturnReturns.Com: Saturn in Libra, Saturn in the Seventh House: Here we have the alchemy of relationships on the front burner. With Saturn in Libra or in the seventh house we are “cooking” with the temper...

TheSaturnReturns.Com: Saturn in Virgo and Saturn in the Sixth House

TheSaturnReturns.Com: Saturn in Virgo and Saturn in the Sixth House: Priorities and details—these are the key words for Saturn in Virgo and the 6 th house. Oh my goodness, that doesn’t sound like much fun, ...

TheSaturnReturns.Com: Saturn in Pisces, Saturn in the 12th House

TheSaturnReturns.Com: Saturn in Pisces, Saturn in the 12th House: There is a “great longing” for union and transcendence of the mundane with Saturn in Pisces or the 12th house. It is a place where the ...

TheSaturnReturns.Com: Saturn in Aquarius, Saturn in the Eleventh House

TheSaturnReturns.Com: Saturn in Aquarius, Saturn in the Eleventh House: "Chained books at Oxford Library" With Saturn in Aquarius or in the Eleventh house your “work” is around groups and the world of ideas. ...

TheSaturnReturns.Com: Saturn in Capricorn, Saturn in Tenth House

TheSaturnReturns.Com: Saturn in Capricorn, Saturn in Tenth House: With Saturn in its own natural sign and house, there can be a strong desire to be recognized for who you really are, and the good work that ...

TheSaturnReturns.Com: Saturn in Scorpio, Saturn in the Eighth House

TheSaturnReturns.Com: Saturn in Scorpio, Saturn in the Eighth House: Saturn in Scorpio or in the Eighth house, by birth or transit, brings up issues around money, sex, inheritance, and attempting to control o...

The Saturn Return, Part Two

     How do we survive, thrive, and reinvent ourself during the Saturn Return? Saturn is the instinct to commit. Ask yourself this: “If I do nothing else in my entire life, what would be most important for me to make an effort at doing or being?” What would that look like? Would it be creating a better family than the one you were raised in? Inspiring others in a way you wish you had been inspired? Financially, emotionally, or spiritually finding peace or success?



Imagine that you could make a phone call to the “oldest wisest part of yourself” and ask this question. What would you want to build? What do you need to do to get there? Are you doing it yet? The good news is that despite Saturn’s connection with plain hard work and self-questioning, it’s also a time when opportunities present themselves to be thoughtfully examined Procrastination now seems like a bad idea, but quick change isn’t in the air either. Things must be taken slowly and old ways and habits may be having their “death and rebirth” and we need to be patient with ourselves as we move through the process of rebirthing and reinventing ourselves.


Maybe the old lover has finally committed “the last straw” and you know you must end the relationship. You make the difficult break, and then accept an invitation to go out on a date. New possibilities are in the making but the grieving process may take longer than you wish, and your heart slows you down. Or you’ve landed the new job, but the learning curve on it sends you home in tears for the first two weeks. But you hang in there. Or you’re finally pregnant, but you’re so sick you can’t enjoy it. Patience and endurance…hallmarks of Saturn.

 That’s the feeling of the Saturn Returns, but look what’s coming! If you follow through with your new vision, you’ve taken the first steps towards a true new beginning. Saturn likes to create forms and structures and new beginnings, but not without strong foundations. Old unfinished business—your psychological baggage--will stand in the way before your new birth takes place. Real change and self-reinvention calls for you to trust the process as it unfolds.


The Saturn Returns are marked by these kinds of personal milestones. We move, marry, divorce, go back to school, have a baby, leave a job or pick up on an old dream we’ve forgotten about. We do something different. The navigational tools are twofold: we must take a chance now, and we must give it all we can. When we are willing to do that, we are be rewarded.


Saturn asks us “Whose movie am I in?”” and then challenges us to be the director and author. Wouldn’t it be so much easier if we could just read some “manual to life” and have the ghost of “Christmas Future” come to us to show the way? Instead, we are called to become our own best “author-ity,” to truly become the author of our life.


We’re being asked now to re-write our personal life script with our own spiritual muscle. Not always so easy, especially when our life drama is full of people who no longer reflect who we really are and what we are becoming. “Letting go” is another key concept for this time


The human unconscious has ways of conjuring up people, events, and situations that challenge us to the bone. Psychologists sometimes call it projection, and we feel it as the remarkable synchronicity between what’s happening in our inner lives with what’s happening to us in the outer landscape—I don’t think it’s just an uncanny coincidence. At times it’s as if we’ve conjured up whoever or whatever we most wanted to avoid—or attract—in our lives. It’s as if the unconscious “hires” other people to play out parts of our life stories—this one is the boss, this one the victim, this one the unfaithful lover.


At the Saturn Returns you’ve probably “had it” with some of these people and situations and it’s time to write them out of the script of your life drama. At each Saturn Return we are challenged to take back our projections and to look at the drama of our life as our responsibility. It’s too late to blame anyone anymore.


The Second Saturn Return, in the late fifties, is also a time that calls for concrete actions in the real world, but it can be more subtle and occasionally more insidious. If we don’t do what needs to be done now, we might not be given a second chance. If we put off our yearly physical exam or don’t stop the spread of some nasty growth, it may be too late later. If we take a stiff upper lip attitude and deny the fact that “the job is killing me” it may indeed kill you. We need to find ways to “fall upwards” rather than “falling downwards.” We don’t measure our life by the same standards as we did the first half of life: Carl Jung said that when he warned us not to measure the afternoon of our life by the same expectations and attitudes as we did in the “morning of our life.”



As the body ages, depression and physical difficulties inevitably arise, yet as the body becomes less an object of vanity it’s a chance for the Spirit to rise. This is also the time when we may feel an uprising of irritability as a few old habits or attitudes have the chance to rear their nasty heads again. This is because now is the time to cut them off—to be done once and for all with them. You may ask yourself: why am I dealing with these same issues again? The answer is: because you’ve almost resolved them. And the last straw can be the hardest. The hallmark of the second Saturn Return is that as you deal with the old pockets of unfinished business, you gain a new life as well as the sense that you are truly coming into yourself with more integrity than ever before. But it’s a process that involves choices—and when you make good choices, you can be “born again” spiritually—not necessarily in religious sense—but in the wider meaning of that metaphor.


And how do you do that? Priorities need to be clearer, and metaphorical closets and basements cleaned. There is a need to look at what we feel disillusioned about and let the illusions go, lest these old ghosts feed on us and make us bitter. It’s time to slow down and allow more sweetness and companionship into our lives, and to let the wild dogs of ambitious willfulness fight elsewhere. © Elizabeth Spring  Please ask permission before reprinting to: elizabethspring@aol.com  Homepage: www.elizabethspring.com For more information about Saturn Returns: http://thesaturnreturns.blogspot.com/  



 

The Saturn Returns, Part One

“When an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate.” C.G. Jung


The Saturn Returns at ages twenty-nine and fifty-nine are times of great change and opportunity. And so, they can also be times of crisis. What do you think of when you hear the words: “Know Thyself” and “Nothing in Excess”? These were the words inscribed above the sacred oracular temple at Delphi, Greece. One might think that by understanding and trying to live by those wise words one might avoid the great troubles in life. Perhaps they help. Our understanding of these words changes as we age, but life often plays some nasty tricks on us in the meantime. Perhaps this is why folks who understand “just a little” astrology view the coming of the Saturn Returns, at 29 years old and 59 years old with deep sighs. But then, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.



Saturn is a “symbolic planet” that asks us to reinvent ourselves and our ways of living. Not so bad! However in ancient times, when people have fewer choices, Saturn was seen as the “old malefic” and its passage was viewed with some suspicion. “Saturnian” times can feel serious, with occasional bouts of melancholy or delay, but Saturn’s purpose is to re-structure our lives—not to make us miserable. If we don’t resist its call to change, restructure and reinvent ourselves, we will reap its rewards. Saturn transits have a way of slowing us down long enough so that we take a cold hard look at the realities we’ve built up in our lives and find new ways to become the true author—the authority—in our life. We are finally having another chance to become who we really are.


Saturn, in mythology, relates to the harvest, rewarding those who have “worked” for the effort it takes. It brings a good harvest if we’re willing to wait, work and endure. Saturn, acting as the “stern taskmaster” likes nothing better than asking us to take out the garbage (psychological as well as physical) and to dig into the soil (of our psyche) before we plant the new seeds (of new intentions/new life). Its passage in our life—especially at these times of the Saturn Returns, is when we have a chance for real change and life-renewing rewards. How fascinating it is that astrologers today are beginning to see that it is Saturn, not Jupiter, that is truly the planet of luck and opportunity!



There are two Saturn Returns that happen to everybody: the first is between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty, and the second, between the ages of fifty-eight and sixty. Basically the Saturn Return permeates the whole time period. So if you’re around 29 years old, or 59 years old, you’re in it! And as Saturn makes its rounds in our charts (and lives) roughly every seven years, it will be particularly strong if it aspects a major planet in your chart as it returns to its natal position. (Here’s where you do need to see your chart.) So, all Saturn transits give us times of renewal, but these two times are often the strongest.


Astrologically speaking, the first Saturn return is when we truly come into our Self, as before age 29 we’ve been more reacting to what we were born into, than acting out of our true Self. And the second Saturn return is when we get a chance again to reinvent our lives as we move into our wisest Self. Ideally at 29 we would stop doing the same things as we were doing during our twenties, and do something different. Reinvent yourself! And the same is true of the Second Saturn Return at 59--the ways we’ve been living up till now, don’t feel as good—it’s time to take a different route to re-invent yourself. Wouldn’t it be ideal if people could “retire” from their work at this point? But even without retiring, we can start being “pregnant” with our new Self at this time. The Self that will blossom in our sixties.

 So even though our culture sees the age of twenty-one as the time of becoming an adult—it is not so for the astrologically minded--for us it’s twenty-nine. And you may get your Social Security at sixty-five, but it’s at fifty-nine, at the second Saturn Return, that your true personal and social security comes up for review. Saturn Returns can be times of rough passage, or harvest, and they’re usually a bit of both. © Elizabeth Spring This is Part One of three…the rest of the article is on: http://thesaturnreturns.blogspot.com/  Please ask permission to reprint: elizabethspring@aol.com  Or for personal readings: http://www.elizabethspring.com/  

Summer solstice,June 21, 2011, and July 1, 2011 Eclipse

In a span of less than a month we’re experiencing 3 eclipses as well as the turning of the season on the Summer Solstice of June 21st.


One could say that these eclipses and solstice times are about change, transition, faith, and the magic of grace. Transition, as we know, is the process of letting go of the way things used to be and the gradual taking hold again of the new way that is coming into being. In between the letting go and the taking hold again, we are like trapeze artists poised in the air by faith and grace, having left behind the hands or ways that held us, and trusting that we will catch or be caught again, as things move along in graceful rhythm. The transition liminal point is scary. This is the time we are called to trust that we will “walk our talk” and that we will “show up” in our lives, the very best we can.



In times of eclipses or changes, my sense is that we may be thrust temporarily into one of these transitional, almost unconscious places. One might say that the eclipses were feared because they appeared to cause a darkening of either the sun or the moon. Although it is only apparent as seen from the earth, these celestial bodies don’t disappear. Symbolically, the Sun reflects our ego identities and the archetype of the Father, and the Moon represents our emotional nurturing instincts and the archetype of the Mother. So when either of these forces or symbols appear to eclipsed in our psyche, we may feel threatened as we fly through the air like a trapeze artist without the familiar supports of the solar and lunar, the father and mother…not the literal father or mother, but the inner counterparts to these.

 So an eclipse is a New or Full Moon that occurs near the Moons Nodes. They have always signaled times of endings and beginnings, births, deaths, marriages, divorces, career and earth changes. They often feel fated as if we have no control, like being swept along with a current. They expose secrets and awaken us to something that was building on the sidelines of our psyche. On June 15 there was a full moon lunar eclipse in the signs of Gemini and Sagittarius at 24 degrees, symbolically calling us to filter the information overload we each receive, and to find ways to connect the dots of information and insight into personal meaningful patterns that we can digest. It calls us to walk our talk….to be as authentic and yet as transparent as possible. On June 1st and July 1st there are 2 new moon solar eclipses where the Moon casts a shadow on the Earth. On June 1 it is at 11 degrees Gemini, and on July 1st it’s at 9 degrees Cancer. If these are significant places in your astrological chart you may feel it more intensely.

 The summer solstice coming at this time on June 21st is the apex of the masculine solar energy that celebrates the longest day of the year when the sun is at its strongest. It is also, ironically perhaps, the first day of Cancer, the sign most associated with home, family and nurturing. Cancer is ruled by the Moon, so the feminine lunar energy is now dancing with the masculine solar energy and symbolically leaping over the fire together. This is the time when our pagan ancestors lit midsummer fires for purification and protection and prayed for prosperity and creativity. As the masculine and feminine join hands it’s a fertile time to ask yourself: what do I want to create over the next few months? At this midsummer time nature spirits are visible and magic is most potent.

 So taken all together, the symbolic solar and lunar energies have been surging forward and backwards, as we fly through the air, keeping our faith that we will make it through this time of transition. Magic, intention, and faith is surely at play now, as the Universe waits with benevolent hands to catch us. (curious to know more about your chart?  www.elizabethspring.com)

A Peak at the book! "North Node Astrology" Chapter on Family Karmic Inheritance