Saturn and the Stuff Life is Made Of

A reader from the UK named Will is facing his Saturn Return with confidence. He's already met the Taskmaster head-on these past two 1/2 years, with his Ascendant and four planets in Leo, including the Sun, Moon, Mercury and Jupiter. Saturn guided this mega-Leo away from a high-pressure job, and on the path to adventure. "I think the most enlightening thing," says Will, "I realized looking back at it, it was when I deliberately downgraded my career to take on a less intense, more fun role." Later this year, he'll be working toward becoming a licensed scuba instructor.

During my Saturn Return, I spent a lot of time in a Japanese-style bathhouse. I didn't know then that the alchemists called the purification of earthly existence, "taking a sweatbath with Saturn." It was a time of stripping down on a lot of levels. Taking all that time was a leap of faith that eventually I would get to a foundation to build on. To get by, I found jobs that didn't suck (my energy). Sometimes Saturn transits mean dismantling structures to find what's real. And that takes time.

Thanks to Elsa for posting (on the Top Ten) a link to Saturn Return As a Cyclical Rite of Passage by astrologer Joe Landwehr. He writes about this life passage, as the most famous of many important Saturn-Saturn transits over a lifetime. They are turning points when structures are built up and/or broken down. Saturn is so often made to be the baddie. But these transits remind you of a planet's true expression, and get you seeking structures that support that. During his own Saturn Return, Landwehr left a stifling job to homestead in the Ozarks. He writes, "I may be relatively poor by society's standards, but in allegiance to my dream, I am living a life where my time is essentially my own."