Words for the People

Saturn in Virgo, 2007-2009: Meaning for the Sign of Cancer

With Saturn remaining in your solar 3rd House through October, 2009, your lesson for the year is: Listen to your inner dialogue. Develop an acute awareness of your thoughts. This can be frustrating and painful in the beginning. Most of us spend much of our waking time avoiding our thoughts (by reading, listening to music or talk radio, watching television, talking, taking drugs, etc.). When you finally get the courage to tune in to your inner dialogue it can be a shocking wake-up call. But your thoughts create your reality and until you become the master of your thoughts, you'll never be the master of your world. You can become a mastermind this year; commit to the hard work and discipline required to be a warrior of the mind.

The 3rd House describes the lower mind, the thinking and language patterns that operate at the level of waking consciousness. (The opposite house, the 9th House, describes the deeper levels of the mind, such as our internalized belief systems, visionary states, dreams, and intuitive knowing.)

Because Virgo is the sign associated with your 3rd House, there is a strong physical or material component to your mental make-up. A physical Earth sign ruled by mental planet Mercury, Virgo is concerned with the mind-body connection and how to achieve a balance between the physical and the mental realms in order to promote order, health and productivity. Cancerians are renowned for their powerful faculty of memory, which could be described as the mental recall of physically-experienced events.

Whereas air sign Gemini (the other Mercury-ruled sign) thinks for the sheer delight of thinking, Virgo's mental processes are always oriented to have an effect on material reality. As one of the four cardinal signs of the zodiac (the signs that initiate a new season in the Northern Hemisphere), you are by nature one who starts things; a creator, a catalyst. One of the key Virgo themes is being of service to others, and this is a strong component of your mental make-up. You intuitively sense where others need help and are adept at coming up with nurturing solutions.

Known as the Teacher Planet, Saturn brings lessons in responsibility to whatever part of our life he touches. But Saturn also represents the energy within us that helps us develop discipline, learn to persevere in the face of adversity, and that ultimately enables us to build successful structures in the external world. In the body, Saturn symbolizes the skeletal system and the skin - these structures define where we end and the rest of the world begins; without them we wouldn't be viable human beings. In life, Saturn helps us define our boundaries in relation to the rest of the world. Saturn has a strong association with authority and with rules and procedures; a Saturn transit can either bring us into conflict with these or it can help us establish them in our lives.

What Saturn in your 3rd House will be teaching you this year is the science of how your thoughts create your reality. Think of your mind as a movie projector; the pictures that spool unceasingly before the lens of the projector determine what shows up on the screen of your reality movie.

In this analogy, the pictures in the frames on the filmstrip are your thoughts. We often tell ourselves that we want to live in a certain kind of reality (a loving relationship, a good job, a steady income, harmony at home) yet the thoughts that spool through our mental projector tell a story of worry, anger, disappointment, powerlessness, grief and isolation. No matter how passionately we insist we want the good life, our actions in the mental sphere guarantee us a life full of flaws and disappointments.

Of course, none of us wants to continually project those negative thoughts; the thoughts themselves are a habit of mind created by our emotional reaction to negative parenting, abusive or threatening childhood environments, and the steady stream of media programming we have all ingested in a lifetime of being consumers. Unfortunately, the fact that we don't want the negative thoughts on the filmstrip doesn't make them go away. It takes work to become aware of the self-defeating, self-destructive thought loops that create our repeating patterns of unhappiness. But once we commit to this work, we learn we can systematically delete negative mental programs and replace them with thoughts that will create a reality of happiness, success, fulfillment and inner peace.

In his wonderful astrological primer Astrologik, author, playwright, and subversive utopian Antero Alli notes that Saturn operates on a trinary cycle of fear, duty and mastery. "By facing the fear, specific knowledge is revealed to support the kind of duty required to take full responsibility for our lack of development in that area. With persistence of commitment, our duty can establish for us enough command to manifest increasing degrees of mastery."

We aren't often willing to put in the hard, persistent effort Saturn requires of us without first becoming aware of why that work is needed. As Alli points out:

Saturn represents an area that stays undeveloped as long as we show little or no accountability for ourselves. The first thirty years or so of our lives many of us remain as children, psychologically speaking. We still seek approval from parental figures or play grown-up by replicating adult roles; start a business or get married....When Saturn is integrated, we produce tangible results and, it is almost always specific to who we are.

Most of us in the West remain incredibly infantile on the level of our minds. This isn't our fault - it is how we are programmed to be. There's a tremendous amount of power and money invested in keeping us in a state of childish irresponsibility where our thoughts are concerned. What Saturn will do for you this year is turn up the volume on those childish thoughts until you really can't stand them anymore. At that point, you have a couple options. You can run for the Prozac or the Paxil or the Jack Daniels, or you can stand up and accept your duty, which is to become the master of your thoughts.

The best way to look at a Saturn transit is as a test of your reality structures. If the structures you currently have in place are appropriate to your life and your current evolutionary needs, then Saturn will help you build upon them to achieve success. But Saturn will also show you the weak links in your life, giving you the choice of fixing those weak points or of watching your structure tumble down under his rather relentless pressure.

What this means for you this year is that your mind can either become a very hellish place to be, or you can commit to the work of mastering your thoughts and say, along with affirmation guru Louise Hay, "My thoughts are my best friends."

Since Saturn is the natural ruler of your 7th House of committed relationships, every change you make in your thought patterns will produce a corresponding change in your relationships. As A Course In Miracles says, "I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thoughts." Of course you already know the truth of this better than most, as your innate sensitivity enables you to pick up on the thoughts of others whenever you really need to do so. Now you get to apply this universal wisdom to your own mind and watch yourself transform into a magnet for loving, abundant relationships.

Learn to listen to your internal dialogue this year. Virgo energy demands honesty and you need to be honest with yourself about your self-talk before you can improve it. While affirmations are often considered a sissy form of self-help pop medicine, the word "affirm" means to make something firm or real. There's nothing weak about replacing self-destructive inner dialogue such as "I don't know" or "I'm stupid" with a positive statement that makes firm your mental power and intelligence.

Body energetic practices such as tai chi, qui gong, yoga, dance, and martial arts are also very effective in taming your internal dialogue. In fact, many indigenous wisdom traditions hold that because experience and emotional memory are stored in the body, only by changing the body can you make lasting changes to the mind.

Another powerful technique you can use this year is to severely limit your media intake. It's hard to have a mind full of loving, positive, life-affirming thoughts when you are filling your mind up with the anger, self-hatred, and fear that characterize 90 percent of all commercial media.