Words for the People

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

With Saturn in your solar 4th House of home, family, roots, property and emotional/security patterns in 2009, your lesson this year continues to be: Take responsibility for your emotions. You'd much rather feed your media jones than process your emotions, but learning how to accept your feelings without judgment or escapism is key to your success in 2009 and in the years to come. Your home is an outpicturing of your emotional reality and you could be moving, buying a house, or renovating your current space this year. You may also be dealing with hard issues involving a parent or family-of-origin issues. Accept this challenge and commit to the hard and consistent work it often takes to really process your childhood and the emotional habit patterns it left you with. The only way to ever experience the security you desire on a consistent basis is to gain your emotional freedom, and the only way you will do that is by finding the courage to face your issues head on and resolutely move through them.

Although he is known somewhat less than affectionately as the Teacher Planet, Saturn also represents the energy within us that helps us develop discipline, learn to persevere in the face of adversity, and 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.

Saturn takes about 30 years to make a complete cycle of the zodiac. Most of us experience at least two and often three complete Saturn cycles, and we experience Saturn differently during each of these cycles. Generally, the older we get, the more we can appreciate Saturn's insistence on doing things the right way, working within our limitations, minding the details and taking a structured approach to manifesting the reality we desire. The more we work with Saturn, the less we experience him as a "mean old man" disciplinarian and the more capable we are of working with his energy to create the structures in life that enable us to become successful on the material plane.

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.

On an outer level, this might manifest as a series of challenges having to do with your living space or property that you own. Saturn in Virgo demands attention to detail, discrimination, and service-oriented thinking. For example, if you've been letting the maintenance slide on your home, Saturn may force you to invest in a new roof at this time. If you have rental properties, a finicky tenant may push you to make upgrades that you have been putting off, even though you know they would be beneficial for everyone in the long run. You might also experience this as an increase in responsibility in your home; if you work from home, as many Geminis do, you might occasionally feel trapped under a heavy workload. An extreme example of this transit would be having a sick or declining parent come to live with you.

It's important to remember that, in the words of Louise Hay, "Your home is always an outpicturing of your current state of consciousness." In other words, any issues that come up with your living space or your father or mother are growing out of your own habitual emotional state. While Saturn expects you to deal with the external manifestations of this energy, you can also use the external to point you to the elements within you that are out of balance. Heal these, and You Can Heal Your Life, to quote the title of Hay's revolutionary book on the external manifestations of inner emotional states.

In 2009 Saturn wants you to learn to process your emotions and create a positive psychological outlook. True security doesn't come from owning a big home in the right section of town, it comes from being good with who you are and knowing who you are on the deepest level. Now is the time to clear away any accumulated emotional baggage or habit patterns that are choking off your roots. Building a strong psychological foundation now will set the tone for the next fifteen years of your life, and will determine whether or not you have the strength to take advantage of big career opportunities that will be coming your way approximately seven and fifteen years down the line.