Words for the People

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

With Saturn in your 2nd House through October 29, 2009, your lesson this year continues to be: Get real about your money. You can build true personal wealth this year, but you need to be detail-oriented about your money. Know what you make and know what you spend. Know what you need to make in order to live the life you want. Don't cut corners, but don't inflate. In other words, if you need a reliable car, budget for a reliable car, not a brand new Mercedes. Paying attention to your money will enable you to quit worrying about money. When you quit worrying you can move into a heart space of gratitude, which is the key to all abundance. This in and of itself will make you considerably richer.

From 2005 to 2007 you had Saturn in your sign. Because Saturn always brings challenges to the area of our life he touches, this was a period where you had to really step up and take on increased responsibilities. The 1st House (your sun sign) is the house of the self and your personal identity, and Saturn pushed you to take full responsibility for your actions and attitudes. Part of Saturn's lesson was to learn to really respect yourself. You are so innately focused on bringing the fun for everyone else in your life that you can fall into patterns of not respecting your own needs. But if you ignore your needs long enough, you turn into a shell of yourself. A Leo who has lost her luster is a sad sight indeed.

So while you probably dealt with more responsibility than almost ever before during this period, you also learned to say no to the types of people who used to drain your energy with their ceaseless demands for attention. With everything you had going on, you simply couldn't afford some of the energy-wasting people and behaviors you used to tolerate. Saturn in the 1st House definitely isn't a "fun" energy signature; Saturn and "fun" don't often hang out in the same places. But the end result of this period is that you became a much stronger individual with an internalized knowledge that you can do anything you put your mind to, if you're willing to apply the persistent commitment Saturn demands.

As Antero Alli points out in Astrologik:

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.

In the most basic sense, the 2nd House of your horoscope represents the benefit that you earn from being yourself (1st House). If you worked with Saturn to overcome your fears, embrace your duties, and achieve self-mastery during the last two years, the result was a stronger, more viable self. It only stands to reason, then, that your benefits or profits would increase accordingly. This is what Saturn in your 2nd House wants to do: help you raise your personal standard of living just as he helped you raise your level of integrity during his transit of your 1st House.

Saturn wants to make you self-sufficient in every way, and he will do this by exposing the childish attitudes you still hold toward your money (and on a deeper level toward the life energy that your money symbolizes) and challenging you to replace them with mature, adult patterns.

A big determinant of your success or failure in this mission will be your attitude. As astrologer Greg Bogart put it in a recent interview in The Mountain Astrologer: "Saturn transits can bring their challenges and adversities, but I choose to believe that these experiences are in some sense intended for us. I try to hold the awareness that 'I really need this.' Saturn teaches us to be more responsible for what is happening to us, for how our lives are unfolding."

Accepting that on some level you chose this challenge and consciously working with it can radically change your experience of a Saturn transit. Rather than seeing it as one setback after another, you can experience Saturn in your 2nd House as a slow but ultimately exhilarating process, the end result of which will be a whole new level of self-sufficiency and the personal freedom that comes with not being dependent on others to sustain you.

Hard work is a strong theme this year, but Saturn in your 2nd House isn't about working harder. With Virgo as the sign in your 2nd House, your key lesson here will be discrimination. What Saturn in Virgo is going to help you understand is what you need in order to feel secure and carry out your soul mission, and which of your values and possessions are draining your vital forces and blocking you from moving forward. Saturn's energy here could manifest either by subtraction or addition. You may have to let go of some possessions, tools or sources of income that you've outgrown. There is a strong likelihood you will have to systematically cut down on interactions with people, places and things that aren't contributing to your mission of becoming strong, secure and financially self-sufficient.

On the other hand, it's quite likely that Saturn will push you to acquire new tools and resources that you need in order to grow more abundant. You may realize that you need to hire an employee in order to help you work more efficiently, for example. You may have to lay out an investment for a video editing suite to finish your movie. You may realize that you need to charge more for your services in order to afford the life your soul wants you to live these days.

Leos hate to disappoint. The last thing you'd ever want is for someone to disapprove of you or think you a miser. Although your ability to love anyone and everyone is one of your finest qualities, it can also be one of your biggest pitfalls. The 2nd House describes your core set of values, the code you live by. And you know you're not really helping anyone when you allow energy vampires to suck you away from what you value and into meaningless, time-wasting dramas. Fortunately, Saturn in Virgo will help you to quite calmly and rationally delineate to the poor unfortunates who just can't survive without your free energy why it's important that you stay on task.

While it will take hard work, perseverance and an unwavering commitment to realizing your own self-sufficiency, the promise of Saturn in your 2nd House is nothing less than personal security and wealth - the feeling that you have enough to meet whatever challenges life throws your way. I hope you embrace it.