Words for the People

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

With Saturn in your 12th House through October 29, 2009, your lesson this year continues to be: Clear your karma. Unburden yourself of the repressed hurt and pain and grief and disappointment that keeps you from being able to love fully. I would love to be able to give you a more sunshiny, Libra-esque task this year, but with Saturn in your 12th House, it's time to go deep into your soul and haul up all the old wreckage and gunk that is blocking your channel to the Source. Meditation, self-hypnosis, journaling, and bodywork (such as somato-emotional release therapy) are all good avenues for reaching and releasing this internalized dark energy. Summon the courage to face your secret fears.

The 12th House is not traditionally considered a positive area of the horoscope, because it represents what is hidden to us. The ancients called this "the house of self-undoing." Modern astrology tends to regard it as the domain of the subconscious mind, where competing archetypes jostle for power and where the personal ego melds into the collective unconscious.

"Self-undoing," in this context, acquires another layer of meaning. To die to the personal ego, to let go of the separating, always-unsatisfied desires of the lower mind, is to undo the self. While the 12th House traditionally has connotations to illness, madness and imprisonment (the effects of self-undoing carried out in an unconscious way), it also holds the promise of transcendence. As all of us who have passed even a moment at the level of universal consciousness know (perhaps through playing music or singing, group meditation, or sexual union), the bliss of self-transcendence is the greatest joy we can experience. We come to realize that the real prison is the limited egoic self, and on the other side of those bars is a freedom and a joy that language cannot describe, only point towards.

Saturn in the 12th House can be a very uncomfortable energy. The way Saturn seems to function in the 12th House is to bring to our conscious awareness all of the trauma, karma, and emotional baggage we have stuffed down inside our psyche because it was too painful to deal with at the time. The best perspective I've found for dealing with this transit is to view it as a two-year window of opportunity to transmute the internalized dark matter that is holding you back from living freely and joyously in the moment.

Saturn transits demand that we take responsibility for ourselves and be willing to work persistently to do what needs to be done in order to overcome fear and master the area of our life in question. On some level, you've always known that the bottled up hurts and griefs and grievances haven't gone away, but are hiding in your cells and nervous system, steadily siphoning off your life energy and laying the groundwork for disease and decrepitude. Now Saturn is forcing your hand, as it were; by relentlessly denying you the ability to pretend that dark matter away, Saturn is giving you the opportunity to move through a whole lot of it in a a short period of time.

The 12th House symbolizes places of retreat or confinement, and practicing some form of meditation on a regular (daily, preferably) basis is highly encouraged under this transit. Since Virgo is an Earth (physical) sign ruled by mental planet Mercury, therapies that work with the mind-body connection are highly effective in accomplishing the inner alchemy Saturn wants you to undertake now. Tai chi, qui gong, yoga, martial arts, kirtan (devotional chanting) and breath work are powerful meditation practices that work specifically to transmute blocked and impacted energy into love and light.

Scheduling a monthly massage, Reiki treatment or other form of body energy work would be a wise investment now; do it, and you'll be amazed at the difference in your emotional reality at the end of the year.