Words for the People

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

With Saturn in your 5th House through October 29, 2009, your lession for the year is: Respect your creative energy. What is the unique gift you have to give to Life? Be willing to do the work it takes to develop it. Sharing this gift with the rest of the world will enrich your life beyond recognition. This year is the time to get in the trenches with yourself and identify the self-sabotaging habits and programs that keep you from consistently expressing the joyful creative genius that lives inside you. Learn to love your process like you would love your own child. I suggest a strong dose of inner child work this year, such as The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron, to help you unfold your gift to the highest level.

The 5th House is the house of creativity, self-expression, children and romantic love. The 5th House is where we look when we're looking for evidence of new love, but be aware that any new romantic relationship that starts during this period will almost certainly come with its fair share of challenges. One of the classic readings of a relationship that starts with Saturn in the 5th House is that the new partner is still secretly or not so secretly attached to their previous lover. That's one of those astrological rules I learned from my mentor Susan Miller and while it doesn't necessarily always have to be the case, I have verified it in my consulting practice.

Saturn always brings responsibility to the part of your chart he is visiting. Known as the Teacher Planet, Saturn represents the energy within us that helps us learn self-discipline, learn to persevere in the face of adversity, and that ultimately enables us to build the structures of our life 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. So 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 increased contact 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 these different 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" authority figure and the more capable we are of using his energy to create the structures that enable us to become successful on the material plane.

As an example of how this might work in the 5th House, take a new romantic relationship. If your normal procedure in falling in love has been a "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead" approach, with Saturn in this area of your chart, you might set up an internal checklist you use to evaluate potential lovers. Even if your feelings are head over heels, you check the other person's behavior against your list of important character traits a partner should possess. This might also be a time when you need to tighten up rules or boundaries with one of your children. In both of these scenarios, Saturn is helping you use your energy wisely. By refusing to waste time with potential partners who don't respect your needs, you are saving yourself a lot of heartache and saving your love energy for someone who will respect you. By being firm with your child, you are saving yourself the energy drain of repeated clashes over boundaries and helping your child move toward maturity and self-responsibility.

If you are an artist, Saturn in the 5th House can represent a time when you struggle mightily with your creativity. Sometimes you can feel as if you are working harder than ever and failing to reap the success, results and acclaim you deserve for your efforts. This is Saturn's way of testing your process. Are you committed enough to your art to do what's necessary to create a viable product that will stand the test of time (time is an eminently Saturnian quality)? Are you working in the field or modality that feeds your soul? If you're in the wrong field, it's awfully hard to keep working when you don't see the results you want.

If we do what he demands of us, Saturn always gives us a gift when he leaves a house for good. So, if what you're doing is in alignment with your soul's mission and you continue to push through adversity, you can be confident of abundant outer-world results when Saturn leaves your 5th House for good in 2009-2010.