Saturn/Neptune Conjunction Part 2: Working with Saturn/Living with Uncertainty

Saturn and Neptune traveling together suggest several themes that we can work with in our personal lives. When we add in the fact that they have both recently entered Aries, we can see the most obvious theme of endings and beginnings.

As I mentioned in the last post, both planets will be transiting back and forth between Pisces, the final sign of the Zodiac, and Aries, the first sign of a whole new cycle. When we consider that Neptune has been in Pisces since 2011, and is the modern ruler of Pisces, we see that all the drama and melodrama of the last 14 years arose from our varied reactions to this energy. Neptune has been a major player in the dissolution of our social and political institutions.

Imagine you are watching a movie on a very wide screen. Stories are unfolding, conflict is triggered, fear runs rampant, things begin to fall apart. But what if this is just the prelude to the real story – a hero’s journey of gathering courage, fortifying values, collecting tools and resources in order to repair and rebuild a new reality. And what if all of this story came from the Mind and Heart of the Cosmos? Maybe there’s a higher purpose, a more expanded vision of these times, of who we are and what we are tasked to perform.

We are entering, or perhaps have already entered, the Age of Aquarius. Passage from one Age or Era into another always involves a paradigm shift. It begins with a ritual initiation that calls upon humans to dig deeper for their power. These shifts are signs of an evolution of consciousness. We have gained more experience, gathered more information. We see anomalies in our consensus beliefs that open up cracks in our certainty.

Pluto and Saturn kicked off this initiation back in January of 2020, although it had been brewing in subterranean realms for decades. The first climactic event was the January 6th insurrection – followed by our Pluto return presenting us with the question, “Can we keep our democracy?” Pluto ploughed the depths of our collective unconscious and unearthed our dark side.

Now Saturn has caught up with Neptune and it’s time to face reality, time to take action, time to embody all the spiritual lessons of the past 14 years.

I told you we were going to talk about the personal impact of this conjunction, and I will. I just have to set the context. We live in juicy times. We’re on the verge of a peak experience, or a catastrophic disaster. We’ve lived with the nightmare long enough. Pluto is now sextile Neptune and Saturn, activating an alchemical process in which we can evolve. It will take courage, and Aries is a reservoir of courage.

Aries is ruled by Mars. We have an opportunity to birth a new masculine energy, to release the patriarchal paradigm of man as macho, man as the boss, man as power, man as abuser. The thing is, we all carry that masculine energy, just as we all carry the feminine. How ridiculous is it to wage a war on women? The war is within each one of us. We struggle to deal with this balance. There is the draw of the paradigm to suppress our feminine side because we have been taught that our emotions are a weakness, that we don’t have what it takes to be powerful, that because we are open to the right sides of our brains, with active imagination and a vision of connectedness, our minds are inferior to the primacy of logic and analysis.

We live in a duality but that doesn’t mean that we have to live in conflict. We need to assert our will, but we also need to consider the impact on others. We need to think clearly, but we also need to feel cleanly. The whole point is to integrate these polarities within our own consciousness, because then we are truly powerful.

Saturn as Ego

So what do we do? Well let’s start with Saturn as a symbol of ego. Saturn builds structures, creates boundaries, separates everything out to look at all the parts, manifests our thoughts and feelings, our subconscious urges and instincts. When Saturn caught up to Pluto the two of them collaborated on a drama to reveal the horrors that lurk in our collective subconscious. Think about our fascination with horror films. Artists have been depicting the contents of our Unconscious throughout recorded history. We feel safe, some of us, to watch a film, or see a painting, depicting horrors happening to someone else. But now we are in its throes and we have to find the best way to respond.

We can say, well yes, there is a lot of darkness out there and point fingers of blame, but the reality is that we all carry every possibility within us, all the dysfunction and beauty wrapped up in our psyche. We see darkness out in our world, because we haven’t acknowledged it in ourselves and taken responsibility for it.

So that’s one suggestion. “Know thyself.” Really know thyself, all the dark corners, all the inner conflict, all the urges and compulsions along with all the grace, talent and beauty that make up our humanity. As a Virgo, I recommend deep self-examination. As a psychologist I’m a fan of therapy, consulting a neutral partner who can witness and point out our blind spots. We have no idea what we are capable of, on both the dark and light sides of potential.

None of us is the same person we were 14 years ago. Whether we’re conscious of it or not, we have evolved. Experience has made us strong, as we face social and political division, isolation during a pandemic, and the daily distress of living in a cauldron seething with hatred and cruelty. It’s almost unbearably stressful, but stress can be an engine of growth.

That brings us to self-care. Jupiter has just entered Cancer, the sign of the nurturing mother, ruled by the Moon. We can expand our self-love and self-caring – take more time to be alone with our thoughts, get massages to work out the knots, soak in hot tubs and relax. Get together with loved ones and bask in their presence. These are ways of nurturing ourselves. Besides knowing ourselves, it’s important to start loving ourselves.

If we want to see more love in the world, we have to embody it. Aries is about the individual realizing its potential. We enter Aries with beginners’ mind and look for opportunities that call to us. We test out our talents and make plans, but sometimes setting goals can limit our potential and stifle our creativity. It’s important to remain open to the unknown.

We need a lot of faith to trust that life will provide the very thing we need in the moment, but the more we surrender control and allow ourselves to go with the flow, the more wonder and delight we experience. As we become more mindful, life becomes more magical, filled with synchronicity and metaphoric significance. This is Neptune at work. But we also have an ally in Jupiter who will spend the next 12 months making its way through Cancer, strengthening our faith and heightening our emotions.

Aries is about taking risks. It’s okay if we fail because that’s how we learn. I’m not suggesting we take up sky diving. It’s enough of a risk to take a good look at ourselves and learn to accept it all.

Saturn as Responsibility

Knowing the complexity of self is the first step. Once we’ve completed our research, it’s time to take responsibility. That means giving up blame, grievance and victimhood, and looking at how we created our own pain, how we triggered our issues and what those issues have to teach us.

Saturn is the Karma Lord. He doesn’t let us get away with stuff. If we ignore it this time around, we’ll come back and face it again, and again until we take responsibility. Saturn works well with Chiron who brings up our wounds. In fact Saturn is headed for a conjunction with Chiron in June of 2028. We have three years to heal wounded relationships, seek our agency in the story of our lives, make peace with the past, forgive and let go. That’s Neptune’s realm – letting go and flowing on. Our Saturn work frees us from ego dysfunction and its many defenses. It allows us to grow and mature, and to claim our sovereignty.

Our wounds and unfinished karmic business keep us tethered to the past, like a drag on our evolution. To operate efficiently in the future, we need to free ourselves from the past. Once we see how we created it all, the conflicts, the heartaches, the loss and grief, our lives begin to take on spiritual significance. We understand who we really are and apprehend the purpose of our life’s journey.

One of the themes of the conjunction is taking responsibility for our spirituality. We can develop a spiritual practice. Meditation is a great resource. In fact sitting alone in the darkness within, observing and listening, draws material up from the unconscious and subconscious realms. Regularity is the key. It’s like priming the subconscious pump.

I don’t want to overlook a dark side of Neptune which is addiction. Neptune lures us into fantasy, or illusion which can evolve into delusion. We become addicted to escape. One of the potential outcomes of Saturn confronting addiction is sobriety. Now is the time to kick old habits which immerse us in old defensive patterns and shut us off from our life force.

Neptune as Uncertainty

Another blockage to our evolution is our personal belief system. We rely of beliefs to establish an identity which Saturn, as ego, constantly reinforces with conditioned and faulty propaganda. We have been fed beliefs from our parents, our friends, our society, the media with its constant propaganda to remind us of our purpose in this paradigm – to be good consumers and shop! We’re told how to look, how to succeed, what drugs and cosmetics to buy. Images of wealth are the equivalent of success in our society.

Mercury goes into its retrograde cycle beginning on the 17th of July, in the heart of Leo. It’s a great time to schedule a private retreat, giving ourselves the space to reflect on our beliefs. Where did they come from? Are they still true? Do they serve us, make our lives happier, our relationships more rewarding? What does the heart tell us about them?

We can let ourselves be comfortable with uncertainty, trust ourselves and embrace the unknown. What manifests in our lives is a mirror of our inner world. If we are at peace, if we cultivate heart/brain coherence, if we exercise our Neptunian talent for dreaming and imagining, if we take the path of kindness and compassion, we can view uncertainty as exciting, loaded with possibility, a benevolent mystery that will unfold with no struggle.

I have long believed that the “Second Coming” is not a single avatar, but all of us working together to forge a new civilization built upon the principles inherent in an egalitarian paradigm. It’s a worthy mission and this is our chance to fulfill it.

To recap:

Take a personal inventory of beliefs

Seek the truth about yourself, your wholeness

Tame the negative ego

Take responsibility for the life you have created

Confront the inner critic and advocate for yourself

Nurture and love yourself

Be willing to trust and build up your faith

Heal the wounds of the past

To these I will add:

Conquer fear and transmute it into love

Look at where you want to land, not at the obstacles

Embody your spiritual values – walk your talk

Be informed, question everything, seek the truth

These are some of the necessary challenges to becoming a Spiritual Adult, one of the major themes of the Saturn/Neptune conjunction. One of the most positive responses to this union of opposites is doing our deep inner work.

Next time we’ll look at the USA chart and see what the Saturn/Neptune conjunction reveals about our 4th House.