Saturn Return Journal: Moi
Welcome to a new series where I will be interviewing some of my favourite people and past clients on the pivotal learnings of their Saturn Return.
As you probably know, I am in the final stages of creating a really fab course for those of you in the throes of your Saturn Return. A big part of my drive to create this was because my own experience was such a humdinger. Important, very intense and yet, if I had had this resource available to me then, I know I could have collapsed a lot of time and lessened the ‘learnings’. I could have read between the lines and seen the lessons and utilised this transit rather than banging my head against a series of hard knocks and wondering ‘why me?’ Here is my Saturn Return story.
Where is Saturn in your natal chat?
It is in Libra in the 12th House, Libra also runs over my Ascendant and 1st house so this whole section (12th, ASC and 1st House) was activated in my Saturn Return (October 2009 - October 2012).
What were some of the themes of your Saturn Return?
Learning to trust myself and become my own authority. Experientially learning integrity. Coming to know who I was and what I wanted versus absorbing and adapting to wherever I found myself. It felt like there was a lot of action going on in my life and all of it was quite dialled up, dramatic. It also felt emotionally murky and there wasn’t a lot of clarity.
Any stories that you would like to share that illuminate these themes?
This is a tale to be told one Negroni down with another in hand but here it is in it’s daylight and abridged form. Mine was bookmarked by trips to India and they couldn’t have been more different from each other. The first was in November 2009 and was pretty damn loose. I met up with some mates after two weeks solo in McLeod Ganj where I had been self-studying and dipping my toes into meditation and reading lots of ‘seeker’ books. I was on a quest for sure and it was rather naive in hindsight. I went with a mate to Pushkar and Jaiselmer and bought a whole new outfit and ditched my other clothes. I started to look even wilder. For me, I visually change my aesthetic as I move into a new experience and I visually changed twice during my Return.
Upon meeting my then boyfriend and some other mates we travelled through Rishikesh, Varanasi and Nepal and we partied. A lot. I got very, very foggy in my mind. I had one of the most visceral stand-out dreams of my life in Rishikesh involving two huuuuuuuuge beings. A lot of psychic activations happened during this period. And a lot of delusions also. It was as if I was now seeing so much more and yet, I was so un-grounded that there was nowhere for this information to really land or be of use. The trip ended with me alone again in a hippie town in Goa, I knew I was pregnant, I had a very strong sense of it, as you do. I contacted my bf who was now back in Australia and he told me via his tarot divination that I was not pregnant and repeated to tell me this. This was my life back then. Chaos.
I had just left one band and was soon to join another. And in that wonderful and loose lifestyle, I did what I wanted. Reason and rules didn’t mean very much. It was glorious and it was hollow. I got depressed after almost every tour I went on. In fact, I just got depressed, often. I cheated, I was cheated on, I never thought of the consequences, I (unconsciously) used drama as a way to escape. I repeated so many relationship patterns it was ludicrous. My job was as an arts writer and I didn’t give a shit, it paid the bills and funded my life. I was anti ambition. I thought that was for people who lacked freedom and creativity. Hahahahaha.
What’s interesting to me is how free and liberated I thought I was. And I thought that that went in tandem with avoiding all responsibilities like they were a disease. On this side of it, as someone with ambitions and desires and a lot of responsibility and groundedness, I shudder at that former incarnation of myself. She was doing the best she could but she was very, very naive.
Long story short, by the tail end of my Return, I was on my final tour around Australia with a couple of American bands. I fell in love with a real gem and guitar god, someone who was already spoken for. He returned to his home and life and I got a very angry ( and totally justified) email from his partner. And then had a bunch of people publicly sledging me on social media, who all belonged to a community in LA that i’d spent some time in. With a broken heart and a broken reputation, I was ripe for the plucking.
I had been working at a Hare Krsna restaurant a few nights a week and during this period I became much more involved in the philosophy of the movement. There was a new preacher in town who was French Canadian and he took a real interest in me. I guess he saw I was ready. We had a number of 4 and 6 hour conversations in which he very convincingly answered every single big and small burning question that I had accumulated over my lifetime. For the first time in a long time I felt safe and held. I moved into the ashram in Darlinghurst and swore off sex, drugs and all of it. I sold most of my possessions. I saved for a ticket to India and I lived by a series of strict rules that were framed and hung on the entrance to the ashram. There were rules on when you woke, when you washed, how you kept your room and your energy, how to talk to those who were your peers and your seniors, how to prepare your food, how to offer it. Every interaction was outlined and there was so much safety for me in that. It was encouraged to only associate with devotees and as such, I cut myself off from 90% of the people in my former life. I had been in chaos and now I was moving into order and structure and I was building a new foundation for myself. Being a very experiential and absorptive individual, I went to an extreme. When I moved to the compound in South West India, the teacher I gravitated to the most lived on the outskirts of the jungle, he worshipped Nrsngadev, my favourite form of God, a fierce lion. My teacher was also fierce, hardcore and an intellectual giant, to me, he was an equal to Plato and Aristotle and my new friends and I referred to him as the King. He was the King of knowledge. He took a shining to me and I felt like i’d won the golden ticket. He operated in a beautiful vastu designed gurukul and I would walk barefoot to his lectures three times a day, five days a week, followed by a three hour fire ceremony there at 4am on a Saturday and then a long temple program on Sunday. My life was entirely filled up with Krishna, with the devotees, music lessons and the appointed lifestyle. I knew that each day I would wake at 3:15am to have my bucket shower and dress in my sari with hair concealed and no make-up. Everything was structured, we all used the same words and expressions, there was no surprises, other than internal revelations and an expanded field of knowledge. No one was rude, there was no backstabbing, no sex, no flirting, we weren’t encouraged to even meet the gaze of the opposite sex. From where I had come from, it was fucking beautiful. In once sense, it held me together and repaired me. In another it was another fantastical extreme for me to go into so that I could (eventually) return to being my own authority. To being self determining rather than being a mutable, shifting chameleon. From full chaos to full order I found a middle ground and to be honest, that took me years to really settle into, I had to undo a lot to get to that place.
I also began my astrology studies during my Saturn Return (I put them aside after the first term when I moved into the ashram and didn’t pick them up for another year or so after that) and began to realise that I could in fact dictate my own direction in this world and perhaps even be my own boss. Up to that point, i’d never considered taking responsibility for my own life direction. I had always had a lot of opportunity around me and very easily fell into things that other people would have killed for. And I took a lot of it for granted because it wasn’t earned.
It’s such a trip to reflect on this time. Like I said, this is an abridged version of this story. I hope it illustrates the change in direction and application from the beginning of this period to the end of it.