Working with Saturn: Honoring Your Own Timing

This is part of a series I’ve been dreaming up for a long time. Over the course of these essays, I will talk about Saturn and how to harness the depth, support, and meaning that Saturn offers us, if we can learn to open up to, instead of resist her realm (the earth realm)

Sometimes during an astrology reading a client will express frustration with themselves because the information coming through isn’t new, they’ve heard it from other astrologers and intuitives’ before.

This happened recently. Why, my client asked, hadn’t she take any action the first time she’d been told, years ago?

I’ve been thinking about this ever since. At the time I said (and still hold to be true), that we are always exactly where we need to be.

I’ll say it again, because I think in our progress, product-oriented culture, where action is the road to happiness, success and even ascendence, it’s pretty radical. I also benefit from hearing it over and over again, obviously, as its one of my guides favorite things to remind me of when I consult them in moments of desperation or stagnation.

We are always exactly where we need to be.

I offered her a more life affirming question.

Not, ‘why didn’t I do it then?’, but, why wasn’t that the correct timing? What was the wisdom in not acting then?

You can think about this too, dear reader, for something in your own life, a place where you feel like you should be farther along then you currently are.

What did I need to learn first? What parts of me are ready for this change now? What parts of me still aren’t, and how can I care for those parts gently and kindly? Why is this exactly where I need to be?

When we assume the correctness of our timing, we open ourselves up to life affirming action and insight.

I then explained that when we try to speed our process up, we tend to skip important steps. There are no short cuts on the path of soul. Often skipping steps means we spend more time doing it in the long run. Its like preparing for exercise. If you skip warming up, you are more at risk for injury, and it may end up taking you longer to meet your health and fitness goals. Warming up is a beautiful example of taking time to honor the limits of where you are, and to prepare yourself for the future, for where you will one day be.

When we skip important steps we welcome in breakdowns and fragmentation. Physical injury is an example of this, but my greater concern is psychic injury. I say this carefully, and in a depth psychological and alchemical context. I do not mean we shouldn’t move towards healing, more awareness, or self-improvement. Just that the processes of change, transformation, and liberation are all held to the rules of reality. The rules of time. The rule of Saturn.

In alchemy, there is no pushing the making of the gold. There is only ever the next step. So is life.

Carl Jung said that if we push ourselves too intensely, too quickly in any awareness increasing practice, we risk psychological breakdown.

Our egos are like bowls, which hold our multiplicity in coherence. They make our expansive incomprehensibility more understandable. The ego is our sense of self and identity. It is the story we tell ourselves about who we are. In astrology, this psychic function is often represented by the Sun. However, our sun is also our deeper self. The self who has let go of the stories.

The ego can also be represented in Astrology through Saturn. Saturn is our defenses, the filtration system that defines our borders. Its the story of who I am, and am not.

Who are you when you take away the labels?

That amorphous being is your Self. The Self is all loving, and divine.

And the ego functions to hold that Self, to make its enormity palatable to the body and brain, and to everyday life. Saturn rules that material, everyday life. Saturn is either the contained loving Self using the ego to connect to others and learn the lessons the soul is here to learn, or the defended self who is cut off from its deeper souls wisdom. In psychology, we call this later situation, an inflation. At its worst, it presents as narcissism and others ‘disorders’ of the personality.

When we engage in consciousness raising practices like yoga, meditation, astrology, healing work, or any medicine practice, the Self that the ego contains will grow and expand. Necessarily, our container changes too. We (hopefully) become more open, more permeable, more compassionate while still contained and safe.

But when the ego container has grown rigid (the paradox of strengths fragility) and the Self expands, the ego cannot contain it, and instead of growing, dissolving, stretching, it shatters. This shattering can be catalyzed by reaching deep into soul or up into spirit, and often is an expression of imbalance in the process. We cannot be whole without all ourselves, physical, spiritual, emotional, on the same page. That’s one of the reasons healing takes so long. Often one part of the psyche wants to shoot ahead, but they all have to go together. For a hilarious and amazing expression of this, watch Pixars Inside Out. Many forms of spirituality and psychology emphasize the multiple nature of our psyches, and the necessity of bringing them into harmony, or at least a working relationship, in order to achieve wellness, meaning, and satisfaction.

Imbalance makes it so that the foundation (Saturn) one tries to build while doing consciousness raising work is unstable. Eventually one side finally falls under the weight, and it all comes crashing down.

My client may have known the actions she should take in her mind, but her heart may have been still nourishing itself from patterns that would have resulted in severe re-traumatization if she broke from them too quickly. If she dissolved the binds that held her/limited her too quickly, there may have been nothing to catch her when she fell.

Saturn is the God of Time. Things can’t come into reality without enough time for it to be so. Saturn is the God of Limits. If we are in resistance to limits (Saturn), we are in resistance to life (Saturn). I don’t mean that we need to accept toxic structures, toxic limits, or never change. But limits are there, like fear, to guide us into the wise path that leads to wholeness. Saturn is the God of Devotion. We devote ourselves to building the future that can hold the entirety of who and what we are, as individuals and communities.

The Seventh Generation Principle, a core concept of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) peoples exemplifies this beautifully. We are building, loving, healing, not just for ourselves, but for those seven generations in the future. Not because we don’t get to have good, beautiful things now. But because things take time. Change takes time. And humans don’t have that much of it when their individual lives are taken into account. But collectively? Over generations? We have the capacity to create enormous impact.

It’s easy to forget, especially in a world structure that thrives on that very forgetting. It’s a lot harder to manipulate, abuse, or sell to folks who radically honor their own timing.

If you take one thing from this first section its Everything in its own time.

You learn this watching nature. The living world is my favorite teacher. You don’t need a guru, just go outside! It teaches all the most important spiritual lessons we humans benefit from. Paradox, compassion, trust, patience, inter-connectedness, multiplicity. All of realities basic truths and contradictions, all that you need to learn and honor if you want to have what the Buddhists call Basic Sanity, can be learned through observing nature. I include in this our own natures, as we are an expression of, not separate from the living interconnected cosmos. But sometimes looking at something we perceive as other can be easier then looking in the mirror. That image is by its nature distorted.

You can’t rush the seasons. Several weeks ago there was a warm day, and the ladybugs came out, thinking it was Spring. The next day the temperatures returned to their normal icy freeze, and all that remained of the ladybugs were several still carcasses.

If birds return from the journey south too soon, they risk starving.

 I don’t need to give more examples. Watch a nature documentary (or take a walk in the forest!). Raise a child. Plant a garden. Be in a body.

Everything in its own time.

A closed or open heart is the ultimate test of Saturn and her lessons of limits and timing. Time is limits. Limits on perception and experience. When we break free from it, whether through drugs, meditation or trauma, we can have life changing spiritual experiences, or psychotic breaks. Time is there so that we can be in one moment. Time is there so our incredible brains can understand what is going on in comprehensible ways. Time is there to give our hearts the chance to soften, receive and grow wise. Saturn asks, have you become kinder, more open, more loving, more compassionate because of your experiences with suffering? Are you stepping into deeper responsibility and creating healthy boundaries? Or have you become more afraid, closed off? Do you attempt to control with your judgements, and refuse to accept anything which challenges your version of truth?

Whatever the answer is, there is no judgement.

We are all only human, and even the most advanced spiritual teachers constantly practice, to remind themselves to come back to their hearts, to the present. To soften, and accept. To open and love.

Everything in its own time.
We come here to learn. That’s why Earth, Saturns realm, is a realm of lessons. Saturn is the teacher. Souls incarnate into matter to learn. To change. Because Spirit cannot change without matter. That’s why we have free will. Otherwise, how would we learn? Mistakes are the measurement of growth.

I tend to watch/read anything I can about ghosts that isn’t scary (slim pickings, let me tell ya). Ghosts are beings trapped in time, unable to change or grow, unable to move on. Stories about ghosts are metaphors for what happens to the soul that refuses Saturns invitations. When our souls lose access to matter, even if we stay on this plane, we cannot grow or change anymore, because we cannot learn.

We are always exactly where we need to be.

Where are you in your journey?

It doesn’t matter! You are where you need to be!

But whats the story your telling yourself about it?

Can you accept it, with compassion to yourself and others?

Is the answer, no? Are you criticizing yourself for where you are (and aren’t) in your process?

That’s alright. You are exactly where you need to be. This is the path. It always is, and its always changing.

Take a deep breath. Call in your guides. Fill your heart with compassion. Give it to yourself.

You are exactly where you need to be.

Write it down, dance it out, breathe it in.

Everything in its own time.