Today is a day for great celebration – Saturn is leaving Scorpio and entering Sagittarius!
Halle- fuckin’-llujah!
Saturn entered Scorpio on October 5, 2012, and if your life has been a crazy hell ride since then, now you know why. The good news: now it’s over!
Saturn (the planet of hard karmic lessons, limitation, patriarchy, constriction) sitting in Scorpio (the sign of sex, mystery, death, pain, and extremities of human experience) was just plain rough on everyone. It’s been a heavy, constricting energy affecting all of us.
It was especially rough on you if, like me, you were born with Saturn in Scorpio in your natal chart (this is called a Saturn Return).
If you made it through your Saturn Return in Scorpio alive, my hearty congratulations to you, friend. I know how hard it was to do. I want to invite you to register for INFLUENCE as a way of celebrating and recouping your direction and strength.
Here’s some stuff that happened in my own life during my Saturn:
- I had a giant beautiful wedding and left my groom that same night
- I became suicidally depressed for the first (and hopefully only) time in my life
- I left an abusive esoteric cult that I was in for 7 years (i.e., academia)
- I lived in a freezing-cold, broken windowed apartment for a year and then on friend’s couches for 6 months
- I published my book but was too broke and cold to promote it properly
- I felt like all magic and joy had died from my life and I would never get it back
- I experienced an in-rush of magic and joy and had visions and divine possession like never before
- I conducted a giant public Summer Solstice ritual and was literally witch-hunted following that
- I nearly died from a tooth infection and no health insurance
- I started a successful coaching and teaching business
- I founded BAD WITCHES with my co-editor, Laura Gyre (and we have lots of great help from Lina Boldt these days)
- I moved to Ubud, Bali and am now living surrounded by warmth and beauty.
Whew baby, and that’s just the short list! So as you can see, in the past 3 years I’ve had my share of close brushes with death, limitation, mystery, constriction, sex, and the extremities of human experience.
And through all of that, here are the three brutal lessons I learned from Saturn in Scorpio that – while I cursed, cursed, cursed them at the time I was learning them – I now would not trade for anything:
1) There is literally nothing to be ashamed of, ever. Fear might be the mind killer – but shame is the magic killer.
After my failed attempt at matrimony (which involved all of my friends and family and all of my fondest childhood dreams), I was just so ashamed. Just wildly, hugely, gigantically ashamed. I didn’t see how anyone could trust or respect me ever again. In one fell swoop I had totally destroyed (so I thought) my whole social circle’s perception of me as a sane, happy, successful person.
I gradually realized that I was so depressed and miserable not because of my circumstances, but because of my shame. I cared more about people seeing me as happy than actually being happy.
It occurred to me that I thought my shame was protecting me or connecting me to something – like “decency” or “respectability” – but really all it was doing was alienating me from the raw shameless energy of my own soul.
I formed the wish inside my heart for no human being to ever have to experience shame ever again, and through that wish and commitment to for freedom for all others, I gradually was able to give freedom to myself (and it’s an ongoing project).
2) The only authority that measures the value of my life is my own inner authority.
I used to be the biggest teacher’s pet of all teacher’s pets. I craved approval from authority to tell me that I was smart, beautiful, worthwhile. In the past three years I had to learn how to give myself my own approval and be satisfied wholly with that.
No guru, no lineage, no group, no level of societal status guarantees that a person “knows better” than my own heart who I am and what I can do.
No one is ever going to come along and annoint me as “wonderful enough” or “witchy enough” or “wise enough” – I have to do that myself, for myself.
All groups have their own standards of truth and their own ways of disciplining dissenters. I’ve had to learn the hard way that I don’t fit in with academia, and I don’t fit in with the corporate community – and I don’t fit in with many people’s definition of the “spiritual” community either.
While I still love fellowship and togetherness, I’ve learned that I don’t need approval from an external source to validate what I subjectively know to be true inside my soul.
And as it turns out, I’ve found that the radical embrace of my own subjective inner authority is a major key to magic.
3) Energy is precious and purpose is paramount.
Illness, depression, and poverty (Saturn’s hard limits) taught me that I’m not an infinite resource.
My time and my life are finite. I have to protect and cultivate my own energy so that I can put it towards my deepest purpose in life – helping others become liberated from their shame and empowered in their magic.
So any friend or lover who’s detracting from my energy and draining my ability to fulfill my purpose, isn’t a person that I can afford to keep around.
In other words, I’ve learned the importance of containers and boundaries in magic.
I’m no longer willing to be a leaking vessel. I no longer practice idiot compassion – the kind of compassion that tries to get a feeling of importance and value through making others dependent on me.
I’ve stopped trying to be “good” and I’ve set out to be potent instead.
In Conclusion
Even if you didn’t just live through a Saturn Return in Scorpio, Saturn’s placement in Scorpio probably brought you hard lessons. My friend and trusted astrologer Adam Elenbaas at Nightlight Astrology has some awesome insights about what Saturn’s movement into Sagittarius and this whole season’s astrology means for us.
Best,
Registration for my upcoming course on practical magic, INFLUENCE, is still open and the response so far has been amazing. I would love for you to join us there, I’ve got a lot of intense insight to share about how you can harness your witchiness and make magic work for you in your life. Click here to register for the course and claim your spot.
Show Comments (6)
Patricia Biesen
Wow! I tip my witch hat off to you. I too am a Scorpio who basically walked on broken glass again and again. I am now moving and facing big change too. Thank you for your bravery. I hope Bali treats you well.
suki divine
thank you for this. i as a healer and psychic underwent many of these exact same expereinces thru the last 3 yrs. thank you for making me feel less alone and thankful that it is over for the time being. love and light suki
Vanessa
Wow, you DID make an extended pit stop in Hell. *nods, to acknowledge a fellow Hell dweller*
I don’t have Saturn in Scorpio, but holymotherfucker! Illness, depression, and poverty? Check, check, and check. Worst 3 years of my life, and it followed hot on the heels of everything clicking into place and going so well. Now I need to read up on Saturn in Sagittarius….
Carolyn Elliott
Vanessa – thank you for the acknowledgment — agggh that feels good. — And yes, even without a Saturn Return in Scorpio, Saturn in Scorpio has just been torturing pretty much every body. So!! Yay for Saturn in Sagittarius!
carol cromie
Thanks…I just wish my son could have survived just a few more days… Weeks.. Ah well. He is cruising in the galactic zephyr, in the all. May my pain not hinder his journey.
Carolyn Elliott
My sincere condolences, Carol. I’m very sorry to hear about your son.