I’m here to tell you that everything will work out.
But at first, it won’t.
You’re made redundant (twice). You break up with the person you thought you were going to marry. Friendships end. New ones begin. Health problems arise. Anxiety, depression and panic attacks hit. Money is scarce. Then comes the near-death experiences. Family issues. Rollercoaster romances. Moving away. Moving back. Childhood pets dying. The feeling that you might also die any minute. Bloated, burnt out, and having a breakdown about almost everything and I AM JUST GETTING STARTED.
Do you feel like your whole world is falling apart? Welcome to your Saturn Return — it’s real.
So what is Saturn Return exactly? Saturn (the planet) was in your natal sign when you were born and it takes about 26 to 28 years (give or take) to circle back around into your chart. When Saturn returns to your sign, it brings with it a great reckoning.
I’ve been there.
One minute I was elated living la vida loca and the next my life was a mishmash of shattered dreams and hopeless prospects with no desirable future in sight or clue about what to do. I was sleep-deprived, highly anxious, lonely, sad, confused, frustrated, exhausted and frankly some days it felt like crawling on broken glass just to get through.
Experience is a brutal teacher, but you learn. My god, do you learn. — C. S. Lewis
Saturn is said to be the great teacher and also the great destroyer — of paradigms, belief systems, addictions, habits, and patterns. In short: anything that doesn’t serve you. Yes, it sucks. We, humans, want to feel comfort and homoeostasis at any cost. If your life is not in alignment, Saturn will have no trouble showing you (sometimes quite harshly) what needs to change. It’s up to you to recognise the signs and take actions to transform or risk repeating the same lessons over and over.
The Saturn rollercoaster is real.
Let’s use my life as an example. I’m a Virgo but my Saturn is in Sagittarius or the ninth house (you can find out your Saturn sign and Saturn return here). This tells me that ‘Cross-cultural relationships will be your learning grounds and you may become “adopted” by a culture different than your own at some point in your life. If you haven’t travelled extensively, your Saturn Return would be an ideal time to live abroad’. Correct. I’m also told that Saturn came back around into my natal sign since birth from 23 December 2014. Correct again. Around age 26 is precisely the time when my life upheaval began.
Each Saturn Return is said to last between two to four years but for me, it was FIVE YEARS AND ONE MONTH (until I was 31) so rest assured that I know a thing or two about what it brings.
How do you know when your Saturn Return is over?
I met a Vedic astrologer and had a reading in Ubud, Bali in May 2019. He told me the exact date that my Saturn Return would end: 20 January 2020. HALLELUJAH, I rejoiced (also how’s the symmetry). Honestly, it felt like I was on a double Saturn Return bender that I thought I’d never come off. The Vedic astrologer also said that when Saturn leaves my birth chart in early 2020, there would still be “aftershocks” for the months following. This was again, very correct.
Saturn as a planet is said to represent a father figure, and not in the physical male body sense but more in a protective, grounding, and looking-out-for-you kind of way. The energy of Saturn is asking you to be the ‘father’ of your own life and take responsibility for what you’re not learning. I knew it was time to be the Saturn of my own life when I was so sick of repeating old patterns, feeling stuck and caged, and had a feeling in my bones that the time was ripe for something new.
Growth is simply learning how to suffer gracefully, elegantly and not letting your pain completely tear you apart. — Nikita Gill
What we resist, persists.
This is a frequently repeated adage in spiritual communities and I can’t deny it. When I resist change and sidestep the “work”, I suffer more and whatever is causing me pain me persists. I get it: transformation isn’t easy. Many of us flag it in the “too hard” basket. But maintaining the status quo over following your truth (or just the plain facts on the table) is a way to be alive on the outside yet dead on the inside. I know this first hand. Everything seems easier than doing that one thing you know you really need to do. The true price we pay in suppressing our integrity and aliveness is not fulfilling our highest purpose in life.
You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign language. — Rainer Maria Rilke
My own Saturn Return was tumultuous, thrilling, and by the far the most painful yet transformative period yet. When I embraced Saturn Return for what it is — a great cleansing and levelling up — I noticed that my life started to change dramatically.
I started questioning everything, saying no more confidently, letting go of ideals that I didn’t agree with and reassessing values that didn’t resonate with me anymore. It’s also when I decided that there are a lot of expectations that I have no interest in living up to, so I don’t. A fun thing that came out of my Saturn Return was deciding to live each year by a word and this is when I learnt the true meaning of grace, flow, reverence, soften, and alignment.
Saturn will return again.
It will come back into your sign around your late 50s to early 60s. Ever heard of a mid-life crisis? Or a delayed call to adventure? It is said if you don’t learn the lessons in your first Saturn Return, you can bet they will show up in your second (or third). I consider doing the inner work the first time around a HUGE HELP to your future self. The work requires a lot of self-inquiry and reflection, as well as bravery in facing the unknown road ahead, but the reward is remarkable.
We live in a world where to admit anything negative about yourself is seen as a weakness, when it’s actually a strength. — Jon Hamm
I wish I could console my late twenties self and say ‘it will all work out, even better than you expected’ but she wouldn’t have listened. She was too busy trying to hold her public life together (career, relationships, family, self-care, identity, the future) while privately wondering why the questions of her soul’s deepest yearnings wouldn’t go away. Ultimately my heart won, but not without a lot of heartache.
And while you’re in the clusterfuck of Saturn.
It bears repeating, everything will be okay. Maybe not right now, or tomorrow, but eventually. I know that might be hard to believe, so I’ll believe it for you.
Here are thirty one bits of advice from someone who made it to the other side: