Understanding Your Saturn Return
Thank you for joining me again on this voyage of Self-discovery, and welcome back.
If you are 25-30 right now, especially, you should be aware of what the “Return of Saturn”
or “Saturn Return” is, and what it potentially means for your life.
Like the Enneagram, I feel this is a very important tool/concept to help you to better understand who you are, and to better find/make your way in the world.
Basically, when you hit your first Saturn Return (between the ages of 27-30), you are at a crossroads — you’re leaving the world of childhood and adolescence and young adulthood, and now you’re fully entering the world of mature adulthood. At this time, you may find your life taking a new, and often unexpected but very welcome direction. It also can be a troubled time for some, and it may require something of a stretch to shift into the new possibilities that are opening to you but which you may not be aware of as of yet.
But don’t listen to me, I am not an authority on the subject, so I am going to give you some websites to go to, some things to check out. First try this video series:
Try this article on the subject:
http://www.newage-directory.com/saturn.html
Now read the Wikipedia Article on the subject:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_return”
And finally an entire blog devoted to Saturn and Saturn Return:
http://www.saturnreturn.net/
Finally, here’s a short piece I wrote on my own Saturn Return, hope you enjoy…
Coming Full Circle, Coming Home — Saturn Return
“He was born in the summer of his 27th year/ coming home to a place he’d never been before//
He left yesterday behind/ might say he was born again/ might say he found the key to every door…”
– John Denver, “Rocky Mountain High”
Let me say first off, and I say this unabashedly: I love John Denver’s music — his early songs at least, particularly “Country Roads,” “The Eagle and the Hawk,” and the one quoted above. Those late Sixties/early Seventies songs struck a deep chord in our national and collective consciousness, perhaps because they reflect so well the soul’s connection with the natural world. But as a romantic, they spoke to me in a deeper way, too.
I had this interesting experience of sitting in a temple in India during the festival of Navaratri (literally “Nine Nights,” dedicated to the Divine Mother), and when I should have been immersed in blissful consciousness (or so I thought at the time), instead I suddenly realized I was actually longing to hear John Denver’s music. But even more than that — I was longing to create music like his — music that is heart-opening, attuned to and reflecting love of Mother Nature. And I longed to be in Nature, too, away from all the dirt, noise, and pollution of the city, not to mention the crowds. Jung might have said that it was the Western consciousness in me that was suddenly bringing this up for me to look at and process, but I would suggest it could have easily been the yogi in me that was yearning to return to the beauty, purity and solitude of nature. Whatever the case, that’s what happened, I’m just reporting what the “eternal witness” observed. But that’s not exactly what I wanted to talk to you about…
I want to talk about a concept called “Saturn Return,” and how it applied to my life. Incidentally, though, on the subject of music (are we ever not on it?), the first time I saw this phrase “Saturn Return” was on an REM album (”Reveal” to be exact). Not knowing what it meant at the time, I took it to be just more of Michael Stipe’s clever wordplay. Later I learned from my partner, Angeliea, who is an astrologer, that Saturn Return is actually an astrological term for a radical shift that generally occurs in each individual’s life between the age of 27-30, and connected with the return of the .
Now do you see the connection between the opening lines of John Denver’s epic “Rocky Mountain High” and Saturn Return? Because whether Denver (his real name Henry John Deutschendorf, Jr. ) knew it or not, he was singing about his Saturn Return rebirth. He was also singing his own personal mythology, the story of his life in four “easy” verses. When he first came to Colorado and experienced the Rocky Mountains, he felt as though he had come “home to a place he’d never been before.” He had been there of course in his heart, in his consciousness — and he had always been searching for it — but not physically in his lifetime. So when he arrived there, it was like, “Ah, this is exactly what I’ve been looking for all of these years!” Tears of joy! Tears of understanding! Tears, beautiful tears!
That’s what it was like for me when I first encountered yoga. It was like: I can’t believe this exists, that this is all coming true, because this is what I have been secretly longing for and looking for all of these years, and I thought I was the only one! Suddenly I was learning that there were others like me, that there was this thing that has been around for thousands of years, that exists, that has been in a sense just there waiting for me to discover it (or re-discover it — more on this soon). Yet from my perspective now, well past my Saturn Return, I can hardly put myself back in that consciousness, when the world had such unexplored frontiers for me. It was very much the consciousness of a naif, of a very young man, whereas now I am much more in the more worldly-wise adult “been there, done that” consciousness (though I will never truly be cynical or jaded, as yoga wisdom has helped me to retain a continued and ever-renewed sense of awe and wonder).
Before I go on, here’s Johnny singing “Rocky Mountain High” in 1974 :
My Love Affair with, and Marriage to, Yoga
“Bring Back that Lovin’ Feeling…” ~ The Righteous Brothers
I wrote the section above last night, and as I reflected on it in bed, it occurred to me that my experience with yoga can be likened to a romance of sorts. The courtship stage was a few months, during which time I was first exposed to its teachings, was reading and exploring, with the help of a friend in graduate school. I was definitely attracted to it, but in that initial period, I wasn’t quite sure of what kind of commitment I would make as I still had a lot of questions, a fair degree of skepticism.
After that initial period of courtship, my doubts had been allayed and I was “head over heels” in love, so to speak (I hadn’t yet been introduced to the headstand). Basically I was fully engaged and prepared to commit my life to Yoga. And Yoga was everything to me, to the extent that I wasn’t interested in even considering any other spiritual path, just as a young lover has eyes for nought but his beloved. In fact, everything else seemed less in my mind. Imbalanced, yes, but such is love…
So we were married, and the “honeymoon” lasted a good while — a couple of years, which is probably how long most honeymoons last. On the one hand, it’s not a long time, but on the other it’s a lifetime in itself when you understand that time is an illusion. At this point, the yoga practices and teachings did not have the same vibrancy for me as they had had initially, and I blamed myself for losing “that loving feeling” when in fact I could have understood it to be a universal stage in one’s growth. At this point, a couple will either divorce and work through things. In my case, there was question of continuing with yoga and keeping the “marriage” alive; after all, it was still assisting my growth in so many ways, and there was still so much to learn. And yet still, it (or I) didn’t have the same juice. Perhaps, as in running, I had gone “too far, too fast” and was burning out, whereas I should have paced myself a little better. Perhaps I was expecting too much too soon (of course I was), thinking that “Enlightenment” was just around the corner, when really I should have been more humble and realized how far there is to go, how many subtle twists and turns there are on the path, how narrow it becomes at times, how much like a “razor’s edge” it can be. Well, I did understand this to a certain extent, and I did keep on with it, and that’s why I’m here right now to tell you how you might deal with an experience of “dark night of the soul” (as St. John of the Cross put it). So stay tuned and attuned for more soon.
Namaste!
For further reading and exploration:
John Denver’s astro chart in regard to his life and “untimely” death:
http://www.accessnewage.com/ARTICLES/astro/benden.htm
