This week’s question comes from Janeta in Australia:

I have my Saturn in the twelfth house and the last time I had that, between 2002 and 2004, I separated from my husband and lost my mother. I am dreading this period, as I am also involved in a challenging relationship and was just wondering if I am repeating some lessons.

Janeta, there’s no reason to dread a Saturn transit through the twelfth house. It’s actually one of the milder transits of Saturn.

The Saturn transit you experienced from 2002 to 2004 wasn’t in your twelfth house but your eighth house. Saturn’s tour through the eighth house is decidedly much tougher and sometimes corresponds to the loss of an important person in our lives (emphasis added). In your case, it was much harder. Not only was Saturn opposed to transiting Pluto during that time – a very intense aspect in and of itself – but the eclipses were in the same signs and therefore also in your eighth house. It really was a Saturn transit from hell, and not just for you.

Saturn takes about 29 years to go around the chart and won’t be in your eighth house again until 2030.

Saturn enters your twelfth house on December 11 and will stay until he crosses your Ascendant in September 2013. That transit will be far more significant, and I strongly recommend that you get a complete astrological reading at that time, as many things in a person’s life do tend to change when Saturn crosses the Ascendant. But that’s almost three years away, so you don’t need to worry about it right now.

For the time being, while Saturn is in your twelfth house, you have a chance to tie up loose ends, clear your plate, and get rid of anything that isn’t working for you. That could well include relationships with people who drag you down and take more than they give back to you. And the choice likely will be yours to make – unless you cling to a relationship long past the time when it should be over. In that case, life has a tendency to hand us situations that force us to let go of what isn’t serving us.

In my observation, the worst thing that tends to happen while Saturn is in the twelfth house is that we feel ineffectual and isolated. Dealing with people can seem hard, and we might give up even trying. It can be somewhat depressing, although it doesn’t have to be. “To everything, there is a season.”

This is no guarantee that people you love won’t die or go away. That’s always a possibility in life, and astrology can’t take away that fear or uncertainty, nor should it be used that way. But I can say with relative certainty that this Saturn transit will not be as difficult as the one you experienced before. You can relax, Janeta, to the extent possible in our troubled times.

I hope that helps, and thank you for a very pertinent question that I’m sure many others will identify with.

Pat

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