The Sun shines the light of the Source through the Zodiac, and the Moon, connecting with the Sun at the New Moon, helps to channel that light into our daily experience. The light shining through Virgo expresses as innate helpfulness; there is an instinctive desire to improve life for us all. This month, the strongest connection between the New Moon and another planet is a quincunx to Neptune in Aquarius. This connection indicates spiritual service to humanity, and firmly suggests the most helpful attitude to Saturn’s move from Leo into Virgo on 2 September.

Saturn leaving Leo . . . the roles we play!
For the time being, Saturn has dealt us the last piece of experience calculated to wake us to the roles we play that hide our true nature. Some roles are obvious – for instance, mother, helper, boss, friend – and each one has a truth within it. If you are a mother, you will be that till you die because you had a child, but acting the mother to another whole person who is an adult and has a life of their own is playing the ‘mother role’. Let’s expand on those: if you are helping someone, you are in that moment their helper, but if you think of yourself as being helpful, you are playing the ‘helpful role’. A boss is a person who is in charge of a situation involving a group of people, holding responsibility for that situation – if that person finds they are expecting others to respect them because of their position, they have become identified with the ‘boss role’. And as for a friend - everyone has a different idea of what the ‘friend role’ entails because we have different priorities. It is the easiest thing to let down your friends simply by assuming that the word ‘friend’ means the same to them as it does to you.

Saturn presents us with the truth, and Leo represents the radiant heart, and for the last two and a bit years we’ve hopefully been finding our true radiant centre. The closer we get to our truth, the more tenacious the roles. We cling to them in case we discover that we have nothing radiating inside. We may have dropped the idea of being a victim in life, but the ‘victim role’ rises every time we assume that something ‘out there’ is making it hard for us. The ‘worthless one’ or the ‘guilty one’ rises every time we assume we should be pleasing someone else. I think the operative word is ‘assume’.

discovering assumptions

The trouble with assumptions is that we don’t know we’ve got them, which is why inner work has to be consciously done, and why the most obvious realisations seem to take so long to dawn. Sometimes we may have grasped the understanding of an assumption we need to let go, but then it takes ages to apply because habitual behaviour patterns have been generated. Assumptions can improve our efficiency, keep us socially in line, and some are essential for survival because we cannot be conscious of everything all the time. And perhaps the roles develop out of the assumptions. So identifying with roles would seem to be a human condition, and discovering the truth of who we really are has to be part of every conscious life.

If ‘assume’ is a keyword pointing at the problem, perhaps the word ‘should’ is the keyword waking us to what we can change. Saturn is about what needs to be, in order to remain in harmony with life. The word ‘should’ suggests moral judgement which is about principles rather than life. And invariably roles are defined by judgements involving the word ‘should.’

For example, if I catch myself saying ‘I should have offered help to that person in need,’ I am crushing myself into the role of ‘helper’, or ‘good neighbour’. The action I am contemplating may be a good one, but I would have done it for the wrong reason, and part of me would have resented it. My heart wouldn’t have been in it, so it wouldn’t have been done with love. So I beat myself up with a ‘should’ as my way of remaining identified with the role, as though I temporarily slipped below my standards – a moral judgement. On the other hand, if I just accept myself, there are times when I just want to help, and the love flows naturally both ways.

The beauty of paring away the roles we play from our inner sense of ourselves is that, in the moment of simply being who we are, we find there is nothing to fear and everything to enjoy. This would be the perfect state that Saturn through Leo represents. And from 2 September Saturn has moved into Virgo.

Saturn through Virgo . . . the truth shows up in the results

From the radiant centre, without fear and with natural enjoyment of life, we would rejoice - and then get on with whatever needed doing next. So from wherever the last two years has brought us inwardly, we now need to focus on what’s going on around us and what we wish to do in all that. Whatever you choose to do, you will need to be careful about the details, read the small print, dot the ‘i’s’ and cross the ‘t’s’. It is in the detail that the final connection is made between the inspired idea and its manifestation. If you are focussed on how someone else is judging you, you will not have enough attention on the detail of what you’re doing – and with Saturn in Virgo for the next two years, that’s where the lessons will show up.

We are likely to experience this as things going wrong immediately we lose our focus. As soon as your attention is drawn to something besides what you’re doing, that is when you drop the plate, mis-step on the stairs, jamb your CD writer by not clicking the CD into its proper place (that was the result of my inattention!).

What all this really means is: you will go far in manifesting your dreams over the next two and a bit years if you are prepared to put the work in, and keep your focus on what you’re doing. The dilemma we have, as evolving human beings, is that we also need to be aware of whether we are centred in our true heart or playing a role! So perhaps, in a nutshell, Saturn in Virgo is a time to practise ‘putting your heart into’ ‘doing the best you can.’ (Our spirit never wants us to do better than we can!)

The other day, on a website introducing specific workshops, I read a paragraph that was very pertinent to life at this present time:

‘There seems to be much suffering involved with people’s work and a great need for wisdom and compassion to take a more centre stage in organisations. You may know people in the course of your own work, who might be grappling with questions related to their work and heart, and who might appreciate an approach that tries to directly bring heart into the centre of the working world.’

The website is appropriately called www.meditation-at-work.co.uk. In case this approach is of interest to you and resonates, the workshop creator is Tim Malnick on +44(0)117 923 2223.

Conscious vs unconscious

Now, of course, Virgo isn’t just about our work, it’s about the detailed functioning of everything we do. This includes the functioning of our bodies – our health – the vitamins, minerals, energy intake, exercise of the muscles, and so on. It’s about breaking something down and re-constructing it better, all done with conscious focus. This is a difference between Virgo and its opposite, Pisces. In Pisces, the breaking down happens all by itself. We don’t need to be conscious of the process of composting and growth; they follow life’s natural timing.

In Virgo, we are involved, and the quality of our involvement crucially affects the results. The exercise is to remain awake – to ourself, and to what we are doing – and with Saturn backing us, our result will be a perfect reflection of the quality of our effort. If we read the result that way, rather than being upset that it didn’t match up to our plan, we will learn a great deal. The delight of having Saturn helping us is that, working with the truth, we get a long way towards creating our dreams.

Prepare the ground for what you wish to manifest

Jupiter will also be in an Earth sign from December 07 – Capricorn, which is ‘ruled’ by Saturn. So growth and achievement on a practical level are within the grasp of us all. Those who have planets, Ascendant, Midheaven, or Moon’s Nodes, in the first part of any Earth or Water sign could have extremely growthful opportunities in those areas. And for us all, 2008 is likely to be transformational growth on the practical level, as Saturn, Jupiter and also Pluto energies blend in the Earth signs. So, 2007 would be well used clearing the ground, and doing the preparation for whatever you wish to develop. ‘No expectation, but abundant expectancy.’

a last thought . . . a shift in our heart sense

Someone e-mailed me a question recently about our movement from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius. There’s a bit of my thinking about that as a ‘Q & A’ on my website under Current Comments for 2005. Also, recently, I read the following quote as part of a channelling someone e-mailed me, which put me in mind of the shift from Pisces to Aquarius. It was advice about what’s going on these days on the broader/deeper levels. The emphasis is on the negative side of Pisces and the positive of Aquarius:

‘. . . a shift from the murky sweetness of the idealistic heart to the sober-clean qualities of the energetic heart where clarity resides. In this clarity, intuition flows, and this is your higher intelligence. . . . the nature of living from the heart is that it is only relevant in the now. Its power to transform and heal, to enliven and enlighten, is contained in the flow of emotions that share your now-time.’

I would add that, if it’s not to be purely the cold unfeeling observer, Aquarius needs to be rooted in the all-embracing love of oneness with spirit that is pure Pisces. We always need to bring into our present the best of what we have learned in the past by assimilating it, and clearly expressing what we have become.