How to Prepare For Your Saturn Return
Saturn’s orbit is 29 years. That means around age 29, Saturn returns to the exact spot it was when you were born: your Saturn Return. This is a coming-of-adulthood moment.
There are a few ways to calculate the duration of the transit. It could be when Saturn returns to the astrological sign of your birth chart (~2.4 year period in each of the 12 signs), or when Saturn is within 2 degrees of exact (~4 months).
Following long periods of depression, Eckhart Tolle had a spiritual awakening at age 29, paving his way to become a spiritual teacher. Bill Gates launched Microsoft around the time of his first Saturn Return. Members of the 27 Club don’t survive theirs. Without knowing anything about astrology, we can see in today’s culture that this late 20s moment is a time when, whether at the peak of success or failure, we question our life choices.
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Saturn’s archetypal meaning is of discipline, focus, lessons, and work. It’s a threshold to our life’s work, and if we aren’t on the right path, we get pushed.
When I thought back to my most notable emotional breakdown, it was off by at least a year from when my Saturn Return should have been. What gives? When I looked up the exact date when Saturn first hit the spot it is on my birth chart, then compared with my email history, I saw it: That was the day I decided to leave a job.
It’s one of the only decisions I regret, which is rare, because we learn from mistakes, so I generally don’t have regrets. In this case, it may have been the best decision, but I can see now that chose it for the wrong reasons. The job felt too easy, which brought out fear that I would be “found out,” that I didn’t belong. Maybe. Or, maybe it wasn’t challenging enough, or not growing me in the direction I wanted to go.
The decision turned out to be a major life redirection. This was the fulcrum of the changes to follow, the breakdown, the breakthrough.
My Saturn Return lesson was that success on the wrong terms isn’t fulfilling. Some things you can only learn the hard way.
“Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”
-Pema Chödrön
The Saturn Return is the completion of a cycle and start of a new one. It’s a test to see if you’ve learned the lessons, and if you haven’t, they all pile up like a semester’s worth of term papers the night before a final. Saturn is the dad who pushes the kid in the pool to teach them to swim, like marathon training in high altitude. With grit, you emerge from Saturn transits that much stronger.
If you don’t know the exact date of your Saturn Return, consider what was going on in your life between the ages of 27-30, any major decisions or disappointments that changed your path. What type of resilience did you gain?
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