Surrender To The Process

I have a client wrestling with a particularly tricky & challenging transit: Neptune is crossing her natal Saturn. Most Neptune transits can be a challenge, but Saturn symbolizes, among other things, how we structure our personal world, ourselves and how we decide what matters & what doesn’t. Saturn is very physical & results oriented. And Neptune? Neptune dissolves it all. Neptune symbolizes all that is not physical. (see http://wp.me/pJ9hq-1k for more on Neptune.) This is a rough time for her. The current cultural mindset likes to emphasize the material, the practical & the immediately useful. And my client has always liked having a strong sense of control—but most people do.

Robert Hand, in his book Planets in Transit, refers to this as “the dark night of the soul referred to by mystics.” This is the time in life when it seems darkest before the dawn, because all the familiar guideposts and boundaries a person has set for their life just aren’t there. Reality, as they know it, simply doesn’t work that way anymore. And at the moment, there is barely anything practical they can do about it. Looked at rationally it isn’t really darkest before the dawn, but people experiencing this transit have lost faith that the sun will rise.

My client is experiencing a health crisis. She has excellent doctors she trusts, but the doctors are struggling to come to a definitive diagnosis. They are doing what they can, running tests, observing her symptoms and reactions. They have narrowed it down, but still need to work the process some more. It has been profoundly disconcerting to my client, and I certainly can’t blame her. No one likes an undiagnosed illness interfering with his or her life. We want to get to the bottom of these things.

So how do you handle a Neptune transit? By not ‘handling’ it. By letting go. Surrendering to the process. Relying on intuition. Neptune does not make deadlines or supply hard facts. It does not give specific answers, but it will bring understanding, when you are open to it. Neptune takes you on a journey, but the destination isn’t clear when you set out. The answers you get will be learned along the way. Even my client’s doctors suggested she needs to ‘surrender to the process.’ They anticipate a positive outcome, a return to health, but the process cannot be rushed.

Ideally, the less you demand answers from Neptune, the more it will tell you. This transit can lead to great enlightenment. When it is over, your worldview will have changed. You will see much more clearly then you did in the past, because you will have restructured your beliefs. Many of the things we think are facts are really beliefs. Saturn is where we harden our beliefs into facts. Neptune wants you to take a second look at what your root assumptions are, and restructure them.

Incidentally, you don’t have to wait for a Neptune transit to examine your root assumptions. You could do it continuously.