What I Learned from My Saturn Return
By: Haydee R. Souffrant
Tags: Astrology, Self-awareness, Lessons Learned, Black Women

For those in the know, or if you follow #AstrologyTwitter, Saturn has been in Capricorn since December 2017. And for those of us with Saturn in Capricorn, has been a MOMENT.

For those that are newer to astrology, consider your Return of Saturn an emotional, mental, and spiritual puberty. Saturn is the “karmic king”, the “Great Teacher” and offers us the opportunity to change the behaviors of our late-20s- early 30s. It’s an opportunity to decide the type of human you truly want to be in the world.

The Preamble

Saturn spent the last three years in the sign of Capricorn, it’s baby child. The energy of Capricorn has intense to say the least. We are the children of learning EVERY single thing the hard way.

I spent the majority of my Return of Saturn struggling with the idea of truly being a writer, and artist, facilitator — all while doing that very work in a multitude of ways. After all, this intense earth energy craves success, rootedness, stability and a detailed game plan. And depending on where it falls in your birth chart, these values are highlighted.

The Amble

Over the past three years, I slowly, at times painfully and stubbornly decided to understand the person I was being called to be. i underwent a deeper spiritual journey in my Yoruba-Kikongo faith, became a reiki master teacher, and really leaned into personal writing, soon, despite a series of interesting events, found myself in a creative writing MFA program in The Second City. This process felt like that moment from The Fifth Element– where Leeloo is being rebuilt, sinew by sinew from a single cell, then learning how to enter a world that feels both the same and radically different, free falling into the unknown.

And I choose to share that rebuilding process through a random series of A-hah! moments in the form of micro poems. My idea had been to just share what the fuck was going on with me, and finding the people in the wild whom understood. It was my personal endurance to try and complete a goal, any goal.

And what I learned was that as you learn more about yourself– your traumas, behavioral patterns, boundaries that either need to be reinforced or torn down– that there may not always be an end goal. You just continue to learn, or as my madrina would say “develop”. Sometimes, I learned that you are actually being asked to let go of visions of yourself that don’t hold true anymore.

The fear.

The heartbreaks.

The old ways of connecting.

The comfort zones.

The language that you talk about yourself with.

It brought about challenging questions that I not only asked of others, but of myself. Is this how I want to live my life? Is this what lifts me up? Does doing x, then y, then z really help me, or is it all I’ve known? The return of saturn is a clean up of the stumbling, haphazard way we managed our emerging selves. A constant metamorphosis that at best, would feel uncomfortable, at worst, throwing everything you are into question if you have chosen to grow.

I also learned that there are people who will grow slower than you, and some that are ahead. And there had been a time when a version of myself would agonize over where I was in relation to everyone else. But wouldn’t you know, Saturn also told me that that ain’t the way. I certainly have no business questioning other people’s timelines when I have my own, that I have a person right in the mirror I ought to pay attention to.

The Re-direct(ion)

Documenting my Return of Saturn on a platform like Instagram was a whole host of things. Exposing. Comforting. Wondering if the shit made sense (sounds an awful lot like the process of writing, non?). If nothing else, there were lots of “damn this hits…ya’ll ever feel like this?” moments. These were often reminders for myself on the growth process — Saturn doesn’t care about “your time”, neither does healing whatever it is I/we/collectively have to heal. Time is Saturn’s plaything.

But just as Saturn overthrew Cronus, his predecessor, Jupiter will overthrow the old god. The old family legacies that chased us without realizing, the legacies that blended with folks in our lives that heightened the wounds, but didn’t help address them, and the ones that do.

And the beauty of this return, I learned, at least while i write this, that I’m not done. Not by a long shot. There will be times I still haven’t embodied a lesson, but I know it’s there.

It’s just all in the letting go. *cue the Diva Dance number*