Saturn Retrograde: Time off to Internalize Deep Life Lessons

Saturn deals with karma, limits, responsibility, tradition, conservatives, authorities, long term goals and accomplishments patiently created, taking responsibility, creating structure, and setting boundaries. Once a year Saturn goes into retrograde for about four-and-a-half months. During this influence, you will probably find it unwise to attempt sudden changes or to rush through things. Take practical steps and accept limitations while you take serious steps toward your long term goals. Saturn retrograde can cause you to become your own hardest taskmaster, limit your actions or leave you feeling blocked and pessimistic. 

In Scorpio, Saturn will teach us how to handle

Life lessons to learn to deal with power and intimacy. You may overcome obstacles through insight or the exercise of power; you may also transform problems into opportunities by getting at their roots.  You may often find yourself blocked by power of others or thwarted by secrecy; you are vulnerable to betrayal; the misuse of power may be your undoing; your blockages may tend to be deep-seated. While retrograde, Saturn will help us clear out issues over sexuality, power, control, and knowing hot to let go of something (someone?) who needs to be discarded.

Saturn also deals with mastering and accomplishing difficult Life Lessons that we often try our best to avoid. Yet there is no negotiating with the Lord of Karma (Saturn): we only end up encountering the same obstacles that we thought had been disregarded. With Saturn retrograde, we internalize and absorb the meaning of the "life classroom experience" we have been shown in order to build some character and moral-spiritual backbone of foundation for our soul and psyche.  Saturn retrograde makes us look at what we SHOULD be doing and why we haven't accepted it as a hurdle to learn to get over, rather than deny. 

With Saturn retrograde, "All talk and no action" becomes the reminder that "Walk your talk" means getting another chance to "put your money where your mouth is." Even better: think of Saturn in retrograde as Hamlet's famous query, "To be or not to be? That is the question." Saturn, ever as strong as can possibly be as the Taskmaster of Lessons, will surely provide the retrograde as an opportunity to give every one of us the time to come up with the answer as well as WHY it matters "to be!"