The Planets As Needy Children

I’ve found that giving planets, particularly outer planets, their due attention is very important.  Addressing all parts of your natal chart is critical, because a balanced self is the key to a balanced life.  If you aren’t paying enough attention to a planet, especially if it negatively aspects the luminaries or even other personal planets, and especially if it’s an outer planet doing the aspecting, it will fight for attention.  This is the conclusion that I’ve come to after personal experience.  If you don’t pay attention to one of these planets, it will act out, like a child but with more power.  It will screw with you and with something in your life.  It. Will. Suck.  And you’ll feel it, you’ll feel imbalanced or out of control. 

This is most prominent when the planet is dominant.  When it aspects (particularly conjuncts) an angle of your chart, aspects your Sun or Moon, is your chart ruler, or aspects your chart ruler.  I’m tremendously concerned with figuring out how to cater to all of the planetary energies in (frankly) the most efficient way possible.  Why?  Well, the Sun is my chart ruler, and it opposes the Moon with a less than 1 degree orb.  Both of these form squares with Uranus, Neptune, and Mars, and the Sun is conjunct Venus and opposite Jupiter, reversed (conjunct Jupiter, opposite Venus) for the Moon. Pluto is conjunct my IC, and Saturn is conjunct my Descendant.  I just mentioned every planet (except Mercury) as a “most important” energy for me to address.  What I wrote about feeling imbalanced or out of control?  That’s me, constantly.

Let’s start with Jupiter and Saturn.  The way that I see it, insufficient attention to these two isn’t exactly… possible. Well, maybe it’s possible.  I suppose you can insist on negativity and cynicism, which would be a betrayal to Jupiter, but Jupiter is such a benefic.  It’s incredibly powerful, which can be rough for planets in opposition to it, but it doesn’t turn nasty, exactly.  And Saturn is always nasty.  It embodies the reality that life likes to kick you in the face and tries to force you to acknowledge it.  You could, hypothetically, refuse to acknowledge it.  And I don’t mean conscious optimism, where you accept the terrible parts of life but choose to stay positive and uplifting.  I mean an outright refusal to accept that there are bad, harsh, cruel parts of life and the world.  Overindulging in some sort of Neptune-Jupiter drug haze.  How long could that last, really?

Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto are the big guys that, when they aspect your personal planets or angles—making these outer planets personal for you—will cause major problems when they aren’t addressed.  They are, all three of them, massive powers.  Pluto is most obviously, governing transformation, death, and rebirth as well as atomic power.  A big hurdle that Pluto calls us to overcome is fear.  Pluto is scary.  When you’re a Plutonian, you can likely sense that darkness, power, and intensity within you.  Don’t be afraid of it.  Pluto wants you to accept it, to embrace it as a part of you.  If you don’t, it will force you to.  Pluto forces change.  If you don’t move with it, if you instead insist on being a boulder in the path of the lesson that Pluto seeks to teach you, it has no reservations about blowing you up.  Yes, it will destroy you to teach you.

Uranus is another force of change.  But it’s both quicker and more fleeting than Pluto.  It brings restlessness, extreme restlessness.  I just went through a Uranus transit conjunct my Sun, which I’ll write about it in detail at another time, and felt how urgently Uranus wants you to do new things.  It wants you to try things.  Take risks.  Remember, it rules Aquarius.  It’s progressive and original. If Uranus is personal to you, you have some Aquarian characteristics whether or not you have anything in the sign or the 11th house.  Don’t deny them.  Don’t deny that you’re a weirdo even though you are.  It’s a pretty great thing to be.  When Uranus isn’t addressed, it tries to draw attention to itself by compelling you to be spontaneous, to try radical new things. Potentially reckless, dangerous, life-threatening things.  Try to be cautious.  Try introducing a bunch of small new things into your life, perhaps, instead of doing that one, big new thing that has a 50/50 chance of killing you.

Neptune, I’ll admit, is the one I underestimated at first.  It rules spirituality, mysticism, escapist behaviors, and substance abuse.  I know my close connection to Neptune gives me addictive tendencies, so I choose to stay away from as much as I can.  But Neptune also rules creativity, and I’ve always been very creative, valuing it highly.  However.  I only recently realized how pervasive Neptune can be.  It’s just as significant as the others, if not even more so for me since my Mercury is in Pisces, ruled by Neptune.  Neptune rules my mind.  The planet of illusion, of smoke and mirrors and delusion, rules my mind.  And I think my experience with it reflects how Neptune can screw up anyone and what it does to anything it touches.  It creates fog and confusion.  And then, depending on the type of person that you are, it creates certainty within that fog.  Which isn’t real.  You can’t know anything when you can’t see straight.  But depending on how deep you are in it, you don’t know that you’re not seeing clearly.  Neptune can make you believe, say, and do delusional things, without you knowing they’re delusional.  You believe it all. My method for combating Neptune is frequently doubting and questioning everything that I believe.  Which is exhausting.  I try to believe only a few very basic and general things, and then specifics as they flow logically from those core convictions.

Thankfully, before I even learned about Neptune, I thought that an insistence on certainty was dangerous, since there are so few things we can truly know.  Remaining open-minded whenever possible (not always or in all cases, but in most cases) is important.  Being sure of things feels great, and uncertainty can be so difficult to handle.  But with how influential Neptune is for me, and knowing how the energies of this planet operate, being too sure about everything would likely lead to me actually being irrational and crazy, instead of just sometimes feeling that way.  I’ve read that certain Neptune aspects can make your imagination so active that you doubt your intuition.  In my case at least, this is true.  Because I can’t tell them apart, I feel forced to doubt my intuition because the alternative would be to simply believe all kinds of ridiculous things.  They are ridiculous… right?  [Re: My Constant Dilemma]

Understanding how each planet operates and what it requires to be satisfied is the first step to keeping them under control.  I’m still working on a list of possible activities and mindsets that can be adopted to tend to each one.  I’ll check back here once it’s in order.

 

 

Disclaimer- I’m not claiming to be a definitive source of information. These observations are based on personal experience and on the belief that if we don’t deal with the conflicting energies inside of us, they’ll manifest outside of us.