More Saturn in Libra Exercises to Understand Your Relationships

Part 2 of 2

©2010 by Joyce Mason

In the previous article, Saturn in Libra: “Form” Your Love Life, Chart Your Relationship History, we began creating a timeline of past relationships. My inspiration was an exercise on charting times of personal transformation, based on the book, Living Deeply by Marilyn Mandala Schlitz et al. One of the exercises the authors invite readers to do: make a chart of your life in seven-year cycles. Of course, that’s the Saturn cycle with its seven-year increments!

The idea behind this worthwhile effort is to observe the way your current relationship issues mirror those of seven years ago and often, other previous cycles of seven, even back to your earliest pre-teen or teen relationships. Sometimes the same themes repeat throughout the seven-year cycles and offer us new opportunities, on each occasion, to greet and resolve them with more maturity.

Why? Every seven years, Saturn is making a major aspect to its natal position. Your planets linked to Saturn by natal aspect are getting an extra boost of Saturn’s influence. You can almost think of it as a double dose—Saturn by birth and temporarily, by transit. Since Saturn is both the planet of commitment and long-lived fears and resistance, most of us can benefit by looking at where we live on the fear-to-commitment continuum. The book I’m reading by popular author Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love) is a great example of the author’s struggle on that continuum. You can tell by the title, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage.

I have done several such exercises, creating timelines about various facets of my life and/or astrological influences. For example, since Chiron is my astrological specialty, I took the dates of my key Chiron cycles and wrote the major points of what happened during each of Chiron’s transits to itself. By the way, Chiron a lot trickier and less straightforward than working with Saturn because of Chiron’s wildly erratic orbit. For example, an individual’s first square of Chiron to itself can happen anytime between ages 5.5 and 23! It’s not neatly predictable like the seven-year Saturn pattern that’s virtually the same for everyone. To find your key Chiron transit dates, you’d need help from astrology software and/or an astrologer, if you aren’t one yourself. (Read Chiron: Rainbow Bridge Between the Inner and Outer Planets by Barbara Hand Clow for an introduction to charting your Chiron cycles.) Since Chiron is the bridge between Saturn and the outer planets, let’s go back over the bridge, back to Saturn, especially now that I’ve explained why this Saturn cycle exercise is going to be a piece of cake by comparison!

Saturn and Form

This relationship cycles exercise takes advantage of Saturn’s affinity for form. (Here’s a literal Word form you can use to do the exercise.) It’s a disciplined, structured, practical, organized approach—very Saturnian--to making sense out of your life’s drama to date when it comes to love. What can you hope to gain from it?

Those relationship patterns are likely to jump off the paper and invite you to take a grounded inventory of whether you’ve been living a soap opera, a heavy drama, a romantic comedy, or something in-between. The idea is to get out of yourself and to become an objective observer of your own life patterns when it comes to love.

The hope? To glean the best intelligence about how you’ve done relationship up to now, and if you don’t like this movie, apply some positive Saturn characteristics to change the picture: wisdom, realism, grounding, work, and discipline.

Bonus Exercise

Back to astrology: Now that you’ve done the Libra half in Part 1 of these two posts—examined the content of your relationship history—you’ve already done a bonus exercise that you can focus on next. Since you’ve recorded your relationship history in seven-year Saturn Cycles, you can see how Saturn affects your love life. At the end of every 7 years, you have gone through a quarter of the full 28-year cycle of square, opposition, square and conjunction to your natal Saturn.

The first return to your natal position, commonly known as the Saturn Return, happens at age 28-30. For the fun of it, you can write on the upper right of each page the where you are at in the Saturn cycle at the end of each age range, e.g. 0-7 (square), 8-14 (opposition), 15-21 (square), 22-28 (conjunction/return), and so on to your current-age page. (Don’t worry if your Saturn Return happens at 29 or 30, since there are slight variations in the cycle. For the sake of simplicity, just put it on the page that ends with 28. If you don’t see anything significant that happened in relationship for you that year, your next page will show them at 29 or 30—and you are now signaled on the previous page to look for them there!)

Of course, you could use any issue in the body of this format. Erase “Relationship History” and do another one for Job History to learn how Saturn has affected your career. But since Saturn’s in Libra, now’s the time to focus on your love life—and whether you want to restructure anything in this area of life that doesn’t work.

Some people may not need this adventure in introspection, but if you’re struggling with why your relationships haven’t worked in the past or are still longing for the right one, I think you’ll find this method to be eye-opening, mind- and heart-changing.

For those that make this journey of putting love into form, I would love to hear about your experiences in the Comments.

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Note: This article is featured in Saturn in Libra and Relationships, published on Sasstrology as Part of the 2010 International Astrology Day Blogathon. The purpose of this web-based event is to create a permanent library of articles about how to deal with the stresses of the Cardinal T-Square of Pluto, Saturn and Uranus. The main page for the Blogathon collections is at The Cardinal T-Square of 2010: Saturn, Uranus, Pluto.