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.

Saturn in Libra: "Form" Your Love Life, Chart Your Relationship History

Part 1 of 2

© 2010 by Joyce Mason

“Mature” relationship, by the very use of the adjective mature involves making peace with Saturn. There is a good reason why Saturn is exalted—best placed—in the sign of Libra. We all want relationships that endure, relationships that are “there for us.” We want love that’s steady and reliable, a love that creates just enough boundaries so we can feel safe to be ourselves, even when we push the envelope. (If we can’t push the envelope in a relationship, we can’t grow and the partnership withers.)

Regardless of where Saturn is placed in our natal charts, while it’s passing through the sign of Libra, Saturn’s relationship to relationship is highlighted for our common consideration.

I admire Donna Cunningham for stating publicly an opinion I share with her in a post on her outstanding blog, SkyWriter. Success in relationship has much more to do with personal history than the contents of our astrological make-up bag. This doesn’t mean we can’t learn from our natal charts and transits, but I think it means we have to look, first, at our own life stories. Our history tells us how we have played the astrological energies to date, whether we were conscious of them or not. (I was not conscious of mine before my first astrology class.) The way we explore our love history is by keeping an ongoing journal or creating a relationship timeline.

Of course, if you haven’t kept a journal your entire life, you don’t have your relationship history recorded. That is the case for most people. Even if you did, how would you ever mine anything out of all that scribbling? This calls for a different kind of exercise.


The Relationship Timeline

Recently, I joined a study group based on the book, Living Deeply: The Art and Science of Transformation in Everyday Life (Schlitz, Vieten, and Amorok). I can’t recommend this book enough for all spiritual travelers. One of the exercises the authors invite readers to do: make a chart of your life in seven-year cycles (Saturn cycles!). On the chart, you note when you had major changes of consciousness. They could be a tragic, joyful, or inspiring life events that led you to see your part in the cosmic whole or anything that seriously altered your worldview. I did it. What a revelation.

You could do the same thing with your relationship history. Make three columns, one skinny one for Dates and two wider ones for Relationship Events and Feelings About Events. (See Illustration. Here’s a link to download a blank Relationship History Form.)

Your first page is age 0-7 with the year below your age to help jog your memory. Second page is age 8-14, and so on. (Warning: The exercise takes longer the longer you’ve lived, but it's worth every minute of your time.) Quietly contemplate what was going on with you in relationships on each of those pages and time spans. Something wonderful about the memory. It will retain what’s important. I call that appearing in yellow highlighter in your mind. You don’t need to remember an event every year. What’s important will bubble up. Write it down.

While "romantic" relationships are the focus, don't limit yourself to them on the form. Especially in early life, your relationship to your parents and siblings impact the quality of subsequent ties. Include major ups-and-downs with family.

Once you’ve filled in the form (it’ll take an hour or two, depending on your age), scan the pages for patterns. What jumps out at you about your relationships? What were the key experiences and the feelings that went with them? Did you have similar reactions to like events?

How did you get into relationships? How did you get out of them? Was it graceful or always devastating? Do you recall the context?

For example, by doing a lot of memoir writing myself, I began to understand that I got into relationships that were wrong for me at my most vulnerable points of personal transition. A big one was between high school and college, my first “coming of age” step away from the parental nest and mom’s apron strings. That’s when I met a young man who had such an impact on me; it took me decades to get over him.

Another transition was when I moved to California—alone. For the first time, I stood wobbly on my own two feet. In this new place so far from home and roots, I had to create my own life. That’s when I met and married my first husband, an adventure in learning I’m grateful to have behind me, even while appreciating its gifts. I’m not sure I would have entered either of these relationships if I hadn’t encountered these men when I was exceptionally vulnerable and felt there wasn’t much Saturn stability in sight.

That’s when I tended—and am sure a lot of other people do, too—to grab the first person to hold onto without doing a thorough background check. I’ve since realized I do the same thing in friendships, another kind of relationship.

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Next: More Saturn in Libra Exercises to Understand your Relationships (Part 2 of 2)

For more tips on relationship and how to manifest it, including flower essences that can help the process, read Finding Love in Later Life—Spirited Edition.

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.