Become Your Own Astrologer: Think Seasonally

You’ve got a new astrology calendar, and you’re excited. You’ve been following transit reports in your favorite podcast casually for a long time, and you’ve decided that you’re going to get serious about working with transits for yourself.

Then you open up your planner, and you’re bombarded by a barrage of astrological symbols.

The podcast made it sound so easy. Even the most thorough transit reports only focus on a few transits a week, but your planner is showing you a few transits (or more!) every day.

There’s no way you can interpret everything you see. You’ll literally do nothing else.

So, you’ve got to prioritize, but how?

Think Seasonally

Ask five astrologers which transits are most important, and you’ll get five different answers.

Modern astrologers prioritize outer planets. Traditional astrologers prioritize planets that are being activated by time lords. Some old school astrologers don’t even work with the outer planets at all.

The one thing most astrologers seem to agree on is that it is better to think seasonally than react to whatever symbols you find in your astrology planner today.

Seasonal transits are like big ocean currents. Just like the Gulf Stream has the power to move boats and fish thousands of miles, seasonal transits have the power to change the course of your life in a profound way.

Short-term transits that happen once or twice and aren’t connected with any seasonal influences are like individual waves. From day to day, we notice the waves more, especially when they’re slapping us in the face, but, in the long-run, the wave that hits you in the face is going to matter less than the current that is carrying your boat to Brazil.

Knowing the currents that are influencing you helps you to pick your battles. Like the raft riders in Kon-Tiki, sometimes it is more strategic to steer your boat in a way that’s counterintuitive in order to catch a current that you’re trying to follow.

How to Find Seasonal Influences

So, you’ve decided to pull back from the chaos of your calendar page and focus on seasonal influences.

How do you decide what to focus on?

Outer Planet Transits

Some planets are seasonal by nature. Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto take years to pass through a sign, and their slowness gives them more time to have an influence on your life. The influence of the moon might last for two hours. The influence of Pluto could last for two or three years.

To figure out which outer planets are having an influence on your life at the moment, track down a transit calendar.

If you have a Honeycomb Collective planner, you’ll find a transit calendar for a year or six months at the beginning of your planner.

Astro.com also has a free Transit Calendar for 3 Years under the Special tab in extended chart selection.

Unless you are going through your Saturn return, you’ll probably want to focus on transits involving Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. The most important aspects will be conjunctions, squares, and oppositions, and they will involve your sun, moon, angles, or chart ruler.

Lord of the Year

Traditional astrologers prioritize transits that involve the lord of the year as determined by annual profections.

Annual profections highlight one house for the year. The themes of the house and the house of the planet that rules the house of the year will be prominent in your life that year. Transits involving the planet that rules the sign of that house will be extra important.

You can find your lord of the year using Astro-Seek’s free Profections Calculator.

Combined Approach

Personally, I prefer a combined approach. When I prioritize transits, I pay special attention to transits that involve outer planet transits and the lord of the year.

The reason for this is because I have experienced outer planet transits involving the lord of the year, and I found them to be especially powerful, even though there should have been more powerful outer planet transits going on.

The last year for me, for example, should have dominated by Pluto. Pluto was squaring my Mercury/midheaven, and the last time I experienced a Pluto square to a personal planet, it was extraordinarily dramatic.

This time, though, Uranus took center stage, and Pluto took a back seat. The reason this transit was so much more dramatic was because Uranus was square my moon, and the moon was my lord of the year.

Pluto themes were prominent. There were a lot of deaths and transformations in my career, but changes to my home (moon) and family life (moon in the 7th house) were much more intense.

The challenging thing about thinking seasonally is that it requires you to plan ahead.

You have to do some digging through an ephemeris or calculator to figure out which transits are most important for you before you can wake up every morning, check your planner for transits the way you check for appointments, and move on with your day.

The benefits, though, are incalculable. Figuring out what season you’re in once a year gives you a much better sense of the currents you’re sailing with, and it makes it much easier to tell the difference between annoying waves and storms that will send you drifting off to sea.