How Pluto Transits Can Change Your Life: Reflecting on Pluto Square Pluto
There are things that happen that divide a life in two: life before the event and everything that came after. Pluto transits tend to bring events like these. Events that change you, mark you, hurt you, break you, and leave you with scars. But there is no Pluto transit more likely to have a before time and an after time than the Pluto square.
By the time you reach the Pluto square, you will have experienced a hard Pluto transit (conjunction, opposition or square) involving every planet in your chart. Go through the outline of the story of your life and pick out the dates of your Pluto transits, and you will have a collection of the stories that have shaped you, the battles you’ve survived.
During the Pluto square, each of the planets that have been impacted by those Pluto transits meets up with Pluto again for trips down memory lane. These visits with Pluto summon flashbacks from the times when transiting Pluto hit those planets.
The choice of the word “flashbacks” (adopting the language of trauma) is intentional here. Pluto is Lord of the Underworld. When he has business with us, he has the tendency to appear out of the ground and pull us down into the depths like Persephone.
Pluto transits are long, and personal planets (the planets most impacted by Pluto transits) move quickly. Over the 2-3 years of the Pluto square, each planet will meet up with Pluto several times, allowing us to examine the stories we tell about the past from different angles.
The Pluto Square Is a Time Machine
I am at the beginning of my Pluto square, and the personal planets are starting to meet up with Pluto for the first time. When I started writing this, transiting Venus was approaching an exact square to transiting Pluto and an opposition to my natal Pluto. I’m finishing it a few hours before the transit is exact.
Transits don’t just happen when the meeting between planets is exact. Just like you don’t need to be sitting on someone’s lap to have a conversation with them, planets can interact with each other from a distance. Typically, the closer they are to each other, the more intense the conversation is, but that isn’t always the case.
A few days ago, I started feeling a strange desire to listen to an album that I hadn’t listened to since Pluto was square my Venus. I had listened to that album obsessively during that transit. I put on the album, and I only had to listen to the first few notes to know that listening to it was going to be a trip back in time.
As you might expect from a Venus-Pluto transit, my Venus-Pluto square was a dramatic time for my relationships. I vividly remember lying in bed with the sure and certain knowledge that the breakup I was going through had left me changed forever.
It’s a love song cliche: If I can’t love you, I will never love again. I was perfectly aware of the cliche at the time, and I knew that it was only a matter of time before love comes again. But I also knew that the way I loved, the people I loved would be different after this breakup. It was like the explosion from the end of the relationship not only destroyed the places where my ex and I connected but parts of me that were necessary for that kind of connection to happen at all.
It is a common saying in the astrology community that Pluto transits only take away things that are already dead. After my Pluto-Venus experience, I’m not so sure of that. That breakup was many years ago. I am happily married. My husband and I have a child. I love more deeply than I ever have before, but I was right. The people I have connected with since that breakup have been different. The way that I connect is different. Different. Not better or worse, but the part of me that Pluto killed had been a living thing, and that living thing is gone.
Time brings distance, and distance brings perspective.
At the time of our breakup, my ex and I were writers publishing in the same genre. Shortly after our relationship ended, I learned that stories we wrote would be published in the same anthology. Publication came with marketing responsibilities. As much as I wanted to run for the hills and avoid my ex after the breakup, I was forced to stay in their professional orbit, long enough to promote the book.
Awkward!
When I think back to the articles my ex published while we were doing promo, it is so clear to me that our breakup was about more than incompatibility between me and my ex. My ex was going through drastic changes to their sexuality. Who I am, the way I do relationships, only worked with the person they had been but weren’t any longer.
In other words, the breakup shattered me, but the underlying reasons weren’t really about me.
Years later, I wish I could say that I feel nothing but compassion for my ex and the person I was. Maybe, I’m still feeling from the wound. Maybe compassion will come. (One of the things I’m curious about as I go into my Pluto square is learning more about the way Pluto wounds heal.) But, for now, what I feel is cold indifference.
Cold indifference is what I imagine Pluto feels looking back at the sun, the cold indifference that comes from a distance so great that the sun is indistinguishable from any other star.
I look back at the people we were with a shrug: It wasn’t really about me. It wasn’t even about us.
The Pluto Square Asks: Where Does It Hurt?
The Pluto square isn’t a magic bullet that takes away the pain of Pluto transit wounds. I know this because Pluto was square my Mercury not that long ago, and every time the moon makes a hard aspect to my Mercury (approximately once a week), those wounds still sting.
What this transit is doing is giving me a bunch of opportunities to do the existential equivalent of body scans. As each of the personal planets interacts with Pluto, I am being invited to look back in time and ask myself, “How have I healed? Where does it hurt?”
Related Articles
