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by Terry Lamb, M.A.

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New to astrology? Read on and ignore the technical bits. There's plenty here for you too! Why don’t I write horoscopes for each sign?

I HAVE BEEN WRITING since January about the Jupiter-Chiron-Neptune conjunction in Aquarius that is occurring this year, because that’s when we began to experience it. As we moved toward the inauguration of Barack Obama, people began to display the characteristics of this pattern: hope, optimism, idealism, love of liberty, and the ability to objectify their experiences; as well as wild-eyed unrealistic dreaminess, knee-jerk rebelliousness, and violent behavior by those detached from compassion. There have also been weather anomalies, such as extremes of cold, electricity and dryness, and water/flooding. (The latest hot spell is not related directly to this pattern.)

Healing the Great Wound
However, this tells only part of the story. On a deeper level, there is much more going on — at the more interesting level of what motivates us. This has to do with no less than our spiritual healing process — all of us, whether we are aware that we have one or not. In addition, it has to do with the healing of humanity, and indirectly all of life.

This process has been going on for a long time in the background as Chiron and Neptune have edged closer and closer to each other. They started to dance together in 2007, changing direction and being linked by the Sun or the Moon in the same planetary breath. This year is the culmination of their performance as a duo, when they are most closely synchronized.

Chiron represents wounding and healing; it also acts as does Mercury to make connections (that’s how the healing takes place), but on the unseen and undetected spiritual levels of consciousness. It is frequently implicated in bringing a more acute awareness of a transformative process that we are going through — one tied to Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto. While Chiron does not render to us the nature of the transformation (that comes from the other outer bodies), it does bring those transformations home to roost in our lives. It facilitates the healing process that we need in order to complete the change.

If Chiron is about healing our wounds, when it is tied to Neptune, our challenge is to heal our spiritual wounds. To be more precise, it is about healing the wound of all wounds, what is called the core wound in some healing lineages. This proceeds in a fairly predictable pattern, although the experience and results are unique to each individual.

When outer planets meet, they always coincide with a great shift in human consciousness. This is no exception. I call this one the Healing of the Great Wound. Each group has its own expression of this, from families to organizations to nations to humanity as a whole. Those who express it the most are the ones who have the greatest contact to Chiron-Neptune. In the United States, it is about the reinvigoration of the American Dream.

I so expected this to be the case as I saw this connection forming, that it seemed humdrum by the time the media were trumpeting their research into a shift in the nature of the American Dream. Where more Americans defined their version of the dream in terms of wealth in recent years, now this is shifting to less tangible values, such as freedom, equality, and safety. Changes are taking place in other nations and cultures as well, in keeping with their respective mind set.

One of the characteristics of this type of change is that the wound “crystallizes” — it becomes more evident through more strident manifestations of its extreme qualities. This is the source of the saying, “It’s darkest before the dawn.”

Enter Jupiter!
The Chiron-Neptune contact has been building up for a few years, and it reaches exactitude this year and next; but then Jupiter comes along and enters Aquarius too! Just like your loud, rich uncle, Jupiter lights up the whole room (sign) when he enters it. Jupiter’s energies give a huge hyper-charged boost to Chiron-Neptune, so that it can be felt immediately in our daily lives. From the time that Jupiter made its ingress into Aquarius and began speeding toward Chiron-Neptune, his powers of magnification and expansion were felt. The intensity of this contact was bound to increase over the time that it took Jupiter to actually reach these two planets, which it does at the end of May.

In addition, whenever the fast-moving planets were/are in fixed signs, the energy of the healing process is also intensified, in spikes rather than a gradual rise The Moon would create a weekly spike; the Sun and its entourage (Mercury, Venus) spike every three months. Mars contacts run independent of these rhythms but are slightly less frequent. The solar spikes are month-long and fall in February, May, August, and November.

Finally, there are spikes associated with the three planets themselves, Jupiter, Chiron, and Neptune, at the times of their stations and the times of their exact contacts with each other. We get six of these spikes at the end of May, as Jupiter conjoins Chiron and Neptune, and all three planets stand still in the heavens before they begin their retrograde period.

The Bottom Line
This makes for one complicated picture of interwoven energies, but put simply it means that 2009 and 2010 are the peak years of this healing process, with 2009 being the most intense. We’ll experience a heating and cooling process that ebbs and flows with the planetary tides. Having the tide tables will help us through.

The Best It Can Be
Although it is possible to describe the way most people will respond to this dynamic combination, what’s the best it can give us? For those who are able to work well with these energies (whether due to conscious practice, natural ability, or unconscious knowledge), there is the opportunity to continually open, dissolve, and clear obstacles, inner blockages, and wounded perceptions. This can result in a constant process of upliftment. At times, it can feel as though all our problems are confronting us at once, or that we are inadequate to the task. We may feel as though we are inalterably wounded.

If we have or have access to the tools and methods of healing, we can move through the inner blockages very quickly. We have unprecedented access to them now, and as they arise we can trace them back to their deepest source in time and pattern. Each of us becomes a mystery to be solved. The issues we face are the evidence. We examine the evidence and follow it back to its beginning in the root of our being. We solve the mystery of that piece of evidence and then begin on another, which leads us back to a different facet of the same root. Bit by bit we chip away at the core wound, going deeper as each trail gives us more understanding of what’s at its heart.

With each solved mystery, we adjust a slight bit of who we are on the inside. This could be felt as a new attitude about someone or something; a new understanding of how we create unwanted circumstances in our lives; a clarification of what we want and how to go about it. This is the seed of a new awareness that ripples outward into all areas of our lives with a sweeping effect. One seed can completely change our attitude, beliefs, decisions, actions, and therefore the way the world responds to us. What results is a deeper understanding of ourselves and profound positive changes to our everyday life.

Working with Fixed Energy
The signs we are currently working with are Taurus and Aquarius. They, along with Leo and Scorpio, are fixed signs. The fixed signs bring to the foreground the universal energy of stabilization. The stabilizing force seeks security, vitality, firmness and stability, resilience, durability, and depth. The products that result must be able to withstand all manner of tests, including the test of time.

In our nature, two qualities are required in dealing with the fixed sign energies: persistence and the suspension of disbelief. First, we must persevere in adhering to what we feel is the core truth of the matter in question regardless of the immediate consequences. Then, we need not believe that all will work out — we must merely not disbelieve it. We must distance ourselves from the “it will never work out” mentality for “even if I don’t know how it can work out, I am open to it doing so”.

We are not required to believe in something blindly — in fact it is unhelpful, even an obstacle. We merely have to be “led through the small door of the improbable, which will only open at the precise moment of need”. (A Guide to the I Ching, Carol K. Anthony)

May’s Planets
With the Aquarian planets establishing this long-term healing process, May’s planetary energy spike is the biggest of the year. However, its surface manifestation will work with the situations established in February. As an example, you will recall that our political landscape completely changed at that time. President Obama had just taken office, and tremors were occurring throughout government, in both procedure and policy. Our personal lives were going through a similar seed-planting process, each of us with our own story.

May takes us into the next step of nurturing the growth of these processes, a normal part of the cycle, but this one is hyper-charged by the Jupiter-Chiron-Neptune spikes at the end of the month. Add to that the fact that Mercury will retrograde and trigger these planets three times in the process, and we have a very potent experience ahead of us.

Mercury Is Our Friend — Even When It’s Retrograde.
When Mercury retrogrades, it often involves a process of saying “no”. If we planted our garden with seeds in January and February, then we must tend the garden now by deciding which sprouts are weeds and which ones are the precious plants we want to nurture. By pulling the weeds from our field of possibility, we say no to what we don’t want. In the first half of May, we could be defining our lives through a process of elimination. The last half will be more about affirmation.

When Mercury is retrograde, it speaks to us more loudly, and sometimes we’d rather live on in oblivion. It lets us know what circuits aren’t connecting in our lives. A car can break down, a bank account go out of balance, a relationship explode. But it is refreshing to be able to hear its voice with clarity, because it is better to know what is going on underneath the surface because then we have power to change its undermining influence on us. With the connections made during Mercury’s retrograde, we’re sure to feel a little abrasion, because three of the four contacts are squares.

The Merry, Merry Month of May
So, we will be working within the parameters established in and since February — known quantities; but we will also be starting something new and huge under the Jupiter-Chiron-Neptune conjunction that is also occurring. We are unlikely to know what that is until later in the year (if not further down the road) because of Neptune’s involvement.

Because there are so many ins and outs of this process, let's look at it day by day:

Before May
If we paid attention to what happened on April 22–25 in our world, we know what the month of May will bring us for the most part. That’s when Mercury made its first pass over the Aquarian trio. We could call this a time of fertilization, when some circumstances were set up that we will encounter again as Mercury goes over these planets two more times.

May 1-2
Venus makes its last square to Pluto, the third of three linked to its 6-week retrograde period March 6 – April 17. This is our last chance to get in touch with necessary changes in relationship and finance. It’s time to be a little bolder in being authentic — masks won’t serve us, and they may block our way.

May 3-5
Commerce and connections become more concentrated, tighter, and perhaps stand still as Mercury puts on the brakes. Sun trining Saturn sheds a ray of hope portending what will come when Saturn returns to forward motion (stationary direct) on the 16th. It has fed many productive moments recently.

May 6-9
This is a time to use wisely. We will be called upon to focus intensely on what we need to accomplish for the rest of the month, as Mercury begins its retrograde period on May 6 and the Full Moon peaks on Friday evening. We should know by the 9th what Mercury’s retrograde will bring us. Because Mercury retrograde is a time of learning, you may be doing something substantially different than you’ve done before, requiring more effort than usual. On Saturday, the Moon sends signals about how we’re experiencing Jupiter-Chiron-Neptune in our lives as it aspects each one.

May 10-12
A breather period — time to catch up!

May 13
Mercury re-enters Taurus backward, escalating the intensity of our healing processes as it pushes back toward Jupiter-Chiron-Neptune. The intensity will continue to grow from now through the 20th.

May 14-16
Two things are happening now: The Sun makes its squares to Jupiter-Chiron-Neptune, and Saturn returns to forward motion — FINALLY! The Sun’s squares to these planets generates a spike of awareness in our healing process, and it has the potential to activate forces of positive development in our lives. We can “turn the corner” on something that is developing in our lives, just as the Sun turns the corner of the square to each planet.

Saturn’s return to forward motion ends a 5-month period of concentrated effort to bring about a necessary change in a seemingly overwhelming situation on a thread of life that we started on September 3 last year. This is an area that you are already well aware of. However, because of Saturn’s opposition with Uranus, there is also an aspect of the situation that is still unresolved and will continue to open up through September, when Saturn’s next yearly cycle begins. This keeps the situation in a constant state of renewal where we might expect (or want) it to be completed. We may be wondering if it will ever be resolved, and it will once Saturn and Uranus stop handing off to each other in July next year. Additional dates that tie in with this one are December 12 and 31 (2008), March 8, and June 5. The release of activity that accompanies Saturn’s change in direction will be muted until Mercury goes direct at the end of the month, so some expected developments may be delayed until after that time.

May 17-20
We are penetrating to the heart of the healing process that is available to us at this time. Mercury takes us into the depths of the ocean (Neptune) with the light from the heavens (Sun, Jupiter) and the help of healer and spiritual messenger Chiron. Mercury reaches Neptune, Chiron, and Jupiter for the second of three times on the 20th, bringing out in fuller form the patterns and situations we noted on April 22-25. This could be good, especially since we’ve had a chance to reinforce whatever we learned or had a chance to bring forth at that time in April. It could feel like too much of a good thing, too much success.

The Sun ignites all that it touches, and once it leaves Taurus, the fire of growth will dim noticeably. While Mercury will keep it very lively for one or two more days, it will dim considerably by the 22nd to a dull roar.

May 21-22
The energies are relaxing a little now, as we are between energy spikes in the planetary patterns of May.

May 23
The Moon reinvigorates the fixed planets for a day, as it contacts Mercury retrograde, Jupiter, Chiron, and Neptune. This gives us another chance to assimilate and adjust to the tremendous change we’re experiencing. This is underlined by Jupiter’s conjunction with Chiron, which is exact today, the first of three this year. The last Jupiter-Chiron conjunction was in 1990, starting the last cycle of inner healing. The other conjunctions occur on July 22 and December 7.

May 24-31
Neptune and Chiron are essentially stationary now, getting ready to retrograde for the next five months. Neptune’s retrograde begins on the 28th, Chiron’s on the 29th. Mercury goes direct on the 30th and prepares to reconnect with Jupiter, Chiron, and Neptune. Jupiter conjoins Neptune on the 27th, starting its new 13-year cycle. The last Jupiter-Neptune cycle started in 1997 just before the bubbles (dot-com and housing) occurred that resulted from deregulation and brought down the economy. Jupiter also makes two more conjunctions with Neptune this year, on July 10 and December 21.

When Mercury goes forward again, we will be able to also but at a new level of awareness and activity. With our new perspective, the way is finally clear for (at least partially) unimpeded forward motion. Mercury makes its third contacts with Chiron, Neptune, and Jupiter on June 9 and 10. Jupiter, although essentially stationary, will not begin its retrograde until June 15.

Life will reveal some of its surprises this month and put us on the path to fulfilling some of our dreams. We will feel better because more factors are known quantities, even though we’ll feel challenged by them.

Significant Planetary Events

Saturn and Pluto are retrograde. Mercury and Mars are in rulership. Venus is in detriment.

All dates are based on Pacific Time.
Blue = harmonious/Red or orange = challenging/intense
Events in bold are more significant.

© Terry Lamb