My Saturn Antardasha in a Nutshell
My Saturn Antardasha in a Nutshell
It was 2021. I was recovering from shock after my dead-end job of seven years finally laid me off. Money was the most precarious it had ever been since my sophomore year of college. All of my skills felt totally worthless. My band was struggling to practice even once a week. The live music scene was dead. I lost touch with most of my friends due to the pandemic. And my latest attempt at romance had ended in total embarrassment.
I didn’t just want a new job, or new connections. I wanted answers. When I would talk about my situation, most people’s expressions of sympathy were lukewarm, as they often accompanied disempowering platitudes—“they did what’s best for the company” or “that’s just the way the world works.” As a man who fully embraced the quest for meaning, words of unwisdom such as these felt like a challenge. Amidst the trials of various new dabblings—coding, singing, Instagram, occult magic, tarot—it was on a whim that I started to look for answers in astrology.
My interest at first started as a series of YouTube binges with a very skeptical lens. I was amazed to find out there were so many varieties of astrology—a fact to which the critics often decline to give attention. But it was when I learned about the role of Saturn in my life and in the world, that I started to get comfortable affirming, “there’s something to this astrology thing.”
It was a very polarizing path to initiate. Superficially I was doing many serious, Saturnine things like getting my career in order. On the side I was fulfilling my Gemini nature by devouring more and more videos and books about astrology. Vedic astrology especially synergized with the years of meditation I had under my belt. The knowledge coming in really forced me to scrutinize the balance of my material and spiritual needs.
In October I took a cross country drive to California. During the days on the road I listened to a lot of podcasts made for self-made millionaires. One of my best friends, who I was visiting in Phoenix told me that astrology was “pseudoscientific bullshit.” By the time I returned I was fully determined to never have my life at the mercy of a company again. As the head of a new marketing business, I was taking entrepreneurship classes and secular self help workshops to help me get rich. My confidence in these matters was a roller coaster. I felt like a liar to everyone who egged me on. During the break times I would always dash back to my hotel room to read more about astrology.
Saturn was the ruler of my antardasha—my secondary planetary cycle. Its advancement through the sign of Capricorn stretched the poles of my material and spiritual pursuits. My emotional state was like a rubber band getting tugged and snapping. In the month of May, a bad sales call caused my fourth and final meltdown. It was a Tuesday. Jupiter was already in my 10th house and the stationary Mercury had just turned retrograde in the 12th. I went to a concert that evening to take my mind off the struggles. By Friday I had resigned from my entrepreneurship classes even though I was almost 6-figures in debt. By that weekend I had a major fever and delirium, owing to a COVID infection. My voice was completely taken away from me. The knowledge that I wouldn’t be able to make sales calls for an indefinite amount of time, confirmed my decision to call it quits.
Indeed it took me two months to recover. But the time of sickness wasn’t so bad, for I had finally committed to my studies. All of the stress and hardship made me more resilient to the pressures and fears of Saturn, and ready to risk full faith in the Dharma of astrological practice. Fearlessly I proclaimed my determination to online networks and received a surprising amount of positive reception. When I had been symptom free for two weeks, I celebrated my 30th birthday at a music festival on a 100-degree day.
As I write this now, at the end of January 2023, Saturn has transited to a new sign and my Saturn antardasha is long gone. Since studying I have completed level 1 of my certification program and performed over a dozen readings, all ending with very positive feedback. Despite my financial troubles and my solitude, I feel blessed every day to be able to collect and share this knowledge. I am looking forward to seeing how far I can evolve my understanding of this sacred practice.
