Surviving 30: Waking Up to Your True Self Through Your Saturn Return

Once you’ve got them sorted out, do your best to “turn down the dial” on those external voices and see what comes up that’s purely from you.

What we don’t always realize is that many of “our” thoughts don’t really come from us, or at least not from our true selves. We all absorb a great deal of input from a variety of other people as we grow up, and their thoughts, beliefs, expectations, and demands take up residence inside us without us even being consciously aware of it. Since the ent

“The Saturn Return is ultimately a process of death and rebirth, the sloughing of the old mask and the discovery of the real – and often less “perfect” – individual who has been growing all along, hidden beneath the scaffolding of conscious identifications…whether palatable or not, [the shadow] is reality, and must be integrated into one’s life. On

That sense of rightness to your own ideas, finding what comes authentically from your own perceptions yet remains flexible enough to share and integrate with a group of common-minded people, is the thing you have to earn.

the classic “loner” who refuses any group participation, or the person who compulsively follows the rules and sticks with tradition out of fear of innovating, or the person who insists on focusing only on themselves and their subjective emotional state as a way of resisting big, abstract intellectual adventures.

Remember that all true change across human history has balanced a vision of what is possible in the future with the inconvenient reality of imperfect human nature, and make a place for both. When you struggle – when the group rejects your ideas, or you can’t find a group that welcomes you, or when you either become obsessed by your beliefs or lose

One way to help yourself become less troubled by uncertainty is to “shorten your horizon” – to focus on your immediate needs rather than the long-term future.

For those of you with Saturn in Aquarius, this is your challenge – to find your ideal vision based on your own principles, with which you can engage with a group that shares those principles.

Our new self is formed gradually, with many false starts and experimental attempts, and we earn it with courage to be honest, attention to personal truths, and willingness to remain open to uncertainty while following our developing intuition. While this can sound discouraging at first, the truth is that the value of anything we earn ourselves is e