But we left the dinosaurs on the island

Ye olde astrology books use the word "natal potential" a lot for a reason, and I want to explain this and what it means for you. This is a basic concept that it's easy to lose sight of but when you look for it, it's everywhere. What it means: transits from or to any planets in your chart will contain the meaning and themes that appear in your birth chart. But what does that mean? How do you know what the implications are for you? It's easy to get lost.

One way of looking at natal potential is that planets that are well-situated in your birth chart tend to portend positive developments, even if they're making a harsh aspect: usually in the long run, things work out. Bernadette Brady refers to this in her book The Eagle and the Lark when she says that transits from the planetary ruler of the 5th house tend to end positively even if that planet is Saturn (which makes most people feel shitty, except apparently the Virgo risings*), and transits from the planetary ruler of the 8th house tend to act in extreme ways, even if that planet is Venus (which is one of the "benefic" planets so generally speaking shouldn't cause intensity).

A different way of thinking about this is to imagine a planet as a "flavor" or a "set of vibes" or "recurring life themes." Pick any of those, or something similar. So if you have Pluto in Sagittarius in the second house, even though Pluto's not transiting Sagittarius or your second house anymore, transits from Pluto bring up Sagittarius themes (belief, things you know or don't know, religion, higher learning) and second house themes (money, self esteem, being stubborn as a mule). No matter what, you were born into the rules of 'Pluto in Sagittarius in the second house,' so you live by them, whether you like it or not. I once observed that someone I know absolutely goes to pieces when Uranus is active in their chart, and it's for several reasons: it's unaspected in their birth chart, meaning they don't have a natural map for dealing with Uranian energy. Unaspected planets tend to function in an all-or-nothing capacity: either you are ignoring it or it is taking 100% of your attention with no happy medium. Also, their natal Uranus is in Scorpio, so it's super-intense. I'd ignore it too if I were them, but this setup makes tolerance of left-field shit basically zero. But I’m Aquarian and have Uranus aspecting lots of things, so a natural ability to deal with weird shit.

How do you figure out what's what in your chart? The slow way: watching your chart and what seems to happen when energies get activated. Some of the best advice I ever got was to pick up a copy of Planets in Transit to get definitions of transits and then just watch Mars aspects to your entire chart for a full cycle (which is two years) and watch what happens. It also helps if you journal, because when you inevitably miss a transit you had (there's too much going on at all times to stay on top of everything, I assure you) you can go back and look at what the themes were.

Most of us have some sort of a mixed bag in our chart. I would say it's typical to have one planetary configuration that's more positive than it should be and one that's more negative than it should be, so don't get too far down a rabbit hole of feeling sorry for yourself, because it's pretty much like this for everyone. For example, some of my beef with Jupiter (it’s overrated!!) is that it's in my 8th house, so every time I have a Jupiter transit, I have to deal with death somehow. I learn stuff, because Jupiter transits usually mean you’re learning or expanding your horizons somehow, but something ends or gets super intense or someone has their hair on fire about something (8th house stuff does not lack intensity). And I'm a working psychic & medium, so I've found a way to "deal with death" that's productive for everybody involved and far less dramatic than it used to be.

A final (for today) lens for natal potential is asking the question "what happened last time?" Either what happened the last time the planetary combination got aspected by a major outer planet in your chart or what happened during the last major transit from the major outer planet. In both cases, there are themes that seem to go dormant once a transit ends that kick back up once the energy gets activated again. This is quite literally what is happening when people say the past is coming back to haunt them. This is going to sound mildly condescending, but sometimes people think they've "handled" or "overcome" something when really what happened was the intensity died down. Then the heat comes back and anything that was unresolved last time is ba-ack. Hints that this is happening include inexplicably thinking about and/or dreaming about a specific time period in your life all the time. It's like the universe is saying "hey you forgot this. But I didn't."

This is why I warned people who have energy in the early degrees of cardinal signs (0 - 1° Aries, Cancer, Libra, Capricorn): they got their shit rocked (technical term) in 2008-9 and then not a lot happened for a long while, so it was almost too quiet for a really long time, and then all of a sudden lots of things are happening at once, because different planets are hitting this energy in kind of an energetic fiesta situation. For some people, it's been very literally a continuation of 2009 themes.

During a life explosion I had a long time ago, I was crying to my therapist and I muttered "this is pretty much exactly what happened last time." She looked surprised, and I informed her that the relationship bullshit (my Pluto's in Libra so Pluto things have to do with relationships for me) I was experiencing had also occurred 13 years previously: different setting and themes, but pretty much the same story. I gave her the details and her jaw was on the floor. It turned out I hadn't learned my lesson the first time, and this is also something the sky likes to do if you are resistant to lessons: dump you back in a very similar situation/lesson with worse drama until you learn to stop being a human disaster. Again, astrological awareness helps a lot with determining where your hangups are and can help you avoid repeating the same mistakes if you're willing to recognize that the common denominator in your repeating life themes is you.

I'll conclude with the fact that sometimes the themes are just fucking weird in a way that's uncanny. A few years ago I shooting the shit with someone I know and he mentioned that he was hospitalized for an extended period with a crazy infection when he was a teenager. In the back of my head I thought "that sounds like Neptune" (this is how I think—I am something of a monster at this point). I waited politely** until I got back to my car to whip out my phone and check his transits back when he was a teenager, and sure enough: Neptune transit to his sun. It is many years later, and guess who was hospitalized when Neptune was again transiting his sun? Not for the same thing, but that's still an obvious pattern. I haven't even badgered him for a list of all the time he's been in the hospital, because I bet I would find more uncanniness if it was socially acceptable for me to ask really personal questions for no reason.

*I’m being facetious.
**Believe it or not, I wander the earth without talking much about astrology to most people.