Crisis of consciousness

Here's the thing about astrology that I can't stand: for people who have Neptune transits or progressions, especially Neptune involved with the 12th house somehow (Neptune transiting the 12th or the planetary ruler of the 12th), there is not a lot I or any good astrologer can tell you aside from the following:

• wait it out

• don't freak out

• don't use substances excessively

• do something spiritually-motivated (whatever that means to you)

Neptune disintegrates and dissolves things. The people who tend to fare worst with Neptune transits are the Saturnian/achievement-oriented, who are appalled that good, old-fashioned hard work can't fix their problems while Neptune is active. Neptune tends to lurk pretty silently in a house until it starts directly making a transit to a natal planet, then you'll notice its presence. Once you notice, you're *in* it for the next 2+ years. When it moves on, things tend to fix themselves, but your perspective towards whatever situation wasn't working tends to have changed drastically. Why? Because you've been face to face with something that isn't working for 2 years that you can't do anything about. You're going to think about it a lot. You're going to wonder whether it's worth it to want what you initially felt you deeply wanted and couldn't live without.

Think about it this way: if you got marooned on an island tomorrow, you have some long-term choices to make after you figure out your food/water/shelter situation. Are you going to believe that you'll be rescued eventually or not? Are you going to have faith (however irrational it may seem) or succumb to fear? We know optimists are happier and healthier long-term, but can you pull off optimism when there's no supporting data? That's what Neptune asks you to do. It isn't that there's no hope. It's that you have to generate hope out of nowhere while things in your life rearrange themselves without your participation.

Neptune transits very often accompany grief processes: you lose something or someone you held dear. You then have to believe that one day you'll wake up and your loss won't be the first thing you think about. Grief magnetizes grief: you're grieving and you suddenly find yourself surrounded by other people who nod knowingly about your grief, or come to you for help processing their grief. Then you wonder if all of life is grief, 24/7. It's not. It's just the times you're living in.

Less dramatically, Neptune can accompany a time when you don't get something you wanted intellectually, but deep down didn't really want, emotionally. A promotion, perhaps. Grandma's house that she promised you. Something like that: there's a snag in the life plan and now you need to move to plan B or plan G, even, all while glancing back over at plan A wistfully, knowing you can't have it.

Here's an existential question: what do you do when a major part of your life isn't working and you can't stop staring at it and ruminating? There are a lot of possible answers here, but my favorite, based on my own experience, is "side quests." Do some weird shit you wouldn't normally do, because often, Neptune will give you a lot of extra time to think about what you can't have, and you can feel sorry for yourself or you can do something else. Go take an art class with a teacher who's either crazy or a genius. Go to the movies a lot. Or concerts. Or the theater (but pronounce it "Thea-tah.") Go help the less fortunate. Get yourself out of your head.

...But get yourself out of your head without drinking about it. You'll find more than a few people who took tough Neptune transits that they never pulled themselves out of: they lost something and then lost themselves doing some destructive shit. Reading this, you could understand why they would, right?

I wrote this because I've had multiple Neptune conversations lately and I am frustrated giving the advice that sometimes there's not much you can do about it but wait and reason will return and find you eventually, but for a long time it might seem like you live in chaos where reason has totally abandoned you.

The benefit you realize if you don't succumb to feeling sorry for yourself too much: you can learn to stop relying on externals. This might not sound like a good thing, but if you have an external locus of control and move it to internal, then only you can determine what type of day you're going to have, and that can confer a significant amount of strength in the end. Just some food for thought.