"Outer planet transits": Now with more definition

I realize I throw this term around a lot, so here's an explanation. Things that move slowly in our solar system create rather forceful psychological/spiritual/energetic climates that cause action on our earthly plane. These "things" are on the other side of the Kuiper Belt: Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, in descending order from fastest to slowest. Probably also Eris, which is farther out than Pluto, and extremely slow. And then Chiron the planetoid, usually slow, can also make noise.

There's a 0% chance that I can cover what each of those planetary transits mean for you personally in this post, because they are the main drivers of non-believers to astrologers. As in: people whose lives have taken rather extreme turns and they are desperate to understand the cause. Saturn can be intense pressure. Uranus: intense change. Neptune: intense confusion. Pluto: intense shitstorm. This is not always true, and I have just overgeneralized. It is perfectly possible for someone to have an unremarkable Pluto transit: maybe they start therapy or get really into researching a subject that's important to them. Maybe during a Neptune transit someone finds religion. But for most people there's an observable effect when they have active transits. They also coincide with major life events: both the good ones and the bad ones. Outer planet transits mean something is transforming. Your individual chart has more to say about what and how.

I'm conservative with math when I'm reading charts, so in order for a transit to be *really* active, it's two degrees out from a direct contact by conjunction (0 degrees), sextile (60 degrees), square (90 degrees), trine (120 degrees), inconjunct (150 degrees) and opposition (180 degrees). Usually sextiles and trines don't cause havoc, but sometimes they do when it's Pluto (sorry....Pluto's Pluto). Sensitive people can feel the energy 5-7 degrees out.

If you can read charts well enough to be dangerous, or you want to learn, get yourself a copy of Rob Hand's Planets in Transit, which is the transit bible (I wish it was on Kindle).  I also recommend Howard Sasportas' The Gods of Change and Stephen Arroyo's Astrology, Karma & Transformation, and Bernadette Brady's Predictive Astrology: the Eagle and the Lark. The astrologer I consulted when I was first learning (and wanted someone else's perspective to make sure I was doing it right) also gave me the great advice to spend about two years watching what the sky was doing relative to my own chart, which starts to give you a flavor for how things work. Bonus if you can get the charts of your nearest and dearest, but try to refrain from handing out unsolicited advice (I definitely drove my friends crazy).

Another tip that some of these books allude to, but I don't think any one of them says explicitly: these transits are a PROCESS. They last for one year or many years, depending on your chart and which celestial body it is. It's not transactional, like you can't voluntarily make sacrifices to appease what seem to be angry sky gods (tried that; don't bother), and you will have several periods of your life where everything seems harder than it needs to be. That's just life, whether you understand astrology or not. Some times during the transit process are louder than other times. Due to retrogrades, things often seem to get better for a while, only to get worse again a few months later. Sometimes you get the hang of what a transit is trying to do and just lean in. When I had Pluto transiting my Mars, I was really angry all the time and decided to channel that energy into lifting weights, and I was scaring trainers at my gym with how much I was trying to squat (in hindsight they were probably right to be scared). When you're in the middle of a process, you can't rush or short-circuit it, you just have to let it do its thing.

Nothing lasts forever, not even Neptune or Pluto transits 😉

XO,J