Transmute it!

One thing I learn again and again and again (as soon as I forget it a little bit, the universe sends me a refresher course) is that energy will always express. This means two things:

1. You have to find expressions for your natal chart energy, which is set at your birth. You have it for life, and you can use it positively, neutrally, or negatively, but you can't not use it.
2. You have to find expressions for your transits, or they will happen to you. We are not completely at the mercy of the prevailing energy, but if you fight the prevailing energy, you're probably not going to have a pleasant/good/easy time.

For point #1, let's say you have a packed 2nd house and you're one of those people who can never throw anything away. Let's say you keep amassing things, and you have more stuff than you have space. That's a problem. You know it's a problem. And if you know astrology, you know that you can't just evict planets from your 2nd house, so you have to give them other things to do. Side jobs: interior design, working as a personal shopper, resourcing materials for people who need them, creating inventory systems for your own stuff or other people's stuff (now we're technically in 8th house territory but you get the point). You can't just stop doing the behaviors: you have to change them into something else. It's very hard to cold-turkey our bad habits: behavioral psychology teaches us to replace the negative behavior with a more positive behavior, or, failing that, at least a different behavior. So, keep this in mind, new year's resolution crowd.

Sometimes when we quit our bad behaviors, it's well-intentioned, but we're denying or suffocating our own energy, and if we're not aware that we're doing it, it can either get disowned and pop up in behavior that we attract to ourselves from other people, or it can fester and manifest as new bad habits. So in my 2nd house example, you need to do something constructive in the material security realm instead of just collecting stuff, otherwise, deciding to stop collecting stuff won't go well.

Regardless of whether you know astrology or not, we as humans are actually pretty good at taking hints, or at least having hunches about what we should be doing a lot of the time. Life tends to afford us opportunities, windows, chance encounters, etc. that nudge us forward in the indirect experience that life is (meaning that you set out to do something and then go on a whole different adventure most of the time). Some of us understand riding waves, and some of us are stubborn as fuck. I used to be the latter and have learned to be the former, because you can't negotiate your way out of a Uranus transit.

I've had Neptune squaring my natal Neptune for the last 2 years, and I've also been in grad school for the last 2 years. Coincidence? Nope. When I had Neptune sextile Neptune (an easier aspect) I was also in grad school, so you could reasonably conclude that when Neptune aspects itself in my chart, I decide to torture myself with higher education (Neptune is in my 9th house and on my south node, so I'm saying this earnestly, as the 9th house is the higher education house and the south node is old and busted energy that's basically uphill in all directions). But 2.5 years ago, a friend of mine pointed out that it might actually make sense for me to do this program. I knew at the time that I had 2.5 - 3 years before I had energy for things I actually wanted to do, so I gave the grad school thing another shot. Given that a Neptune square is uncomfortable energy, I have been frustrated, stressed, and confused by this program, and if I were to describe the program as "disorganized," I'd be speaking charitably. This is the worst possible time for me to pursue another degree given the energy at hand, but my rationale is that 1. I can't accomplish a few other things I want to do because there is no energy for them, and remember: no energy = no action and 2. if I didn't give the Neptune square Neptune transit an outlet, it would manifest itself in existing parts of my life that I actually *like.* I'm not pretending that I control the universe, but this was a mitigation strategy that, if I retain my sanity for 100ish more days, I'll probably get another degree out of. So this was making the best out of bad energy, and it came from a hint from my friend to take advantage of the tuition program at work and the existing degree program most of my coworkers have gone through.

The experience has been a world of stress. If I start complaining, I won't stop, but I think the most concise way to describe it is that the instructions within my courses have changed during the course almost every time, so I will be trying to accomplish something and then find out I'm doing it wrong because the professor changed their mind. Once a final test got cancelled, and you'd think I would have been happy about that, but I'd allocated a bunch of time to take the test and was incredibly stressed about it, and then had to email my professor to ask where the test was, because he didn't post it, and it was only then that he announced he cancelled it. He has since left the institution. Oh, and also: I've had to go by a name I don't use throughout the duration of the program, because of course.

So to hammer this point home: when I had Neptune sextile Neptune, I had easy energy. It was still a little overwhelming, but the experience was engaging, relevant, and smooth. So good energy = fairly good action (again remember my natal potential says this will be harder for me than for the average person). This current program: bad energy = uphill in all directions because it's negatively aspecting harsh natal potential. But if I had no energy in the 9th house/aspecting Neptune = no action. AND, I wasn't going to dodge the transit, and the energy had to go somewhere. It went several other places in addition to this dumb program, but when I look back on this time, I will primarily point to my misguided attempt to get this degree. My last class doesn't start until the 12th of this month, but the professor is just like the rest of them and thinks that we students are enthusiastic about self-flagellation , so opened the course early and recommended that we read over the materials "over the holidays." As a result, I had a classmate email me about something on Christmas. Ridiculous. But on point for this energy.