 Hello, beautiful souls. Welcome back to Art of Awakening. My name is Ona Christie, and today let's talk about the energies of Saturn. So depending on when you come across this video, Saturn is gonna... You'll have come here under the influence of Saturn in some way. Right now I am posting in early May 2022, and we're in the midst of eclipse season, and we're about to go into a really significant eclipse, which will be on the 15th, 16th of May. It's in the sign of Scorpio, and it is square Saturn. So this is gonna be... for some of us, it may feel like a doozy of an eclipse, and here's why, because first of all, it's in the sign of Scorpio. Okay, so this Scorpio is the sign of, like, Saxon death, all this deep stuff. Okay, so it's going deep, and it's a water sign, so it can... you might find emotional things coming up, right? To be processed, as will often happen, definitely for a full moon, and especially a lunar eclipse, right? Often will bring us into the shadows emotionally, and when we're dealing with Scorpio, it can be sometimes kind of stinging energy or just really intense energy coming up. So if you've been feeling it, you're not the only one, and so this is just kind of a... be aware that these energies are here to be processed, are here to be brought up, so that we can work through them and take power from them, right? Because any kind of the pain, energy, or the challenges that we go through are here as tests, and that brings us into the meaning of Saturn, or the energy of Saturn. Okay, so in astrology, if we have a square, usually that means there's going to be some tension, and you know, when we are square Saturn, Saturn is a super interesting planetary energy to me. Whereas Jupiter is this expansive energy, the energy of expansion, of abundance, Saturn's a contractive energy. So it's one that has to do often with challenges and limitations and learning our limitations, learning our boundaries, okay? And so I like to think of Saturn as the taskmaster or the one in charge of initiations, right? The schoolmaster, the stern father, is often a way that Saturn is portrayed. And so you have this energy, this divine masculine energy, but it is... There's different aspects of divine masculine as well as divine feminine, okay? And some aspects of divine masculine are the protector, if you think of Archangel Michael, and some of those similar archetypes, you know, or it can be... It could be a protector, it can be a guide, right, a wise teacher. Saturn is a type of guide, but he often comes in as... Often our first impression of Saturn is as in antagonistic energy, or one that's trying to mess up our lives, or posing obstacles, and that is true, but it's really important to remember that he is here as an ally, right? And if we start to relate to Saturn as an ally, then things start to fall into place. Okay, so Saturn... Often when you're dealing with Saturn energy, you're going to see obstacles come up. You're going to see challenges and the thing to remember is that it is through those challenges that we grow and that we learn and that we learn what is our truth and learn to, you know, align with our own truth, right? And so this is what these challenges do, and this is what Saturn does as you start to relate to Saturn in a way. It becomes... It transforms. You can transform this energy from, you know, why is the world against me to... Oh my gosh, you know, this challenge is coming up. What do I need to look at within myself? Where am I off-balance? Because what Saturn does is as well as any of the trickster energies, right? What they do is they show us where our boundaries are. They show us where we're off-balance, and then it's up to us, right? And there's different ways you can deal with it. One is by fighting it, and typically that's kind of a losing battle, right? Because these are archetypal energies that come up that show us our limitations. We do have limitations. And if we're just like, you know, sometimes we have to fight our way through things. But if we're fighting the fact that life is hard, good luck, because as a wise counselor said to me today, life is supposed to be hard. It really is. And if you look at any of life's creatures, oh, these beautiful creatures that are growing, right? Whoops. You know, the trees. Let's even just take an apple tree. An apple tree has to have a period of really intense cold for it to bear fruit, right? There are like a jack pine that needs to go through the fire in order for the cone to burst open and for a new life to come out of it. And this is true for all living beings. All living beings need a certain amount of stress and challenge in order to, you know, find the strength within themselves and to activate their own inner strength and the life force. So the life force is actually nurtured partially through challenge, okay? Obviously the challenge, okay, so this energy of challenge, it can get unbalanced. We'll talk about that in a sec. But it's really, really important to remind ourselves that all the challenges in our lives really are here for us to, you know, as opportunities for us to rise up, rise to the challenge and to really come into our truth. Often that means looking with deep, deep honesty at where we are off balance, right? It's, it's, you can't really go through a challenge. What happens is like if we're off balance somewhere, there's gonna be a challenge that will come up because we're off balance and sometimes we try to accommodate for being off balance by going more in the direction that we're already polarized, okay? Because that's the direction that we are naturally leading anyway, okay? So anything that's trying to take us and kind of mess with our balance, we're gonna likely first go more in the direction that we already were, okay? So when we're dealing with this energy of dealing with challenge, there's two ways that we can get off balance. One way is to overcompensate, right, with power and that would be to get into this hyper, hyper warrior or drawing on other people's energy, right? So we can either get so much in fighting mode that we don't realize that we're actually just fighting ourselves or we can start going into vampiric mode and, you know, pulling on other people's energy and these are both survival responses, okay? So there's no judgment here, right? Just I'm asking to be aware if you see these patterns within yourself and it's easier to see in other people than it is in oneself, but I think with this full moon energy it's really going to, if you can humble yourself enough, and I'm speaking for all of us, myself included, to start really being honest enough with ourselves to say, hey, is there something within me here? Am I following this pattern? And having that self-awareness and the, so the overcompensation, the overdrive, the overuse of power is one way that we can be off balance. A lot of this has to do with our masculine energy, right? And the other way that we can go off balance with that is by giving up, by becoming incredibly passive and either checking out or just say, hey, anything goes. Sometimes when sometimes it's a good thing to just kind of go with the flow and chill, but at other times we can use that as a mechanism for checking out and not actually dealing with things that we need to deal with, okay? So part of what Saturn energy does teach us also is boundaries and where our limitations are and where we need to draw the line for other people, okay? So if you notice that within yourself, you're going the passive route and that can that can manifest spiritually as, oh, everything's good and you know, everything's divinely ordained and I'm just going to transcend it all and I'm just going to sit in meditation or you know, just allow everything to happen and not actually deal with things that need to be dealt with, okay? So that's that's the the the overly passive side and the challenge that Saturn brings to us is to find that middle way, right? To find that place and another wise counselor once described the word compassion to me as a balance between mercy and justice, okay? So mercy being the you know, the the unconditional love and the acceptance, right? And the forgiveness and then justice, I think referring to natural law, there are always natural consequences to whatever we do, the universe itself will show you, you know, if you're off balance and so we ourselves need to recognize and abide where where natural law needs to take an effect and if we can hold that balance between the you know, the justice and and recognizing the wisdom of the universe and in terms of consequences and to hold our ground, right? And to respect that natural law, even if it's something that we wouldn't want for instance, I'm going to bring kind of like the idea of parenting sometimes looking at Saturn as a wise father, right? Sometimes a father has to let his children go and make mistakes and just allow that, allow them to you know, make the mistakes that they need to make or even set up situations where they are challenged, right? That's the task master and sometimes it is sometimes we're like, oh my dad is such a hole, right? Because oh man, he made me do this. But then if you've ever had that kind of situation where it's like you look back it's like, oh, I am so glad that I had to do that because now I can handle, you know, what's what's in front of me that's what Saturn does. And so you know, if you're if you're experiencing challenges right now or if you, you know, as you move forward if there's any challenges coming your way here is the encouragement is to first of all, breathe in center and then take a look at yourself just really honestly, ran out of room on my camera. So so yeah, three keys to working with Saturn. When Saturn comes knocking on the door one is self-awareness and being completely honest with yourself, really looking beyond any stories that you've attached to, be aware that you can attach to stories do your best to really honestly feel into what is true for you and another one is compassion, having compassion for yourself and gratitude, right? Being grateful for all the experiences that we go through knowing that each one is here for a reason to help us to grow and to expand. Because Saturn, being the contract of energy, actually is here to support us in our expansion. We just need to pass the initiations first. So much love to you and remember that you have your own inner guru, right? So really, really, really know that deep inside you know exactly what to do and remember you were born to be free.