The Lunar Queen Aligning with her King
For those of you who read my last blog post, you know that I’ve recently been blown away by the little known (at least to me) fact that a full cycle of lunar phases does not take 28 days as I previously thought, but actually takes 29.5 days. And while this initially opened up a LOT of questions about the nature of the connection of my menstrual cycle to the lunar phases cycle (see my previous post “Aligning with the Lunar Queen” for full deets) once I had sufficiently peeled back the layer of that inquiry I found another one hiding beneath it.
Basically, what I noticed was that the number of days it takes for the moon to complete a full cycle of phases (29.5) is exactly the number of years it takes for any given human to come around to the same point that Saturn was in their natal chart when they were born. AKA the infamous Saturn return. And, hilariously, just as there is a pretty big fluctuation around what is considered a “normal” cycle length for menstruating women (roughly 26-32 days give or take) there is also a degree of variation in when astrologers consider the Saturn return to have officially started that differs depending on an individuals natal chart. Saturn returns can begin as early as age 27 and sometimes are not completed until the age of 31. However it always takes exactly 29.5 years to the T for Saturn to return to the exact position it was the moment you first drew breath.
So, in essence, Saturn follows an exact cycle, as do the Lunar phases, HOWEVER, the way these celestial bodies act upon us and OUR bodies differs from person to person depending upon our unique individual constitution. And while I may have been a bit shocked at the revelation of a 29.5 day Lunar phases cycle versus the 28 days that I had previously believed to be the case, I have to admit that when I realized the connection between the 29.5 days of the Lunar phases cycle and the 29.5 years of the Saturn return cycle I did have one of those internal shifts of remembrance occur. You know the ones, where your belly expands, and your mind drops down to your heart, and you just know.
Because, my period has always felt like a mini Saturn return for my emotional body. It’s like a little pressure cooker of release, where I have a monthly opportunity to get really fucking clear on what I am ok with emotionally, and what I really really am not. And I think when I was younger, this was part of the reason why my cycle was so difficult. Because I am a chronic people pleaser, and every month there would be a set period of days where my body would absolutely rebel and say NO MORE. And as I got older, I learned to listen, and to attempt to integrate the feelings that would arise so intensely during my cycle, and that process of listening and integrating what my body had communicated helped my body to trust me and not have to speak so loudly.
And you know what’s crazy? Science has actually started to provide some clear information on what happens in the brain during menstruation that highlights the wisdom of listening to our internal process, rather than writing it off as being founded in nothing more substantial than the hormonal ramblings of hysterical bleeding women. According to Michaela Rosandich in her article Brain Function At Menstruation the Corpus Callosum, the thick bundle of nerve fibers that forms the superhighway of information between the right and left brains experiences a significant upswing in activity as women are menstruating. And if you have ever heard of Selective Attention, which is the process the Left Hemisphere goes through filtering down the literally billions of observed and stored pieces of information that the Right Hemisphere picks up during waking consciousness to about two thousand pieces of information deemed the most important based on our learned life experiences, then you can see why this increase in information sharing between the Right and Left Hemispheres at menstruation is such a titillating new discovery. Because, it shows that we potentially have access to more pieces of observable information when we are bleeding then at any other time of the month. That we are quite literally more intuitive, more connected, and in greater union with ourselves. Which I think is pretty fucking rad.
So if my moon cycle is a microcosm of my relationship with my inner emotional world, then I think of Saturn and specifically the Saturn return as being representative of the constraints and realities of my outer world. So in the same way that my moon time brings me into the wisdom of my body through gifting me with more information from my subconscious (right brain observances) my Saturn return brings me into the wisdom of my environment by helping me to observe my reality as it actually is and not just as I would like it to be. This process of living life on life’s terms, of understanding and accepting my limitations, actually, counter-intuitively, frees me up to step into my true, more limitless potential. It is almost as if the little incubation cycles of bleeding month after month and becoming more and more familiar with intuitive knowing eventually feed into the greater Saturn return cycle of using that intuitive knowing to face the truth of my life, and what it means to me. Or, as Amy Herring says in her article A Deeper Look at the Progressed Moon and Saturn Cycles, “Working with the two (our Lunar and Saturn cycles) reveals our development of maintaining the core needs of our heart’s desires (Lunar) while making the right compromises (Saturn) to get those needs met in a concrete realistic way…”
The Lunar Queen puts us in touch with our emotional needs, and the Saturnian King helps us to build a life that realistically supports our hearts deepest desires.
What are your moon cycles trying to teach you? And do you have the bravery to listen? And, if you’ve been through your Saturn return, how did that process help you move towards a life that supports your emotional body?
