I’m feeling super-inspired and grateful for the special group of people who contributed to Saturday’s spontaneous workshop-experiment, which explored some of the dynamics of the final Saturn-Uranus closing square, happening this week. I always encourage my students to take risks and embrace the potential for failure in their creative experiments but I get why it’s so hard to do. The pressure is so intense not only to be hyper-productive in this mad capitalist society but for our outputs to be of spectacular quality. We compare ourselves with the masters of our crafts, and when everything is documented for a digital eternity it feels prohibitive to risk failing publicly. Which is a shame because failure has so many great benefits for experimentation. All of which is to say that I’m feeling so energised by the failures of this creative experiment. The shame I felt afterwards was great practice for self-compassion, the people who accompanied me on this spontaneous journey were the very best I could have hoped to fail with, and the whole experience turned out to be incredibly rewarding in some incredibly unexpected ways.
Suffice to say that I did not succeed in cutting back, streamlining or reducing my workload in this experiment! The recording is available in two parts as a result, for anyone who’s interested to check any of it out and I’m sorry about the crappy quality. I’ve gotten worse at Final Cut Pro in the long gap between videos. The first video (Saturn-Uranus square: Grounding the breakthrough vision into reality) describes the context of the bigger cycle that this week’s closing square fits within. Hopefully it helps to inspire insight into the significance of some larger storylines playing out in our lives and in the opportunities and challenges that we’re individually grappling with now. The second video (Saturn Uranus closing square: All Rising Signs) contains an overview of the astrology in this 12 day period with time-stamped rising-sign readings. If you’ve found them interesting previously hopefully they’ll be worthwhile this time also but after this experiment I know I won’t be doing rising sign readings in future… (If you’re reading this in Insta you can check the videos out via the link in my bio).
But for those who don’t have time for epic astrological overviews etc, here are some of the take-aways in a nutshell: This last roughly 10 year phase of the Saturn-Uranus cycle, we’re mastering our ability to ground a vision into the world. But right now we have time to get things wrong. As we make choices in relation to what we value most, cutting away, little by little, the things that aren’t working, experimenting, failing, innovating, stumbling, course-correcting, trying new things, and practicing what we care about, we’ll attain the kind of excellence we’re aiming for, eventually. The next two weeks may contain some stress-tests but they’re powerful portals through which breakdowns have the potential to reveal liberating insights and energising breakthroughs. They’re not a sign that we’re not doing it right. They’re signals of opportunity that require a deeply compassionate and tender acceptance of ourselves. We’re doing a bloody great job, all things considered my friends. So if you’re feeling a little shook and pummelled around this time, keep reminding yourself of this very important fact with Saturnian persistence. The keys lie in trusting ourselves and what we have to offer; embracing the kinds of creative risks that could both result in failure and open us up to revolutionary shifts that align us more closely with our vision; and simplifying and refining the structures that support us in this work as we keep dancing around those sweet fleeting moments of balance…
#saturnuranussquare #experiment #workshop #astrology #art #failure #breakthrough
