Saturn returns are a sort of spiritual boot camp. They occur roughly every 29.5 years and are characterized by pivotal personal change and transformation. Saturn returns ask us to grow, to claim our inner authority, and to become more of who we truly are.

We all face multiple, major transitions throughout our lives, times when our identities dissolve and we have to re-form and become someone new. The transitions can be delightful or they can be wrenching. Sometimes, they are both. Here’s how to survive the passage.

We’re almost there my friends. We’re at the finish line of 2020: the craziest, weirdest, most tumultuous, contentious, painful, scary, exhausting year that most of us have ever seen.

“There is a mantra I love that can help enormously with this process we call Life. I saw it written on a whiteboard in a yoga class one day and I have adopted it as one of my Core Principles for Living. Here it is:

I’ve been thinking a lot about what to say this month. My mind and heart are troubled by what I see and hear: Division, anger, violence, finger-pointing, hypocrisy, grandstanding, virtue-signaling, and a whole lot of agitated herd behavior. It’s truly disturbing.

One of the more obvious and trying aspects of this pandemic we’re floundering in is all the things we can’t do. This horrid little virus has spurred limitations the likes of which most of us have never seen.

There's a country song with the catchy little phrase: "When was the last time you did something for the first time?" Those words have (annoyingly) stuck with me because, well, I haven't done very much at all for the first time in a long time. This is not good.

The good thing about getting sick of yourself, of hitting a wall, is that it prevents further movement in that dead-end direction. It stops you. It also hurts, just to make the point very plain.

You don’t have to be introspective or make any changes in order to feel better; there is an alternative. In my twenty-some years of practice and study, I have learned some valuable techniques for handling difficulties without delving into the depths.

One of the more interesting phenomena of middle age is the recognition of just how very stupid and arrogant you have been up to wherever you find yourself near the halfway point.

When I was a little girl, I loved searching for caterpillars on the milkweed plants that grew in abundance around our house. I would pluck one from the underside of a leaf and place it in my hand, stroking its smooth body with a tentative finger, carefully carrying it home in cupped hands to be re-homed in a mayonnaise jar, along with a stick and some leaves