I am becoming increasingly convinced every day that much more of our lives may be predetermined than I once wanted to believe. Sometimes I have the strange feeling that I only think I am doing something, choosing something, refusing something, changing direction. What if the major intersections were already there? What if certain people, losses, places, crises and thresholds were always waiting somewhere along the road, and I am simply arriving at them at the appointed time?

I know how uncomfortable that idea is. I have spent years studying consciousness, choice, unconscious patterns, typologies and the ways human beings can change the course of their lives. My work is built partly around the possibility of becoming conscious enough to stop living automatically. I still believe in choice. Or at least I want to have a choice. Lately, though, I have been wondering whether choice and destiny are actually opposites. Maybe certain events are built into the architecture of a life, while our freedom lies somewhere inside our response to them. Maybe we do not choose every room we enter. Maybe we choose what we do once the door closes behind us.

A couple of weeks ago, I received my complete Vedic natal chart from a Jyotish astrologer, and it took me almost two weeks just to digest it. The reading itself was a three-hour lecture, followed by nearly a hundred pages of analysis. I kept going back to it, rereading sections, checking dates, comparing what she was describing with events in my actual life. And through all of it, one question kept coming back: How did she know? She had never met me. We had never spoken before that day. She knew almost nothing about my life. She had asked me for the bare minimum of information needed to calculate the chart, and then proceeded to describe patterns, events, struggles, relationships and periods of my life with a specificity that at times made me simply stop reading and stare at the page. How? How did she know?

Jyotish, the traditional Indian system of astrology, was also very different from the astrology I had previously encountered. This was not simply a description of personality or compatibility. The chart was being read through the language of karma and dharma: the patterns a person arrives with, the work of a particular lifetime, the areas in which development is required, and the periods when certain parts of that life become activated. I learned things about who I am and why I may be here that I am honestly still digesting... Cambodia had already revealed a lot about who I am, but this was different. This was strangely forward-looking. I approached the reading with curiosity. Then she started giving me dates. That was when things became considerably more interesting... and scary!

At one point she told me that I was in the middle of a major Saturnian period called Sade Sati.

I had never heard the term before. She explained that in Jyotish the Moon represents much more than emotion in the ordinary sense. It is connected with the mind, memory, attachment, our inner sense of safety and the subjective world through which we experience our lives. Saturn, or Shani, carries a very different principle: time, limitation, responsibility, discipline, consequence, maturity and karma. Why would you want this guy in your life? BECAUSE! Through Shani you actually get to see your dharma. He has a rather brutal way of showing you what is aligned with the purpose of your life and what is not.

So... Saturn is slow. He does not appear particularly interested in our preferred timeline, our excuses or the story we have constructed around why something should remain exactly as it is. Saturn doesn't listen to begging or manipulation: "Oh, please wait! Give me a minute." Nah...

Approximately once every thirty years, Saturn spends about seven and a half years moving through the section of the zodiac surrounding the position of the Moon at the moment of a person's birth. That passage is called Sade Sati. The easiest way I found to understand it was to stop thinking about planets and signs for a moment and imagine Saturn making a very slow journey toward the territory of my natal Moon, moving through it and eventually moving away. Because Saturn takes roughly two and a half years to move through each sign, the entire process is divided into three phases.

During the first phase, Saturn approaches the natal Moon. Traditionally, this is where restructuring begins around the foundations of emotional security. Life may start putting pressure on whatever has made us feel safe, settled or protected. Depending on the individual chart, that can involve home, family, responsibilities, relationships, work, finances or other structures supporting the life we have built. I began thinking of Saturn as an auditor arriving at the building before he ever gets to the records. He walks around the property, checks the foundation, picks at the walls, shakes the doorknobs, knocks on the windows, maybe throws a rock or two... Have you ever been through an audit? This is the first part: Show me your policies.

The second phase begins when Saturn enters the same zodiacal territory as the natal Moon and is traditionally considered the most intense part of Sade Sati. Now the audit becomes considerably less theoretical. The Saturnian principles of time, limits, consequence and reality are pressing directly on the territory associated with the mind and emotional life. Whatever we have been able to romanticize, postpone, tolerate, avoid or explain away becomes harder to ignore. Saturn looks at the beautiful policy you just handed him and says, "Lovely. Now open your drawers and systems. Let's see how this actually works in practice."

Then comes the third phase. Saturn begins moving away from the natal Moon, but Sade Sati is not finished. Now you have to live with what the audit revealed. What has to be rebuilt? What responsibilities remain? What needs to become a daily practice rather than another realization? What debts, obligations, health issues, work problems or unfinished matters still require attention? In my professional language: Here are your findings. Give me the remediation plan. You have a deadline.

And apparently Saturn occasionally has the bureaucratic temperament of an auditor who is not entirely satisfied with long mitigation approaches, because retrograde motion can bring him back over territory he has already crossed... "Gotcha! You thought I was done with you?" I would discover later that this detail matters enormously in my chart.

Then my astrologer showed me my dates. My Sade Sati began on April 29, 2022. Sounds about right.

According to my chart, its first phase activated the territory associated with home, parents, property, family responsibility, security and the foundations from which I had built my life. I almost laughed. Those years had been saturated with exactly those questions. My mother's care became a major part of my daily life. I moved to Stillwater. I began actively looking for a forest property. I started questioning attachments and structures I had taken for granted: homes, friendships, work, love, responsibility and what security actually meant to me. Things I had spent years building no longer felt as permanent as I once assumed they were. If Saturn wanted to discuss foundations with me, apparently he had decided to be quite literal about it.

Then my astrologer gave me another date. My second phase started on March 30, 2025. And this was where I stopped smiling... From that period until today, and continuing until June 3, 2027, this has been the most painful part. In my individual chart, Saturn moved into the fifth house, the territory associated with children, creativity, learning, the things we create and bring into the world, love, romance and the affairs of the heart. Saturn was moving through the sign of my natal Moon itself while simultaneously putting pressure on the seventh house, the territory of marriage and partnership.

Her interpretation was simple enough that I did not need to understand Jyotish to understand the assignment: this time... relationships would be tested for maturity. What could withstand reality might become stronger. What depended upon avoidance, illusion or structures incapable of supporting an actual life would begin to break apart. Feelings themselves were not the test. Saturn was interested in what those feelings could actually sustain. Could they contain life? Could they support the expansion of your dharma?

I stared at March 30, 2025 for a long time... because that was almost exactly when the fighting began. By the end of June, something between us had broken badly. Feelings were not the problem. If anything, that made everything considerably more complicated. The problem was what could actually be built around those feelings. What was possible in reality, and not imagination? What was each person willing to risk, change, lose, invest into or take responsibility for? What happens when a relationship can no longer survive inside ambiguity without asking for a real answer? Saturn asked for clarity, honesty, discipline, embodiment. There was hurt. There were words said during that period that I still cannot unhear or unsay. There were things I said and did that I had to examine too. There were attempts to move closer, followed by distance. Tenderness followed anger. Hope returned and disappeared again. By October it was worse than ever. And by the following spring, even slight attempts had become painful because there was now too much history standing in the room with us.

I am not saying Saturn caused any of it. Planets did not make human decisions. Saturn did not speak through human mouths. Human beings did that. Humans became frightened. Humans defended themselves. Humans wanted things that could not coexist easily. Humans asked each other for things the other person could not or would not give or risk. Humans reached, withdrew, waited, pushed, interpreted, hoped, protected themselves and sometimes caused pain while trying not to experience their own. This is where astrology becomes interesting to me. It does not absolve us of responsibility. It gives me another language for asking what a particular period may be exposing.

And Saturn's question, I realized, is very different from the question of romantic love. Saturn does not seem particularly impressed by how intensely two people feel. He asks whether something can stand! Can this relationship survive reality? Can it survive disappointment? Can two people tell the truth when the truth threatens the arrangement that has allowed them to remain connected? Can love survive without possession? Can I stop trying to make another person choose what I believe they should choose? Can another person remain inside the structure they have chosen without secretly asking someone outside it to carry the emotional cost? Can two people stop relating to the future versions of each other they have invented and meet the people actually standing in front of them? And on and on and on... Those questions are considerably less romantic than Do we love each other? They are also much harder.

One of the most uncomfortable things I have learned during this period is that something can be completely real and still be unable to become a life. Feelings can be real. Desire can be real. Recognition can be real. Years of history can be real. And fear can be real too. So can loyalty, obligation, avoidance, secrecy, resentment, habit, responsibility, control and the terror of destroying one known world for the possibility of another. For a long time I thought that if I could prove my worth, everything else should eventually resolve itself. If something was deep enough, persistent enough, meaningful enough, surely that had to tell us what to do with it. It doesn't. Feeling tells us that something matters. It does not necessarily tell us what form it should take.

Maybe this is why Saturn belongs so naturally in this story. My astrologer described this phase as a major renovation rather than destruction, and I understood that metaphor immediately because I have spent enough time renovating actual buildings to know what happens when you finally open a wall! From the outside everything can look perfectly acceptable. Then you remove the surface and discover what is underneath. Sometimes there is beautiful old timber that has been carrying the building for a hundred years. Sometimes there is rot... and a skeleton of a mouse... Sometimes someone patched something badly twenty years ago and covered it with drywall. Sometimes what you assumed was structural turns out never to have been supporting anything. And occasionally something you thought was damaged turns out to be much stronger than you expected... But once the wall is open, you cannot honestly say you did not see it.

And then, almost as if Saturn wanted to make the metaphor ridiculous in its precision, in August 2025 I bought my forest property in Wisconsin. Suddenly I was doing the same work in two worlds at once! In one life I was questioning relationships, attachment, security and what could actually carry the weight of a future. In the other, I was literally dealing with buildings, electrical systems, water, contractors, walls, design, cleaning, repairs, land, money and infrastructure. I was learning that wanting a beautiful house in the forest and having a structure capable of safely supporting electricity, water, heat and people are two entirely different things. And oh! Sometimes you MUST upgrade the electrical service for the whole property or you might go bye-bye! Apparently the universe occasionally has a sense of humor.

But the second phase is not only about romantic relationships. My fifth house also concerns my daughters, creativity, education, spiritual knowledge and the things I am trying to bring into the world. That embodiment I had been so focused on for years... now I know why! These years have been asking what I actually want to create, what deserves sustained effort and investment, what is tangible and what exists only beautifully in my imagination. That garden I was so obsessed with: who is watering it? Who is tending it? Does it actually exist outside the story I tell about it? Writing has become more serious. Teaching has become more serious. My work with women, consciousness, death, ritual, the body and thresholds has stopped feeling like a collection of interests and begun demanding structure. Saturn's question here is brutally simple: Is this real enough for you to build it? Not dream about it for some future! NOW! Not announce it beautifully! Not identify with it! Fucking build it.

My astrologer also told me something very specific about this second phase: that my spiritual development would intensify, that serious teachers would appear, and that I would travel to sacred places, almost as pilgrimages. Again... HOW DID SHE KNOW? I had already begun studying every week with V, and that practice brought a completely different level of discipline into my spiritual life. I met D, a teacher of sacred knowledge and mysteries, and entered another layer of study that had been calling me for years. And then I went to Cambodia. I travel often, but Cambodia was not simply travel. I went there for the equinox, entered Angkor as part of a mystery journey and returned knowing that something had happened to me there that I am still integrating. So while Saturn was dismantling structures in one part of my life, another part was becoming more serious, more disciplined and much deeper. Teachers appeared exactly when being merely interested was no longer enough.

And beneath all of these examinations is something even more difficult: internal support. My reading described this period as learning not to depend so completely on external confirmation, especially from the opposite sex. That may be one of the hardest assignments Saturn has given me. Can I trust what I see before another person confirms it? Can I know my own value when someone I love does not choose me in the way I wanted to be chosen? Can I make a decision without spending the next year collecting evidence that it was the correct path? Can I allow another person to misunderstand me without immediately trying to correct their perception... and allow them to learn their own lessons? Can I stop asking the outside world to certify my inner reality? That question reaches much further than romance. It touches work, love, friendship, creativity, motherhood and every place where I have looked outside myself for evidence that what I feel, know or create is legitimate.

This phase continues until June 3, 2027. Then the subject of the examination changes. Risk mitigation and integration.... Saturn moves into my sixth house, and my third and final phase of Sade Sati begins. According to my reading, the territory becomes far more practical: work, service, health, daily discipline, debts, obligations, competition, conflicts and the routines through which a life is actually maintained. I find the sequence almost annoyingly logical. First Saturn examined my foundation. Then he came for my heart. Next he apparently wants my calendar, my bank account and my blood work?

The third phase is expected to last until approximately April 2030, and my astrologer was surprisingly positive about it. In Jyotish, the sixth house is considered an upachaya, a house in which improvement comes gradually through effort. Saturn is quite comfortable with that language. He likes work! He likes repetition! He likes responsibility! He likes things that become stronger because somebody keeps showing up. And you know the paradox? I have spent a great deal of time trying to run away from "duty, obligations, structure..." yelling at people, "Give me space! You are all suffocating me with your duties and obligations!" And now I learn that Saturn is one of my strongest planets. Apparently all those annoying people demanding responsibility were accidentally assisting my spiritual development to start living my dharma. LOL thank you, all! I got it! 

So the next phase is not primarily asking - What do you feel, honey? It asks - What can you sustain, pal? Can you take care of the body you intend to live in, or are you going to continue abusing it? Can you work consistently rather than only when inspired and actually finish shit? Can you organize money, debt, property and obligations without relying on someone else? Can you deal with conflict without turning every disagreement into a war? And very importantly, can you serve something larger without disappearing inside service? Can you create systems that continue working when your emotional state changes? Can you surrender to your dharma?

In some ways I can already see this phase approaching... The forest property has to become economically and physically sustainable. It's not yet. My work has to become more structured. My body increasingly refuses to be treated as an afterthought. There are practical decisions that cannot be meditated away, like an electrical upgrade, or your daughter is sick as a dog and you need to take care of her. There are responsibilities that do not care how spiritually evolved I feel that morning. Maybe this is what happens after an emotional renovation. Eventually you have to clean up the construction site and move on.

But Saturn has one more surprise for me. After entering the third phase in June 2027, Saturn will eventually turn retrograde and move back into Pisces from October 21, 2027 until February 24, 2028. Back into the territory it has just spent years examining... just to make sure I truly meant it. Back to the fifth house: children, creativity, projects.... And the heart. My astrologer described this as a return for a final review of the decisions made during the current phase. Saturn doesn't particularly care whether a relationship stays or ends. He seems to care whether the decision is real. Were those just words spoken under pressure, or are you actually building your life in the direction you claimed to have chosen? When she said that, I became very quiet... because what would it mean for Saturn to audit the heart again?

I don't think it necessarily means that an old relationship returns. Astrology cannot promise that, and I have no desire to organize another period of my life around waiting for a prediction to come true. I am done with waiting for sure... I think the question is much more interesting. By then enough time will have passed for some of the immediate pain to become quieter. There have already been months of silence accumulating on top of years of history. Life will have continued. Other things will have been built. Decisions that once felt unbearable may have become ordinary reality. Some questions may disappear because they were never really questions. Others may remain despite every attempt to put them away.

And then Saturn comes back with the file: Is this still true? Do I still mean what I decided when I was hurt? Do I still know what I thought I knew when everything was falling apart? Was I releasing an illusion, or did I abandon something real because I could no longer tolerate the conditions around it? Do I truly no longer want to invest my life there? If circumstances changed, would my answer change? If absolutely nothing changed, would I still choose what I chose? Did love disappear, or did expectation disappear? Did I finally accept an ending, or did I simply become very good at living around something unfinished? I don't know... And for once, I don't want to know in advance.

There is something almost merciful about life asking an important question twice... because maybe it was THAT important. The first time we answer from inside the event. We are angry, frightened, humiliated, hopeful, attached. Our nervous system is sitting at the table with us. We may be completely right, but we are rarely neutral. Then time passes. Life changes. We change. And the same question comes back without quite as much noise around it: Is this still true? Maybe my answer will be yes. Maybe by then I will know without anger that I do not want to invest another day of my life there. Maybe love will remain while the desire for a shared future has disappeared. Maybe something I once experienced as unfinished will finally feel complete. Or maybe I will discover that something I thought had died was simply buried under pain, pride, fear and circumstances neither of us knew how to change. Maybe Saturn comes back to audit an entirely new heart? I genuinely don't know! That is what makes the question honest. 

What I do know now is that love and relationship are not the same thing. You can love someone and stop waiting for them. You can understand why another person made their choices and still refuse to live inside the consequences of those choices. You can forgive words without pretending they did not change something. You can miss someone and continue walking. You can feel desire without turning it into instruction. You can recognize that a relationship changed you profoundly without concluding that its significance gives you ownership over its future. And another person's freedom remains freedom even when his choice breaks your heart. Maybe that has been the hardest Saturnian lesson of all for me. For years I was preoccupied with another person's answer: What do they feel? What will they choose? What does their silence mean? Will they ever understand? Will they regret it? Will they come closer? Will they finally do something? There is an enormous amount of control hidden inside questions that appear to be about love. The more uncomfortable question is mine though... What am I choosing while I wait for someone else to choose?

There was another part of the reading that changed the way I understood all of this. My astrologer did not describe my Sade Sati as some terrible karmic punishment that I was barely surviving. Quite the opposite. She actually calculated how I was moving through the period and told me that I was passing it at a surprisingly high and positive level. I remember feeling almost absurdly pleased, as if someone had just handed me a good grade on an exam I hadn't even known I was taking. Apparently, I do Saturn well! That does not mean things don't hurt, relationships don't break or structures don't collapse. They clearly do. It means that when Saturn applies pressure, I tend to do the work. I look. I question. I dismantle. I learn. I may scream and resist and ask for an extension on the deadline, but eventually I open the damn files.

She also explained why the experience has not felt only destructive. Saturn is extremely strong in my chart, but so is Jupiter, and she described them as almost equal partners in my life. Jupiter, she told me, represents my dharma: knowledge, wisdom, teaching, spiritual development and the larger direction of what I am here to do. Saturn and Jupiter therefore seem to have divided the work between them. Saturn clears what cannot continue... with several options to make final decisions... Jupiter keeps opening the road toward meaning, teachers, knowledge and purpose. One makes it impossible to continue pretending. The other helps me understand what all this clearing may actually be making room for.

And this is probably why these years, although painful, have never felt empty or dark. Even while parts of my life were being dismantled, another part was expanding at an astonishing rate. Knowledge arrived. Teachers appeared. Cambodia happened. My practice became more disciplined. My work began changing. Things I had studied separately for years began connecting. Maybe that is what it looks like when Saturn and Jupiter work together in a life: one removes what can no longer carry you, while the other keeps showing you what might.

My Sade Sati is expected to end around 2030, and my astrologer described that threshold not simply as Saturn finally leaving me alone, but as the completion of a long preparation. She said that by then I should be coming into much fuller use of my own strength and dharma. She also told me that around that time there is the possibility of a very different kind of partnership, someone much more on the same wavelength as the person I will have become by then. My chart moves into another period connected with endings, karmic relationships, the release of old forms and the possibility of a new partner, teacher or important alliance. Yesterday my teacher said something in class that suddenly connected with this: when I am correct, I will attract correct partnerships, whether personal or professional. A younger version of me would probably have ignored the entire three-hour lecture at that point and walked away delighted with one piece of information: Excellent. A man is coming. Now I am much more interested in the other person in that prediction... me. Who exactly will I be in 2030 after Saturn is finished with me?

Seven and a half years is a long time to be educated by reality. Looking back, I can see that around 2022 I had already begun seeing through certain illusions, although at the time I didn't understand why I suddenly could not unsee them. Maybe seeing was already part of the process. Maybe I could not have stopped it any more than I could have forced myself to see it earlier. There is enough time in seven and a half years to discover how much of what we call security is simply familiarity, where loyalty quietly becomes fear, where patience becomes waiting, where love becomes control, where honesty becomes manipulation, where intuition slips into projection and where spirituality itself becomes a sophisticated way of avoiding a very ordinary truth.

And this brings me back to the uncomfortable thought with which I began this article. What if much more of our lives is predetermined than I have wanted to believe? What if I was always going to meet certain people, lose certain structures, move to certain places, encounter certain teachers and arrive at certain thresholds at approximately the time I did? What if some of the events I experienced as disruptions were not disruptions at all?

I still cannot quite accept that this eliminates choice. Maybe the architecture is given, but consciousness determines how we inhabit it. Maybe Saturn does not decide whether I stay in a relationship, leave it, build something, neglect my body, forgive someone or spend ten years waiting for a different answer. Maybe he simply arrives at the appointed time, opens the walls and makes it increasingly difficult to pretend I don't see what is inside them. And maybe Jupiter keeps turning on the lights. They both ask me to look at my choices and answer truthfully - is it buildable? or you need some new structure here? Do you actually see anything being built? Saturn and Jupiter do not seem particularly invested in which choice I make. They care whether I actually make one, whether I understand its consequences, and whether I am willing to stand behind it. That makes it much harder to hide behind fate. We humans have a convenient habit of saying, “I guess it was meant to be,” “God must have wanted it this way,” “If it were supposed to happen, it would have happened.” Maybe. But sometimes that is not surrender to a higher will at all. Sometimes we were afraid to make a different choice, so we made the safer one, or made no choice until circumstances made it for us, and then handed the authorship to God. I don't think Saturn lets us get away with that. If I choose security over love, I chose it! If I choose love over security, I chose that too! If I remain silent because speaking may cost me something, silence is still my choice! If I stay where I am because leaving frightens me, perhaps that is exactly the life I am choosing! Fate may bring us to the intersection. God may allow the intersection to exist. But neither one is automatically responsible for the road we were too afraid to take. Maybe the karmic question is much less comforting: You chose. Did you mean it?

For some reason, that makes more sense to me than either absolute free will or absolute predestination. Saturn and Jupiter as equal partners: one removing what cannot hold, the other revealing what might grow in its place. Karma without consciousness would simply repeat itself. Dharma without discipline could remain a beautiful idea forever. We need both teachers. So I am no longer particularly interested in escaping Sade Sati. I want to see what is left when it is finished. Maybe in 2030 I will meet someone who really is on the same wavelength. Maybe someone already known to me will look entirely different... Maybe the prediction will manifest in a way I cannot imagine from where I am standing now. But if my astrologer is right, the most important event will already have happened before any of that: I will arrive there having been stripped of a great deal of what was never strong enough, true enough or alive enough to come with me.

And before I get there, Saturn will come back once more to check the work. I don't know what anyone else will want by then, what they will regret, what they will understand or what they will choose. After all these years of being preoccupied with other people's answers, maybe that is finally beside the point. I want to know what will still be true in me when they do.