The Sky Speaks — Why Jupiter is Sometimes SO Difficult

Hey everyone. This is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology [https://nightlightastrology.com/].

Happy Sunday, everybody. A little bonus episode today, we are going to talk about why Jupiter can be so difficult. This is something that puzzles a lot of people. As they get into astrology, you learn and are taught that Jupiter is the great benefic. Jupiter expands. Jupiter is optimistic and buoyant and rains down things like more money and promotion at work.

And there is, of course, something to the fact that Jupiter is designated as a benefic that is very true and very real. Many Jupiter experiences can be uplifting, supportive, and it can feel like certain kinds of blessings are being provided, or good luck and opportunities are presenting themselves, all of that's very real, but there is a very difficult side Jupiter transits that often we sort of throw up our hands and go, Well, gosh, I wasn't expecting that.

Or people will have Jupiter go through a house in which they're anticipating really good, awesome things will happen, and it turns out to be much more difficult, and there might be a lot more spiritual, psychological work and change that you have to create within yourself or within a situation, a lot more work than you were anticipating. Why does this happen? Where does it come from?

So today, what I want to talk about is why Jupiter can be so difficult, and specifically Jupiter transits. But, yeah, why can Jupiter transits be difficult? Where does that come from? And how can we create an understanding of Jupiter that retains its benefic status, because it truly is a benefic planet in the way that it teaches and the way that it delivers karmic results while still understanding why those difficulties pop up, where they come from, within the nature of Jupiter.

So I hope this will be useful for all of you out there who like astrology, who have maybe struggled with this same question yourself. So before we get into it, remember to like and subscribe, share your comments and reflections, like if you listen to this channel regularly, but you're not yet subscribed. Please take a second to do that. It helps us tremendously.

Transcripts of any of these daily talks can be found on the website, which is Nightlight astrology.com. No promotions for the day, because it's a bonus episode. Let's get right into it.

The heart of this talk comes from the fact that I have, over the past several months, experienced a long Jupiter transit to my natal sun in cancer. Jupiter as I'm making this talk, whenever you're listening to it, this talk will be useful. But Jupiter in Cancer is in the sky right now as I'm making this talk, and it recently in forward, direct motion, went over a conjunction to my sun at around 23 degrees of cancer.

It stationed, I want to say, around 25 and therefore stationed, basically in that engagement range of a conjunction to my sun, and then retrograded back over it very slowly, and I as the experience was unfolding. There were a number of things that felt traditionally benefic and then, but I would say, like 60% of the experience felt like work. It felt challenging.

Now I'm going to tell you why I think dichotomies like that exist with Jupiter. That's the point of today's talk. But let me tell you a little bit about what I learned, what I saw, what I experienced in the direct motion.

One of the things that I would say characterized the direct motion conjunction to my sun in cancer. And to be clear, my sun in cancer is in the third house also rules my fourth house of home and family, which is occupied by Leo and whole sign houses. So a lot of it for me was about Dad stuff. It was about how I am as a father, and a lot of feelings of closeness and warmth and joy and, like, deep emotional levels of satisfaction with being a dad.

And that was truly one of the biggest blessings of the forward motion conjunction was like, God, I love being a dad. I love my girls, I love my family. There was a very deep sense of feeling blessed and fortunate. There wasn't anything super magical that happened, in terms of, like, something really good happened, or, you know, whatever.

Now, there were some moments that I also celebrated as real accomplishments. While Jupiter passed over my sun in the third house, I set up my own publishing imprint, and I finished my second book, which is the first book I've written for you know, 15 years. So the accomplishment of that book happened while Jupiter was conjunct over my sun, and then no sooner than it stationed, in turn, retrograde, an editing process of that book began, and a revision of the first book I wrote for republication in a second edition occurred in.

All of that felt like, you know, accomplishments like third house sun, accomplishments that I was very excited about, and really did feel like blessings. So some of that traditional benefic Jupiter stuff was happening, but and also just the feeling of warmth and satisfaction of being a dad.

However, all of that, in many ways, was overshadowed by becoming man fucking taoistically aware of my shortcomings as a dad. And I think that has to do in some ways with the fact that the sun in cancer in my chart is hosted by the Moon in Capricorn, who is opposite the sun. The dignities of the planets in our charts that are being activated by a Jupiter transit matter, the karmic context that a Jupiter transit is occurring within doesn't get erased just because it's Jupiter.

So all of that is part of what I'll say here in a minute, when I go over some of the technical and philosophical distinctions that are important for understanding Jupiter and why it can be difficult, but I would say the the direct pass, there was a lot of awareness, increasing, growing, expanded awareness of what I love about being a dad, of how blessed I feel for my family, and also, just like going to school on how to be a better dad, not that I think I'm some abject failure.

I thought I was doing a decent job, you know. Like, I guess, as good as you can without thinking or anything great, you know. Like, I Okay, I'm doing my best. I'm learning, I'm growing, I'm trying, I'm in it, you know. But this was, like, time to level up, and I got some really good feedback. Yeah.

So anyway, and my experience of that Jupiter transit, a lot of it was like, this is hard work to become a better dad. Now you can feel right away where some of this talk is going to go, becoming a better dad and becoming painfully aware of your shortcomings is a blessing. That's part of the blessing that was happening at the same time that I was publishing or reaching the finality of a book, or whatever else.

So the blessings of Jupiter are sometimes accompanied, not so much by fireworks, but by hard work. Meaning and growth and expansion come through also becoming aware of limits. This is why Jupiter is almost never talked about in ancient astrology, apart from Saturn and the Jupiter Saturn cycle reflects the entire epochs of contraction and expansion. Jupiter's expansion always comes alongside a co-arising sense of contraction.

Where am I contracted? Where do I need to expand? Our part in other words of why Jupiter transits are sometimes painful. Growth is not just growth of money or growth of pleasure or growth of status or fame or growth of good feelings. It's growth as a soul that's benefic to be given an opportunity and to be imparted with the genuine desire to want to grow, but to do so not easy.

Now the retrograde was even tougher. The retrograde of Jupiter back over my sun, coincided with really heavy labor when it came to editing the book, and I'm still in that process, as Jupiter's retrograde is still just separating from my sun. Editing is not fun compared to writing a book, you know, unless you're a glutton for punishment. No, I'm kidding. Some people love to edit. I'm not an editor. I like the creative part. The editing is harder.

So the editing was like, Oh, this is hard, you know, but that's part of finishing a creative work of art with the third house sun, there's editing, and I also, as Jupiter, was retrograde over my sun, on the exact kind of minutes days of its retrograde. Conjunction with my sun, I got a spiked 103 degree fever. Was sick for three or four days, and then subsequently got sick again, only a week later, all while Jupiter was crossing over the sun and that sickness, I thought, well, what is this? You know, what is what is this? You don't get sick with a Jupiter Sun transit, but it was a Jupiter retrograde over my sun.

And remember, as I was saying, the karmic context of my sun includes a Capricorn moon that hosts sun in cancer in my chart. And surprise, surprise, the feedback that I got while I was sick was that I was when my body was starting to tell me that I needed to start cutting back on work and relaxing a little bit. I didn't listen, and I'm usually pretty good at doing that, you know, but I'm writing a book.

I really want to get it done. I'm finishing a 35 week bulk. It's the holidays. Kickstarter is ramping up, and I did not listen to some very clear signs from my body that was saying, Please slow down right now. There's other times when I've been able to listen to that voice, but this was one of the times where I wasn't, and it was a particular part of me that really doesn't like to listen to that voice, ah.

And so I got taken. I got taken to school and church all at once. Now let me tell you, in the midst of that experience in the grips of a 103 degree fever that was off and on for a couple of days. Wow. Fevers first of all, are like otherworldly Angel messengers from the fiery places in heaven.

And during that experience, I, for the very first time, had a vision of my deceased grandmother, dying of cancer, and I became deeply aware of my mortality and how precious life is, and just a lot of insight there around how to safeguard and caretake for the softness of my animal body. To gesture toward Mary Oliver, I guess so. I was like, Okay, well, my dead grandmother is showing up right now, and I'm seeing her passing of cancer in the same, not the same space, but like, really sick, you know.

And I was like, oh, that's and then she talked to me. This was like, you know, I'm in a, like, fever, half asleep, dream, hypnagogic state. So whatever that was, she spoke to me, and she said, This is what it feels like when you're dying, but, you know, it's a lot worse, you know. And but what happens gradually is God starts to take you if you let go, and your faith in your whole life is, in a way, building up to help you through transitions like death, because it's not that you believe in something as much as you trust that letting go is okay, that allows the process of leaving your body to be safe and actually uplifting and blissful, and that happened for me, so you don't have to worry about me, and you don't have to blot out of your mind all of the images of me dying of cancer the way you do in your head.

Wow, wow. That was really I'll take that. Thanks. Jupiter. Was that easy? Was that an easy insight for Jupiter and cancer? You know, the archetypal mother retrograde over my sun to deliver me some insights about self care and see the state of my grandmother while she was dying. Well, as this was, happening, I was, of course, thinking of Jupiter and cancer like this visitation from my deceased grandmother.

But what I forgot, and then I realized during a little bit later, you know, maybe an hour later, I don't know, it was like, Oh, of course, I was born on the same day as my grandmother. She was born with the sun at 23 cancer. I was born with the sun at 23 cancer. I came into this world on her birthday. And so Jupiter's going over her sun right now, and it's going over mine, and we're connected.

And I'm burning alive and I'm scared, and I thank you, Jupiter. I get the lesson. Can I please just feel better? How do you how do you categorize that kind of experience? Benefic it was angelic. It was truly transformative. And I'm not someone who's like, I'm pretty good at self care, honestly, like I'm probably, you know, relatively speaking, I take really good care of myself.

But there is a streak in me that when it's time to rest still, at times, doesn't listen. And I was like, okay, deepening into that. And then, not surprisingly, that little insight threaded its way into greater awareness of myself as a dad, parenting, being a good spouse, just a lot of things. That was hard. It was hard shit.

But I can honestly say that threaded throughout, it was such a, you know, it's like, can you call the ghosts that maybe the Ghost of Christmas Future? Because that's a little like, super ominous. But this would be like if the Ghost of Christmas Future was scary, but like, dressed like your your sweet Cancerian grandmother and the other ghosts that visited me around Christmas when I got sick.

You know, these were hauntings and a little scary, but they but there was no, there was no denying that I was being visited by higher intelligence that was there to make me a little wiser. That's to me, that's a little bit of the difficulty of Jupiter at times, right? Just that's this. These stories, to me, have had me reflecting. All of this.

So now what I want to do for you is distill that story into some takeaway points that you can use as a student of astrology. All right, let's get into it. Number one, benefic doesn't always mean pleasant. Now, in traditional astrology, benefic does not mean pleasant. It means life supporting. It doesn't mean comfortable. It means life supporting.

Life supporting are like the conditions in the weather or nature that are conducive to supporting the growth and preserving and protecting and granting some kind of coherence to like plant life. That does not mean that it's pleasant. And so many Jupiter transits are difficult precisely because a Jupiter in particular is not like Venus. Is sort of the goddess of pleasant things. So it's a lot it's a lot rarer to see Venus transits feeling like such difficult work, depending, of course, on if it's a transit to Venus in your chart or it's transiting Venus, a lot of little distinctions, but the point is that Venus was literally associated with things that feel good and are pleasant.

Jupiter was associated with growth and expansion of wisdom and growth with Jupiter is sometimes difficult. Think of all of the obstacles that nature supports, plants growing through and around, helping it survive and endure and flourish through. Jupiter is very much like that.

Number two, Jupiter's primary action is increase in ancient astrology, which means it amplifies whatever it touches. This is why it was also associated with the north node of the moon, which was also said to amplify or increase whatever it touched. If the natal planet or house already contains conflict or grief or fear or anxiety or excess or boundedness, Jupiter can amplify those things when it transits such places, it can make them bigger, but that sense of enhancing and making it bigger also makes it clearer, which means wisdom has more of a chance to form around the karma.

That's why Jupiter will often make something bigger like a fever, and it will often amplify or augment my awareness of a pattern that led to the fever, which is all the presence of wisdom growing through the action of increasing and expanding or inflating something. This is something that's constantly misunderstood about Jupiter. It's not just good luck. You know, increase is a sophisticated karmic blessing when it touches, when it increases, things that are not always easy.

Jupiter often brings too much. So traditionally, Jupiter's warm, moist, fertile, expansive, generous, but excessive warmth and moisture can lead to overgrowth, indulgence, inflation, loss, proportion. Think of something being overrun with growth, and I, my wife, uses all sorts of weeds for medicine. So I always feel kind of bad saying the word weed, because there's a lot of weeds that are actually super medicinal.

But I mean, if a garden is just overrun with weeds, well, there's a proliferation of life and growth, but the kind that's destructive to the garden. So unless you're, of course, growing weeds for medicine. But even then, my wife will be very aware of one medicinal plant, sort of coming in and taking over something else. And she's like, she'll talk to it. So Jupiter transits can correlate with over promising, over committing, moral certainty or self righteousness, inflation, arrogance, hubris, financial, emotional, over extension, overspending, overeating.

So its problems tend to arise from in moderation with Jupiter. Is the point. And then what's great about Jupiter is that will often provide a lot of wisdom because of that inflation, because of the too muchness, the Jupiter virtue of temperance will be a resulting karma for those who are listening. Temperance is a Jupiter card in the Tao.

Anyway, number four Jupiter is law and justice. So Jupiter is associated with everything that grants coherence and order to social and civic arenas, law, religion, education, government. It is associated with patrons and benefactors, people who have wealth, who support things developing or growing. But with all of those institutions comes rules, judgments, hierarchies, consequences, and so sometimes, because those institutions are corrupt, there will be almost like moral reckonings or the acknowledgement of where a moral or a virtue has fallen short, and something isn't walking its talk.

It's like, how many Jupiter transits coincide with authorities within institutions being called out for corruption? Actually, quite a few Jupiter transits are like that. So Jupiter Zeus is by the way, a punisher of oath breakers. So people who are supposed to uphold moral truth or spiritual truth or virtue, who are in positions of authority or leadership or who work on behalf of institutions like schools or religious institutions, will be brought to karmic consequence or justice to whatever extent they are failing the upholding of that law.

Ideally, these are things that are supposed to be good, you know, so, but that's Jupiter. Jupiter has a double action where it's like, you know, it is the representative of religious, educational, governmental, legal coherence and order in the best sense of it, in the way that it's supposed to be, but it also will bring up karma associated with anything that falls short, which is why there's often this sense, like in my case, Jupiter on the sun a symbol for father.

Here's where you're falling short as a dad. Here's where you're not walking your talk. Here's where you're approximating an ideal. So there were some blessings around that too, like, here's what I love about being a dad. And I really felt that was all amplified and augmented, while I was also sort of taken to task. And some of the ways where I'm like, Yeah, you can get better.

You're a dad, there's an authority, there's a law, a code, a virtue that goes with that archetypal role. Here's how to more closely approximate that. Here's how to embody that a little bit better. See, that's Jupiter, who's always trying to teach us like how to incarnate the virtue and will call us out when we fall short. So Zeus is not a gentle God.

He's a law giver. He's an enforcer. He is about He rewards loyalty and punishes oath breaking when it comes to virtue. He's not just a benevolent father. He's set aside all of his philandering, right? Because that's like we could have a whole separate conversation about that and some of the complexities that that brings up. But that philandering, that kind of inconsistency of Zeus Jupiter, is precisely why Jupiter holds to task the characters who are supposed to uphold law but then cheat somehow, you know?

So anyway, what feels difficult may be correction, in other words, and guidance and greater wisdom, leading us and saying not that way, this way, stop. You know you're falling short of your potential, or you're falling short of your role or your responsibility, or you're outright being a hypocrite, or worse. And Zeus is not always gentle about the way that it offers correction, and you have to take that into consideration when you're thinking about Jupiter, one of the things that Jupiter tends to bless is humility, where someone is humbly doing the best that they can and receptive to feedback, Zeus delivers totally different kinds of results.

I can speak to that. You know, after visiting with 1000s and 1000s of people in Jupiter transits.

Now number six is that Jupiter can it doesn't cancel malefic planets. It activates them by transit. So in timing techniques, when Jupiter touches a malefic in the chart, or a, you know, a planet that is not so well dignified, or, in my case, it activates the sun. But the sun in my chart is hosted by a moon that has some debility.

My moon is sect light and has triplicity rulership. So it's but it still is in detriment in Capricorn. So the point being that whatever Jupiter activates, if there's any difficult context around that karmically, it's going to activate that, and it's going to try to bring wisdom to that. And typically, it will bring that wisdom in a way that is much more generous than Saturn.

That's the difference. They both have a way of bringing karmic consequences, but Saturn's gonna, like, cut your dick off. And I'm kidding, of course, I'm just alluding to the whole Saturn Kronos dynamic. But anyway, Saturn Kronos Uranus dynamic. Okay, let's go on.

Number seven is house placement. So you know when you have Jupiter in your natal chart, in the sixth, the eighth, the 12th, Jupiter can protect or mitigate these places from the worst, but can still express its form of wisdom, enlightenment. It can grant belief, truth, wisdom through illness, loss, confinement, etc. Meaning it, it will still act through the space of a difficult house.

So number eight would be Jupiter brings meaning, not comfort. I've said a few times Jupiter is not necessarily like pleasant. Jupiter's deepest promise that you can trust for sure far more than promotion or more money or more success is meaningfulness. This is something that Liz green recently wrote about at length in her new book on Jupiter. I think it's called By Jove but she wrote about this at length, and that's why I include it.

What do you stand for? What do you believe in? How is your belief being tested? What kinds of responsibilities do you carry? And how do you carry them. Meaning is is heavy. Meaning is like a compass that is constantly orienting our lives. And the question with meaning and our beliefs and our commitments to our beliefs is, are you continuing to live in alignment with them in every new moment where choices are constantly coming up, and your your convictions and beliefs are being tested, and not only tested, but refined and evolved.

That's not always comfortable, but it's good. It's benefic in the sense that Jupiter is called guru in India, and the Guru is sort of like a much more benevolent version of a nun with a ruler. I'm teasing, but you know, it it like Jupiter is going to lay down the law, but in a way that when you understand the way that Jupiter teaches, you experience it very differently from Saturn.

It tends to be much more uplifting and encouraging. Saturn has its own way of teaching that's a lot like harder and it's more like, you know, kind of like the image of, like hitting your rock bottom. It's a little bit more Saturnian. Anyway, we could distinguish those things more later.

Maybe number nine, Jupiter exposes faith problems. If belief has become naive, Hope has become denial. Trust has been misplaced or destroyed. Jupiter will remove illusions or help us do the hard work of restoring faith. And that is not easy, but it is good. It is a very Jupiterian like thing.

And then finally, Jupiter teaches proportionality. The Jupiter temptation is more, but the Temperance of Jupiter is always juxtaposing more with just right? This is why Jupiter tends to call out hypocrites and law breakers or oath breakers who think that they're they are an exception to the law or to the right measure of things, you only get this much out. But I'll take more because I'm an exception.

Jupiter really does not like that. So Jupiter is about how much is enough, and interestingly, there's this beautiful, I don't know, kind of, again, a paradox, I guess, where the people who are really content and don't need more, and finally, find that kind of temperance space their lives are often bestowed with more and more blessings because they know How to use those in service of something greater, all very like Jupiter's Cornucopia overflows into the lives of people who don't try to grasp what it brings in.

Now, I think even though these things can make Jupiter a little bit difficult, Jupiter tends to preserve life, extend opportunities. It prevents collapses. It provides silver linings. It keeps meaning alive during hard times. In fact, makes it more of the point of hard times. It doesn't feel as punitive as Saturn does. That doesn't mean Saturn is punitive. It means that it feels less punitive.

So those are my thoughts for you. I hope that this was a fun episode. I think a lot of people wonder like, why are Jupiter transits sometimes so difficult, or why don't they provide exactly what I think they will, what I hope I've done today is just share some personal stories and tell you a little bit about why I think Jupiter shows up as hard work sometimes, you know, anyway, hope you're having a good one.

Hope you have a nice end to your weekend. We'll see you again tomorrow. Bye.