Preparing Ourselves Body, Mind, and Spirit for the Saturn/Neptune Conjunction

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

Okay, welcome in, everybody. Just getting myself set up here.

Okay, welcome in. Sorry. It took me just a minute to get myself set up here this morning. I'm dragging a little bit this morning because we stayed up late last night as a family watching Lord of the Rings, or The Hobbit, I should say. So I made it out of bed a little bit later. Everything got rolling a little bit later. So, but I'm glad to be here, glad to have some time to hang out and talk about the biggest transit of the year that's upcoming, and a little something special that I've got planned for Nightlight folks who are, or maybe interested in, in doing some spiritual preparation for a really big transit. So I'm going to talk about that today.

We're going to talk about Saturn, Neptune and Aries. I'm going to talk about why I, what the a practice that I recommend adopting, leading into Saturn and Neptune's conjunction in Aries, and an opportunity for you to join me in that, in that practice. And then I'm going to talk a little bit about the timeline of Saturn, Neptune and Aries as well. So we're starting to prepare for it a little bit more. There will be a lot more content devoted to Saturn, Neptune and Aries on the channel. So you'll get a lot more on the archetypal nature. Today is more about preparing ourselves for, let's call it, the psychosomatic load of such a major transit.

I mean, when I think back to the Saturn Pluto conjunction in the sign of Capricorn in 2020, I noticed what a good job I did as an astrologer. I mean, pat myself on the back or whatever. But I think what I did do a good job of was telling people just how profound that transit can be, personally and collectively, and I had a panel of fantastic astrologers come on, and I provided a ton of content on that transit prior to it happening. And then covid happened, you know, and a lot of other events unfolded that year. Speaking of Minneapolis, George Floyd was murdered here in Minneapolis in June of that year. It was a wild time collectively. I know, personally, people were obviously going through it too.

But what I look back on and I say to myself, what I could have done better that year, is I could have done better giving people some suggestions and maybe building some meaningful bridges to physically learning how to create good containers for the processing of these events. Because whether it's collectively or personally, processing massive outer planetary alignments on the psychosomatic, physical nervous system level, is a chore.

And I look back and I say, got all the archetypes right in 2020, you know, I think we did a really good job covering them. I could no one really predicted covid, but in terms of the outlines of what a lot of astrologers thought 2020 would look like, including me, my channel, the people I had on in 2020, I think we did a pretty decent job covering it. But again, did we do a good job building bridges for people to be able to integrate and handle those experiences?

I think about it like this, you know, it's sort of like, it's sort of like saying, you know, if you have a massive experience in a in an entheogenic setting, this is something obviously it's relevant to my own life. So that's why the example, why the example comes to mind. You have a big, you go to go into the jungle. You have three, five Ayahuasca ceremonies over a week or 10 days. That's fine nowadays, compared to when people first started going down to the jungle. There is much more awareness about how tricky it can be to go back into the hustle and flow and the grind of everyday life coming out of experiences like that. You've got to have some integrating.

You have to have a network and a team of people that are helping you integrate such experiences, a good therapist, make sure you have some good community friends. You can talk to other seekers and spiritual folk in your life who can help you process and integrate massive initiating spiritual experiences. And we know that now about psychedelic therapy in general, that it requires some integration, you know?

So anyway, what I want to do today, is try to provide a little bit of that integration support for another massive time that we're about to move through. So I'll outline for you guys the transits. We'll talk a little bit about Saturn, Neptune, Aries, and I'm going to suggest a practice that you can bring in to help you and then we're going to actually do that practice together today for the first time. You can stick around for that or not. It's totally optional, obviously, not trying to indoctrinate anyone into anything, but I'll provide an opportunity for you to actually take up that practice today in this live stream.

And then, yeah, well, we'll get well, I'll tell you more in a second. Before we do that, let me go through the regular because I know a lot of people are just tuning in. Don't forget to like and subscribe as you're listening to this this morning. Hey, take a second to subscribe. It helps us a ton. And if you value this content and community and want to see it grow and live healthy into the future, year after year, your subscription means a ton. It is easily the single simplest and easiest thing you can do to help us.

Transcripts of any of these daily talks can be found on the website, that's Nightlight astrology.com. The transcript will be up later today as we republish this on Spotify and all that good stuff. When you're over on the website, a couple of things that I'll point out. I'm just going to say these briefly. If you go to the events tab under live talks, I'm giving a talk on the 10th house coming up this week. And, um, there are a speed there's a speaker series. It's free happening at the end of the month. Check out the Speaker Series tab.

The master class on the decans just started. We had a great first class. Guild just started. Epic first class. That was like, I was, I'm so excited about the guild. Year three starts in February. So lots of good stuff for Nightlight folks to get involved with at the beginning of the year here. Everything else is on the website for you to check out. There's different readings. We offer tiered price readings for people who might be on a budget. So lots of good stuff over there. Check it out.

Now, as always, where are you all coming from? Tell me where in the world that you are tuning in from. I would love to know cities and countries. What, what are you? Where are you? Where are you guys? Okay, here we go, New Zealand. Okay, that's I love that, especially I've been in New Zealand in my imagination and the Lord of the Rings lately, Hawaii, hot and humid. Florida, Philly, Cornwall, UK, Silverdale, Washington, Toronto, sunny, Cleveland, heights, Greenville, Manchester, Arizona, Kranz, Greenville, South Carolina, New Orleans, French Quarter, Ohio, Utah, Kingston, North Carolina, Arlington, Portland, Austin, Olympia, I'm going to catch up with you guys. Maryland, Myrtle Beach, Pennsylvania, Washington, DC, Colorado Springs, Southern California, Stockholm, Sweden, NYC, Santa Fe, Mongolia.

You get a you get a prize. You get a prize for that. I don't think I've heard of Mongolia before. So you get a like a, you should get like a. At my daughter's school, they give away squishies. They're called you should get a squishy. Okay, Long Beach, California, west of Ireland, Rehoboth Beach. Oh, hey, love Rehoboth Beach. I've been there before. Vernon, BC, Houston, Texas, Salem, Asheville, Maryland, Flagstaff, Wales, Wales, Sweden, Upper West Side. Oh, hey, that's awesome. I lived, I lived in Chelsea for a little bit. So not I mean, but I would go there's then I lived in Harlem, and I would traipse down to the Upper West Side to a few restaurants somewhat regularly. Morning. Love from Brainerd. Hey, Kathy Blake, good to see you. France, Washington. Cassidy's on the Upper West Side too. That's great. Correct me, if I'm wrong, but didn't Seinfeld take place on the Upper West Side, or was it Upper East Side? Florida, Berlin? Yeah, I love being here with you guys too. It's wonderful.

All right, let's go. All right, well, here is, here's the thing, guys, we're coming up on another a major outer planet configuration this year, and I want to talk about it just a little bit today. And remember the framework of this talk is, how can I, what are the practices I can have in place, meaning you and me and all of us, that can help us with the somatic load. And I say that because anyone who's lived through a Pluto transit, for example, to your natal chart, you know very well that the experience of an archetypal field moving through your life.

And I don't think the planets cause these. I think the planets represent these symbolically, but they are real, nonetheless have an energetic load to them. Processing a Pluto transit, even if it is regenerative, purifying, it often brings a bit of trauma, a nervous system load that will have to be processed constructively, and for it to be processed constructively, we usually need not just one thing, and I'm going to suggest one thing today, but one thing that's usually a part of an overall approach to self care in our lives.

And something that I sometimes feel we astrologers don't spend enough time with, and I can only reflect on this on myself, but I think the field in general could use more of it, to be honest, is some advice for people about how to process planetary loads, like the energetic load of a Saturn Pluto transit in 2020 was not something in hindsight that I spent enough time talking about as an astrologer. I've thought that for many years.

And again, what I was saying at the beginning, in case you missed it when I started, was that in 2020 I did a ton of coverage on Saturn, Pluto. I mean, we had, I had in depth discussions about some of the overlaps between massive global events, the failure of systems and structures that will often go through upheavals and contraction, all of which fit really nicely with a lot of the events that happened that year. And I had a lot of astrologers on the channel in 2020 that talked about those transits in ways that, in hindsight, I consider to have been, you know, like sort of prophetic.

But I don't think I had anyone, and I don't think I did much. I mean, I've always talked about myself as a meditator, as someone who's had prayerful silence in my life as someone who's had sadhana. So everyone knows that about me, but I look back at that 2020, and I go, there's one thing I wish I would have added more of, it would have been some just, you know, again, not like prescriptions, but suggestions about what you can do to handle living through intense times, because it's enough to live through them and to process them and to to have there's going to be meaningful overlaps that happen for all of us between massive collective events in years, like 2020 in covid, right?

I mean, it didn't. It touched all of us in different ways, and we all knew, well, this is a Saturn Pluto year. But, yeah, I wish I would have, I wish I would have done a little bit more to say, here are some tools you can use to help you regulate your nervous system. Take care of your mind and spirit. Take care of your heart. Keep your heart open, even when you know it's hard to because of the pain, the suffering, the overwhelm, which can get really extreme in collective times of upheaval, historical times about people.

The astrology is always there to help us understand what's going on. But it's like sometimes you get the feeling like you're trying to empty the ocean with a Dixie cup, when you're hit with the overwhelm of the, you know, processing, emotionally processing in your nervous system the events that are happening in the collective it can feel like that, like I am. I'm overwhelmed by forces that are so much larger than myself.

And so we can we can hide, or we can try to take it all on. Usually, both are sort of extreme, and it's really hard to figure out how to meet the times we're living in. Not process too much of them, but not run from them either, because they're here up they're here. They're not apart from what I'm living through personally right now. They're a part of the personal tapestry of my own spiritual evolution. But I also cannot get so lost in them that I become sick in mind or in body.

So how do you do that? I think that's really hard. I think that's really, really tough. So the idea behind today was we're coming up on one and maybe it's also partially informed by the fact that I live in Minneapolis, St Paul, where we're sort of on the front lines of history unfolding in some ways right now, not not the only place. Clearly, there's many places in the world that are dealing with things that you know might be even more intense, and so on and so forth. So I'm not trying to take an award for Most intensity or anything, but it's intense here in Minneapolis.

I was driving home from my workout, and I could see what looked like an entire team, like, almost like, almost like SWAT teams from the movies, descending on Target and Chipotle at the end of my street. And I felt so much anger, it's hard for me to even describe just anger and sadness and Yeah, and so it this talk is also informed by the fact that, you know, it's, it's like, I'm like, see, I can see it. Oh, here's Saturn Neptune. It's coming. It's right. It's a half a mile down the street from me at the moment.

You know, anyway, and all we have community now in in Minnesota that we've built over a few years hosting meditation gatherings in Minneapolis, St Paul, and you know, hundreds of people that have come out to our events for meditation and for quiet and for a safe place for the nervous system. I mean, well, before any of this was happening here, we've been providing that for over a year now. And so I also thought, what can I give to my community right now? Sorry, it's so sad. It's so sad to see so much hate.

Give me just a second. So I just thought to myself, well, you know, I I'm going to talk a little bit more about this in a second, but astrology as a way of making meaning out of and seeing divinity in any season of life. That's my contribution. I'm not a political astrologer. I'm not a mundane astrologer, and I don't have anything against it. I don't consider myself apolitical. I just don't consider myself a political or mundane focused astrologer. I don't have a problem with people who do that. I don't look down upon people who do that. It's just not my lane. It's not my focus.

I have learned over 16 years of doing professional astrology where my calling is, what I serve, what I'm best at, and what helps me stay in the most peaceful vibration that I can stay in, so that I can be a steady, positive presence in the world for goodness. It's taken me a long time to become comfortable and okay with that and not take the bait of shame, because I am not doing the kind of astrology that someone else says I ought to be doing.

All of that can be true, and I'm still someone who, during really trying times that we're all going through collectively, can try to provide something of help or of goodness to the world. And so what I want to do today is just talk a little bit about Saturn Neptune as it's coming up, and try to provide a safe, positive container for people to be living through and processing these times that we're living in.

So here we are. Let's take a look at the astrology, and I'm sorry. It's just like I've been crying a lot lately. It's just it's a lot to process. And. Um, yeah, not that I'm also I. I want to make it clear that what I'm processing is is nothing compared to what I saw people at Target processing, nothing, nothing. So anyway, all right.

All right. Well, let's take a look at this. Let me get my epic pen. I'm hmm, all right, here we go.

So you can see that like as we are getting together here, Saturn and Neptune are very close together again. And I think it's kind of cool that we're meeting under a new moon right now and in Capricorn. And I'm about to, I'm about to present you with a very Capricornian proposition here in a moment. I love that. It's just like the astrology is so reliable, no? And it came the intention to do so came up over the past few days. And then I was like, Yeah, well, let's just go ahead and do it Sunday. And then I was like, Oh, look, the New Moon is in Capricorn doesn't that fit?

So Saturn, Neptune meeting together in late Pisces right now, but not by degree until they both shift into Aries. So let's speed up the clock a little bit and take a look at this. We're going to see that it is very shortly that Neptune hits zero Aries. And the reason that I'm starting this now is because I'm thinking of some of the practices that I'm going to recommend today as applicable, not just once the transit happens, but almost like creating, creating a build up, you know, moving, moving, kind of leaning into the transit as it's coming, because Neptune is going to enter Neptune is going to enter Aries in, you know what, like, 10 days, nine days, whatever.

So let's go forward just a little bit, and then you can see that Saturn is going to enter Aries in February. So that's also coming up really soon. The exact day of the ingress is February 13, and then they're together at zero Aries now they may not be conjoined by minute of a degree for a little bit, but oh my god, are you going to start feeling it once Neptune enters that zero Aries marker in less than 10 days, and then all the way through the month of February, it's a powder keg. It's a powder keg collectively, I promise you.

And I'm saying that just because, like, I feel and again, like anytime there's a massive collective event, you guys might remember last year when Mars Retrograde opposed Pluto, I will openly talk about the fact that you're going to notice certain transits collectively. Not again, not because that's necessarily my focus, but because it would be silly when there are massive collective transits to not say, Hey, you're going to notice this collectively. Here are some of the themes you're going to notice because that is, there's always an intersection between personal and collective.

I tend to focus on how we process personally and psychologically, but there are inflection points where the personal and collective, like the Venn diagram, overlap in bigger ways than others, and Saturn Neptune, just like Saturn Pluto in 2020, is an event that's just like that. It is a very significant collective transit, and it's happening at arguably the most explosive sort of nuclear degree of the Zodiac, which is zero Aries.

And so this conjunction of these two planets, I'm not trying to strike up fear in your heart. I'm really, I truly, promise you, I'm trying to be realistic, the meeting will occur as the moon is also in Aries on February 20 and in the meet. And this will happen, by the way, as this is very important. Their meeting occurs within days of a Mars Uranus Square, which is one of the more it is one of the more revolutionary dynamic, revolutionary and combative types of encounters that we have between planets.

As Neptune is moving into Aries right now, I want to show you what else is happening. So we're going to have Neptune move into Aries, zero Aries on January 27 and I want to highlight that on January 27 as Neptune hits that zero degree Aries marker, Mars will be conjoined Pluto in Aquarius. There's perhaps no sign more dialed into the collective versus personal level of our experience that the two have conflict, that the two have dialog, is a promise across the Aquarius Leo axis.

And so as Neptune hits that zero Aries marker, Mars is conjoined Pluto in Aquarius, just after the sun conjoins Pluto in Aquarius this next week, by the way, it'll be Mercury cazimi conjoining Pluto in Aquarius, it'll be Venus conjoining Pluto in Aquarius, and then as Neptune hits the zero Aries marker, it is Mars and Pluto conjoined in Aquarius.

Now speed this up again to February. You get Saturn entering the sign of Aries and making the conjunction with Neptune in the sign of Aries. And that conjunction is happening around February 20. If you fast forward past that conjunction just a little bit, we get to right here. This is February 27. On February 27 we will have Mars square Uranus. Now again, like you're going to on my channel, I can promise you, we're going to cover these things from the personal standpoint. I'm going to tell you what to look for in your own life, and whatever that means to you, I trust that that that focus is really my that's my gift, that's my offering, that's my contribution.

But it because these events have such a collective signature around them. You'll see that over this month and next month, there will be slightly more gesturing toward the collective level of things that's taking place on my channel. It not, it won't be consumed by it, for sure, but you're gonna, it's inevitable. It's like, it's like trying to talk about the astrology of 2020 without talking about the fact that we're living through a pandemic. There become certain times in the astrological cycles of the sky where just the overlap between major historical epoch shaping moments and the personal psychological level of things is a lot more tightly joined together.

So because of that, and because you can see these transits are just so tightly bound in each other, I want to talk about what we can do for ourselves. Because one thing that I've learned about being on social media, there's only so much information I can process before my body starts giving me the feedback that I'm in. I'm in a I'm in a compromised nervous system state. My heart is closing. My body is getting into anxiety and panic. I am starting to collapse other living beings into categories. I'm starting to become cruel with my speech. I'm becoming impatient.

I'm not honestly, I see my nervous system getting agitated at a certain threshold of trying to process collective information along with my own shit, you know? And it gets to a point where I start becoming not so great of a dad, not so great of a spouse. I start neglecting friendships, because I start moving through the world being unconsciously co-opted by collective trauma and suffering and grief.

The answer in my mind has never been to bury my head in the sand. Pretend it's not happening. But it has been about learning what I can take where my personal boundary is, where are my personal areas of overlap with the world, where can I be a good presence in the world right now? And also, how do I how do I process this in a way that is not going to contribute to dehumanization of the other, whoever and whatever that other is, and that is going to keep me in a vibration of peace, because in, at least in all of the training I've had in my life in bhava yoga, in in yoga world in general, the Christian faith I was brought up in, even though I'm not so identified with that any longer. The many years of work with Ayahuasca, it has been the idea that peace starts with me.

I can't I. Solve all the problems of the world, but I can be a peaceful instrument of love and compassion in the world, but in order to be that and be used in the best possible ways, I have to safeguard that in 12 step programs, we talk about safeguarding our serenity. That's been a huge part of my life as well. So what I want to talk about today is when we're living through such turbulent times like what can we do?

So I wrote some thoughts down. I'm just going to share them with you, and then, if you find this useful, great, and if you don't, if it's not what you need right now or where you're at, please know I also support you and respect you.

So we're obviously living in another period, I think, much like 2020 I've said that like 10 times now, where there's a lot of collective turbulence, there's confusion, there's exhaustion. I think confusion is rampant. It's hard to know what's real or true anymore when you're sorting through anything, getting a lot of our news from social media, not necessarily trusting big media outlets. A lot of us no longer do or find our sources of information from like traditional media outlets. And there's you might listen to five different astrologers and even go like, I don't know which one to trust or whatever.

There's a lot of exhaustion, there's outrage, there's grief, there's polarization. All of the processing of what's happening in the world is important to see and bear witness to, and yet, the very outlets the whole algorithm is designed to capitalize on delivering that information to us in a way that hooks us on rage and anger and othering one another. How do you how do you stay afloat in a world like this at a time like this?

Saturn, Neptune, conjunction, historically correlate with disillusionment and with idealism colliding. There is a sense that you're in the meaning of a crisis of faith, a crisis of authority, a crisis of truth, that you're feeling completely disillusioned and overwhelmed by the feeling that nothing good can be trusted, nothing good can be clearly seen or relied upon. And yet, at the very same time, some people will be filled with an almost authoritarian level of certainty about their vision of what is good or real or true.

It's a very confusing Saturn Neptune conjunctions are they're like fever dreams, especially, you know, in a fire sign, like Aries, I think in Aries, I think of this, I feel this in myself. It's a sign of great action, a sign that points to Mars in the sun, of leadership, of what's worth fighting for, of what's worth standing for, of what's worth initiating, what new beginnings are worth taking up.

So the question becomes something like, how do you lead? How do you initiate? How do you act? How do you fight for what matters without burning out or becoming what you becoming, coming to resemble that which you oppose or resist? How do you lead, act, initiate, fight for what matters, without dehumanizing someone else, without becoming cruel, without becoming self righteous, without becoming bitter, without thinking that calling someone a name in the midst of a debate because you disagree is going to get anything. Is going to change anything rather than perpetuate a vicious cycle in yourself and in the world.

These are not easy things to do, because you can feel so angry, because you can feel, I can feel, I know I can feel like it's time, it's I have to do something. There's a very strong calling in zero Aries to act. So I decided, well, what can I do? What feels like authentic for me and my channel and what I care about and what I like, the little little bit of medicine I provide in this big world? I thought, Well, I've been offering silent Sundays, which have been an encouragement that I've made to students of astrology and consumers of astrology to cultivate a practice of listening, a practice of quiet time, a practice of nervous system regulation. You could call it, if you want to call it meditation or prayer, you could call it that.

And so I've been hosting these free meetups and just getting people together to have quiet time. A quiet time in community is very powerful. And so I thought to myself, What if we did a 40 day challenge right now, over these 40 days, I'll show up every single day, I'll simply host and open a space where people can sit quietly and maybe. That will contribute in some small and gentle way, whether it's to the people on the channel or my my little community here in Minneapolis that we're we've been building a space in which to calm the mind and a space that can aid in the processing of the energies that are moving through us and moving through the collective right now.

Maybe that's not what everybody needs. Maybe that's not quite the right fit, and that's okay too, but this is what I can do that feels authentic to who I am. Sometimes people think about meditation, they get really revulsed or repulsed by it at times of in times where it feels like action is needed or fighting is needed. And I think it's important to reframe meditation in light of this concern, because sometimes people think that meditation is simply stopping or stopping action, stopping involvement, checking out, dissociating, bypassing.

Those are fair concerns, but that's not what meditation is. Meditation is more like taking the time to listen and taking the time to come home to the body, because a lot of the processing that we do in moments like this is conceptual and ideological. We read texts, we read information, we read tones of voices. We have to try to modulate our own internal voices, we have to choose what to make of the information that's presented with us.

And what meditation often does during this time is it says, Just come home to the body for a second. You can down regulate your fight or flight response to the overwhelm of choices that you have in front of you, to the temptation that you feel to erase nuance because it's hard to restore rhythm to your breath and to bring yourself back to presence, to create a little bit more space between stimulus and reaction to stimulus.

This is during turbulent times. It is very tempting for us to think that this kind of caring regulation, self regulation, nervous system regulation, is self indulgent. I believe absolutely, with all of my heart, that it is not. I believe that it is capacity building. It's about giving yourself the space to not be big enough to handle an ocean of information. And for many of us, we need the reminder that as heroic as our spirit might be, we still every day need to be at the mother's breast.

What is the mother's breast? I think of Jupiter in Cancer right now in the sky, gently opposing all these Capricorn planets working through right now our new moon is opposed to Jupiter in Cancer. The mother's breast is sort of, in my mind. I think of it like a big mother that's just taking us in and saying, you can stop moving, you can stop running, you can stop trying to be a hero. You can get back to it in just a minute. But for now, just like, let me take you in.

I It's also not correct that meditation or quiet time is the absence of conflict or the erasing of conflict. No, no, that is not what meditation is. Whether you call it meditation or you just call it sitting quietly peace. That we the peace that we find in regular meditation practices, is about the ability to remain present inside conflict, breath awareness becomes a bridge between inner life and outer life, breathing in, and I know that I'm breathing in that simple, simple awareness.

I'm breathing right now while you're in the midst of processing a video that you see across your feed that's truly difficult to see, that conjures up your your empathy and your sensitivity and maybe your anger, but you go, here I am. I'm breathing so meditative awareness expands off the mat, off the couch, off wherever you sit, and it comes with you and allows you to be even if you're resisting, opposing, guarding, whatever you're doing, it allows you to do that with peace in your heart, with presence.

Meditation is about softening reactivity. It's about keeping your heart tender without being naive or avoidant. I don't think that compassion is a moral stance, one that says, well, be, don't be an activist, be a meditative compassionist, or something like that. You can, you can be both, but compassion, it really I don't think of compassion as a moral stance. I think of compassion as a capacity. It's the capacity that we have, like the Great Mother, to keep things close to our heart in our breast.

I've been listening to a ton of Thich Nhat Hanh lately. I mean, at least 100 hours over the past couple of months. He was an engaged, what I would call Spiritual Activist. He rejected quite clearly throughout his talks, and you can listen to them for yourself if you don't believe me, he rejected the idea that spirituality and activism have to be separate. He said a lot of things. He said some people are more inclined to a monastic style of life, because that's where they're at in their spiritual evolution as a soul across many lifetimes. There's some people who are more monastic, and that's okay.

There are also some people who are called to be more civically and socially active as they are spiritually evolving, and that's okay. He taught that action of any kind in this world without the peaceful presence of mindfulness, will become violence. It's only a matter of time. He taught that mindfulness, without any kind of action in the world, for a lot of people, will become escapism.

In other words, there's very few of us who are actually monastic. Most of us are living in the world, and so any kind of spiritual practice that isn't finding a way to be present in the world, for most of us living in the world, will be escapism. But he said, any kind of involvement you have in the world without peacefulness in your heart, in every breath and every step as your practice, it's only a matter of time before it becomes violence.

He said that true activism of any kind begins with understanding suffering, understanding that suffering underlies cruelty, suffering underlies anger and self righteousness, and it underlies anyone that we may perceive as an enemy or a threat that beneath the persecution that they direct at other people is suffering their own. And the only way he said that we can understand that about our enemies and remain in a compassionate place in relation to people that we perceive as enemies is to understand our own suffering, that the practice of everyday meditation is about understanding the nature of your own suffering.

The more you understand your own suffering, the more you see it in anything that you resist or oppose, even if you have good reasons to resist or oppose, and therefore it becomes harder and harder to dehumanize the other, because anytime you do, you are dehumanizing yourself. And this is what He taught. He emphasized, as activists, if we're going to be active, that we listen more than we speak, that we understand far more than we condemn. He said, You can't fight injustice using the same energy that creates it.

Meditation, he said, keeps hypocrisy close to our awareness. We might like to think I have to get rid of my hypocrisy, but Thich Nhat Hanh never really said that, as far as I can tell, and I've listened to a lot of him lately. Lot of him lately, but not all of him. But he said, Well, no, meditation is keeping very close. It's a bit in a 12 step program. It's a bit like remembering that you could backslide at any given time. And so every day is one day at a time, keeping your own tendency to be a hypocrite and to resemble exactly what you think you're better than keeping that very close to our awareness is key to being a real agent of change in the world, because it's humble when we see our own fear and when we see our own anger.

And we see our own confusion, and we stay close to the reality of those things, which is what he said, meditation provides us with. Then it becomes harder to demonize other people, and we will resist becoming what we oppose. None of us ever think I could become a lot like the thing that I think is bad. And he said, this is one of the greatest dangers that we all face, is the temptation to think, Well, I'm a good person. Not that you aren't a good person either, but when a voice in you start saying, I'm good, it's those people who are bad.

It's not that, it's not that staying humble takes away the reality of cruelty or suppression or persecution in the world. It's that it keeps framing it in terms of compassion. Because you can't, you keep seeing I can be a bad person myself, it's not so far from what's real or possible in me.

Thich Nhat Hanh was also giving a talk that I listened to, and I also read an article written by someone at Plum Village. I don't know who it was, but you can find it if you search on online. They were talking about the basis of right action in the world. How do you define what is right action in the world? Like, how do you be an agent of goodness in the world? This is the topic of dharma, the conversation that was very present in the bhava yoga world I was in too, where we're talking about what is dharma.

How do you know what your dharma is, meaning right action in the world. What is my duty as a spiritual being to the welfare of other living souls? And what Thich Nhat Hanh said, what Buddhism in general, says, the Dalai Lama has said similar things. Many great teachers have said similar things within these Dharma based traditions, is that dharma is not a one size fits all solution. In other words, you can't be prescriptive and tell people how they ought to engage in the world to make a difference.

In fact, being prescriptive and trying to tell people exactly what they ought to do or how they ought to be in the world to make a difference is often exactly what we were just talking about. It's that I know better. I'm good and you're not good. You should be doing this. And instead, he said that knowing yourself, if you know yourself because you have had honest confrontations with your own inner material, you will find your own inner goodness, your own inner gifts.

You'll come to deep self knowledge. You'll have honest confrontation with your limits. You'll know very well the voices of your own hypocrisy, the voices of your own pride, the voices of your own self righteousness, because you get to know them and because you start to develop honest, compassionate dialog with those voices within yourself. And when we do that, and I know this to be true for my own experiences of meditation, not that I'm any kind of meditation master, but I know these things to be true.

When you do that, you start knowing more of where you can reside or how you can reside comfortably in your own skin. And from that Thich Nhat Hanh said that that's when you know where your contribution can be made. With clarity when you know yourself, you stop thinking, this is what I ought to be, this is how I ought to participate, because this is what I see other people doing, and this is the fear that I have, that if I'm not doing something in the way that this person or that person says I ought to be, that I won't be doing good in the world. No, no.

And anyone who genuinely understands how tricky it is to find your authentic Dharma and to bring it into the world would not treat you that way. You When you know yourself, you see where your gifts naturally belong. You see the doors opening where they can be applied. You stop forcing yourself into roles driven by guilt or outrage authentic contribution lives at the overlap of personal truth and collective need, and the only way in, according to this beautiful teacher that I love is to know yourself, to come into deep interior space and relationship with yourself. That's what he said. Meditation provides us with. Meditation is a dialog between action and rest, between self and other, or self and world between our idealism and realities that they have to run up against.

Saturn Neptune is hard because we can face the collapse of false ideals. We can need a more disciplined imagination. We have to learn how to hold grief without despair. You know, it's it is just a hard transit and it's going to be hard to see it unfold collectively for many of us, I can promise you, because it's just one of those historical epoch shifting kinds of transits, and I've seen enough of them now throughout my 16 years of full time practice to know, ooh, we're hitting a very powerful collective inflection point.

So what I thought to do is, you know, you're going to see me go on. I'm going to cover the content as best I can. I'm going to give you my five things to watch for. I'm going to give you my thoughts about the themes and archetypes. If you pay close attention, you'll notice that in a lot of those talks, there's allusions to what's happening in the world, even though I don't talk specifically about current events. If you listen, you'll see that it's there.

But what I want to do is what's in my lane, what comes from, what I know about myself, is to provide a space for that meditation. If it feels right to you, if it sounds like, Yeah, that might help. Then great. If it doesn't, if you're like, No, I'm then that's fine too. There's no guilt or shame. There's no ought or should in my heart. For anyone listening to this around this opportunity. It's just something I'm trying to do to be helpful, and it's something that I feel like I need to be honest. To be honest, it stems from what I know I need right now.

So what I'm going to do right now is I'm going to give us 20 minutes of silence together, and then every day for 40 days, which will see us right through Neptune entering Aries. It'll see us right through Mars conjoined Pluto. It'll see us right through Saturn and Neptune conjoining in Aries, and it'll end with Mars squaring Uranus for 40 days. Every single day we're gonna get together. We're gonna sit in quiet for 20 minutes. You can hit up our silent Sundays. They'll still be running in February, too.

But let me tell you about how this is going to work, and then we're going to sit in 20 minutes of quiet today. If you want to, you don't have to stick around if you don't want to, and it is my hope that this will be something that can aid you right now. Look, there's not a better time. In a funny way, it's like, could there be a better time to start a meditation practice, or starting to bring one into your life, even incrementally, than a Saturn Neptune conjunction in Aries like that screams meditation practice.

So set aside any processing of collective events. If you're like, Yeah, I'm fine. Well, a meditation practice is still useful, and what a great time to start one. So I'm going to take you over to the website. Now you go to events, and you're going to click on silent Sundays. This is the meditation tab today. I'm starting here on the live stream with 20 minutes of quiet. But then what you're going to see is that for 40 days straight, Monday through Saturdays at 8:30am Central time, 9:30am Eastern Time, I'm going to open up a space.

It's free. You can join here. The passcode for the Zoom meeting is right there on the silent Sundays page. You can join me. You can come and sit for 20 minutes and have some support for your emotional well being, for your mental health. You don't have to think about it as a god based thing. You don't have to think about it as an Eastern meditation based thing. You can just think about it as a shutting the hell up kind of thing. If it helps, a very Cap new moon right now, if it helps, to just think about it as, hey, let's shut up and be quiet for a little bit, because I need something like that. That's fine, too.

Literally, no doctrines, no dogmas. Just come and sit in quiet and trust that your your body and your soul may benefit from it. So that's how you're gonna tomorrow morning, after today's quiet, if you want to join me tomorrow at 8:30am my time in Minneapolis, 930 on the East Coast, you know, just join right there. Come on in. Sit for 20 minutes. Good way to start your day. If you're on the ride to work and you're listening, you're on the subway, wherever you're at, you could tune on some you could turn into some meditation and just music, and not close your eyes while you're driving, but still be in a meditative state.

Right? So yeah, and I know it's earlier Pacific time. There's only this is really the only time of my day that would work for it. So I know I couldn't be quite as flexible for the West Coast. I do apologize, but if you're up early, you can still join and even if you're not, you can still make this a part of your life every day for the next 40 days. You don't necessarily need to be at the lives to do it.

But I thought to myself, What is more? What is more Aries like then? What is what is like a good, heroic challenge we could bring to the moment for ourselves right now? Well, look to me. I. I I don't know many things in my life that have been as valuable as quiet time. It's if you like this channel, every single day behind the production of the content on this channel for 13 years, has been quiet, has been sadhana daily, interiority. That's where this channel comes from. That's my jam. That's my that's my lane.

So, all right, so on that note, I hope that I will see some of you there for the duration of these 30 days or 40 days. But again, even if you can't join for the full 20 minutes, or the time doesn't work out, whatever, you can come to. Just come, just show up. Have fun, enjoy it, or utilize the template and do it on your own time. Even if it's only five minutes a day or 10 minutes a day, you can still utilize this template without necessarily having to be at the zooms.

All right, guys, I'm going to sit quietly for 20 minutes before I have to go teach my class for the day. So I want I just invite you guys to join me. I am going to sit here quietly. I'm going to have my timer for we're going to sit for 20 minutes, and I invite you to close your eyes. If you want to, you don't have to close them. I don't. I recommend not just staring at me. First of all, I'm not that fun to stare at, but, but, you know, find a quiet little space. Keep the volume on, and I'll let you know when we're done and we're going to sit here, and you can breathe or focus on your breath or not.

You can let your mind roam and think thoughts and feel feelings and process things where you can try to empty it. There's not a right or wrong way to sit quietly, guys. So just enjoy it. From me to you. I hope that, yeah, I hope that this will be of service. I'm going to sit on my couch. You'll see me back there for about 20 minutes. I'm.

All right, welcome back, travelers. Oh, that felt good. I know my body needed that, and it needs it every day to be honest with you.

I'm thinking back now, let's see 2000 2017. 2017 that I started the YouTube channel, and I believe it was 2013 that I started daily written horoscopes. And so, yeah, it's been like, what, 13 years or so. And I, you know, mostly produced at least 360 days of the year. And behind the production of all of this content for so many years has been a lot of different daily practices. But to my mind, to daily practice is anything that allows for you to go inward, to commune with spirit, God's goddesses, Higher Self, whatever you find there, and to let that be a place that helps shape the rhythm of the day.

It's been a part of my life, and a part of how the content, like how the This is, like how the soup is cooked in the kitchen of Nightlight. And so I hope that you'll be able to take some of this into your life, even it's five minutes a day as these big transits are coming through. We need all the help we can get to process things, not just to I mean, it's one thing to be just doing the events of life that will come about during these transits. It's a lot, and the Astrology can help us see those patterns and participate in the best way that we can.

And we also need some time to process and some time to reflect and heal the nervous system. So I hope that this will be a good practice to take up for you during this time. And remember, if you go over to the website and you click on the silent Sundays tab for today being day one for the next 39 days, we are going to meet daily and. Monday through Fridays, it'll be 9:30am Eastern Time, 830 Central. Sundays, it'll be exact same time as it was today, 10:30am Central.

And on Sundays, we'll meet for 30 minutes. Every other day will be 20. And if you can't join those, then just take five minutes sometime a day, sit down participate in a 40 day challenge that could be. I mean, don't underestimate how simple that space can be for shifting your alignment to some of these major transits that are coming. It makes a huge difference. It can give you subtle awareness of choices that you didn't know you had in the midst of times that tempt us to be really reactive.

So anyway, thank you for being here today all my Minnesota people, especially you guys, take care and and folks out there who are also, you know, dealing with things, trying right in your city or your neighborhood or whatever, and it was good to good to be with you all, and we'll see you again next time. Bye. Everyone bye.