This is Part I of a series that I will be posting on my website this week. I’m also doing a special radio show on Wednesday, March 3, at 7 pm Eastern on Blog Talk Radio.  Stay tuned for more details.

Looking back to understand the future.

No matter what you think about the controversy over the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012, there is no question that this is a significant time in human history.  As I write this, a wave of revolutionary fervor is spreading throughout North Africa and the Middle East, and in the United States frustrated workers are taking to the streets in protest against a political structure that favors banks and corporations and strips individuals of their economic rights.

It would be easy to think that perhaps the world really IS coming to an end if you weren’t following the astrological trends.  These trends provide a context for these world events and offer clues to help us to make sense of them as well as the changes that are occurring in our own lives.  The interrelationships of the planets as they circle the Sun help us to define periods of cyclic change that will encourage personal growth and global balance.  Depending upon the nature of the individual planet, areas of life which are out of balance will be highlighted and will require that we make some sort of adjustment in order to achieve a harmonious state in our lives.

In order to understand the nature of the changes that are coming, we must travel back in time to the beginning of 2008 when Pluto entered Capricorn.  As the planet that governs destruction and regeneration as well as revelations about the dark side of human character, Pluto has a transformative effect on the issues of any sign that it travels through.  Pluto’s journey through its own sign of Scorpio witnessed revelations of sexual abuse and the HIV epidemic  (death through sex) which transformed the way most of us viewed the permissive sexuality that came about during Pluto’s sojourn through Libra, the sign of relationships.  Pluto’s passage through Sagittarius brought us not only the September 11th tragedy (death by airplane and religion, both Sagittarian motifs) but also a relentless optimism ® that resulted in “bubbles” in the stock market and in housing.

With the entry of Pluto into Capricorn, that excessive optimism of the Sagittarian theme was forced down to earth with a hard landing.  Where Sagittarius encourages us to seek worlds that lie beyond the boundaries of our imagination, Capricorn requires that we restrict our scope and attend to the details at hand.  The economic debacle that followed Pluto’s entry into Capricorn has been most difficult for those of us who were the most optimistic during the Sagittarian period – those of us who took out large mortgages in anticipation of employment success or who were living beyond our means.

The difficult adjustment period of Pluto’s entry into Capricorn in 2008 was followed by a conjunction of Chiron (wounding and healing) to Neptune (spiritual attunement) in 2009 and early 2010 that brought up all of our anxieties and emotional distress and may have made it even more difficult to work through our economic difficulties.  Chiron’s ultimate goal is to heal any imbalance in the body/mind/spirit system and sometimes in order to do that we must undergo a “healing crisis” which forces the release of mental and emotional toxins which have become problematic.  Occasionally this results in actual illness that must then be attended to.