This year's chart is a very interesting one, particularly on the theme of how to integrate our creative individuality, uniqueness, spirituality and idealism with the structures we set up in our world, including our careers and the manifestations of our financial and material security needs.

The chart offers great encouragement to go for our visions, while highlighting the apparent contradictions between what the world tells us is right and what our very souls demand of us. This is exciting stuff, especially because the planet Uranus in Pisces is conjunct the North Node, that visionary point that intimates the future possibilities of following our soul's callings.

The two call for both radical and exciting re-orientations in the way we live, so that the life we create is more in sync with the essence of our individuality. In Pisces, it invites a life lived closer to our hearts and emotions, to our creativity and to feeling more connected to self and spirit.

A supportive sextile from the Sun in the earthy, disciplined and practical sign of Capricorn enhances this message as a major theme for the year. Obviously, this presents many challenges to the way our conditioning has taught us to deal with the world. This is amply represented by the ongoing opposition between Saturn in Leo and Neptune in Aquarius which continues well into 2007.

The old version of this Saturn placement reads like "to get on in this world you have to deny your individuality, your passion and your creativity!" As suppressing, and depressing, as this is, it is a safer place for many than to take the numerous risks of going for your dreams. The danger of any opposition like this is to get polarised in one position, usually the easier or safer end, and deny the other. Some people will get stuck with the old Saturn position, while others will stay with an adolescent state of ineffectual creativity that won't face the hard yards of manifesting their dreams in the material world, an equally stuck position. The real truth is that the Saturn/Neptune is eventually a supportive transit for this quest, as we work beyond the either/or position. Neptune provides the visions, while Saturn gives them the reality tests needed to weed out the delusional and the flaky in our thinking.

It's important to point out here that the Saturn/Neptune is more about processes than results. We have to get this right on an inner level before we can get really clear on what we need to do. And like the planet, there's a fair amount of crap we need to deal with first before things get better. This is why many people know at the moment (thanks to some good prodding from Jupiter entering Sagittarius) that the way they've been living can no longer be sustained, and yet the alternative options haven't clarified themselves enough yet.

It's one of those uncomfortable times of not-knowing, of attending to the healing and rebalancing, while waiting for the more intuitive wisdom to arise. This should change by the second half of the year. From the "dark" side of this passage comes the need for some things to die, particularly old denials that keep us psychologically infantile and disconnected from the wisdom of the primal earthy feminine within (Persephone and Psyche conjunct the South Node in Virgo). In sync with this is the reclamation of fire, passion and power that comes from transforming our rage from powerless anger, frustration and despair into feisty, fiery, assertive, life-enhancing action (Jupiter conjunct Lilith conjunct Mars in Sagittarius sextile Black Moon and squaring the Nodes, Uranus and Persephone! Phew, no lack of power here and as usual, how much of this becomes creative or destructive, as nations and as individuals, is how much we take responsibility for owning our rage and healing the underlying pain.)

All of this demands a commitment to our own depths, to drawing the deepest of inner resources from beneath our conditioning. Fortunately, Pluto and Saturn are trining for most of the year and these brothers can confer the courage, discipline and focus to dive into these depths and to be able to harness our gifts with potency and responsibility. Working well together, they are also great for cutting through the proverbial. How else are we going to be able to manifest our visions and dreams?

As for healing, this will be an extraordinary year as we have a stellium, a multiple conjunction (albeit a little wide, technically) of Pallas Athena, Chiron, Hygiea and Neptune, all in Aquarius. Each of these has awesome healing qualities, each opens us to levels of knowledge that are beyond the rational mind and each is an initiator into altered states of consciousness. The fact that they are all together, combining their energies and supported by Jupiter, is unique and may happen only every 50 years, probably longer. While it's hard to put this into words, what we do know is that any healing work we participate in will have additional voltage, with some almost miraculous effects and some spectacular openings, spiritually and psychically.

In this respect alone, it's going to be a ripper of a year!

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