ASTROLOGY + ENERGY: the Completion of a Cycle

​The year 1999-2000 was a time of huge growth and emergence for me.

I graduated from my 4 years of training at the Barbara Brennan School of Healing in June 1999. I started my healing practice officially at Wind Over Earth clinic on Somerset Street in Ottawa. My career as a yoga teacher began in November 2000 at Rama Lotus yoga studio.  I moved to Chelsea from the Beechwood neighborhood of Ottawa, following a longing to return to living closer to the land.

It was also my Saturn Return. I was 28/29 years old. 

Saturn Return is an astrological event that occurs for everyone around the age of 28/29. This is the length of time it takes for Saturn to make one tour around the Earth. It returns to the same place in the sky, and thus your astrological chart, as it was when you were born. It is the completion of a cycle, and the beginning of a new one. It can be a time of major upheaval, or big transition. It is our full entry into adulthood and adult responsibility for our lives.
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Saturn is the planet that carries the archetypal energy of structure. It’s energy also manifests as form, responsibility, focus, purpose, authority, stability, career, ethics and productiveness in the positive or light side. On the shadow side, it’s influence expresses as conformity, limitation, rigidity, authoritarianism, hierarchy and dour solemnity.

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An astrological chart mathematically laid out to show the cycles of a life and the planetary energies that drive those cycles.

If you trace your way around a circle in quarters, on the astrological chart, Saturn crosses one quarter every 7 years.

So there are events related to it every 7 years, every 14 years, every 21 years, and the returns every 28/29 years. You will experience a Saturn Return again at age 56. Maybe again at 84.

I’ve just completed 14 years+ from Saturn Return to now, with Saturn helping me to build my career as a healer and yoga teacher through the saturnian influence of sustained effort, focus, purpose, and practice, practice, practice, practice, and sticking with it!
I’ve taught thousands of yoga classes in yoga studios all over Ottawa and Chelsea, and finally opened my own-Vraie Nature Yoga + Energie.

I’ve worked with and learned from over 4000 client sessions and participated in many clinics in Ottawa: Wind Over Earth, the Clinic Upstairs, Vitallife, Sage Wellness, and then moved my office into my Chelsea yoga studio.

I’ve been trained ongoingly in Craniosacral Therapy, learned Plant Spirit Medicine, discovered Incoming Soul work, found my spiritual community in the Sacred Fire Community, rediscovered my indigenous roots and been blessed with an elder to guide me. Whew...it’s been a lot of rubber to the road in true Saturn style.

And now the change comes. The cycle ends. A new cycle begins.

The urge to travel this Summer is part of this movement. It’s time to break up old patterns. It might even be time to move home again. It’s exciting. And scary, as it can be when familiar structures and security are broken down. The structures and confidence I have built under Saturn’s influence are now ready to break apart so the next stage of building can emerge.
As I prepare for my tour from West Coast of Canada and back across home, to the UK and back, and East Coast of Canada and return, my main theme since January 2016 has been “Completion & Emptying Out”.

Drawers are being emptied. Papers being shuffled. Items being sold and recycled. I feel as if I am clearing out 15 years worth of living in the same blessed cabin in the woods in Chelsea, and the cycle that is closing.
Some beautiful endings arrive that remind me of what was accomplished in my Saturn cycle.
The other day, I pulled 5 mason jars out of a drawer. They were filled with flower essences preserved in brandy. I checked the production dates on the labels. Autumn 2001.

The remaining bottles of Flower Essences I made
from my garden 15 years ago.

A flower essence is the vibrational frequency of a plant preserved in water and the water preserved with alcohol. I had learned to make them and was producing them from my tiny corner lot garden just off Beechwood Ave. in Ottawa. I’d held onto them all this time, the bottles tucked away in a drawer. Time to let go.

Those flower essences represented my growing relationship with the healing gifts of plants. 

I had planted a little herb garden on my city lawn. The abandoned lot, a block away from my rental dwelling, was full of tall Mugwort plants that I loved to walk among with my dog Aster. ​

Later, when I studied Plant Spirit Medicine from 2003-2005, I would learn that Mugwort was one of the most important plants we call upon in the practice. And I would learn to call upon the spirits of the plants for healing, without needing the liquid essence of their vibration in a bottle.

I opened these remaining 5 jars, and took one last sample of each. I thanked the plants for sharing themselves with me, for teaching me, and let them know I was going to release them back to the land. I poured the essences into my laneway, washed out the jars, peeled off the 15 year old labels, and put the jars away.
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Another very symbolic surprise jumped out of a drawer while I sorted through old cassette tapes.

Howard Jones, Sting, Spirit of the West, Sarah McLachlan...music from high school and my year at university in Halifax, 1993.

Two faded and stained pink business cards appeared.

One is the first business card I ever designed for Dove Heart Healing.

The other is from my Reiki teacher, encountered at age 19-21 (Saturn again), the Summer after graduating high school.
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Kiara was the first person who taught me to feel energy, and encourage me in my learning even though I was young. Reiki classes with her are what started me on my career path as a healer.
As the cycle turns, it also comes full circle.

I’m feeling the pull to return to Halifax this Summer and explore more of the places in Nova Scotia I didn’t get to see, when I cut my university education short to pursue my true calling in healing work. I haven’t been to Halifax or Nova Scotia since I parted ways with my friends in the quad campus of King’s College in April 1993.

​When we honour our endings, we allow new beginnings.

In Plant Spirit Medicine practice, the cycle of the seasons which the plants dance with in union, also teach us that if we do not let go in the Fall, Spring cannot arrive to bring new growth.
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I’m looking forward to dancing with you over this Summer as I travel and follow my guidance and my heart.

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Some questions to explore Saturn cycles in your own life:

• Were there significant events that happened for you at age 7, 14, 21, 28-30?
• Was your Saturn Return at age 28-30 easy or hard? What new cycle of growth did it propel you into?
• When you sense a cycle is ending in your life, are you able to complete and let go, or is that hard? Was there a time you held on out of fear even though it felt like it was time to let go into the unknown?

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Plant Spirit Medicine helps you to harmonize with the cycles of energy within you, the cycles of the seasons, and the greater cycles of your life. 
It’s a beautiful time of year to start receiving Plant Spirit Medicine treatments as all of our plant buddies re-emerge from the ground. I would love to work with you if your heart is wanting to receive the help of the plants. Treatments start with an assessment so we can discuss your needs and goals.
Treatment appointments are $80 with a recommended minimum course of 10 treatments to begin to rebalance and harmonize.
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Astrology is an amazing way to track the cycles in your life and get a sense of what energies you are working with in the present, or overall in your life walk. I find it so helpful to have an energetic backdrop to place life events on, so I can work with things consciously, especially the challenges, in a more empowered way. My friend and personal astrologer Olivia Woodford is seriously well studied and offers recorded consultations by phone. Woodford Astrology.