Astro4Business Intersections

Dear Readers – this is a reprint of an earlier article published on this site. As I’m travelling this week, and in keeping with Mercury Retrograde, I’ll be posting articles of interest from the archives each day this week.

Saturn (Source: NOAA)

Let’s talk a little more about cycles. What exactly do we mean by a cycle, especially in the context of astrology and business? Let’s define a cycle as a rhythmic pattern through time that has a beginning phase, a phase of building toward a vision or goal, a culminating phase where the fruit of the prior effort is evident, a waning phase when the accomplishment starts to wither or lose its glow, and an ending phase when the achievement disintegrates and creates the conditions for the next cycle.

Cycles like this are obvious; we’ve all experienced them. The seasons are an example of course but there are many more experiences that can go this way: love affairs, interests, exercise regimes, economics, political ideas, empires.

I was thinking about cycles because a client called the other day hoping astrology could shed light on a difficult period she is having in her career. Bethany is in her mid-fifties. She built a successful career in business for herself. With a background in marketing, she spent many years freelancing, developing marketing plans for small and mid-size businesses. She was successful financially and she liked the work a lot. She eventually went to work for a large organization running their marketing department. After several years she cut back to half-time; her heart just wasn’t in it anymore.

After spending a couple of years gardening, cooking, and generally laying low, Bethany hit upon an idea she thinks could make a splash on the internet. She’s been working diligently for about a year now and the project just isn’t coming together like she wishes it would. She asks, “Is it just not the right idea?” She beginning to feel filled with self-doubt and a sense of wasted time. Her outlook is bleak.

Can astrology help? Yes! Just listening to her, I could sense a Saturn cycle in play and checking her chart, it was true. Saturn’s cycle around the sun is twenty-nine years and it’s one of the best indicators for the progress of business and career development. Saturn’s influence has a natural affinity with business, especially with the disciplined effort it takes to really make a business take off. There’s a fascinating progression of Saturn through a person’s or business’s natal chart that outlines

• the beginning point of a business endeavor when the idea is just a kernel taking shape,
• the building phase when nothing but hard work is apparent,
• the culmination phase when the endeavor receives public acclaim and financial rewards,
• the waning phase when it’s still happening but the thrill of success is starting to fade,
• the ending phase when the person sells or otherwise ends the business and begins looking for something new.

In this almost thirty year cycle, Bethany is in the first couple of years of something new. She is old enough to have been through it once before and she wonders why her previous success can’t be replicated. It will be; it is just too soon. Bethany is in the phase where she can build her business brick by brick: slowly build a client base, test and codify her ideas, get some education if she needs to. She has planted the seed, it has germinated, but it will be some years before it looks as dazzling as her previous success. It’s not that there won’t be small victories along the way. With Bethany’s talents there are certain to be, but Saturn’s message is patience, keep at it, build a strong foundation.

As we spoke about this cycle and discussed the last time she’d been through it, she remembered clearly those early lean years, the times she only had one or two steady clients, when she was working out of her home because she couldn’t afford an office yet. She was able to connect the dots from that time to her very profitable years later in the cycle, and she remembered why she had lost interest in the prior work. Her new work expresses the businesswoman she has become and takes advantage of today’s trends.

With the help of astrology, she could clearly see the cycle she was part of, and she left determined to continue the effort and keep laying the groundwork for her future.

For another example of this cycle, see this post on Julia Child: