To celebrate the Saturn/Neptune conjunction I have decided to write a different kind of article.
This decision has been taken according to a principle that has been a guiding light for my whole life, that of enlightened self interest.
The fact is I will have both Saturn and Neptune square to my Sun over the next two years, so I feel that both of these planetary gods need to be appeased.
My view of transits is that they are not fate in the sense that a particular event has to occur, but they are in the sense that something within the symbolic range of the planet does have to.
So if we have a choice, that freedom comes from first of all accepting to work within limitations of that range but choosing a behaviour from the higher part of it.
In this way we can hopefully deflect some of the more potentially negative parts of the experience and channel the transit energy into something that is good for us.
My Sun is in Capricorn in the 12th house so my natural direction is inward, to explore and research things in and for myself to find out what works and to make full use of my findings.
This is what I did with astrology for 40 years, checking every method I was aware of against the verifiable events in peoples lives in order to arrive at a system that absolutely works time and time again.
Only after transit Pluto was conjunct my Sun did I come out of the 12th house and begin sharing my discoveries on this site.
At around the same time I first discovered astrology (50 years ago), I was also introduced to meditation when I visited Samye Ling, the Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Scotland.
Both of these breakthroughs coincided with my Progressed Sun conjunct my Ascendant opposing Jupiter/Uranus and squaring my T Square apex Neptune.
This would be the only time in my life my progressed Sun would aspect these placements so it was a monumentally important time for me.
Over the last decade I been writing and teaching astrology non stop but the meditation stuff I have kept for my 12th house self and not communicated it at all.
With Saturn and Neptune transiting through Aries in my 3rd, I have realised that I now need to share my experiences in these areas.
With astrology I know in my research that my methods work in everyone else’s lives because I have proved them to do so, over and over again.
With meditation I cannot be sure if that is the case. People have different make ups, they don’t all have 12th house Capricorn stelliums.
What works for me might really not do so for other people. But I feel that I have some experience to offer and that this might be helpful.
As a triple Capricorn, I am a pragmatist, a natural sceptic rather than a believer.
I will not accept anything unless it has absolutely been proven to work.
I am not tied to any religion or philosophy, I would only use beliefs as techniques in themselves, testing them to see if they work in a practical way.
But what do I mean by work anyway? I am not trying to judge something in terms of my place on the spiritual path or anything like that. I am simply assessing methods in terms of whether they improve my peace of mind, my ability to remain open and in the moment, my capacity to receive intuitive insights, my physical health and sense of relaxation and freedom in my body and my all round enjoyment of this life.
Over the years I have tried many methods from different traditions, both secular and religious.
I have worked over long periods of time with conventional breathing techniques but also used yogic and even hyper ventilation methods.
I have experimented with techniques as diverse as Christian monastic chanting and Sufi Dervish Whirling alongside many simple body awareness methods.
My career for 30 years was as a teacher of the Alexander Technique and my experience with this method has enabled me to continue experimenting with awareness techniques as a full time job.
So with the upcoming Saturn/Neptune transit in my 3rd house square to my Sun, perhaps now is the time to share some of these experiences in writing.
What I have realised in 50 years of research is that finding out what meditation is, is largely about finding out what it isn’t.
The same applies to astrology. You work with all of the available methods and test them. If they are proved to work, you stick with them but continue to test, because some techniques can yield something when applied to a few charts but once you start working on more, they don’t seem to.
In meditation, a technique can yield results but its continued application can result in fixity and more difficulties rather than freedom and peace.
Adherents will say you can’t acquire anything quickly and easily.
Ultimately it may be the case that all roads eventually lead to Rome or nirvana, but it’s equally possible that they may do so only because at some point you have to give them up and start off in another direction.
Maybe everyone has to do the long work and there are no shortcuts, but that also could be a convenient platitude.
In astrology I would like everyone to do the amount of research that I have and find these things out for themselves, but I also have to recognise that not everyone has a 12th house Capricorn Sun and Moon and some people have other things to do with their lives.
So I share my experience in the hope that it might encourage people to head in directions that will prove fruitful rather than wasting too much of their precious spare time running up astrological cul de sacs.
Hopefully my experience and the thoughts that I have about meditation, can help others in the same way.
But where to start?
I feel that a good place is with the idea of sitting meditation itself.
Any meme on meditation would feature a young person trying to sit up straight in a lotus posture with their hands facing upwards on the legs and index finger and thumb joined together in some supposedly infinite gesture.
In all my years, I have never met a Western person who really could do this. I have met many who believed they were doing it and even some who insisted that I could not possibly be a meditator if I didn’t.
I tried to do it for many years on the no gain without pain principle and eventually gave up because pain was not really something I was looking for. My experience is that physical pain is your body’s way of trying to tell you that you are doing something that is unhelpful and that you should stop doing it.
Once I became familiar with the Alexander Technique I realised that people who were trying to achieve a straight spine in order to produce some kind of upward flow of energy were deluding themselves and barking up the wrong tree.
Modern people trying to copy what they think ancient people were doing and trying to apply that to their own lives is a big problem in astrology. Traditionalists will quote Valens and Bonatus at you until they are blue in the face, but they will still get the simplest of their own predictions utterly wrong.
They fail to see that while the methods and approach of their heroes might have suited their own times and practice, they don’t necessarily apply wholesale to modern life.
But this is nothing compared with the delusions of lotus posturers.
They don’t seem to realise that people 2000 years ago spent most of their waking lives standing and moving around. If they wanted to rest they would sit naturally, effortlessly on the ground.
They were able to do this because their bodies had a freedom and flexibility that was similar to that of a baby sitting directly upright with no tension or strain at all.
They weren’t trying to sit upright at all, they just sat on the ground.
Modern people cannot do this because they have spent the greater portion of their lives sitting on or even in chairs and their body has largely lost its natural capacity to support itself upright without effort.
When I visited Samye Ling, the teachers there were people who had walked across the Himalayas with the Dalai Lama from Tibet to India.
When they sat, there was no effort at all to sit upright. They weren’t trying to, you could see that from watching them. What they were doing was sitting wide. They all seemed to have exceptionally broad backs.
Over the years I came to see that the real aim of meditation was to “sit like a mountain”.
A mountain doesn’t stay upright because it’s trying to hold itself up, it does so because it has an extremely broad base, a very wide and firm contact with the ground.
And it’s this strong unshakeable connection with the ground that allows it to stay where it is for aeons, totally unaffected by rain, wind, snows or whatever is thrown against it.
It is this quality in meditation that can allow the thought clouds of mind to pass by without following them or reacting to them, to wait for the clear blue sky to appear once the clouds have passed.
Any attempt to sit upright will naturally contract or narrow your base. So don’t try to sit up, sit wide.
Also don’t bother trying to sit on the floor. Sit on a chair with your feet spread wide as well on the ground. Give yourself as broad and as comfortable a base as possible.
Allow your arse to spread out and make friends with the chair.
It’s good to let your hands rest upwards on your thighs, but don’t bother with the posey finger and thumb thing, that just requires unnecessary tension to maintain.
What this hand placement does do is send your elbows naturally out to the sides, creating an even greater sense of width.
Elbows are one of the most underrated parts of the human body. We all carry far too much tension around our necks and shoulders, but few of us really understand why that happens.
It is basically because we do so many complex things with our hands, but hardly any of these procedures are performed at full arms’ lengths from our bodies.
Consequently we are unknowingly tightening and shortening the muscles of our arms, contracting them up towards our necks.
Millions of activities performed in this way over a lifetime while not completely letting go of those muscles afterwards results in tension and stiffness in the neck and shoulders.
This tension is purely the result of lack of space. The only way that space can be re-created while having the hands closer than arms length to the body is by sending the elbows away to the side and allowing the forearm to bend back towards you.
So if you want to even begin to create the necessary conditions for meditation to happen, allow you arse and your elbows to be as wide as possible.
If you don’t do this, your meditation will always be forced and an imposition of your own mind on your body and on itself.
If you do it, you will find it far more comfortable and you will be able to sit long enough to allow the thought clouds to disperse themselves.
If you place your awareness on the sides of your arse and the points of your elbows, you will soon know the difference between them.
To be continued.
Posted on May 17th 2025
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