Pluto Retrograde and Finding Your Power Deep Within

Pluto has been transiting Capricorn since November 2008. As a collective, we’ve experienced the penetrative planet’s retrograde motion more than a dozen times now. With every year being a different cosmic dose of lessons and awakenings, while treating the same parts of our personality, our deep and complex subconscious selves.

Partly the reason why some of us won’t feel the recent Pluto retrograde shift instantly, if at all. Unless it makes aspects to our personal planets or is at one of our four angular houses, the subtle energy of Pluto can be a sleeper agent in our lives for a long time, guarding the deepest and most valuable parts of self until triggers from transits slowly stir the gatekeeper into consciousness. The keys however are still available to us, we can still benefit from the five month period by being proactive in the area Pluto transits and natally sits.

It’s important to know your natal Pluto. Important to know what swims in the soup of your subconscious self.

Pluto is a few other things: our deepest desires and cravings connected to our uncooked selves, our filtration system and our penetrative power. All mixed in the inner workings of our psych, mingling with our experiences and weaving with the threads of our DNA.

The rawest parts of ourselves can be found wherever Pluto sits in our chart. Consider it the valve that assimilates our traumas, fears, shame—intense experiences that overwhelm most of us to respond according to our personal threshold of tolerance. With the minor few of us equipped to confront it head on, we’re prone to gear up into our personal armour of avoidance and suppression, and court the illusion that time will eventually bury it deep enough out of existence.

With Pluto experiences, what we avoid swims into our subconscious reality. When set to default, it can clog up what Pluto also naturally represents—our filtration system. Locked up, guarded by Pluto, until the sleeper agent is awakened by transits.

Pluto is pure power. It is our due diligence to claim our Pluto power before it completely claims us.

How we stow away our Pluto experiences: 1st House Pluto example

Pluto in the 1st house is experienced directly through outlook, approach and one-to-one contact. They are characteristic of the brooding, stealthy detective, who sees life under a microscope. A laser view framed under a hood of suspicion and above stiff collars, they walk in dark clothing amidst the shadows. Intensity seeps out of their pores, unintentionally or not; they are keen and intuitive, resourceful, sniffing out the truth and are always one step ahead of you. The first houser Pluto can also go through life in cycles of transformation and usually in the form of crisis.

Similar to our own metabolic system, Pluto regulates the flow of what goes in and out. In a subtle style, the penetrative Pluto within processes intense experiences. The harshness of truth isn’t always digested properly. Separating the “nutritious benefits” from the leftover waste can be skipped, which then makes its way to our subconscious vaults. 

Sitting there long enough, it can stink up the place, turn into unwanted fat and toxins, festering for years, the growth starts to leak out in ways that is subtle and displaced. The undigested fears, shame, trauma becomes foreign, pollutants mixed into our lives, unassuming yet intense, are our own shadows, phantoms that direct us from the crevices of our subconscious.

The commonality within the complex layers of each of our unattended Pluto selves, is the marionette we become to our unconscious selves and the unclaimed power we desire to have or give away.

The derailed 1st house Pluto issues are the types that can easily be provoked, paranoid and sees the world in unsavoury bitterness. Within a wide range of responses, the extremity of the Pluto 1st house can have the instinct of a predator, navigating the world through manipulation, in constant craving, to a person with symptoms, living in fear and isolation—an entire spectrum set to survival mode. There is deep distrust that stems from their own stirring depths, and by which is projected outside themselves. A manifestation of deep insecurity that plays out in ways that seeks control or to be controlled.

When we don’t work with it, it works us.

The beast needs to be fed somehow. What does Pluto want? What does your depths holler for?  The unprocessed Pluto parts of ourselves desires acceptance, no matter how raw or ugly. The truth always wants light.

If you’ve ever been to Bali, Indonesia, it would have been hard to miss the daily tiny offerings called canang sari. Intricate bouquet of flowers, wafting aromatic fumes of burning incense, sprinkled in front of temples and statues, along walkways. If would’ve also been hard to not be intrigued by the look of terror cemented on some of the statutes–stone faces starkly contrasting the delicate beauty of the ritual. Seeped into the Balinese culture for about 1000 years now, these rituals symbolize the impermanence of life and said to honour both the light and shadow, the good and evil, between the gods and demons, a balance of peace on earth.

Owning our shadow side, welcoming all sides to self, as the Balinese people do, is the start of alchemizing our Pluto waste and a start of our evolution. When we know our own Pluto selves, when we have confronted, filtered and secreted the necessary, we give space to deep personal truths.

We can continue to evolve more deeply with the Retrograde periods.

For those that have yet to feel the proddings of Pluto. Those that have coast through life yet to feel the canyon-sized dents and potholes the atomically powerful, mysterious planet can create, no doubt, you are not completely immune to the profound lessons and awakenings. The transits will affect you at some point. Buffering the overwhelming, sometimes destructive crisis Pluto tends to pull us into, can be about working to audit the house Pluto transits in Retrograde.

Pluto Retrograde

The prying eyes of Pluto turns inward. A retrograde shift is a chance to solve the mysteries within before it wreaks havoc on the outside world. In connection to our own Pluto experiences, we can be better equipped to understand the retrograde Pluto in another house. To understand how it responds, identify and analyze our subconscious lava and the potential magma released in other parts of our lives. We reflect on what requires inspection, drainage, a rebirthing process. Fully conscious of our flaws, our deep desires, our full selves, we move into our authenticity and continually reclaim our Pluto power.

The themes stay intact within the qualities of the sign Pluto retrogrades. We still have two years to go in the sign of Capricorn with the last couple degrees being the most crucial—as we’re now collectively witnessing in rifts with governing powers, old structures, past traditions being questioned, challenged and in some parts of the world overthrown.

What is Capricorn?

Capricorn, similar to Saturn, symbolizes the seat of power, institutions, structures and infrastructures, rules and regulation that make the structures efficiently work. On a personal level, it’s about tenacity, working to our best efforts, concentration, creating goals and reaching success through material wealth and recognition—reaching that seat of power.

The themes and keywords to look out for during a Pluto in Capricorn Retrograde:

Pluto —  excavation, flushing, detox, truth serum, the past, present and future, rebirth and regeneration, authentication

Capricorn —  status, work. focus. efforts, traditions. governing structures.

The internal work according to Pluto Retrograde transits through the houses:

1st — evolution in self-identity; finding your inner authority; purging outlook and approach, experience created, physical appearance

2nd — re-examining deep desires with accumulation of wealth, confidence, values, sensuality,

3rd — past patterns of communication, old ideas; clearing traumas, fears with siblings, immediate environment, authentication work task

4th —  re-examining stagnate growth; rebuilding a rickety foundation; tyrant behaviour connected to the past, that which comforts

5th — power struggles in romantic partnerships, shadows lurking in the fun side to life, authenticating creativity

6th —purging outdated routines, injecting more control, authenticity to your daily life.

7th — power struggles and dynamics in relationships

8th — issues in intimate settings; unearthing deep, past fears and traumas; excavating true hidden powers

9th — our own struggles with a certain belief systems, transforming aggrandized ideals, graduating into guruship

10th — powers dynamics with authority figures; truth in career choices, status in the world

11th — power dynamics in social circles, re-examining superficial friendships, evolving in goals and highest aspirations

12th —examining, sweeping up subconscious debris, spiritual and creative awakenings

We strengthen our Pluto, our inner wells of power every time we work with the planet during its retrograde period. By continually gutting, detoxing, peeling and acknowledging, we become our own inner sleuth, tending and uncovering our most authentic selves in every part of our lives. At this profound level we are able to nourish our stratum of desire and feed, harness our innermost fires to help fuel a base of self-reliance, full of our own resources and from which we can tap into for rooted self-generation.

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