Saturn Transiting the 4th House: Squeezing Out The Comforts of Home

Saturn Transiting the 4th House: Responsibilities, Limitations and Redefining What it Means to Feel Comfortable.

Gulping in fear or anxiety is a common reaction to Saturn transits.  It’s generally a time of major changes, hard work and restrictions.

When Saturn hits your first house, you can become physically limited, becoming sick more often. When Saturn transits your 8th house, source of income may get taken away or deplete. When the visit happens in your 4th, it’s all about limitations, more responsibilities or working harder in your home, your family of origins, where you go to rest and what you find comfortable. It can also mean moving out of your current home, moving countries, establishing roots elsewhere or redefining what it means to feel comfortable.

When Saturn ingressed into Sagittarius, I witnessed five of those closest to me become drastically affected by the transit. Being all Virgo Rising, each of them experienced it in their domestic scene and in their own ways were affected by transiting Uranus in the 8th house, Pluto in their 4th and Neptune in their 6th house. All five are home bodies, each one finding haven within the jovial world of their Sagittarius-type home.

Saturn doesn’t like to be in Sagittarius. The two are opposite energies. Saturn cages the freedom-loving sign of the zodiac. Generally, the grand visions of the Sagittarian can become constricted. For the five influenced by Saturn, the restriction hit home, literally. Home no longer gave them optimistic comfort, or a place where they felt free to be themselves. When Saturn went into their 4th, the personal got heavy.

A case I witnessed in my own home when my ex partner was having his Saturn transit his 4th house, while Pluto was at its last degree in the same house. Earlier in the year, we were becoming more serious about our bond, by starting to plan a family(Saturn 4th house). He has natal Saturn retrograde in Cancer in the 11th house and natal Mars in his 10th. The North Node was in his 12th house at the time. His natal Mars was opposite transit Saturn, creating tension between his personal obligations and his career status.

His 4th is not tenanted and Saturn in Cancer makes it hard for him to naturally attend to 4th house matters. When we were faced with unforeseen complications in the home front, it quickly turned intense, snowballing into bigger issues, thematic within our relationship. Towards the end of the year, things got quite rocky, which resulted to our break-up and his eventual move out of the house at the start of the New Year.

Saturn had first solidified us but the duties that were required of him at home clashed with his outside world. When I look back at it, he was subconsciously acting it out from his 8th house with transit Uranus in Aries. He was seeking independence and as his business trips took him around the world, his home had become more foreign to him, voicing his feeling of displacement at home and with me.  Uranus retrograde was not only causing a strain in our intimate bonds—the business he owned was under a lot of pressure from an acquisition that was being negotiated. When it fell through, depression hit him—though, he put up a happy front, he started to show his disdain for the industry and his business, which was aggravated by the dissatisfaction of his everyday life at work.

An issue coloured by Neptune in his 6th house—a distress he had spoken about for more than a year. He was also less creative, another layer of confliction for what his Sun and Moon in Pisces have always counted on as an outlet. His 4th house–what I believe is the core or source we rely on to rejuvenate from external daily pressures–was not the well of optimism he was previously quenched by. Saturn’s influence had turned it arid.

When Uranus was sidling beside Jupiter and Chiron for all of 2017, jolting, awakening a deep and growing desire for Aries liberation, the answer was to abandon all that was his life. Like the Tower tarot card, when Uranus went direct, his powerful lightening bolt hit our home, thrashing my ex out suddenly. Pluto was already on the cusp of his fifth when he officially moved his things out and handed me the keys.

2)Another sudden surprise, caused by Uranus, was when the energy made a conjunction to my friend Izzy’s Venus in Taurus, also in her 8th house.

A year or so before, Izzy was under a heavy veil of depression, suffering from unrequited love. Chiron had just moved into her 7th house and had started to make an exact opposition with her natal moon in Libra, in her 1st house. Her natal Chiron is in Cancer. Her past wounds were being cut open through relationships, effecting her emotionally, which was effecting every other part of her life—ie. her work relationships. What she thought was her life’s passion and vocation had slowly become dull and dispiriting.

Similar to my ex partners’s transiting Neptune in the 6th house, she was also no longer being fulfilled on a daily. She claimed to be a zombie at work. She had not felt her usual, creative self for a long time. Transit Saturn was touching her natal Uranus and Pluto in her 4th at this point. It was evident there was much turmoil within. Her Saturn transit was causing strife in her home, causing a stench of depression, not helping the battle she was having in her exterior world. She had felt quite lost in her own skin.

A year or so later, transit Uranus tightly conjuncted Izzy’s natal Venus in her 8th, ruler of the 7th house and her natal moon. At this point, transit Saturn just went direct and was already making his way back to conjuncting her natal Uranus in her 4th house. The combination of transits struck discord in her personal space on a very deep level. Through tough love, Saturn was helping to remove her out of a rut by taking away her comfort zone. To shake her out of her deep and long stagnation of dreariness, Saturn, along with her natal Uranus, made this happen when she was given two months notice to evacuate her apartment. Her foundation was being shaken for rebuilding.

Before she got the notice, I had advised her to go away for a bit. To trust that she’ll find what she was looking for. This woman isn’t into travelling. She likes to plan things with Taurus at the cusp of her 9th house. Also, having Venus in Taurus in the 8th house, she has a deep need and craving for comfort. I don’t think she would have left her situation and would have continued to suffer in the comfort of muck, if it wasn’t for that notice, and Saturn conjunct disruptive Uranus. It’s been about a year and a half since she left to go back to her home country, afterwards travelling in different parts of the world. Least to say, she is enjoying finding herself again.

3)When my ex moved out, as luck would have it, I instantly found someone to help cover rent. Farah is a Serbian born, Canadian, from a small town in Ontario, but had previously lived in the city with her ex for about a year. Was I surprised that she too was a Virgo rising and reminded me of the domestic habits my ex had? Not really.

Aside from my own lessons with Sag in my 7th and Farah moving in, we bonded over recently breaking up with our exes. It was evident Farah was far from being over her past. Uranus was causing her much deep pain, usurping issues and limitations she’d been avoiding from her 8th house. What made it worse was, she, like Izzy, was unsatisfied with her daily 9 to 5 grind. Though she made efforts to find grounded work or hobbies to balance her sterile and toxic office job, Neptune in her 6th was jabbing her stellium of planets and points.(Jupiter, Mars, NN in her spiritual 12th house—this gives her the natural deposition to live a more organic lifestyle) It wasn’t enough to immerse in yoga and lengthy meditation, she had continued to grow dissatisfied with the cold city life.

Farah’s Chiron wounds were showing up in her professional and personal relationships, which was affecting her intimate bonds, creating crisis and money issues. She was the type that ran away from confrontation, and was used to suppressing her true feelings, but no less, felt them intensely as I witness her breakdown on a few occasions about her work collegues and her intimate past.

Uranus was uprooting all the toxins from her past. Much of it tangled with another previous common-law partner and the money they still owed as a couple. She had reached out to him for help, under the belief that he was also responsible for her current financial debt. He gracefully complied, but when his fiancee got word of their reconnection, it got ugly. The fiancee ripped open her Chiron wounds and what had come out were her 8th house fears. This sent her on an emotional downward spiral, unable to deal with all of the shots being fired at her. She made a sudden move back to her native homeland and just like that she was gone. When Saturn transited her 4th, it hit her natal Sun in Cap, aggravating her ego, collapsing it—ultimately for a good reason. Having Mercury(her ruling planet) and Sun in Cap in her 4th overrode the Sagittarius limitations being imposed on her, which helped her find a way to break-free from her own rut. She is currently working on hosting creative retreats in her rural hometown in the Balkans.

4)During my roommates fiasco, my niece had been staying with us. She has a 4th house Pluto and Chiron conjunction and her home was always a source of pain filled with constant crisis, mostly connected to her relationship with her mother. She had always planned on leaving when she turned 18. It got so bad that she left just shy of her 18th birthday. With transit Saturn also squeezing life out of her 4th house, she was feeling cold at home, restricted and it had been time for her to go. She did it mainly for health reason, something she’s been dealing with for a long time and with Neptune in her 6th house, the issues are vague and a cure has been illusive. Her home had been a source of unhealthy triggers and stress to her body. It was of course radical Uranus in her 8th house that erected her out of her home suddenly, it was conjunct her natal Moon(Mother, home) at the time!

Now someone who had been mildly affected by Saturn in the 4th is one of my good friends,  Julia. Though the idea of moving out has been hanging over her since she got a notice that her home was being demolished–all to build new condos, she had made no efforts to do so—despite causing her anxiety. For years, her landlord has been urging her to move out, for reasons that would benefit him financially. Though it is in her best interest to relocate, living in a city where rent has risen to ridiculous amounts, she has had no choice but stay for as long as it was possible. However, she’s needed to expand for a long time, both for personal pain and growth.

5)Like Izzy,  Julia is a creature of comfort. She is a double Virgo and is about security and stability. Her moon in Sag is also in her 4th house. She’s been craving to travel for some time now. For the first time in 20 years, she’s slowly progressed and fed her Sag desires, by travelling out of the country. No amount of strife from Uranus conjunct her Chiron in her 8th house or transiting Chiron in her 7th has provoked her from changing her domestic scene. Maybe, it has to do with how she’s been using Neptune energy in her 6th. For better or worse, she has drowned herself in creativity and the bottle.

Saturn transits in your 4th can seem cold and unrelenting, constricting you from feeling at home, sometimes even in your own skin. Though Julia has made little effort to change her situation—despite warning signs, the other 4 drastically affected have uprooted their lives. It took the influence of other planets —all in their personal ways—to move them out of their domestic settings. Pulling them out of their rut, the comfort that seemed to be growing toxic. Saturn is the planet of maturity and growth, the structure we build in our lives. His transit in the 4th house can shake us out of our foundation, one that’s unlikely unable to hold the heavy weight of current situations.

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