Rahu Mahadasha Shani bhukti Vimshottari period - Barbara Pijan Lama Jyotisha Vedic Astrology

a sample reading: What to expect in her Rahu/Shani period

Rahu-Ketu: Directory of Jyotisha Descriptions

Namaste,

I understand how frustrating these Rahu/Shani periods can be... For most people, Rahu and Shani are the single most difficult Planets in their lives. Since you are entering your 50th year of age, however, you can take advantage of the wisdom of age. One can leverage the life experience in managing rebellious, intemperate young Rahu in battle against grumpy, oppressive old Shani.

Rahu brings forward desires from past lives simply in order to manifest those desires, regardless of whether those desires are "good" or "bad" in the current life. If a Desire is the docket for release into the current life, that hunger will release into consciousness, on schedule!

Rahu is always crazy-making - but Rahu is also dramatic, exciting and often great fun.

Saturn - a.k.a. Pete RePeat - brings forward the results of our ignorant actions which caused harm to others in this life and past lives. Shani enforces repetition after repetition of the bad scene, whatever it was... in order to call one's attention to the role one plays in creating one's own suffering.

In the moment when one understands how one's very own expectations, presumptions, and reactions have once again stimulated one's own repression & pain, the previous ignorance is instantly transformed into wisdom.

Shani's behavior is undeniably punitive. However, the human experience during Shani's periods definitely improves with increased age, because the aging process itself re-asserts the basic truth: what goes around, comes around.

Few people past the age of reason will deny the essential nature of Shani's core truth: physician, heal thyself.

Because your radix Rahu occupies a hostile, self-destructive 6/8 angle vis-à-vis Shani, expect the Rahu/Shani section of the Vimshottari dasha to give you plenty of trouble. (The good news is that it could be worse! Shani in 2nd-from-Rahu is much worse mental health than 6/8.) However, please note that the trouble does have a solution:

To the extent that you have consciously absorbed the contradictory social-spiritual signals that permeate your family network, this Rahu-Shani period will cause plenty of reflective self-conflict followed by constructive self-management and healing. You'll be able to see where these permission / non-permission conflicts have been integrated into the structure of your ego, and you'll skillfully - carefully - ease them out of your unconscious reactive behaviors. Remember the point of each bhukti period is to take one specifically defined STEP UP in consciousness.

To the extent that you have not yet achieved consciousness of the reality that you are projecting ancient personal internal conflicts, which have roots in past lives, upon the personalities of your family members, coworkers, neighbors, and significant others in the psycho-social environment -- you will have plenty of trouble with the restrictive, critical blockage caused by Other People. You could spend a lot of time trying to remove people who seem to be causing the blockage - but they won't go unless you can first remove the matching energy in your own ego that negatively attracts them to you.

As you might guess, Other People are only the mirrors of the internal dialogue. However, we often can't or don't believe that we are truly responsible for the moment-to-moment experience of our own lives. Most of us have been programmed to believe that things happen TO us, rather than THROUGH us. Therefore we need to have other people act out our own internal reality so that we can become conscious of the patterns of conflict, mistrust, resentment, anger, etc. which truly originate within.

In the end, responsibility for wise use of this difficult period rests entirely with Oneself.

While undoubtedly difficult, these challenging periods can bring the most valuable progress of the entire incarnation - if handled with awareness. But unfortunately, without consciousness of matching energy, 6/8 Rahu-Shani can be a very high conflict period with much carnage and little progress.

The primary role-holders in Rahu/Shani's Other People Are Blocking Manifestation of My Desires drama, will be the significators of Rahu's house, and Saturn's house.

Rahu is the Permission agent. Rahu occupies house-4 of the mother, education, roots, & social security. Mother and her understudies (teachers, moral authorities, protectors) are the usual suspects.
Shani is the Restriction agent. Shani occupies house-9 of the father, religion, guru, & higher knowledge. Father, religious authorities, professor, folks in a guru role are the usual suspects here.
Rahu & Shani together create Anxiety - the yes/no, want to/shouldn't, push-me/pull-you complex.
Expect your parents to have trouble getting along with each other. Even if your parents are no longer living, the conflicts they embodied for you are embedded in your personality. The part of you which is your mother, will be in conflict with the part of you which is your father.

In your case, Rahu shares house-4 (mother, home, shelter, emotional security, basic socialization through education, vehicles, properties) with Surya (father, ego, rational self) and Budha (conversation, analysis).

Rahu's only personal characteristic is that He promotes manifestation of Desires. His actual effects are to amplify and magnify the planets which share the house with Him. During your entire Rahu mahadasha 1994-2013, Rahu will be busy amplifying & magnifying Surya who brings you wisdom through education, and Budha who brings you articulate communication through word, gesture, and image. This is a good situation overall.

Surya is an excellent planet for you! He is the all-good 9th-lord, agent of dharma, who brings wisdom into your life. He occupies Pisces the sign of his friend Jupiter in an angular house (kendra) along with Budha the planet of communicative skills.
Budha is debilitated in Pisces, where He is typically too imagistic to express ideas clearly. However, Budha's communicative ability is strengthened by the wisdom-lord Sun. Ruling 2 kendras (houses 7 & 10, contractual agreements and career) help Budha advance your career. Therefore, while Budha is not completely neecha banga, He will carry out his teaching mission to promote wisdom through communicating imagistically.
The Yoga (combination) of Surya & Budha yuti Rahu makes you a natural educator, gifted with a visionary sense of imagery (Pisces) that allows you to communicate some outlandish, exotic, foreign (Rahu) concepts in an educational package. Surya being 6/8 from his own house, and 6/8 from the Moon, makes you a bit of a misfit socially - which keeps you on the creative edge. Since your career is in film production, the entire Rahu mahadasha will be exploratory, envelope-pushing, and overall successful in promoting your dharmic vision.

With Surya the father-karaka occupying 4th house of Mother, and Chandra the mother-karaka occupying the 9th house of Father, we see that your parents reversed the traditional roles in some ways during your upbringing. The mother has a strong but repressed personality which may have promoted values of public recognition and extraordinary performance, at the loss of deeper emotional satisfaction or inner peace. The father probably married a woman much like his own mother: repressed, driven, and prone to substitute conditional approval (Shani) for unconditional love (Moon).

The bottom line is that through the influence of both parents (and their parents before them!) Shani-yuti-Chandra sees you born into an emotionally constricted family environment, where social recognition and approval is valued more than your natural childlike beauty. Approval & acceptance do not come to you easily. Your family culture sets high standards for achievement, including standards for moral correctness which in their eyes qualify you to be a teacher. Therefore you will need to work hard to distinguish yourself through external performance achievement, in order to earn your parent's approving love. It is possible that you can never be smart enough or good enough to satisfy them. But you will keep trying. Career will overshadow family. You will be strongly identified with your work.

This is always the karmic case with Shani-yuti-Chandra.

Luckily the navamsha positions of Rahu & Shani provide good tools for high-achieving socially approved professional work!

Shani is exalted in navamsha with Swakshetra Shukra, which gives you excellent artistic judgment and probably a strong education in practical artistic production as well.
Rahu is empowered to realize many of your dreams and desires in this life because He occupies Vrischika navamsha with expansive, abundant Guru, who throws a navamsha drishti upon your nurturing, maternal navamsha Chandra Moon.

Due to favorable navamsha positions for Rahu & Shani, you are much assisted in resolving some of the internal conflicts that originate with your parents. Intimate partners who come to you in this life are by and large, emotionally supportive and stabilizing.

These navamsha conditions suggest that you will receive the unconditional emotional support that every soul needs more effectively from your adult love partners than from your parents, and this goes a long way toward giving you the safety and confidence you need to tackle the inner conflicts that arise during Rahu/Shani period.

Your adult intimate partners (not always sexual partners, but indeed those partners who are psycho-emotionally intimate or deeply involved with you, are seen in navamsha) will be more willing to grant you some of the permission that Rahu/Shani lack in the social ego /radix chart.

One key permission to be achieved during this period is the "right to be wrong" - i.e., to make mistakes, misinterpretations, and incite social criticism. Making mistakes is of course a major component of the creative process, but the installed parental voices are in conflict over whether, and how much, mistake-making is allowed.

Over the course of the entire 18-year Rahu mahadasha you do have lifetime-high levels of permission to handle taboo subjects and explore culture ideas that are exotic or foreign in nature. Rahu is a huge permission-granter. Rahu says, Desires were made to be Manifest! But the Shani period is always a wrench in the gears, when past-life errors confront us, requiring neutral responsibility, compassion, and care for those who appear to be trying to harm us.

Shani periods evoke subconscious reactive patterns of fear & resistance, which call into our lives agents of repression, conformity, restriction, and denial of our true wishes. In your case, the psychically-installed voices of the parents - and perhaps the present-time voices of social-control agents such as professors, guru's, & various types of authority figures, perhaps bosses/managers or other permission-granters, act out the fear & resistance energy.

In every case, despite our emotional resistance to conflict, our spirits do want Shani to complete His job at the appointed time.

Shani's job is to bring forward the people we have inadvertently harmed in past lives, give them the opportunity to enter into a negative relationship with us, harm us in return, and thereby allow us (in the best case) to consciously realize that we attracted those people into our lives in order to learn a lesson about compassion. This is a painful and frustrating process but it is really the only way to balance the karmic ledger.

Spiritually, there is no advantage to having Shani-evoked troubles magically evaporate. On the deathbed, there will be deep gratitude for having been offered the chance to suffer consciously, and consciously forgive. This is the single greatest achievement of the human soul.

We all want the chance to clear the spiritual path of karmic obstacles. Spiritually, it's quite a good thing that Rahu is temporarily somewhat impeded in His natural process of wildly realizing the huge reservoir of dreams, desires, hopes, wishes, expectations. We want the opportunity to do the work on the conflict, right at the most frustrating moment, so that we can determine the true source of the resistance - our own fear of reprisal.

So, get out there and make some mistakes. Suffer the criticism, disapproval, and fear of being ostracized or annihilated that making mistakes - pushing the boundaries of accepted thought, behavior, or feeling - can induce. Realize that all your fear is just karma, running off. Adversarial agents are, at the psychological level, acting out the expectations that you inherited from your parents: that you had to be good, right, and special in order to deserve love.

In fact, you deserve love because you are a child of the Divine. No amount of punishment or mistake can take that away from you.

Be secure!

The good news is that once you're finished with this Rahu-Saturn, you won't encounter another major internal-conflict period until Saturn-Rahu, age 90-93!

I know that the first thing these chaos/release periods do, is to wipe out your personal boundaries! So be sure to do some body-defining healings like receiving massage, practicing hatha yoga, doing any vigorous sports that you might enjoy and/or taking some good long walks (esp. in the full moonlight), and even (if your budget can handle it) buying some personal-style-defining new clothes. In Rahu/Shani, it's all about defining yourself as an individual pursues personal desires, while at the same time setting good boundaries and meeting reasonable expectations for family, tribe, and society.

Define yourself creatively, elegantly, and well.

file update: 18-Jul-2010

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