The astrology of March 2023 is dramatic.

The astrology of March contains many of the kinds of things that astrologers sit around anticipating, talking about, and bewildered by. Here are some of the events that happen in March:

1. Saturn finishes its three year transit of Aquarius and enters Pisces for the first time since the 1990s on the 8th
2. Pluto enters Aquarius for the first time since the 1700s on the 24th
2. Mars moves out of Gemini where it’s been for seven months and enters Cancer on the 26th. At this point in time, Mars is still considered to be out of bounds.

On top of all that, Mercury is moving really fast. It enters the sign of its fall, Pisces, on the 3rd and then transits into Aries on the 20th.

So, these are big events. It feels like time is moving too fast these days, like we keep getting hit with one big thing after another over and over again. So much movement makes me feel dismissive or helpless sometimes. When I read the news, I feel like I have more information than I know what to do with.

There are also some things that remain the same in March. Jupiter remains in Aries. The nodes of the Moon are still in Taurus and Scorpio. The Sun enters Pisces as is expected of the Sun during springtime. There are some transits that are not as intense. Venus enjoys its transit into Taurus.

I’d like you to enter March without presumption and with a willingness to feel surprise. This is much harder than it sounds. The reason why I know it is hard is because I, too, desperately want to be able to predict the future and the events of the world so that I can feel a little safer, at least intellectually.

What would it take to transform your anxiety into curiosity?

What would it take to turn nauseating uncertainty into acceptable surprise?

Oh, there are a lot of things that we use to defend against surprise. There’s dismissal—“whatever happens, I’m not going to be a part of it.” There’s haphazard overreaction—“I gotta change my whole life.” There’s the attempt to control oneself by advising or guiding other people—“You need to get your life in order.” There’s intellectualizing and abstract analysis—“Pluto in Aquarius signifies a revolutionary advancement of humankind.”

Anyway, then you are still left with the uncertainty. Are you willing to be surprised?

You are only open to someone when you are willing to be surprised by them, when you make no calculations about what they will or will not do based on categorization or your assessment of their character. You are only open to the world when you are willing to be surprised by it. You don’t know what will happen in the future. That’s what makes the future wondrous as well as terrifying. You are only open to yourself when you are willing to be surprised by yourself. You are not a known entity because you, being living, becomes a mystical thing.

I wonder what it would take for you to transform anxiety into a curiosity that lacks pretense. I’m serious about this. I’m not just saying this. Would it take the building of friendship in a way that you haven’t explored before? Do you want to have a plan? Do you need to figure out how to do certain skills that you lack? Know what plants around you are edible or not? Or, do all of these things make you feel more chaotic rather than less and you’d prefer to have a deep appreciation and trust in yourself and your own motives?

You can’t predict the future. Find out what it will take for you to entertain surprise instead.

Pisces

When Saturn enters your sign, I want you to discipline your compassion.

Undisciplined compassion looks like this: reacting to emotional reactions moment to moment without understanding root causes, wishing that a higher power could come and correct life itself, performing tolerance around acceptable emotions while remaining intolerant of less acceptable ones, and allowing oneself to be idealized for boundless compassion and suffering to try to fulfill that ideal when, in fact, one is just another human being.

Disciplined compassion looks like this: awareness around when your idea of enacting helpfulness conflicts with what is actually needed, refusing to take responsibility over someone else’s life for them, and accepting that compassion is aimless and not goal oriented.

Disciplining your compassion takes just one thing—it takes honesty. Honesty has a clarifying quality. Do whatever it takes for you to strengthen your relationship with honesty whether that is assuring yourself of your privacy in expression or asking for social accountability. Keep an honesty journal. Keep it close to your heart. Know yourself and you will not be misunderstood.

Questions to ask yourself in March 2023:
What motivates your compassion?
Why do you want to be seen as compassionate?
What happens when those two things are in conflict?

Aries

March is about closure for you, Aries. Sometimes we close out something because we finished something that we set out to do in exactly the ways that we first envisioned. We know exactly what’s next and we’re motivated to do it too. That’s the ideal scenario and a pretty rare one at that. A lot of the time, we close out something simply because it is time to do so. We have all sorts of things we wish we did or said but didn’t and we have no idea what is coming next.

You close things out when you find it appropriate to do so, not when objectivity tells you when it is time. Closure usually doesn’t look how it looks in the movies because our lives are not narratives. You get to choose what describes closure to yourself and how significant closing is.

I wonder what you might want to close out. It could be a phase of life, a long lived obsession, or even a sense of purpose. I wonder if you want other people to accompany you in your closure or if it’s important to do it alone. I wonder if closure feels lethargic first or energizing first and if one of those things is easier to embody.

Questions to ask yourself in March 2023:
When do you know that you are done with something?
How meaningful is closure for you?
Why is it significant or why is it insignificant?

Taurus

You know that feeling when you’ve changed a bunch of things internally and the people you used to be close to have been feeling more distant and you’re feeling slightly awkward or exposed about being in your own skin because you’re showing up more as yourself than ever? That’s what it’s like to feel Saturn move from an angle into a succedent house. That’s March for you.

Honestly, don’t go the extra mile. Don’t raise your standards for yourself too high and give yourself an excuse for not trying the things that you’re a wee bit curious about trying out. Don’t seek to impress. Just show up. If you show up when you are emotionally available, then you will find your means of expression. You won’t have to create it out of thin air. You’ll find what works for you.

Try this—go where you are invited. Take on the roles that you are invited to take. If you are unsure of whether you are meant to go somewhere, ask someone you respect if they are willing to invite you. Going through a lot of change at once can mean that your old defenses aren’t working for you anymore. Give yourself time and, when in doubt, ask for an invitation.

Questions to ask yourself in March 2023:
What are you being invited into?
When do you feel unsure about entering a space?
When do you need an invitation and when do you not need one?

Gemini

It’s time to make some big and visible changes. I’m sure you’ve been feeling that way already. Angular Saturn transits like the one that will play out for you in the next three years tend to build up in time.

You know, Saturn transiting the tenth house can be a stressful transit. You tend to enter this kind of transit feeling like you are less than adequate in your accomplishments and with the desire to do more for the world around you than you previously thought to be possible. You might have external characters putting pressure on you—parents or siblings asking for money, a job loss or move, or a separation and newfound need to be with yourself. However, I’m not satisfied with describing March in terms of stress for you. I think that stress is often a shorthand for emotions that we initially feel are too complicated to describe well.

You want to make an impact on the world around you. You want to make this impact in an important and necessary way. This desire might produce all kinds of emotions in you. Stress might be one of those reactions. Excitement may also be there and exhilaration too. You might even feel guilt or love. You might shift through expectation before finding a sense of realness in your motivation to do more. Make a plan. You are sturdy and things take time. Remember to use your tools well.

Questions to ask yourself in March 2023:
What kind of impact do you want to make on the world around you?
How do you know if something is important to you?
How do you know if an action is necessary?

Cancer

In March, I want you to deconstruct your idea of authority.

Authority comes in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes, authority looks like a higher power that we seek redemption or rescue from. Sometimes, authority appears erotic because perceived power is erotic even though authority does not always coincide with power. Sometimes, authority makes us feel wrathful and small. We give a lot to authority. There are moments when we excuse our own rigidness as not being a part of us but being a strategy that we use when we want to play by the rules.

The thing is, authority figures are just people. Rules are just agreements that were made during some past point in time. Authority changes. America has a long tradition of performing antiauthoritarianism without actually challenging oppression. This is why we have so many right wing edgelords hanging around.

In March I want you to clarify your relationship to authority. Start with all of the things that you want from authority. Get curious about all of the things that you despise about authority. See if authority feels safe or threatening when other people project it on you. Then, see when responsibility feels safe or threatening.

Questions to ask yourself in March 2023:
What does authority do for you?
What does responsibility do for you?
What feels clear when you ask yourself these questions and what feels blurry?

Leo

It’s alright to feel disappointed with other people. You are finishing a three year transit of Saturn in your seventh house and if Saturn likes to do one thing it’s remove unnecessary things from your life. It’s perfectly alright to feel disappointment about other people and to choose to stay in those relationships or to build relationally in another direction because you’re not condemned to spend the rest of your life with anyone other than yourself. You get to choose your relationships and, even if you don’t, you have a fair amount of choice within them.

But you do spend your whole life with yourself. You live each and everyday with yourself. This is why I invite you into availability with yourself. Is there anything that you’re disappointed about in yourself? What would best support you when metabolizing those disappointments? Is there anything that you’re proud of yourself for? What are you still hungry for?

Saturn enters your eighth house in March. There’s all kinds of sorrowful projections that people make about Saturn in the eighth house. I want to point out that Saturn transiting the eighth house is a Saturn that rises above the horizon for the first time. Saturn in the eighth house is a sign of having overcome some adversity. This is the beginning of a fifteen year period where Saturn is less of a tool for introspection and more of a tool for achievement. Achievement can feel like a lot of pressure. This is why I want you to be with both disappointment and pride.

Questions to ask yourself in March 2023:
How does disappointment motivate you?
How does pride motivate you?
How does hunger motivate you?

Virgo

It’s time to clarify what anxiety can and can’t do for you. That’s right—there are things that anxiety does do for you. There are also things that it can never do for you because it’s not a whole person but simply an emotional phenomenon. There are things that anxiety may try to do for you without being able to and you may be unaware of what those things are until you take a closer look.

A lot of the time, we want to just get rid of anxiety. Throw it out of the window. Why not? It prevents us from doing very necessary things like making friends or taking a shower. If we can’t get rid of it we try to manage it so that we don’t feel it most of the time. By god, we don’t try to listen to it.

But you can listen to anxious emotions. You are larger than your emotions and this means that you can listen to them without becoming them. Anxiety itself is never a whole emotion. It is always accompanied by another emotion. Anxiety is just how emotions ask for attention from you when they sense that they are intolerable to you. Give your anxious emotions some attention. They might show you who you really are.

An exercise to try in March 2023:
When you feel anxious, focus on your anxiety while tensing up your entire body and making it very tight. Then, release all of your muscles at once while telling the anxious emotion that you are available for connection. When you do this, you might feel the emotion that anxiety tries to cover up or distance you from. You might not feel the emotion. It might take a couple tries spanned over time for your anxious feelings to feel convinced that you’re willing to be with them. If you feel an emotion when you release your body, you may need further support at that moment. Anxious emotions are usually anxious because they are overwhelming and something else in you wants to keep that emotion at a distance.

Libra

I want you to spend some time trying to figure out the source of your burn out in March. Is it really due to too much work in terms of time? If so, then what are the reasons that you spend so much time working?

There might be other reasons why you feel burned out when you do. You might feel a lack of control over how you spend your time. You might feel captured by a larger system that does not seek to understand you and this shrinks your power until it is measured by its use value alone. Burnout is a sign of having too little power. You might experience burnout as towering expectations or as cruelly from both external and internal sources.

When studying migration, Max Frisch uttered the famous quote “we asked for workers but human beings came.” This is why it feels so paradoxical to ask for compassion from work. To do so is a great subversion. Asking for compassion from work is probably one of the things that produces the most friction in our daily lives. And yet, there are many people who work with you who are willing to subvert their values alongside you.

Questions to ask yourself in March 2023:
What is your first response to the question “why are you burned out?”
What is your second response to the question “why are you burned out?”
What is your third response to the question “why are you burned out?”

Scorpio

Actually, I think that March will be about not pushing yourself to be more social than you are willing to be. There are a lot of reasons why we might push ourselves to be social when we don’t actually want to be. We might have to because of work or family. We might have an idea of what it means to be a normal person and having a certain number of friends can be part of that conception. We might fear that people will walk away if they don’t hear from us for a while.

But we tend to get very cranky when we are social when we don’t want to be. Trust me—I used to work customer service. We get grumpy and upset and we swipe at people with our claws because we don’t really want to interact with anyone. We might criticize people inappropriately or make fun of them behind their back especially if we lack channels for expressing healthy aggression. These are all signs of social fatigue.

In March, I want you to make sure that you don’t take time with your loved ones for granted. I don’t mean that in the guilt trippy way that implies you have to push yourself past your social boundaries. I mean that in the way of treating your relationships as precious and, with them being precious, being deliberate about the quality of time that you spend with other people.

Questions to ask yourself in March 2023:
What’s been pissing you off lately?
What is responsible for telling you that you want self regulation?
What is responsible for telling you that you want company?

Sagittarius

Saturn entering your fourth house is treatise on how you are shaped by place. You are so, so shaped by place. When you are in a city you are proximate to things that make you see yourself a certain way. When you are away from things you shape yourself according to that distance. When you are close to things, you shape yourself according to that intimacy. Place shapes how you yearn, how you lean, and how you hold onto things.

Make a list of all the places that have been meaningful to you. These places are captured by your memory and they live, still, in your body. You never really leave a place once it has moved through you. And, yet, you are not a tree. You are a person. You have no roots sunken into the ground. You move around.

I wonder what it means for you to fall in love with a place. We can feel threatened by the pull of a place the same way we can flinch away from love in all of its stripes. We can feel liberated by uncovering honesty in how we relate to a place. We might need distance from our hometowns and we might also feel homesickness towards them. We might require willful attention to transform place into home.

An exercise to try in March 2023:
Make a list of places that have been meaningful to you whether you have been there or have ancestral roots there. Try to describe that place. Feel the futility of trying to describe a place. Find the story of that place. See what similarities and differences in emotion the different places on your list produce in you.

Capricorn

There is nothing in life that is more humbling than habit. I know that there have been times in my own life where I have sung my own praises, believing that I am more available than I actually am and more willing to do things than my habits allow for. There is nothing like going to bed past midnight, believing that you’re about to get up and change your whole life only to wake up fifteen minutes late once again because habit told you to.

For the next three years, you’re going to learn your habits. You’re going to study them. There will be habits that you have that don’t even feel like they are your own. You have habits you inherited from your parents, from grandparents, and from ancestors you haven’t even met. You have habits that help you and habits that produce frustration. Some habits are embedded so deeply within you that you don’t even know what they are. There have been instances in which people who have suffered extensive brain damage from concussion or stroke recover habits that they used to perform decades ago, habits that they assumed were already forgotten. We often think of ghosts as presences captivated by their repetitive habits.

I wonder if you are willing to learn what your habits are without dismissing the vital information that they contain. Habits can feel cruel or scary because they do feel like a type of possession. It takes patience to change a habit.

Questions to ask yourself March 2023:
What habits feel like they are your own?
What habits feel like they are not your own?
How might you explore the habits that you haven’t realized you perform yet?

Aquarius

You actually don’t need more. I know that you are burned out after Saturn’s spent so much time in your sign. You’ve done a lot these last three years. You’ve sung your songs, pushed yourself out of your comfort zone, and you have both success and failure under your belt. You actually don’t need more ambition or drive or motivation at this time. Sometimes you need those things but not right now.

I want you to look for contentment. Is there anything in you that feels challenged by contentment and satisfaction? I know that you don’t want to feel safe in complacency and that you will forever be motivated to learn and grow.

But contentment isn’t about stasis. Contentment is about finding fulfillment in the growth that is already happening, discovering satisfaction in your unique pace and all of the many things that you do for yourself and not for show. Contentment is about knowing that you have the time to value and maintain the things that you have worked hard to build. You can do great things with contentment.

Questions to ask yourself in March 2023:
How did you feel about sunset as a child?
How do you feel about sunset as an adult?
When are you content with the rate at which time passes?