Saturn in Pisces as Biotensegrity

Sometimes when a thing breaks, the fault line is not where you would expect it to be.

I've learned this fact in a number of ways - from unexplainable bodily injuries to a song that brings up an immense wave of grief when I thought I was perfectly fine, thank you very much. I spent the last year and a half in massage therapy school. One of the points that was hammered home by every teacher has helped me to understand these seemingly invisible fault lines.

Biotensegrity, or, everything is connected.

Biotensegrity is a portmanteau of biology, tension, and integrity. The common theory of bodily structure used to be that bodies were not so different from brick houses. Bones, like bricks, are stacked on top of each other, creating what is called continuous compression. But biotensegrity explains that your bones are suspended in a web of connective tissue called fascia. Fascia is an intricately laced web that runs through your whole body. It wraps every cell, every bone, every muscle - and importantly - the web is entirely connected. It is the tension of this web that holds everything in your body together. Which means yes, that every cell in your body is directly connected to every other cell. And every time you impact one part of the web, the rest of it adapts in response. This is what makes our bodies so resilient but it also gives pain lots of crevices to hide in.

For the purposes of massage, this means that a client might complain about pain in their shoulder but the root of that pain could actually be in their foot. Pain pops up in mysterious ways and in mysterious places.

When Saturn entered Pisces in March of 2023, I was thinking a lot about biotensegrity. After 6 years of Saturn in domicile, I think we were all ready for a little break. Saturn in Capricorn and Aquarius mimicked the old understanding of our bodies: continuous compression, gravity pushing down on us all. Saturn in Pisces is (hopefully) offering us a little more flow and ease. Pisces' domicile ruler is Jupiter and its exaltation ruler is Venus, so Pisces has some real benefic firepower - tempering some of Saturn's tight constraints and tendency towards seriousness and depression. Pisces has an incredible capacity to draw connections between all things and tends to be pretty light on boundaries. One feeling connects to another, connects to another, until we've gone from "Ow, I stubbed my toe" to "Everyone should have free healthcare." Saturn's role then is to provide structure to the oceanic tangle of feelings. But Saturn in Pisces can't be the rigid stack of a brick house that a domiciled Saturn brings. Instead it is the weaving of that intricately laced web. And what we have seen with Saturn's trip through Pisces is just how connected we all are. From 'the things that impact you also impact me,' to 'the development of AI requires the use of incredible amounts of energy which is ultimately contributing to our evolving state of climate chaos,' to 'none of us will be free until we all are free.' We've seen people cheering on Orcas for sinking yachts and we've seen massive global protests and boycotts against g-nocide.

Saturn brings structure and order to Pisces' web of emotional connection but Saturn also brings destruction. Saturn is still malefic after all. When Saturn in Aquarius squared Uranus in Taurus we saw that destruction in the form of the Surfside, Florida condominium collapse in 2021. Investigation after the fact found that the building had major structural problems that were well known and ignored by the people in power. Water from the pool had corroded the structural support for the parking garage below. That half of the building collapsed. The other half of the building - the part that was not directly impacted - did not collapse. This is Saturn in Aquarius - the condominium was a continuous compression structure and the fault lines were fairly obvious.

With Saturn in Pisces we are seeing something different. A biotensegrity structure doesn't necessarily break at the point of impact, it breaks where the structure is weakest. The pain isn't necessarily at the site of the injury, but where the fascia has been stretched and overworked in order to compensate. For example, the Houthis were able to shut down global trade recently not because they have a super powerful Navy but because they found a weak spot in the trade route. And the "pain" of this shutdown is being felt elsewhere in the world.

Saturn in Pisces is ruled by Jupiter in Taurus, co-present with Uranus. If the squares from Saturn in Aquarius to Uranus in Taurus brought big shake ups and break downs of structure, Jupiter's upcoming conjunction with Uranus might highlight some of these faults in a new way. Jupiter is currently humming along towards Uranus and they will meet up at 21 degrees of Taurus in late April. This transit feels like a summer storm, the sky turns purple, lightning flashes across, thunder booms. Everyone has to get out of the pool. But there's an excitement, something exhilarating about running through the sudden downpour, the fit of laughter when you finally find cover. And after, of course, there's a rainbow. I think that this Jupiter-Uranus conjunction will bring sudden and unexpected opportunities, but I think it may also light up some of the places where our Piscean structures are in need of a little reinforcement. What might that bolt of lightning illuminate if we pause for long enough to take a look around?

As Saturn makes its way through Pisces I am holding on to what one of my massage instructors said: every time we touch, we treat.

If everything is connected, then anything we touch will have an impact on everything else. It is usually not wise to work directly on an injury, but you can work around it and that will help heal the injury. We may not always be able to see the fault lines, or get exactly to the root of the problem, but that doesn't mean we can't do anything about them. Saturn in Pisces gives us the endurance and the tenacity to keep showing up, to say I can impact this one small part of the web, and trust that it will reach far beyond what I might ever imagine.