How Pluto works: the four ways Pluto drives your evolution

Think back to your last major Pluto transit. I bet that when you describe it, your language is mostly: wow, that was an intense period of my life.

A lot of people walk away overwhelmed, with loss, sadness and grief.

And that's the problem, right? If all we can say is "that was intense", we can't integrate it, and we can't see what our soul is about.

So let me give you the mechanics behind how Pluto works. Then you can look back and see, oh okay, that's why that transit happened. It was acting out the evolutionary intention my soul was on.

Pluto enacts its evolution in four ways. I'll start with the most common one and finish with the most intense.

Curiosity and inquiry

Your world is going along, and somebody crosses your path. A best friend, someone you meet at a party.

There's an opening to a new world, and it doesn't have to be dramatic. It could be something subtle that nearly passes you by.

A friend says, I've found this Saturn return thing, it's between the ages of 28 and 31, and it's helped me understand my life. And your curiosity peaks. Oh okay, what is this, tell me more.

Underneath that curiosity an attachment starts to form, with an element of empowerment in it. Something you weren't looking for opens you up to new ways of looking at reality.

It's a progressive osmosis. The inquiry leads you down a rabbit hole, and you find yourself in a completely new place.

Limitation and crisis

This one sits in between: not as intense as cataclysmic change, and not as subtle as curiosity.

Say there's a pattern in your soul's story that needs to be eliminated. Your last three relationships all gave you the same feedback about a behaviour that seems detrimental for you.

That feedback exposes a limitation within yourself. It can come through an external crisis or an internal one, and either way it forces you to look inward at what must be confronted.

You can ignore it for a while, or work on it for a bit. But at some point it comes into such acute focus that it must be eliminated.

And here's the binary. When you address that pattern, it opens you up to the possibility of something new.

Crisis leads to recognition and adjustment. Then you look outside yourself for something that symbolizes an empowerment path: a therapist, a relationship, a job, an education. You merge with it, and through osmosis you carry it within you as a pattern of empowerment.

Time-released activation

I think this one is kind of cool, although it can be confusing at first. Something time-released in the consciousness of the soul gets activated by a Pluto transit.

You get to, say, 31 or 32, and all of a sudden something comes into your awareness and pulls you toward it. Hold on. I feel like this is a destiny. I feel like this is something I've got to do.

It's something emerging from your unconscious, and it becomes almost like an obsession. I need to do this, I need to do this.

You'll identify empowered symbols that reflect what you want to empower within yourself, and you seek them out and merge with them. You become a vehicle of actualization for that Pluto desire, and you watch it fulfill itself through you.

Cataclysmic change

This is the most intense of the four.

It's a sudden and complete elimination of your emotional and psychological attachment to something symbolic to you: your work, a house, a loved one. All of a sudden it gets taken away.

It always comes through a deep surrender. That's the key, right? The intention is to eliminate all pre-existing attachments relative to that reality.

Oftentimes it's shock. You realize a long-term partner has betrayed you. In the extreme, you lose a partner, a child or a parent. Or your workplace closes down.

That shock leaves you in a deep process of loss, and this is where I think the most therapy is needed.

Why would something like that happen? There's no direct answer. But in most charts you'll see an evolutionary cycle ending. The soul can be so fixated on a pattern that the only way to change the pattern is to eliminate it.

Looking back at your own Pluto transits

So reflect on the major transformations in your life and see which of the four fits.

Then connect it to the symbol in your chart. Let's say it's Pluto conjunct the Moon, and it might have come through the home or the mother. Or Pluto conjunct, square or opposing Mercury: maybe a deep intellectual crisis where new information had to come in to accelerate you forward.

The astrology is reflecting your story, your karmic evolutionary pattern, your myth as it were.

Pluto in Aquarius

Pluto is in Aquarius now, and as humanity we're going to experience new ways Pluto enacts our evolution. What cataclysmic events will we go through, what new attachments will we form, what new destinies will we fulfill?

And this is also happening for each of us, individually, in our own charts.