Signs and Symbols of an Accident-Induced Sabbatical

[Author’s Note: I began working on this post in August, before my fingers were really ready to type, and I’m publishing it on the 9th anniversary of Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet’s (Thea’s) 9 October 2016 passing. I am, and will always remain, infinitely grateful for the gnosis she poured out freely from her soul, for her mentorship, and for all of the doors she opened in my consciousness.]

On 25 May 2025 I tripped on a piece of old furniture while helping to declutter my family’s storage barn and shattered my left wrist—both ulna and radius—so badly that it required two ORIF (Open Reduction and Internal Fixation) surgeries and an internal K-wire. Thus I have been on an accident-induced sabbatical. Now, some four months later, I am well out of the trauma of it all, but still a long way to go before my thankfully non-dominant left arm is pain free and fully functional.  

Almost immediately after the break happened I began contemplating the symbols and timing of this painful and debilitating experience. In this post I will share some of the pertinent astrological transits and time-cycles related to Sri Aurobindo’s lineage that were clearly at play, but first I will discuss the more personal symbol—in my mind during the ambulance ride to the ER—which was the symbol of tripping essentially over the accumulated physical clutter of my family, next to none of which was mine and most of which was my Piscean mother’s. One of the dictums and signatures of the Supramental consciousness-force awakening in humanity in our Age of Aquarius/Kumbha, is “perfection in detail.” With this in mind, all of the symbols and details I will discuss, whether personal, familial, astrological, numerological, cosmological, etc., I see and understand as cohesive perfection, all layers being interrelated and intertwined.

A Neurodivergent Convergence

In this section I will discuss the symbol of “tripping over family clutter” in connection to some fairly recent revelations regarding my family’s and my own neurodivergence. In 2024 my oldest sibling, a licensed therapist and also Pisces, upon his own suspicions got diagnosed as having ADHD. When he “came out” to my family with this information, he shared that ADHD has a genetic component and added that, in his view, my mother has the same “disorder” or “neurodivergence” as it is now more appropriately called and discussed. As I began researching the various expressions of ADHD, which include Inattentive (aka Passive), Hyperactive, or Combined, it became clear to me that most if not all of my immediate family, myself included, as well as my beloved partner of two-plus years, has ADHD, with varied executive functioning and organizational challenges as well as varied masking strategies, coping strategies, and interests we tend to hyperfocus on. My mother's version of ADHD includes not just organizational challenges but also difficulties letting go of accumulated things—for emotional, creative, and hopeful re-purposing reasons—that most would put in the garbage, if not donate to Salvation Army. My mother is kind and loving, with an abundance of wonderful and endearing qualities such as optimism, patience, generosity, and unbounded creativity. I love her dearly and am infinitely grateful to have her as a mother for countless reasons, regardless, there is no getting around the fact that her more “Inattentive” version of ADHD and my “Hyperactive” version of ADHD have often been at painful odds throughout my life. 

Without a doubt, my family’s storage barn and the disorganized and chaotic way we were all going about clearing it out—greatly hampered or obstructed by my mother’s difficulty actually letting go of the contents and equally agitated by my impatience and frustration—was a real symbol or manifestation of the literal disorder, inertia, and old baggage of my family’s collective ADHD field. Likewise without a doubt, tripping on some of the chaotically strewn contents of that storage barn and shattering my wrist was a real symbol of the historically challenging convergence or collision of my own ADHD neurodivergence with my family’s varied but collective ADHD. 

My accident has accelerated my own interest in seeing, understanding, discussing, and “unpacking” the accumulated difficulties of our long undiagnosed ADHD family system. And thankfully my family seems to be up for this exploration as well. Thus, I see the physical cleaning out of the storage barn clutter—STILL a work in progress—as a symbol of a deeper emotional or psychological clearing—also a work in progress. On this level, we are clearing at least some of our individual, familial, and even ancestral clutter, baggage, and trauma, i.e. removing some obstacles in the way of better understanding, connection, communication, interactions, shared space, etc.

We occasionally share funny ADHD memes from TikTok and helpful ADHD articles, podcasts, and resources from websites such as ADDitude, and Thom Hartman’s ADHD: Hunters in a Farmers World discussing the challenges, the “superpowers” and the evolutionary advantages of ADHD brains, as well as long-held misconceptions about ADHD. I have welcomed this knowledge of my own and my family’s collective ADHD field as an important and helpful missing puzzle piece of my life falling into place; and I very much enjoy discussing the various manifestations and experiences of ADHD and other manifestations of neurodivergence amongst my family and friends, in the spirit of open-curiosity, humor, compassion, and appreciation for our particular difficulties, coping and masking strategies, as well as areas of hyperfocus, and such. The last article my eldest sibling shared began:

“For over three decades, I’ve been saying what the medical establishment didn’t want to hear: ADHD isn’t a disease, disorder, or defect. It’s an inherited trait that served our hunter-gatherer ancestors well for hundreds of thousands of years—and continues to benefit many people today. Now, groundbreaking research is finally proving what I’ve long called the “hunters in a farmer’s world” theory.” – Thom Hartmann, “The Science Finally Catches Up: New Research Confirms ADHD as an Evolutionary Advantage, Not a Disease” (12 June 2025)

I have come to see and appreciate the divine logic, set up, or perfection of being born with an ADHD brain into an ADHD family system or familial “womb” which was loving, nurturing, wonderful, and very entertaining in many many ways but also caused me great emotional stress and distress and bore out two suicides, my father’s and my maternal grandfather’s, when I was respectively 19 and 29. The second suicide, in 1998, corresponded to the height of my first Saturn Return, which forcefully bore me out of one version of my life, and into an entirely new version, focused on hatha yoga as well as the supramental yoga, consciousness, and mission of Sri Aurobindo’s avataric lineage. It is clear to me that all of the disorder and stresses of my own and my family’s ADHD, and our various interwoven traumas, and my first Saturn Return paved my way towards pursuing a path of healing, via Yoga. Yoga became my vehicle towards regulating and ordering my ADHD brain, nervous system, anxieties, and energies, towards organizing my life around my soul’s interests and truth. In other words, Yoga was my path out of a certain DIS-ORDER towards a higher ORDER of my life, my interests, and my energies.

With this in mind this new ADHD lens feels like an important piece of not only what I need to see, understand, appreciate, dismantle, rebuild, and rebirth in the cauldron of my SECOND Saturn Return; it has also given me a much better view, understanding and appreciation of the crushing circumstances and all that was borne out of my FIRST Saturn Return.

The Pressures and Blessings of Saturn

In astrology Saturn is associated with bones and the structure of the body as well as the structure of the material world and cosmos. It is also associated with contraction, limitation and the ruthless force of Time. It has historically been considered a “malefic” planetary influence, but as many modern astrologers recognize, if understood correctly, the pressures Saturn poses are the pressures of birthing new and more evolved forms, new structures, new order, levels of consciousness, etc. Put another way, Saturn’s contractions press towards dissolving or shattering obstacles in the way of manifesting the Truth-Consciousness-Bliss (Satchitananda) of the soul. 

Saturn was a central figure and evolutionary protagonist in Thea’s supramental cosmology, appearing over 300 times in two of her seminal books The Gnostic Circle (1975) and The New Way, Vols. 1 & 2 (1978). One of her chapters in the latter was titled: “Saturn and the Mystery of the Mother's Yoga.” Below are some excerpts from these books that will help give readers a picture of Thea’s teachings on Saturn and its relationship to Time, and thus its role in creation and in the evolution of consciousness. 

“The Indians call the Time-Spirit, kāla. The feminine form is Kali, the Mother, who devours and gives birth to all things. In the solar system this is Saturn, Kronos, Father Time; and as astrology is linked to the sign Aquarius it must be remembered that the ancient ruler of this sign is Saturn, and is ever joined to it.…

“Saturn is at the sixth orbit [in our solar system], and thus the number six is a primary factor in the division of Time and the Circle. Therefore from ancient times the Seal of Solomon [=Satkona=Star of David] was considered a sacred symbol (two interlaced equilateral triangles), especially since in the old system there were six planets and the central Sun. (The Gnostic Circle,  pp. 12-13)

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“Saturn is the 6 point of the [9-6-3] Triangle as we have stated, the angle that represents the Cosmic Divine, or the sixth orbit away from the Sun; it is the Time-Spirit.”  (Ibid., p. 19)

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[The Transcendent principle is] represented by the number 9, the apex of the triangle: this is Sri Aurobindo. The Mother is the Cosmic aspect of creation, the Shakti: she is the 6 point. The Individual is the third term and its number is 3. This triad is the structure on which all quests and teachings have been based-God, Nature or Cosmos, and Man. (Ibid., p. 51)

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“[T]he Mother is the 6 of the Sacred Triangle whose planet therefore is Saturn, the 6th orbit in the heavens; the very place wherein it is being constructed belongs to this same 6, Auroville, India. It is only appropriate therefore that Saturn should be the fundamental key to the Matrimandir's existence. And the manner in which this heavenly body [the Mother’s Temple] is 'descending' upon Earth is the most awesome and inspiring fact of this Aquarian Age.” (Ibid., p. 266)

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“Since the Middle Ages Saturn has been considered a 'malefic' planet. In fact, it is the most benefic of all planets—in the deeper sense we can say it is the only true benefic, for it irrevocably and implacably brings man to the knowledge of himself, the Cosmos and God. It does not release man until he is aware, until he has gained full and authentic self-consciousness. Man is forever bound by the wheel of Time—Saturn's crushing power—until he has transcended that Wheel, which can only come about by God-realisation, of whatever order we wish to call it, of what ever school, system or cult. This is Saturn's work. He is negative, as Time is a binding force until liberation from the Ignorance comes; then the individual knows an entirely different aspect of Saturn, as well as a new and revolutionary vision and experience of Time. He is then prepared for the experience of unity of Time, or what we have called: simultaneous time.” (Ibid., p. 305, bold emphasis added)

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“Saturn is the planet in the solar system which symbolises the Time-Spirit….” (The New Way, Vols. 1 & 2, p.204)

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“Saturn is the power of Time in the cosmos, and because of this it is the planet that represents the Cosmic Principle.” (Ibid., p. 436)

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“Saturn is the master key [of the Mother’s Temple].... And as we have stated that all avatars are offspring of the Time-Spirit Saturn, then the supramental avatars in particular must be in tune with the deeper essence and harmony of Father Time.” (Ibid., p. 217, bold emphasis added)

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“[T]he Body [the misconstructed Temple in Auroville] formed by the 6, or rather crystallised by Saturn, is built from the energies of the old world. Pressures felt within are the outcome of that world itself. That is, the disharmonies of the old world result in the crushing circumstances which force the new birth.” (Ibid., p. 280)

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“The entire structure [of the Mother’s Temple as she originally measured it] is a hymn to Saturn, or the cosmic Mother….” (Ibid., p. 454)

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“[T]he supramental messengers [=avatars] are agents of the Time-Spirit par excellence, and they are four in a line.” (Ibid., p. 502)

With all of this in mind, soon after it happened, I considered my accident to be an early arrival of my second Saturn Return, which will be exact when Saturn transits 21° Aries in May of 2027. On the June Solstice, a few days after my second surgery, I consulted an ephemeris to see where Saturn was actually positioned on 25 May 2025; and I was amazed to find that the day before my accident, Saturn had just moved from 29° Pisces into 0° Aries, i.e. from the last degree of the Zodiac, into the first degree of the Zodiac. In The Gnostic Circle Thea wrote that 0° Aries,—equivalent to the March Equinox of the Earth’s Tropical/Solar Year—, is the “[p]oint of the zodiac, which tradition indicates as the time of crucifixion and resurrection.”

Some astrologers consider Saturn’s entrance into the sign of one’s natal Saturn, as the beginning of one’s Saturn Return. My bone-shattering accident occurring the day after Saturn entered Aries—the sign of my natal Saturn—would certainly corroborate this measure of the Saturn Return. 

Saturn entering 0° Aries—the Alpha and Omega (0°/360°) of the 360 degree Zodiac or otherwise put, the Head and Tail of the Ouroboros, equivalent to the 0 and 9 of our number system and associated with crucifixion and resurrection—on the day before my accident was certainly and amazing cosmological synchronicity in and of itself. It was additionally impactful for me given that my natal North Node—astrologically indicative of one’s destiny or soul purpose—is positioned precisely at 0° Aries, conjunct my natal Chiron, also at 0° Aries. This fateful conjunction falls in the 9th house of my natal chart, i.e. in the house of the Sagittarian centaur, horse, or divine hero-son or conqueror of the zodiacal Vedic Year, which both Thea and I have written about extensively.

Astronomically speaking, Chiron is a comet-like body orbiting between Saturn and Uranus. In astrology, it is considered to be the archetype of the “Wounded Healer,” symbolizing where and how we are broken or wounded that catalyse our path of healing and the wisdom and service borne thereof. In Greek mythology, Chiron is characterized as not just a centaur, but as the “wisest and justest of all the centaurs.” He is also said to be the son of the Titan Cronos. If we admit the symbolic and etymological connection between the Greek Titan Cronos and the Greek God of Time Chronos (equivalent to Saturn in Roman mythology), then we can say that mythologically speaking, Chiron is equivalent to the Sagittarian centaur-son of the Zodiac—i.e., the Son of Time—a figure who is central to the Supramental Descent and cosmology and likewise to the ancient idea or prophecy of the “Apocalypse” which I have spent the last 9 years trying to uplift from millennia of compounded and disastrous misunderstanding.  

The additional kicker here is that this powerful North Node and Chiron conjunction at 0° Aries in the 9th house of my natal chart conjuncts Thea’s natal Saturn positioned at 29° Pisces. Since 2001, i.e. for 24 years  I have understood this conjunction as an important cosmological credential marking my destined connection with Thea and her third stage of the Supramental Yoga.

The pressures of my FIRST Saturn Return, which began in 1996 when Saturn moved into 0° Aries, in essence and in truth, delivered me to Thea and to the field of her avataric yoga. After my grandfather’s 1998 suicide, I attended a nine-week 1999 yoga teacher training in California and then, compelled by a vision of Sri Aurobindo, embarked my first trip to India. At the close of that trip,  I found Thea’s 1975 book The Gnostic Circle, which completed one level of my initiation into her field of yoga. I studied the book intensely on my own while I worked on my new career path of teaching yoga and opening a yoga studio in California. Finally, it was the global calamity or contraction of 9-11 (2001) that compelled me to “get on with it” in terms of my higher yogic calling, which involved contacting Thea and beginning my relationship and yoga with her. I first contacted her sometime in the first week of October 2001, 24 years ago, as I write these reflections. On 25 November 2001, in what was perhaps my second exchange with her, I asked:

“What is your birth time and place? I think your Saturn is conjunct my North Node (0° Aries).”

She responded on 26 November 2001, which I did not know then was the 75th anniversary of Sri Aurobindo’s “Immortality Day”:

“Yes, Saturn in my chart is 29 degrees in Pisces. If your nodes are at 0° Aries, they are conjunct. The Nodes are, for me, extremely important as if they form an AXIS of a person's horoscope. In such a case, you would need to look at the position by way of HOUSE and SIGN, but perhaps more the former. I find that they point to the focus of a person's life - but more on the order of destiny, or perhaps karma to be dealt with. However, karma is a term I don't like to use much because I feel it is misunderstood. So, if you have Nodes, conjuncting my Saturn that would certainly reveal a destiny pattern, increased because of Saturn. There is a lot that could be said about the Nodes but I rarely have time to deal with matters of horoscopes these days. There is so much that could be done to refreshen the art; perhaps at some point I will get around to it. The most important point to emphasise is the UNITY of the signs (as in TMC), the progression as of a journey, and the knowledge content. This is what has been missed for thousands of years. It has had to be revealed again. As for another good resource, for all this, I really cannot say. I am out of touch with what is being written on astrology, having found most of it too dull and lacking in real insight.”

In the subsequent 15 years of her life and of our relationship, Thea wrote much regarding the necessity of reestablishing the true sense and the true Solar and Tropical measure of the twelve-month, 360° zodiacal Vedic year along with many illuminations regarding the cosmological signature and significance of the Supramental yoga, much of which I helped her publish on blogs and websites I helped to create and edit. Over those years, I considered it my yoga and my soul’s work to help her and her teachings to reach a wider audience via the internet. My ADHD brain and my soul delighted in all of the astrological, numerical, temporal, supramental patterns, and Divine ORDER that she illuminated. I was soul-driven to help people understand the importance of her Integral and Supramental Yoga which included but was hardly limited to, reestablishing the true Vedic sense and measure of the Zodiac in India and beyond. 

She discussed her “third stage” of the supramental descent or yoga as a process of centering, so as to transform the chaos of the fragmented mental consciousness into harmonious order and wholeness. She repeatedly called me to center my disordered and hyper-driven mind. At least on one occasion she compared me to a bolting horse that took great effort to harness and reign in. This relationship dynamic makes perfect astrological sense given that our Saturn-North Node-Chiron conjunction fell in the 9th house of my natal chart, and given that ADHD brains are likened to thoroughbred horses, characterized by intense energy, speed, and potential as well as challenges with heightened sensitivity, self-regulation, control, burnout, and the tendency to bolt, both mentally or physically. My grandfather likened me to a thoroughbred horse in my teens, without any understanding of ADHD and its characteristics; and along the same vein, my father once told me, also in my teens, that if I did not slow down my life would be over before I had a chance to enjoy it.

Neither Thea nor I recognized my very excited and disordered writings and our various interpersonal challenges in terms of ADHD, but in retrospect it is easy to SEE and to better appreciate her Saturnian role of reigning me in and attempting to harness and center my energies from that perspective.

Given this “destiny pattern”—implied in the conjunction of her Saturn and my North Node and Chiron at 29° Pisces/0° Aries in my 9th house—I knew that Saturn moving from the last degree of the Zodiac (29° Pisces), and into the first degree of the Zodiac (0° Aries) on the day before my wrist shattering was not random. I knew that the accident was part of an ongoing “destiny pattern” that I needed to refocus on and endeavor to understand, rather than focus on the ongoing pain and difficulty of having shattered a wrist. And I knew that the accident was, like my first Saturn Return, a contraction towards manifesting or birthing a higher order and expression of my soul in the world. I do not know how this second Saturn Return and Rebirth will play itself out over the next few years. But I do know it will reorganize my life in significant ways. 

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Soon after seeing Saturn’s 0° Aries position on the day of my accident, I realized that Neptune had entered Aries only eight weeks earlier. Thus it came to my attention that Saturn has been conjuncting Neptune in either late Pisces or early Aries for much of 2025 and will continue to do so through February-March of 2026. In Part Two of this analysis, I will discuss this conjunction or convergence of Saturnian and Neptunian Energies, which Google AI characterizes as “ a significant astrological period marked by a tension between structure and chaos.” Note that Saturn will transit once again from 29° Pisces into 0° Aries on 13 February 2026, falling one day after my 57th birthday; and seven days later, the conjunction of Saturn and Neptune at 0° Aries (0° 46′) will be exact on 20 February 2026 — the day before the 148th anniversary of the Mother’s 21 February 1878 birthday.