About Neptune

Neptune is the second of the transpersonal planets and is the higher octave of Venus. While Uranus represents the collective mind, Neptune represents collective feelings. The energy of Neptune can be intoxicating, beautiful, magical—and you can drown in it. And you will feel like you are doing something deeply meaningful and personally redemptive as you drown. Needless to say, it can be a difficult sometimes to work with Neptunian energy. The gift of Neptune is the exquisite feelings it produces, and the beauty it can inspire (if you can handle it).

Neptune is associated with Pisces and the 12th house.

Neptune in our natal chart represents:

• what our sense of magic and wondrousness feels like, its flavor
• what we can idealize and become disillusioned about
• what we want to merge-with or dissolve-into
• what we are creatively inspired, dream, and fantasize about
• where we can feel states of ecstasy and communion
• where we might feel a deep, often inexplicable longing or yearning
• where we may experience a sense of emptiness, loss, or dissolution
• where we are prone to illusion, confusion, or delusion
• where our boundaries become blurred or porous
• where we are prone to self-sacrifice and victim/savior/betrayer dynamics
• where we can feel great compassion and sensitivity to suffering
• where we want to escape, to lose ourselves
• where we experience heightened sensitivity
• where we feel existential guilt or a need for redemption
• where we might struggle with addiction or dependency
• where we might experience spiritual awakening or transcendence

Neptune is especially impactful when it conjuncts your personal planets or angles. For example, if Venus conjuncts Neptune in your chart, you will idealize love, feel ecstasy and desire to merge with your partner, lose yourself in relationships, end up in victim/savior relationship dynamics, become disillusioned about love, etc. It is these areas where we have to work especially hard to develop clarity, discernment, grounding, and boundaries.

Neptune is associated with any form of escapism including drug addiction (especially alcohol and opiates). Addressing addiction is beyond the scope of this site, but I will discuss some escapism dynamics below.

Neptune challenges

Here are some examples of Neptune problems from my own life and how I resolved them. (I have Neptune on my Ascendant, and aspecting a lot of my chart.)

Caveat—intellectual awareness is rarely enough to shift out of the Fog of Neptune. Often it seems that you have to just exhaust the desire by playing it out, at least to a certain point. Letting go of any coping mechanism can also be excruciatingly painful, especially if we learned to rely on them at an early age. But knowing what is going on can give you a roadmap and hope.

Healing fantasies & limerence

These are also called redemption fantasies or salvation fantasies or rescue fantasies—they are all versions of the same idea: someday, someone will rescue you from yourself. It is often about a romantic partner, but sometimes we have a vague idea that someday we’ll finally find the right teacher or therapist or guru and that will solve all our problems.

Limerence is where you are having a relationship with an obsessive story in your head about a person rather than the actual person. It can be very painful and is the underlying issue in most stories of passionate, unrequited love.

Fantasies are a form of self-regulating. And if you have a strong Neptune, they were an easily available form of self-care when you may have not had any other options. But as you grow up, they become a lot more painful and debilitating to having your needs met in real life.

I went into depth about how to work with healing fantasies on my blog.

Savior complex

They are the helpless and needy one, you are the self-sacrificing angel. They are the fuck-up, you are the responsible one. There are many variations, but the bottom line is that you are both playing out a dynamic with different roles.

The dynamic continues because you want the other person to stop it, not you. The only way out is the same way you went in: by choosing to stop. These dynamics can be especially sticky when they combine with attachment trauma. The only way out is to work on yourself, and realize your anger is because you are telling yourself you are a victim, and you aren’t. You are willingly participating in a dance with a payoff for you.

You like something about it—how it feels, the validation it gives you, the security of the bond, something. Admit as much of the truth as you can to yourself.

You don't have to stop loving someone to stop playing out toxic patterns with them. But yes, that means they may find someone else to play them out with. You'll still be better off.

Existential ennui

This is like an addiction to the beauty of pain. Here's the reality of pain: it exists to tell you about a problem. If you are feeling nebulous, ungrounded pain, that's not pain, it's a fantasy of pain.

Ask yourself, "What is this pain about actually?" If you can't name a real need that you have that could be met with something real, then that’s not real pain. And just like savior dynamics, you are choosing it because there is some payoff. And you can un-choose it. It may actually just be a habit at this point, and it never occurred to you that it’s optional.

The reality is that anything that makes you feel good and keeps you from feeling bad can become a sort of addiction. Where Neptune comes in is that it juices up those feelings to levels that make them feel deeply meaningful. And if you’re someone who is oriented toward meaning (for example, you have a lot of Fire in your chart), you will become addicted to the feeling of meaningfulness. Especially if you are lacking meaning overall in your life.

But pain is not more meaningful than joy. Meaning is entirely subjective and you can decide to make your happiness meaningful to you.

Longing to go home

People with heavy Neptunian influence find it difficult to simply be here on Earth, in a body, in a normal life—they want to go home. (Where is "home"? It's not clear, but it’s better, and this is not it.) Life on Earth feels painful, lonely, confusing, difficult, and pointless.

This wasn't something I solved overnight, but over the years these things have helped:

• Healing my trauma. When your nervous system is screaming at you, the sensitivity that Neptune gives you makes it even worse.
• Realizing I was autistic & ADHD. Autism makes your nervous system more sensitive, so it is vital to adjust your daily environment and home so it's not causing you chronic stress.
• Self-validation. This really helped regulate my emotions. (I explain the process on my blog.)
• Leaning into my spirituality. The more I allowed and validated my connection to Spirit, and let go of my rational-atheist upbringing, the calmer and more centered I felt.
• Giving myself permission to detach as much as I wanted from "normal" consensus reality. I no longer try to make my life seem "normal". I don't care about 90% of what most humans care about, and that's OK. It’s really nobody else’s business how I live my life.

When I made my home here better, I didn't want to leave as much. I still have my moments, but overall, I'm having a much better time in my 40’s than I ever have before.