Neptune sextile Venus transit: meaning, duration and advice

The sextile places Neptune sixty degrees from your natal Venus, in a sign that gets along with hers, fire with air or earth with water. Your Venus carries your affinities, your pleasures, your sense of beauty and the scale of values that guides the choices of your heart as well as your spending. Neptune, the planet of imagination and compassion, doesn’t flood her: it whispers ideas to her. What wakes up is a delicacy: you become sensitive to nuances you never noticed before, in a fabric, a fragrance, a gesture, a remark. Love takes on a more spiritual, less possessive tint; your creativity finds its subjects; the way you give grows lighter, with no bookkeeping involved. A refinement rather than a revolution.

The mood of these months is soft, almost muffled. You’re in the mood for candles rather than neon, long conversations rather than noisy parties, a handmade gift rather than an expensive object. An exhibit, a concert, a movie leave you with an emotion that lasts for days. The people you cross paths with touch you more, and you look at them with a new kindness; in a couple, tenderness returns through small gestures, a word slipped in softly, a hand laid on a shoulder. You dream more, and your dreams are about love. The questions of the period are quiet ones: what truly makes me feel good? Who would I like to show tenderness to, without waiting for an occasion?

This sextile demands nothing, and that is exactly the challenge: Neptune sets the mood, it doesn’t hold the brush for you. It asks for one gesture: put painting, dance or singing on your calendar, dare to send the letter you’ve been keeping to yourself, accept the invitation that falls outside your habits, say your tenderness out loud rather than feeling it in silence. The risk is contented daydreaming, two years of pretty impressions that leave no trace, or a tendency to dress people up in qualities before you know them. The gift, for anyone who answers the breeze, is lasting: a taste refined for a lifetime, a creative practice born without struggle, a way of loving that is wider and lighter, bonds that deepen without losing their grace.

Within a one-degree orb, Neptune’s sextile to Venus lasts about two years, since the planet covers only two degrees a year and spends five months of every year moving retrograde. Expect three rendezvous, sometimes five: the first refines your eye; the retrograde gives you the leisure to give form to what you have felt; the last fixes what has been started and lets the rest slip away. Neptune can make two sextiles to your Venus over its 165-year lap, on either side of the conjunction, roughly fifty years apart: some people enjoy this gentleness twice, others only once, depending on where Neptune stood in their chart.

An example: a Venus at 20° Scorpio receives Neptune’s sextile when Neptune reaches 20° Capricorn or Virgo, two signs ahead or behind. The site’s free birth chart gives you the degree of your Venus; the sky-of-the-day page gives Neptune’s. A degree or two either side of that sixty-degree mark, and the gentleness you feel has a celestial origin.