Uranus sextile Mars transit: meaning, duration and advice

Your natal Mars is your way of getting into action: the pace at which you start, the way you take the initiative, what makes you want to fight and what makes you let go. When Uranus comes to sixty degrees from that Mars, in a sign that goes well with its own, fire and air or earth and water, it doesn’t come to shake it up. It offers it another way of doing things. The sextile is an aspect of opening: what gets activated is your ability to act differently as soon as an opportunity appears, to try a tool you didn’t know about, to team up with someone who works the opposite way you do, to find pleasure in effort again because the effort changes shape. No one forces you to do anything; everything is within reach.

The climate of this transit is lively and rather pleasant. You notice that your energy comes back whenever something changes: a new running route, a tool you stumble on by chance, a colleague who shows you a more direct way to handle a task you’d been dragging around for months. Offers drift by, often through people you barely know, and what they have in common is that they ask you to act fast, in an area where you had no routine to defend. The questions that keep coming back are light but insistent: what if I went about it differently? Who is already doing what I dream of doing, and how? What would be fun enough that I’d start tonight rather than next year?

Uranus sextile Mars asks for one move: grab it. The door is ajar, it won’t swing wider on its own, and the opportunity passing by right now won’t come around again in this form. The risk is twofold. On one side, comfort: everything is fine, nothing is pressing, and the window closes without your having tried anything. On the other, scattering: an energy that lights up at every novelty and goes out the moment the novelty turns into a habit, ten projects started, none finished. The gift, for whoever picks one or two opportunities and sticks with them, is a more agile way of acting: skills learned fast, allies who think differently than you do, and the lasting certainty that you can change methods without losing your strength.

Count on one to two years at a one-degree orb. Uranus is retrograde for about five months each year, so the sextile most often plays out in three beats: a first contact that puts the opportunity before your eyes, a step back during which you try things out without committing, and a last pass in direct motion that sets in place what you’ve adopted. Some years the retrograde loop stops just short of your degree, and the transit comes down to a single pass of a few months, even easier to let slip by. In its eighty-four-year cycle, Uranus forms two sextiles to your Mars, one about fifteen years after the conjunction, the other about fifteen years before the next one: you’ll experience one or two of them, at ages that only your chart determines.

To spot it, count two signs: if Uranus is currently moving through the second sign before or after the one your natal Mars is in, within a degree or two of the same degree number, the window is open. Your free birth chart, calculated on the site, gives you that degree; the sky-of-the-day page gives you Uranus’s, and the comparison takes less than a minute.