Mapping Your Annual Profections
A gentle guide to the seasons and cycles shaping your year.
Annual profections are one of the tools I use most when helping clients understand the seasons and cycles they’re moving through.
It’s an ancient Hellenistic timing technique, and also one of the simplest ways to get clear on the focus of a given year. You don’t need to track endless transits or untangle layers of symbolism. Instead, profections move through a straightforward twelve year cycle, shifting the focus from one house of your natal chart to the next. Each year brings attention to a different area of life, a different kind of growth, and a different chapter asking for your engagement.
From one birthday to the next, a single house becomes the focal point of your life. That house holds the themes you are ripening into. It becomes the container for your experience and the stage on which the year plays out.
Alongside that house, its planetary ruler steps forward as your timelord: the planet steering the pace, tone, and texture of your year. Some years feel quick and catalytic because Mars is at the helm. Others unfold slowly and deliberately because Saturn is setting the pace. A Venus-ruled year pulls you toward softness, harmony, and beauty. A Mercury-ruled year brings learning, conversation, and refinement to the forefront.
It’s simple, but the simplicity is part of the medicine. No complexity. No overwhelm. Just rhythm — a rhythm you can begin to track once you know what you’re looking for.
Whenever I begin working with a new client, this is one of the very first places I look. It reveals where their attention is being drawn, what life is asking of them, and the natural tempo their evolution is likely to follow over the year ahead.