I was recently featured in WELL+GOOD, where I discussed the impact of Adele’s Saturn Return, her use of Saturn as an archetypal imprint on her own body, and her new record, 30. Here’s an excerpt:

Astrologically speaking, Saturn is often called the taskmaster because it rules over structure and regimentation in all things. (If you know a Capricorn, you won’t be surprised to learn that Saturn is the sign’s planetary ruler.) But perhaps its biggest cosmic legacy is the infamous Saturn return transit, which simply refers to whenever the planet moves back into the place where it was when you were born. This particular transit is likely why Saturn resonates so deeply for Adele, who recently went through it.

Known for serving up a hefty dose of tough love, a person’s first Saturn return happens sometime around age 30 and tends to generate the upheaval and growth needed to shuttle them into adulthood—something that astrologer Stefanie Iris Weiss calls “a kind of intense rebirth,” where you go through “a cosmic crucible of change.”

“When [Saturn return] comes, it can rock your life,” Adele recently told Vogue. “It shakes you up a bit: Who am I? What do I want to do? What makes me truly happy? All of those things.” While it’s not always tumultuous, the singer says it hit her hard, likely beginning in 2017 and lasting through 2019—which she described to Vogue as a time when she simply “lost the plot.”

“This period encompasses both her wedding to her former partner Simon Konecki and her [filing for] divorce from him,” says Weiss, adding that this isn’t entirely unexpected: “The likelihood that you’ll struggle in a marriage that happens during your Saturn return is fairly high.” And that’s particularly the case for Adele, she says, whose natal Saturn (aka where the planet was at her birth time) is in Capricorn—which Weiss describes as “one of the most challenging yet rewarding Saturn placements of all”—and most likely in her seventh house of relationships, no less.