Your chart meets today's sky
Your birth chart is fixed, but the planets keep moving. Gochara, from words meaning 'moving' or 'grazing', is the study of where the planets are now and how their current positions relate to your birth chart.
In traditional Jyotisha, transits are counted mainly from your Janma Rashi, the sign the Moon occupied at birth. The Moon sign is treated as house one, the next sign as house two, and so on. So when someone says 'Jupiter is in my seventh', they usually mean seven signs from their Moon sign.
Fast and slow planets
The planets move at very different speeds, and that changes how much attention a transit deserves:
- Moon: about two and a quarter days in each sign. Colours mood and the feel of a day.
- Sun: about one month per sign.
- Mercury and Venus: usually a few weeks per sign, always staying close to the Sun, though a retrograde phase can keep them in one sign for longer.
- Mars: usually about six weeks per sign, longer when it turns retrograde.
- Jupiter: about a year per sign.
- Saturn: about two and a half years per sign.
- Rahu and Ketu: about eighteen months per sign, moving backwards.
The slow movers, Jupiter, Saturn, Rahu and Ketu, describe the longer weather of a year or more. The fast movers describe days and weeks.
Traditionally favourable positions
Classical texts list the houses from the Moon in which each planet's transit is usually helpful. A few of the most quoted:
- Jupiter: the 2nd, 5th, 7th, 9th and 11th from the Moon.
- Saturn, Mars, Rahu and Ketu: the 3rd, 6th and 11th from the Moon.
- Sun: the 3rd, 6th, 10th and 11th from the Moon.
Texts also describe vedha, where a planet in another position can obstruct a good transit, and refinements such as Ashtakavarga, which scores each sign for each planet using your full chart. These details are why a single transit rarely tells the whole story.
About Sade Sati
Sade Sati is the roughly seven and a half years during which Saturn passes through the sign before your Moon sign, your Moon sign itself and the sign after it. It is often spoken of with fear, but that is not what the tradition requires.
Saturn asks for patience, responsibility and steady effort. Many people look back on Sade Sati as a period when they matured, cut away what was not working and built something lasting. How it feels depends heavily on Saturn's role in your own chart and on the dasha you are running.
Transits and dashas together
An important principle is that a transit can only deliver what the dasha and the birth chart already promise. Transits act like timing triggers on top of the larger dasha season. This is why two people with the same Moon sign can have very different experiences of the same Jupiter or Saturn transit.
What Matters Now brings these layers together for you, comparing your current dasha with today's planet positions and highlighting the few areas that stand out.
