The Shadow Side of Love: Pluto in Synastry

This fragment from Adyashanti’s The End of Your World perfectly captures the essence of Pluto in synastry. When Pluto touches another person’s personal planets, the connection can feel magnetic, obsessive, and impossible to escape. But at the same time, it can also become the most transformative experience of our lives.

Here’s what Adyashanti wrote about one of his most difficult relationships:

"It was one of these situations where the relationship was like Velcro. Everything inside of me that was needy or addictive or unhealthy fit perfectly with this person. Everything that she had inside of her that was unhealthy fit perfectly with what was unhealthy in me. The relationship was formed around some very unconscious patterns.

(..)It pushed every single button I had. It pushed me in a way that I never believed I could be pushed, and I suffered in ways that I couldn't have imagined. The relationship was a dysfunctional disaster, and I had become an emotional wreck by going through it.

At some point, I realised the situation was insane. What was I doing? I thought. How did I get myself here? And how am I going to get myself out of this? At that point, I started to realise something important: that once again, I had gotten myself into a situation by not being truthful with myself. I had let myself be pulled by desire and attachment, and I had not been honest about what was happening.

I realized that the only way to get out was to start being radically and deeply truthful with myself, to start taking total responsibility for where I had ended up. I saw that the only way I could actually do that was to let go of every image I had of myself, because each image, whether it was of a good person, or a helpful person, or a nice person, or an awakened person, or a wise person, or a stupid person, was part of what had unconsciously driven me into this situation. The only way to get out of the relationship was to start to let go of everything that had gotten me into it in the first place. What had gotten me into it were all the various ways I was still perceiving myself from the egoic level. The only way out was to let go of the person I wanted to be.

(..)It felt like someone was ripping layers of me, one by one. It was very unceremonious. It wasn't nice, it wasn't kind, and it wasn't easy. It was existence showing a mirror in front of my face and literally holding me there so I could not look away for even a second.

This was undoubtedly the most difficult period of my whole life. Through this process, though, I finally found the willingness to let go of everything I thought I was.

(...) By finally allowing the experience to sober me up, I was able to let go. The relationship and its breakup was an emotional bottoming out. It felt like I had been squeezed like a rug, as if all sense of self had been squeezed out of me.

But through the experience, I also started to sense that something amazing was happening. I started to feel the sense of freedom that comes when karmic conditioning is squeezed out of your system.

If the body and the mind and the personality are still divided, if there are still conflicts in your system that are unmet, there will be a gravitational pull to bring consciousness back into suffering.

(..) This process, however difficult, was one of the most important processes of my entire life."

This is exactly what Pluto does in synastry: it pulls us into relationships that strip away illusions, confront us with our shadows, and force us into radical transformation. Painful as it may be, it often becomes the very fire in which we are reborn