I'd say that a few key words from people describing a question or situation that point me towards a look at the progressed chart are:
*a growth or development
*a shift in how they "normally are"
*a new way of being or looking at things
*I used to always be like this but now I feel different

I'd say the progressed chart - from what I have seen - tends more towards showing a development of existing tendencies in a new direction. Not necessarily a total and complete change - but it can feel like a totally new evolution of being.

For example - with mars in pisces - I am naturally quite non-competitive being a bit more tuned into the fact that when everyone succeeds around me - I also benefit from this because of the connectedness of all people. So the martian drives to win and succeed and compete got heavily filtered through compassion and helping things around me in general and trusting that sending this out would come back to me.

Well - I guess that I had always been faced with competitive situations by the world around me. Really, I just found a new and more layered way of dealing with it than I used to. I used to shy away from it and feel the sting of broken connections and antagonism and threat between 2 individuals aong with the threat that one might degrade or weaken others in order to exalt themselves in competition - simultaneously weakening themselves because weaking those they are connected to tears at the fabric suppporting them etc etc etc ... but when mars went into aries I saw that this view of mine wasn't the whole story and I began making adjustments and growing in a new way.

When mars progressed into aries. I was forced by the world to take another look at this approach. The need to grow and develop this martian influence in a new way, direction or level presented itself. The natal way I had learned wasn't completely abandoned, however. I took the approach of "competing to find the best solution for the community" or "recognizing the role of competition in strengthening the connections and the fabric of life around me". Still in keeping with the mars in pisces theme - but shifted a bit or adjusted or evolved along arian themes.

Transits might sound similar to what I am talking about but there is a slight nuance to be detected. It seems to me that transits are at play when people say things like "this is the situation" or "this is what is happening to me" or ""you would never believe what happened". Progressions fall more along the lines of "I feel I have grown in this new way" or "why am I reacting to things differently now than I remember myself?"

it all depends on the question i guess. When i get stuck and cant find an acurate meaning i ask questions to this astrologer on www.astromaher.com they are pretty acurate on the answers an is cheap..

www.astrologyweekly.com/triple...its.php

adding this here since this is beyond a mere single transit assesment.

A few thoughts:

I get asked a lot about what prediction technique I would choose if I could choose only one. My answer is always the Saturnian cycle. All by itself, it can do what both transits and progressions do: It pinpoints the seven-year cycles in life, and it speaks to growth, just as progressions do.

That having been said, I use a large variety of techniques, because lives are too complex to register with only one technique. You can see the same trends showing up in a lot of different ways. If someone is having transiting Saturn opposing Saturn, and is having one of the progressed planets changing signs, and has 29 degrees rising on a solar return, and has an eclipse to their natal Mercury....well, that all speaks to the same thing, depending on the signs and houses involved.

One of the things I like doing is to compare the natal chart with the secondary progressed, converse secondary progressed, solar arc and converse solar arc, then put them in a ring, and note where the major transits are. I didn't think that transits and progressions could be mixed for a long time, but I do think they are valid. For example, if you have the progressed Sun moving into 00 degrees of Aries, you have to take special note that there will be a Saturn/Uranus opposition on the 00 Aries axis next summer.

Paul, the Huber technique is one of several age point methods. It's more detailed in their book, LifeClock: The Huber Method of Timing in the Horoscope. The method takes into account that transits and progressions affect people differently, depending upon their age. It's a system that takes the whole life development into consideration, which to me makes sense. For those not familiar with the technique, the age progression "point" is an imaginary point that starts at the Ascendant, then goes around the chart counterclockwise, up to the age of 72, then starts over again at the Ascendant. It spends six years in each house.

It's useful to know where the point is, as it gives additional depth and meaning to progressions and transits. Thus, the 1st house represents ages 0-6, the 2nd house represents 6-12, etc. If you have an age point in the 6th house, and let's say you also have a transit to the 2nd house, and a progression to the 10th house, you can see that it would mean an emphasis on work-related matters. That gives additional reinforcement to what you would have been seeing anyway with the 2nd and 10th house activity.

You can usually expect significant years when the age point is traveling through a house where there are a lot of planets. But even in an empty house, the age point could be opposing or squaring natal planets.

Age progression techniques make excellent "backdrops". There is another technique called profections used by the classical astrologers that also helps in forecasting matters by being a backdrop of a larger life cycle. The Hindu dasas are also very revealing throughout the lifetime.

hmm, came across this today, ~ www.astrologyzine.com/what-is...gy.shtml