Welcome to Ghost of a Podcast. I’m your host, Jessica Lanyadoo. I’m an astrologer, psychic medium, and animal communicator, and I’m going to give you your weekly horoscope and no bullshit, mystical advice for living your very best life.

Welcome back to your mid-week episode of Astrology Hot Takes. This week my plan was to talk to you about exercises and rituals for Venus Retrograde, and that is exactly what I’m going to do. However, sometimes a girl’s got to pivot, and let me tell you about why today is the day for pivoting. For reasons I will explain in just a moment, I missed on your horoscope episode some really important transits. Isn’t that annoying of me? I would say unto you yes. Yes, it is. Yes, yes, it is. 

Unfortunately, I somehow missed on the 22nd of May the New Moon and Mercury square to Neptune. Now, the reason why it’s perfect is because Mercury square to Neptune, in particular during this Venus square to Neptune mishigas that we are enmeshed in, Mercury square to Neptune is a real scrambler of the mind. Neptune is fog, and Mercury is your thinking, and so missing important details, misunderstandings, thinking you read a whole email and realizing you actually skipped a paragraph, that is classic of this transit. 

It has the tendency to kick off anxiety and distrust, paranoia and confusion. Not the funnest of all the transits, but here it is, my friends. And I apologize for having missed out on these two particular transits that I’m going to unpack for you. But you know what? Sometimes the astrologer is subject to the astrology, and this is one of those damn times. So we live and we learn. 

So the New Moon in Gemini is happening at 10:39 a.m., Pacific time on the 22nd. And as I always remind you, New Moons happen when the Sun and Moon are exactly conjunct to each other; they are sitting at the same degree of the same sign, and in this case, that’s Gemini. It’s Gemini. Two degrees of Gemini and four minutes to be exact. Now, at the same time, we have a Venus/Mercury conjunction forming a nice tight square to Neptune. Honestly, this New Moon is not what I would characterize as a good one for manifesting, unless what you’re trying to manifest is openness, receptivity, fluidity—actually, great transit for those things. Manifesting clarity, not so much, my loves. Not so much. New Moons are generally a great time for openings, for new beginnings, and for manifestation and ritual work in general. But this particular New Moon is so deeply characterized by the confusion and anxiety and uncertainty that can lead to misinformation, misunderstandings, propaganda, honestly—all kinds of things that will throw you off your center. 

Now the trick with this particular New Moon is to be open. It’s to be open without attaching to the data you receive. You might be feeling disconnected from others. You might find yourself fixated on something someone said or didn’t say to you or something that you just can’t quite figure out. Because of Neptune’s involvement, you and everyone else is likely to have an anxiety response. And for some people an anxiety response provokes loneliness or fear or agitation or anger. Now that is specific to your psychology, aka your birth chart, but what you want to expect is that everyone’s kind of having their feathers ruffled. It’s not great; it’s uncomfortable. So try not to take things at face value. Do not assume that the data that you are pulling in is fully reliable data or that you fully understood it. 

Miscommunications and mistakes are likely to occur, and if you can have some grace with yourself when you’re the one who’s messing up or grace with others when they are weird, honestly, or hard to understand or downright misleading, that is where our greatest growth will occur. If you can be open to more of what I’ve been talking about in the context of the Venus Retrograde, looking at your own patterns, the patterns of your assumptions, of your emotional reactions, of what you think of the stories you tell yourself about yourself, about others, if you can try to stay kind of centered around your patterns, then you don’t need to get so fixated on or attached to the details, which are not likely to be super reliable at this time.

Now, it’s a New Moon in Gemini. The Sun and Moon are both in Gemini. Gemini loves details—loves to scatter all the details on the table and then just rejoice in the options of how to see things. Neptune throws confusion and uncertainty into the mix. So you just want to try to be open, whether it’s spiritual, emotional, psychological, technical. This is a time to be open without seeking certainty because Neptune does not offer us certainty that is static. 

One last thing I’ll say about this particular New Moon and the Neptunian energies associated with it, and it’s around COVID -19. This New Moon transit, and this date of May 22nd and kind of the days around May 22nd, there is a great risk of continued contagion. And so much of the world right now is opening back up, getting back to business, right. And I want to really encourage you, if you are putting yourself out there, if you’re going out and doing stuff more, if you’re going back to work, if you’re just kind of like softening the restrictions that you’ve been living with under COVID-19, I want to encourage great caution. 

There is nothing astrologically to me that suggests that we are in the clear and that this is over or near to over. So I want to encourage you to wear a mask if you’re going out. I want to encourage you to be really conservative with how you spend time with people and how many people you spend time with. Keep on honoring that six feet apart rule, wash your damn hands like it’s your damn job, the commonsense things. And if you don’t need to go out, if you can continue to shelter in place, I really encourage you to do this. 

You want to remember that COVID-19 is brand new. It’s really, really new. It has not existed for even six months in the world, and so the data that we have around it is still very much developing. We don’t really understand it yet. And I’m not saying this to frighten you; you don’t need to be frightened. I don’t want to add this to your anxiety pool. I simply want to center you around when we don’t have enough facts and data or when the facts and data we have are still kind of developing yet, that’s when we want to just really be conservative. We want to recognize that we don’t know; we have theories. So do the things that you can do both to protect your health, to protect the health of the people you care about and have consistent contact with, and to protect public health. Because you can be a carrier, and you can pass it along to people who it will have a catastrophic effect on their lives. So be a good citizen. Be kind, and do it with your whole heart, just like the New Moon wants you to. 

Friends, while we’re safely home quarantining, parents trapped in immigrant detention centers have been given a choice by ICE: indefinite separation from their children or prolonged detention alongside them during a pandemic. We saw this happen two years ago during the family separation crisis. We cannot go back to that. Not now. Not ever. 

This administration cannot use COVID as an excuse to separate children from their mothers and fathers. That’s why we are demanding DHS, or the Department of Homeland Security release each and every one of these families to safety together and now. Don’t look away. Stand with families and stand with RAICES.  Help get the word out. Join the Families For Families campaign on social media. That’s #families4families campaign on social media. Visit raices.org/families4families for more information. Find the link in show notes.

On the Carefree and Black Diaries podcast, host Shaakira White discusses the Black experience in America, pop culture, and how to stay persistent while pursuing your goals. Shaakira started her podcast in 2018 with just the Voice Memo app on her phone and Anchor. She had no idea what she was doing or what podcasting entailed, but she knew that it was something that she wanted to do to help others. 

Each episode is filled with her own first-hand experiences and lessons that you can apply to your personal journey. The Carefree and Black Diaries podcast shares lessons that you can apply to your own life to help you see that you’re not alone and can overcome anything. Episodes released every Tuesday, so you’ll always be in the loop. Listen and subscribe to Carefree and Black Diaries on Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts. 

So, my loves, as promised, I’m going to give you some exercises and ritual considerations for this Venus Retrograde, and you know what? If you want more, just send me messages at Ghostofapodcast.com asking for more. 

Okay. First of all I just want to say that whether you are witchy woo, and you love the idea of a ritual, or you’re not so much the one for witchiness, but you want to have an exercise that is emotionally, spiritually, and mentally engaging, these ae exercises that you can use in either way. And I kind of am going to use the term ritual and exercise interchangeably, and in general I’m inclined to do that because I want this to be accessible to you however you like to approach these things.

Now, Venus is the planet, as I’ve spoken about a lot, of our values: what we value, how we hold and experience value. And that has meaningful implications for our relationships, for our relationship to self-esteem, to beauty and how other people see us, to our personal finances and what we own, and to the general principles of ethics that guide our choices in life. And when we’re living in ways that don’t actually reflect what we truly value, Venus is really important to our sense of self-esteem because you’re not going to like yourself or your life if you’re not honoring what you actually care about. So this is where we go to my little homework for you. 

The first thing that I want you to do is simply a writing exercise about your values and your boundaries. List out your most common relationship patterns. This is not about any particular person in your life; this is your most common relationship patterns. If you need to separate it out or you want to separate it out between friends and workmates or people you’ve dated or family of origin or chosen family, you can do it in any way that makes sense for your life.

But the key is to bullet point out—not write poetry—just bullet point out what are the most common relationship patterns that you have experienced in the course of your life that are still active now. So that’s the first stage.

The second stage—how other people act within your patterns. Now, the reason why I want you to start with that is because it’s going to be easy. You’re going to know, like, people are rude. People are liars. People are whatever it is. What other people do tends to be pretty easy to track. 

The next list is how you act, what your part of the pattern is, right. A bullet point of whether you get defensive, shutdown, you start placating people, you try to kill them with kindness. What is your part of the pattern? This is not a time to justify or defend your part of the pattern, only to notate it. 

And here’s the final list. What are you getting out of this dynamic? And if you can’t figure out what you’re getting out of this dynamic, make it an ongoing journaling experience or bring it to your shrink or talk to your besties about it. This is an exercise that you can bring magic and crystals and woo to, or you can keep it very journaly and psychological. What I’m trying to get you to do is to become more clear of what patterns are running through your life at this time. Because in Venus Retrograde, when we become more aware of our patterns, we can actually start to reassess them, and we can realign how we behave and participate in our patterns. And it’s not about what we physically do. It’s about what we resonate with, and what we’re willing to participate in in our lives. 

So this is a really valuable thing to explore. Once you’ve clarified the main parts of your pattern, if you’re a visual processor, you can start drawing it out in circles. And in the center is your most common relationship patterns. And then you want to look at how other people behave, how you behave, and where those things overlap, and where they feel really separate from you.

Now, I’m going to give you one more ritual, and this is a little more witchy woo. It involves candles. So I am a big fan of candle work because in astrology, in Tarot, in witchy woo vibes, fire is associated with enterprise, activity, and energy. And what I really like to do is I like to work with candles as a way of setting intention. 

You’re going to need a bowl that you’re going to fill with water. You’re going to need a pinch of salt, ideally Epsom salt. If you don’t have access to salt, a little bit of dirt will do you. That’s right, dirt. Earth is really what we’re going for, so earth or salt are kind of equal but different in the realm of spiritual work. And what I want you to then also have is a candle that is in glass, like a seven-day candle or something like that. 

Now a great practice is to get clear about what it is that you want to call into your life, what you want to center yourself around. This is not—when you do ritual work through candles trying to manipulate other people or manipulate circumstances and get things to happen is actually not a great idea in my view. I mean, lots of people do things in different ways, and if that’s how you do things, I respect you; it’s just not what I’m advising. What I’m advising is clarifying your own value system and focusing what you’re trying to be willing to engage with, what you’re willing to call in and align yourself with. This is an exercise in centering yourself around what is authentic to you and aligning your energy with your intention. 

So what you’re going to do is you’re going to get your candle, and then you’re going to get a pencil or a pen that doesn’t work, and you’re going to figure out what it is that you want to call in to you. So for me, right now it’s all about boundaries. It’s about getting clearer about how to be present with healthy boundaries. For you, it might be about working with self-esteem issues or body image issues. It might be getting clear about what you care about with money. It might be coming to healing within your relationships, right. It can be anything. 

But what you want to do is you want to take your pencil or your pen, and you want to draw—you want to write into the wax of the candle, at the top of the candle whatever it is that you’re trying to call into you, call into your life or light up in your life. Write it out in multiples of three. Now, you don’t have to read this, so it’s not like drawing a picture on a piece of paper. So it’s just going to look like a mess of wax. So before you light your candle, what you want to do is you want to get a bowl, anything that’s fire safe will do, a bowl with water in it, okay. And then you want to get a pinch of Epsom salt or a pinch of dirt—ideally from some place you really care about—and you want to just stick that Epsom salt or that dirt into the water in the bowl. 

So the reason why you’re doing this is because water is a spiritual conductor, and it signifies emotional presence, and the earth or salt is grounding. It’s about bringing it into the material form. It’s about being grounded, rooted, and present. And then you’re going to take that candle that’s in glass, and you’re going to stick it in your bowl of water with your pinch of salt or dirt, and then you’re going to light your damn candle. The key here is to invest intention based on what we value, and to bring light, attention, and energy to it. 

And that, my dears, is how you do energy work. It’s not that complicated, and it’s not that mystical. I mean, it can be. It can be very mystical. But it’s also really accessible and simple. And you don’t have to make it complicated and too woo if that’s not your vibe. These are some exercises that I’m sharing with you in the hopes that it helps you to focus your energy on what truly matters to you during this Venus Retrograde. And in this way to get the most value out of this transit. 

Now it’s only active until June 25th, which, you might hear that and be like, “Oh, my God. It’s super long.” But, honestly, this is a short-term opportunity to do some real investigative work in to these themes that Venus governs. And your life will be better for it. So even if it’s a pain in your butts, it’s still really good for you. Not everything that is difficult is bad, and not everything that is lovely is good. I’ve said it before; I’ll say it again. 

My loves, thank you for joining me for another Astrology Hot Take. If you haven’t already signed up for my May 30th Venus Retrograde webinar, AMA style—I’m just going to be answering your questions about astrology, about your life—you should. You totally should. All proceeds will be going to National Bailout and the Sovereign Bodies Institute—both really wonderful organizations. 

And also, the weekend of May 22nd, I will be speaking at an astrology conference called NORWAC, and, yeah, sign up. Join me there. I would love to see you there. I’m going to be talking about inherited conditions in the birth chart and the outer planets and love, just in time for Venus Retrograde. Links to both of these things are on my website and also in the show notes, so peep it out if you want to. 

And, finally, if you haven’t already become a supporter over on Patreon, there’s lots of other stuff going on, including, but not limited to astrology and Tarot to help you help yourself. Because, at the end of the day, that’s the damn move, my loves.